Pat Kelleher - Black Hand Gang

“Captain Grantham!” said Padre Rand, kneeling down by him. “What happened? Is the Major all right?”

Grantham lifted his head from his hands. His face was streaked with dirt and tears.

The Padre took him aside. “For God’s sake, compose yourself, Captain. Not in front of the ranks. Remember you’re an officer! Pull yourself together.”

Grantham made an effort to regain his composure as he stood. He brushed the drying mud and soil from his tunic, cleared his throat and straightened his collar and tie.

“Can we help?” asked Sister Fenton, stepping forward.

“Eh?” The Captain looked at the women nonplussed.

“The nurses I reported on last night, Grantham,” said the Padre.

“Ah. Right. Yes, well there’s nothing they can do here,” said Grantham waving away Sister Fenton’s ministrations. “But I’m sure the MO can put them to work.” He gestured to the pile. “The Major’s dead, buried under that lot. I barely got out myself. There was a sudden jolt and the whole place just collapsed around us. There’s the CSM, the orderlies and the signal chappie down there, too,” he said earnestly. “And reports of other dugout collapses. I sent a runner to Battalion but he says it’s gone. How can it not be there? And then there were those damn wolf things. I don’t know what’s happening.”

“This man might be able to shed some light on it all,” said the Padre, introducing the Flying Officer.

“Lieutenant Tulliver,” said Tulliver, extending a hand.

Grantham took it. “Well I certainly hope you can. This is a right bloody shambles. The men are getting windy. It felt like a bloody earth tremor.”

“A bit more than that.”

“A mine explosion?”

“If it was it’s blown us to God knows where,” said Tulliver, looking up at the mountains on either side as he pulled his trench maps from inside his double-breasted tunic. He took a stub of pencil from his pocket and, after studying the map for a few moments, drew a rough circle on the paper around a section of trenches and No Man’s Land. “As far as I can tell, sir, this area is all I could see from the air. It’s as if someone had taken a giant pair of scissors, cut it out and dropped it down somewhere else entirely.”

“Scissors? Talk sense man!” snapped Grantham.

“From what I could see from the air, sir,” said Tulliver, “this circle of mud is all that is left of the Somme.”

THE TANK RUMBLED and squealed its way implacably toward the trench and then stopped. Atkins could see where the beasts had clawed away at the trench paint — camouflage cover and the wire netting gable was torn and hanging off. By the time the engine had puttered and died Atkins and some of the others were out of the trenches and walking towards this new wonder machine. Its guns slowly lowered, as if bowing in obeisance or exhaustion. There were metallic clangs and bangs as a door, barely more than two feet tall, opened in the rear of the gun sponson and there clambered, from the pit of the armoured machine, one small man and then another. They were wearing oiled-stained khaki overalls covered with small burn holes and tight fitting leather helmets with leather masks across the upper halves of their faces, their eyeholes merely thin slits. From the bottom of the masks hung chain mail drapes that covered the rest of their face. They looked as if they’d stepped from the Devil’s own chariot. Two more climbed out of a hatch on the top of the motorised mammoth and walked down the back of the now motionless track that encompassed the entire side of the tank.

“Bloody gas! Now I’m going to have to strip everything down and clean it to stop the damn corrosion.”

“Jesus my head’s banging!”

Atkins had never seen a more otherworldly group of men. They would have looked fierce and impressive, almost like some primitive tribal warriors, if two of them hadn’t then fallen to their knees and started vomiting warm beige splatters into the mud, coughing and retching worse than a retired coal miner.

“Bloody hell!” said Porgy.

The little bantam bloke pulled off his helmet and mask to reveal a pale face covered with flaky, livid red patches. He took a swing with his foot, savagely kicking the body of a dead creature.

“That’s for scratching Ivanhoe , you ugly mutt,” he said, punctuating his invective with further kicks.

The lanky Tank Commander strode over and made a curt introduction. “Lieutenant Mathers. Who’s in charge here?”

“That’ll be Captain Grantham, sir,” said Sergeant Hobson. “I’ll get someone to take you to Company HQ.”

Atkins turned his attention back to the others who were talking to the tank crew.

“Well if this ain’t the Somme it’s not my fault,” the bantam tank driver was saying. “My map reading were bloody perfect!”

“Then where on earth are we?”

“Earth?” spat the bantam figure scathingly. “This ain’t like no place on earth I’ve ever seen!”

“I’M GOING TO need numbers, Sergeant; roll call and casualties,” Everson said as he inspected the fire trench along his Platoon Front. After the attack by what they were calling hell hounds, the men were stood to on the fire step, rifles at the ready. Any questions the men might have were silenced by Hobson’s stern glance, for which Everson was thankful. He had no idea what had happened. Right now he was as ignorant as his men, which was not a position he liked to be in and one he was even less likely to want to admit to. Latrine rumours were flying about. You couldn’t stop them. Those that thought they’d suddenly materialised in Paradise and the Just Reward they so richly deserved were quickly disabused by the attack of the creatures. Now they were convinced they were in Purgatory. Others thought it Hell, although that argument was soon sunk by the virtue of them having been on the Somme which was itself the very definition of hell. Best to nip such gossip in the bud, if you could. Having stalled after the initial confusion over the strange surroundings and the attack of the beasts, the great military machine was beginning to reassert itself.

“I want you to keep the men busy,” Everson told Hobson. “Don’t want ’em getting windy. After they’re stood down, set them to repairing the trenches. Work will keep them occupied until we can sort out what the hell is going on here.”

Cries and moans from the wounded drifted over from No Man’s Land, those wounded by Fritz in the initial attack and those poor souls left alive by the attacking hell hounds. That was the real morale sapper, he knew. In a Pals Battalion like the Broughtonthwaite Mates, those weren’t just any soldiers, those cries came from people you’d known all your lives. That’s what became unbearable; the knowledge that they weren’t just going to die. With gut-shots or shrap wounds they could lie out there for days, begging for help, crying for their mothers, calling for you to help them, and you knowing that if you tried to help them, you’d be joining them on the old barbed wire. That’s what broke men, that’s what ground insidiously away at morale. Oh, the bombs and the shells and the sniping got to some after a while, but this was the clincher.

“Sergeant?”

“Sir?”

“Best, get a party together with stretcher bearers, too, and start bringing in some of those woundeds while we’ve still got daylight. Those damned beasts are still out there somewhere. See to it, will you?”

“Sir,” he said. Everson left him to it, turned down the comm trench and began to work his way back to where the temporary HQ had been set up and a Company meeting arranged.