Dead Man's Land Read online

  Mrs Gregson’s short speech never increased in volume throughout its course, but somehow, like a great flywheel pressed into motion, gathered power and momentum as it went. Watson was about to object that is wasn’t strictly speaking his new method of blood transfusion, but decided to stay out of the contest. It would be like trying to separate two Siamese fighting fish.

  The guns seemed even louder and much closer in the brittle silence that descended on the tent.

  Sister took her time composing her reply. The heightened colour in her cheeks faded, but she twisted the piece of paper she held in her hands as if she were wringing Mrs Gregson’s neck. ‘I did not intend to impugn the service you have given. But there are few here who haven’t performed the same tasks. Isn’t that right, Staff Nurse Jennings?’

  ‘Yes, Sister,’ she agreed softly, eyes downcast. ‘Although I can’t drive—’

  But Sister had turned her attention back to the VADs. ‘You will assist Major Watson, of course, in his important work, and I assume move on with him once the technique for this wonder treatment has been demonstrated. But I do not want you on the re-suss, pre-op or evacuation wards. Or on the officers’ wards in the Big House. It will only confuse the men. I don’t want them to think they are getting . . .’ She paused for a moment and actually smiled before delivering the blow ‘. . . second-rate care.’

  Staff Nurse Jennings gave a little gasp.

  Mrs Gregson’s answer was thwarted by the popping of a motor cycle as a signals courier appeared in the doorway. He skidded the bike to a halt, raised his goggles off a dirt-encrusted face and shouted something that baffled Watson: ‘Pause!’

  ‘What about the Plug Street CCS?’ Sister yelled, pointing to the south. ‘Half our staff are on leave.’

  The driver shrugged. ‘They’ve been bombed. From enemy aircraft. Direct hits. Not big bombs, but lots of them apparently.’

  Sister shuddered at the thought of a shell of any description landing in the midst of a tented CCS and how little protection the thin canvas would provide.

  ‘Casualties?’

  ‘I reckon.’

  She snapped her fingers at Jennings. ‘I’ll send a runner up to the Big House for the surgical teams. You gather the other nurses.’ She turned to Brindle. ‘Perhaps you can lend a hand at the reception area?’ Finally she addressed the VADS. ‘And you two girls, would you kindly do your best not to get under our feet?’

  Once they were alone, Mrs Gregson lifted her long dress clear of the floor and stomped her foot three times, accompanying each percussive blow with a shriek of frustration.

  ‘Nurse Gregson, I apologize for Sister Spence—’ Watson began.

  ‘No, no, don’t call me that, she’s right. I am not a nurse. Nor am I . . .’ her lip curled, ‘. . . a girl of any description. “Mrs Gregson” will do just fine. It’s not the first time I have met her kind, Major. Although she is an exceptional specimen.’

  ‘There might, I fear, be extenuating circumstances.’

  ‘I knew, Major Watson, when I first set eyes on you and your tubes and syringes, that you were a gentleman. I don’t expect you to take sides. The war between VADs and QAs has been going on almost since hostilities began.’ She took several deep breaths and recovered her composure. ‘We’ll carry on unpacking, Major. You’ll be needed at the triage tent initially. We’ll have you ready for any transfusions by the time you’ve finished.’

  One thing still puzzled him. ‘What did he mean by “pause”?’ he asked.

  ‘PAWs,’ corrected Miss Pippery, spelling it out, her voice sounding slight and reedy after the robust exchange between the two older women. ‘The casualties that are given priority transport from the dressing stations. Penetrating Abdominal Wounds. I think you used to call them Double-Is. Intestinal Injuries.’

  He nodded. New weapons, such as shrapnel, needed fresh terminology. And, he reminded himself, new medicine.

  ‘Which means, Major Watson,’ said Mrs Gregson, ‘we’ll be needing your magic blood a lot sooner than you anticipated.’

  FIVE

  The Tommy would never know just how lucky he was. He only appeared for a fleeting second, a grimy, thin face with, as Bloch could see through the scope, protruding, blackened teeth. The soldier had decided to risk a quick glance between the sandbags, to check all was quiet out beyond the coils of wire in no man’s land. In that second, a time span no longer than a heartbeat, Scharfschütze Unteroffizier Ernst Bloch had to decide whether this Tommy was worth one of his expensive bullets and risking the detection of his hide. The cross hairs sat squarely on the face, fixed at the bridge of the nose. Beside him, he felt Gefreiter Schaeffer, his young spotter, stiffen, anticipating the shot. Then the all-too-tempting target disappeared down behind the parapet.

  Wait for an officer or a specialist. Make it count.

  That was the sharpshooter’s mantra. The Tommy had been both a private and a newcomer – his cap was still stiff with the wire that kept its shape. Old trench hands removed it so that the crown collapsed, providing less of a target. Bloch was seeing more and more of the new Brodie steel helmets in his sights now, though. Not that they could stop a shot from him.

  Bloch moved his head slightly and found the drinking tube, sucking up a mouthful of water, which he held over his tongue before swallowing. His eyes never left the scope on his father’s Mauser sporting rifle. They had been out since before dawn, in this shell hole between the lines, one of hundreds that pockmarked the earth. This one was different, though, because it was next to the root ball of a tree that had been ripped out of the ground and reduced to splinters. The remaining tangle of compressed roots gave perfect cover for a sniper.

  The pair also lay under a camouflaged sheet, their faces and hair and hands plastered with mud, so they looked as if they were primordial creatures formed from the killing grounds of Flanders. Bloch ignored the cold seeping up from the earth, the oddly sweet, cloying stink of the decaying bodies and the thin, icy drizzle that had begun to fall from the sullen, featureless sky that sat over the whole of northern Europe. It could be worse, he reminded himself, it could be summer, when battalions of bloated flies filled the air and the stink of putrefaction was enough to make a maggot gag.

  Although further north no man’s land was being churned and harrowed to a hideous strip of ooze and muck by constant bombardment, here, in the quieter part of the line, you could still see evidence of the countryside’s pre-war existence. There were a dozen farmhouses and barns – albeit without their tiled roofs, and with the beams plundered for firewood – in the vicinity. Among the rat-and crow-stripped skeletons of soldiers that littered no man’s land were those of the horses and cattle that had once roamed the fields in peacetime.

  Behind him, a crop of mangels had gone to seed, a promiscuous riot of stems and leaves that had provided Bloch with extra cover as he had moved into position in the strengthening light of the new day. Now and then he spotted a rusting cultivator or roller, hastily abandoned as war overtook the farmer. This had once been rich, productive agricultural land, toiled by peasants whose lives were much like those of their fathers and grandfathers. It was hard to imagine it could ever return to such an innocent time. Surely the scars they had inflicted on Flanders would last for generations.

  Despite the long hours of discomfort, he enjoyed being a sharpshooter. Not for him the weeks of living in dugouts and skulking in trenches, the world reduced to a narrow corridor of sky above his head. A Sharfschütze was one of the élite, allowed to roam free across the front, just as long as he continued to add notches to his rifle butt, which was often a weapon he had used in his days as a Jäger, a hunter, before the war. As with the peasants in Flanders, it was all about family tradition; Bloch had been an accomplished Jäger like his father and grandfather before him.

  ‘Eleven minutes to your left,’ came the whispered instruction. It was the first time Schaeffer had spoken for an hour or more.

  Bloch moved the rifle in a smooth, steady arc. Behind the
rusting coils of barbed wire, a two-metre section of the British trench parapet had collapsed, the badly packed sandbags falling inwards. Bloch could see the urgent hands and arms of those attempting to repair the breach. He imagined them, standing on the firing step, crouched like apes as they endeavoured to make sure they exposed no body part to enemy fire. It wasn’t easy. The British trenches were dug pitifully shallow. Manna to a sniper.

  ‘Officer!’

  But Bloch had already seen the man, noted the distinctive long tunic with Sam Browne belts and the stick under the arm and had decided this was a kill worth having. The discharge sounded enormous to him, but he knew how difficult it was for men in trenches to gauge the direction of a single shot. There was no smoke and little muzzle flash; the cartridges were of his own design, perfected while hunting wild boar. He worked the oil-smoothed Mauser action to chamber another round.

  As Bloch refocused through the Goertz sight, he heard the hoarse cries for a stretcher-bearer ‘at the double’ and watched the periscopes appear, popping up like nervous rabbits from their burrows, scanning the wasteland for telltale signs of his position. He even saw some steel-helmeted idiot put his head up, long enough for him to collect him as a second notch that day, should he so desire. But he held his fire. Now was the time for calm, for holding position, to stay as still as he had been before he had removed that man’s head. Soon, a lumbering spotter plane might appear, trying to locate them. Or, at dusk, men would slip out from the British lines on a mission to flush them out, for the Tommies had countersnipers now, special units designed to spot, track and kill people like him.

  Overhead, there came a sound somewhere between a whistle and a scream, tardily followed by the boom of the 77mm gun that had launched the shell. Several hundred metres ahead of Bloch, beyond the wire, a column of earth leaped skywards as the projectile exploded between the British trenches. It was the early afternoon bombardment, which always began at one p.m. precisely somewhere along the line. General von Kluck was known to the British as ‘General von O’clock’ because of his punctuality.

  A second round followed, vomiting up another cloud of muck that stayed frozen in the air, like a great oak tree made of soil and splinters and parts of men, before it collapsed into smoke and dust. The next few detonations produced inky black flowers. Shrapnel shells. Then the distinctive short, sharp thump as the trench mortars joined in, followed by the more sibilant whistle of howitzers. Soon the ground was shaking continually as the heavier artillery batteries added their might.

  Some of the rounds began to fall onto no man’s land, showering the snipers with fine particles. A thick man-made fog now billowed over the trenches, reducing visibility. The earth was rippling beneath the pair, as if they were lying on the back of an enormous animal, stirring from its sleep. Their organs began to jigger, and teeth rattle in their heads. Soon the noise would consume them, eating at their sanity.

  Bloch rolled onto his side. ‘Let’s go home, Schaeffer. Nobody’s going to be sticking their head up while this is going on.’ He shouted the words, but even so Schaeffer had to lip read. It was something they’d all grown very skilled at.

  The young spotter didn’t need telling twice. In less than a minute the two men were sprinting at a crouch through the mangel field. One officer. A poor tally for the day. Still, Bloch thought in the moments before the building crescendo of shrieks and explosions drove everything else out of his head, there was always tomorrow.

  SIX

  From his pre-deployment briefings at Millbank, Watson was aware that the British Army and the Royal Army Medical Corps had, by a system of trial and bloody error, created a brutally efficient way of dealing with the hundreds of thousands of casualties it took in any given campaign. A man wounded on the front line would first either find his own way or be taken by stretcher-bearers to a Regimental Aid Post. This was the most advanced of the outposts, staffed by a medical officer and three or four orderlies. Minor wounds were dressed there and then.

  However, those with not-so-minor injuries were stretchered or walked or sometimes trollied down on an overhead railway system a few hundred yards to the Advanced Dressing Station, usually situated in a cellar or farmhouse. Some men would be patched up and returned to their units, some were allowed to rest overnight and received food and water. The more seriously injured would be passed down the line by horse or motor ambulance to the Main Dressing Station, where some emergency surgery was possible.

  Eventually, motor ambulances would transfer the worst cases to the tents and ancillary buildings of the more permanent Casualty Clearing Station, where the doctors and nurses readied them for evacuation, by train or barge, to a base hospital. There, conventional care could take place, before, if they were lucky, the injured were shipped back home.

  It was, at least on paper, a well-drilled system. There was little that felt smooth or efficient about the scene that greeted Watson at the reception tent, though.

  A steady procession of battered motor ambulances was emerging from the thin, unnatural fog that shrouded the countryside. They halted long enough for orderlies to grab the stretchers or help down the walking wounded before turning round and heading upstream against the tide of new arrivals. The CCS unloading area was quickly overwhelmed as row upon row of stretchers began to fan out. Most occupants were bandaged or had limbs encased in a Thomas splint, evidence of hasty care at the advanced stations.

  Groups of ‘walking wounded’, caked with blood, yellow mud and black earth, had spread out their capes and sat, with whatever rifles and kit they had managed to bring lying next to them. It had always amazed Watson just how much the modern Tommy was expected to carry – a backbreaking ninety pounds of gear; a sodden greatcoat added another sixty in conditions like this. A Lewis gun or the ammunition for one increased the burden even more.

  Almost every soldier who could manage it was smoking, and a fug of Woodbine and Gold Flake mixed with the petrol fumes that hung over the whole scene. Some leaned over and put a cigarette between the lips of a prone comrade, letting him suck in smoke until the patient gave a grateful thumbsup. The eerie thing was, no man spoke or cried out. It was as if they had been robbed of the ability to speak or utter any sound. All they could do was smoke their gaspers as if their fragile lives depended on it. As Watson examined the men, some of the soldiers stared back at him, eyes hooded with fatigue or shock or a mixture of the two.

  Orderlies moved among them, collecting up rifles and Mills bombs to be transferred to a kit store. Some argued, not wanting to be parted from their lucky rifle or talismanic bayonet. The orderlies explained that they could hardly sleep with them in a medical ward. In a few cases a label was attached, so a man could reclaim his own weapon.

  And still the ambulances came, gears grinding, cabs rocking and twisting on the rutted road. Some of them were the new Vauxhall and Humbers – often bearing the name of the organization or individual from back home who had funded its purchase – but mostly they were of the original generation of ambulance: a lorry chassis with a makeshift body bolted on the rear. There were even some horse-drawn carts with stretchers loaded where once hay, turnips or potatoes would have been transported.

  And this a quiet section of the front, Watson thought. What must—

  ‘Major Watson!’ Staff Nurse Jennings beckoned him from the open sides of the triage/reception tent, where long trestle tables received the stretchers and each case was assessed before being moved on to the appropriate ward or, in some cases, the mortuary.

  ‘Yes, how can I help?’ he asked, hurrying over.

  ‘Over here.’

  He stepped into the tent and into a miasma of stale sweat, tart chemicals and fresh blood. A series of barked instructions rang out, mostly coming from a man in a white coat who, beneath it, was seemingly dressed for a round of golf. The accent was American or Canadian, Watson wasn’t certain.

  ‘Re-suss! This guy needs morphine. Where’s his label? What do you mean it’s fallen off? Re-suss! Are the surgical
teams in place? Pre-op now. Now! Staff Nurse – get this wound cleaned and irrigated. I’ve seen farms in Idaho with less soil in them.’

  American, then.

  ‘Is the X-ray trailer up and running? Good. OK, soldier, let’s see. Well, I’m guessing that hurts like hell, but it’s a Blighty. Yup, even the British Army doesn’t need men with one knee. Orderly! Get this man to X-ray, please.’

  He was striding between the tables, assessing soldiers in the blink of an eye before moving on, but Watson noticed there was always purposeful activity left in his wake. He caught Watson’s eye and gave a mocking two-fingered salute.

  Jennings pulled at Watson’s arm and he swung round and followed her pointing finger. Watson swallowed hard and, for one mortifying second, he thought he might swoon. The man’s khaki jacket was covered in blood and ochre-coloured mud. But it was the source of the blood that was so horrifying. Most of the soldier’s face, from the nostrils down, had simply disappeared. It reminded Watson of the demonstration models of coloured wax used by his professors at the University of London.

  But this was not wax – it was flesh and bone, a series of spongy surfaces, glistening tubes, raw muscle, cotton-like nerves and hard bone, the human workings exposed by the removal of the jaw. Most of the palate had gone, too, and he could see up into the dark corridors of the sinuses.

  The sight made him appalled, angry. The wounds from the round bullets used in Afghanistan had caused nothing like this damage. His own intact limbs were witness to that.

  ‘Lieutenant Cornelius Lovat. RC. Sniper wound. He’s stopped breathing,’ said Staff Nurse Jennings, her voice quavering. ‘He was breathing just a second ago. Then he gave a spasm. I took away the dressing, thinking it was suffocating him and . . . that. Shall I call the padre?’