Benedict, France,
July 1, 1916, Morning
B
ENEDICT LOOKED AT HIS WATCH:
0728 hours. Two minutes to go. Instinctively he looked out toward the invisible wire: the barbed swags and webs and coils of it.
The gun fired again, rolled back. The air shook.
“Do you think they’ll give us a a pension later for being bloody deaf, sir? ’scuse my French,” Smith shouted now.
Then, as if Smith had created it, an explosion of silence, and in the silence an immensity of fear.
The wire.
Jean-Baptiste, France,
July 1, 1916, Morning
H
E HAD SLEPT IN THE
ruin of an old stable. At dawn, he was rested but stiff and bitten all over by insects and more nervous than the day before, when his mind had been full of escape. It was warm and gray, and he was thirsty and knew he had very little water left. He moved off slowly, a little giddy when he first stood up.
North to the British, Vignon had said, south to the French, east to the Germans, but he could hardly stumble upon them without crossing the British lines first, or at least not if the line was continuous. But who knew whether he might run into an early-morning German patrol probing into enemy lines? He ducked down twice as he heard voices from the towpath. He sat down again after an hour or so, with his back to an old oak, already weary. The sun had come out and, astonishingly, there were butterflies on a small patch of dandelions. He put his head back, shut his eyes.
And then, suddenly, there was an explosion, an eruption that sent tremors through the earth beneath him, and he found himself curled up on the ground, his hands over his ears, back in the hours of terror that had been his last memories of Verdun. Two other vast explosions followed; to the northeast and also some distance away, but so violent that he almost expected to see cracks run along the ground. Leaves and half-grown acorns fell from the tree. He sat, clasping his knees tightly to his chest, and retched. He mustn’t succumb to fear now. He looked down and saw fine chalk dust on his sleeve; it was falling like powdery snow. Two aeroplanes crossed the sky, humming, almost innocently, and then there was—nothing.
A great hole of nothingness. A great silence.
Yet just as he had started to absorb the silence, the almost reassuring noise of shelling returned and the machine guns opened up. Something big was happening, an attack: from what Vignon had said, a British attack across the Ancre. Assuming that it had some success, it should push east away from him. He moved behind the tree, half camouflaged by brambles, and there he stayed for a while, until his breathing steadied, listening to war but hidden within it.
He began to calculate: he thought he was about halfway along the fourteen kilometers from Amiens to Corbie. If he followed the river, soon it would make a great loop north before returning to his home town. But he would reduce the distance if he made his way south, crossing over the river and then the lagoons and fens that spread south of Corbie. It was going against Vignon’s advice, but Vignon was not—as he’d so often said, and Jean-Baptiste felt a small knot in his chest thinking of it—web-footed. Jean-Baptiste had been born to this landscape; he knew the hidden throughways, could weave his way through the shortcuts, could tell solid land that looked sodden from apparently dry land in which a man could sink and be lost.
An hour or so later, he had crossed the canal along the one remaining plank of the half-demolished Fouilloy footbridge. Now he was on the south side, the side Vignon had told him to avoid, walking into the waterlands toward the fighting, on the far side from Corbie and nearer the French positions.
The reeds and mud of the southern river bank stretched as far as the eye could see, and patches of water shone between misshapen willows. The path ran through pockets of yellow grass and sedge, and the turf was soft under his feet. He stooped to loosen his boots. A lake loomed ahead, a finger of land projecting into it but not, apparently, reaching the far side. He picked his way along this spit, hardly glancing at the opaque green depths to either side, except to notice that the placid surface he remembered was now bristling with lance-like rushes. He hoped the water at the far end was as shallow as he remembered it. It was, and he arrived on the opposite bank, momentarily triumphant, with almost-dry boots. Two other small lagoons, connected by deep ditches, lay ahead. He took a slight detour to avoid the marsh between them, though it seemed smaller than he remembered; a rotting fishing hut, now abandoned, stood several meters from the water’s edge. A large duck rose up shrieking from behind it and he stumbled back, his heart hammering in his chest.
He went on more slowly, inhaling the familiar stagnant smell of summer. A rotten coracle lay on the edge of what he had expected would be the next large open expanse of water, but instead half-dried gray mud filled a large bowl in the earth. A few decaying fish lay on the surface. He suspected the British had extracted so much water for their needs that the levels had dropped, drying up the shallower pools. He considered whether to try to cross the depression; it would save him time, particularly desirable since he was already tiring again. He stood on the edge, picked up the largest stone he could find, and threw it. It thudded down and skidded a short distance, scattering up dust. He took out his knife, cut a long pole from an alder, and, testing the ground ahead of him, stepped forward tentatively.
He continued to move slowly, prodding the surface to either side like a blind man. As the pole found only solidity again and again, he became more confident, and the ground held under his feet as he edged out. He looked behind him: one footprint had dented the surface and filled with water. He was wondering about the wisdom of continuing when, about two meters from the bank, his right foot cracked the clay surface, went through, and found nothing: no purchase, no bottom at all; just the waiting lake that he could feel pouring into his boot.
His left foot started to sink too, albeit more slowly than the right. Trying to extract it, he sank farther to the right and almost toppled over. He lay down, pushing himself backward—they always said you should take your weight off your feet, spread it over the surface. He threw his arms back behind him, his scars burning as he stretched. He could feel the edge of dry land but couldn’t extricate his right foot; each time he attempted to lever himself free, the weight of the lower half of his body seemed to sink farther. His right leg was in mud up to the calf. His left heel was touching something solid, but he was frightened to put any weight on it in case it lost this fragile purchase.
One hand grasped and lost a tuft of vegetation and then, flailing, the other found coarse grass. He pulled. Nothing but pain—it felt as if he were tearing his old wound apart. He felt panic growing; the watery mud was rising around him. He was going to drown here, slowly, after so long, so close to home. He pushed down hard with his left foot, grasped the reeds; and as one tuft came away, cutting his palm, his bottom lifted and his feet slid out of his boots.
He scrabbled backward and sat gasping, giddy, on the bank. Because he was exhausted and hungry and afraid of man-made danger, he had been stupid in a way that would never have happened when he was a boy. He had always respected the river and the land it lay claim to. He was proud of the landscape and had never taken it for granted. Everyone around here knew someone who’d drowned. Drowned and been eaten by eels, they said. It was Godet who had told him that if a man wore boots, not sabots, he should untie them before walking in the fens. The marshes swallowed up boots, but a man without laces could slip his feet out of their hungry grasp.
Frank, France,
July 1, 1916, Mid-Morning
I
T WAS A NICE DAY,
July 1, in weather terms.
We were back in support. After breakfast, a handful of big bangs went off, just like the sappers had promised. Then the infantry must have gone forward. We could hear the machine guns open up. Isaac made a face at me. The firing went on and on. And we just sat. Some lance corporal was playing with a kitten. He looked up and said “Them Germans sound pretty lively, truth be told.”
We had tea. We watched our aeroplanes taking off from the base at Doullens and heading south toward the big balloons. We didn’t see any of Fritz’s. We were bored, and it seemed all wrong when other men were out there fighting for their lives. The morning got hotter and we moved into the shade.
“What’s a Battenberg cake?” said Isaac.
“Search me.”
They said the cavalry would follow through after the initial attack, but the horses stayed behind the front line the whole time. Beautiful, they were, so I was glad.
When did we see it? The signs? They crept in. An hour or so in. The officers as had working telephones were getting news. You could see it in their faces and see it wasn’t good. Just after lunch, there seemed to be a lull in the fighting. Men who should have been in new positions came back: a mass of them. The walking wounded and the convoys of ambulances, and some said the attack had failed and yet not half the men that had gone forward came back. Some said, well, they wouldn’t have; they’d be having their hot dinner, as promised, at their objective. Others said the Ulsters at least were well forward.
There were rumors flying like bullets, humming overhead with no fixed target. The wave had broken and here was its vicious undertow; with the casualties came all shades of truth and speculation. The unbroken wire, the broken promises (this was mostly the young ones who still believed in such things). All those shells, they said, the crossfire from machine guns that had never been taken out. Men had been mown down as soon as they left the trench, or were left dying on the wire; they’d tried to hide in foxholes but found them stuffed with corpses. They said an upturned rifle stuck in the ground to mark an injured man had been used as a target by Fritz. They said brigadier generals and even full generals had died; that one had killed himself right there—or right somewhere else that someone had told them of—and whole regiments had been lost; the 7th Green Howard—probably the Green Howard, probably the 7th, but maybe the 1st—had attacked by mistake; the Londoners were through but unsupported; that it was hand to hand and slippery and the Scots using their knobkerries; that the 30th had done all right but in the northern sector it was a disaster. That the Devons, poor boys, lads I thought I might know, had gotten through but with terrible casualties; that ambulances were driving from one dressing station to another and being turned away while the men in the back slipped into death and the ambulances themselves got blown to kingdom come from time to time.
In the north, the second wave had run over fields of corpses, no avoiding it. There was a third wave, but it broke on a shore of disaster. Better in our sector, they said. “Considerable success.” We kept repeating it. But better in war is always relative. And still we messengers waited.
“Do you think it’s true?” said Isaac. He was so pale, his lips looked blue-gray like slate.
I shrugged. I was tired from watching and hearing, and spooked, I must admit.
“Well, sounds like it was pretty even-handed,” I said. “Higher-ups mown down with everyday Tommies, so I suppose you would approve of that.”
He gave me a hurt look with those great dark eyes of his and his face all bones these days. He didn’t look good. It was a hot day, but he seemed clammy rather than sweating. That cough of his was getting him down, although I felt more sympathetic about the cough by day than at night when I was trying to sleep near him. I’d lie there imagining what it’d be like to press a pillow over his face. But we didn’t have pillows.
“Why don’t you go back to the M.O.?” I said, by way of making up. “You really look rotten.”
“Now?” he said, his voice getting higher as it always did when he was agitated.
“Now?”
He flung an arm out. “With all those guys blown to bits? I’d have to have my lungs blown clean out of my chest before I could see a medic now.” He looked exhausted even from speaking.
He was probably right. The Army doctors always liked things they could see: missing body parts, rashes with pustules that might be contagious, raging fevers. Things that didn’t depend on a soldier’s say-so. Corporal Byers said he’d had to shit blood on the M.O.’s floor before he’d been sent to the rear with dysentery. What chance a man with a nervous cough? Not that I thought it was all nerves now.
There was something happening. Looked like the reserves were moving up. There was a piercing whistle: not an officer’s silver whistle on a chain, but a two-fingers-in-the-mouth common soldier’s summons. Isaac looked up wearily.
“I don’t think I can do it again,” he said. “Not after yesterday. I was on the go all hours. Not if they ask me today. I’m finished, Frank.”
I eyed him over.
“If they send you out,” said I, “just take it at your own speed. If a message is urgent, they’ll send a runner. Don’t try to ride the bike—it’ll slow you down and you’ll only be a higher target. Don’t put it on your back on your own—you’re not strong enough.”
It was true; I had visions of him snapping backward.
“Use the bike to lean on, to take your weight.”
He looked at me as if I was doling out the wisdom of Solomon.
Then he reached into his pocket. “You’ve been a friend,” he said. “Before the Army I had comrades, but not many I’d call a friend.” He handed me a page from a message pad. “This is my brother’s address.”
“We’ve done this. I’m no more likely to make it than you,” I said sharply.
He just looked at me. “Read it,” he said.
“I’ve read it,” said I, making to tuck it straight in my pocket.
“Aloud,” said he. “If you read it aloud three times, you’ll remember it.”
I was about to tell him to stop all this now when I caught the expression on his face, and it was the look of a man who’d given up.
I opened it up. “Samuel Meyer, 14 Meyer Street, Stepney, London East,” I said and then, feeling a bit of a fool, repeated it two times more, rather more quietly.
“Tell him,” he said, “and he can say Kaddish for me. Tell him I did all right.”
I just nodded. Couldn’t bring myself to look straight at him.
Then we heard a shout that had our name on it. It was Mr. Pierce. There was an NCO next to him. Pierce thought he was staying in the rear, but now he was taking some men forward to support a bunch of Wiltshires who’d gotten cut off. I got up quick, Isaac more slowly. I straightened my uniform, picked up Nora, and wheeled her toward the officer.
“Two messages,” said he. “From H.Q. One for the gunners in Sherwood Forest. And one is for the C.O. of 17th King’s.”
“Blimey,” said a Pioneer Corps private who was hauling one end of a box of ammo, “I wouldn’t want to go down there. That’s right in the thick of it.”
“That’s enough, Perkins,” said Lieutenant Pierce. “Things are much quieter now, as you can hear if you actually listen. And get another man to pick up the other end of the fucking box or you’ll do Jerry’s work for him.”
Mr. Pierce never used to swear when he first came out. When Mr. Summerskill, his pal, called him on it, his mess servant heard him say, “I blame the soldiery. Salt of the earth, but rough-and-ready ways.” He should have worked with Mr. Nugent back in Duke Street.
“Sorry, sir,” said Perkins, in a voice that made it clear that Mr. Pierce was, despite the influence of the soldiery, wet behind the ears, and everybody knew he was scared of the new colonel.
Brave now, though. Tugging at his Sam Browne. Standing up straight. Looking five years older and every bit the officer about to lead his men where other men have failed and no bit of schoolboy left in him.
Pierce looked at Isaac. “There’s been considerable success in the south,” he said. “The 30th has met nearly all its objectives. The Liverpool and Manchester pals have taken a whole sector of the German front line. They’re through and into Montauban, or as good as. You’ll need to put on a bit of speed to catch them, Meyer. Wires have been cut by shelling.”
“Not so good farther north, though?” I said.
“It’s not clear,” he said. But his eyes were moving from side to side. My old dad used to say you could always tell a man who was lying about his means to pay a bill, by if his eyes was yessling about like that.
“I’ll go to the pals,” I said as we pushed off. “You go to the gunners.”
Sherwood Forest was a piddling little copse with a big gun sticking out of it. It was much nearer us and farther from the front, whereas the pals could be anywhere, judging by Summerskill’s reports. I thought Isaac might just get to the copse, but in his condition he’d never make it as far as the front line, with or without being shot, so what would be the point?
Isaac took my message, I took his. We followed each other out onto the track. I rode in front, slow enough that Isaac could keep up until we got to Shadow Corner where we’d go our separate ways. Shadow had been
château,
which was French for castle. There wasn’t any castle left now, of course. Not so as you’d notice. We stopped once we were beyond the junction, which was a favorite of Fritz’s for shelling, and Isaac showed me on my map which was my best route.
“It’s longer but safer,” he said and cleared his throat thickly; for a minute I thought he’d choke right there, but he spat to one side. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t breathe with it. There’s a gentle slope and you’ll have some cover. If you turn
here
, you’ll be straight in the back of the trench system. Let me mark your map.”
Which he did. He didn’t seem keen to move on. “Be careful you don’t go too far south, or you’ll be joining the French Foreign Legion.” He gave me a weak smile as he traced the line of the French sector with a grubby finger. “Or get stuck in the Somme marshes. Listen out for ducks.” There was a sweetness about him when he smiled. Even with his glasses taped up. Even now.
It was a lot quieter, but that was saying nothing after the racket this morning. I looked around me—it was too exposed—and Isaac started in on one of his coughing fits. Some wounded men passed between us, and none of them gave either of us a glance. Not that far down the road a shell exploded. I hadn’t seen any Manchesters; did that mean they’d gotten through? Or were they all dead?
A shell screamed over us and exploded behind us somewhere—someone else’s bad day, and not far away.
Isaac mounted, riding so slowly that the front wheel wobbled and I thought he would fall off, though eventually he got going. But only fifty yards away, the road had been hit. There were dead horses, parts of them, and dead men; one of them, his head, at least, looked Chinese. But there was no road, just a crater.
“We’re going to have to carry the bikes,” I said, and wondered, not for the first time, what cyclists had ever done to the top brass that when the going got tough, we had to be burdened with a bloody bicycle on our shoulders. If you were in the cavalry, you didn’t have to heft your horse about, piggyback, if it was injured or the ground was too muddy. It was clear: you rode the horse, never the other way around.
I struggled to help Isaac with getting his machine on his back. I hardly dared let go of the two of them. He swayed. We walked on, bent slightly forward, going far too slowly for my liking, but there was all kinds of human traffic coming against us now, all of it dark and weary and stained. Clumps of men. We turned into the better cover of a so-called sunken road, where the remains of thorn bushes provided some meager shade. Isaac had to stop to cough, one hand on the side of his chest, the other to his mouth. I held him by his arm, as I thought him likely to fall, and helped him unscrew his bottle, and he drank. Wiped his hand across his mouth. Where his hand had been was a brown smear.
I put a hand out as two men from our division came past, their arms around each other. One was from the Lancashires. One had a head wound, the other a bloody arm with a rough tourniquet.
“Manchesters?” I said.
I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he nodded and said “I reckon as some made it through. If they can hold on.”
The other looked angrily at me, the whites showing all around his eyes.
“Scots dead on the wire, bare arses in the air,” he said. “Caught by their fucking skirts.” They moved away.
I knew his anger was at the whole world he’d found himself in, not me. I turned back to Isaac. He was pulling at his shirt around his neck as if trying to loosen it. His thin shoulders rose and fell jerkily, as if he were laboring to get his next breath.
Soldiers, northern lads mostly, were draped along the bank, filthy and bloody. Some staring into space, some asleep or maybe dead. They were usually a talkative lot even if you couldn’t understand much of it, but now they had nothing to say and eyes you didn’t want to see. The most communication between them was one private lighting another man’s cigarette. I was trying not to watch Isaac, and instead I saw how the hand of the man with the flame trembled so much that his companion had to steady his arm and guide the match to his cigarette.
“All that racket and they didn’t cut half the wire,” I said, but Isaac wasn’t listening.
Isaac had blood on the back of his hand. He simply seemed to have stopped. He was wasting the breath he had worked so hard to suck in by muttering something, and not in English.
“Don’t,” I said. “If you talk like that, it sounds German. You’ll get yourself lynched.” Then I took him by the elbow. “Come on. It’s not far.”
But he went on muttering, and I was half glad I’d be splitting off toward the front line in five minutes and Isaac could be someone else’s responsibility. We came up toward a bank. I was to circle south toward the entrance to the trench system. Isaac would only have to cross a small piece of ground and then find the battery in the wood that we could see straight ahead. No sign of the battery, and it wasn’t firing, but that was his orders.