A volley of shots rang out across No Man’s Land from the approaching German army.
“Bloody bastards are hopeful!” cried Private Dawson. “They think they can hit us from here?!”
A vast wall of German infantry had appeared in the clinging grey dusk of No Man’s Land, a grey blue smudge against the horizon and fading light.
“They’re not firing at us,” replied Henry, peering up and over a sandbag with the periscope, directly in front of his firing position. “They’re shooting into the air, as if to warn us!”
“Warn us?! Do they think we don’t know they’re coming?!”
And they were coming, jogging now through No Man’s Land, their rifles turned towards the sky, firing off rounds in a show of bravado and strength.
“Stay your ground!” growled a Sergeant from the ranks, pacing the trench behind the line of soldiers. “And when you get the order, don’t you stop shooting till every one of those bastards is dead. Do you hear me?”
“Can we start shooting then, sir?” came a dispiriting voice from somewhere in the line.
“No you cannot shoot. You do not shoot until you hear the order. Is that understood?!”
Now the Germans were gaining ground on the trench, two hundred yards away, the sheen from their badges and belts catching the glare of the fizzing flares above. They lowered their rifles and fired as they ran, their rounds buffeting the ground about the trench and whizzing through the air above it. The British soldiers crouched down into their trenches and firing holes and watched with ever growing fear and trepidation.
“Now can we shoot, sir?” someone cried imploringly.
“If I hear another request to fire, I will rip the bloody balls off that man!” roared the Sergeant. “You wait for my order, you bloody riff-raff.”
Now the Germans were running, not a sprint, but a steady pace, cantering over the ground, one hundred yards away, a massed wall of bayoneted rifles and young Germans, looking to tumble into the waiting British lines and down onto the Tommies. And they were firing. Rounds peppered the ground before and beyond the British line. Every now and then, a British soldier would snap back, crumpled into the back wall of the trench.
Seventy five yards. You could make out the eyes of the enemy, dark pits in white, ashen faces, drawn into stern frowns. Their hands worked furiously over their rifle bolts, shooting from their hips towards the British lines.
Fifty yards. The German soldiers seemed so close now that the British could simply reach out and touch them. The edges of their bayonets glinted.
All of a sudden, from along the entire British front, the cry of the Sergeants took hold. The infantrymen lining the walls needed no more than the merest of nods from their superiors before their rain of death was unleashed. The British fired and the call was given to move to ‘rapid fire’. The approaching Germans stumbled and fell like pins in a skittle alley, man after man, set after set, the following lines climbing over the bodies of the fallen without hesitation to continue the suicidal advance forward.
There seemed no end to their number but greater still was the stock of bullets possessed by the British. For what seemed an eternity the British lines fired, for so long and so ruthlessly that the wooden casings of the rifles grew too hot to hold and soldiers rested their stocks on the trench lips as they fired, or gathered cooling soil and grass into their hands to act as a padding against the heat. Wave after wave of them came, scrambling over the dead and the dying to continue their grim pursuit forward.
“They’re bloody off their trollies!” roared Private Dawson, inserting another magazine. “What do think they can do? Walk through bullets?”
The ratta-tat of a machine gun sounded from somewhere and a vast swathe of German soldiers crumpled, the line behind them collapsing moments later. A wall of Germans now lay in front of the British lines, a hundred yards into No Man’s Land, a wedge of bleeding quivering flesh, grey and black and crimson.
From the woods there suddenly came a second wave, shoulder to shoulder as their predecessors had done, moving with slow steady strides over the ground, firing a warning to the heavens as if to announce their arrival and then, as they drew closer, firing towards the trenches with more rapidity and running with fleeter feet. Once again the British rifles replied and the German lines fell. The wall of dead and dying grew taller and broader still, until it became a great surging torrent of death sweeping the entire length of this part of the front. But still the Germans were not done. Another wave came, and was broken as before, followed by another, and then another, and then yet a following wave, each time broken and despatched before the wall of dead was ever breached.
“Fritz is a bloody madman!” cried Holmes, shaking his hand and cursing, after burning it on the stock of his smoking rifle.
“Or his officers are as cruel as ours,” Henry replied, setting down his rifle and rubbing the dirt and grime out of his eyes. “This is sheer bloody murder.”
Eventually, finally, the attacks faltered. The Germans stumbled uncertainly backwards and then fell back altogether, broken in a blind racing panic.
“Alright, lads,” Sergeant Holmes cried. “Hold your fire.” He climbed up onto the observation plate and peered over the sprawling mass of trembling, moaning bodies to the line of desperate Germans in flight, far off across No Man’s Land. “Good shooting lads,” he called, hopping down and brushing his hands clean of mud. “Taught bloody Fritz a lesson there. No doubt about that.”
“Not quite what I was expecting,” said Dawson, sounding hollow.
“Be happy it wasn’t you on the charge,” replied Holmes. “It might be, next time.”
“Sheer bloody madness!” Henry muttered to himself, sinking down the wall, his back to No Man’s Land, as if unable to any longer look on the horror of the scene beyond. And yet, his mind wasn’t trained solely on the dead. He was also aware of the nagging fact that if he’d pushed through with Sandrine’s advice and withdrawn his troops to the houses, they would have been overrun. Fampoux would have been lost. He felt confused and sickened at the betrayal.
All that night the moans and howls of the injured haunted British trenches. They could hear sounds in the darkness of No Man’s Land, the retrieval of the wounded and of dear comrades fallen in the suicidal assault. At least, that was how it seemed to those listening in the British trench. They didn’t fire at the noises. How could they hit anything in the dark? And, after all, enough blood had been spilt for that day.
When dawn broke, they were surprised at how efficient the Germans had been at clearing away their dead.