To End All Wars Read online

  Liversby didn’t appear to be particularly disappointed, and Forrester wondered whether the game was his sole motive for visiting. “Aren’t you two out on a stunt tonight?” he enquired, as though it was a pleasant night-time stroll he was referring to.

  “Not until one,” Forrester told him, more curtly than he’d intended.

  “Bad luck, at any rate,” Liversby acknowledged, and now there was a note of empathy in his voice. “Not an abundance of sense to it, if you ask me.”

  No one, of course, had asked Liversby. Nor had they asked Forrester or Middleton. The order had come from the battalion major, two nights ago, but Forrester had received the impression that even he had only the most basic of says in the matter. He had shown the decency to seem faintly surprised by his own news.

  They’d all known for months that the push was coming. There was no way to discreetly prepare for battle on such a scale, and even if there had been, discretion was not in the British Army’s nature. Men had been gathering since early spring, and with them, artillery and supplies, the endless paraphernalia of war drawing down upon this narrow tract of land. They knew what was coming, and surely the enemy did too. Had anyone remained in ignorance, this last week of torrential barrage would have shaken them from their complacency.

  However, battle had the advantage of allowing for a certain anonymity. Even having been through the experience, one could not imagine oneself as a participant in so immense an event. A raid was an altogether different affair.

  The major had at least been sympathetic. “Orders from the colonel, as you might suppose. What’s important is to make a good show of it. Hop over to their side and throw the odd bomb, make your presence felt. Get a glimpse of their wire; pick up a prisoner or two if you possibly can. But no one’s expecting you to take anything, let alone hold it. Just make them think you mean business.”

  Raids had been growing in popularity of late. Perhaps it was merely that, for any general remembering the Boer wars, this one looked too much like thousands upon thousands of men sat in holes and ditches and too little like proper fighting. Yet, as the major explained it, on this occasion they had a specific purpose in mind. Minor attacks would help camouflage the push when it came; a few small shows would lower the enemy’s expectations.

  All balderdash, obviously. No one on the enemy side could be so idiotic as to interpret days of stupendous shelling as anything but the warm-up for a total assault. And though Forrester had been fortunate, having thus far avoided being part of one, he’d heard stories of other such stunts. They did not have a reputation for going well. Even when carefully planned and organised, a great deal could go wrong in that tormented space between the lines: there was wire to get caught up on, sentries, snipers, craters deep enough to drown in. And, with two nights to make ready, this one would be neither planned nor organised, except in the most rudimentary of ways.

  Had that recognition been the beginning of Forrester’s epiphany, the turning point at which he’d first perceived his own death not as something remote and generalised but as suddenly definite and imminent?

  Liversby coughed, and Forrester realised he had been staring all the while at the tabletop, half reliving that two-day-old meeting. Attempting to speak, he found his mind empty. It took him a second even to recall what observation of Liversby’s had sparked his contemplation.

  Fortunately, Middleton chose that moment to step up to the mark. “It’s a bit of a bungle, all right,” he said, “but that’s the cleverness. You can guarantee Fritz won’t be expecting a few dozen men to come blundering up to his doorstep in the middle of the night.”

  Liversby laughed gaily. “Ah, I see. That is clever. Did you two cook it up yourselves?”

  “Absolutely,” agreed Middleton. “But you just watch the brass try and take credit.”

  “Well ... the best of luck,” Liversby said, with surprising earnestness. Then, more in the manner of the Liversby that Forrester knew, he added, “But don’t get too carried away. Can’t have you two carting off Berlin or any such nonsense.”

  We’ll be lucky if we even make it through their wire , Forrester reflected. “We’ll do our darnedest not to bring the war to a premature end,” he promised.

  After Liversby left, there was no resuming his conversation with Middleton. Forrester’s thoughts had turned in on themselves, dislocating him from the dugout’s tiny single room. It seemed a peculiar grotto, badly lit by the glimmer from the stove and Middleton’s two stubby candles, its furniture so much bric-a-brac. The roar of the shelling was palpable, a constant vibration like the tremor produced by some enormous instrument. Dirt showered from the walls and ceiling in a constant flow.

  None of what was around him felt entirely real. With Middleton’s stories of the Cornish countryside vivid in his mind, Forrester had difficulty crediting that they were sitting beneath the ground while high explosives screamed at the heavens above, preparing to go out upon the shattered earth to try and take the lives of their fellow men or else be killed themselves.

  He would have to shake himself out of this mood before it took too firm a hold. He would not be a coward. His men were relying on him, and Middleton was too, for all his brashness. Perhaps he couldn’t be brave for them, since he could no longer find a shred of anything that resembled bravery within him, but he would not be made craven.

  Arduously, Forrester got to his feet, drew his Webley from its holster, and set about cleaning it. That done, he reloaded the revolver and returned it to its holster, then started on his jacket buttons, dulling them with boot polish. After a minute, Middleton, who had been observing him distractedly, stood up and followed his example. The two of them toiled steadily, in silence, and Forrester’s surroundings grew more concrete, as though he were waking by degrees. The motion of his fingers was reassuringly tangible. The act of working was an antidote to fear.

  When he took out his pocket watch, he was startled that the time was only ten to midnight. Without saying anything to Middleton, Forrester unhooked the watch and laid it on his shelf, replacing it with his army-issue wristwatch. He pulled on his still-damp jacket and his Sam Browne belt and slung the bag containing his gas mask over the opposite shoulder.

  Again, Middleton emulated his example. Once he was done, he spent a few more moments adjusting straps and buckles and lapels, as if preparing himself for an inspection or a dinner date. Finally he asked, “How do I look?”

  “Quite dashing,” Forrester assured him. “I doubt any self-respecting German would have the nerve to spoil that get-up with a bullet.”

  “Or else they’ll pick me out especially,” Middleton complained, with mock gloominess. Then he reached to his neck, plucked some item from inside his shirt, and said, “Look here, I want you to take this, Raff. If I get through, you can give it back to me. And if I don’t, I’d like you to hang on to it.”

  Before Forrester fully appreciated what was happening, Middleton had grasped his hand, pried the fingers open, and placed the object in his palm. It was a rectangular locket of dull gold, with a chain to match. Forrester clicked the front pane open. From within, sepia faces gazed at him, steady eyed: two women, the one on the left dark-haired, strong-featured, and pretty, the one on the right older, greying but still handsome. The likeness between them, and between each of them and Middleton, was unmistakeable.

  “My sister Agatha, and my mother,” Middleton confirmed .

  Forrester pressed the pane closed. He had an almost irresistible urge to hand the locket back. “If you don’t make it,” he said, “there’s every bit as good a chance that I won’t.”

  “Then what’s the use in worrying? There’s no one but you and me I’d want to have it.”

  Forrester had no argument to that. He draped the chain around his neck and slipped the locket inside his own shirt, conscious of its coolness against his skin.

  “Come on,” he said, with a conviction he didn’t feel. “Let’s get out there before somebody decides to call the whole business off.”<
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  If the trench had been challenging by the last evening light, it was a hundred times more so by night. Even when Forrester’s feet found the duckboards, they were slippery and foul, and often he was reduced to floundering through filth, desperately trying to keep his balance by clutching at the fire step or to the liquid-feeling revetment. Sometimes his fingers would fall on an arm or a leg and someone would curse softly in the darkness.

  They came upon Forrester’s platoon first. It was too late, he realised, to say any further goodbye to Middleton. As they turned the corner, he muttered a brief “Take care,” to which Middleton replied, “And you,” and that was it. Middleton was swallowed by the night.

  Possessed by sudden awkwardness, like the last arrival at a party, Forrester cleared his throat and said, “All present and correct?”

  “Everyone’s here, sir.”

  He recognised the gravel drawl as belonging to Vickers. He and Sergeant Stanley had been under orders to gather the men ready. Really, there was little for Forrester to do except attend .

  Having given his eyes a moment to adjust, he tried as well as he could to inspect his platoon. In theory, there should have been sixty of them, but they’d lost a few—to shelling, to snipers, to sickness—who had yet to be replaced, and from the remainder, he’d had Vickers and Stanley pick out the more capable. Between his bunch and Middleton’s, they numbered approximately forty. It was still too many for what they were about to do. A handful of men had a slim hope of moving around out there undiscovered, and the old maxim of safety in numbers failed to hold up when confronted by machine guns.

  Forrester could barely make out the closest faces. It hardly mattered. With the exception of his two sergeants, they were all but strangers. He had learned their names, and that was it. Their features blurred into each other. He was disgusted with himself that he couldn’t keep a better track or find some way to penetrate the walls of rank and social privilege. He was disgusted that he couldn’t take his men more seriously.

  “At ease,” Forrester said.

  He stood uncomfortably, ankle-deep in water, watching as they lit cigarettes and muttered among themselves. They were boys, many of them, and those that weren’t often seemed to him like children. They were plain and simple and took what Forrester considered to be a perverse pride in their plainness and their simplicity, as though they were an armour against the war.

  But he had seen enough of them die to know that there was nothing whatsoever between them and death, nothing they could do to protect themselves. He knew too that, for all their show, they understood that truth perfectly. There was no safety at the front, and after a while, not even the illusion of safety. He had seen soldiers back in the reserve lines buried alive in their dugouts. At Loos, two privates had died from falling asleep beside a gas canister that had leaked all through the night. Death was ever-present. It could not be predicted or outwitted. And tonight they would go into its territory, daring it with their boldness. Let these men do what they could, while they could, to make that fact tolerable.

  At ten minutes to the hour, he had them blacken their cheeks and brows with pieces of burnt cork, remove or darken any exposed metal, and strip off their excess gear, heaping it beside them on the saturated fire step. Subterfuge was a luxury permitted for night raids; thankfully, no one expected them to march over chanting some regimental song.

  He would have liked to say something meaningful, but there was so little he could contribute. They knew this war as well as or better than he did. The knowledge was there in their faces, beneath the tarnish of the cork. There was nothing he could tell them that they didn’t already know.

  “Keep close,” he said. “Stay quiet. If you get into a fix then wait where you are, don’t cry out. Once we’re through their wire, use your bombs, and be quick about it. But no one retreats until I give the order.”

  There came no whispered Yes sir s. No assent was required. Even Forrester’s part was done, more or less. Vickers and Stanley took over and arranged the men with grunted commands that scarcely seemed to be words, more the abstraction of orders.

  Forrester took his place among them. He could just discern the hands of his wristwatch. It was crucial that he and Middleton set off together. His eyes blurred as he strived to interpret the army-issue watch’s ghostly luminosity. A minute passed, and another. Now the two hands were practically indistinguishable, a taut V of bilious yellow-green. Zero hour.

  “Let’s all come back in one piece,” he said softly—so softly that perhaps no one could hear.

  Then Forrester put hand and foot on the ladder beside him and began to climb.

  Chapter Two

  H e had been half sure that a shot would strike him the instant he put his head above the parapet. His neck muscles were painful with the tightness of anticipating it.

  When no bullet came, Forrester had to fight himself not to freeze, as though the omission were some cosmic accident soon to be corrected. He put a hand upon the wetness of a sandbag, slime sliding beneath his fingers, and hauled himself over.

  Immediately, mud slopped round his calves, and around his outstretched arm up to the elbow. Forrester struggled to his feet, hunching as he did so. As much as he could have done with both hands free, he made the effort to draw his Webley. It seemed important that he should be holding the revolver, though the weapon would be useless at such range.

  Forrester’s heart was hammering. He was convinced he could hear it even over the shelling, like the tyrannical cadence of a nearby ocean. He felt—what? Not scared. Exhilarated, yet also nakedly exposed, as if he were doing something both thrilling and indecent. The barrage was a wall of outrageous sound. Irregular explosions lit the horizon, the vast crumps of earth shifting high into the air mingling with the flat whine of the falling shells. He could feel the sound and the light beating on his skin.

  Already men were coming up behind him. Rather than leading, he was blocking the way. Forrester took a moment to get his bearings. In the near distance, he could detect the pale scar that represented the enemy lines. Directly ahead was their own wire, spread in ghastly knots and tangles, and sure enough, there was a decent gap in its midst: whoever had cut it, Blaylock or someone else, they’d done a meticulous job. He could only hope, against all reasonable hope, that they had done the same on the far side, or that for once the artillery had served its purpose.

  But at least they wouldn’t be strung up on their own wire. That was something. Forrester pressed on in a crouch, as close to all fours as he could get without trailing the Webley in the mud. Passing the last line of their defences, he searched for cover. The terrain of No Man’s Land, so flat and desolate when considered from their own trenches, out here was immensely uneven. It had been rutted and gouged by endless misjudged shells, and scattered with litter like sea wrack, juts of wood and metal rising from the mire.

  He slid down the edge of a shell hole and scrambled to circumvent its centre, which was black with water. A body floated there, face down, head and appendages sunk beneath the surface, the torso obscenely bloated. Forrester managed to make it round and then looked back. Behind him, a line of tenebrous shapes trailed into the gloom. Clambering over the rim, Forrester strained his eyes to his left, eager to catch a sign of Middleton’s lot. The plan was that they’d arrive at the same time, each attack diverting from the other. But he could see nothing. Beyond a point, the darkness grew absolute.

  Forrester returned his attention to the view ahead. Just in front of him was another shell hole, even deeper. Again, he did his best to skirt the edge, but halfway around, he lost his grip and slid helplessly. Some irrational instinct made him hang on in desperation to the Webley, and he was up to his knees in stagnant liquid before he halted his descent, plunging his free hand into the sucking mud. He steadied himself, gasped a breath, and pressed on, feet slipping and sliding and constantly threatening to abandon him to the glutinous water.

  Past the next rim there was less cover. All he could do was stay low a
nd hug the shallow contours of the battlefield. The enemy wire was quite clear now. It wasn’t so far away; another minute and they’d be on it. But was it cut? There might be gaps, though he didn’t see any. It certainly wasn’t destroyed, as they’d been promised, not shredded and scattered like confetti.

  What of the shelling itself? Listening to its brutish clamour, he couldn’t believe that so unaccountable a force could be on their side. It seemed a greater threat than the enemy wire, or enemy bullets, or anything the Germans could muster. According to the plan, the barrage should have been pushed forward on the section of trench they were approaching, just enough so that they were in no danger without betraying the raid. Yet, for all the practice they’d had, the accuracy of artillery appeared to remain more a matter of luck than judgement. From Forrester’s perspective, the shells could not possibly be falling any nearer without rending him limb from limb.

  Nevertheless, he pressed on. He felt that he’d come a long way already, and safety, even the unreliable safety of their own trenches, was a distant memory. Simultaneously, a portion of his brain was starting to work against his fear. Here he was in No Man’s Land, surrounded by so many dead and the parts of the dead, wading across earth churned beyond recognition, and no bullet, no bomb had found him. Perhaps , that aspect of him proposed, you’re protected. He knew it for madness, delirium brought on by terror and excitement in unequal measure. Yet he couldn’t ignore it. Even as he rejected such unsound logic, he was stooping less, running more freely across the disfigured, shaken ground.

  The wire was close. He could still spy no path through, but there was a shelf of dirt preceding it, a crease in the land that would hide them while they sought a passage onward. Forrester glanced back once more, to see his men spread out in his wake, a swaying tail of bodies. They would make it to the wire, and then—

  “Gas!”

  The shout came from somewhere behind, and despite the thunder of the shelling, seemed too loud. He wanted to bellow, Quiet that man .