artillery had destroyed their warrens.
He checked his compass to make sure he was still heading west. He did not know whether the trenches he was encountering might be communication or supply trenches, so their orientation did not tell him much.
He knew that the British had followed the Germans in creating multiple lines of trenches. Having passed the first he expected soon to come upon a well-defended trench they called the Red Line, then-if he could break through that-another trench a mile or so farther west called the Brown Line.
After that, there was nothing but open country all the way to the west coast.
Shells exploded in the mist ahead. Surely the British could not be responsible? They would be firing on their own defenses. It must be the next wave of the German rolling barrage. He and his men were in danger of outstripping their own artillery. He turned. Fortunately most of his people were behind him. He raised his arms. “Take cover!” he shouted. “Spread the word!”
They hardly needed telling, having come to the same conclusion as he. They ran back a few yards and jumped into some empty trenches.
Walter felt elated. This was going remarkably well.
There were three British soldiers lying on the trench floor. Two were motionless, one groaning. Where were the rest? Perhaps they had fled. Alternatively, this might be a suicide squad, left to defend an indefensible position in order to give their retreating comrades a better chance.
One of the dead Brits was an unusually tall man with big hands and feet. Grunwald immediately removed the corpse’s boots. “My size!” he said to Walter by way of explanation. Walter did not have the heart to stop him: Grunwald’s own boots had holes in them.
He sat down to catch his breath. Reviewing the first phase in his mind, he could not think how it could have gone better.
After an hour, the German guns fell silent again. Walter rallied the men and moved on.
Halfway up a long slope, he heard voices. He held up a hand to halt the men near him. Ahead, someone said in English: “I can’t see a fucking dicky bird.”
There was something familiar about the accent. Was it Australian? It sounded more like Indian.
Another voice said in the same accent: “If they can’t see you, they can’t bloody shoot you!”
In a flash Walter was transported back to 1914, and Fitz’s big country house in Wales. This was how the servants there spoke. The men in front of him, here in this devastated French field, were Welsh.
Up above, the sky seemed to brighten a little.
Sergeant Billy Williams peered into the fog. The artillery had stopped, mercifully, but that only meant the Germans were coming. What was he supposed to do?
He had no orders. His platoon occupied a redoubt, a defensive post on a rise some distance behind the front line. In normal weather their position commanded a wide view of a long, gradual downward slope to a pile of rubble that must once have been farm buildings. A trench linked them to other redoubts, now invisible. Orders normally came from the rear, but none had arrived today. The phone was dead, the line presumably cut by the barrage.
The men stood or sat in the trench. They had come out of the dugout when the shelling stopped. Sometimes the field kitchen sent a wheeled cart with a great urn of hot tea along the trench at midmorning, but there was no sign of refreshments today. They had eaten their iron rations for breakfast.
The platoon had an American-designed Lewis light machine gun. It stood on the back wall of the trench over the dugout. It was operated by nineteen-year-old George Barrow, the Borstal boy, a good soldier whose education was so poor he thought the last invader of England was called Norman the Conqueror. George was sitting behind his gun, protected from stray bullets by the steel breech assembly, smoking a pipe.
They also had a Stokes mortar, a useful weapon that fired a three-inch-diameter bomb up to eight hundred yards. Corporal Johnny Ponti, brother of the Joey Ponti who died at the Somme, had become lethally proficient with this.
Billy climbed up to the machine gun and stood beside George, but he could not see any farther.
George said to him: “Billy, do other countries have empires like us?”
“Aye,” said Billy. “The French have most of North Africa, then there’s the Dutch East Indies, German South- West Africa… ”
“Oh,” said George, somewhat deflated. “I heard that, but I didn’t think it could be true.”
“Why not?”
“Well, what right have they got to rule over other people?”
“What right have we got to rule over Nigeria and Jamaica and India?”
“Because we’re British.”
Billy nodded. George Barrow, who evidently had never seen an atlas, felt superior to Descartes, Rembrandt, and Beethoven. And he was not unusual. They had all endured years of propaganda in school, telling them about every British military victory and none of the defeats. They were taught about democracy in London, not about tyranny in Cairo. When they learned about British justice, there was no mention of flogging in Australia, starvation in Ireland, or massacre in India. They learned that Catholics burned Protestants at the stake, and it came as a shock if they ever found out that Protestants did the same to Catholics whenever they got the chance. Few of them had a father like Billy’s da to tell them that the world depicted by their schoolteachers was a fantasy.
But Billy had no time today to set George straight. He had other worries.
The sky brightened a little, and it seemed to Billy that the fog might be clearing; then, suddenly, it lifted completely. George said: “Bloody hell!” A split second later Billy saw what had shocked him. A quarter of a mile away, coming up the slope toward him, were several hundred German soldiers.
Billy jumped down into the trench. A number of men had spotted the enemy at the same time, and their surprised exclamations alerted the others. Billy looked through a slit in a steel panel set into the parapet. The Germans were slower to react, probably because the British in their trench were less conspicuous. One or two of them halted, but most came running on.
A minute later there was a crackle of rifle fire up and down the trench. Some of the Germans fell. The rest hurled themselves to the ground, seeking cover in shell holes and behind a few stunted bushes. Above Billy’s head, the Lewis gun opened up with a noise like a football supporter’s rattle. After a minute the Germans began to return fire. They appeared to have no machine guns or trench mortars, Billy noted gratefully. He heard one of his own men scream: a sharp-eyed German had spotted someone indiscreetly looking over the parapet, perhaps; or, more likely, a lucky shooter had hit an unlucky British head.
Tommy Griffiths appeared beside Billy. “Dai Powell got it,” he said. “Wounded?”
“Dead. Shot through the head.”
“Oh, bugger,” said Billy. Mrs. Powell was a prodigious knitter who sent pullovers to her son in France. Who would she knit for now?
“I’ve took his collection from his pocket,” Tommy said. Dai had a stack of pornographic postcards he had bought from a Frenchman. They showed plump girls with masses of pubic hair. Most of the men in the battalion had borrowed them at one time or another.
“Why?” said Billy distractedly as he surveyed the enemy.
“Don’t want them sent home to Aberowen.”
“Oh, aye.”
“What shall I do with them?”
“Bloody hell, Tommy, ask me later, will you? I’ve got a few hundred fucking Germans to worry about at the moment.”
“Sorry, Bill.”
How many Germans were out there? Numbers were hard to estimate on the battlefield, but Billy thought he had seen at least two hundred, and presumably there were others out of sight. He guessed he was facing a battalion. His platoon of forty men was hopelessly outnumbered.
What was he supposed to do?
He had not seen an officer for more than twenty-four hours. He was the senior man here. He was in charge. He needed a plan.
