Susan Hill - Strange Meeting

The Rifles were still advancing. They were beautiful, Barton thought, standing a dozen yards away behind Private Flannery, they are perfectly ordered, lines unbroken, graceful as horses. They are beautiful.

As the noise of the artillery got louder his excitement seemed to fill his body, took him over entirely so that, when they themselves began to go up and over the top, he was no longer conscious of anything except the urge to move forward, to keep up this almost hysterical sense of pleasure in what was so obviously a perfect battle, so easy, effortless. He felt as though he were standing outside himself, and was surprised at this new person he had become, surprised at everything. He wondered when he would come to.

Where the ground began to slope up the mud gave way to grass here and there. But they could no longer see the men on the right and left flanks because of the denseness of the smoke. Hilliard was separated from Barton and not so far ahead, so that when the rifle and machine gun fire opened up from the enemy guns hidden in Barmelle Wood, he had a better view. He watched their own first line stagger and fall, the men going down one after another on their knees and then, before the smoke closed up, the line immediately behind. It went on like that and after a moment they themselves were caught up in it, and the heavy shells began to come over, the whole division was an open target for the enemy guns. Wave after wave of men came walking into the fire, the ground began to open under their feet, as the howitzers blew up dozens of men at a time.

Hilliard began to try and pull his own section of the line together, as the men fell he began shouting at them to close in, before an attack of coughing from the smoke and fumes forced him to stop, gasping for breath. Four men ahead of him and O’Connor on his right went down in the same burst of machine gun fire and he wondered how it had missed him so neatly. He went on.

After that he lost touch, the men coming up behind overtook his own section and fell in the same places, so that the bodies were piling on top of one another, the shell holes were filled and then new ones opened up, filled again. Once, Hilliard slipped and fell and for a moment thought that he had been hit, but could feel no pain. A Corporal beside him was holding his head between his hands, covering his eyes and rocking silently to and fro. Hilliard crawled over, hunted for his water bottle and got a little of it between the man’s lips, but as it dribbled down his throat, he coughed it up with a great spout of blood, and his head fell forwards. Hilliard left him, got up again. He had no idea how far he had gone, he could see nothing. He thought they had begun to walk into their own artillery barrage, but there was a constant spray of fire from the enemy line. He had a clear picture of the whole English army caught in the neatest, simplest possible trap. Another line of men came up the slope. A Company, he thought, stepping between the – already dead and wounded, walking directly on into the rain of fire, and suddenly, Hilliard wanted to stand up and wave at them, shout, push them back, he saw that it was all useless, that those few who did reach the enemy line would be shot to pieces on their wire. He turned and began to roar at the first man who came towards him but before he was near enough he fell forwards, his knees giving slowly under him and his helmet slipping over his face.

In the end Hilliard gave up and went on because, in the total confusion, it was impossible to know how else to behave. Men were rushing from shell hole to shell hole, completely out of order, trying only to avoid the fire now, and caught every so often running straight out of the way of a bullet into the face of an exploding shell. The cries of the wounded men were drowned in the din but now and again came out piercingly clear in the odd seconds of pause between blasts.

‘Mr Hilliard…’

‘Parkin.’

The man was panting, scrambling to his feet. ‘If you come over here sir, we can get through, there’s a space. We can get into the trees.’

‘Where are we?’

‘To the east a bit, I think, but I haven’t seen any of our own Company for ages. I came back to find someone. Captain Sparrow’s dead, sir, I was going to ask him what to do – I met him, he was sitting down, I thought… Only he was dead. Look, if we go this way.’

They seemed to have lost everyone, to be dodging only among dead bodies and great craters and mounds of turned-up mud and smoke, there might have been no other men left except those who were ahead, still firing the guns. Hilliard followed Parkin, they ducked and ran forward as they could. He wondered again how they were managing to stay alive. Then suddenly they came between the stumps of some trees, dropped down into a shell hole. Parkin scrambled out again.

‘We want to be a bit farther, sir.’

‘Mind we don’t get on to their wire.’

‘No, we’re to the left of it, I think, we’ll be all right in a yard or so.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Luck, sir, it’s all luck.’

‘You’re right about that.’

‘Here. In this hole.’

‘We can’t stick here forever.’

‘What else can we do for the time being, sir? There’s nothing. We’ve lost touch with everyone, we don’t know what’s going on, do we? We’ve got no orders and if we had what good would they be? It’d be hopeless trying to get back now. We’d much better sit tight and wait till dark and then have a go. This is a balls-up, sir.’

‘Quite.’

‘We’ve lost half the bloody Division.’

Hilliard leaned forward, suddenly giddy, tried to reach for his water bottle.

‘You’ve done something to your leg, sir, look…’

‘No.’

‘Well, it’s bleeding.’

‘I’d have known. It’s blood from all the wounded men we’ve been wading through.’

He lifted his head slowly and it felt like a dead weight. He glanced down. A huge patch of his trousers all round the left thigh was dark with blood. He had a sense of having been in this same place, and with this same wound, before, or repeating the same bit of time over and over again. His head swam.

‘I haven’t got a field dressing, sir, I used it up on someone else. But I’ll go and find somebody, I’ll get help.’

‘There isn’t anybody.’

‘I’ll get a dressing anyway. You can have it put on and then we’ll wait here till this lot dies down and I can try to get you back.’

‘Can you?’ It seemed unlikely. Hilliard was feeling no pain at all, only this sensation of lightness, of floating, so that his eyes would not focus and he heard Parkin’s voice as from a great distance down a tunnel.

‘Come on, sir.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Get a bit further down in this hole, sir, you’ll be better off.’

Somehow, Hilliard slithered down on his back.

‘How are you off for water, sir?’

‘I don’t know.’

He felt the man put something to his mouth, swallowed twice, and tasted rum from his own hip flask, warm and curiously sweet, trickling down the back of his throat into his belly.

‘I’ll be back, sir.’

He wanted to agree but as he fell further down the side of the shell hole his face came up against something cold and soft and he felt himself sinking into a whirl of blackness and silence.

The first time he regained consciousness, the gunfire was still going on all around him but it sounded now to be mainly heavy shells. The air stank. He lay, trying to make out where he was, for a moment, and then as he came to, wondered what had happened to Parkin. It was almost dark. Hadn’t he been left out here some time in the morning? He sat up and was sick into the ground at his feet. He had been lying next to a dead man and on top of another – or perhaps more than one. A leg had fallen heavily across his own and when he tried to shift himself, the first real pain he had felt shot through his leg from the foot upwards, making him faint again. As he lost consciousness, he realized that he was thirsty. He could not reach around to find his water bottle.