Black Hand Gang (7 page)

Atkins heard the whistle from far away, as if underwater, then another and another; some fainter, some louder. Up and down the line, dozens of subalterns blew their whistles or shouted their men forwards.

This was it. Under the tidal pull of fear he felt the swell of vomit and bile rise, and felt a growing urge to piss. He didn't want to go over the top. You'd be mad to.

Someone hit him on the shoulder. Twice.

Shitohshitohshitohsh -

Atkins screamed in rage and terror, which wasn't clever because it fogged up his eye pieces. He could barely see where he was going as it was. He scrambled up the ladder and over the parapet, and looked around. There to his left he saw sergeant's stripes. Hobson was walking resolutely forward. Somewhere amid the explosions he caught the rolling tinny snap of the marching snares and the harmonious wail of the bagpipes playing as the Jocks advanced over on their left flank.

Standing in the trench with his men was like standing by a pen of cattle waiting to be herded into the abattoir and meant just about as much to him. Jeffries felt no pity for them as he lifted his gas hood to blow his whistle. He caught sight of a man, his shoulders heaving as if with sobs, a dark wet patch spreading down his trouser legs. He wouldn't move. Others clambered over the top to meet their fate. This one wouldn't.

"I'm not going to have you ruin things, Bristow. Get over!" said Jeffries in cold measured tones. Bristow snivelled but didn't stir. Jeffries sniffed derisively then shot him. "A death is a death Bristow, out there or down here, it's all the same to me. You'll have done your part either way."

He climbed the ladder and stepped from the still security of the trenches into a maelstrom of noise and fury. Shots, cries, bullets and bombs raged about him but he felt no fear. Anticipation, excitement, even, but fear? No. What had he to fear, today of all days?

In front of him, Appleton fell. And Harlow. Burton just vanished in a plume of wet offal and dirt. Still Jeffries strode on, unencumbered by the pack, webbing and bandoliers that weighed down his men. Every step a step closer to his destiny. When the day's bloodletting accrued to a critical mass, charging the landscape with a talisman of binding, he would speak the words he had long practised. The air screamed as shrapnel burst overhead, tearing down through flesh and mud alike. But none of it touched Jeffries.

Tendrils of chlorine lapped at his feet. Beneath his gas hood he wore a contented smile as he waded into the choking cloud with a surety that took the place of heroism. To be a hero you needed to feel fear. Jeffries didn't feel fear. He didn't need to. The sigil that he had drawn on his chest with Seeston's blood, now beginning to crust and pull uncomfortably at the hairs there, saw to that.

Around Atkins, men were marching forward into the clouds of gas; a rising tide of asphyxiating death. The ground was soft and treacherous underfoot. Muffled by his gas hood, the crump and boom of shells assumed a continuous roar that made his ear drums crackle. He glanced to his left. Pot Shot and Mercy were striding forward. He could make out the weak sunlight glinting off the tin triangles on their backpacks.

It was nearly a quarter of a mile to the forward German lines. Running with full pack through this mud would tire you out before you got there and you'd have no puff left for the fight. Already he could feel the muscles of his legs begin to ache from pulling against the mud. It was better, so they said, to walk and conserve your strength. Fair enough. But that bollocks about carrying on and not seeking cover? Stuff that.

Following the tape he reached the British wire. He could hear the insistent stuttering of the British machine guns, while above them shells burst, leaving lazy black woolly clouds hanging in the air as shards of hot metal ripped down through bodies below. Ahead of him now, men began to drop, some hanging on the wire as if they were puppets whose strings had been cut. He walked on past the fallen, some dead, some wounded, crying and begging for help. Most still wore their gas hoods and Atkins was grateful that he could not see their faces. You weren't supposed to stop for them. You weren't allowed to. Carry on. Forward. Always forward. He walked on aware that every step could be his last. Was it this one? This one? This?

The great bank of greenish grey fog, a mixture of chlorine, cordite and smoke rolled over them, enveloping the soldiers like a shroud. Atkins lost sight of his Section. He stepped aside to avoid a shell hole that loomed up out of the ground before him and found his leg caught. He looked down; a hand had grabbed his mud-encrusted puttee. A man, maskless, green froth oozing slowly from his mouth, gagged and struggled, tearing at his own throat with a bloodied hand, drowning on dry land as the chlorine reacted in his lungs. Atkins tugged his ankle free and marched on. Shell holes were death traps now. The gas was sinking to the lowest point it could find, settling in pockets like ghostly green rock pools, where the weary and wounded had sought shelter.

As he walked on, he began to experience a light-headed feeling. Around him the gas cloud seemed to glow with a diffuse phosphorescence. The noise of battle, the rattle of machine guns and the constant
crumpcrumpcrump
of artillery, the zing of bullets seemed somehow muffled and distant. He stumbled as he missed his footing. He looked down. His body seemed to be longer than it should have been, stretching and undulating until a wave of vertigo overwhelmed him. Letting go of his rifle, he dropped to his hands and knees. The small area of ground before him seemed to swim and ripple gently and, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't bring it into focus. Sweat began to prickle his face, he felt a pressure in his head, something trickled from his ear and he could taste the iron tang of blood running from his nose. The whole world seemed to tilt and from the periphery of his vision an oozing darkness spilled inwards until he could see no more than a few square inches of the Somme mud before his face. What remained of his vision filled with bursting spots of light as the world began to slip away...

Private Garside's feet skittered under him on the chalky mud as he ran through the communication trench. A German shell had brought down the telephone lines between Harcourt and Sans German. He'd been ordered to collect information from the Front. Battalion needed to know how the advance was progressing. He had to get to the Observation Post and run the latest reports back to Battalion HQ. That alone could take about an hour or two. If he survived. Already two others had failed to get through.

The first walking wounded were beginning to filter back in ones and twos down the trenches, helping each other where they could. Yells of "Stretcher bearer!" filled the air. A shell exploded nearby. Garside flinched, but ran on, pushing past a couple of RAMC sent up from the reserve trenches, carrying their as yet unused stretchers wrapped around their carrying poles as they headed towards the Aid Post.

"There's no hurry, mate. I'm sure Fritz'll 'ave a bullet or two left for you!" they called after him.

Garside ignored them. By the time he'd thought of a witty retort he was several traverses ahead of them. He turned into High Street. The OP wasn't far now. The trickle of wounded he'd noticed before was fast becoming a steady stream.

Two Battle Police were confronting a young soldier, tears running down his face. He's lost his steel helmet and had no gun.

"I can't," he was saying. "I can't..."

"Turn round the way you came, you fucking coward," the bigger, burly one said.

The soldier took a step forward, towards him.

"I
can't
!" he screamed, tendons straining in his neck, his face red with effort as he dashed the Military Policeman's face with spittle.

The smaller man casually put his pistol to the man's head and fired. His legs crumpled beneath him and he dropped heavily to the ground, his head lolling at a sickening angle.

"What the fuck are you looking at?" the burly one snarled as Garside tried to edge past. He lowered his eyes to avoid meeting their gaze, but as he did so his eyes fell upon the now lifeless body of the young private.

"Leave 'im, Charlie," the wiry one said. "He's going in the right direction, 'sides he's got a Battalion armband on."

Garside ran on. He rounded several traverses to put distance between himself and the casual brutality he'd just witnessed.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph!"

He skidded desperately to a halt. Small pebbles skittered from under his boots - and off into empty space.

Before him, where the support and front line trenches should have been, where No Man's Land had stretched away toward the German lines, lay nothing now but a huge crater almost half a mile across and thirty or forty yards deep at its centre.

The entire front line of the Harcourt Sector had gone.

CHAPTER FOUR

"
Though Your Lads Are Far Away..."

Blood pulsing in his ears, his breathing shallow and rapid within the claustrophobic gas hood, Atkins struggled to stand. About him, the featureless smog of war billowed sluggishly, draping itself around him, as if seeking a way through his respirator. Shapes swirled about him and he saw Flora's face, looking like she had that day outside the factory: threading her way across the street towards him between honking motor cars and horse and carts. Her joyous smile made his heart sing. He had to tell her. How would she react? He didn't know. He wasn't sure he could find the words at all. In the end he didn't have to. As she approached her face fell, but she caught herself and smiled again, although this time it seemed strained and polite.

"I - I thought you were William."

His stomach dropped away and his heart rose to his throat. "No, he said quietly, lowering his head and wringing his army cap in his hands as if in contrition. "I'm sorry."

She clasped his hands in hers gently. "No, I am."

"I've no news of William. He's been officially missing for weeks. Lots of lads have. But I'll keep trying for you. He'll turn up, I'm sure."

Unable to look her in the eye, he found himself looking at the small hands that embraced his, and the engagement ring his brother had bought her. He looked up, tears welling in his eyes to see the same in hers, united in grief.

"Hush, Tom. Walk me home."

As quickly as it materialised the shade dissipated. Unseen in the twilit gloom of poison gas, he could hear the gas hood-smothered cries of others.

"Porgy! Porgy! Where are you?"

He thought he heard an answer from somewhere over to his left but the lethal cloud around him left him completely disorientated. He could be stumbling straight towards the German wire for all he knew. And he wished his world would stop spinning. He leant on his rifle to steady himself but, unable to keep his balance, he keeled over again and the ground loomed up to meet him. He just wanted the great big world to stop turning. With a groan he moved into a sitting position and pushed himself to his feet with the help of his rifle butt.

A deep bass rumble filled the featureless miasma around him and his world lurched, lifted upwards and dropped with such a jarring force that it drove him into the mud up to his knees. An explosion? Not any kind of shell he was familiar with. It wasn't a Five Nine or Whizz-Bang or Jack Johnson, that was for sure. It seemed to come from below the very ground he was standing on. Perhaps a mine had been set off. That must be it. Hundreds of tons of high-explosive going off underground. That'd give Fritz something to worry about.

A bright, diffuse light illuminated the smog from above, penetrating its suffocating gloom and throwing strange, disturbing shadows onto the moving banks of mist. There were cries of alarm from all around, moans of pain; calls for help, for pals, for mothers.

An eddy of wind caught the gas cloud and, for a moment, it thinned. Atkins thought he could make out the shapes of others, before the gas closed in again. He lay back in the mud as far as he could, feeling the jumbled contents of his backpack pressing into his back, and slowly began to pull his right leg from the sucking mud. Men had died getting stuck in this mire. His leg came free with a loud sucking noise. Scrabbling to gain a foothold with his free heel again he levered himself backwards, digging the shoulder butt of his rifle into the ground for extra purchase and slowly drawing his left leg free, almost losing his boot in the process.

Stopping to catch his breath, he noticed the silence. The wailing of the distant bagpipes had ceased. But even more disconcertingly, the guns had stopped. He had grown so used to their incessant roar that their absence now startled him. What the hell was going on?

"Only!"

He turned his body trying to gauge where the sound was coming from.

"Only! Where are you?"

"Over here!"

He could make out things moving in the mist. Three hunched shades with gaunt faces containing empty sockets resolved themselves into solid corporeal soldiers in gas hoods and Battle Order.

"Only!"

It was Porgy, Pot Shot and Lance Sergeant Jessop. Well, it was definitely Pot Shot. There was no mistaking the size of him, or Jessop's stripes.

"You okay, mate?" asked Pot Shot.

"What the hell was that, a mine going up?"

"Dunno, but they might have bloody warned us."

"What the hell's going on?" asked Gutsy joining them. "Why's the firing stopped? D'you think it's a truce?"

"It's bloody eerie, is what it is," said Atkins.

"Hey, maybe it's an armistice, maybe the war is finally over," said Jessop. "I can go home to Maud and little Bertie."

A gentle wind began to worry the edges of the gas cloud. The fog thinned and visibility gradually improved. They saw dazed soldiers picking themselves up off the ground. If that had been a mine and it was British, then they should be pressing home their advantage and taking the Hun trenches while the enemy were still dazed.

"Where's the rest of us?" Atkins asked, looking around.

"Over by that shell hole. Half Pint's trying to calm Ginger down. Lucky, Mercy and Gazette are still out there somewhere. Ketch? Who cares? Sergeant's probably taking the Jerry trenches by himself," said Porgy.