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

with our advance so clearly imminent?”
    “I think you all know the answer to that question,” Harker replied evenly.
    Private McDonald muttered something exceptionally vulgar under his breath, the kind of thing that could lead to a court martial if said in the wrong company. The rest of the squad grunted their agreement.
    “We're not expected to make it back,” Quincey continued. “As you know fine well, certain people are counting on it, people who have waited more than a year for the chance to put this squad in harm's way. People it will give me no small amount of pleasure to prove wrong a second time.”
    The five men of the Special Reconnaissance Unit looked at their Captain. Quincy Harker was tall and extremely thin; even in his thick tunic and webbing, covered in bulging pockets and flaps, and with his Webley pistol on his hip, he still cast a narrow shadow in the pale moonlight. His face was correspondingly slender, with a long nose below which perched a surprisingly bushy brown moustache. His cap cast a shadow over eyes that, in sunlight, flashed a sparkling emerald green. In truth, he looked little different than he had on those days in late 1914 when he had approached each of the five men who lay before him now and told them to trust him. They had, and they still did, without question.
    “Captain—” began Private Kavanagh.
    “No more talk,” said Harker. “There's work to be done, regardless of what we may think of it. Follow me.”
    The Captain raised himself into a low crouch and stepped out from behind the tree stump. He paused, absolutely still, waiting for the rattle of guns and the whine of bullets that would mean he had been seen. The jagged expanse of no man's land remained still, and after waiting a further long moment, Harker began to move north. The members of his squad lifted themselves silently to their feet and followed him.
    Their briefing held that the German line was weakest at a point between two trees to the north-west of Crest Farm, a smallholding on the outskirts of Passchendaele proper. Privately, Harker doubted the validity of much of the intelligence, given the nature of the mission, but it would not be helpful to convey this to his men; he would follow the plan until there was compelling evidence to disregard it.
    The six men moved across no man's land, shadows in the dark winter night.
     
    They advanced slowly, staying low, creeping round wide pools of mud, slipping between a cluster of small trees that had survived the artillery barrage, climbing carefully over ridges of displaced earth. As they neared the German line, winding through the patches of densest cover, they passed a deep crater full of thick liquid earth. Abandoned in the mud was a Mark I tank, partially submerged, its angular tracks caked in dirt and pointing woefully up at the sky.
    Thirty yards before them, sunk into the swamp of no man's land, a German sentry post was just visible in the darkness. The faint orange glow of a cigarette flickered through the concrete slit in the front of the box, illuminating the square, heavy shape of a machine gun, pointed no more than five degrees to the right of their position. Captain Harker checked his watch and whispered an order to his men, who immediately dropped to the sodden ground behind a wide bank of earth. Private Potts gently rested the barrel of his Lee-Enfield rifle on the top of the ridge, and waited.
    Far to the east, behind the Allied trenches they had emerged from, a series of deep booms shook the ground beneath them. The men of the squad lowered their faces to the ground and waited for the artillery shells to fall.
    Giant explosions detonated all around them, throwing earth into the sky in volcanic bursts of mud and stagnant water. The sound was so loud it appeared to come from outside the world; it seemed inconceivable that anything built by human hands could create such a noise, a blinding, deafening roar that shook each man to his bones and spun his