The British soldiers charged over the scarred and barren stretch of No Man’s Land, the whites of their eyes gleaming out of their filthy battered faces. They ran forward over the detritus of the month-old battlefield, curses on their breath, hearts in mouths, their rifles raised, the moonlit-gleam of bayonets at the ready, towards the silent trench ahead.
Whether day or night, No Man’s Land was a dreadful place to cross, the stench of rotting soldiers, churned amongst the earth and blasted trees, their bodies left to the torment of the elements and the hordes of rats and crows. But in the dark, the hateful blindness was almost overwhelming. Shadows swept and spun before one’s eyes, every rustle was the swish of an enemy’s trouser leg, every crack the setting of an enemy’s bolt. Every step closer towards the German line brought a growing sense of fear and trepidation, all waiting for the eruption of light from a German flare, the hard clack of the machine gun, the sharp bark of the rifle. But the closer they drew, and the longer not a single shot was heard, the more they realised that someone ahead of them had been busy with the enemy.
Sergeant Holmes set his pistol forward in one hand and raised his mace high in the other in readiness for what might greet him as the first to enter into the trench below. He peered over the lip of the parapet, and the mace slowly dropped to his side.
“What is it?” Henry hissed, stepping up. He looked down into the trench and lowered his own pistol. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, under his breath.
All along the front, a low rumble of surprise and revulsion from the approaching British soldiers gathered against the lip of the trench. Across every inch of the enemy trench, wherever one looked, the remnants of body parts and blood covered the ground, as if it had been used as an abattoir in hell.
Nothing could have survived that butchery. Nothing stirred. All that remained was a grisly carpet of blood, ruptured organs, torn uniforms and broken weapons, splintered bone and ripped skin, cruelly slashed and discarded like disposed filth from a butcher’s yard. Every now and then, amongst the muddied crimson waste, soldiers spotted a discernible body part, the top of a skull, a collection of fingers, the fleshy round of a thigh bone.
Soldiers turned and vomited back into the decay of No Man’s Land. They had seen shell strikes and their bloody aftermath, had witnessed first-hand the evisceration caused by the sniper’s bullet, the carnal gore of the bayonet’s twist. But this scene had a horror beyond anything they had witnessed before, a mass and brutal killing the entire length of the trench.
“Is there anybody left, do you think?” Holmes asked Henry, his dry mouth slackening, his wide eyes trying to comprehend what they were telling him.
“Can you hear anyone?” replied Henry brusquely, feeling a hardening in his stomach.
Holmes shook his head. “What you going to put in the unit diary, sir?”
“What we’ve seen,” the young Lieutenant said, turning away and covering his mouth. “A massacre.”