Dead Man's Land by Robert Ryan Page B

meant they could easily reach forty metres or more into the earth. The British and French were in the soggy lowlands and they were living in shallow gashes in the earth, poorly revetted with wood and parapeted with sandbags to give them extra depth. He had been in the French trenches on a night raid in the early days, before he transferred to the sharpshooters. They were shameful.
    ‘Bloch.’
    ‘Sir.’ He put down the bullet he had been wiping with a cloth and stood to attention. The blanket was whisked back and an officer joined him in the compact space. It was the sniping section supervisor, Hauptmann Lux, a Saxon by birth, now attached, like Bloch, to the Sixth Army. Lux was not a tall man, but held himself well, and his uniforms always fitted immaculately. Next to him, Bloch always felt like the unfinished country lad he was. It could have been worse. Lux could have been a prick of a Prussian. That would have been unbearable.
    Lux looked Bloch up and down, bemused at a man in his underwear standing ramrod straight, as if waiting for a kit inspection. ‘At ease, Bloch. Jesus, it’s hotter than hell down here.’ Lux took off his cap, wiped his brow and looked around Bloch’s impressively neat cubicle. His eyes fell on the needle-nosed bullets. He picked up the scales. ‘Private ammunition?’
    ‘My father makes them, sir. They reduce flash and smoke. But weight and balance are critical.’
    Lux nodded, not really caring. Every sniper had his rituals, his superstitions and some specialist equipment he believed gave him an advantage over his fellows. ‘An officer today, I hear?’
    Bloch knew Lux received a daily tally from all his snipers and, for corroboration, their spotters. ‘Sir.’
    ‘That is twenty-nine kills, I believe. Or at least, twenty-nine confirmed officers.’
    ‘Yes.’ The actual tally was close to a hundred, but, since his overenthusiastic early days when he shot anything that moved, he had become much more selective.
    ‘One more and it’s an Iron Cross, Second Class for you.’
    Bloch remained impassive. He wasn’t doing this for baubles. He didn’t even do it because he hated the British individually; there were times when he felt sorry for the young officers he caught in his sights. But he detested the British imperial arrogance that led the country to think it deserved a hand in every nation’s affairs. He did this job because he believed in a strong Germany that wasn’t dominated by an insignificant island with inflated ideas about its importance. And he did it because he was good at it. ‘Thank you, sir.’
    ‘And a week’s leave.’
    Now Bloch allowed himself a ghost of a smile. However, it didn’t do to dwell too much on the carrot of a few days with Mother, Father, sister and perhaps Hilde. The army had a habit of cruelly snatching away a furlough at the last moment on the flimsiest of excuses.
    ‘There are fresh British units moving into this section,’ Lux said. ‘Untested. Kitchener’s New Army. They’ve been a long time coming, eh? The theory is they will get used to trench life in a quiet section. Learn something from the Scottischers who are already here.’
    Bloch was not surprised by Lux’s knowledge. The army’s intelligence about which divisions and regiments they were facing was always excellent. He assumed they had good spies somewhere over the wire.
    ‘A section defended by untried troops is an opportunity for us to try something different.’ Lux indicated Bloch should move to one side, then took out a map and laid it onto the bed, smoothing the folds with the flat of his well-manicured hand.
    It showed two thick black lines, representing the opposing trenches, snaking across the page, the loops sometimes coming close, within, Bloch knew, twenty metres at some points, then diverging again so that no man’s land might be a void of a half-kilometre in width. Lux pointed to a red trace that had been drawn from Ploegsteert village through the nearby woods.