The Sons of Adam (12 page)

They reached their designated position shortly after midnight. The men ate rations from their packs and were given permission to rest until four.

The rain settled in and grew heavier. Time moved with agonising slowness.

At four o’clock, a thunder of British artillery opened up behind them, and they could hear the torrent of shells crashing down on German positions. The men listened in silence: half pleased at the thought of what the shells were doing to the enemy, half terrified because of what this implied for the coming offensive. Alan stayed with his men. Although Tom was close by, he might as well have been on another planet for all Alan knew of him.

Four thirty approached. The rain was beginning to fall more gently and a meagre grey light began testing its options on the eastern horizon. Alan’s eyes struggled to follow the luminous figures on his watch. The second hand swept remorselessly round. And finally, it was four thirty precisely. Alan raised his hand and dropped it: the signal to advance.

His men moved off. For several seconds, there was silence – beautiful silence. Then, almost simultaneously, three flares rose from the German-held salient. The flares disclosed what the German defenders already suspected. There was a trickle of rifle fire, then a din of machine guns, then the extraordinary violence of concentrated shelling. Air became metal. The noise was so indescribably loud that the sense of hearing fell away until it was almost like walking into silence.

Alan saw the men next to him hold their positions, just as they’d been drilled. No clustering together, no turning human lives into simple targets for German gunners. But the men walked as though into a gale. Bent over. Doubled up.

As he watched his men, he saw one of them struck full in the chest and sink to his knees with a soft ‘Ah!’ of release. Another man bent down, apparently to fiddle with his bootlaces, but he bent too far and slid to earth with dark red tongues of blood where his face should have been. All around, men were falling when they should be walking. Alan watched in mounting amazement and shock. His platoon was being destroyed, his beloved men massacred, soldierlike and courageous to the end.

Still they advanced.

Alan had no real recollection of the next few hours. Only by midday did the true situation unfold. The attack had largely failed. The attackers had bitten off a chunk of German line at huge cost. The two opposing artilleries screamed at each other. In the chaos of collapsed and broken trenches, both sides attempted to reconfigure their defences.

The day passed.

The list of known casualties was appalling. More than half of Alan’s men had been killed or wounded. So had all of his NCOs. So too with Major Fletcher, whose left arm had been torn off by a shell, and who had been found sitting upright in the mud, holding his arm between his knees, repeating endlessly, ‘My poor boys, my poor bloody boys …’

There was no word of Tom.

For two more nights and days the fighting continued. Alan was tired beyond tired, shattered beyond endurance. And then finally, he was given permission to rest.

The permission came in the form of a German
Minenwerfer,
which hurled through the air looking something like a flying dustbin, but a bin packed with enormous destructive power. The canister detonated twelve yards away on the unprotected side of the parapet. Afterwards, Alan thought he recalled seeing the flash of detonation before it reached him, but supposed he must have provided details of the explosion from his imagination.

And that was all.

The flash – then silence. No pain. No slow fade-out into unconsciousness. Simply a plunge into blackness. Total blackness.

And still no word of Tom.

Alan woke in a tent full of iron beds and soldiers. The atmosphere was foetid with the smell of hot air under canvas and the odours of blood, iodine and unwashed clothes. Men in the tent next to Alan and in other tents and huts beyond groaned and called out in their sleep.

Alan stretched himself gingerly. He felt indescribably sore. Although nothing felt broken or missing, Alan knew that wounded men were often unaware how badly wounded they were. He wriggled in his narrow cot, trying to get an arm down to reach his feet under their coarse army-issue blankets. He was so stiff that the effort made him pant. He finally managed it, however, and ran his hand over his toes. Nothing.

He sank back in bed, temporarily satisfied. The men in the ‘moribund ward’ often had red labels tied to their toes to indicate their status. There seemed nothing like that here.

He slept.

At dawn, he woke again, when a doctor, a major in the RAMC, was making his rounds.

‘Am I hurt?’ said Alan. His mouth worked awkwardly – even his jaw ached like hell – and the words came out as if spoken by a foreigner. The doctor reached for a pulse. The pressure of his thumb was painful and Alan felt as if he could feel the passage of blood up and down his arm.

‘Hurt? Yes, that’s why you’re here.’ The doctor kept his thumb on Alan’s wrist a few moments longer. ‘You were caught in a shell blast. Cuts and bruises everywhere, a few places that needed stitching. But that’s on the outside. We can’t always tell what’s happened inside. The blast can kill without puncturing the skin. You’re to stay in bed here for twenty-four hours at least. If there’s no sign of any problems by then, we’ll release you to one of the general hospitals. But I don’t want to see you in the line again. Is that clear?’

Alan nodded. He felt a wave of relief and the urge to giggle. He shoved his head into his pillow to muffle any sound, and the doctor and nurse left in silence, too busy to pry.

Two men from one of the New Army battalions of the Royal Scots escorted Alan to the hospital. Alan tried to thank them, but he couldn’t find the right words. He fell into bed and slept for six hours. When he woke, he ate, drank, then tried to sleep again.

He couldn’t.

His emotions were blocked, like a flood that has blocked its own path with a jam of fallen trunks, boulders and landslip. He was filled with an indescribable sense of loss. He thought about his beloved platoon, about Major Fletcher, about how nothing would ever be the same again. And he kept dreaming about Tom. He asked the nurses if they knew whether Lieutenant Creeley was alive, dead or wounded. They didn’t know.

For three days, he lay in hospital. As for his own well-being, it became clear that he wasn’t dying, that he wasn’t permanently crippled. The doctors advised plenty of rest and predicted complete recovery.

Alan wasn’t so sure. He’d never known himself to feel like this – or rather
not
to feel like this. He ate what he could (not much) and drank (a huge amount). He slept, fainted or dozed through sixteen hours in twenty-four. He could think clearly, or at any rate, he was able to answer correctly the questions put to him by the RAMC doctors: name, rank, place of birth, regiment. But his feelings were gone, both physical and emotional. He lay as if doused in an anaesthetic that reached all the way to his heart.

Then one morning, he woke up. For the first time, the images that swam around his consciousness resolved themselves into just two: Tom and Lisette. He had to know if Tom was dead or alive. He had to see Lisette.

He climbed out of bed, dressed, and went outside, falling four times and clutching at the walls of the hospital like a drunk. By chance, he found a transport captain he’d once had dealings with and was able to beg himself a ride to Saint Tess.

The village had changed. Lightly wounded men were everywhere. The Lincolnshires and London Irish, who’d been billeted there a few days before, had all gone now, either fighting or dead. There were new voices now: pink-faced boys from the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry and a company of fit-looking Canadians. A group of cows had broken into an apple orchard, and some of the Canadians were throwing the hard green apples at their flanks to try to cause a stampede.

Alan sat down in the village square. His body felt as though it had been dismantled and reassembled. A man in major’s uniform approached him: a good-looking officer with a drawn and tired expression. The major’s face lit up as he recognised Alan.

‘Alan, man! Thank God! What on earth … ?’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ mumbled Alan. ‘Do I … ?’

‘Alan, it’s me. Guy. Your brother.’

‘Guy! Good God! You look …’

‘Are you all right, old man?’

‘Yes, perfectly, just a little muzzy. How do you do?’

‘Alan,’ you’ve been in hospital, have you? Did you take a knock?’

‘Something like that.’ Alan raised his hand and fluttered it down. ‘
Wheeee
-
BANG!
’

Guy looked his brother up and down, checking for signs of obvious injury. Apart from some violently coloured bruises, there was little enough.

‘Thank God you’re all right! I’ve been worried sick. Staff haven’t heard a straight word from anyone and all I knew was your crowd was in the thick of the whole bloody shemozzle. I got word that you’d been hit, but the RAMC weren’t able to tell me where you were, let alone how you were.’

The two brothers embraced. Later on, looking back on it, Alan was genuinely surprised by the warmth of Guy’s feeling.

‘And Tom? What about Tom? Where’s Tom? Don’t tell me –’

‘Alan, old chap, Tom’s absolutely fine. He made it up to German lines – unlike most of his men – and held on to his bit of trench despite a pretty nasty counterattack by Fritz. He was relieved three days ago, completely unhurt. He’s been going out of his mind trying to find out what happened to you.’

‘Thank God. Thank bloody Jesus. Thank … Thank … Thank … and he’s hurt, you say? How badly? How … ?’

‘No. Completely unhurt, I told you.’

Alan made a face, as though ready to argue. His breath came in hard pants that hurt his lungs.

‘Don’t you think you should still be lying down?’ said Guy. ‘Why the hell did the medics let you go anyway?’

‘The whole platoon went down? The poor bloody platoon!’ Alan was upset now. He began reciting the names of the men who’d been under Tom’s command.

‘Let’s get you home.’

‘Not hurt? Not wounded?’

‘Typical of the gardener’s boy, eh? No, completely unhurt. Not a scratch. Now come on back.’

Alan giggled in relief, but his emotions were still all over the place. He was laughing but could just as easily be crying. ‘Sounds like he’s the hero once again. You must have been pleased to see him.
So
pleased.
Soooo
pleased.’

‘Mmm,’ Guy agreed, without enthusiasm. Tom’s extraordinary record through four days of intense fighting had been somewhat muddied by a blazing row he’d had with one of the brigadier’s aides on the day of his return to the rear. Tom, incensed by the massacre he’d been in the middle of, had accused High Command of butchery. He’d more or less called Haig a murderer. It had taken Guy’s intervention to prevent Tom from getting into serious disciplinary trouble. ‘He can be a damn fool, that man. Now look, old chap, you’re looking awfully queer. Don’t you think you’d better –’

But Alan’s mood had become suddenly belligerent. ‘You’re the fool, a big bloody fool. And what’s worse, much worse, you’re a bloody staff officer fool.’

Guy’s voice tautened. He could see Alan was hardly himself, but it was dangerous territory that he was entering. ‘Alan, that’s enough –’

‘Bloody staff officers. Just as Tom says. Bloody, skulking, yellow, behind-the-lines, staff bloody –’

‘Stop it!’ Guy gripped his brother’s arm, attempting to swing him back round to the village. ‘I’m taking you home. You need some –’

‘No, I don’t.’ There was a roaring in his ears and a buzzy quality to his vision. He suddenly thought of Lisette, and wanted her with a passionate longing, rejoicing in the knowledge that if Tom was alive, then everything in the whole wide world would be all right. He pushed Guy away with both hands.

‘Don’t touch me. There’s someone I need to see … I have to go.’

Guy looked at his brother with sudden acuteness. ‘You’ve got a girl, have you?
You?’

‘“I’ve got a little lady by the name of Sue,”’ sang Alan. ‘Not Sue actually, Lisette.’ He was babbling. He waved at the farmhouse where she lived. ‘Lisette, Lisette.’

‘That farm? The one just there, with the red-painted gables?’ Guy’s tone was half urgent, half incredulous.