Stories:     The Battle 

                   Over The Top

Somehow we got over the wire, our clothes tearing and the barbs scratching and pulling at out bodies and equipment, and we run slap bang into another gun just behind. Germans jump up and cpme at us. For a moment there is a flurry of figures, half seen, hazy faces loom in front of me. I push forward my rifle and let go working the bolt automatically, and then as I empty my magazine, slash forward with my bayonet. I glimpse O'Donnell flailing about with clubbed rifle, I hear the short, sharp bark of the subalten's pistol and suddenly trip over the gun and fall headlong over a struggling kicking German, who tries to make a grab at me. Oh, my God, as I go down I hear the stutter of another gun close by, and a rushing, whizzing sound of bullets, and then some more spluttering crashes and Rodwell's high cry.  [Giles Eyre] 

                  The Battlefield

We are now scrambling over what must have been the British front-line trenches, a maze of humps and hillocks, half-filled-in ditches, mounds of faded and burst sand-bags, barbed wire clumps sticking out here and there, shell-holes, smashed trench-boards and a litter of rusty tins, pieces of equipment, broken rifles and goodness knows what else. We strike out into what was once No Man's Land, a welter of confused destruction and shell-holes. 

Here all the casulties have not been gathered in yet, and horrible looking bundles in khaki, once men, still lie in shell-holes.

We pass one close in a shell-hole by the cart track. Lying on his back, his steel helmet half concealing his blackened features. Clothing all awry, legs drawn up. Must have been hit somewhere in the stomach. A storm of fat buzzing flies hover over this poor wreckage of humanity. We hurry by, averting our faces.  [Giles Eyre]

                  Aftermath

I left the cemetery and wandered on to the recently captured craters of Ovillers, originally made by months of mining and counter-mining by the enemy and the French. This place, like a huge ravine, was linked by subterranean tunnels which subsequently joined on to a maze of trenches. It had cost hundreds of lives to take, and the enemy may well have thought the place impregnable. From the edge of one of these craters I looked down the sides, covered in rusty barbed wire, where clusters of corpses grilled in the hot sun, khaki and grey uniforms indiscriminately mixed. To shelter from the glare rising off the chalky, tortured ground, I scrambled down this hecatomb, where like the dead staring at the roof of blue sky, I felt seperated from this world.  [Paul Maze]