‘I’ve never really thought about it. But that part is easy you know. The big outer circle of friends.’
‘Is it?’
‘Oh yes. It’s the other which is the real luck – what we have. That’s another matter altogether. Things don’t happen like this often in a lifetime.’
‘Have you – do you have other friends who – is it the same with anyone else?’
‘No.’
Hilliard felt a rush of joy and his mouth was filled up with the words he wanted to say, his head rang with them and he could say nothing.
Footsteps went by in the trench outside, voices came softly. Then silence again.
In the end they slept.
At breakfast, just after six, it was dark and still uncannily quiet. The men’s faces were pale, unshaven, their eyes staring. They queued for the bread and rashers of fat bacon, stood or sat about drinking the sweet tea, and there would be nothing to do, once they were in battle order, but stand about again, watching and waiting until their turn came.
Walking along towards the platoon sergeant, Hilliard thought that they all knew there was very little chance of this offensive coming off as planned. In simple geographical terms the odds were against them, even though they had confidence in the strength and accuracy of their artillery. Nobody spoke much above a whisper as the dawn came up. But the sky was clear, pale as a dove’s back, there had been no more rain. Between the trees of Barmelle Wood half a mile away on the ridge, a thin mist parted and for a few moments the November sun came out, so that the morning frost shone silver-white and the whole landscape seemed to spread and thin out and fade in a trick of light.
Holding the hot tin mug of tea, Barton looked up and saw it all and felt suddenly elated; his muscles were stiff from the few cold hours of sleep, he had had a nightmare for the first time since coming to France, full of images of dark green water in which he was drowning, yet now, the knot in his stomach dissolved, he was no longer afraid. He thought of Parkin a few hours before, looked along the line and remembered the hours of work that had gone into the planning of this battle, of the weight of gunpower and manpower behind them, and thought, we can do it, we can do it, Parkin was right, what is there to be afraid of? And the sun has come out, we are in luck. We must be in luck.
He had a vision of them all going over the top of the trench and running forward up the slope, hundreds and hundreds of them.
‘All right?’ Hilliard had come back and was standing for a moment beside him. He looked puzzled.
‘Yes. I really am.’ For he left it, he had a hallucinatory sense of possessing more than one man’s share of strength and confidence and hope. It will be all right.
‘Good.’
‘Look …’ Barton nodded up towards the slope and the wood, to where they could just see Queronne in the lemon-white light.
‘It’s like a Turner canvas.’
Hilliard frowned.
‘No – it is. The sun won’t last but it won’t rain either, and just for now it’s very beautiful. Can’t you see that?’
‘I can see that.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘You.’
‘No, no, I’m fine. I haven’t felt like this for weeks. Don’t worry about me. You must never worry about me again.’
Filled with unease, Hilliard turned away.
A few minutes later the men took up their places all along the trench. At eight, with a roar like the explosion of a volcano, the barrage began from their artillery. The men reeled with the shock of the noise after what had been such an unnaturally long silence. But then, for some time there was a sense of general excitement as they watched the smoke begin to rise up in the direction of the enemy front line, saw the great flashes of flame and fountains of earth as the guns scored direct hits.
Half an hour later the Rifle Brigade on the left flank came out and began to advance in perfect order. As far as Hilliard could see the plain in front of the slope was filled with men, following the barrage, sweeping on without meeting any answering fire. He felt a surge of hope in spite of himself that it was going to work after all, the Surprise Element, that this would be the breakthrough, they would go up the slope and breach the wood, take over the trenches and gun positions before the Germans had recovered from the bombardment, which was now the strongest he had ever known. He looked at his watch. He wanted to go, to have it over with.
The Rifles were still advancing. They were beautiful, Barton thought, standing a dozen yards away behind Private Flannery, they are perfectly ordered, lines unbroken, graceful as horses. They are beautiful.
As the noise of the artillery got louder his excitement seemed to fill his body, took him over entirely so that, when they themselves began to go up and over the top, he was no longer conscious of anything except the urge to move forward, to keep up this almost hysterical sense of pleasure in what was so obviously a perfect battle, so easy, effortless. He felt as though he were standing outside himself, and was surprised at this new person he had become, surprised at everything. He wondered when he would come to.
Where the ground began to slope up the mud gave way to grass here and there. But they could no longer see the men on the right and left flanks because of the denseness of the smoke. Hilliard was separated from Barton and not so far ahead, so that when the rifle and machine gun fire opened up from the enemy guns hidden in Barmelle Wood, he had a better view. He watched their own first line stagger and fall, the men going down one after another on their knees and then, before the smoke closed up, the line immediately behind. It went on like that and after a moment they themselves were caught up in it, and the heavy shells began to come over, the whole division was an open target for the enemy guns. Wave after wave of men came walking into the fire, the ground began to open under their feet, as the howitzers blew up dozens of men at a time.
Hilliard began to try and pull his own section of the line together, as the men fell he began shouting at them to close in, before an attack of coughing from the smoke and fumes forced him to stop, gasping for breath. Four men ahead of him and O’Connor on his right went down in the same burst of machine gun fire and he wondered how it had missed him so neatly. He went on.
After that he lost touch, the men coming up behind overtook his own section and fell in the same places, so that the bodies were piling on top of one another, the shell holes were filled and then new ones opened up, filled again. Once, Hilliard slipped and fell and for a moment thought that he had been hit, but could feel no pain. A Corporal beside him was holding his head between his hands, covering his eyes and rocking silently to and fro. Hilliard crawled over, hunted for his water bottle and got a little of it between the man’s lips, but as it dribbled down his throat, he coughed it up with a great spout of blood, and his head fell forwards. Hilliard left him, got up again. He had no idea how far he had gone, he could see nothing. He thought they had begun to walk into their own artillery barrage, but there was a constant spray of fire from the enemy line. He had a clear picture of the whole English army caught in the neatest, simplest possible trap. Another line of men came up the slope. A Company, he thought, stepping between the – already dead and wounded, walking directly on into the rain of fire, and suddenly, Hilliard wanted to stand up and wave at them, shout, push them back, he saw that it was all useless, that those few who did reach the enemy line would be shot to pieces on their wire. He turned and began to roar at the first man who came towards him but before he was near enough he fell forwards, his knees giving slowly under him and his helmet slipping over his face.
In the end Hilliard gave up and went on because, in the total confusion, it was impossible to know how else to behave. Men were rushing from shell hole to shell hole, completely out of order, trying only to avoid the fire now, and caught every so often running straight out of the way of a bullet into the face of an exploding shell. The cries of the wounded men were drowned in the din but now and again came out piercingly clear in the odd seconds of pause between blasts.
/>
‘Mr Hilliard …’
‘Parkin.’
The man was panting, scrambling to his feet. ‘If you come over here sir, we can get through, there’s a space. We can get into the trees.’
‘Where are we?’
‘To the east a bit, I think, but I haven’t seen any of our own Company for ages. I came back to find someone. Captain Sparrow’s dead, sir, I was going to ask him what to do – I met him, he was sitting down, I thought … Only he was dead. Look, if we go this way.’
They seemed to have lost everyone, to be dodging only among dead bodies and great craters and mounds of turned-up mud and smoke, there might have been no other men left except those who were ahead, still firing the guns. Hilliard followed Parkin, they ducked and ran forward as they could. He wondered again how they were managing to stay alive. Then suddenly they came between the stumps of some trees, dropped down into a shell hole. Parkin scrambled out again.
‘We want to be a bit farther, sir.’
‘Mind we don’t get on to their wire.’
‘No, we’re to the left of it, I think, we’ll be all right in a yard or so.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Luck, sir, it’s all luck.’
‘You’re right about that.’
‘Here. In this hole.’
‘We can’t stick here forever.’
‘What else can we do for the time being, sir? There’s nothing. We’ve lost touch with everyone, we don’t know what’s going on, do we? We’ve got no orders and if we had what good would they be? It’d be hopeless trying to get back now. We’d much better sit tight and wait till dark and then have a go. This is a balls-up, sir.’
‘Quite.’
‘We’ve lost half the bloody Division.’
Hilliard leaned forward, suddenly giddy, tried to reach for his water bottle.
‘You’ve done something to your leg, sir, look …’
‘No.’
‘Well, it’s bleeding.’
‘I’d have known. It’s blood from all the wounded men we’ve been wading through.’
He lifted his head slowly and it felt like a dead weight. He glanced down. A huge patch of his trousers all round the left thigh was dark with blood. He had a sense of having been in this same place, and with this same wound, before, or repeating the same bit of time over and over again. His head swam.
‘I haven’t got a field dressing, sir, I used it up on someone else. But I’ll go and find somebody, I’ll get help.’
‘There isn’t anybody.’
‘I’ll get a dressing anyway. You can have it put on and then we’ll wait here till this lot dies down and I can try to get you back.’
‘Can you?’ It seemed unlikely. Hilliard was feeling no pain at all, only this sensation of lightness, of floating, so that his eyes would not focus and he heard Parkin’s voice as from a great distance down a tunnel.
‘Come on, sir.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Get a bit further down in this hole, sir, you’ll be better off.’
Somehow, Hilliard slithered down on his back.
‘How are you off for water, sir?’
‘I don’t know.’
He felt the man put something to his mouth, swallowed twice, and tasted rum from his own hip flask, warm and curiously sweet, trickling down the back of his throat into his belly.
‘I’ll be back, sir.’
He wanted to agree but as he fell further down the side of the shell hole his face came up against something cold and soft and he felt himself sinking into a whirl of blackness and silence.
The first time he regained consciousness, the gunfire was still going on all around him but it sounded now to be mainly heavy shells. The air stank. He lay, trying to make out where he was, for a moment, and then as he came to, wondered what had happened to Parkin. It was almost dark. Hadn’t he been left out here some time in the morning? He sat up and was sick into the ground at his feet. He had been lying next to a dead man and on top of another – or perhaps more than one. A leg had fallen heavily across his own and when he tried to shift himself, the first real pain he had felt shot through his leg from the foot upwards, making him faint again. As he lost consciousness, he realized that he was thirsty. He could not reach around to find his water bottle.
This time he dreamed, and his dream was of swimming with Beth out beyond the point, in the bay at Hawton. The sun glittered and shone on the wrinkled surface of the water and he felt his body striking easily through it, felt a sense of jubilation, as he saw her moving in front of him. But when he caught up she turned, laughing, and it was not Beth after all, it was David Barton and they were not children, though the day was the same one that Beth had helped him swim out beyond the point because he was afraid. Looking back towards the house, he could see his father sitting in the deckchair on the lawn, wearing a panama hat tipped down over his eyes, hands folded in his lap, he could see the gardener going to and fro with the lawn mower. For a long time he swam slowly beside Barton, and then they lay on their backs and floated, looking up at the sky, pale as paint.
‘When we get back we shall have strawberries.’
‘The smell of strawberries is the most beautiful smell in the world,’ Barton said and Hilliard realized that it was true, that everything Barton said was true. He would never forget about the smell of strawberries, now. They went on floating and the sun shone, burning their skin, the house and the cliffs receded.
‘There’s my father,’ Hilliard said.
‘I like him.’
‘You like everyone.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘I can’t, I can’t. I want to be like you but I can’t.’
‘Oh no, you should be quite happy as you are.’
‘Why? How can I be?’
‘Because it’s easy.’
‘But I don’t like myself much.’
‘Oh, you’re all right, John, you’re all right.’ Barton was laughing. A gull flew over their heads, silver as a bullet, they watched it land and begin to rock on the water.
‘I’d like to be a gull.’
‘You are all right as you are. Listen, I know what I’m saying.’
Hilliard heard Barton’s voice in his ears sounding oddly distorted. ‘You’re all right, you’re all right.’ There was something else he wanted to hear, he wanted to know the answer to a question but he could not remember what it was. And where was Beth? Beth had been here with them, and was no longer here, where was she? She had not liked to swim so far out and he felt suddenly afraid, because he and Barton had not looked after her, had been so absorbed in themselves. Beth was a child, she was eleven years old, she needed them to look after her, most particularly because she was plain and afraid of the water.
On the lawn his father still sat asleep in the deckchair and in the sun-filled bedroom his mother stood before the mirror, admiring herself in the lilac dress and coat. For the wedding. For the wedding.
A terrible noise burst through his head.
His leg had gone numb. He was sick again.
Now it was completely dark and quieter, except for the odd burst of a shell somewhere far in the distance. He felt better, found his flask and drank the last of the rum and then ate two biscuits from his iron ration. But there was no water left in the bottle when he found that. He wondered if he could move, to look for one that might have been beside one of the dead men. When he tried, his leg was terribly painful, but after a moment or two he found that he could get used to it. What had happened to Parkin? Why hadn’t Parkin come back with the dressing? His trousers were stuck to the wound with dried blood and when he moved they began to tear away from it. He still had no idea when he had been hit. He hauled himself up on his hands, trying to get out of the shell hole, but it was raining again and the sides were slippery with mud, he could get no hold at all. His leg hurt so badly that he fell back again, his ears roared.
He came to another time to hear himself cry out and there was an an
swering cry. Someone had come, perhaps Parkin had returned with a dressing, or else it was some stretcher bearers. He did not mind who it was. He called out again. But after a long time, when the answering cry did not come any nearer to him, and when it sounded simultaneously with his own, he knew that it was another man wounded and crying out, probably not even hearing him. They were no help to one another.
Otherwise there seemed to be no life, only death, all around him. The moon had come out for a while and he saw for the first time that he was in fact among a pile of bodies at the bottom of a shell hole, and the revulsion of it made him determine to get up and out somehow, and he found a hold by grasping the shoulders of a dead man and climbing over his back. Once up on to the level ground, he flopped on to his face, exhausted by the pain in his leg and the effort he had made. He smelled a sweet smell and the dream took him again, he was in his own room, the scent of roses came up to him from the garden.
This time it was the rain which brought him round, his head and neck were cold and running with water, his tunic was soaking wet. A Verey flare shot up and as he lifted his head he saw that he was facing out of the wood, looking down the slope in the direction of their own trenches, though they were perhaps half a mile away. He turned over slowly, his leg throbbing, found another biscuit, but when he put it into his mouth, he could not swallow.
He knew now that if he was to get back it would be on his own, there would be no stretcher parties.
Above his head the moon had gone in, the sky was dark and rain-filled again and he did not want to move, he wanted to lie and drown, he could have gone back to sleep and dreamed his dreams of the sun and sea and his mother in the lilac dress, of Beth and David Barton.
Barton.
He sat up, his heart pounding. He was quite clear headed. Where was Barton? He had been further down the line and a little way behind. Hilliard had not seen him since they first went over the top. Where was he? He had to get back, he had to see him.
He got to his knees and tried to stand. Toppled over again at once. In the end he began to crawl, resting and then dragging himself forward, putting his whole weight on his arms, resting again. Several times he lost consciousness, he did not know for how long. From somewhere a shout. He shouted back. Nothing.