Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [35]
“Begging your pardon, sir,” said the wounded man at last, “but will you be much longer?”
“I could just chop it off,” answered Younger. “That would be faster.”
“The Boches, sir,” whispered the man. “They’re going to shell here in ten minutes.”
“How would you know that, soldier?” asked Younger.
The wounded man glanced about to ensure they were alone. “It’s a—a sort of arrangement, sir.”
“Is it?” Younger looked at the man’s eyes to see if he was raving. He did not appear to be.
“They bomb us here for forty minutes, and then we got a spot where we bomb them for forty minutes. Same time, same place, every day. That way nobody’s the worse for it.”
Younger stopped what he was doing: “Your officers consent to this?”
“They don’t know,” said the soldier. “We gunners worked it out amongst ourselves, so to speak. You won’t tell, will you, sir?”
Younger considered it: “No, I won’t.”
Two days later, at 5:45 a.m., radiomen scattered throughout France picked up an all-channels signal broadcasting from the Eiffel Tower. It was a message from Marshal Foch, the supreme Allied commander, announcing the war’s end. An armistice had been signed. All hostilities were to cease at eleven hundred hours, French time.
By nine that morning, the cease-fire order had been formally transmitted to Allied commanders and communicated to the men in the trenches. Paradoxically, the soldiers with the most to gain from the news were the ones made most anxious by it. Men who had learned to throw themselves month after month headlong into machine-gun fire, numb to personal risk, suddenly feared they might die in the last two hours of the war.
At 10:30, the regiment with which Younger was serving began ferociously shelling German positions across no-man’s-land. In an officer’s dugout, Younger shouted to a second lieutenant he knew, asking what on earth was happening.
“We’re attacking,” said the second lieutenant.
“What?” yelled Younger, refusing to believe he had heard correctly. Then he saw infantrymen filing through the network of intersecting trenches, faces taut, armed and packed for assault. From the direction of the front, he heard commands shouted and machine guns firing—from the German side, meaning that Allied soldiers were already scrambling out over the top.
“This is madness,” said Younger.
The lieutenant shrugged: “Orders,” he replied.
At 10:56, the command went out to halt the Allied attack. It took approximately two minutes for that order to disseminate from field headquarters to radio command posts to captains in the field. At 10:58, the last Allied guns fell silent. At 10:59, the rain of German artillery let up. An ethereal, fragile silence hung in the air.
Twelve seconds later, Younger heard the whistle of one last incoming shell—by the sound of it, a volley from a long-range 75-millimeter gun. The shot hit close by; the ground shook beneath him, and plugs of dirt fell from the walls. Possibly the shell had found a dugout, perhaps even an inhabited one. All waited with suspended breath. Then they heard the eruption of three Allied howitzers, presumably aimed at the German gun that had launched the last shell.
“No,” whispered Younger.
Naturally the Germans reciprocated. Soon the air was screaming and shaking again with a full-scale bombardment. The onslaught went on uninhibited for hours. It even featured the explosion of signal flares in the sky, pointless in daytime and harmless in effect. Neither side appeared to have an objective, unless it was to expend every last piece of ammunition in its arsenal.
Eleven thousand men were killed or wounded on November 11, 1918, in fighting that took place after all their commanding officers knew the war was over.
Younger was attached after the armistice to the Allied army of occupation. The border crossing into Germany was a revelation: in enemy