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MORIBUND
By Spencer Myers
April 29, 1998
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide calls into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.
- Edward Thomas, a soldier of the Great War
The Western Front
France, July 1916
Alan Bennett stood in the trench with the other members of his platoon, clutching his Lee-Enfield rifle until his knuckles ached.
Joseph Myers, his best friend, was on the wooden ladder ahead of him, staring fixedly at the mud wall of the trench.
Heavy guns far in the rear had been firing 3,500 shells every minute for almost an hour, the shells raining down upon the German front lines; their crashing explosions rended the air, each pounding vibration going through the waiting English soldiers like invisible daggers, adding to their discomfort, playing havoc with their courage.
The barrage was so intense it could be heard as far away as Hampstead Heath, north of London.
The men were all tense, waiting for the signal to attack. An officer looked at his watch every five seconds. One man prayed aloud. Another tried to calm his screaming nerves by agreeing with them that he'd be killed the instant he went over the top.
"I'll be dead in twenty minutes," he intoned.
Alan thought back a couple of weeks to their arrival at the front.
The khaki-clad British soldiers had come marching into the line in good spirits, singing boisterously,
We beat them on the Marne,
We beat them on the Aisne,
We gave them hell
At Neuve Chapelle
And here we are again!
And they'd laughed at their bravado.
Field Marshal Haig's summer offensive, The Battle of the Somme as it would later be known, would be the first real taste of combat for most of them. Alan, Joseph and many others marching along had only recently enlisted in the Sheffield ‘Pals', one of several units specially designed for those volunteers who were already friends; entire neighbourhoods, labour unions, football teams, were encouraged to join up to serve together, fight together.
Die together, although this last part was never mentioned at the recruiting drives.
They had volunteered without much thought to the dangers and hardship they would face, the terrible things a man was never meant to experience:
The dreadful nauseating stench of the front lines; you could smell it long before you reached them.
The utter misery of trench warfare; sleeping in bunks scooped out of the wet clay walls; being driven deep into claustrophobic bunkers when the shelling became too intense; the only view of the world above being a narrow strip of sky between the trench walls overhead.
Rats, grotesquely fat, their evil red eyes glowing as they scurried past you in the dark; the fleas and lice; the constant nerve jangling crash of shells exploding, heavy machine-gun fire chung-chunging, enemy snipers picking off the unwary, attacks and counter-attacks; the horror of mustard and chlorine gas, watching your friends choke and drown in a yellow sea of the stuff when they were too slow to get their masks on; heavy rain that eroded the sides of the trench to reveal bodies killed and buried a year or more ago. The mud was half human...
"I'll be dead in ten minutes."
Alan adjusted his steel helmet, rubbing the chafe mark it left across his forehead. Not long now. His racing thoughts came to rest on Sarah Durstling. The woman he loved.
A beautiful brunette with eyes the colour of a summer sky, she was a gentle girl who'd stolen his heart almost at once. But he was too shy to tell her just how strongly he felt about her.
He'd known her for only several months and they'd had precious little of that time together; he had just enlisted in the infantry and was in almost constant training. She was a nurse, soon to be assigned to a casualty clearing station in France.
Before he'd shipped out, she'd given him a picture of herself to remember her by. He kept it in the front pocket of his tunic like a talisman.
He'd planned to declare his love for her and ask her to marry him on the day his unit embarked for France, but at the last minute he had held off, thinking there would be time enough for all that after the war...
"I'll be dead in five minutes."
"All right lads, get ready," the lieutenant shouted. He drew his pistol.
"Sweet Jesus help us," Joseph muttered.
At 7:30 a.m. the officers blew their whistles and all along a twenty-five mile front, men climbed out of the trenches...
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