Lovely War(42)

They wove through artillery mounds, field kitchens, and wound clearing stations, past live horses and dead horses and trucks and motorcycles. From time to time, in a lazy sort of way, artillery shells sailed over from the German lines and exploded, sending up geysers of dirt.

One landed close enough for them to feel its impact, and a few of the new men screamed.

“That’s nothing,” the sergeant said. “Just a bump. Didn’t even knock you over.” He pointed. “See that black smoke? That’s a Jack Johnson. Like the American prizefighter, you know. Big black chappie. You’ll learn how to spot ’em from the noise they make.”

Soon walls of earth rose around them. As a boy, James had visited grand old country estates, where for a penny you could wander through a garden maze of high hedges. He’d hated them, though they, at least, were made of flowering bushes, and country gardeners never shot trench mortars.

This labyrinth wound on and on. The dark corridors turned at right angles every couple of yards, so you never knew if you were in step with the others unless you ran into them, or they collided with you. The narrow passageways couldn’t fit two people abreast, so they flattened against the wall to let stretcher-bearers pass by.

“What’s the matter, soldier?” Sergeant McKendrick watched James stare at a groaning man on a stretcher with blood seeping through his shirt. “This is a quiet sector. You wait.”

“Try not to look shocked,” Mason told him quietly. “It doesn’t help to look green here.”

James lost all sense of direction. He tried to picture the diagrams he’d seen in training at étaples. Zigzag front firing lines, then support lines, then reserve lines, all more or less parallel, with communication trenches running between them like filaments in a spider’s web. Behind the reserve trenches, a row of heavy guns, manned by artillery gunners. The little shoots that ran off the front firing line trenches into no-man’s-land to spy on Jerry were called saps. What did it matter what name you called it? A trench by any other name would smell as sweet, right?

These smelled like rotting human flesh, urine, and feces. And cheap cigarettes.

The path opened up to a right turn, revealing a wider trench. It felt less like a passageway and more like a chairless waiting room where grubby men stood in an endless queue to see a dentist. Some soldiers had stretched themselves out on their packs or on sandbags to sleep.

Here Sergeant McKendrick addressed them. “Home sweet home, lads,” he said. “You’ll spend ten days here in reserve, then move up to the support lines. Ten days there, and you’ll move up to the Front. After that, if all goes well, you’ll get a few days’ rest.”

Thirty days in the trenches. Could rest mean leave and seeing Hazel?

“Of course,” added the sergeant, “if the Germans attack, the whole plan goes bugger up.” He looked around. “Well, lads, make yourselves at home. The old-timers here can fill you in. They’re Thirty-Ninth Division, just like you. Second Section. Now, take a load off your feet until lunchtime, and after that we’ll have gas mask training.” And he was gone.

The other soldiers peeled themselves off the trench walls where they’d been leaning and came over to sniff out the new additions to the wolf pack.

“Welcome home, me darlings,” said one, a lanky, wiry fellow. “What’d you bring me?”

Billy, Chad, and Mick eyed one another. James looked at Frank Mason for some hint.

Mason pulled a cigarette tin from his pocket. “Box open.” Billy, Chad, Mick, and James stared. Five or six experienced soldiers, standing by, wasted no time crowding in around Mason and grabbing at his Woodbines, with calls of “Thanks, mate” and “There’s a chum.”

“Box shut.” Mason pocketed the tin. The soldiers who didn’t get any weren’t bitter.

Chad whispered in James’s ear. “Nobody told us we were supposed to bring a bribe.”

“I’m Frank Mason,” Frank told the 2nd Section lads. “What’s it like up there?”

“Pretty quiet,” said a stocky, broad-faced soldier. “Benji Packer. We don’t hear much from Fritz except at stand-down and stand-to, and even then, his heart’s not in it.”

James was puzzled. “But then, what’ve we been hearing all day?”

The 2nd Section men laughed. “What’s your name, kid?”

“James Alderidge,” he said. “From Essex.”

“It’s German artillery,” Packer said. “But that’s just Fritz having a sneeze now and then.”

Another soldier took a drag on his cigarette. “You wait till he really catches cold.”

“Tell you what, though,” said the taller, wiry fellow. “Something’s cooking. I overheard the adjutant talking to Feetham—”

James interrupted. “Feetham?”

Several heads turned his way, as if this were an embarrassing question. “Brigadier General Feetham,” said a heavily freckled soldier. “CO of the Thirty-Ninth.”

Adjutant: a captain and aide to the CO, commanding officer. Brigadier general: head of a brigade, or in this case, a division. So, the adjutant was aide to Brigadier General Feetham.

At least, James was fairly sure that was how it worked.

“The Fifth Army’s line keeps spreading,” said the chap in the know. “They’ve given us too many miles to cover. We’re stretched too thin. Don’t have enough soldiers to defend it. That’s why they hurried you boys into the army and up to the Front.”