Teague is suddenly behind me. “Come on,” he says. We run off.
“Where are we?” I shout.
“Nearly at the wood!”
Where was the château? I wonder. Through the drifting smoke I see some stumps and shattered trunks of trees. Chunks of wood fly up, spinning off them. Teague and I fall to the ground. Teague starts firing his rifle. I do the same. I can see nothing. Teague takes a Mills bomb from his bag and throws it. It explodes — yellow and orange, white smoke, erupting earth. He takes out another and slithers forward a few yards through the black trunks. He throws again. This time the bomb seems to detonate almost immediately after it has left his hand. I hear him scream.
Then, seconds later, “Todd! Todd!”
I crawl over to him.
Teague has lost two fingers on his throwing hand and his face has taken a lot of flash from the defective bomb. Most of his hair is burned away, as is the first layer of skin, some of which hangs in long fragile shreds from his cheeks like stiff rice paper. He has no top lip and, as far as I can see, no eyelids left. His eyes are bleeding from the perforated whites, filling the sockets.
I help him to his feet and we stumble off. Blood tears an inch wide track his face. We are suddenly free of the black stumps, but I have absolutely no idea which way to go. I seem to be in a circle of infernal noise. Distant shapes of men scurry and creep in every possible direction. I do not know if we are being shot at.
Teague sinks to his knees. He is moaning now. His face seems to be effervescing, forming a creamy brown froth like the head on a glass of stout. “Whiter than the snow, whiter than the snow” hums in my head.
“I’ll get a stretcher-bearer,” I say faintly. I notice there are traces of tangled grass among the mud and upturned clods of earth. We must have come quite far.
I stand up. The noise of explosions has moved off a way. There is still no one firing at me. I lay Teague down and run off in what I think is the right direction. Stretcher-bearers should be following the second wave. I run on.
Then I hear the noise of an immense motor. To my left, bucking and heaving through and over the tree stumps, is a tank, a huge three-dimensional metal parallelogram, eight feet tall, its tracks hurling up a heavy spray of clods and mud. There is a name painted on the front: Oh, I say! The machine gun in the forward turret traverses and begins firing at me.
I fling up my arms, fall down and pretend to be dead for the second time that day. The tank churns on. I get up and, ridiculously, shake my fist and swear at it. Then I run off on my way again, looking for stretcher-bearers.
I stop suddenly, a horrifying image forming in my mind. I feel a bolus of acid nausea rise in my throat. I turn and run back towards Teague. I hear the engine of Oh, I say! ahead in the drifting smoke, straining, grinding.
Wash me in the water
Where you wash your dirty daughter.…
The tank has run over Teague’s legs. He is alive but unconscious. His legs are oddly shapeless now, like partially filled kit bags. One boot is pointed delicately, like a ballet dancer’s shoe.
I chase after the tank. I can see its tracks clearly in the muddy grass. I come over a small rise and stop, staring in astonishment. Ahead of me, fresh in the morning sun, stretches the Belgian countryside. Roads, trees, fields, villages, a steeple, smoke from chimneys. About a mile off I see the fortifications of the German third line and a column of troops being marched towards me. Reinforcements.
“Oil You the British Army then?”
I turn round. The tank has stopped about fifty yards away. One of its crew is urinating against its side. I bite my bottom lip to stop myself from bursting into tears. I walk over. The man shudders and starts to do up his flies. He comes to meet me. He is small, almost as small as a bantam.
“I reckons as we’ve gone a touch too far, mate.” He walks round the front of the tank. “Right through the bloody middle, a hot knife through butter.”
I follow him round.
“No trenches here, see. Only blockhouses.”
On the other side of the tank the crew sit in the sun, in shirt sleeves. They are drinking whiskey — Johnny Walker — from the bottle, and eating bread and ham. One man carves from a joint.
“Here’s the British Army,” my man says, introducing me. “Better late than never.”
“Hello, hello,” says another. “Feeling peckish, I’ll warrant.”
“You people,” I say, unable to control the tremble in my voice, “you people have just run over my friend.”
“No chance,” says one. “Not us, mate.”
“A wounded man,” I say slowly. “You crushed his legs with your tracks.”
“No, no,” says the urinator. “I’d have known. I’m the driver, see. You didn’t spot no one, did yah?” he asks another.
“Nah. Couldn’t have been us, old son. We don’t make that sort of mistake. We run over Huns. Not our lads.”
“His legs are flattened!”
“Ow … nasty. Probably a shell, though. Do funny things, those shells.”
“Damn right. I saw this man once. Dead. Flat as a pancake. Could have rolled him up like a carpet.”
“Bound to be a shell, yeah.”
“Bastards! I’m going to report you. Bloody bastards!”
“Steady on, sunshine. George told you he didn’t run over no one.”
“And I should know as I’m the bloody driver, Jock.”
“Yeah, and watch who you’re calling names, you Scottish berk.”
I leave them to their ham and Johnny Walker and run back. I see that, as the driver told me, there is no German trench line here. Just mangled wire and ruined blockhouses. Somehow we have come through a temporary gap in their defenses. Where I left Teague at the edge of the so-called wood is a small group of men from the Durham Light Infantry, black, exhausted, making some attempt to dig in. They tell me Teague has been carried back, still alive but in a bad way. I ask them if they have seen the Grampians. No one knows.
Shells begin to explode again in the wood. Large pieces of tree trunk are hurled tumbling into the air. A counterattack. I go back with a runner from the Durhams. He points me in the right direction and we separate. I come over the lip of a small rise and I see the undulating mess of no-man’s-land in front of me and — just distinguishable — the thin humped sprawl of the British trench line with its scribble of barbed wire three or four hundred yards away. I recognize nothing. I pause for a second. We must be in some kind of lull. The crash and rumble of guns continues and a ridge a mile away is being pelted with barrage after barrage. This strip of sodden clogged acres on either side of me is full of little figures crawling, hopping, shambling, being carried. Four-man teams of stretcher-bearers search the rims of foul mud pools for wounded. The sun still shines through gaps in the clouds and warms my back and shoulders. I sit down for a minute. Fifty yards away an officer limp-hops back to the lines, using a rifle as a stick. He pays me no attention.
I set off again, sticking to rough plowed-field mud and avoiding the stuff that looks like runny porridge. I make slow progress. I pass a confetti of discarded equipment, a group of about twenty bloodless dead men, people huddling miserably in shell craters waiting for stretchers. I have lost sight of our trenches now. The view changes entirely in a ten-yard journey. I come across a well-organized machine-gun pit, ammunition boxes stacked tidily, a taut tarpaulin shelter against possible rain. The men in it are alert, ready to repel a counterattack. They look surprised to see me. I trudge past.
“Hoy!” the officer, a lieutenant, shouts. “Where are you from?”
“German line.”