Casca 21: The Trench Soldier Page 14

  He regarded Wothering's command of French as a proof of his Germanness. Nor was he impressed by their command of English as he did not speak the language and held it in contempt. And he adamantly refused to transport them to a British camp, insisting that they were Germans and his prisoners and that the matter did not concern the British.

  Wothering then tried telling him that he had urgent military intelligence for the British High Command and demanded that he be taken to General Headquarters.

  "So," the Frenchman sneered as if his deepest suspicions had been confirmed, "you admit being in possession of military secrets. Then, as an officer in an army of the Triple Entente, you must reveal this information to me, your superior officer."

  Wothering patiently explained that he could under no circumstances do that, as he was not within the French chain of command.

  "But if you will just escort me to British Headquarters, we can resolve this whole matter in a moment," he said.

  Casca could see that this conversation was never going to get anywhere, and decided to take a hand. He shouted to the astonished Wothering, "Himmeldonnerwetter! Halt's maul!"

  The French major laughed. "So, the British corporal is telling a British captain to hold his tongue. And in German! What have we here?"

  Casca continued to act like a superior officer infuriated by the conduct of an inferior. He hissed at Wothering in the perfect German of a Prussian officer.

  "You fool. If that British Major Cartwright near Rheims spots you, he will know what's afoot, and we will have lost the whole game."

  "And who is this Major Cartwright?" demanded the French commandant.

  Casca glared at him insolently. "We have nothing further to say to you, and will be very content to be your prisoners for the time being."

  "For the time being? So, a German attack is imminent, and you hope to be rescued. Well, you are spies, wearing stolen uniforms, so there will be no rescue. I intend to shoot you as spies suspected of espionage."

  Casca nodded. "As you like. I don't give a damn what you do."

  Wothering could not understand a word of the conversation in German, but he discerned that Casca had an objective clear in his mind, and he smiled at the game.

  The sight of what he believed to be two senior German officers grinning at the prospect of a firing squad unnerved the Frenchman. He shouted some orders, and a minute later they were again in the Mercedes, this time with a tricolor pennant flying at the cowl and with an escort of four French soldiers.

  Half an hour later they were talking with Major Cartwright, and the sadly discomfited French officer was on his way to his own headquarters with the warning of an imminent attack on Verdun and the proposed use of a new weapon that somehow utilized chlorine.

  The attack on the French fortress came at dawn on September twenty-second. As a result of Casca's information, the French army rushed every available man to Verdun, the key strong point which was supposed to be impregnable. The British Expeditionary Force had shrunk so much that they held only twenty-one miles of line while the French held more than four hundred miles, the Western Front now running almost from the Belgian coast to the border of Switzerland. But every English soldier who could be spared was rushed to Verdun too, and Major Cartwright's men were allocated to the forward defense of the star-shaped Fort Douaumont.

  The attack commenced with the usual predawn artillery barrage which started at first light. The Tommies had been standing to since three o'clock and were ready for action. Many of the shells were what the Tommies called coal boxes – high explosive shells with an impact fuse that detonated the explosive charge when the shell struck the ground or any hard object, releasing great clouds of dense, black smoke. The barrage was still continuing when the first wave of chlorine gas reached the foremost trenches forming the first line of defense of the French fort.

  The gas came rolling in dirty, yellow-gray clouds, mixing with the early morning ground mist and the black smoke from the coal-box shells. Behind the rolling clouds Casca could see German soldiers carrying large canisters of the gas.

  Casca's eyes burned, his nose was on fire. The inside of his mouth and his throat felt as if he had been drinking petrol. And with each eddy of the light wind, the clouds of gas rolled closer, and men started to fall, retching and heaving in agony.

  It was impossible to stand before this weapon. The British line broke. Officers and men clambered out of the trenches and ran for the fort. Thousands of Germans charged from behind the gas clouds and within minutes were in control of the British trenches with scarcely a shot fired.

  But in another minute, they too were running. As the scalding gas clouds enveloped them and scorched the linings of their lungs, they fled in all directions, some running back into the advancing gas clouds only to again turn back and run uselessly about in the area between the defensive trenches and the walls of the fort.

  The British made a stand outside the walls, and their sustained rifle fire cut heavily into the confused Germans who were also taking heavy fire from the fort's machine guns.

  The wind had died, and the heavy gas lay coiled in clouds close to the ground. The advancing Germans could not get through it, and those who tried to retreat found it blocking their way.

  Then the wind sprang up again, but this time blowing out of the south and toward the German lines. The entire German assault was engulfed in the poisonous cloud, and the attack broke up.

  But the British were in no shape to counterattack. Almost every man was disabled to some extent, hundreds had been blinded, and many were dying where they lay, their lungs so severely damaged that they had ceased functioning. Only the wind change had saved the force from total annihilation.

  By midmorning the gas had dissipated, and the suffering Tommies moved back into their trenches.

  German airplanes were playing about in the sky, monitoring the movements on the ground. Casca recognized Goering's Fokker and chanced a shot at it, but without effect.

  The Germans soon came again, the gas blowing ahead of them as they neared the British trenches. The wind was now just a series of light eddies which blew the gas first one way, and then the other.

  The chlorine devastated the British and then the Germans in turn. The attackers found that they could not get through the gas to take the trenches, and light southerly gusts blew the corrosive chemical back upon them in murderous clouds, forcing the second wave of attackers to turn in frantic retreat without firing a single shot.

  The day wore away with men collapsing and dying on both sides. From time to time the gas clouds would clear for a while, and the battle would revert to the pattern that had obtained since the war had started – the attackers dying in droves at the barbed wire entanglements as they ran into sustained machine gun fire from the trenches.

  By the end of the day, some two thousand French and British had been killed or severely wounded, and the Germans had lost about the same number, many of them hanging on the wire before the trenches where they had been cut down by machine gun fire from the fort.

  Hundreds of men from both sides were blinded and shambled about in no-man's-land, whimpering in pain and confusion.

  "This is not the sort of war I care much for," Casca said to Hugh.

  The big Welshman stared at him through reddened eyes. "You've been to war before?" he asked.

  Casca gritted his teeth. "Not if this is war."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The stretcher bearers brought in hundreds of gassed men, but there were hundreds more out in the dark forest beyond the trenches. Throughout the night they could be heard coughing, gasping, and vomiting. The autumn night was cold, and there was a freezing wind out of the north that carried with it the chill of the arctic ice. Gradually, the noise died down as the men died, but there were still many of them groaning and calling weakly for help when the troops were stood to at midnight to await the morning's attack.

  Everybody was still suffering some ill effect from the gas. Men's faces had been sc
alded a dirty yellow, the skin peeling away in strips. Their lungs were clogged with the corrosive chemical, their throats and noses scorched.

  "Do you think they'll use that gas again?" somebody said.

  "Only if they're crazy," another soldier replied. "It did as much harm to them as it did to us. Thank God for that wind change."

  "Yeah. Listen, I can hear a German voice now."

  From out of no-man's-land came a despairing groan between mumbled words. "Heilige Maria, Mutter Gattes, erbarme dich unser."

  "What the hell's he saying?"

  "Holy Mary, Mother of God, have pity on us," Casca answered. To the dying German he shouted, "Behiit euch Gott – God preserve you!"

  "Everything smells of mustard," Cockney Dave said. "I was dreaming of mince pies. Riding me bicycle down our street I was, which is funny, 'cos I never had one. All down the street chimneys were smoking, and as I passed the houses, I could smell the coal fires. Then I was turning into my house, and my mum was opening the door. I could smell the polishing wax on the floors, and I could smell some hot mince pies – and then they were waking me up, and my nose was full of this rotten mustard smell. If I'd had just one more minute I would have had a nice, hot mince pie for breakfast."

  "Well," Hugh Evans laughed, "there's one good thing about fighting alongside Frogs – we do get some sort of breakfast that's worth eating."

  "Yeah, makes a change from our slops, don't it?"

  They were eating chunks of cold, cooked bacon with hard French bread and washing it down with strong black coffee.

  The artillery bombardment started at four a.m. and continued until dawn when the first field-gray uniforms appeared through the ground mist, and the British and French machine guns opened up on them.

  This morning the wind was strongly from the south, and there was no more of the mustard gas. Casca hoped that he would never see it again. The mighty secret weapon had certainly not worked on its first trial. But he had an idea that the weapon would not be scrapped. With the right wind conditions it could be devastating.

  The first wave of Germans died by hundreds before they got anywhere near the wire, and by midmorning the attack had diminished to small skirmishes.

  Then suddenly there was thunderous noise, and a thousand horsemen were charging into the guns. Each cavalryman had a saber in his hand, a lance in its socket, and a carbine slung across his back.

  For the machine guns the horses made even better targets than men, and they were soon dying all over the field. Their dismounted riders formed ranks and poured concerted fire at the British gunners.

  Some of the machine guns stopped firing, but when the Germans charged, they were stopped at the first of the wire entanglements, and while they tried to cut through it, the French machine guns from the walls of the fort chopped them to pieces.

  These men were tough and well trained, and few of them ran. Most of them used their dead horses for cover and maintained heavy fire with their carbines. From behind them a wave of infantry attacked, and aided by the effective fire of the cavalrymen, many of them made it to the wire. But few got through it.

  Twice they did manage to dislodge the Tommies, but their attacks faltered as they approached the walls of the fort and came under concentrated fire from the French defenders. In dogged counterattacks, fighting mainly with bayonets, the Tommies regained their positions.

  At the end of the second day, the British were retired to the fort, and French troops took over the forward trenches.

  Cockney Dave was far from impressed with the French fort and declared that he would rather be back in the trench.

  "What a rotten stink!" he complained as his nose took in the accumulated odors of sweat, blood, vomit, urine, gun oil, cordite, and the dull odor of spent lead.

  The fort was indeed almost impossible to take. Its star shape thrust its points out in all directions, dominating the forest from its hilltop elevation of more than a thousand feet. The walls were concrete, dug into the hill, and more than eight feet thick. And it was well protected with steel-fronted gun turrets.

  The wind overnight was out of the northwest, sweeping down from the north pole. The steel gun turrets had frosted over, and the inside walls were thick with ice. It was impossible to sleep, and the gunners were on their feet all night, stamping their boots on the concrete floors as they tried to keep from freezing.

  Again the action started before first light. From inside the massive fortress the artillery fire was less terrifying than in the trenches but seemed even louder.

  "What I wouldn't give for just one minute's splendid silence," Cockney Dave groaned.

  Casca nodded grim agreement.

  His ears were saturated with noise. From the distance came the sound of the German guns followed by the whine of incoming shells and then the explosions as they struck the ground or the walls of the fort. From inside the fort the big French guns fired shot after shot, each resounding explosion followed without interval by another, each shot building on the noise of the previous one to create, a vast, unceasing thunder.

  This continuous background of noise was augmented by the staccato chatter of machine guns, rifle shots, and the explosions of grenades and punctuated by the screams of men.

  Within this ghastly orchestration men spoke little, communicating mainly by signs. Orders came in hoarse screams which were rarely heard and never understood. Only the shrieks of the wounded and the groans of the dying had the power to attract conscious attention.

  These were the only sounds. No birds sang; there were no cows or pigs or chickens. The tethered horses and mules were as quiet as the men cowering near them. Any conversation consisted of gasped expletives and shouted curses.

  Cockney Dave summed it up: "Hell on the ears, ain't it?"

  Not too good on the eyes either, Casca thought as he stared out at no-man's-land where the shape of the tortured landscape was emerging with the dawn. What had once been a forest of splendid trees was now a tangle of splintered trunks without branches, buds or flowers. The ground was churned into thousands of shell craters and abandoned, half-dug foxholes. Grotesquely erect bodies stood grinning, entangled in the wire.

  The battle lasted for four days, and the Hotchkiss machine guns seemed to fire almost nonstop, pouring lead into the waves of attacking Germans, brass cartridge cases spewing from their breeches.

  More than ten thousand men died, but the Germans got no closer to the fort than the forward trenches.

  Meanwhile, for five days another battle raged nearby at Picardy, and a few days later came the Battle of Artois. In total, nearly thirty thousand men died, and the only result was that the Germans took St. Mihiel and some small and strategically unimportant villages on the left bank of the Meuse River.

  On October first, a strong German force under Hans von Beseler attacked Antwerp, and after nine days of endless slaughter, forced the Belgian and British defenders to evacuate.

  There began a race for the seas that the Germans won. They took Ghent, Bruges, and Ostend in a murderous five days.

  Then the Belgians flooded the whole of the Yser district, and as autumn turned to winter men and mules found themselves up to their knees in freezing swamps. The Germans took Lille and attacked southeast of Ypres in an action that lasted almost a month and produced no result at all.

  On December fourteenth, the Allies launched a general attack on the whole front from Nieuport to Verdun. The action lasted for ten days producing tens of thousands of casualties with no gain.

  All but a tip of Belgium was in German hands, and they held one tenth of France including ten thousand square miles of coal and iron mines.

  The war that was to have been over by Christmas was now almost half a year old with no end in sight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The hard freezes of November and December had once signaled the end of what military strategists had called the campaigning season, and troops moved into winter quarters, cantonments where they passed the days in training for the camp
aigns that would commence at the end of the spring rains in April.

  Casca's mind ran back over many of the European campaigns he had taken part in – in the time of the Caesars, of Charlemagne, Crecy in the fourteenth century and Agincourt in the fifteenth during the Hundred Years' War, the campaigns of Charles in the sixteenth, the Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century, the Seven Years' War in the eighteenth. Never had he experienced campaigning in the depths of winter.

  Nor could he see any sense in it now.

  The two enormous armies were entrenched opposite each other for hundreds of miles. Every day tens of thousands of men raced into the muzzles of the machine guns, and thousands of them died. But no significant territory had changed hands since Antwerp at the beginning of October, and outside Belgium, most of the war had been fought back and forth over the same ten miles or less, all the way along almost five hundred miles of front.

  But the high command on both sides still dreamed of a quick victory, now pinning their faith in the new weapons that were being developed. Their faith remained undimmed although most of these brilliant new developments – the airplane and zeppelin, radio telegraph and field telephone, bicycle detachments, poisonous gas – had so far proved of dubious worth in the field.

  Christmas Eve found Casca and what was left of the Old Contemptibles back in the trenches near Rheims. Captain George had been busted back to lieutenant a couple of times, Major Cartwright was now a colonel, and Hugh Evans a sergeant. Casca was still a corporal, and Cockney Dave still a private.

  Unending warfare had become the normal condition of life. The men in the trenches were coming to believe that the fighting might never end. They lived in a world of endless fear, amidst blood, sweat, piss, shit, vomit, and tears. The cold brought misery, fog, rain, sleet, snow, hail, and mud. Miles and miles of freezing mud, knee deep in the no-man's-land that had been exploded, dug up, and exploded more every day for almost six months.

  The roads had turned to rivers of sluggish mud that drifted between steep and slippery banks. Movement was almost impossible but was ordered every day by the commanders of one side or the other.