The Magus - John Fowles [55]
The Germans seemed to stop firing altogether. Montague called triumphantly. 'On, lads! Victoree!' "They were the last words he ever spoke. It was a trap. Five or six machine guns scythed us like grass. Montague spun round and fell at my feet. He lay on his back, staring up at me, one eye gone. I collapsed beside him. The air was nothing but bullets. I pressed my face right into the mud, I was urinating, certain that at any moment I should be killed. Someone came beside me. It was the sergeant major. Some of the men were firing back, but blindly. In despair. The sergeant major, I do not know why, began dragging Montague's corpse backwards. Feebly, I tried to help. We slipped down into a small crater. The back of Montague's head had been blown away, but his face still wore an idiot's grin, as if he were laughing in his sleep, mouth wide open. A face I have never forgotten. The last smile of a stage of evolution. "The firing stopped. Then, like a flock of frightened sheep, everyone who survived began to run back towards the village. I as well. I had lost even the will to be a coward. Many were shot in the back as they ran, and I was one of the few who reached the trench we had started from unhurt--alive, even. We were no sooner there than the shelling began. Our own shells. Owing to the bad weather conditions, the artillery were shooting blind. Or perhaps still according to some plan established days before. Such irony is not a by-product of war. But typical of it. "A wounded lieutenant was now in command. He crouched beside me, with a great gash across his cheek. His eyes burned dully. He was no longer a nice upright young Englishman, but a neolithic man. Cornered, uncomprehending, in a sullen rage. Perhaps we all looked like that. The longer one survived the more unreal it was. "More troops came up with us, and a colonel came round. Aubers Ridge must be captured. We had to have the bridge by nightfall. But I had meanwhile had time to think. "I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilization, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history or science to know then. I know now it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan--that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves." He was silent; I could just make out his face, his staring to sea, as if Neuve Chapelle was out there, grey mud and hell, visible. "We attacked again. I should have liked simply to disobey orders and stay in the trench. But of course cowards were treated as deserters, and shot. So I clambered up with the rest when the order came. A sergeant shouted at us to run. Exactly the same thing happened as earlier that afternoon. There was a little firing from the Germans, just enough to bait the trap. But I knew that there were half a dozen eyes watching down their machine guns. My one hope was that they would be truly German. That is, methodical, and not open fire until the same point as before. "We came to within fifty yards of that point. Two or three bullets richocheted close by. I clasped my heart, dropped my rifle, staggered. Just in front of me I had seen a large shell-crater, an old one. I stumbled, fell and rolled over the edge of it. I heard the cry 'Keep on!' I lay with my feet in a pool of water, and waited. A few seconds later there was the violent unleashing of death I had expected. Someone leapt in the other side of the shell-hole. He must have been a Catholic, because he was gabbling _Ave's_. Then there was another scuffle and I heard him go in a falling of bits of mud. I drew my feet out of the water. But I did not open my eyes until the firing had stopped. "I was not alone in that shell hole. Half in, half out of the water opposite me was a greyish mass. A German corpse, long dead, half eaten by rats. Its stomach gaped, and it lay like a woman with a stillborn child beside it. And it smelt... it smelt as you