A buzzing sound races past my ear and I feel a sting and think I have been hit, but when I press my hand to the side of my head it comes away without any blood and in my confusion my anger rises and I lift my Smiler and point it indiscriminately at the men beneath me, pulling the trigger again and again and again.
A sound like a balloon being burst and the man next to me falls with a cry of anguish and I can’t stop to help him but it flashes through my mind that this is Turner who has just fallen, Turner who once bested me at chess three times in a row and was the most ungracious of champions. Ten gone, ten left.
I rush forward, to the side, trip, fall over another body and I think, Please God, let it not be Will, but no, when I look down, unable to stop myself, I see Unsworth lying with his mouth wide open and an expression of anguish on his face, Unsworth who had the audacity to question the wisdom of the strategy. He’s already dead. Two weeks ago I found myself on duty with him, alone for several hours, and although we were not particular friends he told me that his girl back home had found herself in the family way and I congratulated him and said that I hadn’t even realized he was married.
“I’m not,” he said, spitting on the ground.
“Ah,” I replied. “Well, these things happen, I suppose.”
“Are you stupid, Sadler?” he said. “I’ve not been home in six months. It’s got nothing to do with me, has it? The dirty whore.”
“Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?” I said. “You don’t have to worry.”
“But I wanted to marry her,” he cried, his face red with humiliation and pain. “I love the bones of her. And I’m not five minutes out of the country and this happens.”
Eleven-nine.
Forward again and we jump down, my first time in a German trench, screaming as if our lives depend on it as we race through unfamiliar lanes, and I find myself shooting indiscriminately as I go, turning at one point and felling an older man with the butt of my rifle, hearing the sound of his nose or his jaw breaking as he collapses.
We’re there for how long I don’t know, and soon we have taken it. We’ve taken the German trench. They’re all dead around us, every last one of them, and Sergeant Clayton rises like Lucifer from the bowels of hell, gathers us together and tells us that we’re good men, we’ve done our duty as he trained us to do, that this is an important victory for Good over Evil but we have to continue tonight, we have to press on, that there’s a lesser trench another mile north-west of our position and we have to make our way there immediately or lose our advantage.
“Four of you will stay here to defend this land,” he says and we each silently pray that we will be selected. “Milton, Bancroft, Attling, Sadler, you four, all right? It should be all clear now but keep your wits about you. Milton, take my pistol, all right? And take the lead, too. The rest of you will have to rely on your rifles if there’s any trouble. Another regiment might advance on you from the east.”
“And if they do, sir,” asks Milton, unwisely, “how are we to defend ourselves?”
“Use your wits, man,” Clayton says. “That’s what you’ve been trained to do. But if I come back later and find that Fritz has retaken this trench, I’ll shoot every last one of you myself.”
And in the madness of the moment I burst out laughing, for his threats are utterly pointless; in such an eventuality we will have long since passed from this world into the next.
“I’m going to take a look around,” says Will, disappearing around a corner with his rifle hanging lazily over his shoulder.
“Couldn’t believe it when the old man said we were to stay behind,” says Milton, grinning at me. “What a stroke of luck, eh?”
“I don’t think so,” says Attling, a skinny lad with huge eyes and an amphibian aspect. “I’d have been happy to go on.”
“Easy to say,” replies Milton scornfully, “when you know you don’t have to. What do you think, Sadler?”
“Easy to say,” I agree, nodding and looking around. The wood that the Germans have used for their fire steps is better than ours. The walls are made of rough-laid concrete and I wonder whether they had an engineer among their number when they entrenched here. There are dead bodies all around us but I’ve lost any revulsion for corpses.
“Look at these foxholes,” says Milton. “They’ve done all right for themselves, haven’t they? It’s like luxury compared to ours. Stupid bloody bastards, letting us take them like this.”
“Cards,” says Attling, reaching down and picking up an eight of spades and a four of diamonds; my earlier idea about what was going on down here has proved strangely correct.
“How long do you think it will take them to take the next trench?” asks Milton, turning to me, and I shrug my shoulders and pull a cigarette from my front pouch.
“I don’t know,” I say, lighting up. “A couple of hours, perhaps? Assuming they can take it at all.”
“Don’t say that, Sadler,” he replies aggressively. “Of course they’ll take it.”
I nod and look away, wondering what’s keeping Will, and just at that moment I hear the sound of boots marching through the mud and he reappears from around the corner. Only this time he is not alone.
“Bloody hell,” says Milton, turning around, the delighted expression on his face suggesting that he can’t quite believe what he sees. “What have you got there, then, Bancroft?”
“Found him hiding in one of the shelters around the rear,” says Will, pushing forward a young boy, who looks at each one of us in turn with an expression of pure terror on his face. He’s extremely skinny, this lad, with a mop of blond hair and a fringe that looks as though someone recently took a pair of scissors to it and simply cut in a horizontal line to keep it out of his eyes. He’s trembling but attempting to look courageous. Under the mud and the dirt, he has a pleasant, childlike face.
“Who are you, then, Fritzy?” asks Milton, speaking as though the boy is a halfwit, his voice loud and terrifying as he walks forward, hulking over him now, making the boy lean back in fear.
“Bitte tut mir nichts,” he says, the words coming out fast, tripping over each other.
“What’s he saying?” asks Milton, turning to look at Attling as if he might know the answer.
“I haven’t got a fucking clue,” says Attling irritably.
“Sod all use to me, then, aren’t you?” says Milton.
“Ich will nach Hause,” says the boy now. “Bitte, ich will nach Hause.”
“Shut the fuck up,” snarls Milton. “No one understands a word you’re saying. He the only one, then?” he asks, addressing Will.
“I think so, yes,” replies Will. “It tails off around there. There are a lot of bodies, of course. But he’s the only one left alive.”
“Better tie him up, I suppose,” I say. “We can take him with us when we move on.”