Take Aim

  Take Aim

  Trench Raiders Book 4

  Thomas Wood

  BoleynBennett Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Wood

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Thomas Wood

  Visit my website at www.ThomasWoodBooks.com

  Printed in the United Kingdom

  First Printing: March 2019

  by

  BoleynBennett Publishing

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  ‘Enemy Held Territory’ follows Special Operations Executive Agent, Maurice Dumont as he inspects the defences at the bridges at Ranville and Benouville.

  Fast paced and exciting, this is one you won’t want to miss!

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  1

  1.

  My body twitched with every syllable of gunfire and every gut-wrenching thump of artillery that tolled across the chaotic patch of France that I stood in.

  I could make out every single rifle crack, and each and every time that one of our boys ejected a round, as they swiftly pulled the bolts back on their rifles. They were doing a sterling job of holding back the German counter-attack, that was itself in reply to one of our own advances earlier on.

  Our offensive had faltered, at the expense of hundreds, if not thousands, of young men’s lives. It was a tactic that I was reluctantly used to by now, but one that was still excruciatingly painful to get my head around.

  The sound of our artillery, pulverising just fifty yards in front of our wire, shook my insides as if I was lying on a train track, with an express train thundering right above my head. With each and every subsequent blast, that accompanied the screaming locomotives, I thought of the death and destruction that each shell would bring.

  I had been on the end of them many a time myself, and did not envy the German soldier in the slightest who was now facing the onslaught of our field artillery. Before too long, I hoped anyway, the German counter-attack would be repelled, and the sounds of the screaming hell hounds overhead would slowly die away. So too with the incessant rattling of the defending machine guns, as they aimlessly fired into the mist, accompanied by the most sobering of thuds, as they tore their way through human flesh.

  Once those sounds had vanished into nothing more than a mere memory, the gradual groans of the dying and wounded would permeate into the eternal memory of every soldier within earshot. That was the worst of all the noises on the Western front.

  There was nothing that you could do about it, there was no ability to exercise compassion, as that so frequently resulted in a German round embedding itself right between your eyes. There was nothing anyone could do, apart from listen and pray that it would all end soon enough.

  The sounds of men hollering at the top of their lungs as they surged towards where I was stood, but also as the Vickers guns continued to chatter away, suddenly brought me back to reality.

  Everything around me that seemed capable of making even the slightest of noises seemed to do so, with each utterance apparently tightening its deathly grasp around my stomach. I felt the burning acid sloshing away around my insides, searing me more than a bullet ever could do.

  As the noise and cacophony threatened to overwhelm me, I distracted myself by finally opening my eyes.

  Quite instinctively, I slammed them tightly shut once again, as I took more comfort from the self-imposed darkness than I did from what I had seen.

  I had seen bodies before, plenty of them in fact, and had in reality contributed my own fair share to the mountain of corpses that was growing every day in this war. But despite everything that I had done and seen, it is never human desire to see even more dead bodies than you strictly have to. Especially when those bodies are those of young men who should have no experience of death.

  They were beginning to mount up throughout the frontline trench that I stood in, and the longer that I stood there the more vulnerable my ears became to hearing the flesh-ripping rounds entering their young bodies.

  The sound of rifle fire, as it intensified and began to twang off bits of metal debris, that was meant to keep these young boys as safe as possible, began to resound even more than my own heartbeat.

  “Left flank! Left flank! Take them, take them!” I desperately wanted to step up onto the fire step and see what it was that the NCO was screaming at, simultaneously wondering if he repeated everything that he said in his life twice.

  Screams of, “I got him!” and “Keep going!” were interspersed with other screams of encouragement.

  “They’re on the turn!”

  “Get back to where you came from, you rat!”

  I listened to a hundred more such phrases, varying in their coarseness and pride at murdering another human being. But it took me a while to realise that one voice in particular was calling out to me.

  “You there! Oi, you!”

  “Sergeant! Are you with us?”

  Finally, I opened my eyes for longer than half a second.

  I was met by the stern gaze of a lieutenant who looked far too old to be carrying such a rank. His eyes were dark and mournful and the words that he spat at me reflected them as such.

  “You are here to help, are you not?”

  He knew that I was, I didn’t need to be, but Captain Arnold did not like half-hearted volunteers. It was why we had all taken the white armband with an enthusiasm reserved only for him.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Well get some of these boys on your stretcher then, will you? Get them away from here!”

  He stood just a few yards away from me, but he still had to utilise all of his vocal chords just to be heard above the din.

  The ground shook feverishly as I looked around for who I could take with me. As the small particles of dirt were disturbed from the walls of the trench, a corporal, who didn’t look a day over the age of fifteen, stepped forward to helpfully point towards one of his wounded comrades.

  “Take him. He copped a sniper round to his neck, I think.”

  I nodded to him, “Righto.”

  Unfolding the canvas stretcher so that we could get the injured boy on board, McKay and I began to unceremoniously heave the weight of a rapidly deteriorating comrade, so that we could get him somewhere a bit safer.

  The boy had indeed been hit by a sniper, either that or it was an extremely lucky round that had sent him flying from the fire step. His neck had been opened up expertly, as if he had carved the wound himself to show something off proudly to us.

  The back of his head too, began to leak a scarlet liquid into the surface of the canvas, as a head wound began to drain his body of his precious blood.

  As we moved him, he began to flap around like a fish out of water, his arms jerking up and down as if he was trying to tell us something, his legs repeating the signal just in case we had missed it.

  “Okay mate… Okay. Calm down, we are getting you out.”

  Suddenly, the young boy clamped his fist around McKay’s lower arm and heaved himself up valiantly. He stared directly into my soul. In that moment I knew that he had seen every regret, every greedy moment, every selfish desire that I had ever harboured in my heart.

  He had the most beautiful, captivating, hazel coloured eyes, which were as open and honest as a child’s, as he continued to stare at me with his childlike belief that I would be able to rescue him from any situation.

  I was dumbfounded and was grateful for the sudden reprieve as he softly blinked. When they reopened, I had still not recovered from the intense glare that he was delivering, and I could do nothing but stare at the gaping hole that had been forcibly ripped open at his throat.

  I was thankful that McKay was there to share the moment with me.

  “Okay, mate. Come on, let go. Then we can get you out of here. Come on.”

  His voice was uncharacteristically soothing, as he gently unwrapped the boy’s fingers from around his forearm. The voice that I had come to know and love, like the sound of a boot crunching over gravel was gone, but it held fast and didn’t crack or crumble, like I was certain my own would have done. McKay seemed confident, unaffected even.

  It had been a long day, and it was only just after daybreak. It had all started in the early hours of the morning, when the hollers and shouts from outside the window of the Café de Fleur began to permeate into my unconscious mind.

  “Get up, get up. Something’s happening!” At first, the voice had sounded like it belonged to Bob Sargent, the man who had held my hand through my first few weeks on the frontline. But he was dead now, alive only in my dreams and thoughts.

  As I slowly began to come round from my much-needed sleep, the figure of Bob Sargent slowly morphed in the darkness to the altogether more harrowing figure of Private David Hamilton.

  “Sergeant, something has happened! Captain Arnold said we are to head to the frontline immediately.”

  He was excited, and I began to wonder how I had slept through such an exhilarating episode that Hamilton had apparently witnessed.
r />   “Come on, Andrew. Move yourself.”

  As I watched McKay begin to dress, I realised that the hubbub was genuine, and that we had indeed been ordered to make our way to the front.

  It was meant to be our night off, but the midnight patrol out in No Man’s Land had hit some kind of trouble and, judging by the scene that had met my eyes, they had hit a lot of it.

  Every single man in the patrol was wounded in one way or another, certainly, half of them never even returned to our lines.

  As we began to tend to the wounded, all the other soldiers around us hopped up onto the fire step, ready to beat an advancing German army away from our front door.

  We had spent the rest of the dark hours ferrying wounded troops to awaiting wagons, which then bumped their way towards the hospitals behind the lines. The young boy hit through the neck by a sniper was just one casualty too far for me.

  Voices began to shout from every direction, a few of them I even recognised, but most of them were already dead. No one seemed to talk to one another exactly, but seemed to take great comfort from their ability to make some sort of noise. It meant that they were still alive.

  “Andrew? Andrew? Are you alright? Can you hear me?”

  I locked eyes with McKay, as his mouth continued to move. Gradually, he began to realise that I could not hear him and so gave up trying to shout above the rat-tat-tat of the machine gun just fifteen yards away.

  We stared at each other in much the same manner that the young boy had stared at each one of us, silently communicating with one another our gratitude and relief that it had been our night off.

  Just as another few thousand shells howled, what felt like inches above our heads, we seemingly agreed that we were the lucky ones. This could have been us.

  “Let’s get this poor git away from here, shall we?”

  The horrible coarse tones that he coughed from the back of his throat were back. That was the kind of normality that I had been craving ever since my early morning wake-up call.

  I agreed, by picking up the wooden handles at the lighter end of the load, as my hands began to tremble ever so slightly.

  I wondered, being the one who was leading the evacuation, if McKay could see the slight tremor in my wrists, and hoped that he might put it down to the fact that I was struggling to keep the weight from crashing down to the ground. But, deep down, I knew that he would know of the real reason for my shaking digits.

  I needed some of that paraffin, desperately.

  I really needed the comfort of my hip flask right now.

  GRHMN.

  2

  2.

  McKay and I continued to ferry men on stretchers for a considerable amount of time, before we got any semblance of a break. Even then the break consisted of nothing more than a swift gulp of water, a few puffs on a cigarette and a much-needed glug from my hip flask.

  “Let’s get back to it, then.”

  I was in no state of mind to be the one taking charge right now, which was why I was incredibly grateful to have McKay by my side once again. It had felt like he had been beside me for a lot longer than he was in reality, and I found myself at regular intervals seeking him out, so that I could take some sort of comfort from his small, but powerful frame.

  It was as if that the way he fought, with a viciousness and fury, would somehow rub off onto me, and if it didn’t, then having him by my side might just be the key to making it home alive.

  I turned to look at him as he called out my name, wondering what it was I had done wrong this time that he was pulling me up for. But as I looked at him, I realised that he was as surprised to see me looking round at him, as I was to hear his voice. As I stared at his face questioningly, the voice appeared again, but this time McKay’s lips did not move.

  “It was your fault, Andrew. Your fault.”

  My eyes narrowed slightly as I tried to figure out what exactly was going on, before spinning on my heel to try and locate the spectral voice. But there was no one else around who could speak in such a low tone and still be heard, especially as the field artillery were doing their utmost to deafen absolutely everyone in this little part of France.

  I felt like talking back but was acutely aware of the inquisitive looks that I was drawing, not just from McKay, but the other men around me who had seen me stop dead in my tracks, to turn and confront a silent companion.

  Then, the voice spoke again.

  “Andrew. It was your fault. You hit me.”

  I had not expected to hear his voice ever again, that is generally how it goes when you witness someone dying. For a moment however, I was comforted by the genteel tones of Bob Sargent’s voice, as they slithered their way into my mind. He spoke forcefully, like he so often did when he addressed me, but that sense of feeling like I was being reprimanded was all I had come to know of him in the last few weeks of his life.

  He went to speak again but, before he could, he was cut short by the screaming and shouting of other stretcher bearers, as they thundered their way over the duck boards, racing to get their casualty to some sort of assistance.

  “Stand back! Make way!” Bellowed the first stretcher bearer, his companion’s face an apologetic one as he zipped past us standing in the mud.

  “You’re still needed up there!” he gasped as he stumbled his way past us.

  It was stating the obvious, but one that made us fly through the trenches, skidding left and right, faster than we had done before.

  We thumped into bodies running this way and that, who were grabbing vital bits of equipment that were needed to keep other boys alive, but also keep the Germans out. The Vickers guns seemed to glow red hot as they unceasingly spat round after round from the barrel of their weapons. They seemed quite well protected from where I stood, nothing more than a letterbox in amongst all the sandbags, for the barrel to poke out of and sweep No Man’s Land. But the man feeding the monster, that cut down so many of the enemy, had a large gash just above his eyebrow, which had started to dribble down the side of his face.

  No one, no matter how powerful they felt, was invincible here.

  Catching sight of us, he turned his body to face us, still expertly feeding the canvas belt into the Vickers.

  “We’ve got them on the run! They’re falling back!”

  I wished I shared his enthusiasm and optimism, but before I could say anything in reply to him a terrifying whistle filled my ears. He had heard it too and he adjusted his body to reflect that.

  The high-pitched screaming of incoming artillery was a noise that I would have been happy to have never heard ever again. But, for the rest of my days, I knew that it would haunt me every time I tried to fall asleep. Right there and then I promised to myself, that if I ever made it out alive of this war, I would pray a prayer of gratitude for every day that I did not hear shrieking shells.

  The grin that had been chiselled into the face of the machine gunner was suddenly wiped clean, as a shell burst just in front of his position, dislodging some of the sandbags that surrounded the Vickers. He began to pull and push them around, to be able to get the gun back into operation again, but he hadn’t realised that the man who sat next to him depressing the trigger, was dead.

  As I watched him struggle, the thought came to me of the saying that you never hear the shell that hits you, and as I made my way over to the floundering machine gunner, I realised that the wise old NCOs who had uttered such words were correct.

  I felt weightless for a moment, like you do when you dive into a lake and allow yourself to just float to the surface. I was peaceful for an instant, as I recalled my childhood days of swimming with the sister that I had long since forgotten. I would rise to the surface gracefully, arms and legs stretched out wide and taking in the muffled sounds of the water as the sediment settled at the bottom once more.

  My sister would jump in beside me, invariably catching a toe or two as she endeavoured to destabilise my Lily pad impression. As I flew through the air, I began to realise how much I missed her, the guilt creeping in about how infrequent I had been in my reminiscences of her. Maybe I would write her a letter after this was all over.