Casca 21: The Trench Soldier (15 page)

The stretcher bearers brought in hundreds of gassed men, but there were hundreds more out in the dark forest beyond the trenches. Throughout the night they could be heard coughing, gasping, and vomiting. The autumn night was cold, and there was a freezing wind out of the north that carried with it the chill of the arctic ice. Gradually, the noise died down as the men died, but there were still many of them groaning and calling weakly for help when the troops were stood to at midnight to await the morning's attack.

Everybody was still suffering some ill effect from the gas. Men's faces had been scalded a dirty yellow, the skin peeling away in strips. Their lungs were clogged with the corrosive chemical, their throats and noses scorched.

"Do you think they'll use that gas again?" somebody said.

"Only if they're crazy," another soldier replied. "It did as much harm to them as it did to us. Thank God for that wind change."

"Yeah.
Listen, I can hear a German voice now."

From out of no-man's-land came a despairing groan between mumbled words. "
Heilige Maria, Mutter Gattes, erbarme dich unser
."

"What the hell's he saying?"

"Holy Mary, Mother of God, have pity on us," Casca answered. To the dying German he shouted, "
Behiit euch Gott
– God preserve you!"

"Everything smells of mustard," Cockney Dave said. "I was dreaming of mince pies. Riding me bicycle down our street I was, which is funny, 'cos I never had one. All down the street chimneys were smoking, and as I passed the houses, I could smell the coal fires. Then I was turning into my house, and my mum was opening the door. I could smell the polishing wax on the floors, and I could smell some hot mince pies – and then they were waking me up, and my nose was full of this rotten mustard smell. If I'd had just one
more minute I would have had a nice, hot mince pie for breakfast."

"Well," Hugh Evans laughed, "there's one good thing about fighting alongside Frogs – we do get some sort of breakfast that's worth eating."

"Yeah, makes a change from our slops, don't it?"

They were eating chunks of cold, cooked bacon with hard French bread and washing it down with strong black coffee.

The artillery bombardment started at four a.m. and continued until dawn when the first field-gray uniforms appeared through the ground mist, and the British and French machine guns opened up on them.

This morning the wind was strongly from the south, and there was no more of the mustard gas. Casca hoped that he would never see it again. The mighty secret weapon had certainly not worked
on its first trial. But he had an idea that the weapon would not be scrapped. With the right wind conditions it could be devastating.

The first wave of Germans died by hundreds before they got anywhere near the
wire, and by midmorning the attack had diminished to small skirmishes.

Then suddenly there was thunderous noise, and a thousand horsemen were charging into the guns. Each cavalryman had a
saber in his hand, a lance in its socket, and a carbine slung across his back.

For the machine guns the horses made even better targets than men, and they were soon dying all over the field. Their dismounted riders formed ranks and poured concerted fire at the British gunners.

Some of the machine guns stopped firing, but when the Germans charged, they were stopped at the first of the wire entanglements, and while they tried to cut through it, the French machine guns from the walls of the fort chopped them to pieces.

These men were tough and well trained, and few of them ran. Most of them used their dead horses for cover and maintained heavy fire with their carbines. From behind them a wave of infantry attacked, and aided by the effective fire of the cavalrymen, many of them made it to the wire. But few got through it.

Twice they did manage to dislodge the Tommies, but their attacks faltered as they approached the walls of the fort and came under concentrated fire from the French defenders. In dogged counterattacks, fighting mainly with bayonets, the Tommies regained their positions.

At the end of the second day, the British were retired to the fort, and French troops took over the forward trenches.

Cockney Dave was far from impressed with the French fort and declared that he would rather be back in the trench.

"What a rotten stink!" he complained as his nose took in the accumulated
odors of sweat, blood, vomit, urine, gun oil, cordite, and the dull odor of spent lead.

The fort was indeed almost impossible to take. Its star shape thrust its points out in all directions, dominating the forest from its hilltop elevation of more than a thousand feet. The walls were concrete, dug into the hill, and more than eight feet thick. And it was well protected with steel-fronted gun turrets.

The wind overnight was out of the northwest, sweeping down from the north pole. The steel gun turrets had frosted over, and the inside walls were thick with ice. It was impossible to sleep, and the gunners were on their feet all night, stamping their boots on the concrete floors as they tried to keep from freezing.

Again the action started before first light.
From inside the massive fortress the artillery fire was less terrifying than in the trenches but seemed even louder.

"What I wouldn't give for just one minute's splendid silence," Cockney Dave groaned.

Casca nodded grim agreement.

His ears were saturated with noise. From the distance came the sound of the German guns followed by the whine of incoming shells and then the explosions as they struck the ground or the walls of the fort. From inside the fort the big French guns fired shot after shot, each resounding explosion followed without interval by another, each shot building on the noise of the previous one to create, a vast, unceasing thunder.

This continuous background of noise was augmented by the staccato chatter of machine guns, rifle shots, and the explosions of grenades and punctuated by the screams of men.

Within this ghastly orchestration men spoke little, communicating mainly by signs. Orders came in hoarse screams which were rarely heard and never understood. Only the shrieks of the wounded and the groans of the dying had the power to attract conscious attention.

These were the only sounds. No birds sang; there were no cows or pigs or chickens. The tethered horses and mules were as quiet as the men cowering near them. Any conversation consisted of gasped expletives and shouted curses.

Cockney Dave summed it up: "Hell on the
ears, ain't it?"

Not too good on the eyes either, Casca thought as he stared out at no-man's-land where the shape of the tortured landscape was emerging with the dawn. What had once been a forest of splendid trees was now a tangle of splintered trunks without branches, buds or flowers. The ground was churned into thousands of shell craters and abandoned, half-dug foxholes. Grotesquely erect bodies stood grinning, entangled in the wire.

The battle lasted for four days, and the Hotchkiss machine guns seemed to fire almost nonstop, pouring lead into the waves of attacking Germans, brass cartridge cases spewing from their breeches.

More than ten thousand men died, but the Germans got no closer to the fort than the forward trenches.

Meanwhile, for five days another battle raged nearby at Picardy, and a few days later came the Battle of Artois. In total, nearly thirty thousand men died, and the only result was that the Germans took St. Mihiel and some small and strategically unimportant villages on the left bank of the Meuse River.

On October first, a strong German force under Hans von
Beseler attacked Antwerp, and after nine days of endless slaughter, forced the Belgian and British defenders to evacuate.

There began a race for the seas that the Germans won. They took Ghent, Bruges, and Ostend in a murderous five days.

Then the Belgians flooded the whole of the Yser district, and as autumn turned to winter men and mules found themselves up to their knees in freezing swamps. The Germans took Lille and attacked southeast of Ypres in an action that lasted almost a month and produced no result at all.

On December fourteenth, the Allies launched a general attack on the whole front from
Nieuport to Verdun. The action lasted for ten days producing tens of thousands of casualties with no gain.

All but a tip of Belgium was in German hands, and they held one tenth of France including ten thousand square miles of coal and iron mines.

The war that was to have been over by Christmas was now almost half a year old with no end in sight.

The hard freezes of November and December had once signaled the end of what military strategists had called the campaigning season, and troops moved into winter quarters, cantonments where they passed the days in training for the campaigns that would commence at the end of the spring rains in April.

Casca's mind ran back over many of the European campaigns he had taken part in – in the time of the Caesars, of Charlemagne, Crecy in the fourteenth century and Agincourt in the fifteenth during the Hundred Years' War, the campaigns of Charles in the sixteenth, the Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century, the Seven Years' War in the eighteenth. Never had he experienced campaigning in the depths of winter.

Nor could he see any sense in it now.

The two enormous armies were entrenched opposite each other for hundreds of miles. Every day tens of thousands of men raced into the muzzles of the machine guns, and thousands of them died. But no significant territory had changed hands since Antwerp at the beginning of October, and outside Belgium, most of the war had been fought back and forth over the same ten miles or less, all the way along almost five hundred miles of front.

But the high command on both sides still dreamed of a quick victory, now pinning their faith in the new weapons that were being developed. Their faith remained undimmed although most of these brilliant new developments – the airplane and zeppelin, radio telegraph and field telephone, bicycle detachments, poisonous gas – had so far proved of dubious worth in the field.

Christmas Eve found Casca and what was left of the Old
Contemptibles back in the trenches near Rheims. Captain George had been busted back to lieutenant a couple of times, Major Cartwright was now a colonel, and Hugh Evans a sergeant. Casca was still a corporal, and Cockney Dave still a private.

Unending warfare had become the normal condition of life. The men in the trenches were coming to believe that the fighting might never end. They lived in a world of endless fear, amidst blood, sweat, piss, shit, vomit, and tears. The cold brought misery, fog, rain, sleet, snow, hail, and mud. Miles and miles of freezing mud, knee deep in the no-man's-land that had been exploded, dug up, and exploded more every day for almost six months.

The roads had turned to rivers of sluggish mud that drifted between steep and slippery banks. Movement was almost impossible but was ordered every day by the commanders of one side or the other.

The trenches were a filthy, stinking mess of lice, leeches, ticks, fleas, rats, mice, cockroaches, and what had started out as men.

The lines had settled down into semi-permanent communities, a network of holes in the ground, connected by communication trenches, linked to dugouts, backed by duckboarded latrines, dirty cookhouses with their greasy cooks, everlasting mess lines, and uneatable food. Casca thought back over almost twenty centuries of campaigning, and his memory came up with no experience as miserable.

His long life had been spent in an endless series of army huts and canvas tents occasionally interspersed with hotel rooms and even a few palaces. Only a very few times had he known what might be called a home with a wife and friends, a horse, a cow, a dog.
But never for long, and never with the joyful scamper of children around the hearth.

He had learned to envy men whose lives were short but whose seed might survive forever. His own seed, like his blood, was poisoned by the curse of the Nazarene. Even though he had experienced much and learned a great deal, he could never pass on his knowledge to his progeny.

But now he found that he felt sorry for his comrades who had once led normal lives. The continuous hell of life in the trenches was as intolerable an existence as he had ever experienced, but for men who had left homes and families, such a life must be an unbearable agony.

Once in a long while there was mail from home – often as worrying for family men as their own desperate existence at the front. The blockades had carried the war into the homes of the civilian population. Another front had been added – the Home Front. Everything was in short supply on the home front; people were working longer hours and spending more and more of their time in the eternal queues to buy sugar or flour, a pair of shoes, or razor blades.

Rumors were rife – confusing and contradictory, they were traded back and forth in the trenches and even with the enemy in shouted conversations with lookouts in the opposing lines which were now sometimes only a hundred yards apart.

"We're moving out." "We're moving up." "We're moving back."
"A big push." "A major retirement." "Reinforcements are on the way."

"Ah, the hell with it," Cockney Dave cursed. "The only
rumor we don't hear is that we're stayin' here – and that's all that ever happens."

The endless siege of the entrenched enemies went on in defiance of all military logic – and contrary to common sense. Suffering, pain, and useless sacrifice became the normal life of men on both sides. The warrior legend was fast losing any romance or glory.

The marks of combat were showing in the hollow eyes of men whose eyes had become focused in the notorious two-thousand-yard stare.

More and more men were coming out of the line unwounded but no longer fit for battle. Shell shocked troops were everywhere, mumbling, whispering, crying, or just shaking and shivering. Some men went into a state of terror as their friends died alongside them and then slipped into a torpor from which they could not be roused.

Nothing worked with these men. Some of the doctors called them "casualties of the spirit" and tried to treat them kindly. Others shouted at them: "Malingerer! Quitter! Coward!"

The French shot them after drum-head court-martials, but still the disease continued to spread. And it was the same in all the armies.

The Red Cross distributed Christmas parcels, cough medicines, and uplifting tracts from the Bible. Most of the men were unimpressed, and many did not even open the packages, although some of them contained the wine and cheese they had dreamed of for months.

Shortly after sunset on Christmas Eve, the desultory artillery fire died down. One after another the machine guns fell silent, and then the sporadic rifle fire died away. A strange silence settled over the front.

Captain George leaped out of the trench and up onto its mound of earth, ignoring the warning shouts of his friends.

From out of the swirling winter ground mists solid figures were beginning to appear. The German army was advancing on the British lines. But this advance was like no other that anybody had ever experienced. There was no barrage, not even a rifle shot. The only sound was the faintly musical chant: "
Kamerad. Kamerad
."

"What the hell does that mean?
Kamerad? Comrade? Is that what they're saying?"

The field-
gray uniforms could now be clearly seen through the gray mist. Every man seemed to be carrying something, but none of their burdens were weapons.

Then the boy officer saw something he recognized – a goose. A giant German
Feldwebel was holding it aloft by the neck; his other raised arm held two bottles. All along the slowly advancing line the young Scot could now discern men wearing bandoliers of sausages, carrying armfuls of cake, bottles of wine, Red Cross parcels. The German soldiers were plodding determinedly through the mud, walking into the British guns, laden with Christmas presents and protected only by the one word: kamerad.

Captain George turned to shout down into the trench, "Corporal, pass me the wire cutters and some of those comfort parcels."

The corporal, trained to obey any order, handed up the tool, a bottle of Guinness stout, and a Christmas pudding. George took them from him and jumped down from the mound to start snipping through the coils of barbed wire.

The amazed corporal watched as his officer dropped the wire cutters into the mud and walked out into no-man's-land through the opening he had made in the wire.

The Scot and the German met and fell into each other's arms like long lost brothers, the goose dangling down the young officer's back as the German enfolded him in a great hug.

Then the two men were sitting in the mud, and George was biting the cap from the beer bottle.

"What's goin' on out there?" Cockney Dave demanded from within the trench.

"Damned if I know," the corporal replied. "Pass me some of those bottles, will you?" He filled his arms and jumped to the ground, running through the opening in the wire.

All along the line the same thing was happening. Within minutes the British trench was full of Germans, each with his arm around a Tommy's shoulder and a bottle in his hand.

Yuletide, Casca remembered in a rush.
A pagan festival that predated the birth of Christ by some thousands of years. A time of peace – even the ever war-ready German tribesmen of antiquity had realized that there was no sense in fighting in the snow. So they turned the very depth of winter into a time of peace, forgiveness, and gift giving. It was a time when even the worst enemies could break bread together, even feast mightily in each other's homes while they joked and made light of their differences and disputes.

And Casca recalled that when Germany was eventually Christianized, the people had accepted the new religion but had refused to give up this midwinter festival. Now it seemed the festival was to survive even in the midst of mechanized war.

The party lasted all night.

At dawn the Germans started to leave for their own lines, but at noon there were still some sleeping drunkenly in the British trenches.

The rumor mill said that the same thing had happened all the way along the hundreds of miles of front, from the North Sea to Switzerland. Some said that even the senior officers had been entertaining each other in their dugouts. Certainly nothing was said about the massive, collective indiscipline, and the guns were silent all through Christmas Day.