‘We are alone, here, lord,’ Hanuman said then.
Krishna looked to right and left and saw no one close by, except the dead, some writhing wounded, and a few men vomiting on the parados.
‘What happened?’ he said.
‘Captain Sher Singh said there was no hope, and gave the order each man for himself.’
Krishna swore and said, ‘We’d better go, then.’
But should he? What was the point? This horror would pursue him now until it choked him. Better to stay here and die now before it got worse. He began to collect ammunition clips from dead and wounded sowars, cramming them into his own pockets; then he again jumped up on to the firestep. By the ripping crackle of bullets ahead he knew the Ravi machine guns were firing. That meant the Germans were also attacking Beaumont.
But British shells were bursting close, too, and he thought he heard a faint cheering from the rear. Some Germans who had got into the trench farther to the right began to work towards him. He and Hanuman took position behind a traverse and shot each masked man as he came round the corner, until four dead bodies blocked the way. Then a potato-masher bomb came whirling over the parapet, and Krishna caught it and threw it back in one motion. The explosion behind the traverse was followed by a confusion of screams and groans. After a long wait, while Hanuman continued to guard the traverse, Krishna climbed up on to the firestep to see what was happening. He saw Germans close by scrambling out of the trench and hurrying away, to join others already retreating across No Man’s Land under a storm of fire; and a line of cheering khaki figures appearing out of the mist from the opposite direction. Coming directly at him he recognized the distinctive shapes of Warren Bateman and Himat Singh, with drawn revolvers, and at their side, Captain Sher Singh. The line of masked sowars stretched away on both sides, all with fixed bayonets gleaming. Krishna Ram stood up waving his rifle, yelling, ‘Don’t fire! ‘
Warren recognized him and jumped across the trench to him. Sher Singh leaped down into the trench and stayed there crouched in the bottom. Warren said, ‘Get up, Sher Singh. Up here. Stand beside us. There. Don’t move an inch or I’ll shoot you.’ To Krishna he said, ‘What happened?’
Krishna told him, as accurately as he could, which was not very. The action, like every other one he had seen so far, had started with a plan as clear as a geometrical drawing, and ended in a meaningless struggle among sweating terrified individuals.
Warren said, ‘I thought it was something like that. When D Squadron came back, in a rabble, I told B to retake the trench and came along with them ... God, I wish this bugger Sher Singh here had got a bullet through his head. This is what your softness at that
panchayat
has led to.’ He glared at Sher Singh, a yard away and barely able to stand he was trembling so much. ‘Mahadeo Singh is reorganizing D in the rear area, and then they’ll take over B’s old trenches ... Here, let’s have a look at this.’ He stooped, and took the mask off a German corpse at his feet. ‘H’m ... a sort of mask, like ours. They don’t seem to have had to piss on them. Probably some chemical inside.’
He put the mask on and peered at Krishna through gauze veiled eyepieces. Krishna restrained an impulse to cry out, ‘Don’t!’ for the mask converted Warren Bateman, too, into a demon, an inhuman monster from legend, an evil monkey feeding on the offal of the civilization it has destroyed.
The CO took off the mask and sniffed the air. ‘It’s blown away. We can take our masks off, for the time being ... When the Germans first used gas a month ago they must have already worked out how to protect their own men against it. So it’s safe to assume that their masks are better than ours. Himat, have these collected off every dead and wounded German in the area. Send them to our machine gunners . . . Where’s the telephone here, Krishna? Call A and get a situation report.’
Krishna slid down, hurried fifty yards along the trench and found the telephone intact in the old squadron headquarters’ position. Soon Puran Lall came on the line.
‘The CO wants a report.’
The young officer’s voice was hard and impersonal--’They attacked about half an hour ago. The machine guns stopped them on my front.’
‘Did they use gas?’
‘Yes. But most of it blew over above us. I have three killed and eight wounded, all by shelling.’
‘Any German dead within reach of your trenches?’
‘About forty.’
‘Send men out to get their gas masks. Keep twenty and send the rest back to RHQ for distribution.’
‘I won’t wear one,’ Puran Lall said. ‘Have you seen what a man looks like in it?’
‘Yes. I understand.’
He hung up. Now the CO would want him to get a similar report from C Squadron at the Well. He told the signaller to get through.
Suddenly the German artillery opened heavy fire again, several field and medium batteries firing what was obviously concentrations, just as they had before the attack. The new gunner subaltern, 2nd Lieutenant Bruington, came up at a run, his signallers unwinding his telephone wire behind him. He tumbled into the trench, saw Krishna and said, ‘Looks as if the Hun is going to come again, sir ... Gun positions? 41st Field Battery, DF 43, fire! ‘
The wind was still veering, and now blew across the line of trenches from south-east to north-west. The Germans would not be able to use gas under these conditions, Krishna thought, unless they carried the cylinders to the south end of the British trenches, even behind them, and released the gas from there.
‘My God, look at the CO.’ The voice beside him was reverent and proud. It was Captain Himat Singh speaking, the ribbon and silver rosette of the DSO and bar bright on his stained tunic. Shells burst like dry geysers in the friable earth all along the line. The mist had risen and was no more than a haze across the low sun and somewhere, unbelievably, birds were singing. Out in the open, arms linked, Warren Bateman and Sher Singh were strolling along the front of the trench system.
2nd Lieutenant Bruington muttered, ‘Good heavens, he’ll get himself killed for certain, sir! ‘
‘He has a purpose,’ Himat Singh said briefly. Krishna Ram thought, you can’t say a word against Warren in front of Himat Singh now.
The strolling figures came closer, Warren’s crown and star linked with Sher Singh’s three stars. The fox terrier Shikari walked at Warren Bateman’s heels, but he was nervous, cowering at the explosions and twice trying to run away into the trenches, to be recalled by Warren’s sharp order, ‘Heel! ‘ Every few paces they all stopped and Warren looked down into the trench, smiled, and said a few words to the men in it. Machine gun bullets began to clack overhead from a German gun firing at long range from the left.
They came close and Krishna saw that it was only the CO’s arm which was holding Sher Singh up. The captain’s face was greasy pale under the brown pigmentation, as though all blood had drained out of it, and not even Warren Bateman’s strong arm could hide the knocking of his knees.
They stopped above the telephone and Warren said, ‘Hullo, what’s your name?’
‘Bruington, sir.’
‘Glad to see you.’
‘Thank you, sir ... We’ve been allotted three medium and three field batteries for DF on your front, sir.’
‘Good. And well done, Krishna, we’d have had a hard time retaking this trench without you.
Eh jawan, ab sab thik hai?’
He chattered on in Hindi with a sowar peering over the parapet behind his rifle. Then, as he moved on, rifles began to fire all along the line. ‘Here they come again,’ Krishna shouted. ‘Get down, sir!’
Warren looked round, and pushing Sher Singh in front of him, slid down into the trench. His face was pale and strained, his eyes glaring. Himat Singh, on the firestep a little to the right, said, ‘Sir...’ Then he gasped, jerked, and fell backwards into the bottom of the trench three feet below. Warren Bateman bent over him quickly: ‘Are you hit, old man?’
‘Chest somewhere, sir ... I’ll be all right.’
Warren said, ‘We’ll have you back as soon as we beat off the Hun. Just lie there ... Sher Singh, take command of B Squadron here. You’ve got another chance. If you fail this time it’ll be a court martial on a capital charge. So make up your mind to die bravely here, or disgracefully in front of a firing squad.’
Sher Singh staggered off down the trench, still trembling. Warren Bateman said to Krishna, ‘Stay here and see that he holds firm. Shoot him if he doesn’t. Make him show himself to the troops. When I can I’m going to A Squadron in Beaumont. I’m sure that’s where the heaviest Hun attacks will come. Meantime I’ll get a bite to eat.’
He climbed up on the parapet, laid his revolver down on a sandbag beside him and opened his haversack. He began to eat a sandwich, every now and then raising his head to watch the progress of the Germans’ attack. Krishna shook himself into realization that he had work to do. It was hard to believe, looking at Warren Bateman, that the Germans were actually attacking this very position. Figures in grey-green, no longer masked, were coming across the fields, disappearing into shell holes, reappearing. Bullets ripped overhead in a continual stream. Himat Singh, lying on the rear step, his cap off, a greatcoat under his head and red-stained field dressing on his bare chest, gaped with glazed worshipping eyes at Warren Bateman on the forward side of the same trench. The sowars stood like supple willows in their positions, not a man looking back, each picking up the clips of ammunition set on the parapet beside him, ramming them into the magazine, working the bolts with an easy flick of the right wrist, aiming, firing, the shoulders jarring to the explosions but the heads steady as boulders set into the earth.
By ten o’clock the second German attack had been beaten back. The CO left, stretcher bearers carried Himat Singh and the other wounded to the rear. Krishna spent an hour with Sher Singh, whose nerves were settling down as the danger receded; also perhaps with the realization that as he had survived the terrible fifteen minutes in the open at the CO’s side, nothing worse could happen to him.
The signaller at the telephone said, ‘CO for you, sir.’
Warren Bateman’s voice was crackling taut. ‘We have been given a report that one of our aeroplanes reports enemy massing in front of Beaumont. It looks like another attack. How’s Sher Singh doing?’
‘All right, sir.’
‘G-good. No-now we have A right B-B centre, C left, D in reserve under Mahadeo S-ssingh.’ Bateman was stammering, halting over the words. Then, with an effort obvious even at the end of the field telephone line he steadied his voice. ‘Any other officer casualties?’
‘No, sir.’
‘I’m going along the line and then back to D, where I’ll stay. You come here to A. As soon as it’s dark we must start linking the squadron trench systems.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Krishna began to collect himself. There was his pack, with his two days reserve rations, on the back step beside the signaller. There was the rifle he’d taken from the dead sowar. It was a much better weapon than a revolver, and also made him less conspicuous as an officer. He’d keep it. He wondered whether Warren would approve. According to his code, an officer ought to make himself conspicuous, so that the men could always see he was there, and unafraid. But this war, that turned men into monkeys and horses into automobiles, was forcing new rules ... not good ones. He slung the rifle on his shoulder and signalled to Hanuman and his trumpeter to follow him.
It had turned into a gusty day and he realized almost as soon as he left the shelter of B Squadron’s trenches and started across the pitted fields behind the tattered hedgerows that the wind had backed into the north-east. He felt for his mask, made sure it was in his haversack, and hastened his pace to a fast walk. Beaumont, the steeple sharp against the sky, was a quarter of a mile to his right front. There were no troops covering the gaps between the squadrons, only scattered aprons of barbed wire and fire from the machine guns by the Well on the left, behind C Squadron.
Shelling began to fall heavily on Beaumont and for a moment he quailed, stopping to watch. He had to go into that ... that holocaust of flying bricks and crumbling mortar and shattering trees. The steeple of Beaumont Church lost part of one side even as he watched. He forced his legs to run. Suddenly he was in the middle of an immense, impersonal clatter. Hanuman was down, bowled over at full run like a hare, but sitting up. The trumpeter was going down, his knees sagging, his turban off, a round blue hole in the centre of his forehead. A yellow cloud came down on the wind, creeping along the earth out of the eye of the storm of bullets. Krishna threw himself flat. He had run into machine gun and rifle fire at close range. Beaumont was still there to the right. This was coming from directly in front, from Germans outflanking Beaumont. The bullets still whistled and clacked low all around, dollops of earth flew, dust kicked into his eyes. If they kept firing it was only a question of time before they got him. He pushed his rifle forward, searched the ground in front, thought he saw a helmet gleam, took aim, and fired. Then he began to choke. His head swam. He dropped the rifle, fumbled for the mask, found it, and held it over his mouth and nostrils. The pad was dry. His eyes smarted, and he could see nothing. He could breathe, just, but his eyes ... He lay face down, pressing desperately closer to the breasts of earth.
A voice above him cried,
‘Raus! ... Himmel, es ist ein Major!’
A hand grabbed him and cried,
‘Auf, auf!... Laufen!’
Someone had taken his revolver from its holster. The rifle was gone. They were pushing and pulling him along at a stumbling trot, the voices now guttural, now sibilant in his ear. He could see a few blurred yards when he opened his eyes, but it hurt so much that he shut them again.
Only one man was with him now, something hard occasionally pressed into his side, muttering fiercely but unintelligibly. The stumbling passage did not go on long. After a time among bursting shells and a time under machine gun fire passing overhead, the man cried,
‘Still gestanden!’
An arm held him still. Another voice spoke in German, the first answered, then the new voice said in excellent English, ‘You are a prisoner. What is your name and regiment?’