Up and Over

by J. Leland Kupferberg

You are a 20-year old postal clerk living in the town of Accrington, England during the time of the Great War. For the past four and a half weeks, ever since you purchased cough syrup for your bronchial Aunt Bess at Clark’s Pharmacy, your mind has been colonized by the image of the 17-year old bow-legged, slightly bug-eyed beauty who caressed your palm as she handed you your eight pence change. You ask around about her and discover that her name is Dolores Something. You also discover that another chap, a 19-year old bellboy who works at the Prioress Inn, has been spotted at Clark’s Pharmacy five times in the past seven days, reportedly by reason of his grandmother’s fungus toenail, but you suspect something more insidious – a rival suitor.

His name is Harry Something, and at 5”6, he has roughly two inches on you, although that is roughly balanced out by the fact that you are the more senior of the two by fifteen months. Bearing a similar level of physical attractiveness and facing equally dismal financial prospects, it looks like you and Harry are in a dead heat for the hand of the bug-eyed beauty at Clark’s Pharmacy.

But then, by late spring, Lord Kitchener sends out the call for a newly minted batch of volunteers to ship out to France and engage the Huns in battle, all for King and Country. You sense an opportunity to break the stalemate, and proceed to sign yourself up. You regale Dolores with tales of heroic exploits you have yet to experience, yet assure her will come. Harry, a pacifist by conviction and self-interest, will have nothing to do with this.

But in the following weeks, practically all the virile, able-bodied lads in Accrington have eagerly signed themselves up for their sacred duty, and Harry – perhaps sensing a substantial rout in the battle to mate – reluctantly follows suit.

In order to produce a more bonded fighting force, the General Staff decides to place the volunteers in “pals battalions,” fighting formations made up of men from the same towns. So, in due course, the adventuresome lads of Accrington form themselves up into the 11th Battalion of the East Lancashire Regiment, informally christened “The Accrington Pals.”

As you head across the Channel toward the Western Front, you sit back and sniff the perfume that wafts up from the letter Dolores slipped in your pocket as she bid you farewell. You wonder if she gave Harry one, too, as you turn to find him sitting beside you, nervously tapping out a beat on his knees. He half-jokingly suggests that your best chances for survival would be if you crawled on all fours, backwards, toward enemy lines – by his reasoning, better the buttocks than the head to be in the vanguard of battle. You chuckle at the absurdity of it, yet guiltily hope that Harry gets one in the ass.

At 7:13 A.M. on July 1, 1916, you are huddling in your trench, trying to keep your head clear with thoughts of Dolores as, overhead, the German lines are being bombarded with a thundering artillery attack from your side. You have yet to experience the thrill of battle, but you and your “pals” will have the honor of being the first wave to go “up and over” to attack the hilltop at Serre, on the northern bank of the Somme River.

A platoon officer assures you that the Huns are at this moment incurring devastating losses due to this blistering artillery bombardment, and that once it lets up, the infantry can then rush across No Man’s Land to breach the German lines, which are, no doubt, in a shambles. What you don’t know is that, a few hundred yards away, the German lines are in fact holding up pretty well under this bombardment, having taken special care to reinforce their bunkers against the devouring firestorm.

Beside you, a stout but confident Corporal, a Corporal Dick Something, asserts that he has full confidence in the strategy and tactics of the Commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir Douglas Haig. What you don’t know is that the venerable General Haig is a cavalryman by training, and it is his earnest hope that, employing the 19th century battle tactics he learned at the Royal Military College, he can send in the cavalry to overtake the greatest array of machine gun embankments ever placed before a body of men. What you also don’t know is that Sir Douglas didn’t much consider the impossibly dense foliage of barbed wire that would have to be cut while those guns are blasting you to pieces.

At 7:18 A.M., the artillery bombardment abruptly lifts, and a nervous calm settles over the trench. You’re startled when Harry Something taps you on the shoulder and wishes you the best of luck. You take his hand in yours, and tell him that you hope to meet up again on “the other side.” What none of you know is that, in these types of battles, the first few waves are generally written off as cannon fodder, and that, in the eyes of the General Staff, your mothers bred you for the sole purpose of wasting German munitions as they splatter the aggregated mass of your blood, sweat, and sinew.

At 7:20 A.M., Captain Something blows the whistle, and you – accompanied by a swarm of men – go up and over into the charred landscape of No Man’s Land. Thirty-four seconds into 7:20, as you charge full throttle with your bayonet extended, an angry little bullet tears off your scrotum. Forty-eight seconds into that very same minute, as you drop to your knees and painfully make your way forward on all fours, another bullet blasts away your right frontal lobe, taking with it your memories of Dolores into the ether.

What you couldn’t know is that, by day’s end, your side will have suffered 60,000 casualties and gained absolutely no ground. Or that the imaginative General Haig would insist until his dying day that it was a pretty good idea at the time, having worn down German supplies – costing them at least 60,000 bullets. Or that, decades later, a military historian would conduct a study and conclude that, indeed, the best way to survive such a battle would be to crawl on all fours, backward, toward enemy lines. Or that Private Harry Something, true to his word, did crawl backward on all fours, and duly took one in the ass. Or that Harry Something finally made it home and eventually furnished his bow-legged, bug-eyed bride with his seed while, in the end, you furnished a few errant blades of grass with the wet nutrients of your brain matter.