Soldier Dog by Sam Angus

Author:Sam Angus [Angus, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781447228172
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers UK
Published: 2012-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

4 April 1918

A few miles to the east of Villers-Bretonneux

At four thirty the following morning, the Allied lines stood to in darkness and in a worrying, wet fog. At four forty-five the enemy howitzers belched into fire, the enemy guns launching an onslaught that whisked the night into shooting tongues of flame. The earth itself was erupting, Stanley’s heart pounding a tattoo to the thudding of the guns, the screaming of the howitzers tearing his eardrums, the veins on his temples throbbing.

Bullets howled and shrieked. Stanley kept a hand on Bones’s head, but Bones, in this deep, dark trench, was calm, only slathering a little because to him the sound of shelling meant there must also be food.

A reluctant dawn broke and a murky light crawled across the battlefield. Out of the fog British aeroplanes appeared and disappeared again towards the enemy trenches. On and on, hour after unending hour, the fighting raged, all morning, every gun in the world firing, the whole plain alight with bursting shells, with savage crashes and fierce shrieks.

Deadened now to the noise, though still shaking with terror, Stanley watched and tried to decipher and disentangle the chaos that he saw. The shells that burst immediately on impact, throwing stones and dirt thirty yards up, were high explosives. Their splinters could fly two hundred yards and probably kill at that distance. The ones that burst in the air were shrapnel-type shells. The long guns gave a yelp when they fired, then a shriek, while the 3 inch guns were a continuous crack and growl.

Hands trembling, Stanley took up the heavy trench periscope. Now he could see whatever was visible in such fog, without raising his head over the parapet. He wanted to check Corporal Hunter’s forward observation posts.

Directly below Stanley’s post was a British pill box. That was the station in which Hunter’s forward Signallers were based and was one of the three posts to which Hunter’s buried cables were laid. Three communication lines, fifteen yards apart and parallel, laddered to each other every fifty yards, led from Hunter’s Signal Station to each forward post. These lines could keep working with up to seventy breaks. Other lines led backwards from the Signal Station to the general Brigade HQ and the high-ranking officers.

Fidget slid around the wooden post of Stanley’s dug-out, his brows shooting up and down his forehead. The noise was too loud to hear anything, but Fidget’s skeletal hands were describing a pigeon rising, circling. Stanley was relieved to see that Fidget’s fingers were shaking, that Fidget looked as terrified as himself. Fidget was gesturing now to the fog, now dipping his head and covering it with an arm. The pigeons wouldn’t like the fog, he was saying, wouldn’t fly in it. If I were Corporal Hunter, thought Stanley, I wouldn’t set such store by a pigeon.

The Aldis lamp, though, would be even less use in fog, and so would the heliograph. Fog presented the worst set of circumstances for a Signal Station. If

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