The Horizon (1993) (43 page)

Major Dyer’s C Company, bayonets fixed, waited on the firestep for the order. The survivors from Conway’s company were detailed to carry ammunition when they went, and a young R.M.A. lieutenant named Jason Ellis had taken Maxted’s place with the H.Q. platoon.

Payne tugged at his chinstrap and muttered, ‘Not before time,’ as the rear artillery began to fire long-range onto the German support lines. ‘Give ’em a bloody headache!’

There was so much smoke that it was hard to tell how the first wave was getting on. Machine-guns were firing again, but on the other sector, where men would be dying, screaming as they fell into the wire they had been promised would be destroyed.

Wyke glanced towards the colonel as his face glowed in profile in another explosion. ‘Are we going now, sir?’

Jonathan turned. There’s nothing here for us.’ Then, as if afraid something might change his mind, he raised his whistle, and throughout the company other whistles replied.

‘
Over the top!
’ For a few seconds more Jonathan pressed his fingers into the half-frozen sand of a torn sack. Inside his mind a voice cried out like a lost soul.
I’m afraid
.
I’m
afraid
.
Help me
.

But the voice which answered refused to acknowledge it.

‘
Forward
,
Marines!
Forward!
’

Then with the others he was running and wading through the mud, past and over the bodies of men he had known, ducking and twisting as rifle-fire sang amongst them. Here and there someone fell, and he heard McCann bellow ‘At ’em, me beauties!’ One marine swung round, his teeth bared like a wild animal’s as figures loomed through the smoke, until Timbrell shouted, ‘It’s us! You bloody madman, Bidmead!’

Slowly and with relentless care, the strengthening light
spread itself across a vast, devastated panorama. Marines ran from cover to cover, one pausing to empty his rifle into a small hole where some Germans had been cut off from the other wire, where they had probably been sniping at the infantry. Then a grenade, tossed as casually as a man throws a ball to his young son, finished it.

Dyer was yelling, ‘Reload!
Reload, damn you!
’ Then he fell, blood spurting from his throat as the life left him. The last stretch. Marines flung more grenades to keep the defenders’ heads down; and Jonathan heard the snap of cutters as the remaining wire broke under them, and they were through.

If the Germans in this one of a network of trenches and bunkers attempted to take cover they were driven to earth, where the grenades turned their holes into traps of blood. Others caught on the firestep fell back under the bayonets, the knives and the other murderous weapons that turned civilised men into beasts for as long as they could use them.

Then bruised, bloody and gasping for breath, they fired into the air and cheered. It had become lighter still, and nobody had noticed it. Ralph Vaughan, his helmet gone, a bloody wound on his cheek, was coming toward him. ‘
We took it
,
sir!
Reinforcements should be here any any moment!’

But Jonathan was staring round. ‘Where’s the adjutant? He was with me.’

Payne said roughly, ‘Here, sir.’ They stood aside as Jonathan slipped his arm around Wyke’s shoulders and tried to lift him. He had fallen on the parapet, his horizon, and lay with one outthrust hand still gripping his revolver.

Jonathan said harshly, ‘I want him taken to a dressing-station!’ He was staring around at the other world as order and discipline took over.

Vaughan said, ‘No use, sir. He’s gone.’

Jonathan stood with effort. One bullet. That was all it took. It had gone through Wyke’s breast pocket, puncturing the steel mirror he always carried there, and the photograph of his girl.

Vaughan suddenly exclaimed, ‘Colonel! You’ve been hit!’

He glanced down at his leg and the blood pumping over his boot. He had felt nothing, and even now it was more like the bursting of an old wound.

He gasped, ‘Don’t let me fall, Harry. Not now, after everything they’ve done!’

The marines parted to let them pass, some with their eyes averted when they saw where the tell-tale blood had marked him down. Payne held him tightly, his eyes stinging when some of his men saluted, or reached out and touched him.

He had called him
Harry.
And it mattered.

Stretcher-bearers were already picking their way through the mud and the bodies of the living and the dead. Occasionally they would stop and retrieve one. But not too many, it appeared.

Vaughan waited until they had forced the colonel onto one of the stretchers.

‘Go with him, Payne. He’ll need you even more now.’

Jonathan opened his eyes as a medical orderly fastened a shell dressing around his leg. The rain, which had not stopped, made him feel clean again.

To Vaughan he said, ‘Take care of them, Ralph. It would have been yours anyway.’

Vaughan said nothing, deeply moved although he did not understand.

Payne watched the orderly’s grim features as he made the dressing fast, until eventually the other man became aware of his hostile scrutiny and raised his head. Then he grinned, and gave a thumbs-up.

Jonathan tried to see more clearly through the pain and the rain on his face. ‘What’s happening?’

Payne slung his rifle, and hung the colonel’s helmet on the muzzle. Then he fell in step with the two stretcher-bearers, and thought what a short distance they had come, only a few hours ago. Yet so many lay dead on every hand.

He cleared his throat and answered quietly, ‘Going home, sir. That’s what.’

In November 1917 the great push along the Ypres front came to a halt. The British armies did not succeed in taking the higher ground, where the exhausted troops might have found some relief from the freezing mud and relentless rain. The coming of winter and the disastrous weather proved to be as savage an enemy as the barbed wire, the gas and the perpetual bombardment by artillery.

Despite all the suffering and death the army never broke, nor was it defeated. There was simply no way forward any more; neither was there hope of a new offensive. When the June attacks were begun Zeebrugge had been thirty-five miles from the Ypres sector. When the offensive of 1917 ended in November, it was still over thirty miles away.

No armies had ever fought in such conditions before, and their record of courage and sacrifice remains unmatched. In less than five months the British armies fighting alongside their Empire cousins lost another
quarter of a million men, killed, maimed and missing. It is almost beyond belief that in that same short period of the war another thirty-five thousand men vanished altogether, drowned in the sea of mud, forgotten, and left to die alone and undiscovered. A missing army, and a lost generation.