Page 18 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
“So their countersnipers can zero in on one of our lads,” Everly explained.
“What happens now?”
“We’re on the line for a week before rotating to the second trench and then the third trench, while others in the battalion rotate in. Up here, there’s no privacy, little sanitation, lousy food, and chronic insomnia. After a week a soldier loses his edge in those conditions, so we keep them on rotation.”
“What about during a battle?” Bell asked, thinking of the men amassing to the north for the spring offensive.
“All bets are off. We try to get men off the line, but there’s no guarantees. First battle of Ypres, I fought for six straight weeks. Slept in craters in the no-man’s-land and pilfered rations off the dead. My ears still ring from all the explosions I somehow dodged.”
There was nothing left to say.
The next couple of days went by in a sort of tense boredom. The thought that there were a couple thousand German soldiers eager to kill them less than a thousand yards away was a thought that neverleft the forefront of anyone’s mind, and yet the tedium of the day was a boring routine that seemed to never vary. It was well known that the main offensive was going to happen to their north, so there was no real need to worry about the Germans crossing the no-man’s-land, and yet every day, all day, sentries kept watch for movement in the wire, as they called it.
Bell got a true sense of what life would be like for American troops forced to fight in the trenches of Western Europe. Over and above the horrors of battle was the continued misery of living, as one Tommy put it, “like bleeding mole men.” One story that stuck with him came from a corporal who’d had a friend vanish wholly when a shell struck their trench, only to have his body discovered a month later when another shell disinterred his corpse.
On his last night before being escorted off the line and eventually to a nearby airfield, Bell handed out the last of his chocolate bars to the dozen or so men hunkered down in a shelter below the rim of the trench. Light came from a heavily veiled hurricane lamp. The dim space smelled of earth and unwashed men. There were three actual chairs, one in which Bell sat at the men’s insistence. Everly took one and another sergeant named Moss had the third. The rest of the men sat on their trench coats on the floor. The men passed the bars around, taking a square for themselves until they were all equally divided.
“It’s the scorned women who are the most vicious,” Bell said. He’d been regaling the men with stories from his fabled career. “I’d rather face down a hired goon or a stone-cold murderer than go up against some of the wives who I’ve shown that their suspicions were right and their husbands were cheating.
“Early on, I’d bring them on a stakeout so they could see with their own eyes, but that proved to be a disaster. More than onejumped from my car when they saw their dearest one backing out of some floozy’s house with her lipstick on his collar. I was too slow the first time and she stabbed him with a steak knife where no man who plans on having kids should ever be stabbed.”
That got a collective groan as the men caught his meaning.
“Never seen so much blood in my life,” Bell said. “And did he scream like a little girl.”
“ ’Cause he was one,” one of the men said to a chorus of guffaws.
At the very edge of his perception, Bell thought he heard a noise under the raucous laughter. He was about to dismiss it and launch into another story about a vengeful wife when he happened to glance at William Everly. His weathered face was creased in concentration as he, too, tried to understand what he’d heard and place it into some sort of context. A moment later the tension left his face as if he were ready to discount the almost-heard noise. That’s when he saw Bell looking at him and both men knew they’d heard something important even if they didn’t understand what it was.
They leapt to their feet, knocking their chairs into men who were lounging on the floor behind them.
Everly raced for the flap of cloth that covered the dugout’s entrance, bellowing, “On me!”
9
Because of the clouds, itwas a near-moonless night, not so cold considering it was still March and tranquil for the exhausted men resting against the trench’s far wall while a few of their mates manned the observation posts.
Everly’s shout shattered the quiet as he erupted from the underground bunker. Men who’d been half asleep roused themselves. They were owl-eyed and blinking as they reached for their nearby weapons.
Bell was right behind the sergeant major, his Browning already out of his haversack. Everly’s big Webley was in his hand, a lanyard connecting it to his gun belt. He ignored the soldiers coming awake and ran for the elevated observation platform. Something wasn’t right about the men manning their posts. They stood unnaturally with their heads and shoulders resting atop the sandbag parapet.
Everly threw himself up the ladder and grabbed the nearest man’s upper arm. There was a little resistance, but the man was suddendead weight and he toppled lifelessly off the platform. Bell caught a glint of something metallic in the man’s hand, but quickly realized it wasn’t in his hands but through them. A long knife had been used to pin his hands in place so from a distance it looked as if he were still watching over the no-man’s-land.
A moment later the corpse of the second lookout tumbled to the floor of the trench in an untidy heap. He’d been shot with a silenced small-caliber bullet between the eyes.
Everly fired the six bullets in his break-action revolver, aiming generally into the no-man’s-land, but not having a specific target in the darkness. The sound was what he wanted. He needed to alert his men to the incoming tide of German soldiers he knew were approaching.
Bell clambered up next to Everly. It was so dark, they dared look over the top of the fortifications rather than limit their vision by using the periscope. There was nothing to see. The landscape appeared black and lifeless, not even a glimmer of starlight flashing off the coils of barbed wire.
A vigilant soldier twenty yards down the line fired a flare pistol into the sky with a whoosh like fireworks. When the shell exploded hundreds of feet into the inky night it lit up with the radiance of a small sun. In the flat light it cast as it drifted downward on a small parachute, Bell and Everly saw a horde of Germans moving across the no-man’s-land no more than fifty feet away. Bell had heard the Brits talk about Germans tunneling close to the Allied lines and popping up so close that they achieved near-perfect tactical surprise. He assumed that’s what these men had done. They were fully kitted out for battle and had rifles at the ready, their barrels fitted with razor-sharp bayonets.
With the night torn open by the flare, the Germans dropped all pretense of stealth and bellowed in berserker fashion as they broke into a running mob.
Bell gave himself a fraction of a second to let the gut-sliding fear he felt at that moment turn into a surge of adrenaline that gave him clarity of thought and more courage than he realized he possessed. His were the first shots fired at the advancing tidal wave of enemy soldiers. The range was close enough, and the wall of men packed so tightly, that every bullet struck a target, and Germans began to fall.
His first shots unleashed a floodgate of fire from the British line as first riflemen and then machine gunners manning the Lewis and Vickers guns added their overarching thunder to the battle’s opening salvo. Sergeant Major Everly tossed a rifle left behind by the dead sentry into Bell’s hands. In one smooth motion, Bell swung the buttstock to his shoulder, turned to face east, and loosened the first round at the closest of the approaching Germans.
The bullet snapped the man’s head back so viciously that his helmet continued forward for a moment while he collapsed behind it. Bell worked the Lee-Enfield bolt without taking the stock from his shoulder and continued firing until the ten-round magazine was empty, and ten Germans lay dead on the field.
