Across the Stream

10th July, 1944: Nightfall

My water bottle was bone dry by the time evening had fallen. The medics and stretcher bearers were doing their best to evacuate as many of the wounded as they could, while others cleared out the dead. The hill retained a deathly, solemn silence as the survivors sat with their own private thoughts, ignoring the moans of the wounded. The darkness that had fallen upon the hilltop and the unbroken silence allowed one's thoughts to run rampant, rewinding and re-playing the events of the hours prior.

I lay with my eyes shut, not attempting to sleep, but to clear my head. We'd just watched hundreds of our own people, originating from the very same region of the very same island, get blasted out of existence within the space of a day. War didn't have time for remorse, nor did it care for the suffering of the remaining few that had cheated it. We were at the mercy of averages; it was easy to calculate someone's chances of survival based on the rate of casualties, but who it would be that won that lottery was impossible to predict.

Johnson was snoring like a baby already, exhausted after the long day. How I envied his ability to dip into slumber whenever he felt the need. Peters was wide awake, twisting and turning next to me as he struggled to sleep. I opened my eyes, having given up on sleep a while ago, and turned to Peters.

"When are the Cornish meant to attack? It's, what, 2200?"

"Lynch said it was scheduled at 2230."

"Oh, okay."

We sat in silence for a few minutes, unable to conjure up anything to converse about. I made an attempt to start a conversation, eager to keep myself occupied rather than sit with my thoughts.

"It's a bloody no-man's-land out there," I said, staring out into the stretches of wheat upon the summit of the hill. Peters nodded.

"If we attack, we're beaten back. If they attack, they're beaten back. Ain't no way we're moving anywhere like this."

I swallowed before speaking.

"You know, when we were coming up that hill today, with all that raining down on us, I don't think I could have been any more petrified. I thought I was a coward, while people like Wilkins and Hartman just ran straight through as if it was some walk in the park. No one else was scared, why is that?"

Johnson opened his eyes and sat up, looking me dead in the eye.

"Walters, absolutely everyone on that hill was scared to hell and back. I bet you ten shillings even Wilkins was petrified. The reason you survived is because you were terrified, and didn't do ridiculous and stupid things. A lot of medal-hungry guys got killed that way. If you were a coward, why would you be sat here right now, in plain view of the German artillery, having just beaten off the bloody SS?"

As soon as he finished his sentence, a bright light suddenly illuminated the hilltop. Curious and with a pang of worry, I craned my head upwards to identify what it was. It was unmistakable.

 A flare.

And within the next ten seconds, the whole hill was alight with shelling.

There were screams of fear and panic all along the line, the shells bursting outwards into a metallic shower. The artillery hammered the line from right to left, each one causing the night to shine as bright as day for an instant. Peters was curled up at the bottom of the hole, hands over his helmet and his rifle next to him. Johnson was laying flat against the rim of the hole, pressing himself up against it as tightly as he could. I was too frightened to even move. It was as if I was frozen in one spot, paralyzed by nothing more than my own emotion.

Hartman was crouched in the shell next to us, yelling something incomprehensible over the noise. With each flash of light another man would be dead or wounded, and with each falling shell I was truly believing it would be myself next. The rate of explosions on the hill would have made it sound like machine guns from far away.

The ear-bursting noise soon lifted, however, and was instead replaced with hurried yells and shouts of commands I couldn't properly hear. The ringing in my ears was still incredibly loud, and the unwavering gunfire and the limitless stream of bullets crackling by blocked out all other noise. Johnson pulled me back down into the hole.

"Walters!" he yelled, transporting me back to the reality I was in. "They're launching another attack! Catch the buggers some hell, eh?"

He handed me my rifle. It felt more cumbersome and weighted since I'd last used it. I gripped as tight as I possibly could and managed to regain my footing. The fact it was night-time meant I could barely see where the enemy was, shrouded behind a wall of blackness. I could only really fire a few blind shots into the abyss of darkness in front of me, hoping they would do some sort of good. I ducked back down into the hole as machine-gun fire raked the ground in front of us. Muzzle flashes from the other side of the hill provided some indication of the direction in which to fire, but the chaos and noise made accurate shooting difficult to pull off.

"Everybody stand ground!" came a yell from Wilkins, who was at the very front as usual. Hartman suddenly slid down into our hole.

"They're coming around on the left!"

We shifted ourselves into a better position and sent a stream of lead flying into the nothingness beyond. We had no idea what we were firing at, so long as it was in the direction of our opponents. Hartman was continuing to direct us as to where the fire was coming from, frantically firing and bolting his rifle.

From all sides our comrades were falling, sprawled lifelessly in the wheat.

The encounter finally concluded by the morning. We'd managed to hold our ground against the onslaught of Germans, but not without a cost. None of us had slept, and the medics were hurriedly evacuating as many wounded as they could. Our battalion had taken heavy casualties from the battles of the day before, and it seemed like myself and the other three in the hole were the last men standing.

Corporal Hartman had been checking on the other men in our section, only to find that himself, Peters, Johnson and I were the last survivors. A section consisted of ten men. It was almost unfathomable that we were the only ones still breathing. The rest of the platoon had been hit hard as well, though comparatively less casualties in the other sections.

"There have to be replacements coming, otherwise we won't last five minutes up here," grumbled Johnson, who was digging into his rations.

"There are, trust me. Captain Lynch said nearly four-hundred will be coming, though we have no idea when," replied Hartman.

The wheat gently swayed in the cool breeze that swept across Hill 112, and the sun was starting to get blocked by ominous-looking grey clouds.

"Bloody hell, those clouds better bugger off before they start raining," muttered Peters under his breath, obviously downtrodden by the thought of having to sit around in the rain. I started to reload my rifle, anticipating another attack at any moment. We had no idea when the Germans would next make an attempt on our lives, so all we could do was hold tight and wait.

I surveyed the long, open field that was the peak of the hill, which had now become nothing more than a no-man's-land. Capturing it would mean another death sprint across it, which we simply didn't have the men or supplies for. And from the looks of it, neither did the Germans.

I had barely sat back down again when the once calm, crisp morning air suddenly started to crackle and choke with lead. Another barrage of artillery rained down on top of our positions, men and boys spilling out of foxholes with half their bodies missing. Bullets slashed past my head and thumped into human flesh behind me.

"We're right in the kill zone! Move, move!"