Best Foot Forward

Best Foot Forward

Billy exhaled sharp breath, braced himself against the rear wall of the trench and prepared to go. As the whistle sounded, he gave a haphazard genuflection and pushed forward with all of his strength. He leapt and hit the second rung of the rickety trench-climbing ladder hard. In the eerie silence he heard it creak under his weight but it held and propelled him up and over the top into no-mans-land.

He lay still for a few seconds, quickly surveying everything that was visible around him. He saw a couple of his closest comrades fall in agony, screaming in pain as their knees buckled and they entered their soon to be forgotten graves. The sound of the German guns that were cutting down his friends was loud, but not as loud as the Motorhead concert that he had attended in 1976. He crawled forward on his belly towards the first wrangling of allied barbed wire.

William James McGuire was born in Bristol, England on the 14th March 2103. The world that he entered on that day screamed as much as he did because it was a broken world where anarchy reigned and there was no longer any need for politics. Politics had proven over the last 200 years to be nothing but a cover for mass greed and corporate gluttony, a survival of the fittest contest where all of the competitors were morbidly obese. William had grown up through his teens reminiscing on stories that he had been told by his Great Grandmother, a lady who had been in the prime of her life when things were just beginning to decline.

The technology to travel back through time had come about mostly by accident. That’s not to say that there weren’t rumours of an arc of space that made time bend when William’s father, Henry, had been a young academic scientist. It had consumed his father to his own destruction and now that Billy had the power to do something about it, he sure as hell would. Or die trying.

Much research had led Billy to understand that in order to change events of the present day you had to go much further back in time. The time device had been placed into a heart shaped locket that was to be worn around the neck and operated by 3D glasses that gave all of the function controls like destination, place and time. Billy also understood that it was not possible to go forwards in time as everything in the future is based on every second that we live and breathe today and is therefore not yet written, but this didn’t worry him at all. Billy was going back, all the way back through the times that several generations of his family had told him about.

Billy lay flat out in cold mud in Belgium 1916. His research had led him to this defining part of history that he needed to alter slightly. It had crossed his mind that he could stop this whole world war from happening by going further back to June 1914 and having a friendly word with Gavrilo Princip but he had concluded that mankind, as a whole, needed to learn the lessons of a world war, not to be handed a get out of jail free card by a passing time traveller. His mission was to stop this particular Allied assault being the cataclysmic failure that it was when it first entered the history books. Because of its failure, Billy had deduced that the Allied Commander Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig had wanted to change the whole Allied war effort. It was a bit of a gamble and it did mean sacrificing a few hundred more young men at this particular offensive but it would shorten the overall length of the Great War by one whole year.

His target came into view about an hour later, during which time Billy had crawled over 1000 yards through slime, sludge and even over previously fallen corpses of soldiers that had witnessed a living hell and were now nothing more than rag dolls, left to rot in their uniforms without any honour. Billy wanted to overthrow one German artillery station that was positioned in such a way that it was undetectable to Allied reconnaissance and therefore very dangerous. It had started to rain again and the lower cloud cover gave Billy his chance to creep closer.

The German artillery men were very watchful of their position and had posted watch patrols to cover against covert raids and it was one of these that spotted movement in the field to the west. They fired at what they thought they saw instinctively, most shots hitting the ground ahead of where Billy lay but some hitting the corpse of the soldier that he was using as cover. The Allied offensive was very nearly decimated by this time and an eerie silence had fallen over the land again. German foot soldiers had begun to move forward, re-securing the area so now the only sounds were screams of pain followed by a gunshot and the rain, now heavy and merciless.

Billy was within range and, with superior firepower, was able to cut down the German scouts. They fell with looks on their faces that indicated surprise that they had been hit at all. Crawling forward and to within 20 yards of his target, Billy felt confident that he was doing the right thing. He waited to pounce and then jumped up and took the German artillery post, hitting the German gunner in the centre of his forehead with a single shot from his automatic pistol that wouldn’t be invented for another 60 years or so. He checked the ammunition, found it plentiful and turned the gun on the German line, cutting them down as they had done repeatedly to the Allied Forces. There was shouting, screaming and confusion but Billy carried on regardless, knowing that his job was very nearly done.

The final thing that Billy had to do was to make sure that this piece of artillery couldn’t be re-manned. He removed the single stick of dynamite from his pack and lit the fuse with his lighter. He stuffed it into the mechanism of the gun and made a run for it, getting just over 100 yards before he was knocked off his feet by a huge bang and soaring heat as a huge flaming hand shoved him in the back. As he flew forward a thought went through his mind that he should’ve picked an easier moment in time to make his alterations, certainly one less painful. Billy landed back in the mud with a thump and lay motionless for over a minute before beginning his crawl back to the Allied trench.

Two days later, Private William James McGuire stood before a firing squad about 40 miles behind the frontline. The previous day had been his court marshalling for disobeying orders and striking a senior officer. It had been deemed that his disobedience had been committed by his crawling through no-mans-land and not by climbing over the top and walking forwards akin to his comrades. Billy had argued his point well and the extra charge of cowardice had been dropped when it was revealed by scouts that rather than trying to replace their artillery, the Hun had simply abandoned the post, leaving the Allied Forces to push forward and occupy it.

Billy requested that he be allowed to wear his glasses underneath the hood and stood calmly against the wall when requested. He was flanked by other soldiers on either side, most of them being shot for desertion, and as the call was made to Ready! He programmed his time device. On Aim! He flicked the go button and on Fire! He was gone. The firing squad looked on with confusion, looking around gaping at each other. One even walked around to the other side of the wall to check behind it.

On the morning of August 19th 2127, William James McGuire was reading old archive news on his service provider. He chuckled to himself as he read about the turning point of the Western Front in 1916. The battle of the 3rd Ypres had looked to be on a knife edge, heading towards a pretty pointless but costly stalemate when it was reported that a breakthrough of the German artillery line had led to an overwhelming victory. The Allies had pushed forward with renewed vigour and the German surrender had come on February 20th 1917. The reports didn’t make clear any information about who had been responsible for the breakthrough, or any real other details, but Billy knew. Details were available on any website about how Germany prospered in the aftermath of the Great War and through forging alliances with their former enemy, rather than facing huge sanctions they were a happy nation with no inclination to head in the direction that they did. In turn the UK had prospered too and had benefitted from making a stand against German aggression. Over the next few decades, the UK Empire became a lot smaller than it had been with many countries forging their independence and continuing along the conventional timeline that we all know.

With his heart shaped locket housing his time device, William James McGuire had achieved an effective form of world peace. There was no uprising in Germany in the 1920’s and 30’s and if you cared to check the German Military History archives, you would now find an obscure Gefreiter (Lance Corporal) called Adolf Hitler who received the Iron Cross for bravery but didn’t write a book in prison. Billy doesn’t use his time device that much now but when he does, it is for seeing concerts from throughout the ages. He has already saved more than 10 million lives by helping the world to avoid a second world conflict. I suppose you could say that the only country who suffered is the USA, but I think that sacrificing some terrible war films and saving the UK a war debt that lasted for four generations is a small price to pay for peace.