The First Casualty (28 page)

FOURTY-ONE

Going up the line

In order for Kingsley to go in pursuit of the missing gun he had to make his way from Armentières to the town of Ypres itself, and beyond that into the forward trenches of the British attack. It was a hard journey indeed: there was no vehicle available for him to commandeer and even had he been able to do so he would have got no further with it than he managed aboard the various lifts that he found. The roads were swollen with a massive and continual traffic of men, machines and horse-drawn transportation, all rattling over those same crippling cobbles that the Tommies cursed with such venom. In fact the going was shortly to get much rougher, but if anyone had told Kingsley this during the first mile or so of his travels he would have asked how it
could
get any rougher.

Axles broke, horses slipped, men shouted and swore like the troopers they were. The entire army seemed to have taken to the roads but to have no particular idea why they had done so or what their hoped-for destination might be. Road marshals were everywhere attempting to impose some order on the chaos, but their efforts appeared to be entirely ineffectual. They were not, of course; slowly but surely men and equipment were moving up the line and a lesser trickle of the same was moving back from it. But for a detective in a hurry it was frustrating indeed.

The famous town of Ypres was no longer a town at all but simply a pile of rubble. The Cloth Hall, a proud symbol of medieval commerce that had for so many centuries embodied the quiet, civilized prosperity of the region, had been almost totally destroyed. Kingsley had in his desk at home (or at least it had still been there on the day he left for gaol) a postcard which his brother Robert had sent to him in 1915, when he had been engaged in the Second Battle of Ypres. It was a French print showing the Cloth Hall half destroyed and partially covered with scaffolding. Above the photograph was printed
La Grande Guerre 1914 — 15
—
Aspect des Halles d’Ypres après le bombardement
. Now the war was two years older and the Cloth Hall had ceased to exist at all. It was strange for Kingsley to think of Robert traversing this same ground, pistol and swagger stick in hand, touching these same bricks as Kingsley himself now stumbled over. He had survived it too and lived to fight another day. Not many more, but some.

Beyond what had once been Ypres there was nothing. Nothing at all.

Kingsley had never dreamed of or imagined such desolation. There were names upon a map, names of places through which he was passing and towards which he was heading. He had heard these names many times — what Briton, Canadian or Australian had not? Menin Road and Château Wood were places in which Allied forces had fought and died for nearly three whole years,’ but now that he had arrived at them, there was nothing. Not a single feature left save the vaguely discernible pathways across the desolation that the brave sappers had made and remade so many times over the years. Nothing else: no tree, no house, no hedge, no wall. Not one single stone or brick stood upright upon another. Not one single leaf or bud was attached to a twig. Only mud and water, and in amongst it men and horses, making their way along the barely existent pathways. Walking on the bones of last year’s battalions, who slept just beneath the surface of the mud with the battalions of the year before beneath them.

Nineteen fourteen, 1915, 1916 and now 1917, every year a new crop of bodies sown across what had once been the pleasant fields of Flanders.

If you want the old battalion
,

We know where they are
,

Kingsley could not help singing that sad refrain beneath his breath as he made his way along the duckboards.

They’re hangin’ on the old barbed wire
.

It was late afternoon before he finally found himself amongst the guns, rank upon rank of howitzers standing just behind the lines. Their job it was to pulverize the enemy’s wire and trenches, to harry him constantly and, before a big push, to destroy him ahead of the infantry, laying down a creeping barrage just in front of the advancing men. As it was still light there was little obvious activity amongst the guns; almost everything that happened at the front happened at night, in an effort to conceal movements from the enemy’s spotters. As Kingsley passed by, the artillerymen were to be seen inside their trenches and dugouts, some getting what sleep they could on the wet boards that were their home.

Now Kingsley exchanged mud at ground level for mud six feet beneath it as he entered the trench system proper and began his final approach to the front. First he descended into the reserve trench. There he found men who were either being rotated forward into the line or back towards their billets in the ruined villages and farmhouses immediately to the rear, or perhaps even for a proper ‘rest’ out of range of the firing line. Men tended to spend an average of a fortnight commuting between the billets and the front before being pulled back for six days’ rest. It was not difficult to see, from the faces and condition of the men, which were going forward and which were heading back.

Kingsley was now only a hundred yards from the front but the going was very slow. First he had to traverse along the reserve trench in order to reach a communications trench that would take him up to the support line. The trenches were fashioned in a zigzag pattern resembling a series of cogs; viewed from the air, they would appear like a battlement stretched out across the ground. This design was to minimize the effect of the blast from a shell landing directly in a trench and exploding out along it, or of the enemy getting in and setting up a machine gun which could then rake all along the line. A sensible precaution indeed, but it made for heavy going. As Kingsley found himself constantly twisting and turning, rounding corner after corner, he felt deeply for the soldiers who had to navigate this labyrinthine swamp every day, carrying sixty pounds of kit. There were rats everywhere, as big as cats, swimming in the water, scurrying along the parapet, running across the men as they sat in their funk holes trying to get a little sleep before the exertions of the night. It was said that only three things lived amongst the trenches: rats, lice and men. Such was the company that man, with his divine inspiration, had arranged for himself to keep.

He eventually arrived at a communications trench and so turned away at right angles from the reserve and headed out towards the support trench that lay between him and the front. As he scuttled along this communication line Kingsley encountered an overpowering smell of chloride of lime mixed with excrement, and realized that he had not opened his bowels since he had taken part in the communal dump in the field beside his horse truck on the journey out. Perhaps it was the smell or the occasional whiz and crack of ordnance overhead, perhaps it was the advice he had been given ‘never under any circumstances to miss the opportunity for a shit’; whatever the reason, suddenly he was overtaken by a desperate need to relieve himself, so he took a swampy detour into a latrine cutting. The sanitary arrangements consisted of a series of pits approached by a short trench cut out from the one he was traversing. In the pits were buckets and one or two large biscuit tins, all filled with the men’s slurry, waiting to be emptied by the sappers under cover of darkness. Kingsley made his way along the slit and selected a bucket. Pulling up his greatcoat and undoing his trousers, he squatted down in the pouring rain. One or two other men were doing likewise.

‘There’s an officer sanitary facility just up at the reserve, sir,’ a lance corporal said, having clearly noted Kingsley’s captain’s pips.

Kingsley could not help but smile at the incongruous use of language; if there was one word that did not apply to an inch of the Western Front, it was sanitary.

‘I’m happy to use your facility if you have no objection,’ he replied.

‘You’re very welcome, sir. But don’t linger, eh? It never takes Fritz long to spot where we’ve dug our closets and this one’s been here a week.’

The corporal left and, thus spurred on, Kingsley attempted to finish his business without delay. There was no paper or water to wash with save for the lime-rich puddles at his feet, so Kingsley had simply to pull up his trousers and belt and move on. He realized that men whose dugouts were often literally shorn up with the rotting corpses of fallen comrades soon got used to doing without the usual niceties, but for Kingsley it felt most uncomfortable not to wipe his backside or wash his hands.

After wading back into the communications trench and turning once more towards the enemy, Kingsley soon found himself in the support line. Here men were stationed whose job it was to supply, cover and replace the men in the front in the event of an attack by the Germans, or occupy the front in the event of an attack of our own. All was in quite good order: there were sandbags and decent boards to walk on, Kingsley noted, and rubbish chutes and gas alarms, rifle racks and properly supported funk holes. However, considering that the British line was supposed to be moving forward in an epic push, he thought that these were worryingly stable-looking arrangements and testimony to the lack of progress being made.

The men who were not still sleeping sat or stood about looking to their kit, cooking a tin of something (if they had any food, and fuel to warm it), cleaning up and engaging in the constant battle that was every bit as much a part of their lives as fighting the Germans: the war on lice. Lice were no respecters of rank, and officers and men simply crawled with them. Even in the short time he had been amongst these troops Kingsley could feel that he himself had collected the beginnings of the usual infestation. He watched as men ran matches and lighted cigarettes along the seams and folds of their garments, listening to the satisfying crackle of popping insects.

‘You might kill a thousand,’ a trooper said to Kingsley as he passed, ‘but a million will come to the funeral.’

Kingsley smiled.

‘I’m looking for Captain Edmonds,’ he said.

‘Keep going,’ the man replied. ‘Him and his mob is up the sharp end. Moved back up yesterday.’

Kingsley thanked the man and was about to move on when a shell burst some ten yards behind the trench. Kingsley ducked down but the men around him scarcely moved.

‘Don’t mind about that, Captain,’ the lice-killer said with a smile. ‘I reckon he chucked two or three hundred of those over yesterday and not a man scratched. He’s looking for the latrine,’ see — don’t half help you get your shit out.’

Kingsley pushed on, turning the corner of another zigzag tooth in the trench, leaving a platoon of around fifty men behind him. Then almost immediately there was another tremendous explosion, such as Kingsley had never experienced before. The concussion thudded into his eardrums like a sledgehammer in the side of the head and he felt a searing pain. The bang was followed by a brief silence and then came the screaming.

Kingsley turned back to look into the section of trench through which he had just passed. Had he not turned a sandbagged corner, he would surely have been a part of the terrible sight that now he witnessed. A high explosive shell had got in amongst the men and the carnage was beyond belief. Of the fifty men whom Kingsley had just passed through — men who had been cooking, cleaning and killing lice five seconds earlier — at least ten were dead, fifteen more were dying and scarcely a man amongst them had escaped a serious wound. The walls of the trench were crimson with blood, body parts were everywhere and, glancing down at his uniform, Kingsley discovered that he had been showered with what the soldiers called ‘wet dust’, the flying flesh and brains that a moment before had been a part of living men. He could see what was left of the man who had given him directions. He had taken a dreaded ‘abdominal’; his guts were blown away, and the surgeons would not even attempt to treat him. The man was pleading with a comrade to shoot him there and then.

‘Let’s wait for the MO, eh?’ Kingsley heard the comrade say, but it was obvious to all that no good news could be expected from that source.

As whistles blew and stretcher teams began to hurry past him, Kingsley struggled to resist the temptation to turn and run. To get out of that appalling place as fast as his legs could carry him. He was terrified, terrified in a way that was new to him. Kingsley’s courage had always been based on the quiet confidence —
arrogant
confidence, he now realized — that he had in his own abilities. He was a man who could think and who could fight and,’ what was more, he could do both at the same time better than almost any man he had ever met. His survival instincts were taut and honed and if any man was equipped to triumph over danger it was him. But that was all very well in the usual way of things, when men made choices and planned their actions. But this, this utterly arbitrary killing over which no intellect, no matter how mighty, could exert the slightest influence had revealed a huge gap in Kingsley’s armour. This was a situation in which genius and fool were reduced to levels of complete equality. Brave man, coward, cautious, reckless, it did not matter, for here men were truly swatted like flies. The only thing in that trench which determined whether a man would live or die was fate.

‘Every bullet has its billet,’ the boys would say.

You simply had to trust to luck.

Nothing could have been more alien to Kingsley’s character.

Struggling to contain his rising nausea and master his churning bowels, he turned away from the dreadful scene and moved on in the direction he had been heading, in search of the last communications trench that would deliver him into the front line. It was there, as night fell on the waterlogged army, that Kingsley finally found Captain Edmonds. He was sitting in a small dugout along with two lieutenants, eating bully beef which a servant was warming for them over a spirit stove.