Heart of War (105 page)

In some waterlogged mudholes close by the men of C Company, in battalion reserve, were singing:

Send out the Army and the Navy
,

Send out the rank and file
,

Send out the brave Territorials
,

They'll face danger with a smile

                                                          (I don't think!)

Send out my mother, my sister and my brother
,

But for Gawd's sake don't send me!

Quentin got up. The cake was a present from his sister Alice, and it was very large. They'd only eaten a small piece of it.

Quentin said, ‘On Christmas Day the officers serve the men their dinner, but …'

‘I know, sir,' Laurence said eagerly. ‘I did it last Christmas, at the Depot.'

‘Well, we can't do it in the line, because the men cook their own rations. But we can share out this cake. Come along.'

He went up the broken steps into the trench. The nearest men stopped singing, and Quentin said, ‘Here, have a piece of cake.'

He cut off a slice and said, ‘Share it round … Merry Christmas.'

‘Merry Christmas, sir. Merry Christmas!'

Quentin passed on, sometimes in the open, sometimes below ground, splashing toward the front line. There he handed out more cake. Singing began again behind him:

For he's a jolly good fellow
,

For he's a jolly good fellow
,

For he's a jolly good feeeellow…

And so say all of us!

Laurence smiled with pleasure. Quentin's lips tightened, and he handed out another piece of cake – ‘Merry Christmas, Loader.'

‘Merry Christmas, sir.'

And so say all of us, and so say all of us
,

For he's a jolly good feeeeellow…

And so say all of us!

The Germans began shelling a rear area, the shells whistling and sighing high overhead. To the south a British machine gun in Passchendaele fired a belt in four long bursts at some suspicious movement in No Man's Land.

Quentin struggled back to his dugout. Laurence saluted and returned to his company. Quentin began to write a letter:

Dear Fiona, I have at last had a letter from Archie Campbell. He has been in a coma off and on for weeks. It turned out that a tiny shell splinter had also entered his stomach close to the bullet's exit wound, and this was not discovered till much later. He is [ –
he paused, pen held high. If he told Fiona where Archie was, she'd go to him, and Archie had said he didn't want to see her again. But he, Quentin, wanted her to be happy. He finished the sentence;
] in Charing Cross Hospital, London. Not five miles away Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell was inspecting the Ypres front … actually, the rear, as he was in a motor car, which could not get anywhere near the actual Front. Kiggell was Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig's Chief of Staff, and thus held much responsibility for the planning of what was later to be officially called the Third Battle of Ypres, but which was already being generally referred to as ‘Passchendaele.' This had begun on July 31 and ended on November 12, six days after the capture of Passchendaele itself. The advance had been of five miles, in three months, at a cost of some 244,000 casualties. A great many of those casualties had not been shot, but drowned – in the mud; and a man wounded in that mud was almost certain to drown within a short time. In fact, the landscape of the
Ypres salient, which Kiggell was surveying, contained the pulverized corpses of 40,000 British soldiers, whose remains were never found. Not included in the total were hundreds of horses, mules, wagons, and guns that had also disappeared in the mud – sometimes shattered by shell fire, sometimes whole.

Now, as Sir Launcelot stood by his car, staring at the desolation, the shattered earth, splintered trees, abandoned artifacts, tears began to flood his eyes and he gasped, the words choked out of him, ‘Good God … did we really send … men … to fight … in that?'

Fletcher Gorse lay thirty yards out in No Man's Land under the ruins of two German ammunition wagons, three dead horses, five dead men, and a scattered mountain of German whizz bang shell cases. This had been well behind the enemy reserve lines, in the field gun areas, before the long autumn offensive, when a salvo of British heavies had hit the battery with destructive effect – three months ago. The place didn't stink too bad, except when it got warm, and the maggots weren't too bad, for the same reason – it wasn't warm, it was bloody cold. The land sloped away gradually to the east, giving Fletcher a good view over the German trenches to a depth of six hundred yards. Lying under the litter of war, he was wearing a loose cloak of sandbags sewn together, and that plastered with mud and dotted with bits of green sprinkled with white paint, to match the thin snow on the ground. His rifle butt was rested an inch in front of his right shoulder, and his eyes ceaselessly scanned the terrain in front of him.

The wind was in the east and the smoke from Roulers, the big town down there, was being blown up toward him. With the smoke of the home fires came the sound of church bells, clanging and jangling against the pale sky, but muted and softened by distance. The ground was iron hard under his elbow, and under the corpse on whose body his rifle stock was propped. He wished he could be spending Christmas with Betty, but quickly dismissed the thought from his mind. Snipers couldn't afford to daydream.

From behind he heard the men of his battalion singing ‘For he's a jolly good fellow.' Old Rowley must be going round, dishing out strawberry jam. None of the other officers had been in the battalion long enough for the men to sing that for them.

In the middle distance a movement caught his eye, and with an infinitesimal bend of his head he lowered his eye to the telescopic sight. There it was – a German lighting a cigar in the door of a dugout in their third line … a little over 400 yards … 440. Carefully he set the range. Behind him the men of the Wealds were chanting lugubriously:

See him in the grand theayter

Eating apples in the pit;

While that poor girl what he ruined

Wanders round through mud and shit
.

           
It's the same the whole world over

           
It's the poor what gets the blyme
,

           
While the rich gets all the pleasure –

           
Ain't it all a bleeding shy me!

There was a gap in the wall of the trench over there. The Jerries didn't realize that they were in full view down to just below the knees, as they stood in the entrance to that dugout.

The German's third tunic button rested on the cross hairs of the sight.

Now she's living in a cottage

But she very rarely smiles;

For her only occupation's

Crushing ice for father's piles
.

          
She was poor but she was honest
…

He was a long-faced fellow who hadn't shaved this morning, wearing the silly little round cap with the red button in front, sort of a fatigue cap, like our cunt caps … he was just standing there, taking the air, not thinking of the war at all. Or of death. Was there poetry in death? There was poetry to be written about death, sure, but was there any in the thing itself? For a moment Fletcher thought of all his dead comrades, then of Betty Merritt, his love. The fellow would learn the truth about death one day, as he himself would. But not today.

Gently he lowered the sights until he had the German's right knee squarely in them. Then he squeezed the trigger. The rifle jerked in his shoulder, the German fell back into the dugout, disappearing suddenly as the gas blanket swung back into place behind him. Fletcher knew he had shot true.

‘Merry Christmas,' he said, but silently, making no sound, ‘and a Happy New Year.'

John Masters was born in Calcutta in 1914. He was educated in England but in 1934 he returned to India and joined the Fourth Prince of Wales' Own Gurkha Rifles, then served on the North-West Frontier. He saw active service in Waziristan in 1937 and, after the outbreak of war, in Iraq, Syria and Persia. In 1944 he joined General Wingate's Chindits in Burma. He fought at the Singu Bridgehead, the capture of Mandalay, at Toungoo and on the Mawchi Road. John Masters retired from the Army in 1948 as Lieutenant-Colonel with the DSO and an OBE. Shortly afterwards he settled in the USA where he turned to writing and soon had articles and short stories published in many well-known American magazines. He also wrote several novels and was especially praised for his trilogy of the Great War:
Now, God be Thanked
,
Heart of War
and
By the Green of the Spring
. He died in 1983 in New Mexico.

Discover books by John Masters published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/JohnMasters