Will Hill - The Department 19 Files - The Devil in No Man’s Land - 1917

By June 1917, Captain Harker and his squad were tunnelling under the Messines Ridge, helping to lay the mines that would destroy the fortified German defences above, along with the town of Messines itself. During the aftermath of this successful operation, as plans were drawn up for the attack on Passchendaele, Gough saw his chance had come.

“Remind me what we're doing here, Quincey,” whispered Thorpe. His pale, handsome face was spattered with mud, and his voice trembled slightly in the biting cold of the Belgian winter.

Harker silently rolled over on to his back and faced his men. They looked as resentful as Thorpe sounded.

“You all know why we're here,” he answered, “The official reason and the real one behind it. Tomorrow the Canadians are going up this salient for the second time, to try and take a little town with no strategic value, because we've been trying for so long now that we don't know how to stop. A good number, maybe most of them, are going to be killed. So we're going through the line to bring back a final positional assessment of this godforsaken village, in the hope of preventing at least a small number of them walking in front of a machine gun.”

“Jerry positions haven't changed in a month,” protested Thorpe. “Why would anyone think they would do so now, with our advance so clearly imminent?”

“I think you all know the answer to that question,” Harker replied evenly.

Private McDonald muttered something exceptionally vulgar under his breath, the kind of thing that could lead to a court martial if said in the wrong company. The rest of the squad grunted their agreement.

“We're not expected to make it back,” Quincey continued. “As you know fine well, certain people are counting on it, people who have waited more than a year for the chance to put this squad in harm's way. People it will give me no small amount of pleasure to prove wrong a second time.”

The five men of the Special Reconnaissance Unit looked at their Captain. Quincy Harker was tall and extremely thin; even in his thick tunic and webbing, covered in bulging pockets and flaps, and with his Webley pistol on his hip, he still cast a narrow shadow in the pale moonlight. His face was correspondingly slender, with a long nose below which perched a surprisingly bushy brown moustache. His cap cast a shadow over eyes that, in sunlight, flashed a sparkling emerald green. In truth, he looked little different than he had on those days in late 1914 when he had approached each of the five men who lay before him now and told them to trust him. They had, and they still did, without question.

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