Troglodytes

In No Man's Land, it was impossible accurately to calculate the passage of time and distance. When fire-flashes lit up the burned-out Snipe, the sorry extent of their progress was revealed. It seemed hours had gone by, yet they had covered only a painful hundred yards.

He had assumed he would have to carry Ball on his back, but, despite fearful wounds, the pilot was the more fit to make headway. Ball surmounted obstacles that forced him to detours. The vampire was a miracle of the will to endure. It was as if the flaming crash had burned away all but the essential parts. He crawled crab-fashion, using his hands as adeptly as his feet, squirming over the terrain as if born to it. Through cracks in his black carapace of burned flesh and cloth, muscles and tendons glistened, working like oiled pistons.

Winthrop resolved to be like Albert Ball, to jettison excess mental cargo and concentrate solely on the needs of the moment. He was thinking too much of Catriona, of Beauregard, of Richthofen. He must think only of Edwin Winthrop.

Fingers of light waved in the sky behind them. If it was dawn, they were heading the wrong way, towards the German lines. It must be fire. After a pause, there were explosions, safely remote.

Winthrop found a French helmet for which the owner could have no further use. He detached it, without distaste, from an unrecognisable protruberance. Besides protection, the ridged Adrian helmet gave him an Allied silhouette. Now, he was less in danger from his own side. Of course, any good German they ran into would shoot him on sight. He doubted the Boche regularly sent night patrols this far into No Man's Land, but if the big push everyone expected was in the offing there might be sneak parties out making maps and clearing paths. And there were probably Germans wandering around as lost as he was, in traditional blind, trigger-happy panic.

'And we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,' he remembered from 'Dover Beach', 'where ignorant armies clash by night.' Matthew Arnold was one of the prophets of the age.

While Winthrop outfitted himself through grave-robbery, Ball scrambled over the ridge of a shell-crater. Winthrop clambered over a shattered gun-carriage and, leaning heavily on his prop, looked down into the dark where Ball was crawling. In most circumstances, he would have found a vampire like Albert Ball disquieting.

His back, turned to Hunland, prickled. He anticipated bullets that would rip through him, ending this nightmare excursion. Suddenly alert, he jumped off the lip of the ridge and slid down in Ball's wake. His panic passed. He had no idea what had spooked him.

The jump jarred his bad knee and he almost lost hold of the propeller blade. He swore loudly and extensively. Not recommended conduct in a young officer eager to be advanced.

The crater was deeper than any they had yet passed. Under its rim darkness was complete, but the muddy bottom was gently moonlit. Another star-shell flared. At least from inside the hole they could not see the damned skeleton Snipe.

Ball made it to the bottom of the hole and waited for Winthrop. The pilot stood, limbs unkinking like the fake cripple faith-healed in The Miracle Man. His outstretched arms bent the wrong way.

Out of the firing lines of both trenches, the crater was an oasis of safety in a desert of peril. By the time Winthrop got to him, Ball had cracked open a pocket in his Sidcot, or possibly his skin, and slipped out a copper cigarette case.

'Care for a gasper?'

Ball stuck a cigarette into his mouth, nipping the end between between exposed teeth, and patted his pockets for a box of matches. Winthrop took a cigarette and found his own matches.

'Ta, old son,' Ball said as Winthrop struck a light. 'Mine went off in the bad business back there.'

Without lips, Ball slurred his consonants badly. It was hard for him to suck flame to the tobacco, but a few strong draughts did the trick. His fused nostrils popped open as he exhaled.

Winthrop relished the tang of smoke. It was a living taste.

The crater was full of forgotten war dead, jumbled together, pounded into mud. Corpses of all nations were under them everywhere they trod. It was a mass grave waiting for earth to be shovelled in.

'This must be the proverbial pretty pass things come to.'

Ball looked around the hole. His eyelids were burned away. Winthrop saw the red tangle of muscle around his eyeballs. The crater was about thirty yards across.

'Been in worse. Last time, I was shot down in Hunland and had to slog through their trenches. That show was considerably bloodier than this jaunt.'

'But last time you were shot down by somebody in an aeroplane.'

'True enough, but wings are wings.'

Winthrop shook his head. It would not do to dwell on what had happened in the air. Not yet.

'Time to push on,' Ball said, stubbing out his cigarette on the steep incline of the crater's side.

They walked across the bottom of the hole. When he stood straight, Winthrop's back ached. He'd been crouching and cringing for hours, trying to present a smaller target.

Ball stopped and held his head like a dog cocking an ear, sensing danger. Before Winthrop could ask what was the matter, darkness swarmed up around them.

They were surrounded by a forest of living scarecrows. Suddenly electrified corpses rose from shallow graves or random piles. Guns were produced and pointed, and cold hands laid on them. Winthrop felt a clutch of pain at his throat and the prod of a bayonet-tip at his ribs. Again, he knew he was seconds from death. Foul breath wafted at his face. If the grip on his throat had relaxed, he would have choked on it.

He could not immediately identify the uniform of the soldier who held him. Tatters were applied to the body with mud, as if the man were an African savage. A cloak of camouflage netting was threaded with twigs and leaves. A necklace of cartridge cases and fingerbones hung on his chest.

A match struck and a thick-bearded face loomed close to his own. Red eyes shone from a mask of filth. Jagged vampire teeth gnashed, wet with bloody spittle.

'Who goes there? Friend or foe?'

The voice was British, but not officer-class. Winthrop would have put the soldier down as a Northcountryman. His terror eased.

'Lieutenant Winthrop,' he said, through a constricted throat, 'Intelligence.'

The creature laughed and Winthrop's terror returned. The throat-grip did not slacken. There were still malice and hunger in the red eyes.

'I know you,' the British corpse said. 'You're a poacher.'

Winthrop was slowly strangling.

'Hunting rights in this estate are exclusive,' the soldier said, indicating the death-strewn wilderness. 'I represent those who hold them.'

Another of the risen dead came to examine the catch. This one was well off his territory: the remnants of an Austrian uniform suggested he had deserted from the Eastern Front to get here. A gasmask, lenses gone from the eyeholes, made his head bulbous. Runic symbols were etched into the leather and a curly moustache was painted on the snoutlike filter.

'Ho, Svejk,' said Winthrop's captor, 'we've netted a representative of Intelligence.'

Svejk laughed too, a muffled malignance. Under the mask, his eyes were maddened.

'Good work, Mellors. Intelligence is a thing we've too little of.'

Svejk spoke thickly accented English.

Among the pack, Winthrop saw French, British, German,

American and Austrian gear. Some combined equipment from different combatant countries. A golden-haired youth, face painted or dyed scarlet, wore a French tunic and a German helmet, and carried an American carbine.

Winthrop and Ball were manhandled to the other side of the shell-hole. Winthrop's propeller was torn away. He bit down on a scream as his knee exploded again. It would not do to show too much funk.

In the side of the crater was an opening disguised by netting and debris. A dirty curtain whisked aside. They were hustled into a tunnel.

'These used to be Froggie trenches,' Mellors, Winthrop's captor, explained. 'Then they were Fritzie trenches. Now, they're our bailiwick.'

'Who are you?' Winthrop asked.

'Nous sommes les troglodytes,' said a Frenchman.

'Correct, Jim,' barked an Austrian. 'We are the cave-dwellers, the primitives ...'

'That's Jules for you,' said the Frenchman. 'Always explaining. I make the poetry, he adds footnotes.'

'We've gone to earth,' Mellors said. 'Down here, there is no war.'

After a few yards of downwards slope, the earth floor was boarded over and the roof was shored up by stout wooden pit- props.

'German workmanship,' Mellors said. 'More concern for the comfort of the fighting man.'

There was more laughter at this remark. Especially from Germans.

These were renegades, deserters from all sides. All seemed nosferatu. Winthrop had heard tales of such degraded creatures, maddened by continual combat, hiding in the thick of war, scavenging for survival. Up to now, he had classed the stories among the legends that had sprung up throughout the war, successors to the ghost bowmen of Mons, the crucified Canadians and the Russians with snow on their boots.

'We get few warm visitors,' said Mellors, with a tone of resentful mockery. 'This is indeed a privilege.'

Winthrop thought he heard Derbyshire in Mellor's voice. The soldier obviously had some education but spoke as if trying to forget what he'd learned. There was an ill-sewn set of lieutenant's pips on his shoulder. He might have won a field promotion from the ranks. It would not do to underestimate this unhappy rogue.

Held between Jules and Jim, Ball offered no resistance. He was gathering resources, trying to see a way through. Winthrop knew he could count on the pilot.

The passageway widened and they emerged into an underground dugout decorated like a neolithic cavern. Fires burned in oildrums, coating the ceiling with thick soot. Crude but striking images of violence and rapine were daubed on the walls with boot-black, dirt and blood. The collage incorporated newspaper portraits of Kaiser and King, images of generals and politicians, advertisements from the popular press of Paris and Berlin, and personal photographs of long-lost men. Sweethearts and wives and families were worked into a red and black inferno. All were swallowed by a many-eyed, many-mouthed monster that allegorised the war.

There was an overwhelming stench of decay, blood and faecal matter. Homemade coffins were laid out, each billet personalised with items that suggested its occupant's former life. Foraged weapons and clothes were piled in unsorted lots. There were also scatterings of human bones, some old, some disturbingly fresh. The troglodytes lived in this appalling bolt- hole, emerging by night to feed on the dead and dying.

'Welcome to our happy retreat,' Mellors said, gesturing freely. 'As you see, we have made for ourselves a Utopia away from the idiocies above. We have settled our differences.'

'There are no German and French, British and Austrian here,' said Svejk. 'All allies, all comrades.'

Mellors let go of Winthrop's neck. As he bent over to choke and gulp in air, he was skilfully spun round. His wrists were bound with loops of barbed wire. Points stuck into his skin, discouraging struggle.

'And there's no rank,' Mellors said.

'You're still wearing your pips,' Winthrop pointed out.

Mellors smiled nastily.

'Don't make me an officer by your lights, sir. Not a scholarship boy.'

I might have known,' the ghastly remnant of Ball said through shiny teeth. 'A grammar school oik.'

Mellors laughed deeply and bitterly. For a moment, Winthrop was almost embarrassed by Ball's sneering. He had been at Greyfriars himself but did not think that alone earned him a place in Heaven. Good schools produced as many swindlers and stranglers as missionaries and martyrs. After all, Harry Flashman was a Rugby man.

As a conclusion to the night's business, it seemed odd to listen to a debate between a pair of grotesque vampires on the merits of their old schools. The Nottingham-born Ball was not even that far removed from Mellors in background.

'The enemy of the soldier is not the soldier on the other side of the ditch,' Mellors said, 'but the high muckety-muck who sends him out to do and die. King or Kaiser, Ruthven or Dracula. They're all the same stamp of bastard.'

'We are good soldiers,' shouted Svejk. 'We are the troglodytes.'

Mellors took off his camouflage cloak and draped it over one of the coffins. The long box was fashioned from ammunition cases broken apart and nailed together.

'You are not our enemy, Winthrop,' Mellors said kindly.

'I'm glad to hear it. Now, if we could be on our way

'You are a living man and you can do us no harm. Only the dead hands of the old men hurt us. The century-befuddled fools with their tides and honours and bloodlines and lineage, they are the monsters who have reduced us to what you see.'

Ball's eyes swivelled. He was bound too, hoisted up by a couple of the troglodytes. There were iron hooks set into the concrete wall, high up and painted to fit in with the savage mural. Ball hung from the hook, shoulder-joints creaking, arms forced behind him. He hissed through lengthening teeth.

'This man has suffered,' Mellors said. 'That's obvious. Why should he suffer? What is it to him which weak-blooded parasite holds sway over the muddy stretch of countryside up above?'

Ball howled like a rage-maddened animal, showing the proper school spirit. He snarled abuse at his captors.

Winthrop's wrists were yanked upwards. Barbs tore flesh. Pain burned in his shoulders.

'No sir, you are not our enemy, but you might be our salvation. As you see, we are sadly short on provisions.'

Svejk's head expanded inside his mask. His eyes grew to fill the holes, wolfish hair swarming around them.

Winthrop was lifted by troglodytes. His wrists scraped as they were forced up over the hook. His heels scrabbled at the wall as his captors let him go. His weight dragged him down, but his feet did not reach the floor. A belt of agony fell across his shoulders and neck.

One of the troglodytes, a kilted Scot, sniffed his swollen knee. He pulled off the boot and rent apart Winthrop's layers of clothes, then ran a long, sandpapery tongue over the wound. Winthrop fought to keep his stomach down.

Mellors reached up and pinched his cheek.

'You might last for weeks,' he said.