Casca 21: The Trench Soldier (14 page)

His manner changed again.
"You dumb fucking corporal, you don't realize just what you have done. You have grounded the world's best three flyers just when the war effort of the fatherland most needs our services.

"Now," he waved a long, threatening finger in Casca's face, "I want to know how you did that?"

"Did what?" Casca asked innocently.

"Don't play with me, Englander!" Goering snarled. "How did you aim your bombs? What special equipment does your plane carry? I have men examining it now, so I will know soon enough anyway. How do you carry these bombs? What sort of bombs are they? And how the hell do you aim them?"

"Just put it down to luck," Casca answered.

"Luck?" Goering's voice was a shrill screech, a comical sound coming from the athletic body in the elegant uniform. "Luck! You dumb Englander corporal. We three, Immelmann, Richtofen, and myself are the three best pilots in the world, and we have not accomplished what you have done here. Don't talk to me of luck. Even from a zeppelin it is difficult to hit a target on the ground, and it flies only at forty miles an hour. You must have been doing twice that speed. Now, you will kindly tell me just how you did it."

Casca looked the German in the eyes. He had no idea of anything that he could possibly say. Luck was the only true explanation, but if the German chose to believe instead that there was some secret, sophisticated weaponry involved, he was certainly not going to tell him otherwise.

But he could think of nothing to say. His mind was totally occupied with what Goering had said. An imminent push on Verdun? And a secret weapon? Chlorine? What the hell sort of weapon uses chlorine? Maybe some machine that runs on it? Impossible, no machine could function with such a corrosive chemical. Does it explode easily? Some new sort of grenade?

Behind Goering's
epauletted shoulder there was an open window, and outside Casca could see the huge Mercedes.

As his mind raced to try to find something to say that would satisfy the German, he saw two German soldiers escorting Captain
Wothering to the car. The late afternoon sun glinted from the bright paintwork, and as he stared at the car, Casca saw another gleam from the cluster of keys in the dashboard.

He was already moving as fast as the thought was forming in his mind. He gathered his legs under him and threw himself across the desk, his outstretched arms reaching for the
epauletted shoulders.

The chair went over backwards, and Goering fell, surprised and winded by Casca's weight thudding on top of him. Before the German could recover, Casca was on his feet and then diving headfirst through the open window. He rolled as he hit the ground and came up running.

Ahead of him the two soldiers were loading the wounded officer into the rear seat of the Mercedes with their backs to him. The one he reached first never knew what hit him. Casca's swinging fist took him behind the ear, and he slumped to the ground. The second soldier had a little more time, but it didn't do him any good.

Wothering
put all of his diminished strength into an elbow jolt that doubled him over. Instantly, Casca was on the soldier's back, slamming his face over and over again into the quickly bloodied steel panels of the Mercedes until the German's body went limp, and Casca allowed it to fall to the ground.

As
Wothering struggled through the open back door, he paused only long enough to retrieve the unconscious soldier's pistol. Casca turned the key and the dashboard instruments lit up. He ran to the front of the car and turned the crank handle.

Nothing happened.

"There's an electric starter," Wothering shouted from where he was still dragging himself into the back seat. "Should be a button on the dashboard."

Casca jumped into the driver's seat and stabbed at a black button. The windshield wipers scraped across the glass.

"On the floor," Wothering's voice said weakly. "Maybe it's on the floor."

Casca looked down. There were two pedals which he was sure were the clutch and the brake, and another that was surely the accelerator. There was also a small, round button. He tramped his foot on it; the motor whirred and instantly fired.

At the same instant he heard the bark of a gun and a bullet passed somewhere nearby. He glanced back toward the hut where he had been interrogated. Goering was leaning out of the small window with the Luger in his hand. A bright orange flash accompanied by the whine of a bullet alerted Casca that the man knew how to shoot.

He looked to his right and saw a number of soldiers running toward the car, cranking their rifles into action as they ran.

"The hell with finesse," he grunted as he engaged what he hoped was first gear and tramped the accelerator to the floor.

The big car shot away at tremendous speed, taking Casca completely by surprise as it hurtled over the uneven ground. He wrestled with the wheel as he looked for something like a road, but the whine of bullets passing close kept his foot to the floor.

He found a rutted cartway and gunned the huge car along it. A quick look to the rear, and he saw that their pursuit was confused and already outdistanced.

A gateway was coming up with a sentry hurrying to open the barrier. He just had time to do so and jumped out of the way saluting smartly as the Mercedes raced through the opening. Casca caught a glimpse of the sentry's startled face as he saw the khaki uniforms. Casca tipped him a salute for his trouble and changed gear, pressing the big car over the rough track as fast as he dared.

He heard a chuckle in his ear. Wothering was leaning on the back of his seat.

"That elegant
chappy boasted to me that this is his own private auto," he laughed. "If he ever catches you, he'll fry your hide."

Casca joined in his laughter. "Can you give me any idea where to go?" he asked.

"Not much," Wothering answered. "South and west – head for the sun is about as close as I can guess. At least we've got the fastest motorcar in Europe. There's no chance that he can catch us." After a moment he added, "Unless he takes to the air."

They came to a road and Casca turned onto it – just as they heard the noise of an aircraft engine overhead. A green Fokker biplane was flying the length of the road, and Casca had no doubt that the pilot was Goering. It was quickly evident that he had spotted them. The Fokker climbed and banked, turning tightly so that it was soon behind them.

As it hurtled past overhead the pilot waggled the wings, and Casca heard pistol shots above the sound of the engine. An instant later there was another shot from the back seat of the car as Wothering fired after the departing plane.

Casca glanced at the speedometer. They were moving at more than seventy miles an hour. The big car straddled the narrow road, bouncing about as they struck ruts and potholes and sliding alarmingly as Casca pushed it through corners as fast as he dared.

Then Goering was behind them again, and this time Wothering was ready, the pistol already pointing at the cockpit when the wings dipped and the man between them was exposed. They traded shots, and Wothering fired again as the plane sped away.

"No real chance of damaging the damned thing," he grunted in dissatisfaction.

Goering made another pass as they were on a straight stretch of road, almost managing to slow his Fokker to the speed of the car.

For what seemed an age to Casca the plane was overhead and alongside,
Wothering's pistol firing rapidly from the back seat. Casca saw the muzzle flash of Goering's pistol, and heard a bullet ricochet from the hood of the car.

Then the plane was ahead of them, and
Wothering was firing a last shot at it. On the next pass another bullet hit the car, tearing through the floor close by Casca's feet.

"Damn, but this
chappy's good!" Wothering shouted.

Casca agreed without enthusiasm. If the chase kept up like this, the German was sooner or later certain to hit one of them or, at least, disable the car.

Goering was now timing his passes to the straight stretches of road, flying slowly at treetop height, and firing two or three shots with each pass. Wothering answered the fire but without effect.

Casca changed tactics and braked almost to a standstill as soon as the Fokker came close so that it swept by quickly. Even so, another shot tore through the upholstery of the back seat.

Then Casca saw an encampment and left the road, heading for where the French tricolor was flying. They were almost to the barbed wire when a French machine gun opened fire on them.

At almost the same instant the Fokker swept overhead, and there was the ring of lead on steel as another of Goering's shots struck the car.

Wothering stood erect, displaying his British khaki uniform, and holding his hands high in the air. The only effect was that more French soldiers opened fire with their rifles.

Then the Fokker was overhead again, but now Casca couldn't brake as this would make them too easy a target for the French soldiers. He kept his foot down, and he heard shot after shot exchanged between the German pilot and his passenger. Mercifully, the French turned their attention to the plane, and Goering banked steeply away as he flew into their fire.

Then the plane was gone, and the French machine gunner was turning his weapon once more toward the Mercedes.

Wothering
again stood up, his hands raised in the air to demonstrate his inhostility.

The machine gun stopped firing, but now dozens of rifles were trained on them as Casca brought the car to a stop. A number of French soldiers came running toward them, their rifles pointed nervously.

Casca, too, got to his feet and put his hands in the air.

They were interrogated by a French chef de batalion, Commandant Jacques Campion. He was obsessively suspicious and believed that they were German agents. Their arrival in the high-powered sports car persuaded him that they were high ranking German officers.

He refused to be impressed by
Wothering's protestations that he had seen for himself that the German plane was pursuing them and firing at them. He was infuriated when Wothering, explaining that he did not know the language, declined to speak with him in German.

He regarded
Wothering's command of French as a proof of his Germanness. Nor was he impressed by their command of English as he did not speak the language and held it in contempt. And he adamantly refused to transport them to a British camp, insisting that they were Germans and his prisoners and that the matter did not concern the British.

Wothering
then tried telling him that he had urgent military intelligence for the British High Command and demanded that he be taken to General Headquarters.

"So," the Frenchman sneered as if his deepest suspicions had been confirmed, "you admit being in possession of military secrets. Then, as an officer in an army of the Triple Entente, you must reveal this information to me, your superior officer."

Wothering patiently explained that he could under no circumstances do that, as he was not within the French chain of command.

"But if you will just escort me to British Headquarters, we can resolve this whole matter in a moment," he said.

Casca could see that this conversation was never going to get anywhere, and decided to take a hand. He shouted to the astonished Wothering, "Himmeldonnerwetter! Halt's maul!"

The French major laughed. "So, the British corporal is telling a British captain to hold his tongue. And in German! What have we here?"

Casca continued to act like a superior officer infuriated by the conduct of an inferior. He hissed at Wothering in the perfect German of a Prussian officer.

"You fool. If that British Major Cartwright near Rheims spots you, he will know what's afoot, and we will have lost the whole game."

"And who is this Major Cartwright?" demanded the French commandant.

Casca glared at him insolently. "We have nothing further to say to you, and will be very content to be your prisoners for the time being."

"For the time being? So, a German attack is imminent, and you hope to be rescued. Well, you are spies, wearing stolen uniforms, so there will be no rescue. I intend to shoot you as spies suspected of espionage."

Casca nodded.
"As you like. I don't give a damn what you do."

Wothering
could not understand a word of the conversation in German, but he discerned that Casca had an objective clear in his mind, and he smiled at the game.

The sight of what he believed to be two senior German officers grinning at the prospect of a firing squad unnerved the Frenchman. He shouted some orders, and a minute later they were again in the Mercedes, this time with a
tricolor pennant flying at the cowl and with an escort of four French soldiers.

Half an hour later they were talking with Major
Cartwright, and the sadly discomfited French officer was on his way to his own headquarters with the warning of an imminent attack on Verdun and the proposed use of a new weapon that somehow utilized chlorine.

The attack on the French fortress came at dawn on September twenty-second. As a result of Casca's information, the French army rushed every available man to Verdun, the key strong point which was supposed to be impregnable. The British Expeditionary Force had shrunk so much that they held only twenty-one miles of line while the French held more than four hundred miles, the Western Front now running almost from the Belgian coast to the border of Switzerland. But every English soldier who could be spared was rushed to Verdun too, and Major Cartwright's men were allocated to the forward
defense of the star-shaped Fort Douaumont.

The attack commenced with the usual predawn artillery barrage which started at first light. The
Tommies had been standing to since three o'clock and were ready for action. Many of the shells were what the Tommies called coal boxes – high explosive shells with an impact fuse that detonated the explosive charge when the shell struck the ground or any hard object, releasing great clouds of dense, black smoke. The barrage was still continuing when the first wave of chlorine gas reached the foremost trenches forming the first line of defense of the French fort.

The gas came rolling in dirty, yellow-
gray clouds, mixing with the early morning ground mist and the black smoke from the coal-box shells. Behind the rolling clouds Casca could see German soldiers carrying large canisters of the gas.

Casca's eyes burned, his nose was on fire. The inside of his mouth and his throat felt as if he had been drinking petrol. And with each eddy of the light wind, the clouds of gas rolled closer, and men started to fall, retching and heaving in agony.

It was impossible to stand before this weapon. The British line broke. Officers and men clambered out of the trenches and ran for the fort. Thousands of Germans charged from behind the gas clouds and within minutes were in control of the British trenches with scarcely a shot fired.

But in another minute, they too were running. As the scalding gas clouds enveloped them and scorched the linings of their lungs, they fled in all directions, some running back into the advancing gas clouds only to again turn back and run uselessly about in the area between the defensive trenches and the walls of the fort.

The British made a stand outside the walls, and their sustained rifle fire cut heavily into the confused Germans who were also taking heavy fire from the fort's machine guns.

The wind had died, and the heavy gas lay coiled in clouds close to the ground. The advancing Germans could not get through it, and those who tried to retreat found it blocking their way.

Then the wind sprang up again, but this time blowing out of the south and toward the German lines. The entire German assault was engulfed in the poisonous cloud, and the attack broke up.

But the British were in no shape to counterattack. Almost every man was disabled to some extent, hundreds had been blinded, and many were dying where they lay, their lungs so severely damaged that they had ceased functioning. Only the wind change had saved the force from total annihilation.

By midmorning the gas had dissipated, and the suffering Tommies moved back into their trenches.

German airplanes were playing about in the sky, monitoring the movements on the ground. Casca recognized Goering's Fokker and chanced a shot at it, but without effect.

The Germans soon came again, the gas blowing ahead of them as they neared the British trenches. The wind was now just a series of light eddies which blew the gas first one way, and then the other.

The chlorine devastated the British and then the Germans in turn. The attackers found that they could not get through the gas to take the trenches, and light southerly gusts blew the corrosive chemical back upon them in murderous clouds, forcing the second wave of attackers to turn in frantic retreat without firing a single shot.

The day wore away with men collapsing and dying on both sides. From time to time the gas clouds would clear for a while, and the battle would revert to the pattern that had obtained since the war had started – the attackers dying in droves at the barbed wire entanglements as they ran into sustained machine gun fire from the trenches.

By the end of the day, some two thousand French and British had been killed or severely wounded, and the Germans had lost about the same number, many of them hanging on the wire before the trenches where they had been cut down by machine gun fire from the fort.

Hundreds of men from both sides were blinded and shambled about in no-man's-land, whimpering in pain and confusion.

"This is not the sort of war I care much for," Casca said to Hugh.

The big Welshman stared at him through reddened eyes. "You've been to war before?" he asked.

Casca gritted his teeth. "Not if this is war."