7

Already they were saying it was a war of inches, but after their notorious April gas attack the German inches had been adding up. They had succeeded through the month of May in pushing the Front three kilometers back toward Ypres, and every day threatened to bring the breakthrough. Whenever the British forces had stopped their drive, the Germans had come back at them again, determined to eliminate the salient that protruded well into German-held territory. The threat at Ypres to the Germans was that the British would be able to use that bulge in the trench line as a jumping-off place to attack the U-boat base at Ostend and even to control the other crucial North Sea ports. That was why, since the autumn, this point had loomed above all others, and why British commanders were willing to suffer losses indefinitely to hold it. The salient was their one advantage.

Every German push there was met head-on. But the first gas attack, which had so astounded and frightened the British, had given the Germans a momentum that was rare in that stalemate war. That momentum could still be felt when Douglas Tyrrell and his regiment joined the battered line of men who’d been trying for nearly two months to overcome it. By the middle of June the salient had been cut in half and the Germans had pressed to within two kilometers of Ypres.

At Poperinge the Fourth Connaught hooked up that night, as planned, with the rest of the Irish regiment. To the troops the rendezvous had seemed chaotic and disorganized. Rations had been haphazardly distributed and the order to move out had come even before the men had had tea. Even the Catholic mass that Lieutenant Keefe had proposed was canceled. The men had to stifle the feeling that after weeks of monotonous waiting, they were being thrown into the line hastily, with none of the measured grandeur Colonel MacIntyre’s speeches had led them to expect. They were a part of a divisional force numbering more than fifteen thousand, and though they knew the division was moving against the ridges south of the town, they could hardly appreciate how little the real movement of such a group into battle itself resembles the graceful, swift flow of arrowed markers on the maps they all carried in their imaginations.

The northernmost tip of Messines Ridge, the part nearest Ypres, was designated Hill 60. The Germans held the hill and the Rangers were ordered into position immediately below it. As they approached in the darkness, they could have no sense of how it loomed above the valley, its sides running steeply up to a narrow pinnacle from which German artillery units had been freely operating. The hill had long since been denuded of trees, so that the men could see the awful flashing of the guns. But that seemed like fire in the sky, and since those guns were targeted on Ypres itself, they did not threaten them. In fact, by then those guns had nearly leveled the historic Flemish town, although not the deep, connecting cellars beneath it that still functioned as Second Army Headquarters. The German guns fired at will on the fixed British lines up and down the sector, and their artillery positions were well dug in, defended with heavy machine guns and fortified just below the crest of the hill, at the steepest part of the slope, with rolls of barbed wire.

Once soldiers dug in, the constant artillery turned them into a paralyzed mass of burrowing creatures, and the orders to attack the superior German positions that had been regularly issued in the previous weeks had been intended as much to ward off that paralysis as to preempt the German assaults. Waves of Tommies, Jocks, and Micks had been ordered up Hill 60 dozens of times in that period, and all had been thrown back. Between assaults, the bodies of the fallen had been scrupulously removed by night crews—out of respect, of course, but also to prevent the next wave of attackers from guessing what had been happening there. Soldiers will obey an order not to stop to help the wounded, but they won’t dash across a carpet of their dead and dying comrades.

The trenches in which the Connaught Rangers were to take up their positions were immediately at the bottom of Hill 60, half circling it for nearly two miles. They were extremely vulnerable to rifle-fired grenades, mortar, and musketry from above, but they were in no danger from the heavy artillery because those guns, even if they weren’t aimed at Ypres, could not have closed the angle of the hill. Still, the noise of their firing was so relentlessly terrifying that Tommies were relieved to be ordered out of the trenches even if it was to attack.

But the Irish soldiers’ fear was at a pitch even before they got to the trenches, because a kilometer from the Front, less than an hour ago, they’d been ordered to don their black-snouted gas masks. They didn’t know that theirs was the only regiment in the division to receive that order; neither were they told that the reason for it was not the expectation of a gas attack that night, but the fact that the Rangers were occupying a position that had been heavily gassed three days before, wiping out their predecessors in the line. The Germans could lob gas canisters down on them with impunity; but even if they didn’t, the poison from three days before would linger in the trenches for at least two weeks, in the present rain-free conditions. But the pressure on Hill 60 had to be kept up.

The men knew none of this, of course. They knew only that in the most frightening hour of their lives, their fear and discomfort had been multiplied a hundredfold by having to wear the suffocating, foul-smelling face gear. In that pitch-black period before dawn they made an eerie sight: dark silhouettes against the sheet-lightning flashes of the guns, monstrously masked, crouching instinctively though to no purpose, moving one after the other along the Ypres-Comines Canal, which led directly to their position.

When the five thousand men of the Irish regiment had at last taken cover in their poisoned trenches, some of the men collapsed with relief as if a rest-easy order had been given. Some took their masks off and gulped at what they thought was fresh air. Those poor bastards screamed at once as the gas residue attacked their lungs. They desperately tried to replace their masks, but it was too late; they writhed in choking agony while their helpless comrades realized fully for the first time that their nightmare had begun. The officers went up and down the ranks, evacuating the gas casualties and enforcing discipline. Soon, just as the first light appeared in the east above the German lines, the British artillery barrage began, and now the worst noise wasn’t of guns firing but of shells exploding from beyond the crest of the hill above the German position. Everyone knew that the order to go over would come within the hour.

Douglas Tyrrell watched a French priest, gas mask above his soutane, move along the line. The lip of the trench was only a foot above his head, but he felt no need to crouch. Each man knelt as the priest came to him. In their gas masks real talk was impossible, and they didn’t share a language anyway, so Tyrrell wondered what kinds of confessions they could be. The priest seemed satisfied that they were real enough, because after a moment or two he absolved each man of his sins by waving his hand in the sign of the cross above the penitent soldier’s bowed head. For once the mindless Catholic ritual, perhaps because in this form its mindlessness was too obvious to be denied, did not seem bizarre to Tyrrell. In fact, to his own surprise, he envied the men the consolation their religion gave them.

When Lieutenant Keefe touched his arm, Tyrrell turned to face him. Keefe spoke, but because of their masks, Tyrrell missed what he said. Keefe repeated himself in the strange hollow voice: “All in order, sir.”

The men had properly assumed the passive, hunched position—ducking shells—that was the near-permanent posture of infantry on the forward line of the Western Front.

Tyrrell nodded, and his eyes drifted back to the priest, who, after ministering to another soldier, straightened and faced the officers. To Tyrrell’s surprise Keefe at once crossed to him and fell to one knee. The priest bent to put his ear by Keefe’s mouthpiece, and a moment later blessed him. Keefe pressed the priest’s hands against his gas mask, and after a moment Tyrrell realized that Keefe was kissing them. Then the priest stood and faced Tyrrell expectantly. Tyrrell shook his head briskly and felt embarrassed as the priest approached him. It was unthinkable that he should kneel before this man, but also that he could possibly explain that he meant no disrespect. The French priest had probably never met a Protestant before and he probably didn’t know that Ireland had plenty of them. Tyrrell put his hand out, surprising the priest. But then they shook vigorously and Tyrrell said in that otherworldly, amplified voice, “Merci, mon père.” The priest bowed, then moved along the line.

Tyrrell looked at his watch: 0527. The barrage would lift at 0600, whistles would sound up and down the line, and they would go. He stretched himself up to his full height, then mounted the fire step to look up at the hill, which now, in that faint light, loomed several hundred feet above them. It was a gray mass with no surviving vegetation or other detail apparent, like a huge pile of slag from the coal fields or like a black pyramid, tomb of a king. The German artillery had stopped firing, its crews having presumably dropped into bunkers when the British shells began to land. At that point in the war British guns still threw, almost exclusively, shrapnel shells that were unrivaled at killing troops in the open but were useless against field fortifications. They wouldn’t dent the pillbox gun emplacements but, in theory, shrapnel shells would obliterate the belts of barbed wire ringing them. That was what the Rangers, like all their predecessors, had been promised. The big guns cut the path for you, chums. Tommies had to believe it; how else could they throw themselves “toot sweet” across the fields at walls of barbed wire?

Despite the noise of the British shells exploding on the hill above him, Tyrrell was aware suddenly of the drumming hollow echo of his own gas helmet, like the “ocean” resounding in a conch shell, and it made him uneasy. Whatever feeling of security against the dreaded gas those masks gave them, they heightened the sense of disorientation, of being suspended in an unreal inhuman world where even one’s mates were monsters. To ward off an unexpected wave of his own anxiety, Tyrrell moved down the line of his men, touching their arms and shoulders reassuringly. “Good luck, men,” he said again and again. He was filled with admiration for them, their stoic patient courage. They stood along the crowded trench shoulder to shoulder, instinctively leaning against the forward wall, clutching their bayoneted rifles, resting their faces and heads, which were covered only with soft cloth hats. Until the order to stand-to was given, they would stay low like this, bridging the fire step or sitting on it. Tyrrell could see only a couple of dozen men at a stretch, for the trench bent sharply in a series of kinks in the line. He remembered the theory: such angles, per regulation, were to prevent an enemy force that succeeded in taking one part of the system from firing down the length of it.

The trench just here had been well house-kept, the walls had been lined with sandbags, and the parapet had been reinforced with timber. Duckboard flooring had been laid on top of the ubiquitous mud and water. Even when it hadn’t rained, as now, the trench floors were always wet because the water table in the Flemish fields was high. Duckboards were a luxury, and the condition of flesh rot caused by their near-universal absence had already passed into the language as “trench foot.” But Tyrrell knew little of that. In training at Grimsby the mock trenches had been sandbagged, neatly cut, and protected by well-constructed breastworks. In the reality of Belgium and France, most British trenches were squalid, ramshackle places because their occupants were always led to believe that the great offensive breakthrough was imminent and they would be moving east to new positions. On those rare occasions when they survived their movements east, overrunning German trenches, Tommies were amazed to discover clean, well-built timber-lined dugouts, domiciles the defenders had intended to occupy indefinitely. Tyrrell didn’t know enough to take the exceptional condition of his own section of trench as an ominous sign; the men who’d built it and occupied it prior to the introduction of chlorine gas, had assumed they were going to be there a long time because the German fortification above them was invincible.

With an absurd regret, Douglas realized that, given the trench’s poisoned state and the timing of their assault, he would not be able to organize the by-the-book routine that would have had his men on a proper cycle of front, reserve, and rest. The Western Front was known for stasis, but his regiment’s experience since leaving Longue Croix was of constant movement. Bizarre though it might seem, he’d been encouraged to look forward to the trench routine. Officers of Tyrrell’s rank were senior in the trenches, since field officers and staff stayed back on the GHQ line, and they took pride in maintaining conditions that kept their men safe and sharp, if rarely dry. However short their time was in it, this was Tyrrell’s first trench, and the two hundred and fifty men stretched along the three hundred yards of it that formed his company’s section were his now in a way they never were in training or in transit. Colonel Maclntyre and the other commanders who up to now had been the experts were suddenly the amateur observers miles to the rear. Tyrrell was the expert here or had better be. But alas, this trench, seat of his authority, was a bare stopping place. He checked his watch again; in half an hour they would be out of it, scrambling up that hill, and then each man would be his own expert.

At the end of his company line, he turned back the way he’d come. How he wished his men weren’t wearing respirators. He longed to see their faces. Their goggled eyes followed him like animal eyes following a flame in the dark. At an intersection where a trench from the rear joined a frontline trench—in the argot, where a communication trench joined the fire trench—Tyrrell came upon the signals officer and with him Corporal O’Day. Instead of a rifle, O’Day carried a wooden box with air holes drilled in it: the pair of homing pigeons. Once the Tommies overran the German position on top of the hill, the marked birds would be released. Within minutes the pigeons’ arrival at GHQ would announce the regiment’s success, and reinforcements would be sent forward at once. Reinforcements were reserved for the purposes of securing victory, not of compounding losses in defeat and not of tilting the balance in a close fight either. Tyrrell clapped O’Day’s shoulder. “Fly your pigeons well, Corporal.” O’Day nodded but said nothing. Even through the mask Tyrrell could see that the lad’s eyes were out of their sockets with fear.

Farther along he came upon a man hunched over the well-creased white page of a letter. They all carried letters like that. My Darling Son. The boy had it out now because, if his mother was near, what harm could come to him? It seemed to Tyrrell that those words were scrawled on the dawn-lit air above them all. My Darling Son. He carried no such letter himself, but, at that moment his personal thoughts overran the defenses he’d built against them to leap toward both his father and Timothy, whom he pictured as an infant curled like a loaf in his arm. It had been two years since his son was that size. Like turning the page of an album, he pictured his father holding his baby son on the bright lawn of Cragside. The boy wears a tiny cricket cap.

For an instant Tyrrell allowed himself to feel a quiet fatalism. He would not see them again, not Sir Hugh or Timothy, not Anne or Jane. He would not see—and this certitude cut more brutally still—Pamela. My Darling Wife. His lips moved around the words, soundlessly.

Pamela was sitting on the terraced lawn beside the trimmed hedges. Beyond were the shimmering bay and the curving hills. Her black hair framed her face, which glowed with happiness to be looking at him. Her legs, covered, were bent under her, her body leaning upon her extended right arm. With her left hand she grasped the ankle on which she sat. She was relaxed, complacent in the repose of a weekend afternoon. On the grass of that very lawn, just beyond that very hedge, he had made love to her once. She had pretended to be scandalized, covering his mouth with her fingers, to silence him. Yet she had been the one to make noise, laughing. Now, sitting there, demure, in his mind, she was quiet. And suddenly Tyrrell thought she was too quiet. Then he realized he hadn’t conjured a memory of his wife at all. She was sitting on the lawn beside the hedges not as she had in life—why couldn’t he picture her beyond that hedge, her stockinged legs around his hips?—but as she had now for months in the photograph he carried. He panicked to think that his memory had taken second place to a mere reminder. But he told himself it didn’t matter if his mind dulled so long as this feeling didn’t. My Darling Wife! It was not a photograph he loved, it was she.

Tyrrell, the officer, should have told the man to put away his letter, but he left him alone.

He didn’t realize he’d returned to his own position in the line until he came upon Keefe, who was on one knee, as he had been before the priest. Keefe was blocking the way. At first Tyrrell thought he was praying, and a qualm filled him. Of all people, Tyrrell was counting on Keefe to match him in maintaining the detached soldierly calm the other ranks needed to see in their officers.

“Keefe?”

Keefe turned and looked up, and only then did Tyrrell see that he was not praying, but rather adjusting his puttees.

Puttees? An officer’s service dress did not include puttees, the woolen strips wound spirally around ankles and calves. Officers wore riding boots or leather leggings. But Keefe’s leggings were lying next to him, discarded, and he was wrapping the second of his legs with cloth. Tyrrell had noticed that Keefe wore straight trousers instead of the trimly cut riding breeches he and his colleagues favored, but he’d assumed that was because Keefe hadn’t the money to properly outfit himself. British officers were still paid as if they all had private incomes and many of the “temporary gentlemen” ran up such bills at military tailors in England that the tailors as a group were even more attentive to published casualty lists—and almost more appalled by the rate at which junior officers fell—than the officers’ mothers were. Keefe, though, had no tendency toward sartorial flare and no physique for it; he hadn’t run up bills at any tailor’s. Now, when he stood, his trousers bloused at midcalf in the oafish manner of other ranks, and it was easy to see the Second Left as one of them.

“What are you doing?”

Keefe pointed at Tyrrell’s knees and said, “The Germans tell their gunners to aim at the ones with thin legs. Our lads call it ‘dandy-fire.’”

Was this a display of fear? Tyrrell strained to read Keefe’s face, hidden inside his respirator, the infernal device. He said, “You’re afraid to look like an officer, Mr. Keefe?”

Keefe stared back at his captain rigidly, then bent to make a last adjustment of one puttee. Only when he straightened did he say, “I’d prefer to look like a linden tree, if the truth be told. But that’s not what I’m after. I don’t want our lads afraid to have me next to them when we’re running up that hill.”

Their exchange seemed unreal because their muffled voices sounded so strange. Tyrrell realized that Keefe’s pragmatism was far more to the point than his own priggishness. It humbled him, suddenly, to have reacted like a sixth-form prefect. Tyrrell abruptly put his hand out. “May I have the glasses, please, Mr. Keefe?”

Keefe handed the binoculars over and Tyrrell turned and stepped onto the fire step to peer over the parapet. Adjusting focus he could just see through the dust the crescent of rust-colored belts of wire near the top of the hill, untouched by their own artillery fire. This was not agricultural barbed wire; razor points gleamed as the early sunlight struck them. But apart from the wire he saw nothing of the German position. Did the fact that the machine guns were not visible mean that the men would be able to scale most of the hill before coming into range? He saw dust billowing from the incessantly exploding shells. When the artillery lifted, it would be a deadly race, his men up the long slope against the German gunners up from their bunkers. The Rangers’ only hope was that the machine guns were even then taking hits, that their ammunition belts were being broken, their tripods collapsed, their muzzles jammed into the dirt—anything to slow their crews in mounting them.

Tyrrell handed the glasses to Keefe, who’d joined him at that parapet.

Keefe stared up the hill for a moment, then mumbled something.

“Crown of thorns,” was what Douglas thought he heard him say.

At 0550, ten minutes before breakout, Captain Tyrrell, like company commanders all along that two-mile stretch of trench line, gave the order to stand to arms. As the word passed, the men uncomplainingly took their positions and, with what seemed to their captain heroic forbearance, they waited. My darling sons, he repeated to himself. My darling sons.

He unsnapped his holster and drew his pistol, then reached into his tunic for his brass whistle, which he fit through his mouthpiece like toffee. He touched his other pocket, where Pamela’s photograph was.

He placed his arm under his chin, propped on the parapet, so that he could watch the sweep hand of his timepiece. Repeatedly over the next few minutes he thought the thing had stopped, and that, more than the knowledge of what awaited them, nearly made him cry out in panic.

At 0600 the barrage was supposed to lift, but it did not. At 0601 the shells were still exploding beyond the lip of the hill and no one in the line had moved.

My darling sons.

He sensed a difference in the noise; the steady din of explosions faded as shells began booming singly, the last rounds. Heard individually like that they seemed louder. They reminded him of the solemn dong, dong, dong of Big Ben’s bell beat, and suddenly he saw the chimney pots of the Inns of Court, the view from his window at Lincoln’s Inn, where for three years he’d marked the time by those gongs.

As if the guns had been striking the hour, on the sixth dong—he’d have sworn it was the sixth—the barrage lifted. The noise stopped. An absolute silence, a blanket of silence fell. But the mind corrects; it was not silence, only a pause. The sense of pause brooded above them. Tyrrell gulped a quick intake of breath, preparing to whistle, but then he waited. The pause lengthened, as if for a period of thoughtful consideration, and in that instant of the neither here nor there, all of their faces came once more into his mind, a tumble of red noses, bashed foreheads, spotted teeth, grinning cheeks, freckles, and, because of their haircuts, ludicrously oversized ears. They were west-of-Ireland faces, the faces of men who’d worked his father’s farm and who’d come to Douglas himself with legal problems; they were the faces he passed on the road to Gort and the faces of the fishermen in Ballyvaughn. He shifted slightly, and his eyes met those of Bernard Keefe, the Galway fireman. But Keefe’s eyes, like everyone’s, were disembodied. In that mask he was a man without a face. That was the horror of the moment—that all those men, his darling sons, even the older Keefe—were going now into the infinite jeopardy of the mad charge without their faces.

Far away a faint whistle sounded. It grew louder, working its way up the line. The two officers were still staring at one another, and for Tyrrell the signal came when Keefe’s eyes, like a starter’s flag, fell.

He blew with all the force he had, as if that shrill screeching were a voodoo act meant to frighten the evil spirits across whose border his men now nobly threw themselves.

Tyrrell kept blowing his whistle as he ran, emptying the contents of his mind into the air. He thought of nothing then, having become, perhaps for the first time in his life, purely physical, a creature without consciousness. Some men have the capacity to lose themselves entirely in the act of sex. He didn’t. He had never lost himself entirely in anything until then. All at once he was capable of no perception, reflection, or experience. He was running and blowing. He forgot Keefe and all the others. He forgot the discomfort of his mask, the threat of gunfire, the racing Germans. He forgot Pamela. He was aware only of the shell-plowed ground. It required an unusual dexterity to run across the pits and craters without stumbling, and he had it. As he dashed higher and higher up the slope, the act seemed so natural, so easy really, that it didn’t occur to him to wonder where the machine-gun fire was.

Gradually, as shortness of breath and the increasing steepness of the hill slowed him, he became aware once more of the other men. They were on both sides of him, matching his speed and finesse, all having instinctively employed the numb suspension of mind that makes such “courage” possible. Tyrrell was aware of them now not as his “sons” or even as his “men” but as his mates; this was the hurley game again, but now he was playing too. Having lost himself in the pure act of pumping legs, he was lost now, also for the first time, in the communion of the charge. It didn’t matter what he gave himself over to—running, camaraderie; the point was to keep his mind at bay until this was over.

He stepped into an old shell crater that was deeper than he expected, and he fell. This was an instant before the moment when the German gunners got to their machines, so that when the opening burst of gunfire broke across the hill, he, nearly alone of that first wave of Rangers, was not hit. Sprawled on the ground, he saw the men above him fall like ninepins.

He had had the wind knocked out of him when he’d hit the ground, and the sight of the lads tumbling over each other ahead of him knocked it out again. Instinctively he tore at his gas mask until it was loose, and he flung it aside. He rose firing his pistol, and resumed running up the hill.

The machine-gun emplacements were plainly visible from that point on the hill, and some of the Rangers had stopped the insane running toward them and were now prone, in marksman’s posture, squeezing off aimed shots. Again and again, the Germans were hit, the gunners and the belt tenders and then the reserve gunners and tenders who rushed to take their places. Even from that distance the silhouettes of their spiked helmets struck Tyrrell. Those helmets were always featured on British recruiting posters, emblems of the “Hun.” But that worked against the British now because those helmets made their wearers seem even more barbaric and therefore more invincible. It was yet another fear to overcome. The Germans fired their rifles individually down at the Rangers, but the prone Irish marksmen remained fixed on the two machine guns. They succeeded for long seconds, then moments, in keeping them silent.

Tyrrell felt nothing but the manic movement of the men around him; motion, everything was motion. Constantly, they fell, picked themselves up, clawed through dirt and over rocks, pushing each other. At one point the ground below him sank sickeningly and he realized he had stepped on someone’s corpse, which only made him climb faster.

The immobile wall of men’s backs just ahead confused him. Why would they stop? Tyrrell was in a frenzy as he approached, screaming at them to keep moving, furious that just below the crest of the hill his company should freeze. They could be taking it! It was a miracle they’d gotten this far! He wanted to crush through them, pushing them aside, the bastards, the cowards; why had they stopped?

But as he drew closer he saw. The men were bunched two-and three-deep across a section of ledge forty feet wide, and the front rank of men—dozens of them—were writhing on the barbed wire they had attempted to crawl over, or into which they’d been pushed by the now panicking men behind them. Their hands and faces were bloody as they continued to rip at the wire. From only a few yards on the other side, the Germans at one position were firing at the mangled bodies from behind sandbags.

“Bombs!” Tyrrell cried. “Bombs!,” thinking of Mills bombs, the hand grenades, as if someone could explode one there to open a swath in the wire. It was nonsense. If the artillery hadn’t cut the wire, a Mills bomb wouldn’t.

Behind him waves of Rangers were bunching up, having successfully mounted most of the hill, and to the left and right, as the ledge spilled off into a broad plateau, other Irish soldiers were running from side to side looking for a gap in the wire.

The German machine gun finally opened fire with a deafening noise, it was so close, and for a moment Tyrrell’s men fell in groups. But then the German gunners must have been hit again, for the machine gun stopped. His men were screaming as the panic spread. Most of them still wore their gas helmets, and that made their hysteria all the more frightening. One turned and began to run back down the hill. Others acted equally out of instinct, but differently, to stand there and fire up at the Germans.

Tyrrell did not know how he came to be on the wire, how he’d forced the men to make way for him. He didn’t know that he’d dropped his pistol and pulled out of his tunic pocket the wire cutters Peter Towne had given him as the War Train pulled out of Victoria Station. He didn’t know that his picture of Pamela had fallen in the mud. With a steadiness that had nothing to do with his inner agitation, he clipped at the wire, snapping through the steel, while someone at his side bent the wire back as he cut through it. He looked once at the man. It was Keefe.

When the gap was opened he didn’t have to give an order; the men poured through less like water through a broken wall, since this was upward, than like smoke through a window. Someone handed him a rifle or he picked it up, and then he too was tossing off shots. Despite the mass frenzy, Tyrrell was lucid enough to grasp at once, as they crested the hill and stormed the gun emplacement and the trench behind it, that the Germans were less prepared for them than they should have been. His soldiers swarmed over the position, taking it. Resisters came at them, but futilely. His men careened across the top of the hill, knocking out the other positions that were facing the other slopes.

Tyrrell, running full tilt, jammed his bayonet into the belly of one German, but then couldn’t pull it free. The blade had lodged in the man’s skeleton, and as he fell he took the barrel of Tyrrell’s rifle down with him. Tyrrell fired, and at once the gun recoiled and came out easily.

When the last of the resisters was subdued, Captains Tyrrell and Tyndale, Lieutenant Keefe, Tyndale’s adjutant, and two platoon leaders conferred briefly. Hill 60 was separated from the main part of the Messines Ridge by the dip of a valley, and that separation isolated the hill from the larger German force just enough to confine the action. Their momentum might have carried the Rangers on to the next position, but the valley stopped them. Having taken the heights, they knew instinctively not to leave them. About three hundred men from all four companies had made it to the top, and a stream of others, many wounded, kept coming. They had overcome a German force of perhaps one hundred. In addition to the pair of machine-gun emplacements C Company had run up against, there were two artillery bunkers and four other pairs of machine guns at various points on the hill. Those guns, having fired more efficiently, had been overrun only from behind by Tyrrell’s men. Looking back down the hill, his eyes clouded over at the sight of all the fallen. Most were bunched at the belts of barbed wire where they’d been so easily cut down. The only gap in the entire semicircle of wire was the one Tyrrell had cut. Most of the regiment lay dead or dying on the slope. At the bottom, where the trenches were, dazed men could be seen walking, half stooped, clutching their throats. Having discarded their respirators in the charge, they had fallen back for cover into the poisoned trenches, and now the chlorine gas was attacking the tissue of their lungs and eyes.

The officers mustered the men into various detachments, securing prisoners, dismantling the artillery, manning the machine guns, and posting perimeter guards.

Keefe hauled out a German major who’d been caught at the field telephone in the dugout. Tyrrell had never before seen the odd German helmet close enough to read what was emblazoned on its seal: Mit Gott fur Koenig und Vaterland. With God? How could the enemy claim God too? The major sputtered in German, and when Tyrrell looked at him uncomprehendingly, he said in smooth, accented English, “Those trenches below were gassed. Who would put his own men in there?”

And Tyrrell understood why the Germans on Hill 60 had seemed less than prepared for their assault.

One of the wounded who staggered to the pinnacle just then was Corporal O’Day. The left side of his body from his shoulder—that skew signalers’ patch—to his hip was awash with blood, and what was left of his arm hung lifelessly. But under his right arm he clutched the air-holed wooden box, and when the sergeant major asked him for it, he refused to let go of it. He was weeping when Tyrrell approached him.

“Good man, Corporal.”

“Captain, sir then . . .” O’Day’s body folded. Tyrrell caught him, bloodying himself. The box fell.

“Release the pigeons, Sergeant Major.” Tyrrell gently lowered O’Day to the ground. He propped O’Day so that he could see. “Look, Corporal!” The two birds leapt free, fluttering, climbing into the white sky. Those pigeons would get them their reinforcements. The sun, fully risen from that vantage, was bathing the countryside, which stretched all the way to the smoking ruins of Ypres itself. From that hill they watched as the pigeons swooped, rose, and fell, flying back across the trenches toward GHQ. The words of Colonel MacIntyre filled Tyrrell’s mind, as if the birds were criers declaiming for all that Belgian countryside to hear. “Ireland did this for us! Connaught did this for us!” And he was overcome with proud exhilaration at what his men had done, at what O’Day had done. When he looked down at him to say so, O’Day’s eyes had rolled back. He was dead. Tyrrell lowered his own face to put it close. The stench from O’Day’s wound was sickening, but he put his lips on O’Day’s brow and kissed him.

“Captain! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Captain! Look at this!”

Tyrrell let O’Day down, then stood, facing the ridge.

Then he saw. Six, perhaps eight columns of German soldiers, winding in more or less parallel, yet oddly twisting lines, were crossing the valley that separated Hill 60 from the ridge. What Tyrrell felt was anger: they couldn’t do this! The columns stretched back as far as he could see, several thousand Jerries, streaming at them. “To arms!” he cried. “To arms!” He looked wildly about. The defenses of the hill were wrong, geared as they were for attack from the west and south. “Remount the guns, Lieutenant!” He slapped Keefe’s shoulder. But just then a deafening noise cracked over them and the hill shook as the first of the German shells landed. The German artillery, on positions along the ridge, had adjusted easily for this new target. The men dove for cover, tumbling one on top of the other and on top of German corpses into the dugouts and bunkers.

Tyrrell watched, remaining in the open. He saw the earth jumping, soil shooting into the air, craters being churned into new craters, and he understood that this artillery barrage would “walk” a few dozen yards ahead of the approaching columns of German infantry. His men had no choice but to bury themselves, and he saw at once that when the Black Marias stopped firing at the last moment to allow the attackers to sweep up onto the hilltop, with no barbed wire to slow them and no properly mounted machine guns to cut them down, his men wouldn’t have a chance. He turned to look back toward his own lines beyond the trenches below. The country was a wasteland of holes and ditches, long lines of trenches at right angles and parallel to each other. It was like seeing the entire Front at once. The battered steeples and jagged rooflines of Ypres in the far distance seemed to beckon teasingly like a vision of home, like London or even Dublin. In the cellars and tunnels of that town majors and colonels bent at the map tables, and in the luxurious châteaux above Poperinge and Bailleul the generals bent at theirs. Tyrrell knew they would never dispatch reinforcements in time. O’Day’s noble birds would arrive with the news of their triumph just as the Germans arrived to undo it.

He was the last one standing exposed. Shells exploded around him. Debris flew and the bodies of the fallen bounced.

“Captain!”

He turned.

In the entranceway of the well-built dugout, Keefe was waving at him to take cover. Tyrrell crossed to him and went in. In the noise, even in that dark chamber, it was impossible to talk. Each man was alone in a world of ear-splitting terror. Tyrrell was content to slump against a wall of sandbags, letting exhaustion take him under at last. Like the others, he made a casing of his arms to protect his head and made himself small. The earth moved under them, but the dugout held. His mind went blank and, but for one faculty, he might have been asleep. Only his hearing functioned, and only the segment of his brain in which he would know by the first alteration in timing and pitch when the barrage was coming to an end. These last living members of his regiment were no one’s sons now, not the major’s, colonel’s, or general’s, but his. His darling sons. He had it in his legal and moral power to spare them. And he would.

The moment came, either hours later or minutes.

As the last shells fell he forbade his men to move and ordered Keefe to give him his service revolver. He holstered it, then climbed out of the dugout alone. The sun blinded him and he wanted to shield his eyes, but instead he held his hands high as the first Germans surrounded him. Their helmets were what he noticed again, but now they seemed ludicrous, not terrible, as if the spikes were candles balanced on their heads. He waited impassively until an officer came, then he saluted smartly and handed over his pistol as the emblem of their surrender.