Fall of Giants

He stopped. The broad trench, whose purpose had not been clear, was now revealed to be an assembly trench. The British were massing their troops for the big push. They stood waiting, fidgeting, the light from the officers’ torches glinting off bayonets and steel helmets, line after line of them. Walter tried to count: ten lines of ten men was a hundred, the same again made two hundred, four hundred, eight… there were sixteen hundred men within his field of vision, then the darkness closed in over the others.

The assault was about to begin.

He had to get back as fast as possible with this information. If the German artillery opened up now, they could kill thousands of the enemy right here, behind British lines, before the attack got started. It was an opportunity sent by heaven, or perhaps by the devils who threw the cruel dice of war. As soon as he reached his own lines he would telephone headquarters.

A flare went up. In its light he saw a British sentry looking over the parapet, rifle at the ready, staring at him.

Walter dropped to the ground and buried his face in the mud.

A shot rang out. Then one of the barbed-wire detail shouted: “Don’t shoot, you mad bastard, it’s us!” The accent put Walter in mind of the staff at Fitz’s house in Wales, and he guessed this was a Welsh regiment.

The flare died. Walter leaped to his feet and ran, heading for the German side. The sentry would be unable to see for a few seconds, his vision spoiled by the flare. Walter ran faster than he ever had, expecting the rifle to fire again at any moment. In half a minute he came to the British wire and dropped gratefully to his knees. He crawled rapidly forward through a gap. Another flare went up. He was still within rifle range, but no longer easily visible. He dropped to the ground. The flare was directly above him, and a dangerous lump of burning magnesium dropped a yard from his hand, but there were no more gunshots.

When the flare had burned out he got to his feet and ran all the way to the German line.

{II}

Two miles behind the British front line, Fitz watched anxiously as the Eighth Battalion formed up shortly after two A.M. He was afraid these freshly trained men would disgrace him, but they did not. They were in a subdued mood and obeyed orders with alacrity.

The brigadier, sitting on his horse, addressed the men briefly. He was lit up from below by a sergeant’s flashlight, and looked like the villain in an American moving picture. “Our artillery has wiped out the German defenses,” he said. “When you reach the other side, you will find nothing but dead Germans.”

A Welsh voice from somewhere nearby murmured: “Marvelous, isn’t it, how these Germans can shoot back at us even when they’re fucking dead.”

Fitz raked the lines to identify the speaker but he could not in the dark.

The brigadier went on: “Take and secure their trenches, and the field kitchens will follow and give you a hot dinner.”

B Company marched off toward the battlefield, led by the platoon sergeants. They went across the fields, leaving the roads clear for wheeled transport. As they left they started to sing “Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah.” Their voices lingered in the night air for some minutes after they disappeared into the darkness.

Fitz returned to battalion headquarters. An open truck was waiting to take the officers to the front line. Fitz sat next to Lieutenant Roland Morgan, son of the Aberowen colliery manager.

Fitz did all he could to discourage defeatist talk, but he could not help wondering if the brigadier had gone too far the other way. No army had ever mounted an offensive like this one, and nobody could be sure how it would turn out. Seven days of artillery bombardment had not obliterated the enemy’s defenses: the Germans were still shooting back, as that anonymous soldier had sarcastically pointed out. Fitz had actually said the same thing in a report, whereupon Colonel Hervey had asked him if he was scared.

Fitz was worried. When the general staff closed their eyes to bad news, men died.

As if to prove his point, a shell exploded in the road behind. Fitz looked back and saw parts of a lorry just like this one flying through the air. A car following it swerved into a ditch, and in its turn was hit by another truck. It was a scene of carnage, but the driver of Fitz’s truck quite correctly did not stop to help. The wounded had to be left to the medics.

More shells fell in the fields to the left and right. The Germans were targeting approaches to the front line, rather than the line itself. They must have worked out that the big assault was about to begin-such a huge movement of men could hardly be hidden from their intelligence branch-and with deadly efficiency they were killing men who had not yet even reached the trenches. Fitz fought down a feeling of panic, but his fear remained. B Company might not even make it to the battlefield.