Casca 21: The Trench Soldier (16 page)

December twenty-sixth dawned red and bloody.

The
Tommies had been standing to since two o'clock, and at four every big gun commenced firing.

Within seconds answering shots were heard, and high explosive shells were bursting all around the British lines. The
Tommies were ordered over the top, and they clambered out, running forward through the exploding shells.

Fifty yards into no-man's-land they met an advancing horde of Germans, and as the sun came up, it lit them as they butchered each other with rifle fire, bayonets, and bare hands.

Both the British and the German artillery were pouring shells into the area, and machine gunners from both sides were spraying the embattled troops with lead. At such close quarters the gunners were killing as many of their own as they were of the enemy.

But the battle raged on. It seemed as if everybody, from the high command to the gunners to the privates in the line had lost their senses. Successive waves of infantry poured out from both sides, and the number of men struggling and dying grew by the hour.

The carnage continued throughout the day, and when darkness brought something akin to sanity, Casca learned that the action had been recorded as a "brisk engagement," which in the language of the high command meant fifty per cent casualties.

One, Casca was appalled to learn, was Captain George.

He had, as usual, led repeated charges with his beloved bagpipes, with Harry, his drummer boy, beside him, their red jackets and tartan kilts standing out clearly among the khaki uniforms. Harry had collected a bullet through the throat, and while trying to effect a dressing on the wound in the heat of the furious battle, George had fallen to a German bayonet.

The next morning the battle was
rejoined, but this time the British troops were strictly on the defensive. Most of the artillery and almost all of the machine guns had expended all of their available ammunition in the frenzy of the previous day. The Tommies had to crouch in their trenches throughout the early morning barrage that did not cease until the attack by the German infantry came so close that they were running into the shells from their own guns.

The artillery fire rolled away, but the Germans had developed a new technique and had hauled with them a number of Maxim machine guns with drum magazines which could be operated by one man. The heavy guns had their water cooling hoses detached and could fire almost a thousand rounds before the water in the cooling jacket began to boil.

They were now able to set up these guns on bipods just outside the British wire and pour concentrated fire directly into the British trenches where the defending machine guns were silent for lack of ammunition.

It was impossible to face such fire, and the
Tommies abandoned their trenches, retreating to the next line of prepared positions. The Germans could not chase them with their heavy, red-hot, steaming machine guns, and the Tommies had a small respite.

But not for long.

The Germans recommenced their artillery fire, concentrating on the new positions and laying down such a barrage that the Tommies suffered enormous casualties. Later in the day the Germans again brought up their portable machine guns, and by nightfall another "brisk engagement" was recorded.

That night Casca found Cockney Dave and asked him if he knew anything of Captain George's death.

"Yeah," Dave said, "George is not too far away."

"You know where his body lies?"

Dave jerked his head toward no-man's-land. "He's out there."

"Unburied?" Casca sat up with a jerk.

"Yeah. I thought about bringing him in when I found him, and then later I thought of going back for him with a stretcher and a burial detail. We can do that if you like."

First light the next morning found a stretcher detail of Casca, Hugh, Cockney Dave, and some others out in no-man's-land, looking down into a shell crater.

Captain George's face grinned up at them, the lips pulled back in a last grimace that death had softened into a smile. He had one arm around the shoulder of the drummer boy, and their pipes and drum were beside them. The German on whose bayonet he had died was lying on top of him, the point of George's bayonet protruding from his back.

"How old were they?" Hugh asked.

"Maybe sixteen," Casca answered. "Harry might be younger."

In the freezing wind the bodies had not yet begun to decay.

"This is where they grew up, ain't it?" Cockney Dave said. "They wouldn't want to lie in that military cemetery, all lined up with they don't know who, like being on parade in a strange battalion. But out here, why, they're amongst friends – their own kind – front-line soldiers."

"Yes, you're right," Casca answered. "This is their place alright."

They returned to the trenches with the stretchers empty.

During the night some ammunition wagons had come up, and they were able to withstand the day's attack. But the casualties were still enormous, and Hugh Evans died in one of the murderous onslaughts of the portable Maxim guns.

The opposing lines were now so close that the Germans had developed a technique for effective rifle fire from trench to trench. They used a small telescope fitted over the sights of their Mausers, and their marksmen could hit any Tommy who was incautious enough to show his head above the earthworks. Striking a match to light a cigarette became especially dangerous. Matches were scarce and precious, but no longer did several men take a light from one match. A German marksman only needed the time it took to light two cigarettes to aim his rifle. To light a third cigarette had become suicidal. And not a few men died shouting: "Put out that light!"

Some of the surviving Old
Contemptibles had served in India and had developed and sharpened the necessary skills for hunting snipe, a small, fast bird, and the favorite game fowl of the British in India. These marksmen, called snipers, were posted on the earthworks to answer the threat of the German sharpshooters.

Winter dragged on. Actions were attempted in the freezing mud and snow, and there were huge casualties on both sides, but no territory changed hands.

The battalion was thrown into a mid-February attack on the German entrenchments in the eastern Champagne district.

The German line had been impregnably strengthened. They had made a catacomb of the hills overlooking the Allied trenches. Dugouts had been timbered with huge beams and reinforced with concrete. There were underground arsenals, aid stations, gun repair shops, even laundries.

Day after day for weeks the combined British and French force attempted to dislodge the Germans, and when after six weeks the attack was called off, they had not yielded so much as a foxhole in return for some thirty thousand Allied casualties.

A ragged copy of The Times appeared in the British trenches. It reported an eloquent speech in which Lloyd George had praised the troops for their ascent of "the glittering peaks of sacrifice," and also announced the doubling of the income tax from nine pence to a shilling and sixpence per pound. Turkey had entered the war on the side of the Central Powers. There were reinforcements of a quarter of a million men ready to leave England for France, and contingents from the British dominions were on their way. The newspaper also castigated the lack of ammunition for the British forces that had become a major scandal with threats of a change of government in London.

The paper also had a headline: GREAT AIR RAID IN HISTORY. A number of British planes had taken off from Dover and Dunkirk and bombed a power station, a sailing ship, harbor warehouses, a railway station, transport on the Ghistelles Road, and a boat towing some barges. The surprise attacks panicked the civilian victims, resulting in evacuations and work stoppages. Five of the twenty-one planes did not return.

Life in the trenches got worse every day. When the troops were not being uselessly sacrificed in hopeless assaults on the entrenched Germans, their time was spent in boredom, digging latrines, cleaning each other of lice, and freezing in the damp and the Arctic wind.

Cockney Dave went west in one more hopeless attack on the German fortress. Casca was leading his squad in a charge, and they had made it almost to the wire when a Maxim that had remained silent suddenly opened fire right in front of them. Dave fell backwards into a shell crater, and Casca tumbled down beside him.

"Comes as a surprise," Cockney Dave said in wonder. "Funny, ain't it? Shouldn't be no surprise, but somehow it is. Make sure that little
widder gets me final pay, will you?" He gave a tired, resigned smile and died.

Casca stood up so that his head was about level with the lip of the crater. Slowly and carefully he fired shot after shot until he killed the whole of the machine gun crew. "Nothing personal," he muttered as he lined up each man in his sights and deliberately squeezed the trigger.

Then he was up and running for the wire, tugging the pins from Mills bombs. He lobbed the grenades into the wire entanglements and was running through the blasted gap before the smoke had cleared, dropping two more grenades into the trench. He made it into the trench and moved along it, shooting from the hip, as the few survivors of his squad followed behind him.

They had cleared quite a length of the trench when they encountered a determined group of Germans armed with a new chemical weapon, the
Flammenwerfer.

Casca was in the lead, and was sprayed with the thick, blazing fuel. His clothes and hair ignited, his skin turned to charcoal. He dropped to the floor of the trench, huge chunks of his skin cracking away to expose the bleeding flesh beneath.

His men turned and ran, and the Germans ran after them.

Casca, near death, lay still in the bottom of the trench, but his mind was racing. He seemed to be looking at the battle from above, as if he were in a balloon. He saw his body lying in the mud, surrounded by dead comrades and dying Germans.

"Well, so much for this war," he thought, "I'm glad to be out of it – senseless fucking charade."

Then he was watching a parade of all the men he had known who had died in these fields, from Captain George to the brave fool Major
Blandings. They were moving away toward the distant hills but with their faces turned toward him as if waiting for him to join them. Cockney Dave was bringing up the rear, and he turned back to salute and smile. And he saw another procession of horror-struck faces and mangled bodies, and he recognized the men that he had killed in this war.

He had no doubt that he was dying, and the ancient curse of the Nazarene no longer seemed to relate to him. Almost two thousand years of fighting vanished from his memory, crowded out by the enormous numbers of men he had seen die since he had landed in France less than a year ago.

Somebody threw a grenade, and it exploded a few yards beyond Casca's head. Some empty ammunition crates absorbed the shrapnel but not the concussion, and he slipped into merciful unconsciousness.

He was still unconscious the next day when, at last, the British succeeded in taking the trench from the Germans.

A Tommy stretcher team carried him back to the field hospital where a doctor was about to pronounce him dead when he realized that the exposed red flesh was maintaining its color.

"I don't know what's happening here," he muttered, "but I can't count him off as dead while his metabolism is still functioning. There's nothing I can do for him, though. Just put him aside until he dies."

The next day Casca was still alive, although the doctor could not detect either heartbeat or breathing. But the torn red meat was clearly still hanging onto life, so he had the incinerated body bandaged to keep it clean and again set it aside.

A conference of doctors agreed that Casca was not quite dead, and as there was nothing else they could think to do, they listed him to be repatriated to England.

"It's only a matter of where he's to be buried, but if he's still in this state when he gets to the boat, he might even make it home to be put in the ground."

When the ambulance train arrived at the coast, Casca's body had still not commenced to rot, so it was loaded with a number of other drastically wounded onto a small freighter, the Shropshire Maid, that was sailing for Southampton.

It was a fine spring night with a bright moon in a cloudless sky. Casca with a number of other wounded was placed on deck, lashed to the deck cargo of crates of oranges.

The little ship was contributing mightily to Britain's war effort, running supplies from England to France, and returning with wounded men and cargoes of food. The owner and captain was also getting extremely rich in this process and willing to run the submarine blockade.

Until November of 1914, the U-boat policy had been to board intercepted vessels, allow the crew time to take to the boats, and then sink the ship. In February of 1915, however, the German government declared the waters surrounding Great Britain to be a military area and announced that henceforth enemy merchantmen found in this area would be sunk without warning. This announcement followed the Allies' infringement of international law in November when they had similarly declared the North Sea a military area in the enforcement of their blockade of German ports.

Captain Jacobsen was not concerned unduly. His ship was small and unimportant and was registered in Liberia.

But a submarine commander, Hauptman Wolfgang von Ritter, was almost at the end of his seventeen-day mission and had not yet made a kill. He decided not to risk a miss and the waste of a torpedo by trying for an attack while submerged. He brought his ship to the surface and approached the unarmed merchantman.

Jacobsen's crew were keeping a sharp, seamanlike lookout, but they did not see the black U-boat on the black sea. The first they knew of its presence was a great explosion as the submarine's cannon scored a direct hit near the bow.

The crew raced to the davits and tried to crank down the two heavy lifeboats that were carried on either side of the superstructure. The ship was listing heavily to port where it had been hit, and the starboard side boat proved impossible to launch. The port side boat was dangling in the air when the second cannon shell hit, blasting another hole in the hull and opening it wide to the sea.

In a matter of minutes the ship was sinking beneath the waves, a handful of crew members and a few of the wounded soldiers swimming for their lives until they tired in the cold water.