Harvest of War (5 page)

After a few seconds he heard shouting behind him and realized that the second wave had left the trenches and were advancing. He stood up, gripped by a strange fatalistic calm, and began to move forward. On either side, other men were scrambling to their feet. He waved to them and shouted, ‘Come on, lads!' In a shell-hole to his right a man was crouched, as if doing up his boot laces. ‘Get up!' Tom yelled. ‘Come on, up!' He leaned down and shook his shoulder and the man keeled over on to his side. Tom saw that bullets had carved a line across his waist, almost cutting him in half. The man's intestines were bulging out and even in death he was clasping them with both hands as if trying to shove them back. Tom straightened up and struggled forward.

There were others with him now, no longer a straight disciplined line but a rabble of desperate men. He saw more of them fall on either side of him, and the bodies of the dead and wounded barred his way. He jumped over some, trampled on others, and found himself at a gap in the wire. Ahead was a trench. He pulled a Mills bomb from his belt and lobbed it in, then ducked until the explosion was over. Jumping into the trench he saw five Germans. Four were dead. The fifth was reaching for his rifle. Tom raised his revolver and shot him in the head.

There was a slither of stones behind him and a man from his platoon dropped into the trench, quickly followed by two others.

‘What now, sir?' one asked breathlessly.

‘We must hold this section of trench until the reserves come through,' Tom said. ‘Try to find something to barricade either end. And collect all the grenades you can find.'

They could hear German voices approaching as reinforcements arrived. Tom took a grenade from the body of one of the Germans and lobbed it round the traverse at the end of the trench. There was a scream and the advance seemed to pause. The men with him dragged everything they could find, including the dead bodies, to each end of the section and piled them up, but it was not long before a grenade landed close to one of them, the fuse still fizzing. Without hesitation, the man picked it up and hurled it back and they heard it explode on the far side of the barricade.

How long they held out Tom was never sure. They threw every grenade they could find, more than once returning those that were thrown at them, and each one gave them a brief respite, but it seemed that at any moment the enemy must break through and overwhelm them. Then, at last, the attacks ceased, there was a sound of English voices and a second lieutenant in the Somersets led a small party into their section of the trench.

‘Bloody good show!' he exclaimed. ‘You can fall back now. There's a German sap just to your left. If you follow that it'll take you back nearly to our lines.'

Numb and almost too weary to move, Tom led his small contingent along the sap, finally fell into his own front-line trench and lost consciousness.

He came round on a stretcher in the forward dressing station. An orderly was bending over him. ‘Am I wounded?' he asked.

‘Nasty cut on the head, that's all,' the man said. ‘We thought it was worse to begin with. You were so covered in blood we didn't hardly know where to start looking. Seems like most of it wasn't yours.'

As he lay waiting for the wound to be stitched Tom tried to come to terms with what he remembered of the last hours. It was hard to focus his thoughts, but he could not escape a feeling that he had crossed some kind of threshold . . . that he would never be the man he was a day earlier. He remembered that he had shot a man, quite deliberately, and had felt no compunction. In the struggle for survival his most primitive, atavistic instincts had taken over and even now he felt no regret, but rather a vague sense of triumph. They had taken the trench and held it, against all opposition. He wondered how far the advance had gone beyond that point.

When his wound had been treated he was free to return to his unit – if he could locate it. The trenches were a milling chaos of wounded men and stretcher-bearers and it took Tom some time to find an officer.

‘God knows!' was the answer to his question. ‘It's a nightmare out there. You'll be lucky to find any of them alive.'

Tom discovered what was left of his company occupying a German dugout just behind the first line of trenches. Barton was there, one arm in an improvised sling, his head drooping in exhaustion.

He looked up as Tom clattered down the stairs. ‘Tom? Thank God! We'd given you up for dead.'

‘What are we doing here?' Tom asked. ‘I thought we'd be further forward than this.'

The captain gave a brief, bitter laugh. ‘You went over the top with the first wave, didn't you? You saw what happened.'

For the first time Tom remembered the domino collapse of the men on either side of him. ‘I don't understand. What went wrong?'

‘Look around you. How deep is this dugout? Thirty feet? Nothing short of a direct hit by a high-explosive shell would affect anyone in here. The Jerries just sat out our bombardment in their cosy little bolt-holes and then, as soon as the shelling stopped, all they had to do was run up the stairs and man the machine guns.'

‘How many have we lost?' Tom sank down on a packing case.

‘God alone knows. Hundreds, thousands. And all for a few forward trenches. Fritz will counter-attack as soon as he can bring up reserves and we'll be lucky to hold on to what we've gained. What a bloody shambles!'

At some point in the days following the first assault at Thiepval Tom decided that alive or dead it made no difference. He was already in hell. Again and again they were ordered to attack, and again and again he led his men towards the enemy guns. Sometimes the advance ended with hand-to-hand fighting in the German trenches; sometimes it petered out in the craters of no-man's-land. Sometimes they gained their objective: the crest of a small hill, or a copse of trees reduced to skeletons by the bombardment. Sometimes they were able to hold it; more often they were driven back by a determined counter-attack. Death became commonplace. Replacements for men lost were sent up and died before he even had time to learn their names. He trampled over bodies as if they were fallen branches. Often he had no food for days on end. He took rations from corpses, drank from dead men's water bottles. Yet still he survived. He came to the conclusion that this was his punishment. Not for him the peace of oblivion; he must live on as punishment for what he had become, what he had allowed the war to make him.

One day, he heard that the Second Battalion had been withdrawn from Ypres and sent to reinforce the troops on the Somme. That meant that Ralph was somewhere in the vicinity, if he was still alive. But he had no chance to enquire. Social interaction had been reduced to the barest necessities. Then, at last, they received the order to retire and regroup. For the first time, all three battalions of the Coldstream Guards were to attack in line. The objective was the village of Les Boeufs and the news that the whole regiment was to be together seemed to cheer the troops considerably.

‘Now we'll show them!' Tom heard. ‘Fritz won't know what hit him!'

He could not share their optimism.

The attack began at 8.30 a.m. and once again Tom forced his limbs to carry him out of the trench and forward up the slope of the long hill ahead, shouting to his men to follow. Enfilading fire from machine guns on the crest was kicking up the dust to either side of him but he ignored it. Suddenly a new sound, audible above the chatter of the guns and the crash of exploding shells, caught his attention: a grinding, throbbing roar that came from somewhere to his left, and with it a wave of cheering. Looking round, he was stopped in his tracks by an extraordinary apparition. A huge machine, a steel leviathan that moved forward not on wheels but on some kind of moving belt, was advancing towards him, crushing beneath it every obstacle in its way. From the top of it a gun spat fire towards the enemy trenches and following behind it were a throng of cheering soldiers. The enemy gunners had seen it too and for a moment all firing ceased. The machine ground forwards, smashing through the enemy wire as if it was made of gossamer and rolling unimpeded over the first trench. Tom saw German soldiers scrambling out of its path and fleeing. The British men rushed forward in pursuit and Tom ran with them. But suddenly a spurt of black smoke issued from the rear of the machine and the engine choked into silence, leaving it tilted to one side like a beetle left helpless on its back. The advance faltered and came to a standstill and the enemy guns opened up again.

A shell exploded at the feet of the man next to Tom, leaving a smouldering crater and showering Tom with earth and fragments of human flesh. He heard the whistle of a second shell approaching and instinctively flung himself sideways into the still smoking hole. He lay for a while, panting and listening to the sounds of the battle around him. He could tell from experience by the noise whether the advance was continuing or whether it had stalled. This one, like so many before, had stalled. The survivors would cower in their shell-holes until dark and then try to crawl back to their own lines. He knew he should get up and try to rally them but he was exhausted and sick of the whole business. Then, a little way off, he heard the unmistakable notes of a hunting horn, followed by a ragged cheer. He raised his head cautiously. A figure he recognized as Colonel Campbell, the commander of the Third Battalion, was running forward, hunting horn in one hand, revolver in the other, and his men were racing after him. Tom scrambled out of the shell-hole and joined them. In a wave they swept towards the enemy trenches. To his amazement Tom found his section empty. He drew a Mills bomb from his belt and threw it round the traverse wall, then went in after it. A figure appeared in front of him. He fired and the man fell. Others from Tom's own company were behind him now and he led them along the communications trench towards the second line.

Time and distance became a blur. He ran and fired, reloaded and ran on, hearing the shouts and cheers of men on either side and, when they began to falter, another call on the horn. As dusk began to fall they found themselves entering the ruins of the village of Les Boeufs. In what remained of the village square Colonel Campbell called them to a halt.

‘We'll dig in here for the night, men. We're far ahead of the rest, so we'll hold this position until the reinforcements come up.'

Suddenly Tom felt that his legs would not hold him up any longer. He sank down with his back against a broken wall and closed his eyes.

A voice nearby forced him to open them again. ‘Cup of char, sir?'

A soldier was crouching in front of him with a steaming mess tin. He took it and thanked the man.

‘Something to eat, sir? It's only hard tack, I'm afraid.'

Tom shook his head. The thought of food turned his stomach. He sipped the tea gratefully, then closed his eyes again and slipped into a sleep that was like a coma. When consciousness returned he was stiff and shivering in the damp chill of dawn and the village was astir with the sound of tramping feet and new voices. An orderly with a Red Cross arm band approached him.

‘Better let me have a look at that wound, sir.'

‘Wound? I'm not wounded,' Tom said.

‘Don't know about that, sir. Look at your tunic.'

Tom looked down. His tunic was ripped across the shoulder and stained with blood, and when he tried to lift his hand a stab of pain went through him. The orderly efficiently cut away the remaining material, exposing a deep gash from which blood was oozing.

‘That's going to need proper attention, sir,' the orderly said. ‘It needs stitching, and the bullet could still be in there. I'll tell my CO.'

He bandaged the wound tightly and a few moments later a captain, whose name Tom did not recall, came over to him.

‘Can you get yourself back to the dressing station? We're taking over here so all you chaps are being withdrawn. Bloody good show, incidentally! Do you think you can manage?'

‘I expect so.' Tom hauled himself to his feet. A steady stream of men was heading back down the hill towards the British lines, but it was a trickle compared to the flood that had swept the Germans aside. Bodies littered the ground and they had to pick their way over them. The Coldstreamers had paid a heavy price for their victory.

Tom was never quite sure how he ended up at the dressing station. At some point he must have passed out, because he came round on a stretcher with a doctor bending over him. The doctor took a cursory glance at the wound and said to someone Tom could not see, ‘Not serious. He can wait.'

He waited, the pain in his shoulder growing more insistent, until it seemed to consume his whole torso. Finally the doctor came back, probed the wound and pronounced it clear. He gave Tom a morphine injection, stitched the wound and put his arm in a sling.

‘Right,' he said. ‘I can't see that that wound warrants sending you back home. The truth is, there are hundreds of men in a worse situation than you are. But you've lost a lot of blood so you need to take it easy. I'm going to send you back to Battalion HQ for them to decide what to do with you. If you're up to it, there's a car leaving in a couple of minutes that will take you.'

Battalion HQ was in a ruined farmhouse a mile or so behind the lines. Tom reported to a corporal sitting at a table in what had once been the kitchen and was asked to wait. He sat in a kind of stupor, wondering vaguely how long it would be before someone offered him something to eat or drink. His throat was so parched he could barely speak.

The corporal returned. ‘Major Malham Brown asks you to come this way, sir.'

Ralph was sitting behind another table, spread with maps. He got up as Tom was announced and hobbled forward. Tom registered that his left foot was in a cast and he supported himself with a stick.

Ralph grasped Tom by his good shoulder. ‘Tom! Dear God, what have you been doing with yourself? You look terrible. But you're alive, that's all that matters! I've been worried out of my mind.' His voice broke. ‘I'm just so glad to see you!'