1/6/11
The Great War
I fired three rounds of .30-06 steel-jacketed lead straight into his face.
Not that my aim was all that good. I was a damn-sight better footballer than ever I was a soldier. To be honest, I was scared as hell and about ready to wet my pants. He was running straight at me, the German was, yelling at the top of his lungs (something in German I assumed he intended to be insulting and/or demoralizing) and I just whirled around, raised my rifle and squeezed. He was the equivalent to a corporal, I’d learn later, which raised my status tremendously, me being a mere private at the time. Killing superior officers was greatly smiled upon as a morale booster.
That the bullets hit him at all was a bloody miracle, but getting three in his face was a sheer act of God. I’d brag to my mates later that I took an extra second to aim and fire, but it wasn’t true. I almost didn’t fire at all. I tell you as sure as I’m standing here; I was almost as surprised as that bloody Hun. If he had had a face left, I’m quite sure the look on it would have been priceless.
The only other human on God’s green earth who knew what a bullshit story that was, was Paul. After all, we were the only buggers from the 22nd Infantry left alive. But bless his soul, he never once said a word that contradicted my account. He just smiled whenever I told that bloody story – and whenever anybody asked him to verify it, he just said, “It sounds better when Castor tells it.”
Paul’s my best mate, and not just ‘cause we walked out of Hell together. I don’t make a lot of friends, regardless of the situation, and my current occupation didn’t allow for much practice of social amenities. But from day one, Paul and me were like peas in a pod.
We had met in March of ’16 when we had both volunteered and signed up with our local pals’ battalion. I’d been living near Glasgow for all 16 years o’ my life, full of piss and vinegar and completely convinced of the righteousness of “our” war. Paul had lived up north in Edinburgh, only recently moving to my local neighborhood. We kicked the football around a couple of times, and had seen each other around, but never really palled around much. Even if we had been chums our whole lives, I don’t think we’d have really known each other till after we lived through that day in France.
I’ll never forget the first time I met him formally. He pulled his Webley Mark 1 revolver (that I would later learn had been passed down from his father’s use in the Anglo-Boer War), pointed it right at me and pulled the trigger. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that he was firing at the Turk running up behind me, and I was pretty shaken for a minute. But once I grasped the situation (and ranted hysterically for several minutes) I was cool as a cucumber. So that’s how we met, he saved my life and I called him a sodding daft bastard.
We chummed together quite a lot after that, raising the kind of cain that best mates tend to do, and got away with much more in the Army than we ever could have out of it. Never got in to anything too serious, and Paul was always good for talkin’ our way out of the thickest of it just as fast as we could get into it. We went too far once, and though we didn’t know it at the time, our punishment was to be our salvation. Funny how life works, innit? Damned if I can figure it.
Y’see, decent food was scarce most days and damn if the officers ever seemed to lack for quality nourishment, so being the decent blokes we are, we naturally assumed they wouldn’t mind sharing.
There was hell to pay, but they couldn’t make us toss up and give it back, and for Christ’s sake there was a war on. Paul tried to explain very carefully to the officers that he could dump it out for them in a pile of shite, but he’d want his own food back. They didn’t laugh at all – and I couldn’t stop. Well, they couldn’t bloody well just kick us out, though we suggested that, too. So they did the next best thing. They transferred us from the quiet post of Verdun to the raging battle that was the Somme. Spineless officers did us a bloody favor and they didn’t even know it. Trouble was, neither did we at the time, and we bitched up a shit storm when we heard our destination. The word had come down through ranks that General Haig had something big planned for the Somme and there wasn’t a place on Earth I didn’t want to be farther from.
It was our first day in the trenches at the Somme, just north of Paris, and over the artillery shells and Captain Pereé’s bloody whistle and the other screaming boys I hear Paul yelling in my ear, “It’s times like this wot I wish I was back home — having me nuts run through a meat grinder!” Then he laughed that madman laugh of his and I couldn’t help but smile. Fuck the Huns, fuck the Good Lord, and fuck Captain Pereé for good measure – and over the bags we went, and waded into Hell.
The Somme River was to be our “big push” and Sir Douglas Haig, the High and Mighty King Shit and General of the Holy British Empire’s Forces had declared that “not a rat will have survived” when we were through. Well, just for the record, fuck ‘im in his cozy chair while I lost good mates to dysentery. But that General Haig was a right good bastard in one respect, and true to his word, dropped a million and a half shells on the good Kaiser’s Huns and quite literally bombed the shite out of them. Stories tell of ‘earing the bombardment clear across the bloody English Channel. We all figured that the bloody Huns were good and buggered.
So, just after dawn on the first of July, 1916, me, Paul and about 100,000 other volunteers from pals’ battalions and British Army Corps advanced ceremoniously across No Man’s Land. All the while playing those bloody pipes and a couple fuckers even brought their bloody footballs. About 30 seconds later we learned what a horrible mistake had been made and exactly who was left to pay the price for that error.
I only found out after that we lost almost fourteen thousand men in the first 10 minutes. After that, apparently, it was too difficult to estimate.
How can I describe what it felt like to dive for cover under the steel rain of artillery shells and machine gun bullets? As far as I knew, my whole platoon was lost, and the rest of my company wasn’t far behind. I heard Sergeant Thompson screaming for us to fall back. A right good Tommy that one, but there wasn’t anywhere to fall back to. The trenches were a good fifty yards of open fields behind us. Then I heard this wet THWACK behind me and as I turned, I was sprayed by what used to be on the inside of Sergeant Thompson’s veins.
The German concertina wire that was supposed to have been demolished by our brilliant artillery fire was still in place and hardly scratched – entire units tore themselves apart or were cut in ‘alf by machine-gun fire while they tried to extricate themselves from that bloody razor-wire. Some bloke, I think it was Emerson, or maybe it just sounded like him, finally got on the radio and screamed at the Bastards-In-Charge how badly we were being slaughtered, and they, in due course, let loose with more artillery. Right on target, but that was a waste, see, ‘cause more than one out of every three of them shells was a bloody dud. By noon we’d lost almost 20,000 men to the Big Sleep and 40,000 more were maimed, crippled, blinded, paralyzed and thoroughly buggered.
The officers and non-coms screamed for us to fall back and ordered us to ignore the wounded. “Save yourselves!” they cried. Paul was right, bloody wankers, every one. Paul and I walked away with what the hospital officially termed “minor lacerations and bruises.”
I don’t know how to begin to explain it. I mean, we were there, knee deep in gore and muck and what’s left of our mates, bullets whizzing by and artillery shells crashing every couple of seconds, but we just fired back. It wasn’t loud as you might suspect, but almost quiet, even with the shells going off. Not slow, but quiet, as we’d been nearly deafened by the explosions. We kept firing and firing and reloading and firing. We quickly lost track of “official kills” and that sort of nonsense that we always figured would be so important. Paul shot in my direction more than a few times, and I know for fact that I came within an inch of shooting him a half-dozen times, but every time the bullet cut through a German soldier instead of me or him.
There’s a Private Owen in Bravo Platoon wrote a poem that’s been circulating through the lower enlisted ranks and I haven’t been able to think about anything else for two days. Paul read it and told him he was a pretty good soldier for a poet. We were marching in formation three days ago to some damn place or another, and I kept thinking of my Grammar School days in Latin class. How all I had wanted was to be away from that little town, and realizing that right now I’d give just about anything to be back there and away from here. Which reminds me of another phrase from my childhood: Careful what you wish for, Castor ol’ boy…
The platoon was standing at dusk over the bodies of the recently dead, our mates, and presumably some of theirs, having recovered what equipment was salvageable, and the phrase Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori keeps repeating in my head. As I remembered, it meant that it was good and proper to die for one’s country. I guess those Romans had a funny sense of patriotism, as Paul and I decided it’d be better to live for your country. Sod what we know of politics, I suppose. Soldiers aren’t politicians and vice versa. Paul knew the saying and I just mumbled to him and myself “Dulce et decorum est…” He nodded and knew it as our code.
Anyway, this Private Owen overhears us and when he asks, I explain the meaning. He asks if he can use it in a poem. “I didn’t make it up, mate,” I tell him.
That wanker just looked me right in the eye and says, “I just figured you were the closest thing to authority out ‘ere…” That cracked Paul up ‘cause usually he’s the only one who’ll take the piss out of me. We all had a laugh at that, and for a few seconds we almost forgot where we were. Anyways, here it is.
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime. –
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitten as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
That shite about the wagon gave me pause, ‘cause after the last of Jerry’s poison gas attacks, I helped haul three bodies into the one lorry that managed to stay on the road during the shelling. For the life o’ me, I can’t remember their names, though. Gilbert something, or maybe Gillian… Shite! Why can’t I remember their names? I see their faces sometimes in dreams, and the look on their mugs is like gasping shock mixed with the relief of not having to fight this bloody war another day.
Fuck all that. The dead know only one thing. It’s better to be alive.
Six hundred miles away, she waited by the window every day for news.
At least, that’s what I imagined. Whenever I dreamed, whenever I had even five minutes that didn’t involve shooting something or being shot at, my thoughts would return to her. I thought of little else. Catherine had been lovely even at 15, and I imagined her in my mind’s eye growing only lovelier as we lived through these horrors.
Paul and I were reassigned after the debacle at the Somme, but our accomplishments served us no real honor except among other enlisted who knew the story. Among them, we tread as gods. But I swear I would give it all up to be returned home that very day.
(To be continued...)
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