Lorimers at War (15 page)

He thought of Jennifer as well, whom he had wanted to kiss at the end of that leave. Her shyness had restrained him on the last occasion when they had been alone together, and their final goodbye had been said with his mother watching. Although there was nothing to suggest that she disapproved of their deepening friendship, her presence had proved inhibiting to them both. But Jennifer had written to him regularly during the past six months, and he had replied to each letter. The correspondence was important to him. To his mother he wrote only in reassurance. He told her about his rest periods, his billets, the pleasures of buying an occasional meal or cup of good coffee. His letters to Jennifer were quite different. As though it were necessary to tell the truth to somebody,
he described to her with complete honesty his moments of fear and nausea, disgust and shame. Perhaps he hoped that the moment would come when she would tell him that she could not bear to hear any more, so that he would have reason to hope that she was beginning to care for him; but until that time he poured out his feelings about the war without reserve.

She, like himself, might be awake at this moment, approaching the end of night duty in a ward full of men who in their time had awaited the dawn with as much apprehension as Robert felt now. He tried to force himself into her mind, so that his own mind should be distracted. Robert suspected that Jennifer was not a particularly good nurse. She had none of the controlled compassion which enabled his mother to recognize a need and alleviate it as far as she could with all the sympathy and skill she possessed but without allowing any kind of emotional involvement to distort her judgement. Jennifer was too young and too highly-strung to remain detached. She suffered with her suffering patients, deliberately indulging her own feelings, whether of anger with those who had inflicted the injuries she tended, of anguish with those who endured them, or of desolation with the bereaved. She had confessed to Robert that she chose to work as a nurse deliberately to ensure that she should not be happy when so many people were frightened or unhappy. It was an attitude wholly to her credit; yet in these moments of waiting it proved not to be the memory of Jennifer which brought most comfort to Robert, but that of Frisca. He felt almost that Jennifer had a need to suffer and did not want to be spared anything; whereas it seemed important that Frisca should be protected, that nothing should ever happen to sadden those sparkling blue eyes. Dear little Frisca, he thought affectionately. And then suddenly it was not possible to think about England any longer.

The barrage which began at six o'clock was more
intense than any he had heard before. As though a conductor had signalled with the sharp double tap of his baton, a symphony of gunfire began with a single ear-splitting chord. With a rolling reverberation it developed through all its different movements: of surprise, range-finding, concentration, obliteration, deterrent – all leading up to what must be the finale: the creeping curtain barrage of attack. There could be no crescendo, because the fortissimo was sustained from first to last; and after the first few moments it was impossible even to distinguish the notes of the different instruments: the smacking percussion of field guns, the rasping of the medium artillery, the drumming boom of the biggest guns and the high-pitched scream of shells. The orchestra became a double one as the reports of guns firing behind him were echoed in sinister fugue by the explosions of the shells out of sight in front. These in turn were joined by another band of instruments altogether when the distinctive notes of the German howitzers began to punctuate the score, their crashing chords coming nearer and nearer as they probed behind the lines for the British guns.

Beneath Robert's feet the ground was shuddering. His ears were battered not only by sound but by the vibrating pressure of the air. His whole body became tense, as though by drawing in on himself, holding every nerve-end under tight control, he could give himself immunity from death's flying splinters. An hour passed, and more, but still there was no pause in the relentless battering on his ear drums. The noise hung over him like a cloud, a huge umbrella, filling the atmosphere almost visibly, with no chink or break in its intensity. Nothing but noise existed: nothing but noise was real. Robert felt himself beginning to tremble, his self-control stretching towards snapping point. Only the presence of his two equally dazed companions prevented him from crying.

In the firing trench at the foot of the hill the rising sun glinted on a row of bayonets. Robert reminded himself
that, unlike the men who held them, he was not just about to walk towards a line of machine guns. A sudden conviction that he would never see Brinsley again made him angry with himself. He had said goodbye to his cousin too casually, wishing him good luck with nothing more than a smiling nod of the head. Just as he ought to have told his mother how much he loved and admired her, so he ought to have touched Brinsley on the arm, shaking him by the hand, even embraced him. How ridiculous it was that it should be so difficult to demonstrate affection even where affection so genuinely existed. Well, it was too late for regrets. He could think only of himself, and by now the tension had become unbearable. How much longer would the barrage continue? When would the attack begin?

In the trenches, no doubt, whistles were blowing. To Robert, who could not hear them, there was something uncanny about the manner in which an unbroken line of men, stretching away as far as he could see, began to move. They scrambled out of the shelter of the trench, paused, steadied and then advanced, with rifles held at the port and heads down so that their steel helmets would provide some kind of shield. The solidity of the line and the slowness of its pace was almost unbearable to watch. Robert knew well enough that the speed of the advance was determined by the movement of the curtain barrage, that if the men moved too quickly they would run into shellfire from their own supporting guns; but he felt sure nevertheless that if he had been amongst them he would have found the temptation to run and zig-zag overwhelming.

For the first thirty yards the slope of the ridge gave the attackers some protection. But as they approached the top they were greeted with a savage burst of machine gun fire. Within seconds more than half the men within Robert's viewpoint were flat on the ground. Some of them might have flung themselves down in self-protection,
but as he searched the nearest part of the ridge through his binoculars he could tell that many would never rise again.

A second wave followed twenty yards behind and received the same welcome – although rather more of these, bending low, broke into a run as they reached the dangerous point of exposure and pressed on towards the German lines. A third wave moved at first much faster than the other two: the artillery barrage was well ahead of them by now. But as they approached the top of the ridge they began to falter. Robert knew from his own experience how great a mental effort was needed to step over or upon a man's body, even when it was quite certain that he was dead.

As they hesitated, they were rallied by an officer who straightened himself ahead of them and turned, gesturing them to follow him at a run. It was not possible for Robert to hear what he shouted, but the effect was immediate. The third wave charged forward, the officer at their head. He was running in front of them, moving diagonally to avoid a large crater, when he was hit. Even without binoculars Robert could see all too clearly what happened. The man's head jerked backwards, either as a direct result of the impact of shrapnel or bullet or because the strap of his steel helmet, dislodged, tightened across his neck. For a moment or two his legs continued their running movement, but his arms were thrown upward and his shoulders forced back. Losing his balance, he fell into the shellhole which he had been trying to avoid. But there was time, as he staggered on the edge, for Robert to see, beneath the displaced helmet, the officer's curly golden hair. So distinctive; so familiar. Surely it couldn't, mustn't be Brinsley.

Yet as he raised his binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus with fingers trembling with shock, Robert had no doubt that it was his cousin's face he would see. He had to wait a moment for the smoke of the battlefield
to clear briefly. Then his fears were confirmed. Brinsley had not fallen to the bottom of the crater – a huge hole, big enough to stable a team of horses or store an ammunition wagon – but was clinging with one arm to its side. He was writhing with pain, his legs from time to time jerking convulsively. Robert felt every spasm as though his own body were suffering. With a feeling of panic which increased as every moment passed he waited for someone to carry Brinsley back to the British lines. But Brinsley's own men had by now surged forward, beyond him, and although the stretcher bearers had begun to make their quick dashes out of cover to pick up the wounded, they were bringing the nearest in first. With so many fallen men in need of them, it was hardly surprising that they should leave until last those who lay on the top of the ridge, within the range of the German machine guns.

Robert handed the binoculars to one of his runners. His trembling had stopped and he felt both very calm and very much afraid. ‘Wait here,' he said to the men, though there was little enough danger that they would follow him unbidden into the smoke and chaos below.

He dashed first for the shelter of the communication trench and used that to lead him into the section of the firing trench from which Brinsley had led his men. If one of his own senior officers had seen him, he could well have been court-martialled for leaving his post, but he had only one thought in his head: that Brinsley was still alive and must be brought in. As he climbed out of the trench he automatically crouched low, head down. The ground was littered with men and equipment and made rough by shellholes and mounds of soft earth, but he ran as straight as he could over the first uphill stretch, only beginning to zig-zag as he approached the brow of the hill. The noise here was perhaps no louder than it had been in the observation post, but it was more confusing, and punctuated with the shouts of the assault troops as
well as the cries of the wounded. All the craters which could be seen through the smoke looked much alike, and others were visible only when he reached the very edge. It was difficult to preserve any sense of direction. Twice he thought he had arrived at the right place and twice was disappointed. He paused briefly and saw across a stretch of exposed ground a shellhole which was large enough to be his goal.

Again he began to run. Then, without warning, there was no more noise. He was floating in the air, turning slowly over and over in a state of bliss. Or at least, part of him was, for it seemed that he had left his body behind on the ground. He could see it, but he was not inside it.

The silence seemed timeless but ended with a crash. Now he was back inside his body, and his body was lying inside the crater he had been hoping to reach. Earth at first trickled and then rushed down its side as though from an erupting volcano. It covered his face as he lay prone. He lifted his head for a second to escape from it, and put up a hand and arm for protection. That was something – that there was nothing wrong with his head or his arms. But he found himself unable to sit or stand or move his legs. He tried to work out where he was injured, but there was no pain to guide him, only numbness as he pressed whatever he could reach and tried in vain to flex the muscles of his lower limbs.

Raising his head again and propping himself up on his elbows, he looked around for Brinsley. But even if this was the right crater, the new shell-burst had destroyed its shape, throwing out or burying any previous occupants. Robert lay there alone as the battle raged around him. His mind, still in some curious way detached from his physical state, was unable to make itself care.

In the course of the day he received company. A grey-haired man, too old for war, weeping uncontrollably and unable to advance any further. An injured stretcher-bearer, flinging himself in for shelter as a mortar exploded
nearby. Two dead men and a third who died within an hour. And a blood-showering rain of arms and legs which arrived after a shell-burst that made the ground tremble as though an earthquake were beginning. Robert observed what happened, but felt no reaction to it. He supposed that he was dying, but the fact did not seem to be of any importance. He tried to remember his mother, and to feel sorry for the grief she would experience, but he was unable to visualize her face. His imagination refused to move outside the confines of the crater. He lay without moving, waiting without knowing what he was waiting for or what he hoped would happen.

The noise around him continued throughout the whole of the long day and so dense was the smoke at the top of the crater that it was impossible to tell for certain when night was falling. But at some point in the early evening the numbness of Robert's wounds began to recede. Uncertainly at first, his mind re-established its link with his body. He became frightened for himself and angry at the chain of events which had brought him where he lay. But these feelings did not survive for long, for they were driven out by a pain so overwhelming that he could not even begin to control his reaction to it. It first attacked his hips and then spread downwards through his legs. Finally, as though carried in his bloodstream, it moved upwards, towards his heart, into his head, agonizing and unendurable. Robert began to scream: uncontrollably, on and on and on.

On the morning of 1 July Margaret heard from Kate at last. The letter – the first to arrive since the brief message which had announced her niece's escape from Serbia and decision to remain with the Serbian Army – was a cheerful
one. She was on the Romanian Front, Kate told her aunt, and had established a hospital with a hundred beds at Medjidia. The remnants of the Serbian Army were now under Russian command, so she was finding it very useful that a Russian friend's tuition had made her fluent in the language some months ago. She had to spend half her time arguing with Russian transport officers and quartermasters. The inefficiency of the Russian Army was almost unbelievable, and she was glad that her medical supplies came directly from Beatrice's office.