The Wraiths of War (12 page)

Luckily the coat was a decent fit. Not perfect – I’m tall but fairly lean, whereas the German had been shorter and stockier, which meant that the sleeves came up over my bony wrists – but good enough. When, bent over double with one hand on my belly, I had once again conquered the urge to puke, I straightened up and spat on the ground.

Okay, I thought. Time to go.

Digging my fingers into the muddy walls of the shell crater, I heaved myself up and out. As I ascended I moved as slowly as I could and kept my head down. It was an awkward manoeuvre, and tough on the biceps, which had to take the majority of my weight, but having been on guard duty many times over the past few weeks, I knew that what tended to catch a sentry’s sleepy eye at night were sudden, jerky movements – a fact that had caused many a scurrying rat to be blown to Kingdom Come.

It took me a long time to slide up and out of the shell hole, and by the time I managed it I was knackered, and at first could do no more than lie spread-eagled on the ground, breathing hard and trying to recover. I’d like to have lain there for at least twice as long as I did, but after about five minutes the cold oozing up from the muddy ground once again started to seep into my limbs through my layers of clothing, and so I slowly and reluctantly raised my head and tried to get my bearings. Ahead of me I saw the shattered tree trunk I’d been heading towards earlier. I estimated it was now something like thirty metres away.

How long had I been out in No Man’s Land? It seemed like forever, but it was probably no more than about ninety minutes. Possibly less, as far as Frank back in the home trench was concerned, when you took into account how the older me had helped by winding time back a little. No need to panic just yet then – I still had several hours of darkness ahead of me. Trying to stay calm, I moved forward on my belly, inch by painstaking inch, negotiating a route through the mangled bodies and darting rats and often lethal chunks of shrapnel.

At last, having traversed a distance that would have taken me no more than a minute to cross on foot, I reached the tree stump. I paused here a few moments to catch my breath, my curled-up body pressed behind the stump for shelter as my lungs laboured and my ribs heaved. Once again, although my hands and feet and face were numb with cold, I was pouring with sweat inside my uniform. The muscles in my arms, legs and stomach were aching as if I’d been pumping iron for the last hour, and my head was swimming both with exhaustion and with the stink of decomposition from the coat, which was rising with the heat from my body and enclosing me in a reeking fug.

Again, I waited until the cold started to creep through me, and then pressed on, though more cautiously than ever now that I was nearing the German lines. Just ahead of me, like thin, dark, looping scratches on the marginally lighter horizon, I saw coils of barbed wire rising from the rutted mud. Many a soldier, both from the German side and ours, had come a cropper on this stuff. If you ran into it in blind panic, as many did, you became ensnared, and therefore an easy target for enemy snipers. The trick, when approaching it horizontally as I was, was to take your time, to flatten it down bit by bit, keeping your movements slow and, most importantly, your mouth shut whenever you felt the hot, sharp sting of barbs scraping across your flesh. Eventually, if you were both patient and lucky, you would succeed in flattening a section of it down enough to be able to roll over it – though even at this point you had to be careful. If a stray upstanding barb snagged on your coat, you might end up pulling the wire taut and setting off a rattling chain reaction down the length of the coils, which would alert the enemy just as effectively as if you were to leap to your feet and wave your arms.

It took me a good twenty minutes – my fingers as cold and numb as icicles even as the sweat trickled down my face and stung my eyes – to deal with the barbed wire strung across my path. The process involved delicately isolating each loop between the fingers of my two hands and then very carefully flattening and twisting each of those loops into corkscrew-like lengths, like the twist of wire at the top of a metal coat hanger, until I could squash them down into the mud. I had to repeat this process maybe a dozen times in all, taking care not to tug too hard on each loop of wire and make the whole coiling length of it jerk like a fisherman’s line. It was back-breaking work, not least because I had to do it flat on my belly with my chin resting in a pool of mud and my outstretched arms raised no higher than an inch above the ground, but eventually I managed to create an area wide enough to crawl over.

Five minutes later, having successfully negotiated the German defences without raising the alarm, I came upon an upward-sloping ridge of mud, stretching to the right and left of me as far as I could see (which admittedly wasn’t far in the darkness) and topped with a layer of sandbags. I’d known the German trench must be close, but now that I could actually see it, no more than half a dozen yards in front of me, my heart quickened and my body started to shake with nerves. Once again, doubts assailed me. What the fuck was I doing here? Who was to say that the heart wasn’t lying out there in No Man’s Land somewhere, half-buried in the mud, and I had simply crawled past it in the darkness?

Then I again remembered my older self’s words. He might not have said it outright, but hadn’t he strongly hinted that in order to get the heart back I would have to penetrate the German lines? But what the fuck could I do? I was one man against the entire German army! All right, so maybe that was exaggerating. Instead of panicking I needed to stay calm, think this through, break it down. What exactly was I likely to be faced with here? What obstacles would I have to overcome?

If the Germans operated a similar system to ours, and I had to assume they did, they’d have somewhere between a dozen and two dozen men occupying each traverse – by which I mean a single section of trench, the trenches themselves being dug in a zigzag pattern to confine the blast of any explosives that might find their mark, and thus reduce the number of casualties. At this time of night most of those men would be asleep, with maybe only a couple of sentries on duty. So initially, if I were lucky, I’d have only two men to overcome. Which still made the odds two against one. But at least I had the element of surprise. Plus I was wearing a German officer’s overcoat.

I crawled a little closer, moving so slowly now that a snail could have overtaken me. After reducing the distance between myself and the trench to only a couple of yards, I froze again.

I could hear voices.

There were two of them, and they were conversing quietly in German. I had no idea what they were saying. I’d never done German at school, and the only words I knew I’d picked up mainly (and ironically) from old war movies – ‘
Achtung
!’ ‘
Schnell
!’ ‘
Auf Wiedersehen
,’ ‘
Heil
, Hitler!’ Lying flat on my belly and listening to the voices for a minute or two – one light, almost boyish, the other deeper, more jovial, the words often accompanied by a rumbling chuckle – I was relieved to hear that they sounded both relaxed (which meant they must have decided the movement they’d seen and shot at in No Man’s Land earlier was nothing to get alarmed about) and that they were endeavouring to keep their voices low (which meant the other men must be asleep, as I’d hoped). It was odd to think I was only a few yards away from them, and that if I’d been so inclined I could have ended both their lives with a grenade or a couple of bullets. Odd and creepy too, because on numerous occasions Frank and I had been in the same situation as the two German sentries, and my presence here was a reminder of how easy it was to become complacent, how close you could be to death without realising it.

After a couple of minutes I retreated from the edge of the bunker, inching myself backwards and wincing at every tiny slurp and squelch of mud caused by the movement of my body. Once I was out of earshot of the German sentries (or at least, I
hoped
I was) I swivelled round and headed to my right, my intention being to drop into the trench some distance from the two men. I was now utterly plastered in mud from head to toe, but aside from the fact that it clung like glue, which meant that crawling through it was an enervating business, it didn’t worry me unduly, because most of the other men in the trenches were in a similar condition. After five minutes or so I reckoned I was far enough along the trench that I wouldn’t alert the sentries, whereupon I crawled up to the line of sandbags and after a quick peek to make sure there was no one about, I slithered up and over them.

My heart was hammering now, the adrenaline rushing through me. I slid to the bottom of the trench, then clambered to my feet, my boots and the dead German’s stinking coat now so caked in mud they felt as heavy as lead. I did what I could to scrape off some of the filth, but it was a pretty hopeless task. I had nothing to scrape with except my hands, and they too were gloved in mud. In the end, hoping I wouldn’t have to move quickly any time soon – whether that be to fight or flee – I took a couple of deep breaths, then drew my revolver. Holding it by my side, concealed behind a fold of the mud-caked overcoat, I moved along the trench towards the two sentries.

Be brash. Be confident. Act as if you own the place
. I had no idea whether anyone had ever specifically given me that advice, or whether it was just one of those general life tips that you hear repeated every so often (the kind of approach interviewees and new employees and insurance salesmen are encouraged to adopt), but it was a mantra I was fully committed to right now. My best chance of success was to catch the enemy off-guard, and I knew I couldn’t do that by sneaking about like a thief.

That said, my limbs were so stiff with cold and tension, and I was shaking so much inside, that as I moved in the direction of the murmuring voices I couldn’t help but think I must look like some ghastly, grinning marionette. With each step the voices, though still conversing quietly, grew louder and clearer, a fact which I tried (and failed) not to find increasingly unnerving. Ahead of me was a natural curve in the muddy wall, from a few metres beyond which both the voices and a faint bloom of lamplight were drifting. Bracing myself, I strode, with as much confidence as I could muster, around the corner.

As soon as I appeared the heads of the two sentries snapped up and they fell immediately silent. The bulkier, older, dark-haired one who had been sitting on a box, leaped to his feet, though whether to confront me or as a mark of respect, having seen my officer’s overcoat, I wasn’t sure. The younger one, his hair a flaxen yellow, the cheekbones of his thin face so sharp that he looked cadaverous in the dim candlelight, raised his rifle uncertainly. Ignoring it, I gave both of them what I hoped was an easy smile and spoke one of the few German phrases I
did
know: ‘
Guten abend
.’

At first the men just gaped at me, which made me wonder whether I’d misremembered what I’d thought was the German for ‘Good evening’. Then the older man nodded, albeit warily, repeated my greeting, and said something else in German, which by the inflection of his voice was clearly a question.

Taking a gamble, I smiled again, nodded and said, ‘
Ja
.’ But this only made the two men frown. I was no more than four or five steps away from them now, and still strolling unhurriedly forward. Perhaps deciding that I had misheard his question, the older man began to repeat it.

Instead of answering him I brought up the gun, which I’d been holding by the barrel, and smashed it down on the bridge of his nose. Almost before the blood had started to gush I hit him twice more, once on the forehead and once, as his legs gave way beneath him, on the top left side of his skull.

I didn’t want to kill him, but neither did I hold back. I couldn’t afford to. If I was going to get through this, I had to do everything full-bloodedly; there could be no half measures. Having chosen the bigger and tougher-looking of the two men, I knew that my first blow had to incapacitate him, and my second and third had to render him unconscious. I knew too that it had to happen quickly, while the younger man was still in shock and before he had time to work out what was happening. I’d gambled on the fact that because I was wearing a German officer’s overcoat, the young soldier’s instinctive assumption would be not that I was an enemy soldier launching a one-man attack, but that I was a superior officer inflicting a punishment for some unknown but serious misdemeanour on his unfortunate comrade.

And so it proved. As the dark-haired man slid to the ground, his face a bloody, ruined mess, the younger soldier continued to gape at me, his mouth open but silent, his rifle drooping, momentarily forgotten, in his hands.

So
incapacitated by surprise was he, in fact, that I had ample time to flip my revolver round, so that I was holding it by the now blood-stained butt instead of the barrel, and press its muzzle against the centre of his forehead, directly between his bulging, terrified eyes. With my other hand I yanked the rifle from his nerveless fingers and threw it into the mud behind me. Then, raising that hand, I extended my forefinger and placed it to my lips.

‘Shh.’

The young soldier’s face crumpled in shame, but I only realised he had pissed himself when a stink of urine wafted up between us. I could hardly blame him. He was no older than eighteen and more than likely a raw recruit, who having been dumped into the sheer hell of trench warfare, had just seen his friend battered unconscious by a mud-spattered mad man who was now pressing a revolver to his forehead. As if the full implication of this had only just entered his stunned brain he abruptly began to cry. To his credit he did it quietly, his blubbering lips emitting almost silent gasps of breath as tears poured down his face.

There was a part of me that felt desperately sorry for him, and ashamed of my actions. I was immediately transported back almost a couple of decades, to when I was barely older than this young soldier was now, and I had been part of a gang that had held up a van carrying around £100,000 in cash. There’d been a kid in the van that day, a boy of about ten riding shotgun with his uncle, and the stark, blubbering fear on his face when we forced the van to the side of the road and appeared with our stocking masks and baseball bats was exactly the same as the expression on the German soldier’s face right now. Weird to think that that incident had taken place almost twenty years ago for me, and yet in linear terms was still eighty years in the future.