The First of July(89)

He had returned to his battery to tell them that the date of the infantry attack and cavalry follow-through had been changed to July 1. “Z” Day. Zero hour. Not that the next morning would be any different to them. Their field guns had started the run-up to the attack over a week ago. The infantry grumbled at the noise and worried that the shells weren’t hitting the barbed wire. The shelling seemed relentless, but the gunners were actually firing on a schedule of two hours on, two off, plus one session of eighty minutes every day. Howitzers and eighteen-pounders. Four days. Five days. Six. Who knew what it was doing to the three German lines, apart from alerting every man of them that something big was coming.

He had seen the effect in their own trenches: men crouched with their hands over their ears, grimacing, mere gargoyles of flesh, but it made no difference. The ground itself shook with the barrage; earth fell into the trench. The Germans fired back from time to time, but the British troops were quite adequately numbed by their own artillery. It was making sleep well-nigh impossible, as well as deafening the gunners.

On and on it went, day and night. The first night there had been a sort of glory to it in the darkness—the sky lit with man-made and lethal shooting stars, fiery planets, phosphorescent flares shooting up. After that, it rained and then became so misty that they were hurling missiles from a limited world of guns, sandbags, and tree trunks into the unknown. Spotters were useless, so they had no idea whether they were succeeding in destroying the wire. The pounding was colorless, apart from the close detonation of a shell, which would create a purple veil of light that Benedict alone could see.

The gun he was standing by was a beauty, as guns went. New, still shiny in places. The horses had pulled the limber up a slight incline, and it had been set up in a small wood. The infantry had put a Lewis gun on the perimeter to cover their positions. They were all exhausted. When active, the gun crew had stayed half naked; it was hot work despite the rain. But waiting, as their own gun fell silent, listening to other guns firing in sequence, they were hunched together in shining waterproof capes as implacable as a coal face. The branches above them offered no cover; when it stopped raining, the leaves dripped constantly and the sandbags were sodden, so to lean against them to rest was to be sodden too.

After the main attack—“the infantry breakthrough,” the colonel had said, confidently—it would be the turn of the cavalry. Benedict’s gunners would lay down a final barrage on the wire and then shift the range farther to allow the attack to follow. By then, the first and second waves would be moving forward to seize the German positions. But had his guns destroyed the wire? He had a good team, but they had been hurried to the front with very little training. One of them still winced every time they fired a shell.

The wire, he thought, and knew his faith had been finally obliterated when he couldn’t pray.



“July 1,” said Corporal Smith in a lull in the firing. “Who’d’ve thought it?”

“Why?” He liked hearing Smith’s Lancashire accent, and the man’s common sense steadied the young gunners.

“It’s my birthday, sir, and it’s Saturday tomorrow. Has to be good luck. Last year, Saturday night, the big excitement was going for a pint of ale with the lads.”

Benedict was surprised to find tomorrow was Saturday. Had lost count somewhere.

“I expect we all had something better to do,” he said. “It would have been a lot quieter, anyway.”

“To my way of thinking,” said Smith, as if it were something he’d thought about a lot, “it must be worse for you. You officers. Blokes like me—hold down a job if you’re lucky, marry a girl from the next street, a pint of ale in the pub of a Saturday, that’s it. Nothing wrong with it, mind, good laughs. But you—you’ll have expectations. For all kinds of things. To see the world. Meet people. Read books. Learn stuff. I’m missing out on my pint, but you’re here missing out on everything.”

When Benedict didn’t answer, he went on: “I didn’t mean to talk out of turn, sir.”

“Not at all. No. Let’s hope we all get back home soon. Get this business over with. Though I don’t think my life was quite as rich as you think. Mostly I played a church organ. And I liked a pint too.”

Smith made a face. “Well, you’ll have to come and have an ale with the lads, then. One day.”

Behind them, the gun started firing again. Benedict moved forward. On the accuracy of their fire depended the lives of thousands of soldiers, spending this last hour of daylight waiting in the trenches. Soldiers whose waiting was tempered only by the knowledge, for those who believed it, that the wire would be obliterated. It was torn apart at Loos the year before, the colonel had said, hitting his boots with his swagger stick for emphasis. Shredded. Men had sauntered through the German defenses. As every soldier would have noticed, the ordnance here was on a vast scale. Thwack. So much greater than Loos. Where it had torn apart the German defenses. Thwack. Thwack.