The Sorrowing Wind (The Apple Tree Saga Book 3) Page 6

  ‘What happened to our Lewis-gun sections?’

  ‘Copped it, sir, quite early on. A shell got one of ’em ‒ Mr Rail’s ‒ and the gun was useless. I know it was ’cos I went to see. The other lot stopped at the corner of the wood, trying to get that bloody Maxim. They were cut down in seconds. They never even got their gun into action.’

  A rifle cracked from the German line, and a bullet struck the edge of the crater. Minching wriggled back at once.

  ‘The colonel was killed, sir, did you know? So were Mr Lightwood and Mr Haynes.’

  ‘And Mr Spencer?’

  ‘Badly wounded in the head. A Company’s worse off than us. I reckon they’re pretty well wiped clean out.’

  Michael turned away and closed his eyes.

  Just before darkfall, Minching opened their iron rations. They ate corned beef and hard biscuit. Aston, though conscious, could eat nothing. He asked for water all the time. Darby kept giving him his own bottle.

  ‘Hang on, Fred, it won’t be long now. We’ll get you back, don’t worry. But for God’s sake remember to keep mum or we’ll have Jerry down on us as sure as fate.’

  As evening came on, artillery fire was renewed on both sides, and the air above was filled again with the shrieking of shells; but after a while, as night fell, it eased off and became intermittent; and between the two flashing skylines, darkness settled along the ground.

  ‘Now,’ Minching said. ‘It’s time we started.’

  He and Darby hoisted Aston till he hung with an arm round each man’s neck. Aston gave a cry but choked it back quickly, sucking his breath between clenched teeth.

  ‘Easy does it,’ Minching muttered. ‘Hold on, my lad, and bite on the bullet. It’s a long way to Tipperary.’

  He turned his face towards Michael, who lay trying to bend his knee.

  ‘You coming, sir?’

  ‘No, not yet. Better for you to go ahead.’

  ‘Supposing you was to need help?’

  ‘Don’t fuss, man! Just get a move on and do as I say.’

  ‘Very well, sir, but don’t dilly-dally too long ‒ the Jerry patrols’ll be out soon.’

  ‘I know that. I’m not a fool.’

  ‘All right, sir, and good luck.’

  ‘Good luck, Minching,’ Michael said, and watched as the three men stumbled over the edge, vanishing into the misty darkness.

  He crawled to the rim and lay listening. All around in the darkness, wounded men groaned and whimpered, and sometimes he heard slithering noises as somebody crawled along the ground, inching his way down the slope. Sometimes he heard tortured breathing. Once he heard a man praying.

  Half a mile below, shells were bursting in High Wood, great yellow flashes splintering the darkness between the trees, while, on the horizons, north and south, as the big guns answered each other, the sky flickered, pulsing whitely. Now and then a star-shell rose, green-spiked, beautiful, a man-made meteor rising and sinking like a sigh. And every few minutes the bright Very flares blossomed overhead like Japanese flowers, spreading their light over all the earth.

  Michael lay back again, looking up at the throbbing sky. He had lost much blood; he was weak and light-headed; a deathlike weariness numbed his limbs. Somewhere nearby he heard voices speaking in German, and heard the tread of booted feet. The first patrols were going out, picking their way among the dead and wounded.

  ‘Ach, Du liebe Güte, was fur ein wüstes Durcheinander!’ a voice said, quietly but clearly. Then the voices and the footsteps went further away.

  Michael knew he ought to move. His wound was not crippling; he could easily find the strength to crawl; and the doctors at Douvecourt would soon patch him up as good as new, so that he could fight again another day. But his will was paralysed, his soul inert, and his body obeyed its own dictates. So he stayed where he was in the shell-crater and waited for the Germans to come and take him prisoner.

  Betony, receiving a letter from Mrs Andrews, went at once to King’s Hill House. She was shown into the morning-room, which was full of sunshine and the scent of roses. Mrs Andrews sat straight-backed, her face impassive, but when she began talking of Michael, she broke down and wept and it was some time before she could continue. She felt ashamed, weeping in front of this carpenter’s daughter, this girl of twenty whose own eyes were dry, whose manner was strangely matter-of-fact.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Izzard, but I haven’t yet got over the shock. I didn’t expect you to come so soon.’

  ‘Have you heard from Michael himself?’

  ‘Yes, but only one of those printed postcards. A letter is following, it said.’

  ‘Is he wounded badly?’

  ‘The Red Cross people say not. But he’s in a German hospital and I cannot believe they will treat him properly.’

  ‘I’m sure they will. The Red Cross are there to see that they do.’

  ‘I wish I could share your confidence, but we hear such terrible tales sometimes …’

  ‘At least he’s safe. That’s the main thing.’

  ‘My son is a prisoner-of-war with the Germans. I find little in that to comfort me.’

  ‘But he is alive!’ Betony said. ‘He will be coming back again, eventually, when it’s all over. Surely that must comfort you?’

  And she thought of the thousands of men who had died since the great offensive had begun, for, travelling about England as she did, visiting factories, she met grieving women everywhere and had lost count of all those whose menfolk lay dead on the Somme.

  Mrs Andrews got up.

  ‘I’m glad you’re taking the news so calmly. I was afraid you might be distressed. I expect you young women are getting quite hardened, which is probably a blessing in its way.’

  ‘Is there an address where I can write to Michael?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. I’ll give it to you.’ Mrs Andrews went to her desk. ‘He’ll be very glad to hear from you, I’m sure.’

  All through summer and on into autumn, fighting continued on the Somme. Pozieres. Longueval. Delville Wood. Morval. Le Transloy. Then, in November, it ground to a halt. A few miles of territory had been gained. 500,000 lives had been lost. The big push had failed. But the Germans, it was said, were demoralized by their own losses. It was bound to tell on them in the end. Meanwhile there was deadlock again; the two opposing armies dug themselves in; and winter advanced upon them both: the worst winter for twenty years.

  Chapter Four

  ‘D’you think it’s as cold as this at home, Woody?’

  ‘Definitely. My missus wrote she was getting chilblains.’

  ‘We’re practically strangers, my feet and me, not to mention other members.’

  ‘Anyone here called Winterbottom?’

  ‘Hey, Toss, remember how hot it was at Monkey Britannia? I could almost wish myself back there now. Or Devil’s Wood, say, when the trees was burning. I’d sooner’ve been burnt like poor old Glover and Verning and Kyte than froze to death by bloody inches.’

  ‘How can you talk like that?’ asked Costrell, one of a new draft out from England. ‘As though it was all a huge joke?’

  ‘It is a huge joke,’ said Danson. ‘A killing joke for some, it’s true, and has a lot of the rest in stitches. But you new chaps don’t understand.’

  Costrell was silent. He thought them callous, ghoulish, disgusting. He could never share their attitude. He was always aware of the frozen corpses lying out in no-man’s land, many of them visible from the front trenches, some quite close to the picket wire, only a few short yards away. And when Danson said, as he often did, ‘D’you reckon old Bill could do with a blanket?’ or, ‘I could swear John Willie has turned hisself over since this morning,’ Costrell could not help shuddering.

  ‘It’s all right, son,’ Bob Newers said to him. ‘They’re all right, the ones out there. They don’t feel the bleeding cold, or hear the ruddy shells come over, or get told off for san fatigues. They’re better off and they bloody well know it.’

  ‘Did you notice that
subaltern smelling of scent?’ said Pecker Danson.

  ‘Poor sod,’ said Dave Rush. ‘He’s probably plastered with anti-louse cream.’

  ‘Get away!’ said Privitt, looking up from the letter he was writing. ‘Do officers have chats, then, the same as us?’

  ‘Not the same, no. The chats they got is bigger and better, with pips on their shoulders and Sam Browne belts.’

  ‘What about Fritz? Has he got ’em too?’

  ‘It’s him that flaming well sends ’em over. He fires them in canisters, same as gas. It’s the Kaiser’s most successful weapon.’

  Privitt, going back to his letter, wrote for a moment or two in silence. He was having a bit of fun with the censor. He looked up again to read what he had written so far.

  ‘ “Dear Brother Humphrey, Last Saturday night I slept with three French girls and their mother. The mother was best though not as good as the Friday before when I spent the night in a high-class establishment kept by a Chinese lady who used to run a laundry in Solihull.” There! That’ll make ’em open their peepers! When the major reads that he’ll be after me to know the address.’

  ‘It isn’t true, is it, Privy?’

  ‘Hah! Get away! All I’ve ever slept with is a woolly rabbit.’

  A shell came over and exploded, crump, behind the parados. The men ducked low, and a shower of hard-frozen clods fell upon them, bouncing off their steel helmets. Privitt sat up again, wiping the debris from his notepad.

  ‘The way things are here, I shan’t get much chance to graduate, neither!’

  ‘The Lord be thanked for tin bowlers,’ said Pecker Danson, adjusting his helmet. ‘Or do I mean Lloyd George?’

  ‘Get a move on there!’ shouted Corporal Flinders, coming quickly round the traverse. ‘Clear that mess away, quick sharp, and no sweeping it under the carpet!’

  The men got to work with entrenching tools, shovelling up the fallen earth and tossing it onto the broken parados. They filled new sandbags and repaired the gap.

  ‘Entrenching tool,’ Costrell muttered. ‘Why can’t they call a spade a spade?’

  ‘I’m thinking of changing my name,’ said Privitt. ‘It’s no joke, you know, being called Private Privitt, nor Privy neither, seeing the privies here ent all that private.’

  ‘Say that faster and you’ll find yourself in the next camp concert.’

  ‘How many shells has he sent over this morning, Toss?’

  ‘I dunno. I ent been counting.’

  ‘Seems quiet to me. Perhaps he’s busy doing the crossword.’ Newers, on the firestep, sniffed the air. ‘He’s got bacon for breakfast again this morning. Smoked, I reckon, the lucky sod.’

  The two lines at Brisle were certainly very close together, and there was a live-and-let-live policy there, so that rifle and machine-gun fire was only rarely exchanged, and that, as Corporal Flinders said, just as a sort of formality. No-man’s-land was scarcely fifty yards across, and when some Tommy sneaked out and raised a notice there, saying Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted, the Germans, instead of blasting it to smithereens, merely pelted it with snowballs. Even the officers turned a blind eye to these unwarlike pastimes.

  One freezing night, when the men were huddled in a dugout, warming themselves at a small brazier, Dave Rush got out his wheezy old mouth-organ and began playing popular tunes. The men sang, swaying together from side to side, for the singing and the movement kept them warm. And then, half way through There’s a long, long trail a-winding Burston, on sentry, suddenly pulled aside the curtain.

  ‘Shut up and listen,’ he said to them, and when they obeyed him they heard the Germans finishing the song.

  ‘Would you believe it!’ Rush exclaimed. ‘They’ve got a nerve, pinching our songs. But I’ll soon fix them. Just listen here.’

  He raised his mouth-organ to his lips and played the first verse of God Save The King. At the end he stopped and listened again, and across the way, in the German trenches, there was utter silence.

  ‘That’s foxed ’em!’ he said. ‘They’re not singing that, the saucy buggers!’

  ‘No more ent we,’ said Pecker Danson, and, taking the brazier outside, swung it about till the charcoal glowed redly again. ‘The new moon is up,’ he said, returning. ‘Anyone got a franc to turn?’

  The Germans now, recovering, were singing Deutschland Uber Alles. The Sixth Three Counties retaliated and noisily drowned the rival song.

  ‘Oh, the Kaiser fell in a box of eggs,

  Parleyvoo!

  The Kaiser fell in a box of eggs,

  Parleyvoo!

  The Kaiser fell in a box of eggs

  And all the yellow ran down his legs,

  Inky-dinky-parleyvoo!’

  There came a day when Sergeant Townchurch was with them again, after a month in hospital. No one knew what his illness had been, though rumour gave it as ‘a bout of German measles and a bad cough’. He himself gave no explanation. He preferred to forget he had ever been ill. And he reasserted his authority by reporting Corporal Flinders, acting platoon sergeant during his absence, for letting the discipline run down.

  One morning, after a heavy fall of snow, two excited German soldiers, fair-haired boys of about seventeen, climbed onto their parapet and began making a snowman there. Tom and Newers, looking through a loophole, watched with amusement as the snowman grew to lifelike proportions and was given a field-grey comforter and cap and a few bandoliers slung over his shoulder.

  Sergeant Townchurch came along. He pushed between Newers, Tom, and Evans, and peered out at the two Germans dressing the snowman on their parapet. He unslung his rifle, put it to his shoulder, and took careful aim through the narrow loophole. Newers moved along the bay and apparently tripped on a loose bit of duck-board. He lurched against Townchurch and the shot went wide. The two German soldiers dived for cover.

  ‘Clumsy swine! You done that on purpose! You got friends over there, have you?’

  ‘Sorry, sarge. It’s these loose slats. I’ll go and get a hammer and nails before someone breaks his silly neck.’

  A few minutes later, an arm appeared above the German parapet, and a well-aimed grenade exploded inside the British trench. Then a second and a third. Costrell and Rush retaliated. Six grenades were returned for three. The sector quietened down again. But Burston and Trigg had each lost a hand and Corporal Flinders had been blinded; and Dick Costrell, hearing this news, would have gone for Townchurch with a pick-axe if Tom and Newers had not restrained him.

  Quite soon afterwards, the silence in the enemy lines became uncanny. Patrols going out after dark found the trenches deserted. The Germans had withdrawn, noiselessly, to the strongly fortified Hindenburg Line, ten miles or so behind their old trenches.

  ‘Why not to Berlin while they was at it?’ said Dave Rush.

  ‘The Hindenburg Line,’ said Bob Newers. ‘Is that part of the Great Western?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Danson. ‘Paddington, Oxford, Cardiff Docks, and all stations to Haverfordwest.’

  ‘If Jerry’s gone we can maybe go home ‒ I don’t think!’ said Dick Costrell.

  Two days later they were relieved by the North Warwicks and went into billets at Doudelanville. When they returned to the line again, it was to take over newly dug trenches in the Vermand area.

  The weather continued bitterly cold. Men who stood still for a few seconds found themselves frozen to the boards. They could scarcely bear the touch of their rifles, so cold was the metal in their hands, and they fired off round after round at nothing, to warm the barrels and prevent the bolts from freezing up.

  But worse even than the cold was when the thaw came, and they lived always in a world of slush, wet through, waking or sleeping. A man named Thompson complained of trouble with his feet. They were badly swollen and had gone numb. He could not get his boots off to rub in the oil that might have brought him some relief.

  ‘Move about a bit more!’ Townchurch said. ‘Of course you’ll get trench feet if you never shift yourself, i
dle bastard!’

  Three days later, when their spell in the forward area ended, Thompson was quite unable to stand. He had to be carried out of the line, into the rest camp three miles behind, and there he went for a medical.

  His boots were cut away and the feet were revealed, swollen and shapeless, the colour of raw meat putrefying, with the woollen socks darkly embedded, making a pattern in the rotten flesh. Thompson, watching, said not a word. He merely swallowed, making a noise. Then he looked away, into the distance, whistling tunelessly between his teeth.

  The doctor took Newers on one side. He said Thompson would probably lose both feet.

  ‘Why wasn’t he sent before?’

  ‘Sergeant Townchurch thought he was swinging the lead.’

  ‘I must have a word with your Sergeant Townchurch.’

  But the doctors at Vraignes were busy men. They worked a twenty-hour day. And when the battalion returned to the line, at Gricourt this time, Townchurch went on as he always had done.

  ‘Evans! Maddox! Newers! Rush! I want you in a raiding party. The colonel has asked for a couple of Boche prisoners. It’s up to us to try and oblige him.’

  ‘Why always Evans?’ Newers asked.

  ‘Why always me?’ Townchurch retorted.

  Townchurch himself was without fear. Rush said he meant to get a decoration. He had more than once been mentioned in dispatches, and was held in some regard by the C.O. Townchurch knew it. It was only his due. He worked hard and he had courage. He could do great things if only he were given the chance, and he told his fellow N.C.O.s that he meant to make the Army his career. He wouldn’t go back to being coachman at Capleton Castle. The gentry would never wipe their boots on him again. He was somebody now and his great ambition was to gain a commission in the field.

  There was hard fighting again that spring. The British were following up the German withdrawal. They were pushing on towards St Quentin. The bombardment was heavy on both sides.

  In the Gricourt sector, shells were falling with great accuracy, aligned exactly with the front line trenches for a length of fifty yards or so, reducing the earthworks to a mass of debris. The noise of the British guns answering was overwhelming. It was like living between volcanoes. And under the storm, human nerves were stretched and broken, human minds were dislocated.