To End All Wars Read online

  Forrester reclaimed the rifle, straightened up with its support, and peered around. Though he could see the weird light, its beams were channelled upward by the lie of the land about and offered imperfect illumination. But the rain was thinning, the clouds above were starting to fracture, and in places a sliver of starlight had broken upon the darkness. He could make out the contours of the barren earth, which even by day consisted of little more than contours, its characteristics long ago erased.

  As he watched, a Véry light went up from his own side. He observed its drunken parabola. When it finally exploded, it vanished for an instant, and then returned with blinding intensity as a miniature sun. Seized by sudden inquisitiveness, Forrester took the opportunity to pick a path toward the German trenches.

  Above him, the flare tumbled lazily through the air. It began to diminish before he reached the veering barricade of the enemy wire, but its spell had sufficed. By then, he was certain he could discern a helmeted head resting innocently on an outstretched arm, a rifle left neglected beneath slack fingers. Even as the head became an ambiguous silhouette, Forrester was sure that what he’d seen was a sleeping German soldier, arrested in the act of firing over his parapet.

  Picking out the flayed remains of a tree stump, Forrester shuffled to it and sat with his back against the scarred wood. The exertion had been too much. Though the sense of peace he’d been experiencing since he woke hadn’t left him, he was inexpressibly weary. His left leg was pulsing with alternate waves of pain and cramping numbness. It was growing harder to bend the knee, or to put any weight on it. His head ached as well and was muzzy with tiredness.

  Some of his men were dead. Others, impossibly, were sleeping, as was at least one of their enemies. He himself was awake, and apparently unique in that regard. None of it added up.

  Anyhow, with the German lines temporarily stilled, a rest could do no harm. In the flare’s wake, the darkness was deeper, almost solid. When he closed his eyes, he was conscious of its pressure on his eyelids. Beneath that weight, his thoughts began to smear. Vague images flickered, and he couldn’t say whether they were a fantasy, a distortion of the afterglow from the nearby shellfire, or some abstraction of the noise it made, a synaesthetic rendition of unbearable volumes. But he would feel for moments that the images possessed a sort of narrative: a flash of detail would seem to have meaning, only to smudge and dissolve. Perhaps, too, he was dreaming, though he was never unaware of the battlefield close around him, the mud seeping under him—or of that distant, bright light.

  Forrester opened his eyes. His muscles had stiffened, especially his thigh. Getting to his feet was torturous. There was another flare up, again from his own side. Was that what had brought to mind the mysterious light? He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting. His calcified muscles implied hours of inaction, but he was inclined to doubt, given that everything else appeared much as he’d left it.

  Despite the worsening pain, Forrester felt more clear-headed for his respite, and more curious. This time, he used the flare’s transitory blaze to get his bearings. Ahead was the German wire. To right and left, the blemish of No Man’s Land spread to limitless horizons, its scant features limned starkly by the flare. There were many bodies within sight, and it took an effort to remind himself that a handful of them belonged to living men.

  He could make his way back to his trench without much trouble, so long as his leg held up and the firing didn’t renew, so long as there wasn’t another batch of gas or a particularly misaimed shell. If the Véry lights kept coming, he might even return at the point he’d left. Yet he found that he wanted an answer—or if that was more than he could expect, at any rate the seed of a hypothesis. To his left lay the inexplicable light, and also Middleton’s platoon, though he could see no signs of movement by the flare’s dwindling glimmer. Behind him was safety, and care for his wound. Forrester set out left, keeping parallel to the line of the enemy wire.

  The flares were coming regularly now, casting a constant, wintery brilliance that turned piled filth into glistening banks of snow. Every so often he would pass a prone body. Most were dead, and many of those were left from earlier conflicts, shabby corpses mingling by degrees with the earth, but a few he recognised as from his platoon and were only sleeping. They each looked tranquil. He passed the last of them twenty yards or so from where he’d set out, and then for a while he saw no one alive.

  The next figure Forrester came upon not in a state of obvious decay was familiar. The reddish stubble and incongruously leathered skin identified him as Sergeant Blaylock, whose years in Africa had left their indelible mark. Though he was sprawled half in a shallow foxhole, it was evident even from a distance that he was alive, for his snores were sonorous and carrying. Forrester felt an impulse to wake him: Blaylock would be able to tell him what had happened with Middleton’s platoon, and whether his experiences matched with Forrester’s own. However, when he put a hand to Blaylock’s shoulder and shook, there came no reaction except a brief rise in the tempo of his snoring.

  Disappointed, Forrester carried on. There were more bodies, and here the ratio of death to life was less forgiving. They had been caught by the machine gun he’d heard, and it had shown no mercy. None of them were wearing gas masks, which indicated that they’d been spared that horror at least—or had failed to acknowledge it. Were some of these sleepers also dying, their unconscious bodies succumbing to the poisons they’d inhaled?

  Then, beneath the arctic luminance of another flare, Forrester spotted a uniform distinguished, like his own, by the narrow strap of a Sam Browne belt. He hurried over, as rapidly as injured leg and makeshift stick and dragging mud would allow. It was Middleton, as he’d known it must be. Forrester was positive he was sleeping, as so many of the others had been, until the last moment, when he saw the stain of blood across his breast. The machine gun had got him: the bullet holes were a second belt crusted with rubies. Likely he had been its first victim. Still, he looked peaceful, almost as peaceful as the sleepers. His blue eyes were open, gazing up at the night sky. The fall had dislodged his cap, and the rain had tousled his sandy hair, like the hand of a fond grandparent.

  Forrester reached down and brushed Middleton’s eyelids closed. He tried not to cringe at the rain-wet clamminess of the skin. Not knowing what else to do, he made a mental note of the nearby landmarks, such as they were—a shattered cartwheel here, two decapitated trees crumpled together there—so that he might pass them on to the burying party.

  There was nothing left but to satisfy his curiosity regarding the light, and that had been a very secondary concern. Probably it was a new type of flare that the Boche had cooked up, or a shell had come down and set fire to some large wreckage. Yet even as he thought this, Forrester was forced to concede that neither explanation would accommodate the facts. He was near enough to the source of the light, where it radiated from within the exploded ground, to see that the high banks of cast-off earth which hid it from view were recent and that the crater was large, too big for anything shy of a howitzer shell. He could see as well that the depression was not circular but cigar shaped and pinched at one end.

  Forrester took a few steps closer. He was becoming interested again, despite himself, despite the knowledge of Middleton lying bullet-riddled and cold a short way behind him. Whatever had impacted here must have come down at an angle. And there were no flames, just those slants of luminance, now faintly blue, now palely green. It was unlike any combustion he’d seen. Yet it was reminiscent of something .

  Gas. Yes, he was more persuaded than ever that gas would make sense. Some advanced compound that could burn for a long time, and while it burned produced an airborne vapour. The shell would have been fired at an angle from the south-east somewhere, and he was aware of no batteries in that direction, but then a new weapon might require a new sort of gun. The container had burst overhead, and that had been the explosion he’d heard. Its contents had dispersed over Forrester’s platoon, and afterwards, the shell had plumm
eted, affecting Middleton’s men as it fell.

  Strange that it should cause unconsciousness, though, and so serene an unconsciousness at that. Strange, too, that no one had thought to tell the German soldiery to wear their masks. But of course, masks offered no defence, or most of his men would be on their feet. This truly was an innovation, something that might turn the tide of the war. If all of this had been achieved with a single shot, two platoons incapacitated and who knew what numbers back in their trenches and on the German side, then a half-dozen guns could knock out whole stretches of the line: whole towns, whole cities even.

  Forrester decided that he had to get a look at what remained of the shell. While the possibility of this new superweapon didn’t scare him exactly—he was too numbed for that, he rationalised—he was still capable of being intellectually appalled. What if they dropped the stuff over London? How long did it last? And—a thought that came close to penetrating the stuporous calm hanging around his mind—what if its effects never wore off? Forrester remembered trying to wake Blaylock, how futile the attempt had been. A weapon that induced sleep was one thing. A weapon that left men comatose was quite another.

  He was bordering the edge of the crater now. The earth bank was nearly higher than his head, and he doubted he could climb up with his hurt leg. Better to pick his way round in the hope that the slope was shallower along the tail. Certainly, he could get no sense of what lay beyond from where he was. He could, however, plainly see the beams of light. They appeared to have grown brighter again, like spotlights tinted in aquamarine hues. Dust motes danced, as if the rays shone from a bright exterior into a darkened room. Some subtle quality there made his heart tremble; he was touched with unexpected awe.

  “Hey there! You, man!”

  The call came from Forrester’s left, the direction of his own trench. He hadn’t glanced that way in minutes and was amazed to observe a line of men approaching. There was a score of them, and more coming behind, clambering inelegantly from within the earthworks. At the point nearest to him, the row had bunched behind a spindly character who’d roved a little in front, moving quickly and deliberately, navigating the more broken parts with the assistance of a swagger stick.

  “Put your hands in the air.”

  The man in front was the one calling to him. His manner of speech was clipped, refined, not used to being contravened: an officer’s voice, though not one Forrester was familiar with. He couldn’t obey the order without relinquishing his makeshift support. He settled for raising his free arm above his head and shouting back, “Wounded.”

  “Well, stay there, then. Don’t move.”

  Even that was a tall order. Deprived of activity, Forrester felt the ache in his thigh keenly. He would have preferred to sit. Standing still was profoundly uncomfortable, and left in one place, the butt of the rifle sank into the mud. He busied himself with adjusting its angle, seeking some solid ground amid the morass. But the pain in his leg was like a fire steadily igniting, deep in the knots of his muscle. He was concerned that he’d fall over and that the approaching officer would discover him sprawled in the mud.

  Electric torches began to blink on, as bizarre a sight as Forrester had seen all night, for under normal circumstances the lighting of even a match in No Man’s Land was tantamount to suicide. The gas has dissipated , Forrester thought. They’re close enough that otherwise they’d be unconscious. What does that tell me? And he tried to remember the lectures he’d been made to sit through. But those had always been short on technical details, more occupied with the mechanics of getting masks on with haste, with symptoms and warning signs and with maintaining discipline. No one had ever bothered to tutor them in chemistry.

  The pain was becoming intolerable. Forrester felt giddy with it. Now that he considered, he’d been ridiculous to wander about, scrabbling through mud and over shattered walls and other debris when he had a bullet wound in his leg. There was fractional relief in closing his eyes. Yet each time it was more difficult to open them again, and when he did, the approaching figures with their bobbing firefly lights had leaped nearer.

  The last time he opened his eyes, he was startled to see the officer almost on him. His face was in shadow, and Forrester couldn’t make out any rank insignia. There was a flare up, over to their right, and it had recast the world into a stark geometry of black and white.

  “What’s your name, man?” The question was at once peremptory and dismissive, a formality pretending to be nothing else.

  “Forrester, sir. Lieutenant Rafael Forrester.”

  “You saw it come down?” The officer pointed at the crater with his swagger stick.

  Forrester tried to recall. “I saw an explosion. But no, not the impact.”

  “And you’ve been awake all this while?”

  Hadn’t he said he’d been awake? And clearly he was now. Then he remembered that he had slept, first in the shell hole, and later, propped against the ruptured stump. “Mostly,” he clarified. “I might have passed out once or twice.”

  “Passed out?”

  “From my wound, sir. My leg.”

  The officer looked down at Forrester’s leg as though it were a fresh consideration. “This did that?” he enquired, with a nod toward the crater.

  How absurd; what could gas do to one’s leg? It struck Forrester that this man, for all his impression of knowing authority, hadn’t the faintest clue of what he was on about. But then, didn’t that describe so many of the brass, believing they had a perfect handle on the war until they found themselves face to face with its true, vulgar horrors?

  Only, it wasn’t this officer he resented, not really. He was simply chagrined by the pain. It was practically unbearable, and the officer had reminded him of it, when he’d been focusing his every effort to keep his attention elsewhere.

  “I took a bullet,” Forrester said. “A sniper, I think. But, sir...” He felt like a troublesome schoolboy, and it was hard to put the words in order. “I’m in rather a bad way, sir. Could do to be off my feet.”

  “Oh. Damn it.” Over his shoulder the officer shouted, “Will somebody bring up a stretcher? Be quick.” Back to Forrester, he said, “Well, sit down, lieutenant. Don’t want you collapsing on us. But I’ll have more questions for you, do you hear me?” He looked to the crater again and added more softly, perhaps no longer speaking for Forrester’s benefit, “Or if not me, then someone will.”

  Forrester crumpled gratefully into the mud. He endeavoured to retain a degree of dignity, to slump in a manner befitting the British Army, but much of his body was ignoring the signals he sent, and his mind wasn’t performing so efficiently either, his thoughts swirling in spirals that led nowhere .

  He wondered if this officer did know anything. Were there questions of his own Forrester might have asked? About the gas. About whether the men of his platoon would ever wake. Then there was Middleton. They would have to bring him in, to give him a proper burial. There were his letters too, the ones for back home, those would need posting. Damn it, why hadn’t he told someone?

  So much to do. So much he should have asked and said. Yet, now that he was sitting, the prospect of further movement was inconceivable—even the labour of speaking. He was utterly tired, down to the marrow of his bones.

  And his immediate part was over. The raid was done. The fighting was done. The rest would have to wait.

  Chapter Four

  T here was a jolt as they hauled him into the trenches.

  He’d been out again, not sleeping or anything close but in the deep depths of unconsciousness. He remembered nothing of the intervening period.

  For a brief while, they left him lying on the fire step, as they calculated in muffled whispers how best to get him back onto the stretcher. He could hear them moving about, like big animals shuffling in the gloom. Then rough hands were clasping his shoulders and calves and they had him loaded once more. With a lurch, they were in motion.

  He wasn’t surprised when they passed sleeping men, slouched every
which way against the parapet and parados, and if his bearers found the sight strange, they gave no indication. They merely steered around, making an effort not to step on outstretched hands and feet.

  That made Forrester query how far the pall of gas could have spread. He didn’t have long to await an answer: their next stop, and their first encounter with waking life, came a few minutes later. They’d arrived at an aid relay post, little more than a shallow funk hole. A man that he could barely discern made rapid work of cleaning and dressing his leg, and they were off again.

  After that, Forrester tried to keep his eyes closed. Sometimes, though, the flash of a shell or some piercing noise would disturb him, and then he’d look up to see a pale face staring from the shadows, or ragged sandbags, or just the shapeless earthen walls jouncing in time to the step of his bearers. The calm he’d felt ever since he’d been wounded was fading, and alarm was building in its wake. It was easy to forget the reason for this comfortless trek through the oppressive dark. He was cold. He would have been grateful for a blanket. The pain in his leg was unremitting, roused by every hint of motion, and his lungs ached too. He wanted badly to cough, but his throat was raw, and when he managed it, all that came out was a horrid chuckling that set his nerves on edge.

  “Settle down, sir,” suggested one of the stretcher bearers, in a broad West Country drawl. “We’ll be there right soon.”

  “Ssh!” hissed the other.

  “What ?”

  “Didn’t he tell us not to talk to him?”

  “I’m not bloody talking to him, am I? Just aiming to settle him down a little, that’s all.”