Fall of Giants

Was there anyone in the trench? No shots had been fired. But it was best to make sure. Walter pulled a pin from a grenade and tossed it into the trench as a precaution. After it had exploded he looked over the parapet. There were several men lying on the ground, none moving. Any who had not been killed earlier by the artillery had been finished off by the grenade.

Lucky so far, Walter thought. Don’t expect it to last.

He ran along the line to check on the rest of his battalion. He saw half a dozen British soldiers surrendering, their hands on their steel soup-bowl helmets, their weapons abandoned. They looked well-fed by comparison with their German captors.

Lieutenant von Braun was pointing his rifle at the captives, but Walter did not want his officers wasting time dealing with prisoners. He pulled off his gas mask: the British were not wearing them. “Keep moving!” he shouted in English. “That way, that way.” He pointed to the German lines. The British walked forward, eager to get away from the fighting and save their lives. “Let them go,” he shouted at von Braun. “Rear echelons will deal with them. You must keep advancing.” That was the whole idea of storm troopers.

He ran on. For several hundred yards the story was the same: destroyed trenches, enemy casualties, no real resistance. Then he heard machine-gun fire. A moment later he came upon a platoon that had taken cover in shell craters. He lay down beside the sergeant, a Bavarian called Schwab. “We can’t see the emplacement,” said Schwab. “We’re shooting at the noise.”

Schwab had not understood the tactics. Storm troopers were supposed to bypass strong points, leaving them to be mopped up by the following infantry. “Keep moving!” Walter ordered him. “Go around the machine gun.” When there was a pause in the firing, he stood up and gestured to the men. “Come on! Up, up!” They obeyed. He led them away from the machine gun and across an empty trench.

He ran into Gottfried again. The lieutenant had a tin of biscuits and was stuffing them into his mouth as he ran along. “Incredible!” he shouted. “You should see the British food!”

Walter knocked the tin out of his hands. “You’re here to fight, not eat, you damn fool,” he yelled. “Get going.”

He was startled by something running over his foot. He saw a rabbit disappearing into the fog. No doubt the artillery had destroyed their warrens.

He checked his compass to make sure he was still heading west. He did not know whether the trenches he was encountering might be communication or supply trenches, so their orientation did not tell him much.

He knew that the British had followed the Germans in creating multiple lines of trenches. Having passed the first he expected soon to come upon a well-defended trench they called the Red Line, then-if he could break through that-another trench a mile or so farther west called the Brown Line.

After that, there was nothing but open country all the way to the west coast.

Shells exploded in the mist ahead. Surely the British could not be responsible? They would be firing on their own defenses. It must be the next wave of the German rolling barrage. He and his men were in danger of outstripping their own artillery. He turned. Fortunately most of his people were behind him. He raised his arms. “Take cover!” he shouted. “Spread the word!”

They hardly needed telling, having come to the same conclusion as he. They ran back a few yards and jumped into some empty trenches.

Walter felt elated. This was going remarkably well.

There were three British soldiers lying on the trench floor. Two were motionless, one groaning. Where were the rest? Perhaps they had fled. Alternatively, this might be a suicide squad, left to defend an indefensible position in order to give their retreating comrades a better chance.

One of the dead Brits was an unusually tall man with big hands and feet. Grunwald immediately removed the corpse’s boots. “My size!” he said to Walter by way of explanation. Walter did not have the heart to stop him: Grunwald’s own boots had holes in them.

He sat down to catch his breath. Reviewing the first phase in his mind, he could not think how it could have gone better.

After an hour, the German guns fell silent again. Walter rallied the men and moved on.

Halfway up a long slope, he heard voices. He held up a hand to halt the men near him. Ahead, someone said in English: “I can’t see a fucking dicky bird.”

There was something familiar about the accent. Was it Australian? It sounded more like Indian.

Another voice said in the same accent: “If they can’t see you, they can’t bloody shoot you!”

In a flash Walter was transported back to 1914, and Fitz’s big country house in Wales. This was how the servants there spoke. The men in front of him, here in this devastated French field, were Welsh.

Up above, the sky seemed to brighten a little.

{III}

Sergeant Billy Williams peered into the fog. The artillery had stopped, mercifully, but that only meant the Germans were coming. What was he supposed to do?