He was long past getting angry about the incompetence of his superior officers. That was all part of the class system he had been brought up to despise. But on the rare occasions when the burden of command fell on him, he took little pleasure in it. Rather, he felt the weight of responsibility and the fear that he might make the wrong decisions and cause the deaths of his comrades.
If the Germans attacked frontally, his platoon would be overwhelmed. But the enemy did not know how weak he was. Could he make it look as if he had more men?
The thought of retreat crossed his mind. But soldiers were not supposed to run away the minute they were attacked. This was a defensive post, and he ought to try to hold it.
He would stand and fight, at least for now.
Once he had made that decision, others followed. “Give them another drum, George!” he shouted. As the Lewis gun opened up he ran along the trench. “Keep up a steady fire, boys,” he said. “Make them think there’s hundreds of us.”
He saw Dai Powell’s body lying on the ground, the blood already turning black around the hole in his head. Dai was wearing one of his mother’s jumpers under his uniform tunic. It was a hideous brown thing, but it had probably kept him warm. “Rest in peace, boyo,” Billy murmured.
Farther along the trench he found Johnny Ponti. “Deploy that Stokes mortar, Johnny bach,” he said. “Make the buggers jump.”
“Right,” said Johnny. He set up his two-legged gun mount on the floor of the trench. “What’s the range, five hundred yards?”
Johnny’s partner was the pudding-faced boy called Suet Hewitt. He jumped up on the fire step and called back: “Aye, five to six hundred.” Billy took a look for himself, but Suet and Johnny had worked together before and he left the decision to them.
“Two rings, then, at forty-five degrees,” said Johnny. The self-propelling bombs could be fitted with additional charges of propellant in rings to extend their range.
Johnny jumped up on the fire step for another look at the Germans, then adjusted his aim. The other soldiers in the vicinity stood well to the side. Johnny dropped a bomb in the barrel. When it hit the bottom of the barrel, a firing pin ignited the propellant and it was fired.
The bomb fell short and exploded some distance from the nearest enemy soldiers. “Fifty yards farther, and a touch to your right,” Suet shouted.
Johnny made the adjustments and fired again. The second bomb landed in a shell hole where some Germans were sheltering. “That’s it!” shouted Suet.
Billy could not see whether any of the enemy had been hit, but the firing was forcing them to keep their heads down. “Give them a dozen like that!” he said.
He came up behind Robin Mortimer, the cashiered officer, who was on the fire step shooting rhythmically. Mortimer stopped to reload, and caught Billy’s eye. “Get some more ammo, Taffy,” he said. As always, his tone was surly even when he was being helpful. “You don’t want everyone to run out at the same time.”
Billy nodded. “Good idea, thanks.” The ammunition store was a hundred yards to the rear along a communication trench. He picked out two recruits who could hardly shoot straight anyway. “Jenkins and Nosey, bring up more ammo, double quick.” The two lads hurried away.
Billy took another look through the parapet peephole. As he did so, one of the Germans stood up. Billy guessed it might be their commanding officer about to launch an attack. His heart sank. They must have guessed they were up against no more than a few dozen men, and realized they could easily overwhelm them.
But he was wrong. The officer gestured to rearward, then began to run downhill. His men followed suit. Billy’s platoon cheered and fired wildly at the running men, bringing down a few more before they got out of range.
The Germans reached the ruined farm buildings and took cover in the rubble.
Billy could not help grinning. He had driven off a force ten times the size of his own! I should be a bloody general, he thought. “Hold your fire!” he shouted. “They’re out of range.”
Jenkins and Nosey reappeared, carrying ammunition boxes. “Keep going, lads,” Billy said. “They may be back.”
But, when he looked out again, he saw that the Germans had a different plan. They had split into two groups and were heading left and right away from the ruins. As Billy watched, they began to circle around his position, staying out of range. “Oh, bugger,” he said. They were going to slip between his position and neighboring redoubts, then come at him from both sides. Or, alternatively, they might bypass him, leaving him to be mopped up by their rearguard.
Either way, this position was going to fall to the enemy.
“Take down the machine gun, George,” Billy said. “And you, Johnny, dismantle the mortar. Pick up your stuff, everyone. We’re falling back.”
They slung their rifles and backpacks, hurried to the nearest communication trench, and began to run.
Billy looked into the dugout to make sure there was no one inside. He pulled the pin out of a grenade and threw it in, to deny any remaining supplies to the enemy.
Then he followed his men into retreat.
At the end of the afternoon, Walter and his battalion were in possession of a rearward line of British trenches.
He was weary but triumphant. The battalion had had a few fierce skirmishes but no sustained battle. The storm troopers’ tactics had worked even better than expected, thanks to the fog. They had wiped out weak opposition, bypassed strong points, and taken a great deal of ground.
Walter found a dugout and ducked into it. Several of his men followed. The place had a homely look, as if the Brits had been living there for some months: there were magazine pictures nailed to the walls, a typewriter on an upturned box, cutlery and crockery in old cake tins, and even a blanket spread like a tablecloth on a stack of crates. Walter guessed this had been a battalion headquarters.
His men immediately found the food. There were crackers, jam, cheese, and ham. He could not stop them eating, but he did forbid them to open any of the bottles of whisky. They broke open a locked cupboard and found a jar of coffee, and one of the men made a small fire outside and brewed a pot. He gave Walter a cup, adding sweetened milk from a can. It tasted heavenly.
Sergeant Schwab said: “I read in the newspaper that the British were short of food, just as we are.” He held up the tin of jam he was eating with a spoon. “Some shortage!”
Walter had been wondering how long it would take them to work that out. He had long suspected the German authorities of exaggerating the effect of submarine war on Allied supplies. Now he knew the truth, and so did the men. Food was rationed in Britain, but the Brits did not look as if they were starving to death. The Germans did.
He found a map carelessly left behind by the retreating forces. Comparing it with his own, he saw that he was not far from the Crozat Canal. That meant that in one day the Germans had taken back all the territory so painfully won by the Allies during the five months of the Battle of the Somme the year before last.
Victory really was within the Germans’ grasp.
Walter sat down at the British typewriter and began to compose his report.
CHAPTER THIRTY – Late March and April 1918
Fitz held a house party at Ty Gwyn over the Easter weekend. He had an ulterior motive. The men he invited were as violently opposed as he was to the new regime in Russia.
His star guest was Winston Churchill.
Winston was a member of the Liberal Party, and might have been expected to sympathize with the revolutionaries; but he was also the grandson of a duke, and he had an authoritarian streak. Fitz had long thought of him as a traitor to his class, but was now inclined to forgive him because his hatred of the Bolsheviks was
