FIVE
The Tommy would never know just how lucky he was. He only appeared for a fleeting second, a grimy, thin face with, as Bloch could see through the scope, protruding, blackened teeth. The soldier had decided to risk a quick glance between the sandbags, to check all was quiet out beyond the coils of wire in no man’s land. In that second, a time span no longer than a heartbeat, Scharfschütze Unteroffizier Ernst Bloch had to decide whether this Tommy was worth one of his expensive bullets and risking the detection of his hide. The cross hairs sat squarely on the face, fixed at the bridge of the nose. Beside him, he felt Gefreiter Schaeffer, his young spotter, stiffen, anticipating the shot. Then the all-too-tempting target disappeared down behind the parapet.
Wait for an officer or a specialist. Make it count.
That was the sharpshooter’s mantra. The Tommy had been both a private and a newcomer – his cap was still stiff with the wire that kept its shape. Old trench hands removed it so that the crown collapsed, providing less of a target. Bloch was seeing more and more of the new Brodie steel helmets in his sights now, though. Not that they could stop a shot from him.
Bloch moved his head slightly and found the drinking tube, sucking up a mouthful of water, which he held over his tongue before swallowing. His eyes never left the scope on his father’s Mauser sporting rifle. They had been out since before dawn, in this shell hole between the lines, one of hundreds that pockmarked the earth. This one was different, though, because it was next to the root ball of a tree that had been ripped out of the ground and reduced to splinters. The remaining tangle of compressed roots gave perfect cover for a sniper.
The pair also lay under a camouflaged sheet, their faces and hair and hands plastered with mud, so they looked as if they were primordial creatures formed from the killing grounds of Flanders. Bloch ignored the cold seeping up from the earth, the oddly sweet, cloying stink of the decaying bodies and the thin, icy drizzle that had begun to fall from the sullen, featureless sky that sat over the whole of northern Europe. It could be worse, he reminded himself, it could be summer, when battalions of bloated flies filled the air and the stink of putrefaction was enough to make a maggot gag.
Although further north no man’s land was being churned and harrowed to a hideous strip of ooze and muck by constant bombardment, here, in the quieter part of the line, you could still see evidence of the countryside’s pre-war existence. There were a dozen farmhouses and barns – albeit without their tiled roofs, and with the beams plundered for firewood – in the vicinity. Among the rat-and crow-stripped skeletons of soldiers that littered no man’s land were those of the horses and cattle that had once roamed the fields in peacetime.
Behind him, a crop of mangels had gone to seed, a promiscuous riot of stems and leaves that had provided Bloch with extra cover as he had moved into position in the strengthening light of the new day. Now and then he spotted a rusting cultivator or roller, hastily abandoned as war overtook the farmer. This had once been rich, productive agricultural land, toiled by peasants whose lives were much like those of their fathers and grandfathers. It was hard to imagine it could ever return to such an innocent time. Surely the scars they had inflicted on Flanders would last for generations.
Despite the long hours of discomfort, he enjoyed being a sharpshooter. Not for him the weeks of living in dugouts and skulking in trenches, the world reduced to a narrow corridor of sky above his head. A Sharfschütze was one of the élite, allowed to roam free across the front, just as long as he continued to add notches to his rifle butt, which was often a weapon he had used in his days as a J?ger, a hunter, before the war. As with the peasants in Flanders, it was all about family tradition; Bloch had been an accomplished J?ger like his father and grandfather before him.
‘Eleven minutes to your left,’ came the whispered instruction. It was the first time Schaeffer had spoken for an hour or more.
Bloch moved the rifle in a smooth, steady arc. Behind the rusting coils of barbed wire, a two-metre section of the British trench parapet had collapsed, the badly packed sandbags falling inwards. Bloch could see the urgent hands and arms of those attempting to repair the breach. He imagined them, standing on the firing step, crouched like apes as they endeavoured to make sure they exposed no body part to enemy fire. It wasn’t easy. The British trenches were dug pitifully shallow. Manna to a sniper.
‘Officer!’
But Bloch had already seen the man, noted the distinctive long tunic with Sam Browne belts and the stick under the arm and had decided this was a kill worth having. The discharge sounded enormous to him, but he knew how difficult it was for men in trenches to gauge the direction of a single shot. There was no smoke and little muzzle flash; the cartridges were of his own design, perfected while hunting wild boar. He worked the oil-smoothed Mauser action to chamber another round.
As Bloch refocused through the Goertz sight, he heard the hoarse cries for a stretcher-bearer ‘at the double’ and watched the periscopes appear, popping up like nervous rabbits from their burrows, scanning the wasteland for telltale signs of his position. He even saw some steel-helmeted idiot put his head up, long enough for him to collect him as a second notch that day, should he so desire. But he held his fire. Now was the time for calm, for holding position, to stay as still as he had been before he had removed that man’s head. Soon, a lumbering spotter plane might appear, trying to locate them. Or, at dusk, men would slip out from the British lines on a mission to flush them out, for the Tommies had countersnipers now, special units designed to spot, track and kill people like him.
Overhead, there came a sound somewhere between a whistle and a scream, tardily followed by the boom of the 77mm gun that had launched the shell. Several hundred metres ahead of Bloch, beyond the wire, a column of earth leaped skywards as the projectile exploded between the British trenches. It was the early afternoon bombardment, which always began at one p.m. precisely somewhere along the line. General von Kluck was known to the British as ‘General von O’clock’ because of his punctuality.
A second round followed, vomiting up another cloud of muck that stayed frozen in the air, like a great oak tree made of soil and splinters and parts of men, before it collapsed into smoke and dust. The next few detonations produced inky black flowers. Shrapnel shells. Then the distinctive short, sharp thump as the trench mortars joined in, followed by the more sibilant whistle of howitzers. Soon the ground was shaking continually as the heavier artillery batteries added their might.
Some of the rounds began to fall onto no man’s land, showering the snipers with fine particles. A thick man-made fog now billowed over the trenches, reducing visibility. The earth was rippling beneath the pair, as if they were lying on the back of an enormous animal, stirring from its sleep. Their organs began to jigger, and teeth rattle in their heads. Soon the noise would consume them, eating at their sanity.
Bloch rolled onto his side. ‘Let’s go home, Schaeffer. Nobody’s going to be sticking their head up while this is going on.’ He shouted the words, but even so Schaeffer had to lip read. It was something they’d all grown very skilled at.
The young spotter didn’t need telling twice. In less than a minute the two men were sprinting at a crouch through the mangel field. One officer. A poor tally for the day. Still, Bloch thought in the moments before the building crescendo of shrieks and explosions drove everything else out of his head, there was always tomorrow.