Invisible Frontline Read online

  I needed to pull myself together, and quickly, as I was still focused on Hughes’ unachievable dog collar.

  Not moving my gaze away from the traversing trench, I breathed out into the night, the warm air fusing with the cold in a twirling cloud.

  “We’re going to be flooded here, Sir. Very quickly. We’re already a man down and the Boche won’t take too kindly to what we’ve done here. Plus, we’ve got a matter of seconds before our guns begin to drop some shells on us here. We could move left out of the fire zone and find our own way out of the trenches further along.”

  The switch had been flicked, I was back in the room.

  The Captain mulled over what I had said for a second or two, before replying, straight down the canal of my ear, directly into my mind.

  “No. We need to head south. To the right. We have other parties further north. The artillery will be pummelling there too. I reckon no more than a hundred yards or so and then back out into No Man’s Land.”

  “Right, Sir.”

  He scampered away behind me, relaying his orders to the other two, who quickly joined me where I was. The Captain seemed like he was kissing Hughes goodbye, but quickly appeared, wielding his Sergeant’s revolver.

  “Let’s go.”

  He was back with us. I could take more of a back seat once again.

  Bob had become far bolder than he had ever been before in recent weeks, one of the only ones to have grown as an individual since McKay’s slight falter out in No Man’s Land. Even so, I was surprised at the words that were breathed into the darkness, his gentle, smooth tones recently replaced by gruff, even rude noises.

  “I’ll go up top.”

  “You sure, Bob?”

  “Yes, Sir. It’s only a slight headache.”

  His curt demeanour only served to reinforce the notion that I had of Bob in recent weeks. The young, chipper lad who had been my best friend since arriving on the frontline, was now a permanently bad-tempered man, who saw nothing but ill of anyone and everyone. It was a disappointing spiral that he was in.

  Even still, it had made him a better soldier, not least because he saw no issues in running an enemy soldier through with his bayonet. After all, it was their fault that we were here, according to him. In truth, I personally couldn’t even recall why we were here in the first place. I had started to not care.

  It was Bob who began to lead us through the deserted trenches, a common, however haunting phenomena that we had become used to each time we visited the German’s side.

  They much preferred to fall back, after offering up an initial weakened resistance, before swarming forwards in large numbers to repel us once more. It made no sense to them to hang around and wait for us to slaughter them.

  They would be back though, and soon. Especially now that we had outstayed our welcome.

  We sauntered past empty dugouts and abandoned cans of food and I noticed a distinct lack of any weapons. At least the Hun had still retained some presence of mind to take anything useful with them.

  We tried to minimise as much of our collective noise as possible, the bone-dry duckboards that the Germans had laid down doing us no favours at all.

  “The next fire bay, Bob,” the Captain breathed as we approached another trench corner. “We’ll make our way out of that one, no matter what.”

  I was surprised that I could hear him, his ear so close to Bob’s that it was difficult to work out where one head ended and the other started. For a moment, I thought I might have even imagined what he had said.

  Bob muttered nothing in reply to Captain Arnold’s command, but instead tilted his head slightly, to look over his shoulder in acknowledgement.

  I wondered how soon after he had done that, that Bob had realised he had made what could be one of his final moves.

  The long, sneering barrel of a broom-handle pistol, a Mauser, was pressed firmly into the temple at the side of Bob’s head. All it would take would be a squeeze of the trigger and Bob would be gone.

  First, the skin and hair around the impact site with singe and burn, while the bullet burrowed further and further into his skull. Within moments, the barrier of the skull that was meant to protect his brain would be shattered, leaving nothing to protect poor Bob’s most vital of organs.

  But it wasn’t the prospect of losing another of my team mates that was worrying me the most. It was the noise. The short, sharp snap of the Mauser would be all we needed to bring a tonne of bad news down on us in an instant.

  The silhouetted figure that stepped out from behind the shadow of the pistol seemed confident, cocky almost. He had us exactly where he wanted us.

  No one moved for what felt like an age. No one knew what was going to happen next. Neither, it seemed, did the German, even though he was the one calling all the shots.

  It was Captain Arnold who moved first, apparently adamant to sign our death warrants.

  It took him an awfully long time for him to finish crouching to the point where he could go no further. It was almost as if the nerves had got the better of him and he was going to ask for a little bit of privacy for a moment. But then he began to stretch his arm out.

  He held Sergeant Hughes’ revolver by the barrel, a demonstrative act of how subservient and peace-loving he was prepared to be. Then, locking eyes with the German as obsessively as possible, he pushed the revolver towards him, the sound of wood against metal rattling louder than a Maxim gun ever had done before.

  The German eyed it suspiciously, like he half-expected it to suddenly explode in his face. But then his eyes gave him away.

  That revolver would make him very popular. Very popular indeed.

  It was also worth a lot of cigarettes.

  The prospective glint in his eye told me everything that I needed to know about him. His fatal flaw. We all have them. He was greedy.

  As the Captain gradually rose back to full height, I felt McKay lean in to me and I could feel every hair on his top lip as they swayed over the skin of my ear.

  “There’s a break in the wire up there, I can see it. We can get out of this fire bay here.”

  Like a game of Chinese whispers, I lowered my voice to so little that I was unsure if Captain Arnold would actually hear me.

  “Toss the other revolver to him too. Just over to his left, just out of reach. Stay low.”

  Without questioning, the Captain did exactly as I had instructed, clearly with no other option in his own mind at that moment in time.

  I could feel McKay breathing hard behind me, as he prepared to dart for the fire step and leap over.

  The Captain repeated his motions, his arm so far outstretched that I thought he would do himself an injury if he carried on much longer. Eventually, he returned to the squatting position, ready to toss the revolver over.

  It clattered to the ground perfectly, just far enough away that the German would have to stretch to reach it.

  I felt a fist thump me right in the gut, as the first sounds of falling artillery only sped up our negotiations. Within seconds, the dugout would be packed with more smoke than Bob’s bedroom and filled with so much dust that we would choke.

  The German pressed his broom-handled pistol further into Bob’s skin and I could tell that his veins would be bulging at the news.

  But he had bitten. He had taken the bait.

  He began to stretch one, battered leather boot out towards the first revolver, which scraped and grinded on the wood as it found its way to him.

  The second proved more problematic though. It was too far for him, he would have to alleviate some of the pressure on Bob’s head. But his greed was the only justification that he needed and so his leg continued to manoeuvre towards the revolver.

  It was too much for him and his attempts at rebalancing himself were futile. He staggered over to his left, just an inch or two, but just enough for what I needed him for.

  I raised my Webley up to my eye, so that my arm was leaning over the top of Captain Arnold’s head.

  I sud
denly realised that my hand was quivering terribly, and I was finding it difficult to distinguish where the German’s chest was.

  I blamed it on the artillery for a moment, the ground tremoring shakes offering me no assistance in the slightest.

  But I knew what it really was, I couldn’t shake the thought from my head.

  I really need a sip of that paraffin. Just to steady myself.

  I needed to take my opportunity now, the German was already remedying his mistake.

  I squeezed the trigger, as hard as I could.

  Bang.

  Bob suddenly spun away from the German, smacking into him as he collapsed to the ground, opening up the German’s figure for me to aim at.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  The German slumped to the floor with a thud. None of us watched over him to see if he was going to be getting up again.

  Instead, we fell back on the ancient military tactic that had got soldiers out of trouble for centuries.

  We ran away.

  3

  I was particularly glad to make it back to the Café de Fleurs that night.

  As ever, everything had seemed to blur into a distant memory, one that would only come back in my dreams in the coming weeks.

  It hadn’t been our most successful raid, that much was certain. With one man wounded and another dead it was, in fact, one of the worst raids that I had been on since I had started on them.

  Progressively, over the last few weeks, the human cost of conducting such raids had spiked, not just with our team, but all the others too.

  The Germans were slowly becoming more astute as to ways of repelling us or inflicting heavier casualties. Booby-traps were now common place, as was the hand-to-hand fighting that they had been so keen to avoid before.

  Maybe it was also something to do with the fact that there wasn’t really too much variation to our role, we always did the same thing.

  Jump in, kill and injure, ransack, then leave. We never got any further than the fire bays themselves. We would need to change it up a bit eventually.

  The raids had become less effective too, especially in the way of intelligence gathering. To begin with, it wasn’t too difficult to locate a map or a communiqué or two, as they were frequently left lying about. Now, it was just as easy to find them, but perhaps too easy.

  It was so easy in fact, that I wasn’t really sure why we were still out there, as almost all of it was falsified or made up in some way. There was no real option of acting upon any of the intelligence that we gained.

  Maybe that was why the only place where I seemed capable of any kind of happiness was back at the café. In the past, I had gleaned small droplets of glee and delight at the amount of information that we had come back with, or the calibre of prisoner that we had taken.

  Now, none of it seemed to matter. We were losing men like Sergeant Hughes for no reason whatsoever. We were increasingly morphing into the new infantry.

  The café had become the only image that I had that resembled something of a safe haven. I could barely remember home, the world that I was in being so far removed from the premise of one that it felt like it had all been a figment of my imagination.

  I dreamed of the café, both day and night; when I was both there and absent from it. It had become one of the very few things in my life that I actually cared about.

  “Paul!” I bellowed as I entered the small, but adequate café. It was far too small for what was being demanded of it, but the owner was more than happy to let as many men stack themselves in, to help them forget the war for an hour or two.

  “Monsieur Ellis! It is good to see you back in one piece again!”

  He was a pleasant fellow, who spoke excellent English, which was just as well owing to the number of us who descended on his establishment day after day. He was accommodating too, sacrificing the top floor of his building plus two other rooms below for us to use as our home.

  Paul Sancy, and the rest of his family, were squeezed into two tiny rooms along the corridor from our own, a small sacrifice, he had said, for the men who came to his country’s assistance.

  “It is good to see you too! You tubby little fellow!”

  He bellowed uproariously each and every time that I had said it, and I wondered frequently if he would have had the same reaction, if someone was to enlighten him as to what I was calling him. Deep down, I think he knew.

  “My old soak! Back again!” he squeezed out in between chuckles. That phrase, he did know the true meaning of, as McKay had been so quick to enlighten him.

  “Speaking of which, where is my drink?” I winked at him.

  Paul had become my main provider of the paraffin that I now needed to keep on going, especially now that Earnshaw was holed up in some hospital somewhere and unable to top me up. It was no trouble for Paul to source me the paraffin, especially at the price that I was paying for its provision anyway.

  “Coming, my friend. Coming!”

  It had started out as a little bit of a joke, a quick top up of the paraffin-like liquid in my bloodstream immediately after a raid. But slowly, it had become a desire of mine, a superstition, one or two may have even said a necessity.

  They may have been right, to a degree, the quivering in my hand that I had experienced as I pointed the Webley towards Bob had refused to subside. I was a slave to it, hiding my right hand in my trouser pocket all the way back to the café, where Paul’s routine remedy would sort it out.

  “Andrew,” breathed Paul into my face as he bent down to pour me a cup of his terrible cognac, “where is Nicholas?”

  He said it in such a way that I thought he was deliberately trying to rile me, every syllable becoming an exhalation of breath and an odious one at that.

  I recoiled slightly from him, the Frenchman mistaking my tears of discomfort for ones of sadness.

  It was the first time since Hughes had died that I felt any kind of distress at his passing, and not just because I wouldn’t get to ask him my burning question about the clergy.

  He was not just a good soldier, but an upstanding and loyal member of the human race and now, in the blink of an eye, he was just a memory.

  He had been the one who was the most experienced out of all of us, the eldest in the group that we could all look to for guidance. In a group of brothers, he had been our father.

  Now that he was gone, our little team would never be the same.

  The Frenchman had noticed the changed expression on my face, from one that usually exuded confidence and buoyancy, to one that was now dejected and scared. I was more like the boy soldier that I had been the year before.

  As if he needed to hear the words from my mouth, he waited, bottle in hand awaiting my response.

  “Erm…He’s…He’s gone, Paul. He won’t be coming back.”

  I gulped at the cognac and let the glass clatter to the table loudly.

  He thought for a moment, before refilling my glass.

  “That is a shame, Andrew. He was a nice man. A good man. He was always very kind and gentle. He used to pray with my children before bed time.”

  “Did he? I didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, yes. Every night since you came here. He was a gentle man, he always liked talking to my children. I think they reminded him of his own.”

  He registered the look on my face.

  “You did not know he had children?”

  I clearly didn’t know him as well as I had thought.

  “No…”

  “Three. All boys.”

  “Right.”

  “He had seemed slower more recently though. Reluctant to pray with them it seemed. He looked tired. More exhausted. Like all of you really. Something had happened in the last few weeks.”

  It was a probing statement, but one that did not necessitate an answer, which I did not give him the pleasure of having. Paul was not a nosy man, but the human desire for knowledge had overwhelmed him on that one.

  “Anyway, I will leave you now, Andrew. I am sorry to he
ar about Nicholas. But this is war.”

  He had learnt the harrowing lesson of this war. Don’t get attached to someone too easily, they’ll only break your heart.

  I watched him as he scurried back behind the counter, whispering to his wife about the latest demise of one of their cohabitants. She looked over at me with forlorn little eyes and the kind of withering sympathetic look that is given to a child on news of their parent’s death.

  I nodded towards her, with a weak smile on my face in thanks of her compassion and raised my glass to her gently.

  “What you doin’, you big pansy?”

  His drink hit the table first, then his fist as he slid his buttocks into the battered wooden chair next to mine.

  “Just told Porky Paul about Sergeant Hughes.”

  “Oh…Right…What does he actually care?”

  “What?”

  “Him…He doesn’t really care for Hughes, does he? That’s just one less person to pay for these dreadful drinks.”

  “I think you’ve probably had enough of them tonight.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk, Ellis.”

  A passer-by to our conversation may have mistaken it for something far more malicious than it was. But, in actual fact, this was why both McKay and I had grown so incredibly close in recent weeks.

  We were both able to acknowledge our weaknesses in one another’s company and, in doing so, joke about them. It made us better people, helped us to realise that we weren’t perfect and that if we didn’t improve on them, we would die.

  We had bonded in recent weeks, over a smoke and a packet of playing cards, as he slowly tried to rediscover his feet after what had happened out in No Man’s Land. It was still not referred to by any that knew of it, not even after a skinful of drinks or an emotionally charged argument. It went unsaid.

  “I liked Hughes. He was good to me,” he said, lifting his glass towards Paul to come and refill it. I knew that he would be marking down how much he was putting in our glasses before he had even topped it up. He would want to be paid.

  “Me too.”

  “He always trusted me. Always believed in me.”