Chapter Three
H e had slept, and now he was awake once more.
No, not slept. He’d been unconscious and could still feel a pressing exhaustion at the level of his nerves, like the need for sleep but magnified, distorted. His leg was hurting, more than it had before and in a different way. The sensation made him nauseous. There was a wrongness about the pain, as though he didn’t quite have the mental vocabulary to express the notion of a foreign object having torn a passage through the meat of him.
For all that, Forrester wasn’t afraid. The anger he’d felt, the acute disillusionment, the despair, that was gone also, replaced by a pervading calm. Despite what his body was telling him, he knew on a profounder level that he was safe, that the worst danger was passed.
He was, however, uncomfortable. The rain was falling with a heavy patter, and the mud he lay in was seeping through his trousers and jacket, and around the edges of his gas mask. He thought again of taking the mask off. He was confident that the rain would have dissipated the phosgene. But it would be in the water, in the mud, and although the prospect didn’t alarm him, common sense advised that he should be cautious.
He was lying on his back. As a first step, he set about flopping onto his front. Doing so was tricky. The mud didn’t want to release him, and his left leg was dead weight. Yet he succeeded in the end, and once he was over, it was only a matter of crawling. The sodden muck was clammily viscous. As long as he stayed low, creeping on his belly like a lizard, it supported his weight.
When he gained the rim of the crater, Forrester questioned the wisdom of going farther. If he stuck his head up, he’d be exposing himself. But he couldn’t hear any sound of firing, not even the musicless rattle of the machine gun, and his instincts continued to affirm strongly that he was in no danger. Though he couldn’t explain it, the reflex was powerful. In any case, he knew rationally that he was at equal risk from cowering through the night in a wet foxhole, with the stench of decay all around.
Forrester flattened his arms upon the edge of the shell hole and perched his chin on one forearm. He could make out a number of bodies from where he was, strung in a ragged line behind whatever scant defence they’d found. Not one of them was moving, and there was no sign of activity from the enemy trench either.
With the wall of the shell hole no longer cutting off his perspective, he could see clearly, and the light was prominently visible: there was another crater far to his left, or else a high bank of soil, and from it, luminescence slanted in shafts of green and blue that flickered queasily. What had been beautiful before now unsettled him, as if a dying, cold sun had been entombed within the earth and was projecting its last glimmers.
With considerable difficulty, Forrester clambered to his feet. The leg, he discovered, would hold him. Did that mean the bullet had missed the muscle, had failed to shatter the bone? He couldn’t say. He had, after all, seen men carry on with the most appalling injuries. Once he had witnessed a young soldier wandering with a portion of his own left arm clutched in his right hand, the whole of the limb from below the elbow. The man had had a look of empty determination in his eyes, as though sure that, as long as he kept hold of the severed appendage, everything might yet be all right.
But inevitably that man was dead now. The fact that Forrester could stand meant nothing.
A few paces away, a rifle lay partway sunk in the mire. Forrester shuffled over and hauled it free. After some experimentation, he found that, grasped by the tip of its barrel, the weapon made for a serviceable prop. Supported so, he gripped a fistful of his gas mask, pulled it off, and dumped the sack-like garment at his feet.
A tentative breath revealed no telltale trace of rotting straw, just the smell of rain struggling against the familiar odours of swampish water and decay. Whether he had inhaled the gas before was another question. He knew that the symptoms of phosgene poisoning came on slowly. At any rate, he was grateful for the freshness of the air and of the rain upon his face.
Still supporting himself with his makeshift stick, Forrester began toward a cluster of his men. They’d made their stand behind a shallow bank, some geographic feature from prior to the war since compacted into shapelessness. There were five of them close together. Though the distance was short, it took him a minute and more to reach them. All the while, he wondered detachedly at how he was limping through No Man’s Land, offering so easy and unapologetic a target. He was the only one moving—the only thing moving, besides the slanting rain—and that made him feel ghostly, unreal. The war, for the first time since he’d left Dover, seemed far away .
Attaining the line of bodies, Forrester realised he had no idea what he’d hoped to find. None of them had stirred as he’d approached. Yet even if one of his men was merely wounded, there was little he could do, except rationalise to himself that at least he’d tried, that he hadn’t simply abandoned his responsibilities to save his own hide.
Forrester huddled beside the first of them, propping the rifle as well as he could against the low bank. The man wasn’t wearing his gas mask. His helmet, which so resembled an upturned tin plate, had slipped to obscure his eyes. Nevertheless, Forrester recognised him. His name was Lambert. He had been up for a minor disciplinary offence once, and Forrester had had to dock his pay. The entire affair seemed very petty in retrospect. Forrester leaned to inspect the placid visage, seeking something he couldn’t identify even to himself, perhaps an explanation, or in those slackened muscles some inkling of forgiveness.
Instead, he felt breath on his cheek.
Initially, Forrester thought it must have been a breeze or a subtle distortion of the rain. But the wind had dropped to nothing, and the rain was driving vertically, in remorseless stripes that were incapable of so delicate a touch. He held a palm out, close to Lambert’s mouth. Sure enough, there it was again, the softest of sighs against his dirt-crusted skin. Lambert was alive.
And now that Forrester looked, he could see no sign of injury. It might be that Lambert had been shot in the back, but his breathing was steady, not the jarring rattle of a wounded man. His pose—half curled on his side, one arm stretched loosely, the other tucked beneath his head—was relaxed. Of the two likelihoods, the one that had seemed absurd was on reflection inescapable: Lambert was not hurt but fast asleep. Nor did he wake when Forrester placed a tentative hand on his shoulder .
Any further interference struck him as cruel. However strange it was to find a man soundly asleep in No Man’s Land, where minutes before a battle had been raging, it was also miraculous. In spite of his mother’s attempts to instil it, Forrester had never had much in the way of faith, and for all of the Chaplain’s declarations, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that any god watched over these pitiless fields. Was there a way in which one could believe in a miracle that didn’t require belief in the divine?
Feeling hopeful, almost giddily so, Forrester moved on to the second figure in line—and was jolted to see the neat hole in the hood of his gas mask, approximately where his forehead must lie beneath the black-stained fabric. Forrester made no effort to stir him. He knew with sickening conviction that the man was dead.
Yet the third was asleep, apparently unhurt, and so, when he checked, were the other two. Could the gas have done this? Perhaps only his imagination had ascribed to it phosgene’s distinctive odour. Might it have instead been a sedative, a pall cast over the whole of their front line in prelude to an attack? But that made no sense. Three of the sleepers had their masks on, and he could detect no difference between them and the fourth man who hadn’t. More, what logic could there be to a weapon that rendered unconscious when it could kill, and kill wretchedly? Nothing in the German strategy so far had suggested such mercy.
Forrester reclaimed the rifle, straightened up with its support, and peered around. Though he could see the weird light, its beams were channelled upward by the lie of the land about and offered imperfect illumination. But the rain was thinning, the clouds above were starting to fracture, and in places a sliver of starlight had broken upon the darkness. He could make out the contours of the barren earth, which even by day consisted of little more than contours, its characteristics long ago erased.
As he watched, a Véry light went up from his own side. He observed its drunken parabola. When it finally exploded, it vanished for an instant, and then returned with blinding intensity as a miniature sun. Seized by sudden inquisitiveness, Forrester took the opportunity to pick a path toward the German trenches.
Above him, the flare tumbled lazily through the air. It began to diminish before he reached the veering barricade of the enemy wire, but its spell had sufficed. By then, he was certain he could discern a helmeted head resting innocently on an outstretched arm, a rifle left neglected beneath slack fingers. Even as the head became an ambiguous silhouette, Forrester was sure that what he’d seen was a sleeping German soldier, arrested in the act of firing over his parapet.
Picking out the flayed remains of a tree stump, Forrester shuffled to it and sat with his back against the scarred wood. The exertion had been too much. Though the sense of peace he’d been experiencing since he woke hadn’t left him, he was inexpressibly weary. His left leg was pulsing with alternate waves of pain and cramping numbness. It was growing harder to bend the knee, or to put any weight on it. His head ached as well and was muzzy with tiredness.
Some of his men were dead. Others, impossibly, were sleeping, as was at least one of their enemies. He himself was awake, and apparently unique in that regard. None of it added up.
Anyhow, with the German lines temporarily stilled, a rest could do no harm. In the flare’s wake, the darkness was deeper, almost solid. When he closed his eyes, he was conscious of its pressure on his eyelids. Beneath that weight, his thoughts began to smear. Vague images flickered, and he couldn’t say whether they were a fantasy, a distortion of the afterglow from the nearby shellfire, or some abstraction of the noise it made, a synaesthetic rendition of unbearable volumes. But he would feel for moments that the images possessed a sort of narrative: a flash of detail would seem to have meaning, only to smudge and dissolve. Perhaps, too, he was dreaming, though he was never unaware of the battlefield close around him, the mud seeping under him—or of that distant, bright light.
Forrester opened his eyes. His muscles had stiffened, especially his thigh. Getting to his feet was torturous. There was another flare up, again from his own side. Was that what had brought to mind the mysterious light? He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting. His calcified muscles implied hours of inaction, but he was inclined to doubt, given that everything else appeared much as he’d left it.
Despite the worsening pain, Forrester felt more clear-headed for his respite, and more curious. This time, he used the flare’s transitory blaze to get his bearings. Ahead was the German wire. To right and left, the blemish of No Man’s Land spread to limitless horizons, its scant features limned starkly by the flare. There were many bodies within sight, and it took an effort to remind himself that a handful of them belonged to living men.
He could make his way back to his trench without much trouble, so long as his leg held up and the firing didn’t renew, so long as there wasn’t another batch of gas or a particularly misaimed shell. If the Véry lights kept coming, he might even return at the point he’d left. Yet he found that he wanted an answer—or if that was more than he could expect, at any rate the seed of a hypothesis. To his left lay the inexplicable light, and also Middleton’s platoon, though he could see no signs of movement by the flare’s dwindling glimmer. Behind him was safety, and care for his wound. Forrester set out left, keeping parallel to the line of the enemy wire.
The flares were coming regularly now, casting a constant, wintery brilliance that turned piled filth into glistening banks of snow. Every so often he would pass a prone body. Most were dead, and many of those were left from earlier conflicts, shabby corpses mingling by degrees with the earth, but a few he recognised as from his platoon and were only sleeping. They each looked tranquil. He passed the last of them twenty yards or so from where he’d set out, and then for a while he saw no one alive.
The next figure Forrester came upon not in a state of obvious decay was familiar. The reddish stubble and incongruously leathered skin identified him as Sergeant Blaylock, whose years in Africa had left their indelible mark. Though he was sprawled half in a shallow foxhole, it was evident even from a distance that he was alive, for his snores were sonorous and carrying. Forrester felt an impulse to wake him: Blaylock would be able to tell him what had happened with Middleton’s platoon, and whether his experiences matched with Forrester’s own. However, when he put a hand to Blaylock’s shoulder and shook, there came no reaction except a brief rise in the tempo of his snoring.
Disappointed, Forrester carried on. There were more bodies, and here the ratio of death to life was less forgiving. They had been caught by the machine gun he’d heard, and it had shown no mercy. None of them were wearing gas masks, which indicated that they’d been spared that horror at least—or had failed to acknowledge it. Were some of these sleepers also dying, their unconscious bodies succumbing to the poisons they’d inhaled?
Then, beneath the arctic luminance of another flare, Forrester spotted a uniform distinguished, like his own, by the narrow strap of a Sam Browne belt. He hurried over, as rapidly as injured leg and makeshift stick and dragging mud would allow. It was Middleton, as he’d known it must be. Forrester was positive he was sleeping, as so many of the others had been, until the last moment, when he saw the stain of blood across his breast. The machine gun had got him: the bullet holes were a second belt crusted with rubies. Likely he had been its first victim. Still, he looked peaceful, almost as peaceful as the sleepers. His blue eyes were open, gazing up at the night sky. The fall had dislodged his cap, and the rain had tousled his sandy hair, like the hand of a fond grandparent.
Forrester reached down and brushed Middleton’s eyelids closed. He tried not to cringe at the rain-wet clamminess of the skin. Not knowing what else to do, he made a mental note of the nearby landmarks, such as they were—a shattered cartwheel here, two decapitated trees crumpled together there—so that he might pass them on to the burying party.
There was nothing left but to satisfy his curiosity regarding the light, and that had been a very secondary concern. Probably it was a new type of flare that the Boche had cooked up, or a shell had come down and set fire to some large wreckage. Yet even as he thought this, Forrester was forced to concede that neither explanation would accommodate the facts. He was near enough to the source of the light, where it radiated from within the exploded ground, to see that the high banks of cast-off earth which hid it from view were recent and that the crater was large, too big for anything shy of a howitzer shell. He could see as well that the depression was not circular but cigar shaped and pinched at one end.
Forrester took a few steps closer. He was becoming interested again, despite himself, despite the knowledge of Middleton lying bullet-riddled and cold a short way behind him. Whatever had impacted here must have come down at an angle. And there were no flames, just those slants of luminance, now faintly blue, now palely green. It was unlike any combustion he’d seen. Yet it was reminiscent of something .
Gas. Yes, he was more persuaded than ever that gas would make sense. Some advanced compound that could burn for a long time, and while it burned produced an airborne vapour. The shell would have been fired at an angle from the south-east somewhere, and he was aware of no batteries in that direction, but then a new weapon might require a new sort of gun. The container had burst overhead, and that had been the explosion he’d heard. Its contents had dispersed over Forrester’s platoon, and afterwards, the shell had plummeted, affecting Middleton’s men as it fell.
Strange that it should cause unconsciousness, though, and so serene an unconsciousness at that. Strange, too, that no one had thought to tell the German soldiery to wear their masks. But of course, masks offered no defence, or most of his men would be on their feet. This truly was an innovation, something that might turn the tide of the war. If all of this had been achieved with a single shot, two platoons incapacitated and who knew what numbers back in their trenches and on the German side, then a half-dozen guns could knock out whole stretches of the line: whole towns, whole cities even.
Forrester decided that he had to get a look at what remained of the shell. While the possibility of this new superweapon didn’t scare him exactly—he was too numbed for that, he rationalised—he was still capable of being intellectually appalled. What if they dropped the stuff over London? How long did it last? And—a thought that came close to penetrating the stuporous calm hanging around his mind—what if its effects never wore off? Forrester remembered trying to wake Blaylock, how futile the attempt had been. A weapon that induced sleep was one thing. A weapon that left men comatose was quite another.
He was bordering the edge of the crater now. The earth bank was nearly higher than his head, and he doubted he could climb up with his hurt leg. Better to pick his way round in the hope that the slope was shallower along the tail. Certainly, he could get no sense of what lay beyond from where he was. He could, however, plainly see the beams of light. They appeared to have grown brighter again, like spotlights tinted in aquamarine hues. Dust motes danced, as if the rays shone from a bright exterior into a darkened room. Some subtle quality there made his heart tremble; he was touched with unexpected awe.
“Hey there! You, man!”
The call came from Forrester’s left, the direction of his own trench. He hadn’t glanced that way in minutes and was amazed to observe a line of men approaching. There was a score of them, and more coming behind, clambering inelegantly from within the earthworks. At the point nearest to him, the row had bunched behind a spindly character who’d roved a little in front, moving quickly and deliberately, navigating the more broken parts with the assistance of a swagger stick.
“Put your hands in the air.”
The man in front was the one calling to him. His manner of speech was clipped, refined, not used to being contravened: an officer’s voice, though not one Forrester was familiar with. He couldn’t obey the order without relinquishing his makeshift support. He settled for raising his free arm above his head and shouting back, “Wounded.”
“Well, stay there, then. Don’t move.”
Even that was a tall order. Deprived of activity, Forrester felt the ache in his thigh keenly. He would have preferred to sit. Standing still was profoundly uncomfortable, and left in one place, the butt of the rifle sank into the mud. He busied himself with adjusting its angle, seeking some solid ground amid the morass. But the pain in his leg was like a fire steadily igniting, deep in the knots of his muscle. He was concerned that he’d fall over and that the approaching officer would discover him sprawled in the mud.
Electric torches began to blink on, as bizarre a sight as Forrester had seen all night, for under normal circumstances the lighting of even a match in No Man’s Land was tantamount to suicide. The gas has dissipated , Forrester thought. They’re close enough that otherwise they’d be unconscious. What does that tell me? And he tried to remember the lectures he’d been made to sit through. But those had always been short on technical details, more occupied with the mechanics of getting masks on with haste, with symptoms and warning signs and with maintaining discipline. No one had ever bothered to tutor them in chemistry.
The pain was becoming intolerable. Forrester felt giddy with it. Now that he considered, he’d been ridiculous to wander about, scrabbling through mud and over shattered walls and other debris when he had a bullet wound in his leg. There was fractional relief in closing his eyes. Yet each time it was more difficult to open them again, and when he did, the approaching figures with their bobbing firefly lights had leaped nearer.
The last time he opened his eyes, he was startled to see the officer almost on him. His face was in shadow, and Forrester couldn’t make out any rank insignia. There was a flare up, over to their right, and it had recast the world into a stark geometry of black and white.
“What’s your name, man?” The question was at once peremptory and dismissive, a formality pretending to be nothing else.
“Forrester, sir. Lieutenant Rafael Forrester.”
“You saw it come down?” The officer pointed at the crater with his swagger stick.
Forrester tried to recall. “I saw an explosion. But no, not the impact.”
“And you’ve been awake all this while?”
Hadn’t he said he’d been awake? And clearly he was now. Then he remembered that he had slept, first in the shell hole, and later, propped against the ruptured stump. “Mostly,” he clarified. “I might have passed out once or twice.”
“Passed out?”
“From my wound, sir. My leg.”
The officer looked down at Forrester’s leg as though it were a fresh consideration. “This did that?” he enquired, with a nod toward the crater.
How absurd; what could gas do to one’s leg? It struck Forrester that this man, for all his impression of knowing authority, hadn’t the faintest clue of what he was on about. But then, didn’t that describe so many of the brass, believing they had a perfect handle on the war until they found themselves face to face with its true, vulgar horrors?
Only, it wasn’t this officer he resented, not really. He was simply chagrined by the pain. It was practically unbearable, and the officer had reminded him of it, when he’d been focusing his every effort to keep his attention elsewhere.
“I took a bullet,” Forrester said. “A sniper, I think. But, sir...” He felt like a troublesome schoolboy, and it was hard to put the words in order. “I’m in rather a bad way, sir. Could do to be off my feet.”
“Oh. Damn it.” Over his shoulder the officer shouted, “Will somebody bring up a stretcher? Be quick.” Back to Forrester, he said, “Well, sit down, lieutenant. Don’t want you collapsing on us. But I’ll have more questions for you, do you hear me?” He looked to the crater again and added more softly, perhaps no longer speaking for Forrester’s benefit, “Or if not me, then someone will.”
Forrester crumpled gratefully into the mud. He endeavoured to retain a degree of dignity, to slump in a manner befitting the British Army, but much of his body was ignoring the signals he sent, and his mind wasn’t performing so efficiently either, his thoughts swirling in spirals that led nowhere .
He wondered if this officer did know anything. Were there questions of his own Forrester might have asked? About the gas. About whether the men of his platoon would ever wake. Then there was Middleton. They would have to bring him in, to give him a proper burial. There were his letters too, the ones for back home, those would need posting. Damn it, why hadn’t he told someone?
So much to do. So much he should have asked and said. Yet, now that he was sitting, the prospect of further movement was inconceivable—even the labour of speaking. He was utterly tired, down to the marrow of his bones.
And his immediate part was over. The raid was done. The fighting was done. The rest would have to wait.