"Archer, Jeffrey - As the Crow Flies v0.9(txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Archer Jeffrey)

Within another mile they had both witnessed so many stretchers, so many bodies and so many limbs no longer attached to bodies that no one had the stomach for jokes. The battalion, it became clear, had arrived at what the newspapers called the "Western Front." No war correspondent, however, could have described the gloom that pervaded the air, or the look of hopelessness ingrained on the faces of anyone who had been there for more than a few days.

Charlie stared out at the open fields that must once have been productive farmland. All that remained was the odd burned-out farmhouse to mark the spot where civilization had once existed. There was still no sign of the enemy. He tried to take in the surrounding countryside that was to be his home during the months that lay ahead if he lived that long. Every soldier knew that average life expectancy at the front was seventeen days.

Charlie left his men resting in their tents while he set out to do his own private tour. First he came across the reserve trenches a few hundred yards in front of the hospital tents, known as the "hotel area" as they were a quarter of a mile behind the front line, where each soldier spent four days without a break before being allowed four days of rest in the reserve trenches. Charlie strolled on up to the front like some visiting tourist who was not involved in a war. He listened to the few men who had survived for more than a few weeks and talked of "Blighty" and prayed only for a "cushy wound" so they could be moved to the nearest hospital tent and, if they were among the lucky ones, eventually be sent home to England.

As the stray bullets whistled across no man's land, Charlie fell on his knees and crawled back to the reserve trenches, to brief his platoon on what they might expect once they were pushed forward another hundred yards.

The trenches, he told his men, stretched from horizon to horizon and at any one time could be occupied by ten thousand troops. In front of them, about twenty yards away, he had seen a barbed-wire fence some three feet high which an old corporal told him had already cost a thousand lives of those who had done nothing more than erect it. Beyond that lay no man's land, consisting of five hundred acres once owned by an innocent family caught in the center of someone else's war. Beyond that lay the Germans' barbed wire, and beyond that still the Germans, waiting for them in their trenches.

Each army, it seemed, lay in its own sodden, ratinfested dugouts for days, sometimes months, waiting for the other side to make a move. Less than a mile separated them. If a head popped up to study the terrain, a bullet followed from the other side. If the order was to advance, a man's chances of completing twenty yards would not have been considered worth chalking up on a bookie's blackboard. If you reached the wire there were two ways of dying; if you reached the German trenches, a dozen.

If you stayed still, you could die of cholera, chlorine gas, gangrene, typhoid or trench foot that soldiers stuck bayonets through to take away the pain. Almost as many men died behind the lines as did from going over the top, an old sergeant told Charlie, and it didn't help to know that the Germans were suffering the same problems a few hundred yards away.

Charlie tried to settle his ten men into a routine. They carried out their daily duties, bailed water out of their trenches, cleaned equipment even played football to fill the hours of boredom and waiting. Charlie picked up rumors and counter-rumors of what the future might hold for them. He suspected that only the colonel seated in HQ, a mile behind the lines, really had much idea of what was going on.

Whenever it was Charlie's turn to spend four days in the advance trenches, his section seemed to occupy most of their time filling their billycans with pints of water, as they struggled to bail out the gallons that dropped daily from the heavens. Sometimes the water in the trenches would reach Charlie's kneecaps.

"The only reason I didn't sign up for the navy was because I couldn't swim," Tommy grumbled. "And no one warned me I could drown just as easily in the army.,

Even soaked, frozen and hungry, they somehow remained cheerful. For seven weeks Charlie and his section endured such conditions, waiting for fresh orders that would allow them to advance. The only advance they learned of during that time was von Ludendorff's The German general had caused the Allies to retreat some forty miles, losing four hundred thousand men while another eighty thousand were captured. Captain Trentham was generally the bearer of such news, and what annoyed Charlie even more was that he always looked so smart, clean and worse warm and well fed.

Two men from his own section had already died without even seeing the enemy. Most soldiers would have been only too happy to go over the top, as they no longer believed they would survive a war some were saying would last forever. The boredom was broken only by bayoneting rats, bailing more water out of the trench or having to Fisten to Tommy repeat the same old melodies on a now rusty mouth organ.

It wasn't until the ninth week that orders finally came through and they were called back to the manmade square. The colonel, monocle in place, once again briefed them from his motionless horse. The Royal Fusiliers were to advance on the German lines the following morning, having been given the responsibility for breaking through their northern flank. The Irish Guards would give them support from the right flank, while the Welsh would advance from the left.

"Tomorrow will be a day of glory for the Fusiliers," Colonel Hamilton assured them. "Now you must rest as the battle will commence at first light."

On returning to the trenches, Charlie was surprised to find that the thought of at last being involved in a real fight had put the men in better humor. Every rifle was stripped, cleaned, greased, checked and then checked again, every bullet placed carefully into its magazine, every Lewis gun tested, oiled and retested and then the men finally shaved before they faced the enemy. Charlie's first experience of a razor was in near freezing water.

No man finds it easy to sleep the night before a battle, Charlie had been told, and many used the time to write long letters to their loved ones at home, some even had the courage to make a will. Charlie wrote to Posh Porky he wasn't sure why asking her to take care of Sal, Grace and Kitty if he didn't return. Tommy wrote to no one, and not simply because he couldn't write. At midnight Charlie collected all the section's efforts and handed them in a bundle to the orderly of ficer.

Bayonets were carefully sharpened, then fixed; hearts began to beat faster as the minutes passed, and they waited in silence for the command to advance. Charlie's own feelings raced between terror and exhilaration, as he watched Captain Trentham strolling from platoon to platoon to deliver his final briefing. Charlie downed in one gulp the tot of rum that was handed out to all the men up and down the trenches just before a battle.

A Second Lieutenant Makepeace took his place behind Charlie's trench, another officer he had never met. He looked like a fresh-faced schoolboy and introduced himself to Charlie as one might do to a casual acquaintance at a cocktail parry. He asked Charlie to gather the section together a few yards behind the line so he could address them. Ten cold, frightened men climbed out of their trench and listened to the young officer in cynical silence. The day had been specially chosen because the meteorologists had assured them that the sun would rise at five fifty-three and there would be no rain. The meteorologists would prove to be right about the sun, but as if to show their fallibility at four-eleven a steady drizzle began. "A German drizzle," Charlie suggested to his comrades. "And whose side is God on, anyway?"

Lieutenant Makepeace smiled thinly. They waited for a Verey pistol to be fired, like some referee blowing a whistle before hostilities could officially commence.

"And don't forget, 'bangers and mash' is the password," said Lieutenant Makepeace. "Send it down the line."

At five fifty-three, as a blood-red sun peeped over the horizon, a Verey pistol was fired and Charlie looked back to see the sky lit up behind him.

Lieutenant Makepeace leaped out of the trench and cried, "Follow me, men. "

Charlie climbed out after him and, screaming at the top of his voice more out of fear than bravado charged towards the barbed wire.

The lieutenant hadn't gone fifteen yards before the first bullet hit him, but somehow he still managed to carry on until he reached the wire. Charlie watched in horror as Makepeace fell across the barbed barrier and another burst of enemy bullets peppered his motionless body. Two brave men changed direction to rush to his aid, but neither of them even reached the wire. Charlie was only a yard behind them, and was about to charge through a gap in the barrier when Tommy overtook him. Charlie turned, smiled, and that was the last dining he remembered of the battle of the Lys.

Two days later Charlie woke up in a hospital tent, some three hundred yards behind the line, to find a young girl in a dark blue uniform with a royal crest above her heart hovering over him. She was talking to him. He knew only because her lips were moving: but he couldn't hear a word she said. Thank God, Charlie thought, I'm still alive, and surely now I'll be sent back to England. Once a soldier had been certified medically deaf he was always shipped home. King's Regulations.