relief, and formed up. Fitz led them the last few hundred yards to the frontline assembly trench.
Then they had nothing to do but wait for zero hour. There was water in the trench, and Fitz’s puttees were soon soaked. No singing was permitted now: it might be heard from the enemy lines. Smoking was forbidden, too. Some of the men were praying. A tall soldier took out his pay book and began to fill out the “Last Will and Testament” page in the narrow beam of Sergeant Elijah Jones’s flashlight. He wrote with his left hand, and Fitz recognized him as Morrison, a former footman at Ty Gwyn and left-handed bowler in the cricket team.
Dawn came early-midsummer was only a few days past. With the light, some men took out photographs and stared at them or kissed them. It seemed sentimental, and Fitz hesitated to copy the men, but after a while he did. His picture showed his son, George, whom they called Boy. He was now eighteen months old, but the photo had been taken on his first birthday. Bea must have taken him to a photographer’s studio, for behind him there was a backdrop, in poor taste, of a flowery glade. He did not look much of a boy, dressed as he was in a white frock of some kind and a bonnet; but he was whole and healthy, and he was there to inherit the earldom if Fitz died today.
Bea and Boy would be in London now, Fitz assumed. It was July, and the social season went on, albeit in a lower key: girls had to make their debuts, for how else would they meet suitable husbands?
The light strengthened, then the sun appeared. The steel helmets of the Aberowen Pals shone, and their bayonets flashed reflections of the new day. Most of them had never been in battle. What a baptism they would have, win or lose.
A mammoth British artillery barrage began with the light. The gunners were giving their all. Perhaps this last effort would finally destroy the German positions. That must be what General Haig was praying for.
The Aberowen Pals were not in the first wave, but Fitz went forward to look at the battlefield, leaving the lieutenants in charge of B Company. He pushed through the crowds of waiting men to the frontline trench, where he stood on the fire step and looked through a peephole in the sandbagged parapet.
A morning mist was dispersing, chased by the rays of the rising sun. The blue sky was blotched by the dark smoke of exploding shells. It was going to be fine, Fitz saw, a beautiful French summer day. “Good weather for killing Germans,” he said to no one in particular.
He remained at the front as zero hour approached. He wanted to see what happened to the first wave. There might be lessons to be learned. Although he had been an officer in France for almost two years, this would be the first time he commanded men in battle, and he was more nervous about that than about getting killed.
A ration of rum was given out to each man. Fitz drank some. Despite the warmth of the spirit in his stomach, he felt himself becoming more tense. Zero hour was seven thirty. When seven o’clock passed, the men grew still.
At seven twenty the British guns fell silent.
“No!” Fitz said aloud. “Not yet-this is too soon!” No one was listening, of course. But he was aghast. This would tell the Germans that an attack was imminent. They would now be piling out of their dugouts, hauling up their machine guns, and taking their positions. Our gunners had given the enemy a clear ten minutes to prepare! They should have kept up the fire until the last possible moment, seven twenty-nine and fifty-nine seconds.
But nothing could be done about it now.
Fitz wondered grimly how many men would die just because of that blunder.
Sergeants barked commands, and the men around Fitz climbed the scaling ladders and scrambled over the parapet. They formed up on the near side of the British wire. They were about a quarter of a mile from the German line, but no one fired at them yet. To Fitz’s surprise the sergeants barked: “Dressing by numbers, right dress-one!” The men began to dress off as if on the parade ground, carefully adjusting the distances between them until they were ranged as perfectly as skittles in a bowling alley. To Fitz’s mind this was madness-it just gave the Germans more time to get ready.
At seven thirty a whistle blew, all the signalers dropped their flags, and the first line moved forward.
They did not sprint, being weighed down by their equipment: extra ammunition, a waterproof sheet, food and water, and two Mills bombs per man, hand grenades weighing almost two pounds each. They moved at a jog, splashing through the shell holes, and passed through the gaps in the British wire. As instructed, they reformed into lines and went on, shoulder-to-shoulder, across no-man’s-land.
When they were halfway, the German machine guns opened up.
Fitz saw men begin to fall a second before his ears picked up the familiar rattling sound. One went down, then a dozen, then twenty, then more. “Oh, my God,” Fitz said as they fell, fifty of them, a hundred more. He stared aghast at the slaughter. Some men threw up their hands when hit; others screamed, or convulsed; others just went limp and fell to the ground like dropped kit bags.
This was worse than the pessimistic Gwyn Evans had predicted, worse than Fitz’s most terrible fears.
Before they reached the German wire, most of them had fallen.
Another whistle blew, and the second line advanced.
Private Robin Mortimer was angry. “This is fucking stupid,” he said when they heard the crackle of machine guns. “We should have gone over in the dark. You can’t cross no-man’s-land in broad fucking daylight. They’re not even laying down a smoke screen. It’s fucking suicide.”
The men in the assembly trench were unnerved. Billy was worried by the fall in morale among the Aberowen Pals. On the march from their billet to the front line, they had experienced their first artillery attack. They had not suffered a direct hit, but groups ahead and behind had been massacred. Almost as bad, they had marched past a series of newly dug pits, all exactly six feet deep, and had worked out that these were mass graves, ready to receive the day’s dead.
“The wind is wrong for a smoke screen,” said Prophet Jones mildly. “That’s why they’re not using gas, either.”
“Fucking insane,” Mortimer muttered.
George Barrow said cheerfully: “The higher-ups know best. They been bred to rule. Leave it to them, I say.”
Tommy Griffiths could not let that pass. “How can you believe that, when they sent you to Borstal?”
“They got to put people like me in jail,” George said stoutly. “Otherwise everyone would be thieving. I might get robbed myself!”
Everyone laughed, except the morose Mortimer.
Major Fitzherbert reappeared, looking grim, carrying a jug of rum. The lieutenant gave them all a ration, pouring it into the mess tins they held out. Billy drank his without enjoyment. The fiery spirit cheered the men up, but not for long.
The only time Billy had felt like this was on his first day down the mine, when Rhys Price had left him alone and his lamp had gone out. A vision had helped him then. Unfortunately, Jesus appeared to boys with fevered imaginations, not sober, literal-minded men. Billy was on his own today.
The supreme test was almost on him, perhaps minutes away. Would he keep his nerve? If he failed-if he curled up in a ball on the ground and closed his eyes, or broke down in tears, or ran away-he would feel ashamed for the rest of his life. I’d rather die, he thought, but will I feel that way when the shooting starts?
They all moved a few steps forward.
He took out his wallet. Mildred had given him a photo of herself. She was dressed in a coat and hat: he would have preferred to remember her the way she had been the evening he went to her bedroom.
He wondered what she was doing now. Today was Saturday, so presumably she would be at Mannie Litov’s, sewing uniforms. It was midmorning, and the women would be stopping for a break about now. Mildred might tell them all a funny story.
He thought about her all the time. Their night together had been an extension of the kissing lesson. She had stopped him going at things like a bull at a gate, and had taught him slower, more playful ways, caresses that had been exquisitely pleasurable, more so than he could have imagined. She had kissed his peter, and then asked him to do the equivalent to her. Even better, she had shown him how to do it so that it made her cry out in ecstasy. At the end, she had produced a condom from her bedside drawer. He had never seen one, though the boys talked about them, calling them rubber johnnies. She had put it on him, and even that had been thrilling.
