Free The Devil in No Man's Land: 1917 by Will Hill Page A

weeks to select a small squad of men from the thousands awaiting deployment to the front, then make them available for whatever duties the High Command might deem appropriate.
    Harker asked no questions. Instead, he set about his task with characteristic diligence and, by the Christmas of 1914, he had found the other five members of his squad. In the third week of 1915, the six men shipped out to mainland Europe and began their work.
    Throughout February and March, they sabotaged the Austro-Hungarian attack on Russian-controlled Poland, assassinating officers, blowing up ammunitions dumps and railway lines, appearing from the frozen eastern European woods like ghosts and disappearing without trace. They spent the summer in Isonzo, undermining Hungarian preparation for the imminent Italian offensive, before moving on to Serbia in October, where they assisted with the attempt to repel the latest Austro-Hungarian invasion.
    Throughout the first half of 1916 the squad had fought relentlessly, amassing a treasure trove of medals they could never be officially awarded, sustaining not a single injury between them. They waded through the mud of Verdun, launching dead of night hit-and-run attacks on the enemy lines, sowing fear and confusion among the exhausted German soldiers, until in late June they were summoned north to the River Somme, where Captain Harker made the decision that would ultimately cost one of his squad their life.
    It was immediately apparent that the plan for the upcoming attack was folly, lacking both strategic thought and any understanding of the true nature of this first modern war, so when Field Marshal Hubert Gough told his squad to infiltrate the German line and sabotage the supply chain, Quincey Harker flatly refused.
    He explained to Gough that the attack was an act of lunacy, one that could only result in catastrophic Allied losses. He begged the Field Marshal to reconsider the offensive, whereupon Gough had his entire squad arrested and sentenced to death for cowardice.
    On 1 st July 1916 the offensive began, as the six members of the Special Reconnaissance Unit sat in cells thirty-five miles behind the front. Eighteen hours later nearly twenty thousand Allied soldiers were dead or dying.
    As news filtered through to headquarters, Field Marshal Gough received a telephone call from the War Cabinet. For several minutes, he shouted down the black receiver, at one point threatening to resign, before eventually hanging up the phone and following the orders he had been given. He sent his adjutant down to the cells to release their six occupants, and began waiting patiently for the opportunity to exact his revenge.
    By June 1917, Captain Harker and his squad were tunnelling under the Messines Ridge, helping to lay the mines that would destroy the fortified German defences above, along with the town of Messines itself. During the aftermath of this successful operation, as plans were drawn up for the attack on Passchendaele, Gough saw his chance had come.
     
    “Remind me what we're doing here, Quincey,” whispered Thorpe. His pale, handsome face was spattered with mud, and his voice trembled slightly in the biting cold of the Belgian winter.
    Harker silently rolled over on to his back and faced his men. They looked as resentful as Thorpe sounded.
    “You all know why we're here,” he answered, “The official reason and the real one behind it. Tomorrow the Canadians are going up this salient for the second time, to try and take a little town with no strategic value, because we've been trying for so long now that we don't know how to stop. A good number, maybe most of them, are going to be killed. So we're going through the line to bring back a final positional assessment of this godforsaken village, in the hope of preventing at least a small number of them walking in front of a machine gun.”
    “Jerry positions haven't changed in a month,” protested Thorpe. “Why would anyone think they would do so now,