He listened, straining to hear a cough, a few muttered words, perhaps a fart followed by a sigh of satisfaction. He seemed to be in front of a quiet section. He turned left, crawled fifty yards, and stopped. Now he could hear an unfamiliar sound a bit like the hum of distant machinery.
He crawled on, trying hard to keep his bearings. It was easy to lose all sense of direction in the dark. One night, after a long crawl, he had come up against the barbed wire he had passed half an hour earlier, and realized he had gone around in a circle.
He heard a voice say quietly: “Over by here.” He froze. A masked flashlight bobbed into his field of view, like a firefly. In its faint reflected light he made out three soldiers in British-style steel helmets thirty yards away. He was tempted to roll away from them, but decided the movement was more likely to give him away. He drew his pistol: if he was going to die he would take some of the enemy with him. The safety catch was on the left side just above the grip. He thumbed it up and forward. It made a click that sounded to him like a thunderclap, but the British soldiers did not appear to hear it.
Two of them were carrying a roll of barbed wire. Walter guessed they were going to renew a section that had been flattened by German artillery during the day. Maybe I should shoot them quickly, he thought, one-two-three. They will try to kill me tomorrow. But he had more important work to do, and he refrained from pulling the trigger as he watched them go by and recede into darkness.
He thumbed back the safety catch, holstered his gun, and crawled closer to the British trench.
Now the noise was louder. He lay still for a moment, concentrating. It was the sound of a crowd. They were trying to be quiet, but men in the mass could always be heard. It was a sound formed of shuffling feet, rustling clothes, sniffing and yawning and belching. Over that there was the occasional quiet word spoken in a voice of authority.
But what intrigued and startled Walter was that it seemed such a big crowd. He could not estimate how many. Lately the British had dug new, broader trenches, as if to hold vast quantities of stores, or very large artillery pieces. But perhaps they were for crowds.
Walter had to see.
He crawled forward. The sound grew. He had to look inside the trench, but how could he do so without being seen himself?
He heard a voice behind him, and his heart stopped.
He turned and saw the glow-worm flashlight. The barbed-wire detail was returning. He pushed himself into the mud, then slowly drew his pistol.
They were hurrying, not troubling to be quiet, glad their task was done and keen to get back to safety. They came close, but did not look at him.
When they had passed, he was inspired, and leaped to his feet.
Now, if anyone should shine a light and see him, he would appear to be part of the group.
He followed them. He did not think they would hear his steps clearly enough to distinguish them from their own. None of them looked back.
He peered toward the source of the noise. He could see into the trench, now, but at first he could make out only a few points of light, presumably flashlights. But his eyes gradually adjusted, and at last he worked out what he was seeing, and then he was astonished.
He was looking at thousands of men.
He stopped. The broad trench, whose purpose had not been clear, was now revealed to be an assembly trench. The British were massing their troops for the big push. They stood waiting, fidgeting, the light from the officers’ torches glinting off bayonets and steel helmets, line after line of them. Walter tried to count: ten lines of ten men was a hundred, the same again made two hundred, four hundred, eight… there were sixteen hundred men within his field of vision, then the darkness closed in over the others.
The assault was about to begin.
He had to get back as fast as possible with this information. If the German artillery opened up now, they could kill thousands of the enemy right here, behind British lines, before the attack got started. It was an opportunity sent by heaven, or perhaps by the devils who threw the cruel dice of war. As soon as he reached his own lines he would telephone headquarters.
A flare went up. In its light he saw a British sentry looking over the parapet, rifle at the ready, staring at him.
Walter dropped to the ground and buried his face in the mud.
A shot rang out. Then one of the barbed-wire detail shouted: “Don’t shoot, you mad bastard, it’s us!” The accent put Walter in mind of the staff at Fitz’s house in Wales, and he guessed this was a Welsh regiment.
The flare died. Walter leaped to his feet and ran, heading for the German side. The sentry would be unable to see for a few seconds, his vision spoiled by the flare. Walter ran faster than he ever had, expecting the rifle to fire again at any moment. In half a minute he came to the British wire and dropped gratefully to his knees. He crawled rapidly forward through a gap. Another flare went up. He was still within rifle range, but no longer easily visible. He dropped to the ground. The flare was directly above him, and a dangerous lump of burning magnesium dropped a yard from his hand, but there were no more gunshots.
When the flare had burned out he got to his feet and ran all the way to the German line.
Two miles behind the British front line, Fitz watched anxiously as the Eighth Battalion formed up shortly after two A.M. He was afraid these freshly trained men would disgrace him, but they did not. They were in a subdued mood and obeyed orders with alacrity.
The brigadier, sitting on his horse, addressed the men briefly. He was lit up from below by a sergeant’s flashlight, and looked like the villain in an American moving picture. “Our artillery has wiped out the German defenses,” he said. “When you reach the other side, you will find nothing but dead Germans.”
A Welsh voice from somewhere nearby murmured: “Marvelous, isn’t it, how these Germans can shoot back at us even when they’re fucking dead.”
Fitz raked the lines to identify the speaker but he could not in the dark.
The brigadier went on: “Take and secure their trenches, and the field kitchens will follow and give you a hot dinner.”
B Company marched off toward the battlefield, led by the platoon sergeants. They went across the fields, leaving the roads clear for wheeled transport. As they left they started to sing “Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah.” Their voices lingered in the night air for some minutes after they disappeared into the darkness.
Fitz returned to battalion headquarters. An open truck was waiting to take the officers to the front line. Fitz sat next to Lieutenant Roland Morgan, son of the Aberowen colliery manager.
Fitz did all he could to discourage defeatist talk, but he could not help wondering if the brigadier had gone too far the other way. No army had ever mounted an offensive like this one, and nobody could be sure how it would turn out. Seven days of artillery bombardment had not obliterated the enemy’s defenses: the Germans were still shooting back, as that anonymous soldier had sarcastically pointed out. Fitz had actually said the same thing in a report, whereupon Colonel Hervey had asked him if he was scared.
Fitz was worried. When the general staff closed their eyes to bad news, men died.
As if to prove his point, a shell exploded in the road behind. Fitz looked back and saw parts of a lorry just like this one flying through the air. A car following it swerved into a ditch, and in its turn was hit by another truck. It was a scene of carnage, but the driver of Fitz’s truck quite correctly did not stop to help. The wounded had to be left to the medics.
More shells fell in the fields to the left and right. The Germans were targeting approaches to the front line, rather than the line itself. They must have worked out that the big assault was about to begin-such a huge movement of men could hardly be hidden from their intelligence branch-and with deadly efficiency they were killing men who had not yet even reached the trenches. Fitz fought down a feeling of panic, but his fear remained. B Company might not even make it to the battlefield.
He reached the marshaling area without further incident. Several thousand men were there already, leaning on their rifles and talking in low voices. Fitz heard that some groups had already been decimated by shelling. He waited, wondering grimly whether his company still existed. But eventually the Aberowen Pals arrived intact, to his
