Christmas Truce: A Short Story of the Great War (Part One)

Prologue

November 1914

Strangely, almost as though it were a sign from the heavens above, sunlight managed to punch through the heavy cloud cover, bathing the waiting men, crowded in the trench that wasn't anywhere near big enough for such a congregation. Some of them looked skyward, transfixed by the bright sunlight against the dark clouds, though their attention was short-lived. Closer to home, the thundering artillery guns, half a mile behind the trench line, coughed again, wheel-to-wheel howitzers throwing an extraordinary weight of shell at the German lines.

Every man was thinking the same thing as they watched, nearly deafened, the rain of artillery come cascading down on German lines, which, at about three hundred yards away, weren’t as distant here in the Saint-Yvon region in Belgium as they were in other parts of the battlefield, where the distance of two or three soccer pitches was the difference, the enemy manifesting itself only through his continuous artillery presence.

It was different in Saint-Yvon, where the Germans were close enough to be heard quite clearly on a still and clear night – not that there’d been to many quiet nights in this war – and certainly close enough for them to have some sort of an idea of what was about to happen. The sun actually didn’t help, catching and illuminating so many steel bayonets, seventeen inches of horror attached to lugs on the underside of the barrel of so many Lee Enfield bolt action rifles, standard issue for British infantry in this war. 

Those thoughts, simultaneously, went along the lines of, it couldn’t happen to me – it won’t happen to me. Going through the minds of all the men who stood waiting for a signal which would send them over the lip of the trench to assault the German positions across the muddy, bleak bog of No Man’s Land – that wasteland of so much humanity in existence since the Race to the Sea had ground to an inglorious, stalemated halt months before – was the thought, the certainty, that it couldn’t happen to them. None of them believed they would die. It was going to be someone else, they were sure. A friend of a comrade certainly, but not themselves. It couldn’t happen. They had too much to live for.

Soon, the shrill whistle from an officer, and they would be off, climbing over the sandbags atop the trench, advancing across shattered land, into whatever the Germans had waiting. But the heavy guns had been firing nearly nonstop for sixteen hours, and as much as the men hated the constant bombardment, they were glad of it, too, for it had brought a special sort of misery upon the men they were about to attack. The German trenches would be in disarray, machine gun posts destroyed, men ripped apart and, most importantly, the thick mess of barbed wire in front of the trenches would be no obstacle, destroyed like so much else in the long bombardment, which had progressed through rain and shine, not letting up until just a few minutes ago, a momentary pause as artillery observers took stock of their work.

Lieutenant Martin Wells stopped the captain on his way past, tapping the man on his right shoulder to ask, “How much longer, sir?”

“Three minutes,” the captain replied. “The guns are going to fire one more big blast, then we go over. It should be fairly easy. The Jerries can’t have survived through the amount of shells that our gunners have dropped on their heads. Just keep your men moving, keep them spread out and I’ll see you in the Hun trenches.”

“Good luck, sir,” Martin replied, offering his captain a salute.

“And to you, Martin. Though, God and the British artillery willing, we won’t need it.”

More men crowded into the trenches, officers with pistols, non-commissioned officers with rifles and bayonets, and a fair number – perhaps half – wearing the new-fangled tin helmets that had come into being in the early months of this war, and were given to every new recruit. Whether they were worn was something the Army didn’t care about. 

In the tangle of apprehensive men, more than a hundred of them waiting to make the attack, Martin caught sight of Sergeant Warwick Danson, the short, perpetually-angry and completely distrusting of the enemy South African veteran. Like most of the other men in the platoon who’d fought against the vicious Boer rebels, he didn’t believe in the helmet, preferring to go bare-headed. He was moving in amongst some of the newer enlistees, offering whatever advice he could. This would be Martin’s first frontal attack, too, and he was trying his hardest to maintain a dignified confidence, at least externally. His insides were a churning mess of nerves and outright dread, the worst he’d ever felt.

“Bayonets fixed, rifles unloaded,” Danson said, squeezing his way through the narrow gap between the back row of men, the third wave, waiting to go over the top and the earthen wall of the trench. His advice now was for general consumption. “Nothing up the spout, lads – we’re going in with the cold steel. The Jerries don’t like it, so we’ll bloody well feed it to them!”

A slight cheer went up from the men, though Martin didn’t join them. He watched the young, eager faces of the Yorkshire lads that he commanded, though, really, Sergeant Danson looked after most of the day to day duties, whilst Martin continued to come to grips with commanding men at the same time as surviving a war that had already claimed the lives of so many men his age and younger. He’d been on the front for nearly a month, and it had been the most horrific of his twenty-three years on earth. Just when he thought it couldn’t get worse, it did.

“One minute, men!” That was the captain, studying his fob watch, calling out in his thick voice, fiddling with the revolver he carried.

It seemed longer to Martin, by the time the captain had blown his whistle, which was the signal for others up and down the line to blow theirs, moving the line forward. One last burst of artillery flew over the heads of the attacking men, for whom it was a mad scramble in the beginning, struggling over the sandbags, getting some sort of footing in the muddy No Man’s Land, confronted immediately with bodies, horribly mangled by decay, some barely recognisable as the men they’d once been. There had been fighting here for weeks, and the casualty list continued to mount.

For the initial few yards of the advance, it seemed that the artillery had done it’s job well, for there wasn’t so much as a peep from the Germans as the British advanced. Martin dared to hope that the attack would be as much of a success as some had been predicting: that they would slice through the enemy lines, and instigate a front-wide withdrawal that would win the war before the calendar turned to 1915: the war that, everyone had said in the summer, would be over before Christmas, which was a mere six weeks away now.

Then, suddenly, all hope was lost. Fifty yards out from the German lines – fifty yards from their objective this afternoon – Martin saw what he took to be their death. The barbed wire was there, looming out of the mud and the dirt, giant coils of the stuff, some of it with tin cans affixed, designed to make a noise when disturbed, thus alerting the Germans to the presence of would-be attackers. His stomach turned, seeing that the wire remained intact, and could only think that the artillery barrage had simply caused the continuous coils to bounce up and down, rather than the shrapnel from the howitzers actually ripping it apart. Now, the attackers were in trouble.

Somewhere to the left, the captain had seen the problem and called, “Bring up wire cutters!”

“Wire cutters! We need wire cutters!” Sergeant Danson had taken up the call, bellowing as loud as his voice would allow. “For Christ’s sake, get the fucking wire cutters up here!”

Like a bear emerging from a winter-long hibernation, the Germans, aware of the British attack, and knowing that it had been held up by the barbed wire, swung quickly into action. They had not been shelled into submission by the British howitzers. Far from it, in fact. They had hidden in dugouts beneath the ground, waiting for the big guns to stop so that they might come out and take their revenge. Now, they got that chance, and the British attack was doomed. One, two, three and then countless machine guns opened up, sweeping left to right and right to left across the front of the British attack.

No one in the first wave had a chance. They were cut down where they stood: officers, non-commissioned officers and enlisted men alike. The Maxim machine guns, fired by specially-trained German gunners, did not discriminate. And the guns did not stop firing until everyone in the front row had been reduced to figures in the mud, and still they continued, spitting rounds into those body-shaped mounds in the chopped-up earth that constituted No Man’s Land, trying to make sure that no one survived.

In the second wave, Martin saw the bullets coming towards him, and could almost actually pinpoint which of the gun emplacements was firing at him, only just resisting the urge to dive for the nearest shell crater and hide until the carnage was over. He had a front row view for the death of the platoon, good men, men whom he’d known since enlistment dead now, lifeless bodies tumbling into water-filled shell craters, others dropping where they stood, bodies or faces or both a horrible bloody pulp now.

Thousands upon thousands of bullets fanned out to cut down another British attack, the soldiers unable to withstand such a gale of steel. The bullets chewed up the ground, each round that didn’t chew through the soft flesh of an attacking soldier instead tossed up a small fleck of wet earth, and men continued to die. Martin struggled forward, suddenly feeling as though his legs were weighted down with concrete and feeling, also, like he lived a charmed life, for men around him were ripped apart by a bloody patchwork of bullets, becoming yet more unrecognisable human wastage in mere seconds, and he managed to survive. For the time being, anyway.

Far louder and more repetitive than the screams of the dead and dying in Martin’s ears seemed to be the hammering of the enemy machine guns, joined now by the sharper crack of Mauser rifles, snipers having a field day, and, finally, inevitably, arcing out from the German trenches, across the barbed wire coils into the still, clear afternoon – the first such afternoon without rain for some time – were the grenades.

The British infantry had taken to calling the German grenades potato mashers, for their style, making them look a little like the kitchen implement. They were causing great havoc amongst the attacking British. Explosions of flame and smoke appeared in amongst the Tommies, and men were tossed into the air, almost conically so, limbs crudely sheared off, instantly separated from their bodies, arms, legs and more flying in the air, landing in the dirt, coming under machine gun fire once more.

A flurry of bullets exploded the captain’s head like a can of tomatoes, blood and brain matter splashing on men on either side, the lifeless remains of his body tumbling harmlessly to the dirt, another life taken. A corporal died mercifully quickly, shot between the eyes. A lieutenant from the new reinforcement draft fell to his knees, disbelieving, looking down at the rapidly-increasing red stain over his chest, swore once, fell forward and died without another sound. A private crawled helplessly towards the German trenches, dragging most of his guts behind him and crying for his mother until an enemy bullet ended the mess. Still, the guns hammered. Still, the British died.

The attack had stalled, and it was well on it’s way to being bloodily repulsed. There was no way through the barbed wire. Men who tried to use the wire cutters that someone had procured from somewhere were shot dead, their bodies falling backwards, the cutters still attached to the wire. Others tried to burrow underneath, some succeeding in getting out the other side their uniform ripped to shreds, their back consisting of bloody welts, and only then – perhaps delivering false hope was the Germans’ idea of amusement – were they killed, caught by a grenade or shot up by a machine gun.

Back and forth, left and right, the machine guns swept. Those who had been lucky to survive went to ground, hiding behind felled trees, dead bodies, any of the flotsam and jetsam of war that would provide even a modicum of cover. From there, they tried to fire back, to somehow even the score, but were able to aim at nothing but barbed wire.

More men went forward, trying to cut through the barbed wire where others had failed, and were picked off by snipers. The Germans were well protected in their trenches, from where they were able to inflict the most damage possible with little risk to their own men. A British grenade was tossed through the air, but it landed only on the lip of the trench, exploding there and inviting, in response, a prolonged burst from the closest machine gun.

“Retreat! Fall back! Fall back!” They were the last words of the lieutenant, whose command this disaster had become after the captain’s death, for he was spun around by a storm of bullets seconds later: one more casualty in a sector where there had been countless thousands.

But the call was out, and the British, held up and being massacred, fell back. Martin saw a man in front of him turn to follow the order and, instead, fall: shot through the leg. In a moment of madness or bravery, he couldn’t work out which, he selflessly dove forward, grabbing the wounded man by the back of the uniform, dragging him away from the barbed wire and machine gun in front, where only certain and likely quick death awaited.

It was then that Martin felt a sharp pain, down near his thigh, like someone had knocked the wind from him, but it seemed to disappear quickly, and he felt little more pain for the next few seconds. Indeed, he was able to struggle along for a few more yards before it felt like his entire left side collapsed, sending him face first not just into the dirt, but into a pool of mud. The next he knew was searing pain, the sort that seemed to assault his whole body all at once. It was as much as he could do to breathe let alone walk or crawl, though he did manage, somehow, to roll onto his back to stare up at the darkening sky.

The man he’d pulled back was gone, and, the shadows of unconsciousness encroaching, the next face Martin saw was that of Sergeant Danson. The sergeant, battling with a wound on his left hand, had stayed behind to chivvy the laggards – not that there were men, with German machine guns nipping at their heels – back to the trench, and Martin, coming across the sergeant, noted that the man’s anger had only increased having been shot. The two men were the rear-guard of the remains of the British attack.

“What – how is it?” Martin managed to ask, albeit breathlessly.

Danson hardly broke stride as he hauled the lieutenant over his shoulder. He gave the wound only a cursory glance, too. “Shot in the thigh,” was the gruff report. “You’ll live.”

The most galling noise was the cheering of the Germans as the last of the British retreated. It was a strange view for Martin, the world on an angle, and he saw dozens of men returning, blood on their uniforms, crude bandages already affixed in some places, tired and dirty faces, men who bore the mental scars of a bad defeat, and hearing the enemy celebrating their own win was tough to swallow for proud men like these Yorkshiremen. Those who had born the physical scars of this defeat mostly weren’t coming back to the trenches.

At the edge of the trench, sets of hands were outstretched, carrying Martin down into the relative safety. He felt strange, eyes closing and opening in no particular rhythm, and could feel a wetness right down his leg, idly wondering how much blood he’d lost. He felt weak, dizzy, completely strange, an out of body experience except that he was in his body to feel everything. Eventually, the combination of pain and extreme tiredness was too much and he closed his eyes, the last thing he heard being repeated cries for medics.

It was left to the irascible Sergeant Danson, who had lost the tip of the middle finger on his left hand to a German bullet, to close the chapter on another failed attempt to break through German lines: “Well, that was a fucking mess, then, wasn’t it?”