Read Online As the Crow Flies by Jeffrey Archer - Free Book Online Page A

twelve weeks’ training as well,” said Tommy, hopefully.
    At
exactly zero nine hundred hours Lieutenant Colonel Sir Danvers Hamilton, DSO,
trotted in on a jetblack mare and brought his charge to a halt in the middle of
the man-made square. He began to address the troops. Charlie’s abiding memory
of the speech was that for fifteen minutes the horse never moved.
    “Welcome
to France,” Colonel Hamilton began, placing a monocle over his left eye. “I
only wish it were a day trip you were on.” A little laughter trickled out of
the ranks. “However, I’m afraid we’re not going to be given much time off until
we’ve sent the Huns back to Germany where they belong, with their tails between
their legs.” This time cheering broke out in the ranks. “And never forget, it’s
an away match, and we’re on a sticky wicket. Worse, the Germans don’t
understand the laws of cricket.” More laughter, although Charlie suspected the
colonel meant every word he said.
    “Today,”
the colonel continued, “we march towards Ypres where we will set up camp before
beginning a new and I believe final assault on the German front. This time I’m
convinced we will break through the German lines, and the glorious Fusiliers
will surely carry the honors of the day. Fortune be with you all, and God save
the King.”
    More
cheers were followed by a rendering of the National Anthem from the regimental
band. The troops joined in lustily with heart and voice.
    It
took another five days of route marching before they heard the first sound of
artillery fire, could smell the trenches and therefore knew they must be
approaching the battlefront. Another day and they passed the large green tents
of the Red Cross. Just before eleven that morning Charlie saw his first dead
soldier, a lieutenant from the East Yorkshire Regiment.
    “Well,
I’ll be damned,” said Tommy. “Bullets can’t tell the difference between
officers and enlisted men.”
    Within
another mile they had both witnessed so many stretchers, so many bodies and so
many limbs no longer attached to bodies that no one had the stomach for jokes.
The battalion, it became clear, had arrived at what the newspapers called the “Western
Front.” No war correspondent, however, could have described the gloom that
pervaded the air, or the look of hopelessness ingrained on the faces of anyone
who had been there for more than a few days.
    Charlie
stared out at the open fields that must once have been productive farmland. All
that remained was the odd burned-out farmhouse to mark the spot where
civilization had once existed. There was still no sign of the enemy. He tried
to take in the surrounding countryside that was to be his home during the
months that lay ahead if he lived that long. Every soldier knew that average
life expectancy at the front was seventeen days.
    Charlie
left his men resting in their tents while he set out to do his own private
tour. First he came across the reserve trenches a few hundred yards in front of
the hospital tents, known as the “hotel area” as they were a quarter of a mile
behind the front line, where each soldier spent four days without a break
before being allowed four days of rest in the reserve trenches. Charlie
strolled on up to the front like some visiting tourist who was not involved in
a war. He listened to the few men who had survived for more than a few weeks
and talked of “Blighty” and prayed only for a “cushy wound” so they could be
moved to the nearest hospital tent and, if they were among the lucky ones,
eventually be sent home to England.
    As
the stray bullets whistled across no man’s land, Charlie fell on his knees and
crawled back to the reserve trenches, to brief his platoon on what they might
expect once they were pushed forward another hundred yards.
    The
trenches, he told his men, stretched from horizon to horizon and at any one
time could be occupied by ten thousand troops. In front of them, about twenty
yards away, he had seen