Page 15 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
“Not to be immodest, but I am a very good horseman. Been riding since before I can remember. At another time and place my skill would mean something. I would be able to ride into battle faster and safer than anyone else because I have an eye for covering terrain and a mastery over my animal.
“But not here. Not in this war. My skills mean nothing against a double line of crisscrossing German machine guns and a tangle of barbed wire. That’s not to mention the artillery barrages that have raged without end it seems since the opening salvos back in ’fourteen. To the lads in the trenches, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a good soldier or not. All he needs to be is lucky. Lucky that a fifteen-centimeter shell full of high explosives from one of the German howitzers lands at any spot other than where he is standing.
“It’s the same out here. You were a victim of it. It mattered not that theLusitaniawas a fast ship in closely watched waters andcrewed with plenty of well-trained lookouts. That morning, chance put her abeam of a U-boat that managed the luckiest shot of the war. Twelve hundred perished when she went down for no other reason than they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Not much I can do in the trenches if shells start raining down, but out on the water I can at least keep a weathered eye for a periscope or a torpedo already heading for us. It’s my way of trying to stay alive long enough to see an end to this whole wretched business.”
Bell understood the randomness of a gunfight. He’d been in far too many to count. He understood what Fleming meant. He practiced shooting every week to keep his skills honed to a razor’s edge to give him the advantage of speed and accuracy over an opponent. But what good would that do if your enemy threw up a wall of lead with Maxim guns while at the same time shelling you with a hundred big guns?
“Grim,” was his one-word reply.
“Depending on what you see and don’t see on your tour, it’s something you needed to know.”
“Thanks for that.”
The channel crossing was without incident. The French port of Le Havre was just as chaotic as Southampton, with strings of ships arriving from all points on the compass—Aussie soldiers fresh from the Outback, troupes of French colonial police pulled from duties in Africa and elsewhere, and freighters hauling goods from all over the world in an all-out effort to defeat the Central Powers.
Dockworkers swarmed like ants, while parallel lines of soldiers disembarking from the troopships made straight for waiting trains that would take them to the front to the north and east of Paris. Bell saw the inevitable strings of horses. No matter how mechanizedarmies were becoming, the mud and mire of trench warfare meant that equine power and agility still ruled the transportation sector.
With the French countryside ravaged by war, and so many of its men in uniform, the country relied on food imports, and so much of the cargo coming off the freighters was lowered directly onto flat-bottomed barges that would then be towed up the Seine to Paris. Word was that rationing in Paris now required that bakers make only one type of bread. Gone were the beloved baguettes and brioches, replaced by a utilitarian loaf calledpain national.
To the average Frenchman this was a sacrifice of the highest order.
Bell also saw the rows of ambulances pulling up to a hospital ship from the run across to England. Some men could walk under their own power, their bandages white against their khaki uniforms. They had drawn, gaunt faces and eyes made hollow by pain and the horrors they had witnessed. The blind walked with an arm touching the man ahead. Those coming out of the ambulance on stretchers lay under army blankets, but their silhouettes were off. Limbs were missing, oftentimes more than one, blown off on the battlefield or sawn off by an overworked surgeon just behind the front lines.
It was a sobering sight that made both men grunt in that understated way men have who don’t want to show how deeply they were affected.
TheAcastahad no place to berth as she was not discharging any cargo and would soon return to England. Instead, Bell and Fleming and their bags and mysterious trunk were rowed to a boat ramp down one of the port’s artificial channels. The seamen helped unload the baggage and were gone before Bell and Fleming realized they had no transportation off the ramp.
Being of a certain class and having a certain flair, it didn’t takelong for Valentine Fleming to enlist the help of a pair of dock boys of no more than thirteen to drag the steamer trunk up the ramp and onto the quay. They were further convinced with a few shiny coins to find them a car to take them back to the railhead and the troop trains.
They found no automobile, but rather a wooden wagon pulled by a single donkey with such bad flatulence that Bell and Fleming walked beside the carriage rather than in it.
“C’est la guerre,” Fleming quipped.
It took an hour to make their way across the sprawling port, but then things accelerated quickly. Fleming was an officer, a major, with travel papers that couldn’t be questioned and an air of studied indifference that made all around him want to be at his beck and call. No one bothered to check Bell’s hastily drawn-up orders signed almost illegibly by the munitions minister.
The trunk was loaded aboard a railyard flatbed with hundreds of wooden crates of .303-caliber ammunition. Rather than travel in an officer’s carriage, Bell wanted to head to the front with some of the regular soldiers. The enlisted soldiers’ railcar had no amenities, the seats were roughly hewn wood, and the windows didn’t open. The men lucky enough to find a seat sat packed shoulder to shoulder. Others were relegated to a spot on the floor atop the packs that had been dumped as soon as the men boarded.
Bell and Fleming shared a bench that normally would have accommodated three men. A couple of the soldiers who were forced to the floor looked resentful until Bell pulled a bottle of Portuguese port wine from a rucksack. Because the nights were still cold, Marion insisted that port was better than claret because it warmed the blood.
The distance was roughly a hundred and thirty miles, but tookthe better part of ten hours because they were forced to stop on sidings at random intervals to let other trains pass. The closer they got to the front lines, the more the countryside bore the scars of battle. Whole forests were reduced to blasted stumps and disarticulated branches that looked like the skeletal hands of giants that had been lopped off by the gods. The earth, too, was torn and pounded with topsoil pushed deep under the surface during one barrage, only to be flung high into the air at some later cannon fusillade, so all that remained was pockmarked mud as cratered and desolate as the moon’s surface.
As they neared their destination, the young soldiers’ boisterous talk, their bragging of feats past and boasts of future glory, slowly petered out until, as the sun’s final rays were retreating to the west and the landscape took on a funereal air, they no longer looked each other in the eye. Closer still to the front, when they realized the rolling thunder they heard in the distance was thousands of cannons, howitzers, and mortars firing in a crescendo without end, some began to tremble and a few began to weep.
As seasoned fighters, Bell and Fleming knew this moment was coming for the boyish conscripts and enlistees, and said nothing.
The marshaling area behind the front was as chaotic a scene as Bell had ever experienced. Under the glare of powerful arc lamps that were nearly blinding at a mere glance, tens of thousands of men were being organized into groups according to their units. New replacements stepping off the trains were met with the bellows of sergeants gathering their men, like militarized carnival barkers drawing in a crowd.
Fleming led Bell into the melee, freshly laid gravel along the rail line crunching under their boots. Though miles away, the scent of burnt powder drifted in from the mass of gun emplacementsbombarding the German lines. They had made it just a few steps from the carriage when one of the NCOs tapped Fleming on the shoulder.
“Oi. Where da ya think you’re ’eading?”
“Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, if you must know,” Fleming replied, only half turning to face the cockney sergeant.
“Queer oddities on ’orses, ay?”
Fleming had heard the nickname many times. “Sergeant, before you dig your grave any deeper, look at my insignia,” he said with a sting like a hornet.
