part0005

There had been days when it had seemed that the sole possible conclusion would see every continent reduced to mud: a sickly ocean in which no seed would grow, in which no creature could live but the rats and the lice.

There had been times when he could think of nothing else. When they’d been forward for days without break, he could no longer conceive of a world nearby in which trees still stood, flowers still bloomed, and men did not try, unrelievedly, to kill one another. Even when they’d recently been back and he had seen that world with his own eyes, he’d found that afterwards he was unable to quite accept the memory.

Yes, escape from the war had often felt impossible. Yet here he was, with a definite end in sight, and Forrester was afraid.

Curious that he hadn’t given more thought to death, or rather, to the probability that death would be the close of at least his own experience of the war. If he’d considered his personal annihilation, it had only ever been obliquely; on occasions he’d had the wind up, like everyone. He had cringed through the heavy shelling, while doing his best to give the impression of steadfastness, to be the example he supposed he ought to be for his men. When called on to fight—and the fighting, so far, had been such a very small part—he had not wanted to, while accepting he must.

But had he really addressed the possibility that, in all likelihood, it was he that would end and not the war? That this interminable conflict would continue without him, an automaton no one knew how to stop? It seemed to Forrester that he never had.

“I say, you do look in a funk, Raff.”

Forrester, shaken from his reflection, glanced up to see Middleton propped against the timber beam of the dugout entrance. Middleton was squinting at the dim illumination that crept past the edges of the gas blanket, the expression clustering the freckles around his eyes and cheeks.

“No good worrying, you know,” he added. “It’s only another mess.”

Forrester closed the book in his lap. He had borrowed a volume of Aurelius’s Meditations from Fitzpatrick, their company captain, and had been endeavouring to decipher its cramped text by the scant light.

“It’s just that...” He wanted to say, This all seems such a frightful waste . But when he probed the thought, he determined it to be too close to self-pity. “I’m just sick of an army that can’t keep us in candles. Is it asking too much that a man shouldn’t have to sit reading in the dark?” Forrester forced a smile. “So keep standing there, will you? In fact, move a quarter step to your left. And hitch up the blanket a fraction.”

Middleton gave a short, bright laugh and made a show of jigging in the doorway, flapping the gas blanket about him like a cloak. He was younger than Forrester, caught up in the conscription midway through a second year at Cambridge. Now, he appeared more youthful still. “How’s that?” he said. “How’s this? Any better?”

He looked happy, unconcerned, and so very boyish. For a moment, from nowhere, Forrester felt as if his heart would split in two. “Hopeless,” he opined, “Quite hopeless. Come on, I’m going out to see what’s what.” He got up, tucked the Aurelius volume onto a shelf, pulled on his jacket and cap, and holstered his Webley.

Middleton gave him a disgusted scowl. “I’ve just been out there. Can’t you tell? I’m soaked to the bone. I was actually rather hankering after a drop of tea.”

“By all means,” Forrester agreed, shocked that he hadn’t noticed Middleton leave. “Then you stay here.” Now that he was up, the dugout seemed stifling; he was eager to get outside.

Middleton, having started down the half-dozen steps, pressed against the dirt wall so that Forrester could brush past. “Try not to drown out there,” he said. “Not much use to us if you do.”

Sweeping the blanket aside, Forrester saw what he meant. The rain was coming down harder than ever. The deluge had turned the evening sky the colour of gunmetal at its base, and higher up, to the patchy, shifting grey of wood smoke. The clouds looked viscous and vague, yet inordinately solid when the flash of an impacting shell lit them from beneath.

They were into summer, and the desperate cold of the winter was a fading memory, albeit a terrible one. However, when one lived in a channel carved out of chalk soil, hot days were hardly better. They had suffered through clouds of dust and clouds of flies, each as choking as the other. This last week, though, had brought far more than its share of rain, to the extent that the generals had had to put the big show back, in the vain hope that the downpour would slacken. What else could be done when the trenches had been reduced to ditches, the machine gun nests were sinking into the earth, and for all their efforts, the mud was a foot and more deep in places?

Glad of his calf-length boots, infinitely better than the rubbish given to the men, Forrester waded across the duckboards, picking his way with care. There were huddled figures everywhere, sheltering as well as they could from the foul weather, picking feet up so that they might be free of the sucking morass. Perhaps he should have required a salute, or some acknowledgement besides the fact that conversations tended to peter out as he passed, but Forrester had few expectations in regards to such things, and most of them knew so. Under the circumstances, he’d have considered himself callous beyond measure to demand parade-ground formalities. That these poor souls stayed and endured was surely enough.

Still, a minimum of discipline could not be avoided. In more than one spot, the sandbags had slipped or ruptured beneath the inundation, and twice he ordered men into work parties to perform hasty repairs. He didn’t envy the task, for what the bags were leaking was oozing, primordial, and bore only a passing resemblance to sand. They had been mortared together with mud and, where shells had hit, with the dead, or what remained of them.

Such horrors were no longer strange or even noteworthy, but sometimes a particular sight would catch Forrester unawares. On this occasion, it was a hand that had slipped loose between two bags, blue and bloated, with three of its fingers missing. As his gaze settled on the extremity, he realised it was waving back and forth, ever so slightly, drawn by some current in the mud or by vermin creeping within the envelope of flesh, and momentarily he thought he would gag. Yet the men he’d ordered to the repairs had been sitting beneath the ragged appendage quite peacefully.

After a minute more of cautious navigation, which had brought him no distance at all, Forrester recognised one of Middleton’s sergeants, a man named Blaylock. Blaylock had found an overhang where a couple of sandbags had edged forward, and was making the most of the partial shelter, drawing on a hand-rolled cigarette that he kept cupped with his palm.

“Anything happening?” Forrester asked.

“Quiet as lambs they are, sir,” Blaylock affirmed in his rich brogue, more fitted to a music hall singer than to a soldier.

“I suppose a week of shelling will do that,” Forrester noted. As he spoke, he was raising his voice over that selfsame barrage, which for six days had shaken the earth and rattled and gouged the heavens. He had almost grown used to the sound, having long since stopped expecting it to cease. It was the nature of the war that one adjusted, even to the unimaginable.

“Aye, we’re keeping their heads down, all right,” Blaylock concurred.

There was something in his tone, though. Forrester knew there was a suspicion among the men that the shelling would achieve little, that the Germans would take shelter, weather the calamity in their superior dugouts, and rise, like sleepers refreshed, when the time came. In truth, Forrester shared their scepticism. He had seen such miracles of endurance before.

“Middleton’s talked to you about our party tonight?” he queried.

“Aye, sir. Lieutenant Middleton informs me we’ll be starting the ball rolling a smidgen early. Got the honour of warming them up for the big day.”

“That’s it. So, as soon as it’s fully dark, get a couple of men out there to check the wire.” Forrester had given the same order to his own sergeants, and had no doubt that Middleton would have told Blaylock, but as the senior officer, he felt an obscure impulse to take charge, need or no. “We’ll want gaps cut in ours, and a good look at theirs to confirm that the shells have chewed through. Let’s have it done right, or we’ll be in a dreadful mess.”

“Aye, I’ll see to it, sir,” Blaylock declared.

Though Forrester didn’t know the man well, he got the sense that Blaylock intended to go out himself. Irrationally, Forrester would have liked to convince him to send someone else—irrationally because it scarcely mattered who went, and because they’d all be getting their share of No Man’s Land soon enough. “Whoever you pick, make sure they’re careful,” he said. “The last thing we need is to tip Fritz off.”

Forrester bid goodbye to Blaylock and started back toward the dugout. There was no point in his going farther and nothing useful to be done besides waiting. In any case, the rain had penetrated his cap, leaving his hair streaked in inky stripes across his forehead, and his shirt and trousers had plastered to his skin. So bedraggled an appearance was bound to undermine whatever message he was trying to send by showing his face. He didn’t feel like a model of army discipline, or of anything.

When he arrived, Middleton greeted him warmly. “Isn’t it filthy out there? Can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

In spite of Forrester’s earlier assertion, Middleton had unearthed a couple of candles from somewhere, and was busily writing a letter on their small folding table. However, he got up when Forrester sat and began to make tea, heedless of the half-finished cup beside his papers. They’d been looking after themselves in recent days: Forrester’s batman Sykes had taken a bullet in the shoulder that had probably cost him the use of that arm, and Middleton, though he’d been with the company nearly two months, had yet to pick someone out. Through tacit agreement, they’d developed a sort of egalitarian domesticity, and Forrester had discovered that he found the arrangement preferable. Performing a few mundane chores was better by far than boredom .

Middleton put a cup in front of Forrester and then sloshed out his own on the already sodden steps and refilled it. Forrester took a sip. The thin brown liquid was barely warm. It tasted of chlorine and sugar and too-sweet condensed milk, and, beneath those overpowering flavours, only a little of tea. Yet it was refreshing, and bit into the chill that had settled on his skin. How would the British Army have ever kept going without tea? There would have been mutinies within a week. Put it together with cheap cigarettes and there seemed to be no depth of trauma or tragedy that couldn’t be alleviated.

When Middleton sat down again, Forrester tilted his head toward the letters. “Did I interrupt?”

Middleton looked almost shy. “Oh, just penning a couple of goodbyes. To mother and father, and one to Agatha. In case of the worst, you know.” He peered up and held Forrester’s eyes, as if preparing a question he couldn’t quite work out how to phrase. “It’s so hard to write anything that doesn’t come over as terribly melodramatic.”

Forrester had written such a letter once, to his father, before the push at Loos. He had finished it and then burned it, and couldn’t remember what he’d said. “Under the circumstances, I expect they’d forgive a touch of melodrama,” he suggested.

“It’s not what they’ll forgive, though, is it? I’d hate to go out there thinking I’d sent them something ridiculous. But when you get down to it, one approach is as silly as the other. All I’ve managed so far is a bit of bluster about what a lark it will be to die for king and country. I doubt ranting and wailing could come off as much worse.”

Was that what Forrester’s own letter had been like? Straining his memory, he recalled the beginnings of a conciliatory draft, which he’d torn up, but any insight into what he’d replaced it with eluded him. Had his missive been full of heroic platitudes? Had he allowed the fear to show through? No, he was confident that he’d included little about the war, that it had been the farthest concern from his mind. “Try and buck them up,” he said. “That’s the most you can do.”

Middleton nodded. “I suppose that’s it.” He scribbled a couple more lines, then signed his name on each of the two letters with a flourish, tucked them into envelopes—the stationery was excellent, a gift from his mother—and placed the envelopes on a shelf. “You’ll take care of it, won’t you?” he said. “I mean if—“

“Of course. But best to let someone who’s not going out know as well.”

Middleton nodded once more, and now he seemed solemn and distracted. “Yes, that’s true.”

Forrester, feeling that he’d helped to poison Middleton’s mood, struggled for a change of subject. “Anyway, shouldn’t you be hunting a newspaper? I thought you said there’d been a match on.”

Middleton was a fervent devotee of cricket, and if his own accounts were to be believed, had been developing the makings of a fine amateur career before he’d been called up. It was the greatest frustration to him that the war had infringed upon the cricket seasons and increasingly looked set to wipe them out altogether. In his eyes, that crime eclipsed all of its other privations. Forrester, though he viewed the sport with indifference, was happy to listen to Middleton prattle on. The topic always made him so cheerful, practically lighting him from the inside.

“Oh yes!” Middleton rubbed his hands together gleefully. “Why, I’d almost forgotten. And here’s me worrying about trivialities like letters and the danger of being shot! Well, it was rather a drama, all told.” Then, with an impressive semblance of crestfallenness, he wheedled, “But I’m sure you don’t want me to bore you with the details?”

Forrester laughed. “Bore me? Never.”

That was all the encouragement Middleton needed. He pulled a newspaper from his cot, and, while explaining that he’d scrounged the paper from the Company Quartermaster—“How he gets them so fast is beyond me”—thumbed through the pages. When he found what he was searching for, he immediately launched into an account of the match, using the reportage as a foundation that he embellished freely with his own speculations.

Middleton talked for an hour, moving from cricket to anecdotes of his time at Cambridge and then to incidents from his youth in the Cornish countryside, where his family owned land. Forrester, whose education had been suspended for wholly different reasons and whose childhood contained little that struck him as of anecdotal value, was content to listen, and to respond with amusement or dismay as required; not much effort was necessary on his part to keep the stream of recollections going.

He suspected Middleton could have chattered the entire night away. He was being unusually voluble even by his standards. But abruptly there came a rap on the door post, timed for a caesura in the awful roar of the shelling, and Liversby slipped in past the blanket. “I say, you two,” he began without preamble, “My man’s snagged us a couple of bottles of the local vin blanc and Broadbank and I are trying to get a four together for whist. Why don’t you join us?”

They had a few hours to pass, and sleep was a hopeless prospect. Yet Forrester hardly felt sociable. Listening to Middleton ramble about cricket and his youthful exploits was one thing, playing cards with the excitable Liversby and the proportionately dour Broadbank was quite another. “I think I’ll pass,” he said.

Liversby didn’t appear to be particularly disappointed, and Forrester wondered whether the game was his sole motive for visiting. “Aren’t you two out on a stunt tonight?” he enquired, as though it was a pleasant night-time stroll he was referring to.

“Not until one,” Forrester told him, more curtly than he’d intended.

“Bad luck, at any rate,” Liversby acknowledged, and now there was a note of empathy in his voice. “Not an abundance of sense to it, if you ask me.”

No one, of course, had asked Liversby. Nor had they asked Forrester or Middleton. The order had come from the battalion major, two nights ago, but Forrester had received the impression that even he had only the most basic of says in the matter. He had shown the decency to seem faintly surprised by his own news.

They’d all known for months that the push was coming. There was no way to discreetly prepare for battle on such a scale, and even if there had been, discretion was not in the British Army’s nature. Men had been gathering since early spring, and with them, artillery and supplies, the endless paraphernalia of war drawing down upon this narrow tract of land. They knew what was coming, and surely the enemy did too. Had anyone remained in ignorance, this last week of torrential barrage would have shaken them from their complacency.

However, battle had the advantage of allowing for a certain anonymity. Even having been through the experience, one could not imagine oneself as a participant in so immense an event. A raid was an altogether different affair.

The major had at least been sympathetic. “Orders from the colonel, as you might suppose. What’s important is to make a good show of it. Hop over to their side and throw the odd bomb, make your presence felt. Get a glimpse of their wire; pick up a prisoner or two if you possibly can. But no one’s expecting you to take anything, let alone hold it. Just make them think you mean business.”

Raids had been growing in popularity of late. Perhaps it was merely that, for any general remembering the Boer wars, this one looked too much like thousands upon thousands of men sat in holes and ditches and too little like proper fighting. Yet, as the major explained it, on this occasion they had a specific purpose in mind. Minor attacks would help camouflage the push when it came; a few small shows would lower the enemy’s expectations.

All balderdash, obviously. No one on the enemy side could be so idiotic as to interpret days of stupendous shelling as anything but the warm-up for a total assault. And though Forrester had been fortunate, having thus far avoided being part of one, he’d heard stories of other such stunts. They did not have a reputation for going well. Even when carefully planned and organised, a great deal could go wrong in that tormented space between the lines: there was wire to get caught up on, sentries, snipers, craters deep enough to drown in. And, with two nights to make ready, this one would be neither planned nor organised, except in the most rudimentary of ways.

Had that recognition been the beginning of Forrester’s epiphany, the turning point at which he’d first perceived his own death not as something remote and generalised but as suddenly definite and imminent?

Liversby coughed, and Forrester realised he had been staring all the while at the tabletop, half reliving that two-day-old meeting. Attempting to speak, he found his mind empty. It took him a second even to recall what observation of Liversby’s had sparked his contemplation.

Fortunately, Middleton chose that moment to step up to the mark. “It’s a bit of a bungle, all right,” he said, “but that’s the cleverness. You can guarantee Fritz won’t be expecting a few dozen men to come blundering up to his doorstep in the middle of the night.”

Liversby laughed gaily. “Ah, I see. That is clever. Did you two cook it up yourselves?”

“Absolutely,” agreed Middleton. “But you just watch the brass try and take credit.”

“Well ... the best of luck,” Liversby said, with surprising earnestness. Then, more in the manner of the Liversby that Forrester knew, he added, “But don’t get too carried away. Can’t have you two carting off Berlin or any such nonsense.”

We’ll be lucky if we even make it through their wire , Forrester reflected. “We’ll do our darnedest not to bring the war to a premature end,” he promised.

After Liversby left, there was no resuming his conversation with Middleton. Forrester’s thoughts had turned in on themselves, dislocating him from the dugout’s tiny single room. It seemed a peculiar grotto, badly lit by the glimmer from the stove and Middleton’s two stubby candles, its furniture so much bric-a-brac. The roar of the shelling was palpable, a constant vibration like the tremor produced by some enormous instrument. Dirt showered from the walls and ceiling in a constant flow.

None of what was around him felt entirely real. With Middleton’s stories of the Cornish countryside vivid in his mind, Forrester had difficulty crediting that they were sitting beneath the ground while high explosives screamed at the heavens above, preparing to go out upon the shattered earth to try and take the lives of their fellow men or else be killed themselves.

He would have to shake himself out of this mood before it took too firm a hold. He would not be a coward. His men were relying on him, and Middleton was too, for all his brashness. Perhaps he couldn’t be brave for them, since he could no longer find a shred of anything that resembled bravery within him, but he would not be made craven.

Arduously, Forrester got to his feet, drew his Webley from its holster, and set about cleaning it. That done, he reloaded the revolver and returned it to its holster, then started on his jacket buttons, dulling them with boot polish. After a minute, Middleton, who had been observing him distractedly, stood up and followed his example. The two of them toiled steadily, in silence, and Forrester’s surroundings grew more concrete, as though he were waking by degrees. The motion of his fingers was reassuringly tangible. The act of working was an antidote to fear.

When he took out his pocket watch, he was startled that the time was only ten to midnight. Without saying anything to Middleton, Forrester unhooked the watch and laid it on his shelf, replacing it with his army-issue wristwatch. He pulled on his still-damp jacket and his Sam Browne belt and slung the bag containing his gas mask over the opposite shoulder.

Again, Middleton emulated his example. Once he was done, he spent a few more moments adjusting straps and buckles and lapels, as if preparing himself for an inspection or a dinner date. Finally he asked, “How do I look?”

“Quite dashing,” Forrester assured him. “I doubt any self-respecting German would have the nerve to spoil that get-up with a bullet.”

“Or else they’ll pick me out especially,” Middleton complained, with mock gloominess. Then he reached to his neck, plucked some item from inside his shirt, and said, “Look here, I want you to take this, Raff. If I get through, you can give it back to me. And if I don’t, I’d like you to hang on to it.”

Before Forrester fully appreciated what was happening, Middleton had grasped his hand, pried the fingers open, and placed the object in his palm. It was a rectangular locket of dull gold, with a chain to match. Forrester clicked the front pane open. From within, sepia faces gazed at him, steady eyed: two women, the one on the left dark-haired, strong-featured, and pretty, the one on the right older, greying but still handsome. The likeness between them, and between each of them and Middleton, was unmistakeable.

“My sister Agatha, and my mother,” Middleton confirmed .

Forrester pressed the pane closed. He had an almost irresistible urge to hand the locket back. “If you don’t make it,” he said, “there’s every bit as good a chance that I won’t.”

“Then what’s the use in worrying? There’s no one but you and me I’d want to have it.”

Forrester had no argument to that. He draped the chain around his neck and slipped the locket inside his own shirt, conscious of its coolness against his skin.

“Come on,” he said, with a conviction he didn’t feel. “Let’s get out there before somebody decides to call the whole business off.”

If the trench had been challenging by the last evening light, it was a hundred times more so by night. Even when Forrester’s feet found the duckboards, they were slippery and foul, and often he was reduced to floundering through filth, desperately trying to keep his balance by clutching at the fire step or to the liquid-feeling revetment. Sometimes his fingers would fall on an arm or a leg and someone would curse softly in the darkness.

They came upon Forrester’s platoon first. It was too late, he realised, to say any further goodbye to Middleton. As they turned the corner, he muttered a brief “Take care,” to which Middleton replied, “And you,” and that was it. Middleton was swallowed by the night.

Possessed by sudden awkwardness, like the last arrival at a party, Forrester cleared his throat and said, “All present and correct?”

“Everyone’s here, sir.”

He recognised the gravel drawl as belonging to Vickers. He and Sergeant Stanley had been under orders to gather the men ready. Really, there was little for Forrester to do except attend .

Having given his eyes a moment to adjust, he tried as well as he could to inspect his platoon. In theory, there should have been sixty of them, but they’d lost a few—to shelling, to snipers, to sickness—who had yet to be replaced, and from the remainder, he’d had Vickers and Stanley pick out the more capable. Between his bunch and Middleton’s, they numbered approximately forty. It was still too many for what they were about to do. A handful of men had a slim hope of moving around out there undiscovered, and the old maxim of safety in numbers failed to hold up when confronted by machine guns.

Forrester could barely make out the closest faces. It hardly mattered. With the exception of his two sergeants, they were all but strangers. He had learned their names, and that was it. Their features blurred into each other. He was disgusted with himself that he couldn’t keep a better track or find some way to penetrate the walls of rank and social privilege. He was disgusted that he couldn’t take his men more seriously.

“At ease,” Forrester said.

He stood uncomfortably, ankle-deep in water, watching as they lit cigarettes and muttered among themselves. They were boys, many of them, and those that weren’t often seemed to him like children. They were plain and simple and took what Forrester considered to be a perverse pride in their plainness and their simplicity, as though they were an armour against the war.

But he had seen enough of them die to know that there was nothing whatsoever between them and death, nothing they could do to protect themselves. He knew too that, for all their show, they understood that truth perfectly. There was no safety at the front, and after a while, not even the illusion of safety. He had seen soldiers back in the reserve lines buried alive in their dugouts. At Loos, two privates had died from falling asleep beside a gas canister that had leaked all through the night. Death was ever-present. It could not be predicted or outwitted. And tonight they would go into its territory, daring it with their boldness. Let these men do what they could, while they could, to make that fact tolerable.

At ten minutes to the hour, he had them blacken their cheeks and brows with pieces of burnt cork, remove or darken any exposed metal, and strip off their excess gear, heaping it beside them on the saturated fire step. Subterfuge was a luxury permitted for night raids; thankfully, no one expected them to march over chanting some regimental song.

He would have liked to say something meaningful, but there was so little he could contribute. They knew this war as well as or better than he did. The knowledge was there in their faces, beneath the tarnish of the cork. There was nothing he could tell them that they didn’t already know.

“Keep close,” he said. “Stay quiet. If you get into a fix then wait where you are, don’t cry out. Once we’re through their wire, use your bombs, and be quick about it. But no one retreats until I give the order.”

There came no whispered Yes sir s. No assent was required. Even Forrester’s part was done, more or less. Vickers and Stanley took over and arranged the men with grunted commands that scarcely seemed to be words, more the abstraction of orders.

Forrester took his place among them. He could just discern the hands of his wristwatch. It was crucial that he and Middleton set off together. His eyes blurred as he strived to interpret the army-issue watch’s ghostly luminosity. A minute passed, and another. Now the two hands were practically indistinguishable, a taut V of bilious yellow-green. Zero hour.