Part One
I
The sudden silence was immense. Its heavy intensity pushed me to my knees in the filthy mud, where I stayed immobile for what seemed like an eternity.
The lack of sound seemed complete, but it wasn’t; it was just that the guns had stopped. The fading thunder of the last roars of those now unemployed weapons rolled across the sky and disappeared.
There were still noises. Horses progressed in their lines past me, their harnesses jingling and creaking. Wagons squealed by, full of pinch-faced, rotten-toothed, laughing boys who had behaved as men for far too long. Birds sang. Soldiers talked.
And what did they talk about?
Home, of course. What they were going to do now the war was over.
The shock of survival was painted all over their ugly, wonderful faces. They had lived. They had got through it. In truth, I think most of them were only just coming to terms with this rather than wondering about what was next. They seemed lost, if anything. There were no obvious celebrations I can recall.
As for myself, I just remember that morning as a time of nothing. No thoughts. No feelings of what I had seen, what I had done. Of the men I’d killed or the friends I’d lost. There had been too many.
Even at that early stage of my new life, I was beginning to disregard them, to forget them. I had lived. They had died. War had thrown its fickle dice and they had lost, whereas I had won. It was as simple as that. Fate did not come into it, just luck. Pure, blind luck had seen me through to the end, or so I then believed, and the intense comradeship which warfare brings about had almost instantly disappeared. The only real memory I have of the eleventh of November 1918 was the sudden silence of those guns. And that I was hungry.
I eventually got to my feet and looked about for something to eat.
I spied some smoke in the distance and stepped through the recumbent throngs of khaki-clad, filthy individuals towards a rough fire which some of my lads had got going. The smell of the frying meat made my nostrils twitch as I neared.
There were four soldiers hunched over the fire, poking at it in a desultory manner. One of them noticed me and grinned, showing filthy teeth.
‘Alright, Sarge?’ he asked. ‘Smelled the bacon, eh?’
I nodded. My mouth was watering. The young lad, clad in a motley collection of rags that had once been a uniform, scratched his head vigorously, dislodging lice by the bucket load. We were all covered in the little bastards. He handed me some bacon on a broken plate which had been swiped from the remains of one of the houses in the decimated village around us.
The other soldiers nodded at me as I caught their gaze, but they didn’t smile. They didn’t want me to stay. They didn’t want me near them, I could tell. I didn’t blame them.
‘Ta, Shanksy,’ I said to the young lad and moved away to sit by the road and watch the endless columns rumble by, stuffing the hot bacon into my willing mouth.
The noise of the columns—men, horses, even the occasional bellowing tank—soothed me. I didn’t like the missing sounds. The silence of the guns unnerved me; it didn’t seem natural.
I watched the columns and it slowly dawned on me that this was my new life. I would now watch, not do. I had become a watcher of life, no longer a dispenser of death. Like the guns, I was unemployed. Surplus to requirement. Pointless.
I polished off my bacon and threw the plate down, where it broke and mingled with the scattered glass and ruptured brickwork.
German POWs were now marching by. Their uniforms were rags, they were like skeletons. They walked towards a future even bleaker than my own: although at the time neither they, nor I, knew this.
It was over.
This single thought began to pound incessantly in my head as I watched the battered Germans shuffle past me. It was over. Four years of my life.
*
‘Over!’
The officers’ whistles squealed, and we scrambled up the side of the trench. To my left, one of the ladders snapped and two men fell back onto the mud-smeared duckboards. There was hysterical laughter from their comrades as the sergeant kicked and shouted at them until they got to their feet and went up another ladder. I walked forward into a sudden maelstrom.
Three men on my right went down instantly, one of them screaming shrilly. I knew them all: Archie Thompson, Bobby Cooper and George ‘Dilly’ Dilson. It was Dilly who was screaming.
Half his face had been torn away by the enemy machine gun fire. I remember the one eye left in that horror mask staring at me with a terror I could comprehend only too well. I stepped around his gutted, dying body, ignoring the utterly still forms of the other two. I went on, leaving them on the hard ground.
It was like being surrounded by angry, invisible bees. Bullets tore all around me, the warm air fluttering and buzzing from their intensity. The line of men was being cut down all over; in twos, in threes, or single men falling.
Some of them were flung backwards, some of them crumpled slowly. Some of them screamed like Dilly, some of them made not one sound. It was totally random. The noise of the machine guns and the death they unleashed was overpowering.
Our artillery guns joined in the cacophony, still firing from behind our lines in a blistering barrage even though they were supposed to have stopped by now. I swear some of the shells were no more than five feet above my head. I had to duck more than once. They roared or screamed or thundered forward, smashing and crashing down two hundred yards in front of us.
I kept going, trying to concentrate only on following the orders of the officers and sergeants as they urged us forward.
Ahead of me, I got my first glimpse of the trench we were supposed to take. The yards of twisted barbed wire did not seem at all troubled by the week-long bombardment it had been subjected to. It was a tangled, jagged trap, waiting for us, its prey.
I registered a flash of smoke-laden sunlight on a steaming gun barrel and took one more step. Then someone punched my chest three times in rapid succession, and I was slammed to the artillery-ploughed earth. I lay with the corpses of my comrades.
I stared up at the suddenly clear blue sky. Boots tramped past me, accompanied by harsh, frightened breathing. They were moving forward without me. I tried to speak, to urge them on or to beg for help, I don’t now know. They left me. The blasts from the shells moved on.
A swallow flitted above me, still hunting for food over the savage games of the fools below. I coughed and something warm and wet spattered onto my face. A whining sound came to my ears and I thought it must be a shell coming in towards me, even though they were moving away. I felt no pain. I was simply short of breath and tired. I just needed a little nap, that was all. The whining noise grew louder and overcame me.
The sky turned black…
*
A hand on my shoulder brought me back to the village. I looked up and realised Captain Greene had been talking to me, asking me something. I scrambled to my feet.
‘Sorry, sir. I was daydreaming there for a second.’
Greene nodded, a smile on his face.
He was, like all of us there, a young man: younger than me and I was only twenty-two. But his eyes held the shadow of what he had seen in his years of war. It had scarred him, even if nothing showed physically.
‘That’s all right, sergeant. It’s nice to have the freedom to do so.’
He looked around the destroyed village, then at the never-ending columns winding slowly past us. Eventually, he turned back to me.