Dead Man's Land (44 page)

He unbuttoned his tunic, but as he did so he moved position and felt the ground shift beneath him in an undulating wave. He kicked backwards but he only sank deeper into the malevolent mud. As it sucked at his back he remembered Great Grimpen Mire. A flash of panic ripped through him, that the earth might swallow him, envelop him in its grasp until it filled his nose and mouth with semolina-like sludge. He would be just another corpse swallowed by this death strip. Food for rats and carrion. He began to thrash, the viscous soil around him making a horrible slurping noise, as if the poisoned ground was greedy for another body.

Now he had to try hard not to cry out as he felt the needle-sharp cold seep through his clothing. One leg had disappeared into the earth altogether, the boot filling with a runny mix of mud and icy water. Watson now knew he was lying on a place where a spring or a stream came to the surface, further liquefying the already fluid mud. He could pull the limb free, but knew he must lose boot and sock. The rest of him was being squeezed, as if by a watery vice, pressing against those damaged ribs. No man’s land was determined to keep him, to never let him go. He stopped struggling, knowing it was only hastening his eventual immersion.

He put a fist into his mouth and yelled into it. This wasn’t how he envisaged going. He was here to help the dying, not to join them.

His spine felt it first. Something unyielding, solid. Beneath the freezing slime there was . . . what? An erratic boulder, deposited by a glacier millions of years ago? A body, perhaps? A horse or a man? A lost howitzer or humble tractor? Or simple bedrock? He had no way of knowing for sure what it was now firmly beneath his buttocks, but he gave thanks as it slowed his progress, anchoring him, so that he was only half buried.

He moved his arms and his free leg. Yes, his progress towards the bowels of this Flanders field had been arrested.

So braced, Watson used his teeth to take the glove off his left hand, folded the leather in his mouth and clamped down with all his might. He bit harder and harder, until the ache in the jaw almost matched that of his ribs. He felt a tooth give.

With his right arm, he finished unbuttoning the tunic and reached in for the Very flare pistol, the one that had caused further damage to his ribcage when he had stumbled and fallen. The glove masked his grunts of pain as he extracted it. Gently does it, he admonished himself. Conserve your energy for this one last task.

With studied concentration on the required muscles, Watson raised the pistol to the sky. His side was on fire and tears squeezed from his eyes unbidden. He closed them and pulled the trigger, releasing the charge. The recoil jerked him against his subterranean anchorage, but whatever it was held fast. He dropped the pistol and opened his eyes. He watched the trail of fire streak away from him, arcing towards the friendly lines, then hesitate and begin to fall, where it blossomed into a bright red sphere.

Mars, he thought to himself. God of War.

Beneath the hellish fire, picked out for a few moments, was the scuttling shape of de Griffon, who looked up at the glow in horror. Like a judgement from above, it had sought and found the guilty man.

From over to his left, some many yards distant, Watson heard the crack of not one but two rifles. De Griffon stood upright, as if he was ready to run forward, but as the flare fizzled, the desperate sprint became a stumble. As the exhausted red ball fell to earth and died in the mud of no man’s land, so did Johnny Truelove.

Ernst Bloch knew the flare would bring out Tommies to try to rescue the stricken soldier. Although he was certain that it had been his headshot that killed the unfortunate man who had been bathed in its glare, he magnanimously ceded the kill to Lothar. It would have taken him to that magic thirty, but now he was leaving this strange life, it didn’t seem to matter.

The flare had damaged his night vision and, even with the new scope, he couldn’t actually make out the exact position of the man who had launched it. There were several possibilities he could see, humps and lumps in the night, but none moved and it wasn’t worth wasting a bullet on an inanimate object. Whoever it was would probably expire out there anyway. Only the desperate launched a red flare.

Minutes passed, the slow beat of life out there.

‘I have movement.’ It was Schaeffer. ‘Dead ahead.’

‘On my instruction,’ said Bloch to Lothar.

‘Yes.’

Bloch used the night sight to scan the area just ahead of the enemy wire. Some of the smoke from the bombardment had cleared and the moon was strengthening. Yes, there was something there. Gone now. Wait. He needed a starburst, but there was no way of communicating that back to his lines. Perhaps that was something they ought to experiment with.

There it was again. A very unusual outline.

‘Target acquired,’ Lothar said.

God, his eyes must be good. ‘On my instruction,’ Bloch repeated. ‘It is my call.’

Now he could see the shape clearly. He looked for any sign of an officer. No, not a cap . . . that was . . . out here? How could it be?

‘I’m taking the shot.’

‘No,’ he said, louder than intended, and pushed Lothar’s shoulder.

The rifle gave a crack and the bullet whined off uselessly into the sky.

‘What the hell . . . ?’

‘It’s a woman.’

‘A what?’ Lothar asked.

‘I would recognize that headgear anywhere.’

‘Ssh,’ warned Schaeffer.

‘Well, if it’s a woman, it’s a fucking British bitch, isn’t it?’

‘We agreed not to shoot them. They are the Women of Pervyse. It’s a gentleman’s agreement.’

That made the boy laugh. There were no gentlemen out in no man’s land. ‘What the bloody hell is a woman doing out there?’

‘I saw one near here the other day.’ She had helped patch him up, in fact, along with the elderly doctor.

Lothar lay back down and resighted. ‘That’s your agreement. This is my patch now.’

‘Stop, that’s an order.’

‘A woman? Out there? You’re mad.’ He adjusted the focus and took a deep breath. ‘Target acquired.’

‘Let him, Ernst,’ said Schaeffer softly. ‘You could be mistaken. And he’s right. This is ours now.’

A few moments passed while the boy’s rifle barrel tracked a few centimetres to the right. He had her. ‘I am taking the shot.’

Bloch knew he was going to have to stop him, somehow. He turned to extract his knife from its sheath. That is when he caught a movement of black ghosts in the corner of his eye.

The hardwood club rang off Lothar’s skull and, before he could react, something equally heavy struck Bloch. His vision exploded into spinning galaxies and his limbs turned to lead. He was unable to react as his arms were rapidly bound together and a rag of some description pushed into his mouth.

He shook his head to clear it, trying to make sense of what was happening. Five, perhaps six men, dressed head to toe in black, were circling around the three Germans. Schaeffer and Lothar still lay sprawled on the ground close by, totally out of it. One of the raiders picked up the two sniping rifles and slung them over his shoulder.

They’ll have the new night sight
, he thought
. Lux will kill me
.

‘Right, back the way we came,’ said a low, growling voice. ‘But we just need the one, I’m afraid. And if we leave them be, these two will be back out here again tomorrow.’

The scream from Bloch’s throat dashed itself against the gag filling his mouth as one of the wraiths stepped forward and drove a bayonet through his two prostrate comrades, one after the other, like sticking pigs. He squeezed his eyes shut as he was hauled to his feet and half-dragged, half-carried west, towards the British lines.

Bloch didn’t know it yet, but Churchill’s new team of trench raiders had just grabbed their first prisoner.

The journey that took Watson to this place, standing at the rail of the HS
Arundel Castle
, had been an interminable one. After time at the CCS for an X-ray and bandaging – two broken ribs, one cracked – he had been moved onto an ambulance train. On the scale of things, it was a mild wound. But everyone knew the damage went deeper. That the sheet-drenching nightmares of drowning in mud weren’t abating. Hence his ticket home.

Thanks to being a medical man, an officer and one of the walking wounded, he had been given a berth in the staff car, the old First Class compartment. He earned his bunk by helping with general medical duties where he could. His heavily strapped ribs made lifting impossible, but he could administer medicine, reapply mustard plaster dressings and offer comforting words. It was the latter, more often than not, that the broken and smashed soldiers needed.

It took three hours to load on the patients. The coaches had been converted to take racks of stretchers and the patients were warned they might be there for up to sixteen hours. It was, he was told, a French train, not a ‘khaki’ as they called the English rolling stock. These were preferable because they didn’t have the central corridor like the khakis, which meant easier access to the men.

Despite the depressing catalogue of injuries, amputations and disabilities – nearly all of them life-changing – the atmosphere during entraining was surprisingly buoyant. These were men who knew, no matter what was in store at the other end of the journey, they would never again have to go back to those trenches. It was a feeling he could empathize with.

The train to Boulogne had taken just over ten hours. The journey was a series of spurts, crawls and shunts. It proceeded through the countryside at little more than a walking pace for some of the time, the rhythm of the rails just gentle enough to act as a lullaby for those who could sleep. Soon enough there would be a squeal of brakes and a halt. A ripple of apprehension would run through the carriages if the stop were too long. These men wanted to be
away
from the front, the further the better.

On occasion the train moved backwards, from whence it had come, and apprehension turned to panic for some of the wounded. The nurses moved along the swaying carriages, telling anyone who would listen they were probably reversing for a troop train. Ambulance trains were fourth in the transit pecking order – men, ammunition and food had priority on the tracks.

Getting men up to the front, bringing the food to feed them and the bullets to kill other men were, apparently, more important than recovering those who had already been through the mincer. On the other hand, if the stop was at one of the stations, gaunt-faced locals appeared like wraiths from the dark, offering water, alcohol, coffee and precious fruit for the wounded men, not caring if the train held British Tommies or French
poilus
.

A jerk and the train would move again, speeding up to perhaps ten or twelve miles an hour to make up lost time. Watson had been amazed at the nurses who cared for the men. They were half medical staff, half acrobats. They could clamber up a bunk and hold on against the swaying while adjusting splints, applying fomentations, changing dressings, offering tea or Bovril. All in a strange hazy half-light caused by the veiled lights.

Once on his trip the lamps were extinguished altogether and the darkness beyond the windows was cut by the flashes of an air raid. Still, the train chuffed on its sinuous way, every tortured mile taking the soldiers closer to Blighty.

At Boulogne an army of stretcher-bearers and orderlies had appeared to take off the wounded, while the exhausted medical staff began to scrub the carriages, ready for the return journey and another load. Would these people ever get the recognition they deserved, Watson had wondered. But he knew the answer. Nobody would be striking an Ambulance Train Service Medal in the foreseeable future.

Then, another delay. They had waited overnight in the port for the ambulance ship to set sail. There was talk of U-boat activity in the Channel. A troop ship had been sunk off Poole. A legitimate target, but nobody was in any doubt that the days of the Red Cross being given free passage were gone. The Hospital Ship
Pride of Lancaster
had been lost to a mine off Dover. So the wounded piled up on the quayside; more serious cases were taken to 2AGH, the huge Australian-staffed hospital on the cliff tops.

As the darkness fell the air had thickened about them and the temperature plummeted. It felt as if ice crystals were about to form and blankets were distributed to the stretcher cases. After all the rain, a cold snap had descended across Benelux and Northern France. Watson had thought of the men in those trenches, their fingers and lips blue, their feet immersed in icy water. More trench foot and frostbite. Even if there were no more action in their section, the East Anglian CCS would have its work cut out now winter was well and truly here.

Watson had spent the night in a tent at the officers’ transit compound, sleeping on a Wolseley camp bed, with twenty-odd others and two pet greyhounds. Breakfast was egg and tinned sausages. Eventually, at mid-morning, the all-clear was given and they began to embark the 450 patients onto the
Arundel
, taking up every conceivable inch of deck space. Just after midday it steamed out of Boulogne, en route, although on a meandering zigzag course, for Folkestone.

It was drizzling and misty in the Channel and visibility was poor. This, said some old hands, made it equally difficult for the marauding submarines to find them as it was for the captain to spot a periscope. Watson wasn’t so sure, but the rumour lifted the spirits of men huddled under tarpaulins and greatcoats. Mugs of tea, the universal panacea, were dispensed in an endless stream.

They were lucky in that the
Arundel
was a proper Channel steamer; many ships that did the crossing were converted pleasure craft or river ferries, like the Mersey ones. They rolled and wallowed in the gentlest of seas and the decks became awash with vomit. The
Arundel
, however, felt good and solid, piercing the swell rather than bobbing over the top.

Watson helped with mundane tasks, one eye on the grey sea that surrounded the ship, imagining the white line of a torpedo heading for them. But once they were half-way, he began to hope they might make it after all. As the scale of the evasive manoeuvres diminished, and it was obvious the captain was running for home, he took his place at the rail and allowed himself a cigarette, even though drawing the smoke too deeply hurt his ribs. He was out of his own brand; an orderly at the quayside had slipped him a pack of White Cloud, but the tobacco was coarse and nasty, rasping the throat.