Lost Paradise

  LOST PARADISE

  BY

  MARTIN SUTTON

  PROLOGUE

  Even this far from the front line, in socked feet you can feel the ground-shock of shells from the big guns, their boom splitting the air, night and day. This constant assault upon the senses makes it difficult to remember that other world. Green and sweet, it was. Of course, there were battles even then. It seems to me now that our lives were one continuous series of minor raids and major offensives - almost uninterrupted warfare.

  People like Diane and me were never content until we'd locked horns with a world we found wanting. Whether misguided or heroic, she tackled the clay-pit bosses, just as I did my Head Gardener. I even fought my beloved parents, over the basic right to love her. Then, when the world had weakened and divided us, we turned on each other.

  The real war is the one which rages inside us. That is the kind of battle you can never win. Neither trench nor barbed wire can protect you against yourself. That war goes on until the moment you lay bare your soul before your Maker.

  Then, and only then... peace, at last.

  William Pascoe's 'Diary of the Damned'. The Western Front, 7th. October, 1916.

  The Wailly-Arras Front, France, February, 1916

  1

  A LIFE MORE REAL

  IF William Pascoe suffered from any affliction it was a compulsion to weigh, measure and attach a label to every new experience in his life. It was as if he believed that not to do so might result in the disintegration of his world. Only by understanding, or at least attempting to understand, some process did he feel confident in moving on. Even at this moment, one of the most terrible in his life, he found himself standing in the middle of a battlefield cogitating: running through various options, deliberating the odds, drawing parallels.

  William had not previously engaged in hand-to-hand combat. In fact, in the eleven months he had served at the front, this was the first time he had actually seen a German up close.

  During his early training at Bodmin, and in his drills behind the lines, he had thrust bayonets at dangling sacks filled with sand, or straw-filled models of enemy torsos. He began to think that an enemy lacking legs, arms or heads could not be so formidable. Recommended 'vulnerable points' were the throat, left or right breast, and the groin. On first hearing of this last vulnerable point, the men in his platoon with any imagination had passionately hoped that this particular instruction could not be found in German military training manuals.

  To William's relief, these directions proved as doubtful as several others. He had been warned by 'Diggers' (Australian veterans were fearsome wielders of the bayonet) to be wary of accepted beliefs. A bayonet thrust deep into a breastbone was devilish to wrench back out, and the groin was not the best target. Cold steel driven into the genitals was so excruciating that the unfortunate victims grabbed in desperation at the blade and would not let go. Men had been forced to detach their bayonets and fight on without them.

  These references to training procedures versus practical experience in combat flickered through William's head as he faced a Bavarian infantryman. He picked out the detail of a deep cleft in the man's square chin. Little else at first registered. The man's face was largely in shadow, and William was too busy scanning him for weapons. As he prowled closer, it emerged that, like William, he was unshaven, haggard, and caked with mud. Their breath hung on the space of air between them, as if they had exhaled their souls to do the fighting for them.

  Cautiously, the Bavarian stepped around two bodies, prone on the bottom of the shell hole, and approached William with a very shaky knife, held blade forward at waist height. There was another accepted theory ground into them by their NCO: faced with a bayonet, any man will run, or throw up his hands in surrender.

  Not this Fritz.

  William could just have shot him - the man had become separated from his own rifle - except that the manual was very strong and very correct on this point. In the melee of hand-to-hand combat, a bullet fired at close range could pass through the enemy and hit one of your own men. William had to fight this soldier with his hands and his wits. There were currently six or more of his platoon lying dead or wounded on the floor of the shell hole, two of whom were his closeset friends. He could take no chances.

  Combat instruction had instilled into him the need to initiate action, even if, as at this moment, one's legs were unwilling to obey orders fired from the brain. So another William took over, one who recalled the advice of a Digger to put a man's hands out of action before all else. "No hands, no bloody danger!" he had told him.

  William raised his rifle, leant suddenly forward on his long legs, and brought down the blade of the bayonet in a sharp slicing motion. Although the complete action was achieved in a matter of seconds, each separate detail possessed a burningly vivid reality for both men, like the separate frames of a length of motion picture film. The bayonet ripped into the raw-knuckled hand holding the knife, scoring deeply through the two middle fingers and neatly severing the little one. The Bavarian looked down in astonishment as the knife fell from his useless hand, his little finger dangling, barely attached, by a bloody thread of flesh. The hand was temporarily numbed, but the sight of the detached finger horrified him. He brought his left hand across to nurse it. William struck again, driving the point of the bayonet through both hands, neatly skewering them.

  For a split second, William quite involuntarily recalled the wounds of his Saviour. He wavered, but only for a moment.

  The man cried out as the bayonet was wrenched free, with a grinding of sinews, of metal on bone. The Bavarian staggered back, shock set in, his legs tangled up with the dead body of a comrade, and he was brought down. William swivelled his rifle around, cautiously avoiding poking his eye out with the bayonet, and drove the butt down hard into the man's face. A cheekbone cracked, and the youth lay still.

  A flare from the German trenches rose high into the air, exploding like a silver phosphorescent flower in the night sky, lighting up William's corn-coloured hair. Attached to a small parachute, to extend the duration of its brilliance, it swung and hovered over no-man's-land. Reality took on the texture of dream. Events appeared to unfold slowly outside William's framework, as if he were merely a distant observer, or a dreamer enmeshed in someone else's nightmare.

  By the eerie light of the flare he saw that he had fought a boy. No more than sixteen - the age of Christopher, William's younger brother. He ran an eye swiftly across the other bodies, seeking two faces in particular. There was Rawlins, their NCO. And what should rightfully have been on the inside of the man's belly lay in glistening coils across his thighs.

  His eyes fell on his friend, David Drew, prostrate beneath a heavily-built German private, a rifle pressed down hard against his throat.

  William took two steps towards them, but his head was jerked violently to one side, his brain sloshing in his skull from the force.

  When his eyes flicked open, seconds later, he was on his back. Blood coursed across the shoulder of his jacket, seeping inside the collar, warm and reassuring in the chill of the night. He looked up, to understand what had happened.

  The German private loomed over him, entrenching spade raised. William knew that this was the enemy's preferred hand-to-hand weapon over the bayonet. They brought down the flat of it like a club, or struck with the sharp edge. It had been known to take off the top of a skull, like a knife neatly striking off the point of a boiled egg with surgical precision.

  The heavy underbelly of the clouds was lit up by the magnesium white of flares. Against the sickly pallor of the sky, the German towered over him, a jagged black outline. He raised his shovel high above his head, sharp edge forward. Having failed to behead his enemy, he would now attempt to cleave apart his sk
ull.

  William had fallen still gripping his rifle, in automatic obedience to the instruction never to allow your weapon to leave you on the battlefield. He flipped up the SMLE, butt resting on his chest, and depressed the trigger. He tried to recall whether he had ejected the last spent cartridge from the breech, and just hoped to God that he had. The kickback jolted the stock painfully against his ribs.

  The impact of the bullet, fired at close range, lifted the German into the air, hurling him down onto the bloody tangle of bodies.

  William surmised that if the bullet had passed through the man, it would currently be headed harmlessly for the silver-plated heavens.

  He rolled over onto his stomach, his head spinning. It was easier to rise by pushing himself gently upright in stages. He was in time to see David jab a fragment of shell, from the floor of the hole, into the face of the man attempting to throttle him. The soldier screamed and fell back, his legs kicking in spasm, as if performing a tap dance on the air.

  David had stabbed at the German half-blinded by his tears. The shard of metal had entered the eye at an oblique angle, penetrating the man's frontal lobe. The legs thrashed for a moment, then the body settled, at rest at last.

  The shell hole fell still. For the first time since they had slithered down into it, a mere three and a half minutes before. The men lay motionless, bleeding peacefully into the blackened, scorched earth.

  David sat up, clutching his throat with both hands, coughing and spluttering, each breath rasping and laboured, as if he were drawing down iron filings with the foul air of the battlefield.

  Several stages on the other side of exhaustion, his vision drifting in and out of focus, William staggered across bodies and sank down beside his friend, one hand clasped tightly to the side of his neck. Their eyes met briefly in the half-light.

  In the time they had served at the front - almost a year now - the faces around them had come and gone with a bewildering frequency that made theirs an ever-new battalion. At the ages of nineteen and twenty, William and David discovered themselves to be veterans, looked upon by raw recruits to Kitchener's army as regimental symbols of good luck. And here, for the moment, they endured.

  Neither of them knew the best way to handle their friendship within the context of this war. It was the same for many other men. You did not want to be there when your mate got it. On the other hand, how could you bear not to be, if there was even the slimmest hope of saving him? When they had volunteered separately for patrols or raids, the one remaining in the fire trench regretted it as soon as his friend had hoisted himself over the parapet, and you were suddenly looking at the tread of his disappearing boots, slithering off through the mud.

  Once his breathing had settled a little, David reached over and pulled William's hand away from his neck. The wound was long and deep, welling blood, with dirt from the blade of the shovel driven in. They wore lightened packs, and David pulled his off, unbuckling the straps. He did his best with a handkerchief, William flinching when the wound was touched, then bound on a field dressing from his pack, which quickly darkened with blood.

  They looked around the deep crater, scattered with bodies.

  With artillery fire generally directed behind the front line, fresh shell holes appearing in no-man's-land were hotly contested. A sap, or narrow passage, could be forged out at right angles to the fire trench to meet the hole, which could then be used as a listening post by two or three men. Indeed, to occupy any new shell hole created within sixty yards of a British line was a General Order. The scramble to possess these holes in the ground created a frenzy of attack and counter-attack, until the victor was at last permitted to dig his sap.

  David cleared his throat, managing a husky grunt which bore little relation to his familiar light baritone.

  "We have to look for Stan. See who's wounded."

  William nodded, acknowledging the unstated priorities inherent in David's two sentences. They began to crawl on their hands and knees through the twist of bodies.

  Their unit of eight, under Sergeant Rawlins, had reached the hole first. Smoke still curled up from its depths, as if Hades blazed just inches beneath the earth. Within minutes, an enemy unit of ten had fallen upon them, dropping like dark, silent demons over the lip of the crater. The hole became a small universe of pain and panic. As returned rifle fire from each front line choked the dark air above them, preventing rescue or reinforcements, they stabbed, gouged, throttled and bludgeoned. By the flickering light of artillery fire, signal rockets and tracer flares, blades and eyes flashed, shifting shadows playing around them. They were locked into a ready-made grave, and the process which had been set in motion had to proceed to its logical conclusion, by rules far more ancient than any training manual.

  You watched your back and your sides as you engaged with the man before you. The temptation to succumb to the luxury of exhaustion and death gripped each man before too long. But fierce instincts, for preservation of self and the pack, drove them on, until they either fell or were left standing. A crude but accurate compression of the exigencies in the lives of men and animals alike.

  They picked their way across the bodies, searching for signs of life.

  Stan was nowhere to be found, which was possibly good news. He might have crawled back wounded to the trench. While not medical experts, it seemed to them that the only people still breathing, other than themselves, were four of the enemy. Which presented them with a new dilemma. The manual informed them how very dangerous was a wounded enemy soldier. They could take the four men prisoners, but one of them would have to leave the hole, crawl back to the trench, and get help. This would leave the remaining man in a vulnerable position, defending the shell hole and guarding the prisoners for an unspecified period of time. They had to be practical.

  Briefly exchanging glances, they raised their rifles, ejected the spent cartridges, and reloaded.

  ***

  David saw the small hand clenching and unclenching.

  "Will!"

  They rolled over the huge dead German, in his mud-splattered field grey uniform. Stan Griffiths lay beneath, the handle of a small dagger projecting obscenely from the right side of his chest. William gently drew out the blade. The small man stirred, his eyes focusing, a tongue flicking out to moisten cracked lips. William found the water bottle in his pack and propped Stan's head in his lap to let him drink. David kept watch at the edge of the hole.

  Stan smiled up at William, as his brain began to synthesize small units of information from around him.

  "Thanks, mate," Stan croaked.

  "How do you feel?"

  "Couldn't handle a game of ping-pong right this minute."

  "Does your chest hurt a lot?"

  "Feels sort of numb. Worst thing was having a ruddy great Boche land on me!"

  William looked across at David. "I'll take him back and bring help."

  Another flare split the darkness, chasing shadows about the crater, making it seem that the dead around them turned over in their sleep.

  Stan Griffiths was five foot nothing, with the build of a pre-pubertal boy. William had adopted him from the day he joined the battalion six months before. Even though Stan was thirty and William nineteen, it had been brotherly love at first sight. Stan was fascinated that William read books in the fire trench, was tall as any officer, and could identify birdsong. For his part, William the Cornish gardener thought Stan exotic. He was a London bus conductor, with five sisters and three little sons. He had a pocket-handkerchief garden behind his Tottenham house, and took in every stray cat the district threw at him. He was also a bit of a philosopher.

  "Well, William, look at the positive side," he would say. "Chances are we won't live long enough to go bald, and find the hair growing instead inside our noses and ears."

  Stan's take on life was oddly skewed, but he always had a point.

  William first guided then dragged Stan back to their front trench, slithering through half-frozen mud which sucked at them hungrily
.

  Automatically, William called upon the hypnotic power of his personal refrain: "Just do what you can. Just do what you can." He repeated it endlessly in his head, cutting out as much external data as he could to help him feel the words. The cadence had the satisfying sensation of onward motion, like the clatter of train wheels along the metal track. And there was a neatness, a feeling of closure, to the falling accent on the last word.

  Then, quite suddenly, Stan was no longer with him.

  William drew to a halt, twisting around. He picked him out, at last, from the slime - ten feet back, either asleep or unconscious. William himself was so weary that there was no word to describe his level of exhaustion. His wound burned fiercely, as if red-hot coals were pressed against his neck. Somehow, he hoisted Stan onto his back - the man's short arms dangling down on each side of William's neck - and dragged them both through puddles like dark mirrors, around a bloated German corpse, using elbows, knees and boot tips for purchase.

  A sudden pain gripped William's chest, like a knife was lodged there. He halted, drawing in a sharp breath. When he snaked his way forward again, there was a sensation in his chest of ribs grinding, rough end against rough end. He imagined that he could actually hear them scraping. The kickback from the rifle butt had done its damage. He tried to recall all the things this could mean. Cracked ribs could penetrate a lung. He should be lying still.

  His vision was showing him double, sometimes triple, overlapping images, the terrain appearing to tilt and shift around him. Every muscle in his body screamed at him that it had had enough, so watch out.

  He was almost there. He thought of David back in the crater, and ploughed on through the mud.

  He passed along the path they had cut in their barbed wire entanglements. Or at least some damned path through somebody's bloody entanglements. A sharp end slashed his cheek. He had sudden misgivings that he might have headed in the wrong direction altogether, approaching the opposite front line. Anything was possible.