To End All Wars Page 3

  “Gas!” the cry came again, and the word registered, finally, as more than mere noise. Vickers was the one shouting, Forrester realised, Vickers who was assigned to bring up the rear. This second time, there was panic in his voice, along with a garbled quality. No doubt he was endeavouring to pull on his mask even as he called the alert. Perhaps he was conscious, also, of having left it too late.

  Only then did Forrester think of his own mask. He fumbled one-handed at the case against his hip, perceived how hopeless that was. Sliding to his knees, he holstered his revolver, and used both hands to open the case and pull his mask free, marvelling as he did so at how monstrous and absurd the baggy hood looked.

  As he struggled with the mask, Forrester wrestled too with the possibility that this was the beginning of some retaliation. But that was unlikely. He was seeking for reason where there was none. They’d been pummelling the Germans for a week and the Germans had elected to throw up the odd gas shell in return, and chance had dictated that they’d chosen this stretch, where forty men were creeping through No Man’s Land—and further, that those shells had fallen short, that the wind was blowing unwaveringly from the west, that it was carrying the gas away from the trenches and so toward them.

  Still, counterattack or no, they were in trouble. His men were stumbling, not making any attempt to keep low. Most had their masks on; their silhouettes had become grotesque. A few didn’t, and of those, the majority were battling with the bulky respirators, dismay making their fingers clumsy. A couple had lost their nerve altogether and were blundering in a panic, overworked lungs labouring to advance their own destruction.

  As for the gas itself, there was no visible evidence, no cloud of poison roiling like fog. Yet Forrester was positive that, for a second before he’d got his own mask on, he’d caught the curious, faint odour of mouldering hay. Was that what had alerted Vickers? The thud of a shell falling close by and then that distinctive smell? Phosgene gas. Forrester had seen what it did to men. Phosgene was the ugliest of deaths, and an ugly thing to survive. Mouldy hay; for a moment he’d smelled it, had tasted it on the tip of his tongue. Had he been too slow?

  Now all he could smell was the mask and its overpowering chemical reek. He could barely peer through the thick lenses, and had lost sight of the enemy wire, which a minute ago had seemed so near. The raid was a disaster; surely the misfortune of being caught by gas was ample excuse to call it off, even for the colonel.

  But what of Middleton? Was it conceivable that the gas had missed his platoon, that they were still hastening upon the wire?

  Forrester forced the question from his mind. His immediate obligation was to preserve the lives of his men. He turned, half stood, and called, “Retreat,” marvelling at how warped the syllables became through the thick cloth of the mask; he could scarcely make them out himself. He drew the Webley, thinking there must be some gesture he could make.

  Then the shot came .

  Forrester heard it in two parts: a shriek like the snap of a violin string, followed by a pop, as of a champagne cork erupting, which he recognised for the rifle’s report. The shot must have passed close, and yet he wasn’t afraid. Now, when there was such good reason for it, all his fear had drained away. His brain was working sluggishly. He resented the unseen sniper for imposing new problems upon the ones he’d already had to contend with.

  The second shot struck him above the left knee.

  He felt it distinctly, as a sharp, rushing sensation. He was surprised to still be standing. He tried to kneel, but that sent a jolt of pain up toward his groin, so he let himself topple instead, onto his side. Then it occurred to him that the next shot might be to his head or body. But since he could no longer see the enemy lines, he couldn’t resist the irrational certainty that therefore he was hidden in return.

  Someone came up beside him. They weren’t wearing their gas mask; nonetheless, it was difficult in the darkness to make out features. From posture alone, Forrester identified Sergeant Stanley: the broad shoulders, somewhat hunched inside his too-tight jacket, were unmistakeable. Stanley was holding a Mills bomb high in one hand, and as he came alongside Forrester, he threw it with a bullish roar. Then a bullet caved in the whole side of his face. Forrester watched it happen, the bullet entering Stanley’s jaw on the left and exiting through his cheek in a bloody gout. He slipped on the mud of the slight incline, but before he could fall, another shot caught him full in the chest, and he fell backwards at an angle, sprawling near Forrester’s feet.

  Other men were joining them, the line that had trailed Forrester into the depths of No Man’s Land swinging as though on a pivot. They were skidding in the filth, diving for any scrap of concealment, hunting the slenderest groove that might camouflage their presence. A couple more Mills bombs went sailing through the air, impacting with dull crumps.

  Forrester was sure that the grenades would have fallen short. They were too far from the wire. He should be giving orders, but a tremendous numbness had taken hold of him, something akin to the feeling he’d endured in the dugout earlier but overwhelming now. He couldn’t take his eyes from Stanley’s face, from the piece of his jaw that hung by stringy tendrils of muscle. Did his own leg look like that? He couldn’t bring himself to check. If his leg had been shot half off, he had no desire to know—and he was conscious that the minutest of movements might expose him.

  Yet the fighting was absorbing. He hadn’t quite abandoned the notion that he should be involved, or directing somehow. Several of the men were fitting rifles to shoulders, taking clumsy pot-shots. The exercise was useless, and he didn’t blame those others who were simply cowering, pressing low as if they hoped the defiled earth would swallow them. But there was so little cover. The bullets were arriving in hurried succession from the German lines, with deft, rapid cracks like the splintering of ice, and even as he listened, the clatter of a machine gun started up from somewhere to their left.

  Left. Middleton’s platoon. Forrester thought vividly of Middleton, and imagination merged his countenance with Stanley’s, messily unhinging the soft, dimpled chin. The vision was horridly convincing. At that same moment, a flare from the German side bathed the scene in scouring alabaster light, casting crouched forms and the lines of the landscape into crisp relief. Nearby, a man raised his gas-masked head to fire and was hit in the face, the rear of his head surging away in the bullet’s wake. More rifle fire hiccoughed in competition with the machine gun’s mirthless laughter. Reality resumed with renewed harshness, like a wave dashing over him.

  Forrester stood partway and took three tottering steps, toward where he believed their own lines to be. “Fall back,” he cried. “Fall back!”

  A few of the men looked in his direction, one or two making moves to follow, as though on impulse. However, the leg wouldn’t hold him. He tumbled, landing with a hard splash. In any case, there was nowhere to fall back to. There was no safe route to their lines. Forrester managed to haul himself over the rim of a crater, then failed to halt his progress, so that when he came to rest, one arm and his injured leg were sunk in slime. There were two bodies beside him, partially raised from the mud. The nearest was bulging and distorted, close to disintegration. The other was more whole, and he thought that they might be one of his, maybe even alive, before he saw the cavity where their stomach had burst open.

  All of his men, his platoon, would end up this way. He could hear them beyond the rim of the shell hole, calling to each other, perhaps to him—receiving no answer besides the retort of German bullets. They were trapped. Machine gun fire would chew them away to nothing, or else mortars, or their own shells. He had no means of leading them to safety, and the possibility was perverse, a responsibility exceeding what anyone could bear. Forrester tried to rise again, but his foot had caught under the water, and the attempt only dragged him farther down. His masked face sloshed into the mire. Even through the coarse and chemical-reeking cloth, the stink of foul water and seeping death invaded his nostrils.

  It was too m
uch. Forrester had never considered the war to be anything except a hideous necessity, but nor had he truly hated it, not until that moment. He had no precedent for the bitterness that rose within him. It was inordinate. It outweighed everything. Without warning, every resentment he had felt toward the conflict, toward any conflict, came together, and with it his fear for Middleton and for his men, and at the same time, an unbearable sadness, a sense of loss and of waste, of lives taken and lives broken and—

  Light. Blue light.

  No, green. Blue. He couldn’t be certain. The radiance above him was ethereal and changing, as though observed through shifting water. Yet it was also bright, dazzlingly so, and despite the intermediacy of the gas mask’s stained lenses, beautiful. Just the sight of it erased all of his sudden grief. It must be a flare, or a shell detonating in midair, but he had never in his life seen a shell or a flare anything like this.

  Without warning, the sky exploded.

  For an instant, Forrester thought his eardrums had burst with the sheer violence. He needed that time to reconcile what he’d heard as sound; it had been too immense, a thunderclap magnified beyond the limits of reason. The explosion had come from directly above him, and with it, the light had flickered crazily, its submarine shifting of greens and blues amplified and accelerated.

  The light was moving. Whatever its source, it was descending rapidly toward the horizon. Its coruscation had settled into a scalding whiteness tinctured by those earlier hues. Then it was gone, cut off from the field of his vision by the incline of the crater.

  In its absence, the dark was intense. It was worse for the gas mask. The thing was suffocating, and he would very much have liked to tear it off. But one arm was trapped, sucked deep into the mud, and the other, though free, seemed disinclined to respond.

  His whole body, in fact, felt lethargic. He missed the light, and the darkness was stultifying. His leg hurt, but the pain belonged to someone else. The sounds of battle were gone. Only the shelling remained, and that was distant, less a tempest than the patter of driven rain. Indeed, it was raining, he realised, warm drops that penetrated to his skin and clung .

  Forrester felt blanketed, at peace. Closing his eyes, he tried to remember the light as he’d first seen it: the turquoise of a Mediterranean sea, viewed from within its sunlit shallows. In his reverie, the waters rose about him, and he had no will to resist.

  Chapter Three

  H e had slept, and now he was awake once more.

  No, not slept. He’d been unconscious and could still feel a pressing exhaustion at the level of his nerves, like the need for sleep but magnified, distorted. His leg was hurting, more than it had before and in a different way. The sensation made him nauseous. There was a wrongness about the pain, as though he didn’t quite have the mental vocabulary to express the notion of a foreign object having torn a passage through the meat of him.

  For all that, Forrester wasn’t afraid. The anger he’d felt, the acute disillusionment, the despair, that was gone also, replaced by a pervading calm. Despite what his body was telling him, he knew on a profounder level that he was safe, that the worst danger was passed.

  He was, however, uncomfortable. The rain was falling with a heavy patter, and the mud he lay in was seeping through his trousers and jacket, and around the edges of his gas mask. He thought again of taking the mask off. He was confident that the rain would have dissipated the phosgene. But it would be in the water, in the mud, and although the prospect didn’t alarm him, common sense advised that he should be cautious.

  He was lying on his back. As a first step, he set about flopping onto his front. Doing so was tricky. The mud didn’t want to release him, and his left leg was dead weight. Yet he succeeded in the end, and once he was over, it was only a matter of crawling. The sodden muck was clammily viscous. As long as he stayed low, creeping on his belly like a lizard, it supported his weight.

  When he gained the rim of the crater, Forrester questioned the wisdom of going farther. If he stuck his head up, he’d be exposing himself. But he couldn’t hear any sound of firing, not even the musicless rattle of the machine gun, and his instincts continued to affirm strongly that he was in no danger. Though he couldn’t explain it, the reflex was powerful. In any case, he knew rationally that he was at equal risk from cowering through the night in a wet foxhole, with the stench of decay all around.

  Forrester flattened his arms upon the edge of the shell hole and perched his chin on one forearm. He could make out a number of bodies from where he was, strung in a ragged line behind whatever scant defence they’d found. Not one of them was moving, and there was no sign of activity from the enemy trench either.

  With the wall of the shell hole no longer cutting off his perspective, he could see clearly, and the light was prominently visible: there was another crater far to his left, or else a high bank of soil, and from it, luminescence slanted in shafts of green and blue that flickered queasily. What had been beautiful before now unsettled him, as if a dying, cold sun had been entombed within the earth and was projecting its last glimmers.

  With considerable difficulty, Forrester clambered to his feet. The leg, he discovered, would hold him. Did that mean the bullet had missed the muscle, had failed to shatter the bone? He couldn’t say. He had, after all, seen men carry on with the most appalling injuries. Once he had witnessed a young soldier wandering with a portion of his own left arm clutched in his right hand, the whole of the limb from below the elbow. The man had had a look of empty determination in his eyes, as though sure that, as long as he kept hold of the severed appendage, everything might yet be all right.

  But inevitably that man was dead now. The fact that Forrester could stand meant nothing.

  A few paces away, a rifle lay partway sunk in the mire. Forrester shuffled over and hauled it free. After some experimentation, he found that, grasped by the tip of its barrel, the weapon made for a serviceable prop. Supported so, he gripped a fistful of his gas mask, pulled it off, and dumped the sack-like garment at his feet.

  A tentative breath revealed no telltale trace of rotting straw, just the smell of rain struggling against the familiar odours of swampish water and decay. Whether he had inhaled the gas before was another question. He knew that the symptoms of phosgene poisoning came on slowly. At any rate, he was grateful for the freshness of the air and of the rain upon his face.

  Still supporting himself with his makeshift stick, Forrester began toward a cluster of his men. They’d made their stand behind a shallow bank, some geographic feature from prior to the war since compacted into shapelessness. There were five of them close together. Though the distance was short, it took him a minute and more to reach them. All the while, he wondered detachedly at how he was limping through No Man’s Land, offering so easy and unapologetic a target. He was the only one moving—the only thing moving, besides the slanting rain—and that made him feel ghostly, unreal. The war, for the first time since he’d left Dover, seemed far away .

  Attaining the line of bodies, Forrester realised he had no idea what he’d hoped to find. None of them had stirred as he’d approached. Yet even if one of his men was merely wounded, there was little he could do, except rationalise to himself that at least he’d tried, that he hadn’t simply abandoned his responsibilities to save his own hide.

  Forrester huddled beside the first of them, propping the rifle as well as he could against the low bank. The man wasn’t wearing his gas mask. His helmet, which so resembled an upturned tin plate, had slipped to obscure his eyes. Nevertheless, Forrester recognised him. His name was Lambert. He had been up for a minor disciplinary offence once, and Forrester had had to dock his pay. The entire affair seemed very petty in retrospect. Forrester leaned to inspect the placid visage, seeking something he couldn’t identify even to himself, perhaps an explanation, or in those slackened muscles some inkling of forgiveness.

  Instead, he felt breath on his cheek.

  Initially, Forrester thought it must have been a breeze or a subtle
distortion of the rain. But the wind had dropped to nothing, and the rain was driving vertically, in remorseless stripes that were incapable of so delicate a touch. He held a palm out, close to Lambert’s mouth. Sure enough, there it was again, the softest of sighs against his dirt-crusted skin. Lambert was alive.

  And now that Forrester looked, he could see no sign of injury. It might be that Lambert had been shot in the back, but his breathing was steady, not the jarring rattle of a wounded man. His pose—half curled on his side, one arm stretched loosely, the other tucked beneath his head—was relaxed. Of the two likelihoods, the one that had seemed absurd was on reflection inescapable: Lambert was not hurt but fast asleep. Nor did he wake when Forrester placed a tentative hand on his shoulder .

  Any further interference struck him as cruel. However strange it was to find a man soundly asleep in No Man’s Land, where minutes before a battle had been raging, it was also miraculous. In spite of his mother’s attempts to instil it, Forrester had never had much in the way of faith, and for all of the Chaplain’s declarations, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that any god watched over these pitiless fields. Was there a way in which one could believe in a miracle that didn’t require belief in the divine?

  Feeling hopeful, almost giddily so, Forrester moved on to the second figure in line—and was jolted to see the neat hole in the hood of his gas mask, approximately where his forehead must lie beneath the black-stained fabric. Forrester made no effort to stir him. He knew with sickening conviction that the man was dead.

  Yet the third was asleep, apparently unhurt, and so, when he checked, were the other two. Could the gas have done this? Perhaps only his imagination had ascribed to it phosgene’s distinctive odour. Might it have instead been a sedative, a pall cast over the whole of their front line in prelude to an attack? But that made no sense. Three of the sleepers had their masks on, and he could detect no difference between them and the fourth man who hadn’t. More, what logic could there be to a weapon that rendered unconscious when it could kill, and kill wretchedly? Nothing in the German strategy so far had suggested such mercy.