No blood, anywhere.
He was used to the smell of it by now. The taste of blood misted the air after an artillery barrage, it had dried on his face and neck after one vicious hand-to-hand fight in a German trench just the week before, and with this many dead men before him he expected to be gagging. But the blood of these Germans remained just where it belonged: inside them. Stopped now, stagnant, already clotting and giving itself to rot.
Smith turned and looked back across his own lines. The pale faces of his mates started at him from their trench, and further back more trenches crissed and crossed, mud banks here and there like boils on the earth, a skeleton of trench supports pointing at the sky to his left where a shell had erupted within. He saw bodies — hundreds had died over the past couple of days, and there was never enough time or opportunity to bury them properly — but there was no hint of whatever had come to help them. No footprints, no disturbances in the smoke drifting slowly from left to right across the battlefield, no shadows disappearing back towards the rear. Only silence, and stench, and the mangled evidence of futility.
“There’s no way I saw what I just saw,” someone said from further along the trenches. It sounded like he was crying. “No bleedin’ way at all.”
“I saw nothing,” another voice piped up, but its owner stared out at the sea of dead and repeated the other man’s “No way,” sounding as if he were arguing with himself.
“Angels,” Bill said. “I saw angels.”
Smith walked forward until he drew level with the first dead German. The young man looked barely old enough to bear arms. His helmet was lost somewhere in the mud, his rifle lay inches from his outstretched hand, and his eyes… they were wide, deep, amazed. Smith knelt down and touched the dead boy’s neck, just in case. Nothing. He was still warm, but as dead as the million other men melting back into this hungry earth. His uniform was muddied and wet, but it showed no signs of damage, no point of impact. There was no blood. The boy’s face… those eyes…
Smith heaved the corpse over. The muck relented unwillingly, and the sucking sound startled Smith so much that he stumbled over his own heels and fell into the mud. His hands sank down and touched old, hard things below the surface.
How old? he wondered. Days, weeks or ancient? Too old to know of machine guns and gas, perhaps}
“What’s up, Delamare?” someone shouted from the trench behind him, but Smith did not answer, and the men had enough of their own disbelief and fear to contend with to pursue the matter.
He ran his hands over the dead German boy, lifting his leg, pulling apart the lapels of his greatcoat, tipping his head back so that he could see his neck. In the end, Smith stood and gazed out across the field of dead.
Only a few minutes earlier, he had seen the sky darken with cloud after cloud of singing arrows. He’d heard the hiss of longbow strings as the shafts were released. And now that the battle was over, and the dead could not come back to tell their story, there were no arrows to be seen.
None at all.
The only proof of what Smith had witnessed was ten thousand dead men.
“We are all someone different to ourselves,” Machen said. “No one can ever really know us but us. So asking me to tell you who you are… that’s foolishness.” He puffed on his pipe and added to the dingy atmosphere of the room. A string of bombs fell in the distance, and glass buzzed in the blacked-out window frame. For some reason, the room felt incredibly safe.
“I’ve hinted at why I wanted to see you, I believe,” Smith said. “In my letters to you, my desperation to meet you. Surely as a writer your interest must be piqued?”
Machen nodded, but said nothing. He never took his gaze from Smith’s face. Smith felt scrutinized, his thoughts laid bare, as if this old man knew everything about him and could, given time, find things that he himself did not know.
“I mean to ask you about a story you wrote a long time ago,” Smith said. “But first, I need to tell you of the angels that saved my life.”
Machen relit his pipe. “Go on, Lieutenant Smith. You have my attention. Providing we have no surprise interruption…” He cocked his head toward the sound of falling bombs. “Then I should be pleased to hear your talk of angels.”
“Sir, cast your mind back to the Great War.” Smith leaned forward, his heart pumping hard. He longed to unburden himself of the secret that had weighed heavily for so long. Now he feared that the words would jam in his mouth and he would not be able to speak. A trickle of sweat rolled down his neck to his shirt collar. “Cast your mind back to the Great War,” he repeated, willing his lips to form the words he’d ached to speak for twenty-five years. “I was with a company of a thousand men from my regiment, holding a salient in the fields of Mons. Though in reality, of course, there were no fields any more. Artillery had transformed the land into a morass of mud and shell craters, filled with stagnant water and the pulverized remains of thousands of men, from both the German and Allied armies. The German and British lines were separated by three hundred yards of ground at this point. We were close enough to hear the German troops singing their songs or calling to each other. That was a dreadful time for us. Everywhere, the Germans had been advancing. Our own troops were falling back in confusion. Mr Machen, I can still hear the terrified cries of our men as they threw away their rifles and ran for their lives. And I can still see the look of terror on the faces of infantrymen who just weeks before had been boys working in factories. Their eyes would be wide open, staring so hard you’d swear they were going to burst from their faces…”
Machen spoke gently. “Here, let me refill your glass.”
“Thank you.” Smith took a deep swallow of the whisky. He needed to feel that burning spirit in his mouth, but at that moment it had the potency of water. “My battalion — or the thousand that remained of it — had been ordered to hold the trench against a German assault. It was to allow our troops — all eighty thousand of them — to make good an orderly retreat to new, better-fortified trenches five miles behind our position. It was vital that my battalion held the line and prevented a German breakthrough. We knew only too well that if the Germans launched an attack and broke our line, they would flood through in their thousands to attack our retreating army. And believe me, Mr Machen, our men in that month of August were so exhausted and demoralized that they’d have either run like rabbits or surrendered.” Once more he gulped at the whisky. If only it were stronger. The wretched liquor was tasteless.
“You and your men were courageous,” Machen told him. “A thousand Welshmen pitted against an enemy of how many thousand strong?”
“Three hundred thousand.” He shook his head. “And I don’t know that we were courageous. I certainly didn’t feel at all brave at the time. I simply knew it was my duty…my sacred duty. That we had to prevent a German breakout. If we failed, the Hun would overwhelm the British troops. Of that there would be little doubt. Then there would have been nothing between the enemy and the Channel ports. And if the Germans reached the coast, it wouldn’t be long before the Kaiser’s men would be marching into London.”
“So you held fast.”
“We did our best,” Smith told him, as yet more squadrons of bombers throbbed their way through the night sky. The bitter smell of burning reached him, along with the distinctive scents of seared human flesh; the same aroma as pork roasting in an oven. But even the horrors of the Blitz weren’t pungent enough to prevent the memories of more than two decades ago carrying him back to that Great War battlefield. “We vowed to stand and fight with our bare hands if our ammunition ran out. Then we waited. Many of my men crouched down in the trench to scribble a farewell note to parents and wives. And all the time I could sense the coming storm. There was an oppressive heat in the air. Thunder clouds rose on the horizon. The sun turned a bloody red. There was no birdsong. Even the rats fled the battlefield.” Once more he tipped the whisky into his mouth. Good God, his taste was dead. The spirit was a bland liquid that did nothing to calm his nerves. “The German generals didn’t dally. Their spotter planes must have reported the mass retreat, and that a mere thousand infantry had been left to hold the trench-line. Within moments the fiercest artillery barrage imaginable rained down on our heads. You know, it’s not the big shells that are the most fearsome. No, they’re slow and throw up a lot of mud, and mostly you could hear them coming. It was the little three-inch shells, what we called whizz-bangs, that terrified us. They were fast, with an almost flat trajectory, exploding in the air at head height. I’ve seen countless men dissolve into…” The words dried on his lips. He shrugged, hating the grim weight of the memory in his stomach. “It was the shrapnel. They just dissolved, that’s all.” He rubbed his face. “I do beg your pardon. I’m falling into the trap of the old soldier. Telling you old war stories.”