No Surrender

Ten minutes until zero.

            The bright glint of sunlit steel burns into my eyes, leaving me blinking and temporarily blinded, as the men lift their rifles to their shoulders, the affixed bayonets the cause of the assault on my eyes. The dull silver blades flash spots of tarnished light across the shored up walls of the trench, and to my blurry vision it seems as though a thousand stars have come to grace us with their presence, a token of good luck from the souls of the ancestors.

            I can feel it in my bones; we are destined to win this day.

            Waves of khaki uniforms undulate haphazardly in the corner of my eye and I find myself blinking against both the spots in my vision and also the burn of unshed tears threatening their imminent arrival.

            These men are consummate professionals. They never grumble or complain, no matter the weather or trench conditions. To look at them, calmly spread out across the line, straight-backed and steadfast to a man, one would never guess that we are a Battalion in mourning.

            The timing of it all was so inconvenient. Two nights before the largest planned offensive of the war, The Big Push as every man has come to refer to it, and our battalion, the mighty 107^th, aka: the pride and joy of the Thirty Sixth Division, the battalion with the most highly trained soldiers of the Allied armies.

            Two nights before the Push and the Jerry’s dropped a bomb in the midst of the 12^th Inniskillings as they marched up to the line, killing sixteen men and wounding a further twenty four.

            Even in spite of their tragedy these men do not show their weary spirits, or lash out in anger. I am as proud of them as a mother is proud of her child who has said his first word.

            Eight minutes until zero.

            The artillery barrage is winding its way up to a dramatic finale. It feels almost akin to a fireworks show, as hundreds of shells fly, screeching through the air, and heavy, viscous smoke singes the nostrils of every man in a ten foot radius.

            In just a few minutes, the bombardment that the British have rained down on the Jerry’s for the last week will be at an end, and the entirety of the Schwaben Redoubt will be ours for the taking. Nothing could have survived the utter pounding our forces have given the German front line.

            I almost feel sorry for the Hun bastards. Then again, what’s the use in pitying the dead?

            Five minutes until zero.

*

“Come on boys, no surrender!” The General’s cry rings out from where he has elected to observe this utter shit-show of an offensive; behind the relative safety of the trench wall. His grating voice is loud and clear, a gravelly, gruff, smoker’s growl that commands our attention, despite the ever present chattering of Jerry’s machine guns, despite the yells and groans of the wounded and the dying.

Even despite the ragged breaths that tear from my chest as I pant out adrenaline and rage.

“No surrender.” Fuck knows who first yelled it back, a lone Ulster accent echoing hollowly across the expanse of No Man’s Land, timid and unsure but startlingly sweet in its sincerity, an unexpected expression of faith and belief in a world that is being consumed by the flames of Hell itself.

It’s a fucking stupid reaction. Given that Jerry’s machine gun fire stops it’s all encompassing, sweeping arc of death and instead focusses all fire about 8 metres to my left, I can only assume the wet behind the ears kid whose bright blue eyes had shone with innocence and naïveté as he led a round of prayers to the ancestors for our protection last night, the kid who could hardly heft his pack let alone the barbed wire roll most of us were lugging for no damn reason, the kid whose name I never bothered to learn, much to my shame, was the fool who sent up the responding cry.

He was never going to survive long in this war. At least multiple bullet wounds is a fairly quick way to go. If nothing else, Jerry are frighteningly competent shots - there was no way none of those bullets had hit their mark.

It would be madness to drop my pack and sit on the ground. It would be madness to just stop everything and refuse to move.

Quite apart from anything else, it wasn’t as if I could just suddenly stop the war simply by refusing to participate.

I felt a hysterical giggle begin to rise bitterly in my throat. It tasted of regret and too many cigarettes. The burn of the rum shot we had all been given before going ‘over the top’ accompanied it, a tingling molten lava that I fancy I could feel blistering it’s way up my throat, the column of the lining giving way like a wax candle. It tasted like sick.

Wait, no. I was going to be sick.

The two second warning my brain had given my body ensured that I missed vomiting up my stomach lining onto my boots. Barely. God, I hadn’t even bothered to learn the poor kid’s name.

YOU NEED TO KEEP MOVING! A SLOW SOLDIER IS A DEAD SOLDIER! MOVE, MOVE, MOVE! My brain was screaming at me, adrenaline sparking through my veins like so much static electricity, but my feet were lead. There was so much to lose here. My country men, all of Ulster was out on this battlefield somewhere. Waves and waves of good, hard-working, honest, earnest, Christian men; fathers and brothers, sons and friends. Each person in this God forsaken field in France meant something to somebody, would be leaving behind somebody who cared for them, somebody who did know their names.

The bile threatened my throat again, its warm, burning, claggy texture sat menacingly under my jaw, paralysing me entirely.

I’m going to die here. The thought rang clearly through my mind, loud in it’s simple honesty, and it ruthlessly silenced every other thought in my head. It silenced everything. It was the mental equivalent of being submerged entirely in water. I felt a pressure in my ears, in my spine, my temple. My hands, with their vice like grip on my rifle, had gone very white and strained, raised blue veins throbbed desperately against the barriers of my papery skin, like my blood was impatient to escape my body. I couldn’t hear anything of the battle that must still be going on around me, no retort of gun shots, no unearthly screaming of shells or pained yells of my fellow soldiers. All that existed was my paper hands, the cold steel of the gun in my hands and the stench of the small pile of my vomit that lay, just hidden, in the corner of my eye-line.

Not exactly the peaceful vision I had hoped for of being surrounded by all my loved ones as I slipped slowly away in my sleep.

I’m going to die here.

“NO SURRENDER!” The yell erupted from all around me. It slammed into my bones, a sledgehammer of awareness that cracked the shell of panic that had formed around me and let the outside world back in with a rush of sound and sensation.

My head snapped up, and the world existed again. The churned up mud of the battlefield, dotted with soldiers in our khaki uniforms, my brothers in arms, my countryfolk, my battalion. The heavy tang of gun fire permeates the air, a think grey cloud of smoke hovers above us, residue from the artillery barrage of this morning. Through the thick smoke the July sun beats down on us, a sweltering, sweat inducing heat that I can’t believe my panic was able to block out. My legs shake and quail beneath my weight as I observe No Man’s Land, and the cry goes up again, running through me, electrifying my bones, sparking fire in my blood, relaxing the tension in my shoulders.

“No surrender!”

No surrender indeed. The men howl it out, many voices, young and reedy, mature and rumbling, desperation, pride, fright, all the voices create a tapestry across the battlefield and I feel strength and purpose renew inside of me.

We will never surrender. I did not know the boys name. I may never know the boys name. But someone did. He will be remembered. And more than that, he and I, every poor sod here, we are Ulster men.

As Ulster men we must honour our legacy.

Our ancestors fought. At the battle of the Boyne, 200 years ago, our ancestors railed against tyranny, against the imposition of a foreign power in our land. They fought against helplessness and the panic that I can still feel, even now, drowning in the adrenaline flooding my brain.

“No surrender.” Just as our ancestors would not simply lie down and die, nor will we. Nor will I.

“No surrender!” I cry, and continue my advance.