Spawn of Man (15 page)

This man was huge and he smiled affably at Alex, ‘Begging your pardon, sir, but may I have leave to speak candidly.’

Through the tears and sheer terror, Alex almost smiled. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘It’s just that I’ve heard tell of men going over the top and leaving their senses, their mind and body separating. If that happened, then when it was all over you would not recall the experience, as if it were a dream. And if that happened, you would survive the jaunt.’

Through some transference of knowledge from Frank’s brain, Alex knew the man to be called Hawkins and he seemed to be basing the plausibility of this theory on her response. So she told him she had heard this too and believed it to be true.

Hawkins beamed. ‘You are a gentleman, sir, you have always treated us fairly. I will see you on the other side, Lieutenant Douglas, and if you get into difficulty, I’m your man. You just look for me and I’ll make sure of it. Might I be permitted to shake your hand, sir?’

Alex shook the man’s hand.
I will see you on the other side
. The same words the young boy had said, and Alex went cold. Then all was quiet and Alex was certain she had been rendered deaf by the endless barrages. But the sky was less luminous now for the guns had stopped and Alex witnessed raw and bloody rents and blooms of billowy grey and black smoke, floating like infernal balloons.

Hawkins spoke, ‘This is it, sir.’

Alex looked at her wristwatch and heard Frank’s voice in her head again, ‘Three long minutes.’

There was no sound, save for the cadenced splatter of rain on the sand bags at the parapet of the trench, like rifle fire and the mournful cry of the wind, creeping across the ground that separated one group of tired, frightened soldiers from another.

Alex heard herself shout, ‘Fix bayonets!’ and the command was barked along the trench. Then without knowing she raised a whistle to her lips and blew hard and long. The sound echoed through the trenches piercing the air, sharp and urgent, and instantly men scrambled up the wooden ladders with a cheer.

But Alex’s legs had turned to stone underneath her. They were numb with dread and refused to move. Hawkins was ascending the ladder directly ahead of Alex, roaring an indeterminable jumble of adrenaline-fuelled curses and rallying cries. Machinegun fire peppered the top of the trench, ripping and tearing sand bags and flesh, as the first of the troops to spill into no man’s land were scythed down mercilessly.

Alex managed to gain the ladder but her legs felt like bloodless, lifeless appendages and she worked the rungs like a child climbing its first tree. Hawkins was already scrambling over the trench summit and falling, stumbling forward, his own momentum propelling him clumsily as bullets cracked and whined overhead. It seemed inconceivable that a target that presented itself as looming as Hawkins could escape uninjured, but as Alex collapsed into the ploughed earth beyond the lip of the trench, Hawkins was making steady ingress into the hail of fire issuing from the German trenches. Alex hauled herself to her feet, reeling from the cacophony of sound that threw no man’s land into such harsh dissonance.

The platoon was now passing through the lanes cut in their own barbed wire. A dozen had already fallen, dead or injured, and Alex found herself shoulder to shoulder with a man she sensed Frank had spent many a long night with,
swapping stories of their hopes and dreams for the future, after the Great War. The man’s name was John Taylor, and he was a carpenter in the real world. Alex screamed his name but John seemed to be in a daze, plodding forward mechanically with his legs propelling him in a straight line, much like Alex’s own movement; running but with no sensation of motion below the waist.

Alex looked at the sky, her eyes wide against the falling rain. Scenery seemed to fly past, as if she was suspended in the air and it was the land around her that was being moved. The men were guided across the scene as if by strings attached to their limbs and Alex glanced at John again, but he was ahead of her now and she realized John had dropped his weapon and was merely running in a stupor. Alex discarded the pistol she had hardly noticed she held and collected the rifle.

The Germans put a barrage of shrapnel across no man’s land and Alex heard the deadly pieces of twisted metal slap the ground all around her and she gripped the rifle like it was a length of rope that could pull her along to the enemy’s trench.

The air was thick with smoke and the hard cracking sound of bullets passing by on every side. Small spurts of dirt rose as bullets whistled along their trajectories and Alex found herself pointlessly hopping from side to side as if to somehow evade them.

Then Alex felt something snag her left shin, followed by a warm sensation, like she had spilled tea, and the liquid was seeping through her puttees, not unpleasantly, but she knew of course that she had been hit. Then the world lit up red-orange, a mini sunrise encapsulated in front of Alex, holding her in a bright embrace.

Alex had not heard an explosion. It was as if she was underwater and the world was a dense, murky place. Then she saw John and crawled frantically to where he lay. His arms were thrown above his head in a curious attitude, maybe as an attempt to protect himself from the shell, but it looked like he was surrendering to the sky. His face held a look of utter shock, but not horror, and his eyes were staring, mouth open as if he perceived a wondrous sight that Alex could not behold.

When Alex looked at her comrade’s waist, it was merely a ragged mess of blood and fabric and she saw that his legs were strewn some ten feet away and had by gruesome chance landed next to each other. The feet were turned outwards as if the owner was slumbering on a sunny afternoon back home in England. Alex lay next to John’s torso for some time and waited for her senses to clear, fighting the impulse to just lie and stare at the clouds of smoke with John.

Frank spoke inside Alex’s head and the sound seemed to arrive over a great distance, ‘
Alexandra, I need you to tell me this happened, to prove it really happened. Do you understand
?’

Alex was aware of gunfire again and of cries in the distance now and then she watched Hawkins coming out of the fog of battle like a stampeding bull.

He grabbed fistfuls of her uniform and hauled Alex to her feet, glaring into her eyes with a boyish eagerness and shouting, ‘Come on, Lieutenant Douglas, stay close to me, sir.’ Then there was a wet, slicing noise, like raw meat being ripped apart, and Alex saw glints of dim light bounce off the steel that came through Hawkins’ throat. Hawkins looked at Alex with surprise and confusion, but no pain. Alex thought he was trying to speak, but although his lips moved, he made no sound as the bayonet skewered his neck, suffocating the words. Alex looked at the German soldier holding the rifle and saw he was furiously trying to dislodge the bayonet through Hawkins’ neck, cursing and shouting. He was forcing his knee into the small of Hawkins’ back, trying to lever the weapon free, and Hawkins still looked at Alex with the same bewilderment.

Hawkins staggered forward, arms outstretched towards Alex, pulling his adversary with him, and the bayonet looked like a steel bone protruding from his throat.

Alex lifted her rifle and tried to steady her shaking hands. But as she began to apply pressure to the trigger, Hawkins pitched forward and fell to his knees, his huge hands clawing at his throat. Alex wondered how much blood there was in a human body. She was sure she knew but couldn’t remember now.

Ribbons of blood were flowing from the wound at Hawkins’ neck, as if impelled by bellows. Alex knelt and
looked into Hawkins’ eyes, and they still showed traces of recognition. Then his hands dropped and his head fell forward, his chin resting on the obtrusive blade.

Alex thought how at that moment that he resembled a puppet, with cut and useless strings, and she fired a round into the German’s breastbone. The German took three or four backwards steps, as if he was trying to keep his balance on a sheet of ice, and tumbled to the ground.

Alex’s rifle slipped from her grasp and she fell to her knees again. All around there was chaos, screams, shouting, the staccato report of machineguns and the firing of rifles across no man’s land. A shell exploded in close proximity to Alex, and she was thrown through the air by the blast, landing heavily almost ten yards away.

Alex stood and swayed, disorientated by the high pitched ringing in her ears, and at first she was not conscious of the alteration that she had undergone. She saw Frank staggering towards her. He seemed to be shouting but Alex’s hearing was only returning in gradual bursts and the whole scene was reminiscent of a silent movie.

At the moment Alex understood she was back in her own body, a German soldier emerged from the rolling mist and smoke. Like a berserk apparition, the soldier ran at Alex and slid his bayonet into her thigh. Pain flared in hot spasms through Alex’s leg and radiated into her groin and stomach as the German soldier tore the blade free, screaming incoherently.

Frank had watched from the trench and had been a spectator to his own progress through no man’s land. He had known on some intrinsic level that it was Alex that inhabited and coordinated his body and now he was lurching through the mud towards her.

As the German soldier raised his rifle to deliver another stabbing thrust at Alex, Frank looked down at his hands and found he now held a Lee Enfield rifle and he swiftly fired the weapon. A hole opened up in the German soldier’s midriff and the man froze, rifle poised to strike, and looked at his own stomach. A dark red stain was now expanding like the accelerated blooming of a deep red rose and the soldier looked incredulously towards Frank.

Frank loaded and fired again, almost hitting the exact same spot as the first round and the German soldier cried out this time, dropping his rifle and holding the wound in a vain attempt to stem the flow of blood, as he sank to his knees. The man was now whispering to himself, maybe a prayer, maybe senseless babble induced by shock, and Frank found himself now standing over the kneeling figure, screaming in a paroxysm of undefined rage at the soldier, but something inside him also wanted to console the man.

A deep, dull sensation erupted in Frank’s chest, as if he had walked blindly into a blunt pipe. When Frank touched his tunic blood deluged from a wound in spurting waves of warm liquid. He felt a curious lethargy begin to creep over his mind, making him almost apathetic, as he began to walk towards where Alex knelt.

Another spike of pain punched into him, this time his right shoulder, and he was aware of the bullet passing through him and taking a lump of something with it as it exited his body.

He stopped, his vision seemed to be truncated, as if the periphery had been sliced off and all that was left was the six or seven feet directly in front of him. Into this frame loomed two more of the enemy. Frank’s rifle was still facing forward, at hip height, and he reloaded mechanically and fired once, twice, three times.

As the clean snaps of his rifle fire resonated through his senses, he heard the simultaneous crack of the two German guns being discharged. The sound seemed miles away, yet almost instantly a white-hot lance of pain was driven into the side of his neck and a shuddering pounding began to apply intolerable pressure behind his eyes. He almost traced the path of the next bullet as time seemed to slow down and implode into a defined sequence of disconnected events. It hit him in the cheekbone and Frank felt a shattering, hollow explosion of sensation that became at once blinding and deafening. But he also observed the first German fall to the ground, as two of his own shots hit the man’s head.

Frank was unaware now if he was standing or kneeling. He had no feeling in his arms or legs and was almost blind. There was a riot of color painting a gaudy tapestry across what remained of his vision, but Frank could not ascertain if the splashes of reds, oranges and yellows were stained across the sky or inside his head.

The second German was still shouting as he raced out to Frank. Frank could not feel his hands and wondered if he still gripped his Enfield. He could discern only the shape of the second soldier as it moved towards him. He thought he heard Alexandra shout to him and he turned to face her, but there were only indistinct and amorphous clouds ghosting in and out of his awareness. He slumped to his knees, dropping the rifle, and spoke Alexandra’s name, the words tumbling from his lips as if spilled, as the second German’s bayonet entered his chest and emerged from his back.

Frank’s head snapped back and thin lines of blood splattered from his mouth. There was no pain now. The German was mocking him with a face contorted into a sneer. Then Frank watched as, almost in slow motion, a bayonet emerged from the German soldier’s mouth like a great steel tongue. The soldier slid away to leave Alex standing there, holding the Lee-Enfield that had impaled him. Frank fell forward, the weapon still impaling him, and its butt now sinking into the soft mud and becoming fast there. He managed a deep breath, and then found he did not need to breathe any more. He existed only inside himself now, as a concentrated hub of memories that he conceived from a distance. But even in that moment, he realized sharply that these events had happened before. Maybe even many times.

Frank spoke as Alex fell onto her knees to face him, ‘The young boy in my platoon, the one that crawled out into no man’s land, I can’t remember his name. I saw John Taylor’s body, blown to smithereens, he was a carpenter. Then Hawkins was killed too, a bayonet through his throat. Then, then…’