Chapter 24: Nights In No Man's Land

• How little I thought that my time was coming 
  • Sudden and splendid, supreme and soon; 
  • And here I am with the bullets humming 
  • As I crawl and I curse the light of the moon. 
  • Out alone, for adventure thirsting, 
  • Out in mysterious No Man's Land; 
  • Prone with the dead when a star-shell, bursting, 
  • Flares on the horrors on every hand.
• Yet oh, it's great to be here with danger, 
  • Here in the weird, death-pregnant dark, 
  • In the devil's pasture a stealthy ranger, 
  • When the moon is decently hiding. 
  • Hark What was that? Was it just the shiver 
  • Of an eerie wind or a clammy hand? 
  • The rustle of grass, or the passing quiver 
  • Of one of the ghosts of No Man's Land."
    • Robert W. Service.

The first night 'out there.' The memory of it still quickens the pulse and makes the check grow pale. How my teeth chattered, my heart beat almost to suffocation, every splash of a rat was an enemy scout, and every blade of grass magnified itself into a post for their barbed wire. I had but gone a few yards when I expected the next instant to bump into the enemy trenches.

There are strange sounds in No Man's Land ; not human sounds, for such carry far-the beat of a hammer on a post, the sharp twang of unrolling barbed wire as it catches, and then springs away
-voices even come as through a megaphone in the eerie silence-but these are long-drawn sighs
that penetrate the inner consciousness and hushed murmurs that fall on the ear of the soul. I
have felt a touch on the shoulder as though one would speak to me when there has been no
one by.

It is the grave of ten thousand unburied dead, but the grinning skulls and quivering jelly or the few rags that flutter in the wind are not the comrades that we knew. I think their spirits hover near, for they cannot go to their abiding-place till victory has been won. They are ever seeking to pierce the veil of sense so that they may add their strength to our arms, and these make for us of No Man's Land 'no strange place,' and give to our sentries encouragement until the land of No Man vanishes and our possession reaches to the barrier of the enemy barbed wire. My nights in No Man's Land if added together would total many months, and I grew to feel that it was one of the safest places on the whole front.

There was one night when I got a huge fright. I was crawling alongside a ridge-it had been an old irrigation farm, and this was a low levee running across-I heard on the other side a splash which I thought was made by one of the innumerable rats, but I put up my head and looked over -so did Fritz, not a yard away ! We both stared blankly in each other's face for a long second and then both of us turned and bolted. This was excusable for a German, but I have no defence. When I went back to look for him, after a court martial by my own conscience, he was nowhere to be seen.

There was another night when Fritz got the better of me. In my explorations I came across a path through his barbed wire which was evidently the place where his patrols came out. I thought I would provide a surprise-party for him, so I planted some percussion bombs and put a small Union Jack in the centre. In the morning the Union Jack was gone and a German flag in its place. Everybody, from the brigadier down, rubbed it in that Fritz was too smart for me.

But after this the tide turned and came in in a flood of ill-luck for Fritz. It was a pitch-black night and the occasional star-shells only served to make the black more intense when they faded. As we crawled out one behind the other each had to keep a hand on the foot ahead so as not to get separated. We made several ineffectual attempts to find the opening in our barbed wire and then cut a new one. Was this like the darkness after Calvary ? The red signal-rockets ascending from the enemy's trenches gave no light, but only burnt for a second or two as a ruddy star. And the green lights turned the vaporous fog a 'sickly yellowish green as though it were some new poison gas of the devils over there. I led the way straight across. 

It was too dark to pick a path, and we committed no sacrilege as we trod on the bodies of forgotten comrades. It was impossible to repress a shudder as the hand met the clammy flesh, and the spilt light from a rocket exposed the marble eyeballs and whitened flesh of the cheek with the bared teeth gleaming yet more white. Our mission was to wait for a German patrol at the gap in their wire I had previously discovered. We were seeking identification of the regiments opposing us, and we desired to take at least one of them alive.

We waited drawn-out minutes while the dark smothered its and our thoughts haunted us. Minute piled on minute while we suffered the torture of the heretic who was fastened so that the falling drops of ice-water would follow each on the selfsame spot. Home and ' Love of Life' sought to drag us back to the shelter of our trenches, but Duty like an iron stake pinned us there. But the stake was fast loosening in the soil of our resolution, when we heard the guttural gruntings that announced the approach of our quarry. 

We let them pass us and get well away from their trenches, then silently, like hunters stalking wild beasts, we followed them. When we were close enough to be almost overpowered by the smell of sauerkraut and sausage mingling with stale sweat, my voice rapped out, though muffled by the thick air: 'Hands up !' There was no hesitation in obeying, although there were eight of them and only six of us. We pointed out the direction for them to go, and reminded them that there was no time to waste.

There is nothing so easy as to be lost in No Man's Land. A compass is useless, for you may be lying on a fifteen-inch shell just covered with a few inches of earth, and the stars refuse to look down on its pain, and the sky is always thickly veiled. Turn round three times, and you don't know which trench to return to. It is an awkward predicament, and many a time I went blindly forward praying that it was in the right direction. The German's horn-rimmed glasses but bewilder him the more, and we have had several of them walk into our arms without intention, though they soon found that thereby they had bettered themselves. 

There was one young Bavarian officer who made this miscalculation. I saw him moving near our wire in the early dawn. I called to some men to draw a bead on him, but he came toward us, and at the last with a run jumped down into our trench. 'Good morning !' I said to him, looking down my automatic, and you never saw such a crestfallen countenance in your life. It must have been some shock, expecting to join his own people, and suddenly finding himself in the camp of his enemies. I found out afterward that he was a young cadet qualifying for his commission, and this was his first night in the trenches. 

He evidently was seeking an iron cross very early in his career. I spat question 
after question at him What's your regiment ?i How long have you been in the trenches ? ' etc., but in English he replied ' I won't tell you anything. You can't make me!' 'All right, old chap, don't get excited. Come along with me.'

I took him to the dug-out which I shared with the medical officer in the support- trenches, and sent Pat, my batman, to get together the best meal he could. Pat was a genius as a provider. None of the other officers liked him, for they suspected he was the medium for the loss of some of their luxuries, and I always had a blind eye. On this occasion Pat got together a real slap-up feed-some tinned sausages, mashed potatoes, strawberry jam, preserved pears and cream, not forgetting a bottle of champagne. 

I sent for the doctor and we fell to with gusto, and never offered his nibs a bite, though the eyes were popping out of his head, and his mouth watering with hunger. Toward the end of the meal I said to him : ' I can't compel you to tell me anything, but I am not compelled to feed you. But you know how to earn something to eat.' I was surprised at the effect this veiled threat had on him. He trembled and paled and gave me a lot of information that I afterward proved to be correct.

The trained scout moves very cautiously in No Man's Land, with all his senses at high tension. After moving from one shell-hole to the next he lies and listens for a full minute. If there are any human beings near they will likely betray thems6lves by loud breathing, a muffled sneeze, or some rattle of equipment. If satisfied that the way is clear, he moves forward into another hole. Should he suddenly come into sight of the enemy, he is taught to freeze instantly, and the chances are he will not be noticed.

There was one night when I was making a way through the German wire, and had my hand up cutting a strand, when a sentry poked his head over the top and looked straight at me not three yards away. I froze instantly in that attitude, but he fired a shot at me which, of course, went wide, being aimed in the dark. He then sent up a flare, but the firing of this dazzles a man for several seconds, and then so many shadows are thrown that I was no more distinct than previously. He went away, returning a minute or two later to have another look. By this time I was feeling quite stiff, but he was quite satisfied that no live man could be there. 

Had I jumped into a shell-hole, as fear prompted me to do, he would have roused the whole line, and a bomb would likely have got me. However, I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a look into the trench, for I reasoned that this sentry must be alone or some one else would have put up the flare while he fired the shot. Probably the rest of his regiment were on a working fatigue not far away. It was a breastwork trench, and I climbed tip the sand-bags, but tripped over a wire at the top and came down with a clatter. 

A red flare went up, and I heard the feet of many soldiers running along the duck-boards. I only had time to roll into the ditch at the foot of the back of the parapet, where I was quite safe from observation, when they manned their trench to repel the ' raid.' After several minutes when about a hundred rifles, several machine-guns, and a trench-mortar were pouring their fire into No Man's Land, I began to recover my nerve and saw that it would be a good opportunity to mark the position of one of these machine-guns which was firing just above my head. In fact, I could, with ease, have had my hand drilled just by holding it up. 

I tore a page out of my note-book and placed it in a crevice between the sand-bags, just under the gun. Hours afterward when all was quiet I returned to our own trenches and fastened another piece of white paper to a bush half-way across No Man's Land that I noticed was in line with a dead tree close to our 'sallyport' and my first piece of paper. In the morning the artillery observation officer could see these two pieces of paper quite plainly with his glasses, and that trench was levelled for fifty yards.

No Man's Land is a place of surprises where death plucks its victims without warning. There have been some strange deaths there when bodies lay with unbroken skin, having neither mark of bullet nor shell. Times when the spirit laid the body down, fair and unmarred human flesh, but other times when the flesh was rent to ribbons and the bones smashed to splinters by the force imprisoned in a shell.

Such was the death meted out by justice to six Germans in a listening-post fifty yards in advance of their trench. This party was in the way of our raid. We could not enter their trench by surprise without first removing it, and the job fell on me. I prepared a mine of my own. I took two Stokes shells, changed the time-fuse for instantaneous, took out the safety-pins holding the lever down by means of an iron ring. I crept out with these shells just a little before dark so as to arrive at the position before the Germans. 

I then put the shells, one on either side, and connected them with a fine trip-wire tied to each ring. I hurried from the spot as though the pestilence were after me, and got back safely-to the surprise of my brother officers, who very consolingly said that they all expected I would blow myself up. At half-past eight, however, there was music in our ears of a loud explosion in the direction of my mine. Next morning, through the telescope, could be seen what remained of several Hun carcasses.

Pat, my batman, who was always a job's comforter, informed me that the Germans would lie in wait for me to revenge this outrage ; but if I had taken any notice of him, I would never have been able to do my job. He would come to me some mornings and beg me not to go out in No Man's Land that night as he had dreamed that I was ' kilt,' when I generally consigned him to a place where the English cease from troubling and the Irish are at rest.

The enemy did his share in surprises. There was one occasion when I received word from the Tommies on our right that a large German patrol had been out on their front all night. As they did not attack I was considerably worried as to what they were up to, knowing they would not be there for the benefit of their health. I was responsible that our portion of the line should be guarded from surprise, and fear of some unknown calamity that might spring upon us from the dark made me so concerned that I lay pretty nearly all day on top of the parapet covered with sand-bags searching every inch of No Man's Land for a sign of the cause of their nocturnal activity. 

The setting sun revealed something shining that looked like the barrel of a Lewis gun. I determined to go out and get it after dark. When I went out I found I could not get near the place, for a machine-gun was playing round it to discourage curiosity, which it very effectively did. I reported next morning that the only chance of seeing what it was was to go out in the daytime, and it was suspicious enough to justify the risk. I donned a green suit, and with a snail's progress crawled through the long grass and discovered that the Germans had laid a five-inch pipe from their trenches to within fifty yards of an indentation in our own. 

They would be able to enfilade us with gas before we could don our masks. We looked on our dangerous wind being one that blew across No Man's Land, but with this pipe we would be gassed when the wind blew down the line from the Tommies to us. The engineer officer wanted to blow up the pipe, but I thought if we blocked it up the enemy might not discover it, and put through gas which would come back on himself. Some concrete dug-outs were being constructed at this time, and I took out a bucket of concrete and dumped it over the end of the pipe in broad daylight without having a shot fired at me or being seen. 

Afterward I found crawling in the daylight in No Man's Land to be less dangerous than at night. On a quiet front there is very little rifle or machine-gun fire by day for fear of betraying machine-gun and sniper positions. Never once in two or three daylight excursions into No Man's Land was I seen by the enemy or our own sentries.

Darkness always holds fear for the human heart, and it is the unknown danger that makes the bravest quail, and not so many are cowards in the daylight. But who can tell which holds the more peril for the soldier ? He faces the terror that cometh by night, the destruction that walketh by day, and the pestilence that wasteth at noonday. But night is often kindly - it brings the balm of sleep to our tired bodies and covers coarseness and filth with a softening veil. No Man's Land at night is more beautiful than by day, for we need not know of the horror we do not see, and it shuts us off from sight of our enemies, and lets us feel that the wall is thick and strong that stands between our homes and women kin, and the savagery and bestiality of the monster who ravaged the homes and raped the women of Belgium and France.

• But if there's horror, there's beauty, wonder ; 
  • The trench lights gleam and the rockets play. 
    • That flood of magnificent orange yonder 
      • Is a battery blazing miles away."
        
        Robert W. Service