Casca 21: The Trench Soldier (4 page)

When eventually they came to combat training, Casca was appalled at the elementary level of sophistication. What passed for unarmed combat was no more than a simple set of
armlocks which almost required an opponent's cooperation to be effective.

Weapons instruction was an even greater shock. Each company was issued one Lee Enfield .303 rifle with bayonet and an empty five-round magazine – for the instructor. The recruits were issued plywood dummies and had to pretend to manipulate these in a parody of the sergeant's motions with the one real rifle.

Casca recalled his first training in Domitian's legions. The Latin word for army was derived from the word for exercise, and early and late Roman recruits were instructed to march, run, jump, swim, carry each other, handle every type of arms that could possibly be utilized for offense or defense, for work in a distant engagement, or for close combat. They moved always to the sound of flutes playing the Pyrrhic martial dance. And all their training arms were double the weights of those they would actually use in battle. Casca felt something close to despair as he hefted the six-ounce replica of a nine-pound rifle and looked around him at the callow boys with whom he was about to go to war.

Replicas were also used to introduce them to the Mills bomb, an explosive grenade with a time-delay fuse that commenced when a lever was released as it left the thrower's hand, the lever being normally held in place by a pin. The practice dummies merely looked like the real
thing, lacked both moving lever and pin and were absurdly light.

The only worthwhile training was in the use of the bayonet. The Territorials were expert musketeers, and since their day-of-fire issue was only twenty-five rounds per man, the bayonet was as important
as the bullets. Day after day they practiced at the straw dummies that represented German soldiers, taking turns to use the few real rifles.

"In! Out! On guard!" the instructor bellowed, and the sweating soldiers would stick their bayonets the regulation four inches into the dummy, withdraw them, and return to the on-guard position.

They also practiced against each other. Two men faced each other with real rifles and bayonets and went through the motions of trying to stab each other. They learned how to thrust and how to feint, how to wrestle down the opponent's guard, and how to turn their rifle so that the opponent's own force brought his weapon down, uselessly out of the way and with his body off balance.

Casca was impressed but shocked to find that this represented almost the whole of their combat training. Bullets were too scarce to waste on target practice, and each man's total marksmanship training consisted of firing one five-round magazine.

The worst shock of all was the pay. In the mines Casca had earned enough for his simple needs with always something left over to treat Gwyneth and the children. He now learned that his army pay would be less than half that, and he had already signed an allotment form remitting what turned out to be most of it to Gwyneth on the first of each month.

"I don't believe it," Cockney Dave lamented. He too had signed over what he had thought, was half his pay to his ex-landlady.

When he had fought in Britain for the Roman Emperor Domitian, Casca had been paid a piece of gold per month, about twenty English pounds a year. And at the end of twenty years, he would be paid off with three thousand denarii, about two hundred pounds sterling. After twenty years a British soldier would get about a quarter of that.

"Well," Cockney Dave ruminated, "for all that, it beats being down the mine."

The troopship was yet another shock. It was a derelict hulk laid up ready for scrap and had now been pressed into urgent military service. The British Army, despite its global responsibilities, had no regular means of conveying its troops abroad and depended on commercial shipping companies.

The SS Plymouth was an antique rust bucket, a tramp steamer registered in Panama, barely seaworthy, commanded by an elderly neurotic with a polyglot crew hastily recruited from numerous waterfront bars. One hold had been converted to convey the troops with crude timber bunks one atop the other and hammocks slung between. The only ventilation when the hatch covers were closed was a single pipe vent.

The troops spent most of their time in endless lines waiting for their food, drinking water, to use a toilet, to shave, and to wash. The hold stank like a cesspit, but the soldiers were forbidden to travel on deck.

The Territorials disembarked in France on August fifteenth, the day the last Belgian resistance collapsed. The huge German army had entered Liege on August fifth, but Belgian troops under the determined command of diehard General Leman had demolished all the city's bridges and retreated to a dozen modern, thick-walled forts on high ground.

Over the next ten days, German 420mm siege guns demolished the forts one by one. Colonel of Fusiliers Erich Ludendorff succeeded in getting lost with his three brigades and was harassed severely by civilian snipers. He gave orders for the summary execution of these "Francs
Tireurs," and the German firing squads were kept busy shooting every civilian they found at large. Many hundreds were slaughtered including a number of elderly priests.

On August 10, Fort
Barchon was captured from the rear, then Ludendorff and his fusiliers got lost again. By August 15, Ludendorff had found his bearings and laid siege to Fort Loncin. Toward nightfall the gallant General Leman was carried unconscious from the ruins.

The previous day, August fourteenth, German troops engaged a large French force in Lorraine. The French general
Lamezac was defeated in what became the ten-day battle of Charleroi.

Meanwhile the British Expeditionary Force of ninety thousand men under the Boer War hero Sir John French was idle. The troops spent their days in unending, trivial drill, digging latrines, cleaning and re-cleaning their tents, and telling and retelling the numerous
rumors.

It seemed that Germany had eighty-seven divisions, each with eighteen thousand men, equipped with
Mauser rifles and Maxims, the machine gun invented by an American-born Englishman. Each German division was backed with thirty-six 105mm and sixteen 150mm howitzers.

The French had mustered sixty-two divisions, each with seventeen thousand; barely a million men, about two thirds of Germany's strength. And they had three hundred medium and heavy cannon against Germany's three and a half thousand.

The British Expeditionary Force totaled a mere ninety thousand in six slender infantry divisions armed with rifles and bayonets and five cavalry brigades with lances, sabers and carbines. Their only heavy weapons were four five-inch guns and two machine guns per battalion. There were also a few bicycle detachments, field telegraph and carrier pigeon detachments, and some observation balloon units. When the Kaiser was advised of the arrival of this force, he sneered, "A contemptible little army."

At last, on August twenty-second, the British troops were issued equipment. Far too much equipment, it seemed to Casca. Each man was weighed down with a total of sixty-six pounds.

Casca divided his mountain of junk into two parts – the rifle, bayonet, ammunition pouches and two Mills bombs he wanted, also the water canteen, entrenching tool and eating equipment. The rest he set aside to dispose of at the first opportunity.

It was an opportunity that he didn't get. They were marched to the town of Mons where the French Fifth Army was locked in a losing struggle with superior German forces. They marched along country roads lined with trees beside fields and farmhouses. The soldiers occupied the
center of the road, and both sides were jammed with French refugees, as many heading for the German border as were heading away from it. Most of the groups consisted of a stout farmer in the lead – blond, blue-eyed ones heading north, swarthy ones moving south. Behind the farmer came a high-laden, horse-drawn dray hauling everything of value that could be carried – brass beds, barrels of wine, furniture, perhaps a plow, a butter churn. Behind the dray came numerous children and women, all carrying as much as they were able to bear.

The over-laden British troops arrived on the outskirts of the town as darkness fell and had to set up camp in the open, blundering around by lamplight.

At dawn the next morning they moved into some empty French trenches while their twenty-four pieces of artillery were dragged about and eventually aimed at the German lines.

The hastily set up British guns were too far away, too small, and too few to have any real effect other than to alert the Germans that an attack was imminent.

At eight o'clock, in broad daylight, the Tommies climbed out of the trenches, each man hampered by his enormous pack and accoutrements. Second lieutenants with wire cutters opened narrow passages through the giant sausages of barbed wire, and they stumbled forward into a hail of artillery bombardment accompanied by withering machine gun fire. The tracer rounds from the machine guns made long lines of white light as they reached for the British troops.

Stooped almost double, they ran into the rain of lead.

To Casca's right a Highland division was advancing, led by a group of young boys in kilts playing bagpipes and drums. Behind these boys came the subalterns, only slightly older and armed only with swagger sticks and holstered pistols.

The German trenches were only four hundred yards away, and the intervening ground had been churned up by constant French and German artillery fire for the past ten days so that now it looked like the surface of the moon.

Casca stumbled at the lip of a shell crater and fell into it, rolling down the slope to come to rest in the bottom pinned by his heavy pack. He struggled up and saw that he shared the crater with two corpses, one German, one French, and both stinking. He shrugged his way out of his pack and abandoned it then climbed the far slope of the crater and paused to survey the scene of action.

All around him men were dying, blown to bits by shells, or cut in half by machine gun fire. Second lieutenants with swagger sticks were pacing back and forth exhorting the men to advance. Here and there a few
Tommies would clamber out of a crater and run forward to be torn to pieces in the fire storm, and every few moments one or the other of the subalterns would fall.

A lieutenant passed close to Casca's crater, a boy of perhaps eighteen, his muddied pink cheeks streaked with tears, his swagger stick waving urgently as he called for another charge.

Casca, cursing himself for a fool, rose to his feet and ran until only Casca and the lieutenant were on their feet. And then Casca was alone.

The enemy trenches were only a hundred yards away when Casca fell again. He lay still, staring at the barbed wire entanglement that topped the German trenches.

Every few yards along the trench there was a machine gun, and all of them were spitting flame in his direction. Around him British troops were either hugging the ground as he was or screaming out their lives in messes of blood and lead and dirt.

The last of the officers seemed to have died or perhaps had learned enough to keep down. Only the Highlanders over to the right were still advancing in the wake of the barelegged boy musicians. None of their officers had survived, and they were led by a sergeant.

As Casca watched, the German mortar crews concentrated their fire on this sector, and he saw first the drummers, then the piper, and then a sergeant and most of his following soldiers fall to the ground as the shells burst around them.

The wire was now less than fifty yards away, but it was clear to Casca that they were not going to reach it. Suddenly the boy piper leaped to his feet, his pipes held above his head in one hand. Then he ran for the English lines. Good thinking, Casca decided quickly and took off after him. All along the line
Tommies were getting to their feet and fleeing too.

But the carnage continued. The machine guns poured lead after the retreating backs, and more men fell.

Then Casca was at his own wire, searching desperately for an opening while all around him men fell to the machine guns. There were no openings. The wire had been re-entangled as soon as the charging troops were clear of the trenches. And all the wire cutters were out in no-man's-land with the dead subalterns.

Inside the wire stood Regimental Sergeant Major Norman, wire cutters in hand, but he was not about to use them. He paced back and forth, his impeccable boots and cap peak glinting in the sunlight, abusing the troops and screaming at them to turn around and attack the Germans.

Casca succeeded in getting the butt of his rifle beneath a roll of wire, and a number of other men ran to join him, all lifting together until there was just space enough for Casca to wriggle through on his belly.

RSM Norman ran toward him.
"You 'orrible, worthless coward! You rotten disgrace to the race! Get back there and fight like a decent English soljer! You no-good ..."

His voice died in his throat as Casca calmly shot him from where he lay, and the tirade ceased. A moment later Casca had opened the wire and
Tommies were pouring through it into the safety of the trench.

Casca leaned against the wall of the trench and worked the action of his .303 to eject the spent cartridge then removed the magazine and squeezed a fresh bullet into place.

"Hope I don't have to shoot too many more Englishmen," he muttered to himself. "I don't like this war already."

He looked out across no-man's-land toward the German trenches. Shaking his head he muttered to
himself, "I don't see how men can stand against these machine guns. We could be here for years."

A Major
Blandings appeared on the other side of the trench. Purple in the face, he stammered his outrage. "Disgraceful. Running like chickens. Not a man amongst the lot of you. Scarcely a single shot fired."

Casca stared at him calmly, just managing to restrain the desire to shoot him too. The furious officer was still ranting when whistles sounded all up and down the line. The machine guns commenced firing and Casca turned to see a thick wave of Germans rushing for the trench.

He fired deliberately, each bullet accounting for a man. Then he reloaded the five-shot magazine and fired again. Beside him everybody was doing the same, and the chatter of the machine gun was continuous. The boy piper and one of his drummers were moving back and forth on the earthworks. The piper was limping, and the drummer's sleeve was red with blood and he occasionally missed the beat, but they played as if in a peacetime parade in London. They marched to the opening in the wire and through it, heading for the oncoming waves of German troops.

Casca didn't want to go, but he found himself swept up in the tide of men who clambered out of the trench and ran into no-man's-land behind the two boys.

From somewhere he heard orders: "Fix bayonets! Charge!" And he found himself obeying, although he had a profound contempt for bayonet fighting while there were bullets available.

The German riflemen could have cut them down, but the wild music from the kilted boys and the long line of threatening steel unnerved some of the men in the front rank, and they faltered. Other men blundered into them, and their charge lost momentum and cohesion.

Then the two forces met. Many of the Germans had emptied their magazines and needed to reload. Their bayonets were still on their belts and they quailed before the Tommies' flashing steel. Even those with bullets ready only had time to fire one round and were still working the bolts of their rifles when the British closed with them.

A lot of
Tommies died and a few Germans, but many Germans stopped in their tracks, and not a few turned and ran. Soldiers behind them who could not see what was happening turned and ran too, and the British quickly broke through their lines.

Those Germans who had continued their charge were now at the wire struggling to cut through the entanglements in the teeth of machine gun fire with British bayonets at their rear.

The heavy Lee Enfield rifle was a yard long, and the bayonet another eighteen inches. Together they made a very effective pike, and the professionals who made up the main strength of the British force were well trained in its use. They fell upon the Germans from behind, stabbing them through the kidneys, clubbing them with their rifle butts. The attack stalled. There was some fierce hand-to-hand fighting, but when it came to steel on steel, the Tommies had the better of it. More and more Germans turned back, and soon the entire force was in retreat.

Casca was glad to see them go, and made no attempt to follow. He was mightily relieved to hear the piper sound the Retreat, and he readily turned to follow him back to the trench.

At their trench Major Blandings was furiously waiting as he upbraided them again. There were also a number of provosts questioning men at random, as it was clear that RSM Norman had not been killed by a German bullet. Norman's replacement was strutting back and forth with a clipboard in his hand, demanding that all soldiers account for their sixty-six-pound packs which were lying all over no-man's-land.