The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (25 page)

In the last week the cold snaps into frost, the tumbling rain and slush hardening to snowflakes drifting westward. A dry stinging wind. The pools in the shellholes crust with an inch of ice. One morning the men crawl out from their sleeping quarters, shelves in the trench wall curtained with a waterproof sheet, and when they look over the parapet toward the front line all is blanketed in white.

Ashley stands on a fire step sweeping no-man’s-land with his collapsible periscope. At intervals he blows warm air onto his gloved hands, cupping them tightly. He wishes it would snow more, ten times more, until the pitiful ridge across no-man’s-land gleamed as white as the Weisshorn. It must be a few hundred miles from here, but it feels like ten thousand.

Ashley shuts the periscope and comes down the stairs into company headquarters.

—Hunting season is over, Ashley says. If we couldn’t get forward in the slop, we shan’t get forward in this.

Jeffries shakes his head. —I wouldn’t be certain. Brass hats will want to straighten the lines before we settle in for winter. And they’ll want the Empress.

—Impossible.

—We’re long past impossible.

Two days later they receive their orders to attack. The battalion is to travel by night to Patience Trench, arriving at the position well before dawn. From there they will attack the following morning. B Company will be in the second wave.

Their target is a German fortification called Empress Redoubt, a prehistoric burial mound rising dramatically from a bog of icy mud. The white chalk of the mound’s summit has been shaped by months of shelling into a queer humanoid projection: to the staff officer who named the redoubt, it resembles the figure of the Empress of India in her youth. The enemy has fortified the mound into a maze of barbed wire and dugouts and tunnels and concrete pillboxes; the British
general staff claims the redoubt is an essential artillery observation point that must be seized.

In truth it is useless to both armies. But it is the only landmark in an ocean of mud and the enemy holds it. The crumbling chalk and rusting wire of the redoubt look down upon the British every morning, upon subalterns inspecting troops at dawn stand-to, upon staff officers eyeing the position with field glasses. Since July the British have attacked the redoubt four times, failing each time at great cost.

The soldiers now believe the Empress to be German.

The evening before they go forward, Ashley asks his servant Mayhew to clean his revolver. Private Mayhew is a stocky man from Wiltshire who joined the army because he thought it would be easier than dairy farming. He lopes among the trenches in an odd shuffle, never looking another man in the eye when he can avoid it. But Private Mayhew wears the 1914 star. He fought at Mons and Loos, and the other soldiers say he has survived too many battles to ever be killed now. Ashley does not like Mayhew personally and finds him a poor servant, but Mayhew is a crack shot and an experienced soldier, and orderlies fight side by side with their officers. So Ashley keeps him on.

Mayhew takes the revolver from Ashley. He murmurs the name Patience Trench, giving a low whistle.

—Patience Trench, Mayhew repeats. Hoped I’d never see it, sir. Worst of the worst, they say. Chum of mine come out of there last week. Not any kind of trench, he said, just shellholes strung together. Nowhere to kip but in the mud—

Ashley smiles. —Look on the bright side, Mayhew. We shan’t be there but a few hours.

The battalion begins its march shortly after supper, the sky well darkened in the November blackness. They travel by a sunken road flooded with icy water and dead horses. The road has been photographed by German airplanes and is printed on German trench maps of the sector in red ink. German artillery officers who have never laid eyes upon the
road know it intimately, raining explosive shells on every curve and rise with pinpoint accuracy, night and day.

The road is a channel of misery and there is no other way forward.

Ashley marches at the front of his platoon, an electric torch in hand, the muck lapping at his knees. Small bergs of blue ice bob in the channel, the water pockmarked by the tumbling rain. The soldiers slog forward at a crawl. They are all heavily laden, carrying rifles and haversacks and shovels, the bodies draped with bandoliers and water bottles and bombs. Some of the men have added equipment on their shoulders: iron pickets, coils of barbed wire, drums of Lewis gun ammunition. They duck under sagging telephone wires that have been strung and restrung zigzag above the sunken road to hold taut. The men have no waders. Their feet are wet and painfully cold, but they suffer with little complaint. A few of them are singing.

—Could be worse, one man says.

—How’s that?

—We could be going to Patience Trench.

The column arrives at a blockage in the road. A horse has fallen into a trap of mud, a deep crater filled with tacky gray sludge. The horse is sunk nearly up to its shoulders. The driver has unyoked the animal from its wagon and is coaxing it forward, but he cannot get it out of the mire. The horse brays and snorts, its shoulders thick with foaming sweat, its legs skittering hopelessly for footing. With every motion the horse sinks further down, with every suck of air.

—She’ll never make it, Ashley tells the driver. You oughtn’t let her suffer like that.

—He’s a stallion, sir. A strong brute. He might get out yet—

—Bollocks.

Ashley watches the horse struggle, stirring up the mud with its forelegs only to collapse further down. A captain from the Durhams arrives from the other direction and halts his soldiers behind the wagon. He comes around the cart and Ashley salutes.

—That horse is drowning, the captain says. What’s the holdup?

The captain does not wait for an answer. He draws his automatic pistol, approaches the channel of mud carefully and levels his pistol at the horse’s head, aiming at the base of the brain, behind the eyes and below the ears. The captain fires. The horse jerks and its neck collapses. It goes on sinking with a soft gurgle, its eyeballs huge and grotesque, the fine musculature of its neck tense and rigid. The driver stands stupidly by the road, watching the dead animal. The captain orders Ashley’s men to push the wagon to the side of the crater. It is impossible to move the horse.

—Just tread right on him, the captain instructs. That’s right, on the withers, safest place to step.

They go on eastward. The men are no longer singing. The trench water gives way to thicker mud and their progress is slower. As they advance the shelling grows fiercer and several times they dive deep into the mud to seek cover. They come out dripping with sludge, several pounds heavier.

The column passes more stalled carts with dead horses still attached, mouths grinning in the darkness. Below the mud lie worse things, spongy or rigid forms that collapse under the men’s boots and send up bubbles of foul gas. The soldiers follow only the man in front of them, too dumb and tired to think for themselves. The road disintegrates into a mess of shallow channels breaking off in different directions. The column goes in one direction, then another. The soldiers become lost in the night and the shells that fall upon them could be theirs or those of their enemy, for it makes no difference. A huge howitzer detonates at the rear of the column and two men are pulverized into a mess of blood and bone. One of the new recruits starts gathering the meager remains into a sandbag, but Ashley shakes his head, calling over the booming artillery.

—It’s not safe here. We must keep moving—

They trudge on toward the flashes of the front line, making their way along another drowned road, the ground sinking until it is waist-deep and impassible. Jeffries comes back along the column to consult
Ashley, bearing his torch and a map in a waterproof case. The two officers go a few paces away so as not to be overheard. Ashley’s boot slips into a hole and he tumbles into the mud. Jeffries pulls him up by the shoulders, stifling a laugh.

—We’re at Ten Bells, Jeffries says. Must have passed our turning point under the shelling. I suppose A and C companies made the turn. We must come out of this road and traverse to the north. It shan’t be easy, but it can hardly be fouler than this. How are your men?

—They know we’re lost. We’re always bloody lost.

Ashley leads his men up out of the sunken road. On hands and knees they scramble up the slope of mud, tossing rifles up and clawing at the gunk, sliding back down and squirming up until they flop over. They travel northeast across the refuse of old battlefields. The men march with their eyes half-open. They can no longer feel their feet. Some collapse and they are ordered forward, and when this fails they are cajoled and insulted and dragged back into the column. The soldiers drain their water bottles and even in the frost they sweat under seventy-pound loads until the sweat turns clammy and makes them shiver. Once an hour the officers halt to let the men rest, but later Jeffries worries that once halted the men will not start again, so there are no further breaks.

The sky goes from rain to icy rain. At three o’clock in the morning it begins to snow, the thick flakes silhouetted under the star shells flaring and sinking over no-man’s-land in the distance. The column descends into a shallow basin of limbless trees and a few minutes later a barrage of shrapnel opens upon them, the metal pellets bursting and singing through the broken forest. Two of Lieutenant Bennett’s men are killed and Ashley loses another, a lance corporal who is all but decapitated by a huge metal shard. The wounded are taken to the aid station and Ashley leads his men around a vast shell crater. At the far side of the crater Ashley sees a shadowy figure sunk up to his waist in mud. Ashley halts his men and calls out to the figure. It is difficult to hear over the crashing artillery.

—Just leave me be, sir, the man begs. Soon I’ll be out of everyone’s misery.

—Who are you?

—Evans, sir, C Company. Hit in the leg. Fell in here and they never saw me. I don’t want to trouble no one. No point in bringing me out, only for me to die under the Empress. You can shoot me, sir—

—Rubbish.

It takes ten minutes to extract the man from the mud, and then he has to be half-carried by Ashley’s men, dripping and exhausted. His leg wounds are slight, but he has lost his rifle and most of his equipment. He repeats over and again that he wishes he had drowned where he lay. Ashley tells him to shut up.