The Soldier's Song (34 page)

The second band of wire had not been touched, but when he looked over at Wilson’s company he saw that they were already through. Stephen’s men had to cut; the wire hard and taut under their hands, pecking and twisting and cursing with the wire-cutters.
Holy Mary, Holy Mary! Oh bloody fucking Christ!
They worked feverishly in a spitting hail of bullets. The man beside him was hit and sagged lifelessly against the wire. Then one strand parted with a twang, and another, and they could crawl through. Wriggling forward, he glimpsed Wilson’s company again, half-hidden by the smoke as shells fell amongst them. Scrambling up, he saw half a dozen men scattered across the ground, the rest darting forward, pausing to fire. Panting, he kept running as hard as he could with the spongy, yielding earth pulling at his feet.

Suddenly, through the smoke, he saw Wilson standing clear in the open, firing his revolver at the angular hump of the blockhouse. A shell burst beside him and he fell down on his knees, but he stayed up and raised his revolver, still firing until another shell burst right in front of him and knocked him over backwards. Stephen stood rooted, aghast. He cast around and saw there was nobody following him any more – nobody left but the sagging man on the wire. The grey bulk of Vampire Farm loomed over him. He was almost there.
Forward, forward!
But it was no use. His lungs were bursting with the effort and he felt his strength failing him. He was alone. Sick, dazed and unimaginably tired, it took all his strength to pull his leg out of the mud and take another step forward. What was the bloody point? He let his revolver fall from his hand, felt its weight on the lanyard around his neck and as his knees sagged he heard the shriek of a shell falling, growing higher and higher as it came, until the ground burst up beside him and then he felt nothing at all.

When the postman’s knock came at the door, Sheila was up first to answer it. It never ceased to surprise Mrs Bryce how much energy that girl had. Working late again at the hospital last night, and yet there she was, up with the lark and fresher than the milk. She wasn’t entirely unaffected, though – she looked older than her nineteen years, and her mother knew very well that she was never as carefree as she liked other people to think. Her uniform was gone quite dull with wear, and Mrs Bryce dearly wished she would take a holiday – even a week or two for herself, anything so she wouldn’t look as if she was carrying the cares of the world on her shoulders.

As she listened to the muffled words passing from the hallway, Mrs Bryce contemplated her eldest daughter, who sat at the far end of the table, poring intently over her newspaper.

Poor Lillian, she . . . Mrs Bryce stopped herself in mid-thought. Why did she always think of Lillian as if she was to be pitied? She was not unhappy, though there was always a trace of sadness about her, even when she smiled. True, her father’s death had cut her deeper than it had Sheila – though she hadn’t shown it at the time. She had been much closer to him than her sister. Mr Bryce had loved them both, but there was no denying that he’d had a special affinity for his eldest girl. She was the one who brought the light to his face when he came home from the sea. He’d known she was precocious and he’d revelled in it. Lord, the conversations they’d had when she was just eleven or twelve. Mrs Bryce could hardly follow it herself. But Lillian took after him in other ways, too. She was stoic, tough, always with a brave face. Her mother had not seen her cry since she was three years old. Which wasn’t to say that she hadn’t cried. But she was her father’s daughter, his rock, and she wouldn’t cry in front of anybody.

Mrs Bryce sighed and swirled the dregs of tea in her cup. Poor Lillian, she thought, for strength was her weakness. Few men would put up with her intellect, and fewer still would suffer her self-sufficiency – she did not have the vulnerability they craved. But she could be full of surprises too. There was that young man she’d brought home a few weeks back. Mrs Bryce had all but given up hope she might find one – particularly now they were in such short supply – but then she suddenly brings one to tea. And not just any young man either, but a perfectly agreeable one, in an army uniform and medals.

‘It’s for you, Lillie,’ Sheila said, resting the letter against her teacup, and with a knowing look at her mother. ‘It’s got an army postmark.’

Mrs Bryce hid a secret smile in her teacup. All was not lost. Something had happened with that young man; something disagreeable, though wild horses wouldn’t have dragged it out of Lillian. It pained her to think they’d had a row – he’d seemed such a nice lad – but then there was no telling with Lillian. She wasn’t the sort to take up with very ordinary, uninteresting people. Maybe that was why she was ignoring the letter. She did not move, but remained bowed over her newspaper, peering at something, her eyes only inches from the page.

‘Lillie? Are you not going to open it?’ Sheila said at last, speaking for them both. But her sister seemed hardly to pay her any heed. She had gone rigid. Almost a minute passed before she slowly looked up from the page, and they could see her face was pale with shock. Mrs Bryce could tell from the set of her jaw that she was steeling herself against something, and she instinctively started to reach across the narrow table.

‘Lillie, dear, what—?’ she began, but before she could get the question out her daughter stood up from the table, threw down her newspaper, and ran from the room with her hand over her mouth.

It was about as dark as it was ever going to get in August. Over the rim of the crater, he could see the ground sweeping downhill, gradually dissolving into the night. Somewhere in the distance a machine gun was chattering, like a mechanical bird singing in the dusk. Closer by all was quiet; no sound but the sucking of the mud as he moved, sat up, tried to organize himself.

He was lying on his revolver, the lanyard stretching over his shoulder, and it was caked in mud. With trembling hands he wiped it clean and broke open the barrel. The shells tinkled to the ground, glittering like gold in the dying gleam of the day. He reloaded and snapped the gun shut, picking some more mud from the end of the barrel, and resting it in his lap. He felt more secure now, but the gathering darkness felt sinister. He could feel the strongpoint looming over him. It was barely thirty yards away – he hadn’t thought he was so close; he’d nearly had a bloody heart attack when he saw it. So he could forget about stretcher-bearers; he would have to get back under his own steam.

How easy it would have been to just lie there under the brow of the hill and wait for death. He’d thought about it earlier, while he was waiting for the dark. When the pain in his leg started to gnaw at him he had pulled out the tube of morphine tablets the MO had given him. Enough there to put him out of his misery. Or there was always the revolver if he wanted to be more certain. He’d tipped the pills out into his hand and stared at them, little grey discs, hardly anything to look at. Then he slowly started to pop them back into the tube – all but one, which he swallowed. Not yet, he thought, you can always do it later.

That was two hours ago, and he could feel the effects starting to wear off. But he couldn’t take another yet. What if it was too strong? What if the last one was still in his system? He needed his head clear if he was to do this. The quickest way to the downhill side of the crater was through the water, but he was shivering with the cold and he had a horror of the slimy feel of that yellowish pool and what it might hide. So he had to slither around the edge of the crater, clawing with his hands and pushing with his good leg. Every movement brought sharp pains stabbing up from his wounded knee, every foot gained brought his hand to the tube with its promised relief. But he couldn’t, he couldn’t. And he forced himself to go on. By the time he reached the other side he was in a muck sweat and panting as if he’d run a mile.

The moon was hidden in cloud. With the black silhouette of the strongpoint hanging over his shoulder he peered down the slope and tried to gauge the distance back. Four or five hundred yards – a long crawl through thick mud and broken wire and God knew what. The throb in his leg was a hard reminder of what it had cost him just to get to the other side of the crater, but he didn’t have the luxury of time: he needed the darkness for cover. If he didn’t make the distance by sunrise, a sniper or machine gun would pick him off. Better get bloody on with it, then. He holstered his pistol and took a deep breath, and then gritted his teeth as he dragged himself out of the crater.

Pain had sharpened his senses and there was a dreadful clarity about what followed. Every moment was sharp and cutting and burned in his memory by the pain in his leg. At first, he was sure he would never be able to do it. When he crawled over the lip of the crater and started pulling himself downhill, digging his hands into the soft earth for grip, it was excruciating. It clawed at him like a savage animal, twisting nerves and tearing at his flesh. But gradually, the screaming pain subsided and it just became wearing, tiring him out so he had to stop every few yards, panting for breath.

At least his head was clear. The throbbing, congested feeling was gone and he was alive to the night, the touch of the air like cold water on his skin. But if he was more lucid, he felt the loneliness all the more sharply. He knew many of his men were scattered about this ground, blown down like straws in the wind, and the thought that he had led them to their deaths weighed on him like lead in his chest. He thought of Wilson: he knew he was dead, though he had barely glimpsed it, and as he pushed himself through the cold mud he heard the wind whistling in the wire and remembered the banshees in his grandfather’s stories. Keening death into the house, he said, though it was the silence that followed that was more terrible, falling like a shadow on the face of the moon. He pictured him lying cold on the ground with only the wind wailing over him, and sobbed as he crawled forward, dumb tears scalding his face. Was he crawling to an empty trench? Or one that was manned only by corpses, their faces turned to the dark sky, the wind tugging at their hair, and just the burrowing rats to animate them.

Rats!
He heard a noise and froze, gripping the revolver in his fist. Something brushed his leg and he recoiled, only to get a fleeting touch of fur across his face that made him curl up in horror, heedless of the hurt screaming out of his leg. He lay in a ball, arms over his head for protection, feeling the disgust flowing through him. Then, slowly, pain won out and the clarity came back. He straightened his legs, panting with the effort, gulping deep breaths to soothe the burning in his chest, and then the smell rose up on him like a wave, filling his nostrils, clinging to his skin. Putrefaction, decay, rotting flesh. He must have interrupted their feast. With his stomach heaving, bile rising in his throat, he scrambled forward on his elbows, desperate to escape the charnel pit he had crawled into.

Panic carried him a few hurried yards before he collapsed, the pain in his leg overpowering. When it became bearable, he rolled over on his good side, holding his knee out of the wet, and peered at the dial of his watch to try to get some idea of the time. It was too dark to see, and he didn’t dare light a match, but after a few minutes a passing gap in the clouds revealed a glowing half moon and he saw it was past midnight. Then, in the waning light, he saw fence posts standing up all around, filaments of broken wire waving and glinting between them. As darkness closed about him once more he had a feeling of despair, that he was trapped in a cage. And to think this had once been open fields, with sheep grazing among the summer flowers. What on earth had they done?

It took an effort to get moving again, but he forced himself to roll over and start crawling. He was tired now, could feel fatigue overtaking him, and he was losing track of time. Crawl and stop, crawl and stop. He had no idea where he was, no sense of direction; he was floating in a void, with nothing but the pain in his leg and the cold, clinging mud to fix him in the world. He had to struggle with the urge to stop and rest his head on his arms, let sleep take him. Twice, he felt his head nodding, and then caught his breath as he snapped awake, eyes raw and closing. But then it happened again, and as he came awake he realized he’d been sleeping, not just dozing off.

He knew he had to move again, but he couldn’t find the strength. He’d had it. He was utterly past all caring, and he let his head sink back down on the ground with a low sob. Self-pity welled up. It wasn’t bloody fair. What sort of life had he had? What chance had he had? He thought of Lillian. God, he wished he could have seen her again. He wished he could have said everything he wanted to say. With his own words, and not just in a paltry letter. He wished he could have kissed her again, just once. He thought of how she would receive his letter and the news of his death, probably on the same day. Christ! He hadn’t wanted that, of all things. He felt tears start to sting his cheeks. Not bloody fair. Not bloody . . .

Without even realizing it, he had stretched out his arm and dragged himself forward a few inches. He groaned with pain and pulled back his arm to wipe the tears on his sleeve. And again, and again. He gritted his teeth, but still the groans escaped. Maybe another pill. But he had momentum now. The pain was keeping him going. Five more pulls and then . . .

He froze, listening, hastily fumbling for the revolver that was dragging behind him on its lanyard. The pain faded and he cocked his head towards the sound. It was a sound – he’d heard it. Again! A sigh – just a few yards ahead. He strained his eyes towards it, holding his breath, sliding his thumb over the hammer of the revolver. A shadow seemed to move, there was a loud metallic click, and then the words, ‘Who goes there?’

He wanted to answer. He strained his throat, working his lips furiously, but it seemed his mouth was parched and his throat had shrunken. All he could manage was a dull croak. A light blinked on, blinding him, and indistinct whispers followed. Through shielded eyes, he saw a man crawling towards him, then felt strong hands on his shoulder. He must have cried out as they pulled him over the rim of the crater: whispered apologies followed and he saw lanterns and men hurrying up, encircling him with worried, wondering faces. These parted a few moments later and Nightingale looked down at him in consternation.