The mud of France is red with blood, men killed by sword and quarrel and musketball over a thousand years. Now the Hun was dying there by shellfire. Streaks of light arced overhead, ending in distant dull thuds. More guns opened up, shelling no-man's land, knocking apart the wire, the creeping barrage behind which the regiment would advance.
A runner dashed down the trench, calling "Stand to ! Stand to !" into the holes and bunkers. The darkness was fading now, the sky a dull grey. Venus was hovering between wrecks of trees. The men climbed onto the firing step and braced their ladders, checked their magazines and bolts.
Wilfred Humber was there, and ready. His letter home was with the company postman, his reply to Emma, his wife of only a few months when war came and he'd taken the shilling. He'd told her of the cycles of three days in the second line of trenches doing support work, three days at the front, three in support and then a march back to a nameless, and now populationless hamlet for three days rest. He'd told her about his friends in B company. He hadn't told her about the assault today -- she would only worry, and anyway you weren't supposed to do things like that, the Germans might have spies anywhere.
He'd met Emma on New Year's Eve 1912 at a party thrown by friends. She'd entranced him from across the room, a perfect English rose with eyes as blue as an ocean. He'd gently romanced her for six months and they'd married in the summer of 1913.
Wilfred squelched across the trench from his tamboo, the dugout in the back edge of the trench he'd been resting in, and stood beside the base of a ladder. His rifle was fully loaded, his knapsack of spare bullets clanked gently at his side. He gently slid off the safety on his rifle and nodded good luck to his comrades-in-arms.
The sun was rising, slowly and sullenly, through a thin grey mist rising from the rank puddles in the craters. The light was cold and white, the second autumn it had looked down on a war that had started on the basis it would last a few months.
Whistles blew up and down the line as the advance began, the infantrymen clambering over the brick and sandbag parapets of their trenches, dim shadows against the dawn light. Gunfire greeted them, sporadic riflefire at first, but becoming a constant cacophany, machine guns and small mortars joining in.
They marched forwards into the smoke and mist and mud, rifles clenched firm. Not all of them would return, and the small parcel of french mud gained was recaptured a week later by a huge force of Prussians, freed up from the eastern front by the Bolsheviks suing for peace.
Wilfred and Emma's first son was born a year to the day that the Armistice treaty was signed. They called him George. Just over a year later they had another son, named Albert. And then a daughter the hot summer after that, they named Victoria. The family ran a public house on the very edge of a town, purchased with a small inheritance and savings. It was not a vastly wealthy business, but it did well enough and the children never lacked for anything. There were fields nearby where the children played long, wide games as they grew, with the family's cats and dogs.
The family was popular, the inn was frequented by farmers on market days at first, but less and less as the town grew around it, suburb adding to suburb as homes fit for heroes were built. The slums of the city centres were being torn down and replaced by row upon row of neat houses. The fields the children played in were a distance now, but the town was full of families, a boom of children from the roaring decade. The public bar gained a wireless and a telephone, the corner opposite became a cinema.
War came again, the boys went to fight and in the clear blue sky over the home counties the elder lad's aeroplane was shredded. He was only 20. They year after that Albert went to the desert, left Tobruk just in time, watched Italian tanks brewing up at El Alamein. But when Rommel gave in outnumbered and beleaguered, Albert came back to Europe and drove his bren carrier through France and Germany.
The fighting came very close to home one night when the town was bombed. There was nothing to be done, the public house was in ruins, but the sirens wailed early enough. Even the cats were safe, despite nothing and no-one being able to persuade them to stay in the bunker.
Albert married a young girl just after the war, he wed in uniform and most of the young men guest were in khaki or blue. He trained as a steelworker and had a son of his own. He worked hard, the steel industry did well from the reconstruction work and in time he was promoted to running the day shift at the mill. His wife thought it was all she could ask for, for him not to be working different shifts every week, not be able to count on him being there when she opened her eyes.
Victoria too had a son, Joseph, and a daughter, Kate. Her husband became wealthy from his small engineering company, which made a new kind of aeorplane engine. Kate went to the best public schools and then Oxford where she met and married a mathematician who eventually had a formula named after him in a complex field of physics.
Wilfred saw Kate's daughter before he breathed his last. Her bright blue eyes, Emma's eyes.
The newly issued steel helmet, the paint barely scratched, was no defence from the 9.62 millimeter bullet that zipped between the wire strands. At more than two thousand feet per second, it barely even slowed and none of it was to be and the french mud grew just that little redder.