TWENTY-FIVE
The pain was so intense that Bloch wanted to cry out, but he knew he couldn’t. Drawing attention to himself would be fatal. He felt as if a wild animal were gnawing at him where he lay, and he had to play dead, while it nipped and ripped and chomped. The world had faded; his eyes could no longer see anything but shades of grey, sounds were muffled and distant, as if he was already in his coffin in the ground. This was, he felt, the last station on the line before oblivion.
No, he told himself. He wasn’t ready to board that particular service yet. He needed to live.
Bloch became aware that the shellfire had ceased when the ground stopped shaking. He strained his damaged ears. The low hum that was left in place of silence was unwavering. It was time to move.
If he could.
He tried to get a sense of where his limbs were in space. His left arm was under his body, filled with pins and needles. His right was ahead of him, held down by some great weight. One leg was free but the other, again, was fixed and immovable. He arched his back, enough so he could release the trapped left. The action disturbed a layer of stones, which skittered away. He tried to raise his head, which caused more disturbances, but daylight bled through his eyelids. Not completely buried then. With the newly freed arm, he groped forward and found the wooden beam trapping its companion. Three heaves and he had both arms free. Now time was of the essence.
Bloch pushed himself up on his hands, releasing the upper body completely. He was in the woods, where the tower had fallen and taken some saplings with it, and for the moment he appeared to be alone. He crawled clear of the mess of stone and timber to a patch of damp ferns and lay on them, panting, his face throbbing and burning. His eyes were full of grit and when he touched his ear, there was blood on his fingertips. A brush of the nose and his eye almost burst from his face. Broken. A roughness on his tongue told him that his front teeth were chipped. He desperately needed a drink of water, for his throat was coated in fine powder, and swallowing felt like he was trying to force an ostrich egg down his gullet.
He stood, shakily, releasing a shower of grit around him and pulled at his clothes with numb fingers. The leatherwork came off easily enough and, after removing the pistol and the bayonet, he threw them into the bushes. He had already lost one boot and the other he kicked off. His tunic was stiff with dust and debris, and undoing the buttons took an age, but eventually he was down to his underwear. A sudden shiver took him. How incriminating were the singlet and longjohns, he wondered. He couldn’t take the chance. He pulled those off too and walked deeper into the forest, hoping he could circle back round towards his own lines.
Luck was with him. He found two Tommies, buried by the collapse of earthworks. One had lost his face; the features had been neatly excised and cauterized by a piece of hot shrapnel, leaving a grisly, shiny oval where his face should be. Nearby was a folded pile of something grey and pink. The other soldier was intact and still alive, albeit barely. His eyelids were flickering as he dropped in and out of this world. He plunged the man’s own bayonet into the body, twice. A simple reflex, he told himself. From the other he took the identity disc and slipped it over his head. The boy was younger than he, or appeared so in death. No matter. Soldiers often aged decades at the front, only to see the years fall away as they were freed from the worry and cares of this life.
The lad was wearing an unofficial ID bracelet, which Bloch also took. Stripping the body proved as arduous as removing his own clothes. The trousers and socks were all he could manage, before exhaustion overwhelmed him once again. He rifled the pockets and found a water bottle and a pouch of iron rations. He gulped down the water and ate the hardtack biscuits, cheese and the beef cubes from the ration, then scooped out handfuls of the bully beef from the tin. He also found the man’s paybook, which he pocketed.
Fatigue hit him again and the mixture of foodstuffs in his stomach made him feel queasy. He knew he couldn’t be found next to the two bodies and further undressing of them was beyond him. He pulled on the trousers and kicked at the soil to bury the lower half of the Tommy he had become. Then he headed towards what he thought was east again, losing the incriminating blade in a shell crater.
It was no more than five minutes before he staggered into a clearing where three genuine Tommies were manning a machine-gun post in a shallow depression, protected by a half-moon of sandbags. Its field of fire was a narrow forest track through the trees. It was an ambush for any German incursion that might follow the bombardment. The NCO in charge stood and levelled a Lee Enfield at Bloch and yelled something. No words appeared to come from the mouth. The sergeant signalled the Vickers crew to remain at their stations and took a step forward.
Bloch went to raise his hands, but his balance deserted him and he fell to his knees. The sergeant, still pointing the rifle at him, crossed the clearing in long exaggerated steps. He bent and lifted the ID disc with his free hand. He shouted something else, back to his comrades. Slinging the Lee Enfield over his shoulder, the NCO put his hands under Bloch’s armpits, lifting him back on his feet. He flopped Bloch’s right arm around his neck and began to half-march and half-drag him towards Somerset House.
Once there, a blanket and some boots were found, tea provided, cigarettes, and, after a lengthy wait at the back of a queue, during which he pointed to his ears whenever anyone addressed him, a kindly British doctor and his firm yet attractive nurse – the same ones, he eventually realized, he had sighted in his cross hairs – cleaned him up as best they could. This involved extracting two teeth, multiple splinters and stones, straightening his nose and placing a fat dressing over the centre of his face. After they had finished, they found him a cot to lie on until he could be transported to the rear. If he could have managed it without agony, Bloch might have smiled at the irony of how things had turned out.