‘Three blasts and we head for home,’ he said, looking at Lysander, askance.
‘What is it, Foley?’
‘You’re fully dressed, sir. Like you were going on parade.’
‘I don’t have any other kit with me.’
Foley had a tin of black candle grease and he painted some stripes on Lysander’s face. He turned to look at Gorlice-Law, who had stripped himself of jacket, webbing and puttees and had thrust his revolver in his belt.
‘You do everything I say, now, Mr Gorlice-Law. Understand?’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’
Foley put up a pink Verey rocket to let the battalion front know that a patrol was going out and they clambered up the ladder and over the sandbags, advancing at a crouch through the wire and on into the engulfing darkness of no man’s land.
It was a moonless night and yet Lysander was still astonished at how quickly he lost his bearings as they crawled through the long grass. After a minute or so he had no idea in which direction he was heading as he followed Foley – with Gorlice-Law bringing up the rear. A white flare went up from the German lines and for a few seconds the world turned brightly monochrome. He had a sudden temptation to stand up and see where he was. They all froze.
‘Where’s the ruin?’ he hissed at Foley as the glaring light dimmed and fizzled out.
‘About fifty yards, diagonal, right.’
‘Take us towards it.’
Foley changed course and they crawled on. A few miles north some kind of ‘stunt’ was taking place – star shells and distant artillery, the throat-clearing expectoration of machine-gun fire. Lysander glanced back – nothing was happening in the 2/10th Loyal Manchester Fusiliers’ trenches, however. Black sleeping countryside. Even the precautionary, exploratory rocket-flares seemed to have died down. Everybody keen on a good night’s sleep.
‘How far are we now?’ Lysander tapped Foley’s ankle.
‘Over that little rise and you’re there.’
It was time.
‘Stay here,’ he said to Foley. ‘Don’t leave him.’
‘No, sir. Don’t go alone. Let me come with you.’
‘It’s an order, Foley. Look after the lieutenant.’
Lysander crawled away from them up the slope – just the smallest undulation, but it gave him enough height to see the pale tumbled blocks of stone from the demolished tomb. He looked right for the ravaged elms and thought he saw their darker shape against the night sky. Ruins, elms, drainage ditch – at least he had physical reference points to aim for in the fluid blackness and the whispering grass all around him.
He slithered down the reverse side of the slope towards the ruined tomb. It must have been quite an edifice, he thought, as he drew nearer, some local dignitary who wanted his family name to last. Well, he hadn’t reckoned for –
Lysander froze. He heard a squeaking noise. Rats? . . . But it was too sustained. Dripping water? Then it stopped. He slipped his torch out of his kitbag and the two Mills bombs. Pull the pin, count to three, throw and move away, smartly. These explosions would be the diversion, the cause of his ‘death’ that would allow him to make the French lines.
The squeaking noise started again. It was very faint. He was up against the first blocks of stone from the crumbled wall. He aimed his torch in the direction he thought the noise was coming from and switched it on for a second. In the brief flare of light he saw two white faces turn and look up from a trench-sap dug deep under the base of the tomb. He saw a man with a black moustache and a very fair young boy’s face and the turning spindle of a roll of telephone wire being unwound – squeaking quietly.
He switched off the torch, pulled the pin out of the bomb and tossed it into the sap. Clatter. Oaths. He did the same with the second and, in a running crouch, scrambled off in what he thought was the direction of the elms.
After what seemed an eternity he heard the bombs detonate – seconds apart – the flat blap! blap! of the explosions in the confined space below the tomb. Somebody started to scream.
Lysander dropped to his knees. The screaming continued, ragged and high-pitched. Almost immediately random gunfire began to come from both lines of trenches – sentries shocked awake by the bombs going off. Rockets curved up into the night sky – green, red, white. Suddenly he was in a world of glaring primary colours. Then came the whistle and thud of rifle grenades. A machine gun began to traverse. Lysander was now crawling on his belly, not daring to look up. He reckoned he must be sixty or seventy yards south of the ruin. Where were the fucking elms? Then he heard, in a moment’s silence, the anguished shout of, ‘Foley? Foley! Where are you?’ A powerful white light from a rocket showed him he was past the elms. He had gone further than he thought – now he needed to change course to find the willows and the drainage ditch. He huddled in a ball and shone his torch on his compass. He was heading straight for the German lines – east – he should be going south. He turned through ninety degrees and set off again. There was a cacophony of shooting coming from behind him and now he could hear the bass crump of big mortars being fired. His little diversion had got somewhat out of hand – he hoped Foley and Gorlice-Law had made it back safely.
He fell into the drainage ditch and thoroughly soaked himself from the four inches of water in the bottom. He squatted and leaned back against the bank, allowing his breathing to calm. A few more rockets were going up but the shooting seemed to be dying down. False alarm. Nothing of consequence. Just a scare.
He took out his map again, hooded his torch with his cupped hand and tried to see where he was. If this ditch was the one Foley had described then he had only to follow it a hundred yards or so before it began to angle right and bring him up to the French wire. Then all he needed to look out for were the green rockets from the French lines that would tell him where to come in. Assuming all was going to Munro’s plan . . . He looked at his watch. 3.30. It would begin to grow light in an hour or so – time to make a move.
He sloshed his way along the ditch and, sure enough, it did begin to bear right but then it seemed to come to an abrupt halt in the face of some ancient culvert. Lysander peered into the blackness. In theory, the front-line wire of the French Tenth Army should be facing him. But no sign of any of the green rockets that Munro had promised. Every ten minutes one would go up, he had said. Surely they would have heard the noise and the fuss caused by his bombs going off?
He thought then about the two bombs he had thrown into the sap below the tomb. He saw in his mind’s eye the snapshot of the two faces looking up at him – the man with the moustache and the fair boy – utterly shocked, astonished. Two signallers laying a telephone wire, setting up the listening post again, he assumed. He also had to assume that his bombs had killed or seriously wounded them both. There had been that screaming. Anguished, feral. The panic in the dark as the Mills bombs clattered off the stone. Fingers groping, searching, swearing frantically, then – BOOM! . . .
He felt himself start to shiver and he hugged his knees to his chest – no point in thinking about that, of what had happened to those two signallers. How was he to know that they would be there? No, he decided, the best course of action was to stay put and wait until sunrise. Then he might know what to do next.
It was rather eerie and beautiful to watch the sky begin to lighten behind the German lines and as the dawn advanced he was able to make out the key features of the landscape – there were the three elms to his right and in front of him the dark cross-hatchings of the French wire. The culvert mouth was a crude stone arch and rushes were growing thickly around it, drawing on the extra moisture the drainage ditch provided. A breeze sprang up and he began to smell the smoke drifting across no man’s land as braziers were lit in the trenches. He felt hungry – some crispy rashers of bacon and a hunk of bread dripping with hot fat would do nicely, thank you.