The Passing Bells (28 page)

The major's smile was thin. “Talk about the fog of war. The right hand hasn't a clue to what the left hand's doing. I don't like this groping around in the dark one bloody bit, I can tell you. Got any whiskey?”

“Afraid I don't.”

“Pity.”

There was a crackle of rifle fire in the distance, the sound distorted by the wall of trees. The major cocked his head to one side like a hound. The rifle fire slacked off to be replaced by the unmistakable chatter of a machine gun.

“Trumpeter!” the major shouted as he swung up into the saddle. “Mount! At the canter! . . . Forward!”

A bugle blared, and the troop mounted and followed the major across the road and into the trees. They were soon out of sight, swallowed by shadows as the French dragoons had been. There was something foreboding about the woods that brought a shiver up Fenton's spine. They might not have seemed so ominous at noon, but the sun was almost down now, and the sky, or what could be seen of it, was a blood red. The faint light that filtered through the beech trees had the same sanguinary hue.

“Drive on,” he said. “Fast.”

The road curved east, then due west, and the woods began to thin out. The sun was a grossly enlarged scarlet ball that seemed to touch the road ahead of them. Shadows flickered across it.

“More bleedin' horses,” Ackroyd muttered as he stepped on the brakes.

“Lancers,” Webber said, squinting into the glare from the windshield.

Fenton caught a glimpse of the riders' headgear silhouetted against the sun. Not English cloth caps nor French brass casques, but small helmets with a flat projection on top, like a miniature center-post table upended.

“Uhlans,” he said with remarkable sangfroid, considering the chilling quality of that name. “Back up.”

Private Webber was only a batman, but even the lowliest guardsman went through the regimental training depot and its extensive musketry course. He stood up, braced his body against the windshield, raised the Lee-Enfield to his shoulder, and squeezed off a shot. One of the shadowy figures toppled to the road and a riderless horse careened wildly past the car. His second shot went wide as Ackroyd threw the gears into reverse and floored the accelerator, the car roaring back down the road, weaving from side to side. There was a burst of machine-gun fire from the fringe of the woods ahead of them, and bullets splattered the car, shrieking through metal, rubber, and glass. The front tires blew and the car lurched violently off the road into a ditch. Fenton caught a glimpse of Webber toppling backward with blood sheeting his face, and then he was flying out of the back of the car, crashing through branches and landing heavily in a drift of summer-dried leaves.

He blacked out from the fall, and when he opened his eyes he could see nothing but dancing red lights. He struggled to breathe, but something seemed to be pressing against his face, holding his mouth and nose with a suffocating grip. He began to struggle, and then a mouth pressed against his ear and the barely audible voice of Lance Corporal Ackroyd said, “Don't move, sir . . . don't move.”

The grip on his nose slackened, but Ackroyd's hand was still over his mouth. His eyes came into proper focus, and he could see that the red lights that had been darting and flipping about had turned into billows of flame shooting up from the car. He was lying a good thirty yards from it, well into the woods, his view of the fire fragmented by slender black trunks. Surely, he thought, he had not been thrown thirty yards through a beech forest. Lance Corporal Ackroyd must have dragged him. By Harry, he'd see that the man made sergeant, and was awarded a DCM to boot. He nodded slowly, an assuring signal to Ackroyd that his restraint was no longer necessary.

“Where are they?” he whispered.

“Fuckin' everywhere . . .
sir.”

He could hear them now: the soft thud of horses' hooves, the crack and splinter of young trees and underbrush, the cursing of men—guttural German curses. There was a clatter of hobnailed jackboots on the road—the Jäger unit of infantry who followed along behind the Germany cavalry to support them with expert rifle and machine-gun fire. Someone shouted, “
Achtung! Die Engländer kommen!
”

A bugle call from far down the road, and then the distant thunder of galloping horses. The uhlans who had been searching the wood crashed back toward the road. A machine gun began to clatter from a position near the still-blazing car. Rifles joined it, and the firing was sustained and intense. Fenton could see nothing of the action, but he could visualize it all too clearly—the hussars coming back at the gallop, drawn by the fire, or pyre, more than likely, because poor old Webber was probably being consumed by it. Horses and men would be going down in a heap.

“Oh, God.”

“Shhh . . . quiet, sir . . . quiet. Can you walk, sir?”

“I . . . don't know.”

“Try, sir . . .
try.”
There was an edge of desperation in Ackroyd's voice. Fenton got slowly to his feet. There was a dull pain in the small of his back, but nothing seemed to be broken.

“Keep low, sir . . . and run like hell.”

The direction seemed unimportant at the moment, the only factor being to get as far away as possible from the German lancers and the Jägers; the latter, as Fenton knew, were born hunters and foresters. Bending nearly double, they began to run, Ackroyd in the lead, racing through the closely grouped trees, stumbling and plunging through the thick underbrush. The firing continued behind them, but no shots came their way until they broke out of the woods into a small clearing. Dark shapes moved, and rifles barked. Ackroyd dove for the tall grass with Fenton right behind him. They lay flat and crawled as bullets hissed through the grass around them. Once among the trees again, they stood up and kept running, dodging from trunk to trunk, not stopping until total exhaustion brought them panting and sobbing to the ground. Fenton vomited and rolled onto his back under a hawthorn bush. Ackroyd lay on his face as though dead. They were deep in the forest, and there was no sound but the gentle rustling of leaves, a nightingale's lilting notes, and their own tortured breaths.

They hid by day and moved by night, working their way slowly southward. The German Army was all around them, but not in a solid mass. There would be hours during the day when they would not see even one enemy soldier, and they would debate whether to leave their hiding place—be it copse or haystack, abandoned mine shaft or reeking pigpen—and walk on more quickly than they could at night, but invariably Germans would appear sometime during the day: a solitary squad scouting a road, or an entire battalion swarming across a field. And then there was always the lurking menace of uhlans, death's-head hussars, or less exotic-looking cavalry to worry about. So they walked south by night, traveling by the map, using kilometer road markers as points of reference, and avoiding the villages. They ate apples and wild berries and what little food they could find in the many abandoned cottages. The weather was good, hot by day and balmy at night, with cloudless skies and enough moon- and starlight to make walking cross-country easy. A sudden, violent thunderstorm struck during the second night of their journey and forced them to seek shelter in a barn. The rain stopped at dawn, but a different thunder continued—the thump-thump-thump of heavy shellfire. The artillery bombardment was nearly due east, ten miles or so away, at or near Le Cateau, as far as Fenton could judge. It continued from dawn to dusk and was obviously a major battle, but when the firing ceased there was no way of knowing who had won.

“I suppose we could walk to Le Cateau tonight and see who's in possession of the place,” Fenton said, studying his map and eating an apple.

“We could, sir,” Ackroyd said dubiously. “If we're awful ruddy careful about it.”

It was impossible to maintain a strict officer-to-man relationship with Lance Corporal Ackroyd, considering the circumstances. Men who had spent hours together half submerged in the stinking wallow of a pigsty while uhlans foraged their horses nearby learned a great deal about each other's qualities as human creatures. Fenton had only the greatest respect for Ackroyd. He was uncomplaining, resourceful, cautious, and brave. The type of indomitable soldier any officer would want at his side when a situation became rather sticky.

“You don't think it's a good idea, Ackroyd?”

“Beggin' the captain's pardon, but no, sir, I don't. If there was a battle over there, it would seem to me that both sides'll be a bit touchy and we could get crumped by either of 'em if we got spotted blunderin' about in the dark. Fritz or Tommy . . . we'd still be feedin' the crows.”

“A sensible deduction.” He squinted at the map in the fading light. “Well, then, what say we keep going south until we reach the railroad line from Cambrai . . . then follow the track toward St. Quentin? If the Hun is that far south, then we know it's all up and we might just as well toss in the towel.”

That met with Ackroyd's approval, and they set out as soon as it got dark. The moon rose early, and they made swift progress through fields and woods, reaching the railroad tracks before midnight. They rested in a culvert for an hour, eating the last of their apples, then walked along the edge of the tracks in a southeasterly direction. Fires ringing the northern horizon created a dull glow, as though some strange dawn were about to break. They could only speculate as to the source of the fires. Villages and fields going up in flames? The bivouac fires of some uncountable host? Either thought was chilling and drove them on without further rest. At four in the morning they reached the first scattered houses of a small town, a railroad sign beside the tracks revealing the name—St. Petit Cambresis. A narrow road leading to the town came into view, a white ribbon under the dying moon snaking over a low hill and through vineyards. Transport wagons were parked along it, the draft horses grazing in a field.

“Ours, by God,” Fenton said as he spotted the distinctive field cookers.

The two men paused to dab at their mud-caked, bramble-torn uniforms, then marched on smartly, Ackroyd whistling “Tipperary” to alert any sentries. They were not challenged when they walked along the station platform, nor when they went through the deserted station house onto the street beyond.

“A bit queer,” Fenton said. “There should have been a sentry posted.”

“Ruddy town seems to be empty, sir.”

“Impossible.”

They walked on, their boots ringing loudly on the cobblestones. The street curved and led to the town square, which was dominated by a stone fountain in its center. Around the fountain and spread out across virtually every inch of the paved square were the sprawled figures of soldiers, three hundred or more, lying like dead men. They were not from one unit. Fenton noticed the badges of half a dozen regiments. A sergeant in the Gordon Highlanders lay on his back in the gutter with his head resting on his pack. His left hand was swathed in a dirty blood-caked bandage. Fenton nudged him gently in the side with his foot.

“On your feet, Sergeant.”

The man stared stupidly at Fenton for a moment and then stood up with a groan.

“What the hell is going on?” Fenton said sharply. “It looks like beggars' army.”

The sergeant's red-rimmed eyes moved from Fenton's face to his regimental cap badge and then down to the pips on his stained, muddy sleeves. He pulled himself to rigid attention.

“All the lads just worn down, sir.”

“I can understand that, Sergeant. But why are there no pickets out? Good Lord, man, Fritz'll be here by dawn.”

“Yes, sir . . . colonel told us to stack arms and get some sleep, sir. Told us we were out of the war, sir.”

“
Your
colonel, Sergeant?”

“No, sir . . . from the Winchesters, sir.”

“How many Gordons are here?”

“Twelve of us, sir.”

“Wake them up. Send six out along the railroad tracks and six down the road. Find the transport drivers and wake them up, too. I want those horses in the traces. Where is the colonel?”

“Town hall, sir . . . just across the square.”

“Do you believe you're out of the war, Sergeant?”

The muscles in the tall sergeant's jaw tightened. “I can no' argue with a colonel, sir—even a colonel in the bluidy foukin' Winchesters,
sir
.”

The foyer of the town hall and the central corridor were crowded with badly wounded men, who were being attended to by a couple of medical orderlies and a French civilian. The wounded were well bandaged and all of them appeared heavily anesthetized. Fenton was impressed by the efficiency.

“You men are doing a good job here.”

“Thank you, sir,” one of the orderlies said, then nodded toward the Frenchman. “Thanks to 'im. He's the local vet. Brung over bundles of 'orse bandage and plenty of morphine.”

“Can any of the men be moved?”

The man rubbed the side of his face and looked thoughtful. His eyes were sunken and there were deep shadows under the sockets.

“A dozen maybe . . . if they're kept flat. Most are in rum shape, sir. Them bloody shells tear 'ell out of a man.”

“Sort out the men you can move . . . then you and your mate decide which one of you will stay behind with the rest. Toss a coin if you have to, but one of you must stay, I'm afraid. It won't do for the Germans to say we abandon our wounded.”

The man nodded gravely. “Right you are, sir . . . only Colonel Hampton's been sayin' we're all chuckin' it in.”

“Not so. Where can I find Colonel Hampton?”

The orderly pointed vaguely down the corridor. “One of them rooms, sir.”

“Any other officers present?”

“Yes, sir, two lieutenants and a major. The major's over there on a stretcher. Fractured leg, sir. The lieutenants are with the colonel.” He lowered his voice and looked earnestly into Fenton's face. “There's something a bit odd about the colonel, sir. I been in the RAMC for twenty years, sir, an' I've seen it happen before, more than once I can tell you.”