Page 13 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)

A fter taking an empty cot in a tent reserved for six sergeants, Bell was awoken before dawn the next morning and got his first good look at the camp.

There were two companies bivouacked in the forest clearing and they were far enough behind the lines that all the men got to sleep in tents rather than holes and tunnels dug into the earth.

They would face that horror once they rotated up to the lines and another two companies of men were given a week or so to stand down.

Mess was an open-sided tent with a metal chimney poking through the roof, and in the predawn shadows, men were already lining up for a hot meal, something that would also be a rarity at the front.

The men ate on the ground, spooning boiled beef, which they called “bully” after the French verb to boil, bouillir , from mess tins they carried as part of their personal kit.

This was the last morning of their rotation away from the front, so they looked reasonably rested, their uniforms were cleaned, and any rips or missing buttons repaired.

Though they were miles from the fighting, each man had their rifle within easy reach and all looked cleaned and oiled.

Bell was able to sense rather than see the apprehension of returning to the battlefield.

Their sector was quiet for the time being, but the fear of a German attack never went away.

It was a shadow behind their eyes or a tremble in their fingers as they ate or held a cigarette.

Month after grinding month was taking its toll and robbing these men of their youth.

Sergeant Major Everly sidled up to Bell. He hadn’t realized the night before because the NCO hadn’t gotten out of his chair, but the top of Everly’s head barely reached Bell’s chin. “Figured a civilian like you would still be abed.”

“Back in the real word I’m a private investigator. I tend to sleep when I can and wake when I detect others around me are moving about.”

“Real Sherlock Holmes type?”

“Minus the seven percent solution,” Bell replied, referencing Holmes’s famous use of cocaine. “When do we head to the front?”

“Trucks should arrive in about an hour. Get yourself some hot food while you can. I’ll find you when it’s time to load up.” Everly moved away at a brisk clip, but came back an instant later. “Let’s have a look at your gear.”

He inspected Bell’s boots, clothing, and coat and the contents of a leather dispatch bag he had over his shoulder. “Not bad for a civvy, especially the pistol. What is it?”

“Browning automatic in nine millimeter. I prefer the stopping power of the Colt .45, but I am simply a better and faster shot with this.”

“You want stopping power, you need one of these.” He pointed to the heavy Webley revolver strapped around his waist.

“I hear they use those against rhino in Africa.”

“And elephant in India,” Everly said in a deadpan. “Listen up, I’ll ask Major Fleming’s batman to find you a helmet, gas mask, and a pair of puttees for your legs. And you’re going to want to muddy up that coat once we’re on the line, so you don’t stand out.”

“Will do. Thank you, Sergeant Major.”

“And one last thing. I don’t think either of us are used to taking much guff. How about for the duration I’m Evs and you’re Bell?”

“Evs?”

“It’s what my mates call me.”

“Evs it is.”

A convoy of trucks arrived at the camp two hours later, muddy and bedraggled soldiers sitting on benches in the rear or leaning over the wood-framed sides of the cargo beds.

Some of the men called to one another, comrades who hadn’t seen each other in a bit, but for the most part the men coming off the line were quiet, introspective, and ashen.

Bell had heard that their sector of the front hadn’t seen much more than a couple of patrols and a few random snipers in months.

If this was the toll taken for just defending a quiet section of the front, he couldn’t imagine the horror of a proper battlefield, and he was beginning to think he didn’t want to, Wilson’s conscience be damned.

As with all things in the military, unloading and reloading the trucks took far longer than need be, with time spent simply standing around and awaiting orders that weren’t really necessary.

It was near enough noon when they were ready to leave and since the mess was opening up for lunch, the men were allowed to disembark and have a final proper meal before their deployment.

They finally arrived at the rear-most battle positions at two in the afternoon.

These were fields of artillery embankments, like giant anthills made with sandbags with cannons as big as trucks in their centers.

A few were far bigger, monstrous fieldpieces sitting on iron wheels that were fashioned of steel plates and looked like a circle of metal feet.

These siege guns had barrels as thick around as beer kegs and could hurl a projectile weighing in the hundreds of pounds.

A short while later they arrived at the first of three trench lines dug into the oft-pummeled earth. The men quickly exited the trucks. Bell stayed close enough to Everly to not get lost, but far enough away to let the man do his job.

The trenchworks were heavily supported with timber balks and boards built into their faces for stability.

The floor of the trench, some seven feet deep, was covered in more wood to prevent mud from building up.

There were storerooms and barracks built into the sides of the trench and sandbag parapets and bulwarks along the forward rim of the zigzagging trench.

Trucks in their convoy had been carrying additional supplies.

The soldiers worked tirelessly to unload the vehicles and stow ammunition, food, and crates of military gear.

This was the third line of defense and was the best of the three, having not been overly shelled, and thus was in great repair.

A series of connecting trenches ran forward for a thousand yards to the second line.

This trench was also laid out in a zigzag pattern to help absorb the explosive forces of a direct shell hit.

Staying close to Everly, Bell noted more mud in this trench, some standing water in a few places.

Many of the sandbags had been holed by shrapnel and appeared partially deflated.

A farther thousand yards to the west they entered the main trench that faced no-man’s-land and the German lines some half-mile distant.

It smelled of raw sewage and decay. Clots of mud stuck to Bell’s boots even though it hadn’t rained in a couple of days.

Rats the size of racoons and just as fearless scampered amid the offal.

The men barely gave them a second thought.

The soldiers tried to keep themselves clean, but in such an environment it was nigh on impossible.

Some were so filthy they made Bell think of Appalachian miners coming up from working a coal seam with nothing more than a pick and their bare hands.

It was a thoroughly awful and dehumanizing place, a circle of hell that Dante failed to mention.

“Bell, on me,” Everly barked and strode off.

The trench was so narrow in places, especially corners, that the men had to turn sideways and still brushed against each other.

Fifteen yards from where they’d entered the main trench, they came to an observation stand, a bench built into the western face of the trench with a dual-lens periscope mounted on an adjustable tripod.

Two men were taking turns sweeping the no-man’s-land with the device.

Bell followed Everly up the short ladder to the bench.

Neither soldier saluted the sergeant major, but there was deference in their stance.

Everly took a few moments with his face pressed to the eyepiece as he traversed the periscope from left to right, surveying the disputed territory between the lines.

He stepped back and made a gesture to Bell. “Your first look at no-man’s-land.”

The trench was paradise on earth compared to the ground laid out when he peered through the eyepiece.

Crater holes overlapped each other so that the very large ones might contain the scars from five or six more high-explosive detonations.

Skeletal poles for strings of barbed wire rose up from the tortured soil like accusatory fingers.

Of the barbed wire itself, there were acres of the stuff, as thick and dense as hedgerow.

There was no human way through it, and finding a path around looked impossible.

In the far distance, Bell saw brief flashes of movement and it took him a moment to recognize the coal-scuttle helmets worn by the German soldiers.

They were working on their own trench, and he caught an occasional head pop up as more sandbags were piled onto the edge of their embankment.

“I see some of their men,” Bell said as he stepped away from the apparatus.

“They do that from time to time to dare our snipers into firing at them.”

“Why?”

“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 never left 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 one jumped 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!”