Fall of Giants

Billy looked at Prophet. The sergeant hesitated, then went along with it. “Line up, line up!” he called.

“Look at that,” Tommy said to Billy.

“What?”

“Beyond the wire.”

Billy looked.

“The bodies,” Tommy said.

Billy saw what he meant. The ground was littered with corpses in khaki, some of them horribly mangled, some lying peacefully as if asleep, some intertwined like lovers.

There were thousands of them.

“Jesus help us,” Billy whispered.

He felt sickened. What kind of world was this? What could be God’s purpose in letting this happen?

A Company lined up, and Billy and the rest of B Company shuffled into place behind them.

Billy’s horror turned to anger. Earl Fitzherbert and his like had planned this. They were in charge, and they were to blame for this slaughter. They should be shot, he thought furiously, every bloody one of them.

Lieutenant Morgan blew a whistle, and A Company ran on like rugby forwards. Carlton-Smith blew his whistle, and Billy set off at a jog.

Then the German machine guns opened up.

The men of A Company started to fall, and Morgan was the first. They had not fired their weapons. This was not battle, it was massacre. Billy looked at the men around him. He felt defiant. The officers had failed. The men had to make their own decisions. To hell with orders. “Sod this,” he shouted. “Take cover!” And he threw himself into a shell hole.

The sides were muddy and there was stinking water at the bottom, but he pressed himself gratefully to the clammy earth as the bullets flew over his head. A moment later Tommy landed by his side, then the rest of the section. Men from other sections copied Billy’s.

Fitzherbert ran past their hole. “Keep moving, you men!” he shouted.

Billy said: “If he insists, I’m going to shoot the bastard.”

Then Fitzherbert was hit by machine-gun fire. Blood spurted from his cheek, and one leg crumpled beneath him. He fell to the ground.

Officers were in as much danger as men. Billy was no longer angry. Instead he felt ashamed of the British army. How could it be so completely useless? After all the effort that had been put in, the money they had spent, the months of planning-the big assault was a fiasco. It was humiliating.

Billy looked around. Fitz lay still, unconscious. Neither Lieutenant Carlton-Smith nor Sergeant Jones was in sight. The other men in the section were looking at Billy. He was only a corporal, but they expected him to tell them what to do.

He turned to Mortimer, who had once been an officer. “What do you think-”

“Don’t look at me, Taffy,” said Mortimer sourly. “You’re the fucking corporal.”

Billy had to come up with a plan.

He was not going to lead them back. He hardly considered that option. It would be a waste of the lives of the men who had already died. We must gain something from all this, he thought; we must give some kind of account of ourselves.

On the other hand, he was not going to run into machine-gun fire.

The first thing he needed to do was survey the scene.

He took off his steel helmet, held it at arm’s length, and raised it over the lip of the crater as a decoy, just in case a German had his sights on this hole. But nothing happened.

He raised his head over the edge, expecting at any moment to be shot through the skull. He survived that, too.

He looked across the divide and up the hill, over the German barbed wire to their front line, dug into the hillside. He could see rifle barrels poking through gaps in the parapet. “Where’s that fucking machine gun?” he said to Tommy.

“Not sure.”

C Company ran past. Some took cover, but others held the line. The machine gun opened up again, raking the line, and the men fell like skittles. Billy was no longer shocked. He was searching for the source of the bullets.

“Got it,” said Tommy.

“Where?”

“Take a straight line from here to that clump of bushes at the top of the hill.”

“Right.”

“See where that line crosses the German trench?”

“Aye.”

“Then go a bit to your right.”

“How far… never mind, I see the bastards.” Ahead and a little to Billy’s right, something that might have been a protective iron shield stuck up above the parapet, and the distinctive barrel of a machine gun protruded over it. Billy thought he could make out three German helmets around it, but it was hard to be sure.

They must be concentrating on the gap in the British wire, Billy thought. They repeatedly fired on men as they surged forward from that point. The way to attack them might be from a different angle. If his section could work its way diagonally across no-man’s-land, they could come at the gun from the Germans’ left, while the Germans were looking right.

He plotted a route using three large craters, the third just beyond a flattened section of German wire.

He had no idea whether this was correct military strategy. But correct strategy had got thousands of men killed this morning, so to hell with that.