The First Casualty (30 page)

‘If only I had one, sir,’ a trooper piped up cheerfully.

‘Well, do your duty to mine and I’ll show you a picture, ‘Edmonds replied, and everyone laughed. ‘Cotton! There is almost a whole fruit cake in my kit. If by any chance I am not with you tomorrow, you are to divide it amongst the men who do return to have with their morning rum.’

‘Quite right, sir. See you in the morning.’

‘Good. Well done. Sergeant, the ladders if you please.’

The sergeant issued his orders and ladders were leaned against the parapets. Then Kingsley watched as Captain Edmonds led his men silently up the ladders and into no-man’s-land. Kingsley’s blood was up: he knew exactly what he had to do. He had come to gather evidence and he intended to do just that. As the last man disappeared over the top and the men who remained were about to remove the ladders, he stepped forward.

‘One moment, Private.’

Despite the protests of the assembled soldiers, Kingsley ran up the ladder.

FOURTY-TWO

A raid on the enemy trenches

A few feet in front of him, Kingsley could make out the crouched figures of men as they made their way forward, creeping from shell hole to shell hole across the blasted landscape. The ground was sodden, for it had rained pretty continuously since the storm of the previous night, the night in which he had watched a show and lain on a soft bed of wet grass with Kitty Murray. On that occasion, Kingsley had felt fully the sensation of living a totally different life to the one he had lived before. Making love to a stranger on a lawn in front of a French château seemed as far away from the life of a happily married London policeman as he could possibly get. But now, crawling in Belgian mud towards German machine guns, he felt doubly dislocated from the life he had known. Every day now seemed to herald the beginning of another new life.

He remembered that he had not blacked up his face as the others had done. It was true that he was bearded but he felt that he should take all precautions; after all, it would be foolish to die and perhaps cause the death of others because of a bead of sweat on a pale cheek. He plunged his hand into the dirt to gather up some earth. The next moment he was gasping and swallowing, trying to retch as silently as possible, realizing that he had stuck his hand through the body of a maggot-ridden corpse. After a few seconds he regained control of himself and, wiping his stinking, maggoty hand on his already gory greatcoat, he continued to creep forward. Only for a moment, however, because almost immediately a flash in the sky signalled that another star shell had gone up. A split second later the whole area was bathed in a curiously flattening, silvery light. Ahead of Kingsley, the men of the raiding party froze. Kingsley froze too, understanding by instinct what most soldiers had to be taught: when the star shells burst, the way to save oneself was to become motionless. Instinct tempted a man to hurl himself to the ground but it was movement, above all, which alerted the observer to your presence. Edmonds’s well-drilled company understood this and every man became a statue, then as the light faded they were able to resume their progress undetected.

Captain Edmonds led at a goodish pace. He and his men clearly had some knowledge of the terrain because there were numerous holes and obstacles that Kingsley would have most certainly blundered into had he been finding his own way. It was obvious that this raid had been very well scouted; Kingsley was learning just how much time the British spent in no-man’s-land during the still watches of the night. The German wire was indeed their front line.

In scarcely twenty-five minutes they arrived at their destination and assembled before the German wire. Kingsley remained unnoticed at the back of the group. Captain Edmonds was signalling his silent orders: the shells had not done sufficient damage to the wire and they must needs cut more away in order to get through. This two or three of the men did, working in near-complete darkness and with the enemy now only yards away. The tiny pings that rang out as the cutters did their work were agony for the attackers; if they were detected at this point they would be the proverbial sitting ducks, and death a near-certainty. The German soldiers’ voices were clear and Kingsley, who spoke German like a native, had no problem understanding their conversation. For the most part, little of any interest was being said. The sentries were clearly too tired and numbed by the rain and the tedium to bother with much more than observations about the weather and requests for tobacco, but two fellows were engaged in animated talk, although they kept their voices low. It was not a dissimilar discussion to the one that Kingsley had taken part in while defecating at the side of the railway line.

‘I tell you, this war is a war between two ruling classes. And
we’re
fighting it, more fool us! I’m a tram driver from Frankfurt. What has any of this to do with me? It’s so stupid it makes me weep.’

The other soldier disagreed.

‘The English started this war,’ he said.

‘Why?’ the first man replied. ‘Why would they start it?’

‘Because they’re bastards, that’s why, and they’re in the pay of the Jews. And that is also why the Americans are in, because they are all Jews.’

Ah yes,’ Kingsley thought to himself, that was an element of German nationalism which thankfully was far less prevalent in Britain. The Germans always loved to blame the Jews.

‘It’s got nothing to do with the Jews. It’s about capitalism, you prick.’

‘Ah-ha! Exactly! And who invented capitalism?’

‘I suppose you think the Jews did.’

‘Of course they did, just like they invented communism.’

‘But communism is the opposite of capitalism.’

‘You see how clever they are? They have it all. Both ends and then the middle.’

The last wire had been cut and Edmonds’s men were now gently bending back the strands to create a pathway. It seemed impossible to Kingsley that they had remained undetected for so long, but they had and now the hour had come. Three gaps had been formed; the men in front of Kingsley gently took up their weapons and crept through. As he followed, Kingsley could see that this was to be a battle as old as man himself, a desperate hand-to-hand struggle. The men carried hatchets and clubs. Some of the weapons they had clearly fashioned themselves during idle hours in the trenches; he saw maces studded with spikes, sometimes with a short stabbing blade protruding from the end. Stone Age man had done battle in exactly this way, leaping upon his opponent and attempting to slash, stab or bludgeon him to death.

The section of trench to be attacked had been carefully chosen. It had been scouted on three previous nights and the Royal Flying Corps had taken a number of photographs. A complex including two large dugouts where men were quartered, it was approached by single slit trenches on either side, and if the British could once get into the complex a small force could hold its perimeters for a short period while the main battle was joined in the middle.

And so Kingsley watched, as with a mighty yell the attack began. Having crept forward beyond the wire to the lip of the German trench, twenty Britons rose up and hurled themselves over it and down on to the heads of the soldiers chatting within. Kingsley followed as the first thuds and screams began, peering over the parapet into the darkness below where the crunch of metal on bone punctuated German cries of panic and bloodcurdling yells of pain.

‘Bombs in the hole! Sharp now,’ Edmonds’s voice cried out, and Kingsley watched as men approached the dully glowing patches of light that marked the entrances into the underground complex. One or two Germans were already stumbling out, attempting to raise their rifles, but as they did so they were stabbed or shot. Then Mills bombs and grenades were hurled into the dugouts, and almost instantly great bangs beneath the dirt were followed by a chorus of screams and pitiable whimpering.

Now a flare went up and the whole scene was suddenly bright as day. The British were laying about themselves with wild and savage fury, and the Germans to whom Kingsley had listened only moments before were all dead or dying. At the edges of the battle the Germans were clogging up the approach trenches, attempting to get at the British but being held at the perimeters by those Tommies whose job it was to secure the area of attack. Kingsley could see Captain Edmonds in the midst of it all, with two dead at his feet, in the process of emptying his revolver into a third, a large man who appeared to be brandishing a cook’s ladle. Kingsley lay flat on the parapet, watching Edmonds’s gun.

Now stunned and wounded Germans began to emerge from the smoky darkness of the bombed-out holes. They were attacked instantly and the dead piled up,’ blocking the entrances and muffling the cries from within.

‘Carstairs, Smith! Look to the edges,’ shouted Edmonds. Kingsley glanced to left and right and could see what Edmonds had already spotted: the perimeters were being squeezed, two or three Tommies were already dead and the Germans were pushing the remaining defenders back into the mêlée.

‘Warm work, lads! Too damn warm, prepare to withdraw!’ Edmonds shouted.

Kingsley thought that this excellent officer might have left his order to retire a minute too long. The Germans who had come to the aid of their comrades were nearly in amongst the British now, and the fighting was shocking in its violence and frantic energy. For a second Kingsley was reminded of those ridiculous scenes in American moving pictures when entire Wild West saloons erupted into fighting, with every single person furiously thrashing away at everyone else. The trench was now a seething mass of flailing humanity.

Looking down,’ Kingsley could see Edmonds draw breath to shout further orders, when a German buried his bayonet in him from behind. Instead of words, blood blurted from his open mouth. He fell forward to the boards, and in so doing dropped his revolver.

Kingsley sprang forward over the parapet wall and leaped into the mob below. He did not hesitate. He did not think at all. Right from the first moment when he had accepted the assignment from Cumming he had known that it would almost certainly place him in enormous physical danger, but only a danger that millions of other men were facing every day. Since arriving in France he had taken a certain grim satisfaction in the prospect that he would now be able to give the lie to those who called him a coward; finally he would be able to share the dangers that his countrymen faced without compromising his conscience.

Kingsley had almost
sought
this chance to see action. Now that it presented itself, he hurled himself into it.

He had the advantage of having had an aerial view of the fighting, so he knew the current make-up of the struggle. He dropped in between two Tommies near where their captain had fallen and was about to duck and pick up the gun when suddenly a German loomed up in front of him, raising his Mauser pistol to shoot. Kingsley had in his hand the gun he had hoped to trade with Captain Edmonds. He had not intended ever to fire a weapon in this terrible war, but now he had no choice. His arms snapped into the firing position he knew so well from the pistol range at Met Small Arms, and he took aim and squeezed the trigger. The German fell back, shot between the eyes. As the soldier fell away, Kingsley saw another one directly behind him and a third and fourth approaching from either side. Kingsley shot them all, each between the eyes, turning his hips from left to right, his upper body firing position never altering: left arm up and crooked, barrel across the sleeve, gun held high, eye behind the hammer. Whenever Kingsley fought, he remembered the advice of his first fencing tutor: ‘It takes about as long to panic as it does to think. In a fight, think quickly but always
think
.’

As the fourth man went down, Kingsley was looking about himself for Abercrombie’s gun. He had marked well where it had been dropped and there it should have been, next to the body of Captain Edmonds, but it was gone, kicked away in the movement of the fight, perhaps slipping off the boards or between them into the mud, perhaps still nearby but impossible to see amongst the skidding, thumping crowd of scrambling legs and boots. Fully forty men were upright in a space no bigger than half a rackets court. Another twenty must have been beneath them, dead or dying, trampled under the struggling soldiers. Kingsley could see that it was hopeless to try to find that gun now: in another few moments the Germans would overwhelm their attackers, and it was already a moot point whether any of them would get out alive. In front of him Kingsley saw the young subaltern with whom he had drunk tea spin round with half his head blown off. Both officers were now gone, the raid was being overwhelmed.

Then Kingsley remembered the fat man Edmonds had shot. Where was he? Rolling away one of the men he himself had dispatched, he found the corpse of Edmonds’s victim, the cook’s ladle still between his fingers. Was his body fat enough to stop a bullet? By rights a service revolver fired at point-blank range should send a bullet through one man and then perhaps another before drilling into the mud behind. But this had been an exceptionally fat man, wearing a big greatcoat, heavily webbed with leather and buckles. Kingsley dropped to his knees and rolled the man over. There was no exit wound.

For the second time in less than half an hour Kingsley found himself burying his hand in a corpse. A fresh one was not so easy to penetrate, and he was forced to take a hatchet from the man’s belt and hack the dead cook open with it. The bullet had entered the chest, so whilst above him three dozen men stabbed and bludgeoned their lives away,’ Kingsley chopped at the man’s ribs, then took a knife and delved beneath. Having created an enormous incision, he put his hand inside and felt for the bullet. Sure enough, there it was, wedged between the man’s back ribs. Kingsley plucked it out and slipped it into his pocket, then stood upright in the mêlée to consider his position.

‘Order them back,’ he heard a voice beneath him say, ‘or they’ll fight till they die. No officers left. Someone must give the order.’

It was Edmonds,’ who much to Kingsley’s surprise was still alive.

‘For God’s sake get them out, man.’

Kingsley took in the scene at a glance: the perimeter of the field of battle was within moments of collapse. More Tommies now lay dead at either end along with twice as many Germans, and it seemed to Kingsley that only the logjam of piled bodies was preventing the Germans beyond from coming to the aid of their embattled comrades.

‘Mills bomb!’ Kingsley shouted at the top of his voice. ‘Mills bomb here this instant! Captain Edmonds is fallen,’ I am in command. Mills bomb, if you please!’