Dead Man's Land By Robert Ryan
SATURDAY
ONE
As the observation balloon cleared the spindly crowns of the surrounding trees, the major gripped the side of its wicker gondola tight enough for the blood to leach from his knuckles. He risked a quick glance at the rapidly receding forest floor. It was covered with the men of the 3rd British Field Balloon Company (Training), who were fussing over the arm-thick hawser that snaked from the nose of the rising inflatable to the winch on a flatbed lorry, making sure it ran free and easy as the balloon gained height. Others were carefully folding the disconnected umbilicals that had fed the gas from the tanker truck into the greedy belly of the balloon. Forty-eight men to launch one balloon, so they had told him. He could well believe it.
The men of the ground crew were shrinking to insect-like proportions already and what had seemed a huge clearing in the forest was but a small hole in the great swathe of beech, larch and oak surrounding the launch site. Beyond the tree line was his car and Brindle, his driver, shading his eyes as he looked up at the strange apparition that had risen from within the forest. The driver waved and the major felt obliged to return the greeting, albeit rather self-consciously. It didn’t seem at all like correct form to be waving at one’s orderly.
Beyond Brindle was the village they had driven through in the semi-darkness of dawn, with its church now revealed to have a shell-damaged steeple, shocked out of the perpendicular. He could see the black ribbon of the main road stretching off back towards the hospital they had left before the sun had troubled the sky. To his right was the soft, cotton-wool plume of a steam train heading towards France and the coast, perhaps ferrying wounded to the hospitals at Bailleul or St Omer or the great tented encampments that stretched from Calais to Boulogne.
Elsewhere, the sky swallowed the puffs from the smaller locos, shifting men and munitions around this vast hinterland on their iron web of hastily laid rails. He could see the unwavering line of a distant canal, drawn across the landscape as if with a rule, its dark water thick with overloaded barges. Beyond it, a huge lorry park, a man-made crop of green and brown, metal and canvas, slab-sided vehicles sprung up where once wheat or oats had thrived. Over towards Wallonia, fields dense with hop poles, their regular patterns interrupted by deep depressions, as if a giant had pressed his monstrous thumb into the midst of them, scattering and flattening the delicate frames. Shell blasts, he assumed.
From his fresh aerial perspective he could see that the entire land, its fields and forests, ridges and marshes, was covered with a skein of footpaths and sunken roads, old drovers’ paths and bridleways, cartpaths, towpaths, dykes and greenways, all the traditional ways and means of moving across the countryside, from farm to market, village to chapel, hamlet to city, birth to death. And all far too slow for modern warfare. A new grid of roads had been laid over this landscape, wide and brightly metalled, designed to echo to the sound of hobnail boots and the thrum of rubber tyres. Between these new seams stitched into the fabric of Flanders and Wallonia, he could count a dozen whitewashed farmhouses, with their brightly tiled roofs and cobbled courtyards, some filled with toy-sized livestock.
He had almost relaxed when a gusting breeze caught the flanks of the inflatable – ‘Florrie’, as the men had christened her. The cylinder bucked like a harpooned whale and the basket suspended beneath it twisted against its lines. The major gripped tight once more.
‘You all right, sir?’ asked Slattery, the lieutenant who was his companion in the flimsy gondola.
No, he wanted to reply to the young man with his glowing cheeks, wind-burned from many such ascents. I am not all right. The major had sworn after the accident that had changed his life that he would never ride in anything that tried to defy gravity, ever. Yet here he was, soaring above a forest clearing in Belgium, borne aloft by a tumescent sausage full of thirty thousand cubic feet of distilled coal product, enough of which had leaked to give the whole countryside the whiff of the gasometer, standing in a basket more suited to a picnic on Hampstead Heath. I am a doctor, he wanted to explain, not a . . . what did they call them? Balloonatics? Yes, that was it. A word that was far too close to lunatics for his liking.
Florrie gave a groan as she was buffeted again, but this time the wind filled the crescent-shaped pockets in the rear of her gutta-percha envelope and spun her to face into the breeze. The hanging basket began to pendulum and the major’s stomach flipped in a queasy somersault.
‘I must be mad,’ he said under his breath, he thought, but loud enough for Slattery to hear.
‘Not to worry. Worst part of the ascent as the tail stabilizers fill, I always think. She gets a bit twitchy for a minute. You get used to it after a few times.’
‘I’m not intending to do this more than the once,’ he said. ‘I’m only here under protest.’
The major’s request to move closer to the front had been met with much resistance within the Royal Army Medical Corps. There were those who thought a man of his vintage had no place crossing the Channel, let alone being put in harm’s way. Strange, he had answered, that we insist on killing our young men, valuing their lives less than that of one who has put in a good portion of his threescore and ten. His passing would cause precious little anguish in the world, he thought, recognizing a kernel of sadness in the sentiment.
Eventually, his demand to be deployed at a forward station had landed on the desk of the Deputy Director of Army Medical Services in France and Belgium. Any senior medical officer who wanted to experience life at the front, the DDAMS had said, must go up and see for himself what he was letting himself in for.
The front. It had taken on the qualities of a mythical beast in the major’s mind. He had seen its vicious handiwork in the beds at Charing Cross Hospital and on the stretchers at Victoria Station, Dover and Boulogne and in the overcrowded wards at Wimereux, Lille and Bailleul. Wounded men pleaded not to be sent back to face it again, others lamented friends still in its grip, some flinched at the mere mention of it and a brave few were eager to do battle with the front once more, as if it were some test of manhood they had somehow failed. In his mind, the front was a living creature capable of chewing up and spitting out thousands of men at a time. He had seen its sinuous shape marked on maps and talked of in hushed or awed tones, as if the cartographer’s legend said: ‘Here be Dragons’.
‘Right,’ said Slattery, peering upwards at Florrie and apparently satisfied with what he saw, ‘it’ll all be smooth riding from now on.’
The lieutenant busied himself with freeing two pieces of rope that had been tied to one of the gondola cables. Let loose, they dangled on either side of him and stretched all the way up to Florrie and over her flanks. ‘Just in case, Major, you should know about these two pieces of kit. This one is the bleed valve. It takes us down slowly, with or without the winch. This one –’ he tapped the cable that was marked with a red band ‘is the panic panel.’ He pointed up at Florrie. ‘Whatever you do, don’t touch it. It rips out a piece of the envelope and vents a large proportion of the gas. Gets us down fast if there is an enemy plane coming. Sometimes too fast. But don’t worry. Nothing much happens at this time of day. Even wars stop for brekkers.’
As the balloon calmed, the major looked down once more at the Belgian soil they had recently vacated. How high were they? He stared over into France, trying to focus through hazy air, wondering if they would gain enough altitude to see England.
‘Major?’ He felt a tap on his shoulder. Slattery was handing him a heavy pair of binoculars and pointing to the east. ‘The front is that way.’ The major took the glasses, turned to face east, and pressed them to his eyes, his head swimming as a blurred world leaped closer. He adjusted the focus with the central ring. Through the binoculars, humanity was no longer a succession of indistinct blobs. He could see a farmer quite clearly, one foot on a gate, smoking a pipe contentedly as he watched a sow suckling her piglets; a few hundred yards away, a cluster of soldiers were brewing up tea in a three-sided farmhouse, and in a field, several cavalrymen were brushing their horses, the post-gallop steam rising from the animals’ backs clearly visible. A young girl, white blouse, long woollen skirt, her hair tied with a yellow scarf, moved among a flock of belligerent geese, scattering feed, lashing out with a lazy foot at those who got in her way.
There was a field kitchen, the cooks ladling out food to grimy-looking Tommies and, nearby, outside a bell tent, two officers bracketing a rickety table, a breakfast of eggs and thick, crusty bread laid out between them. They smoked and chatted and supped from tin mugs of tea. One of the pair threw back his head in laughter at a remark, almost losing his seating as a chair leg sank into the soil, causing the other much mirth. Boys, he could see now as they joshed each other. Twenty if they were a day. Some hundred yards to the right of them, yet another alien feature: a cluster of wooden crosses, the bodies of the fallen waiting for the time when they could be exhumed and transported to a more permanent resting place. A solitary figure stood in front of one of them, head bowed, possibly in prayer, his steel helmet in his hands. The major moved his prying eyes on, feeling like an intruder on private grief.
Each and every subject his magnified gaze fell upon was acting as if they were a long, long way from any conflict. Just how close they were in reality was soon apparent as they continued their ascent. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the war was heaving into view.
‘As we are a training unit we are a little further back than an operational company, so our perspective isn’t quite as good, sir. But look to your left. North. That’s the Ypres Salient, a bulge into the Germans’ territory. See the rise of hills? German positions. Poor blighters underneath that don’t half take it. Those few shards sticking up? Used to be villages. See the artillery emplacements? They’re ours, of course. Now look straight ahead. Believe you me, Major, this is the only way you can make sense of what’s down there. Once you are in the trenches, you keep your head down and the world shrinks. Don’t worry, we are too far away for any small-arms fire to cause us any bother and any artilleryman who could hit us would deserve every medal the Germans have. Start nearest to us. See those farmhouses, sir? Not a roof between them? Billets for the men either on their way up the line or down it or just having a few days’ respite. Right, move forward, follow one of the new roads. You should be able to see some dark lines? Running north to south? That’s left to right, see? Got them? Reserve trenches. You’ll find you can’t keep men constantly right at the sharp end, they have to be rotated. Now branching off from those – steady, wind’s shifting a little, Florrie’s just righting herself again – branching off from those are the communication trenches that go towards the forward trenches. They zigzag, right? Most trenches do, you’ll find. If not zigzagged, then they are castellated, like battlements. It means there is no clear line of fire for any interloper and that shell blasts won’t funnel down them for miles. The traverses, that’s the correct term for non-linear trenches, they contain the shockwave, you see. They learned that the hard way. The next row running left to right, that’s the support trenches, one back from the front line. That’s probably where you’ll find your lot. The Regimental Aid Posts. Then, more communication lines run to the main fire trench system. The front line proper. See the parapets and the sandbags? And beyond that, the wire and the anti-cavalry obstacles? And then . . .’
‘No man’s land,’ the major said, the first sight of it drying his mouth.
They were high enough now that the major could see a similar pattern repeated on the German side – obstacles, wire, trenches, lazily zigzagging communications lines, and yet more trenches. It was almost a mirror image. But it was the gap between the two opposing armies that caught and held his attention. It went on as far north and as far south as his powerful glasses could see. In some places it was a black strip of featureless mud, unless you counted shell holes and rusty wire as features, in other sections a few benighted trees and shrubs were clinging on for dear life.
He was surprised to find this death strip was not a consistent size. He supposed that the two sides had not dug their trenches according to any blueprint, but simply where it was expedient to do so as the war ground to a stalemate in late 1914. Therefore, this contested band separating the Allies and the Germans randomly swelled and shrank in width, as the two front lines grew closer together or retreated away from each other.
No man’s land was like a wayward river, an apparently permanent fixture of the European landscape, snaking over seven hundred miles, from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. Except the only thing that flowed in this waterway and burst from its banks to inundate the surrounding countryside was human misery and suffering. He was, he realized, looking straight at the belly of the beast that was sending the Empire’s young men home in pieces, or consigning them to an eternity in the soil of France or Belgium. Here be Dragons, indeed.
Now he could see the method in the Deputy Director’s kite balloon madness. It was to give the uninitiated a taste of what was to come, to bring home the enormity of the task facing anyone who thought they could make a difference to the course of a war being fought on an unimaginable scale. To dent the resolve of an old doctor, a veteran of a different kind of war, a persistent nuisance who should, perhaps, be contemplating his retirement rather than insisting there were new ways available to save the lives being snuffed out on those plains below.
There came the boom of an artillery piece, and, closer, the manic chatter of a machine gun. A plume of dirty smoke rose from the north and wood pigeons clattered from the trees beneath them. It appeared breakfast was over. And so was this jaunt. He lowered the binoculars.
‘Excuse me,’ said the major as he reached across, past Slattery, and yanked at the slow-bleed valve. Florrie gave a hiss and whistle of protest and the major felt his insides lift as she checked her rise and began to sink.
Slattery looked puzzled. ‘I haven’t finished, sir. There’s a lot more—’
‘Apologies, Lieutenant, but I’ve seen enough for one day,’ said Major John Hamish Watson of the Royal Army Medical Corps. ‘And I’ve got work to do.’