The Wraiths of War (8 page)

Not surprisingly Pyke’s wild claims were met with bewilderment, amusement and scorn.

‘Come off it, lad!’

‘What does he think it is, a bloody shell?’

‘You need a holiday in the funny farm, mate.’

But Pyke, as if drawing on every last ounce of strength and courage he possessed, suddenly rose to his full height and pointed his finger at me again. His arm was rigid this time, no sign of a tremor there at all.

‘
He’s a witch!
’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s what he is! A witch!’

The amused sniggers turned into howls of laughter, the scorn into outright ridicule.

‘Oh, aye! Where’s his broomstick then?’ Reg Coxon said.

‘Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble!’ cried Geoff Ableman.

But as the men around me dissolved into laughter, I continued to look at Pyke. His face was twisting, turning bestial. And then suddenly he leaped forward. Before I could shout out a warning, he snatched the heart from McDaid’s hand and barged into him, knocking him backwards into the brazier. The men jumped back with cries of alarm as the hot brazier rocked, puffing up a great cloud of orange sparks. As a couple of the guys lunged forward to steady McDaid and stop him falling headlong on to the hot coals, Pyke bolted past them, heading for the shelter’s entrance. One of the men made a half-hearted grab for him, but Pyke shoved him out of the way. He loped into the trench, hunched and long-limbed, like an orang-utan that had broken out of its cage.

‘Hey!’ I shouted, panic surging in me as I ran after him. But it was like running in a dream. The rain was battering down, and the deep mud at the bottom of the trench was clinging, slippery. As my right foot went from under me and I fell to my knees, I saw Pyke ahead, apparently having no such difficulties, clambering up the ladder that Frank had been standing on a few minutes before.

‘Pykey, no!’ I shouted, fear sluicing through me. ‘
Please!
’

But desperate though my plea was, I knew he was too far gone to listen to reason. As I clambered to my feet, my thoughts were racing, flicking through possibilities at breakneck speed.

There was nothing
I
could do to stop him, short of putting a bullet in his back, which was never an option. My only hope, therefore, was that, if Pyke didn’t slip off the ladder and knock himself unconscious, the heart itself would intervene, perhaps transform in some subtle way that wouldn’t freak the men out. I clung to this hope even as Pyke scaled the ladder; even as – to my horror – he reached the top and kept going, scrambling up over the lip of sandbags and loping out into No Man’s Land.

Most of the other guys had followed me out of the shelter, just as horrified as I was to see what Pyke was doing. From behind me came a chorus of raised voices:

‘Fuck’s sake, Pykey!’

‘Pykey, come back!’

‘No, mate, no!’

But Pyke kept going, disappearing from sight, though we could still hear his footsteps over the rain, splashing through the mud towards the German lines as if he hoped to find salvation there. Plastered in mud, I regained my feet and plunged towards the ladder. I began to climb it with only one thought in my head – to get the heart back. Though
how
I was going to do that I had no idea.

I was halfway up the ladder when I felt the bottom of my uniform jacket snag on something. I glanced down, to see that Frank had grabbed my jacket and was tugging me back.

‘Not you too, mate,’ he said, his face streaming with rain. ‘Not for a family heirloom. It ain’t worth it.’

I glanced at the men, all of whom seemed to be staring at me with wide, shocked eyes, then turned my attention back to Frank.

‘I wasn’t going after him,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to see—’

Then I heard the crack of a rifle above me, and Pyke started screaming.

He wasn’t screaming in pain, though. His voice was a high screech of anger.

‘
This is for you, Jerry!
’ he was yelling. ‘
This is for you!
’

Distracted by the rifle shot and by Pyke’s voice, Frank allowed his grip to slacken on my jacket. I took advantage of the moment to wrench myself free and scramble up the ladder until I was high enough to poke my helmeted head over the top.

In other circumstances, the Germans holed up in their trench several hundred yards away might have taken a pot shot at me, but just now they had a much bigger target to aim at. A man-shaped target that was charging at them like an enraged bull, one arm raised and what looked like a grenade in his hand.

I clapped eyes on him just in time to see him hurl the heart with all his strength towards the German trench. Even as it arced through the air, a dwindling black speck, and was lost in the slashing murk of the rain, there was a barrage of gunfire that made me flinch and dip my head, though not before seeing Pyke’s body twitch and twist and crumple, as if boneless, to the ground.

‘
No!
’ I screamed. ‘
No!
’

But – although I’m ashamed to admit it – my sudden outpouring of distress and desolation was more for the loss of the heart than for the death of John Pyke.

I felt a tugging on my jacket again. I looked down. Frank’s wet face was pallid with shock. Suddenly he looked very young.

‘He’s gone, mate,’ he said. ‘He’s gone, and it was his own doing. There ain’t no helping him now.’

‘I’ve got to get it back.’

It was 1:15 a.m. and Frank and I had been on sentry duty for fifteen minutes. Everyone else was asleep, or at least resting, either huddled round the brazier in the shelter or curled up in their groundsheets in one of the many cubbyholes that had been hacked out of the muddy inner walls of the trench. Although the cubbyholes were colder and (marginally) dirtier than the shelter, at least they were off the ground, which meant you were not so bothered by rats. The little bastards were bolder and more plentiful at night; they’d run not only past your feet but right over them. We always did sentry duty in pairs, each shift lasting two hours. Whoever was on duty in the early hours, when it was quiet, would often pass the time with a game of ‘rat football’, where a ‘goal’ was scored every time you managed to kill a rat with a single kick.

Frank was sipping tea from a tin mug, each mouthful making him grimace. The tea here was foul, but we kept drinking it, partly because it was hot and partly because it was a reminder of our far-distant homeland. The water was transported to us through the winding maze of communication trenches in old petrol cans and was then boiled over a wood fire in pots that we also used to make stew, and that we had no way of washing properly. As a result the tea tasted mainly of wood smoke, petrol and old bully beef – an irresistible concoction.

Frank’s eyes narrowed over the rim of his mug. ‘Get what?’

‘The heart. The thing that Pyke threw into No Man’s Land. I’ve got to get it back.’

Frank sniggered, thinking I was joking, then he saw my face and his expression changed in an instant. ‘You ain’t serious?’

‘It’s important to me, Frank. That heart… well, it’s been in my family for years.’

It was the feeblest of reasons for putting myself in peril. Frank’s boggle-eyed response was almost cartoon-like.

‘Maybe so, but it ain’t worth getting your head blown off for.’

‘I won’t get my head blown off. I’ll be careful. I’ll just go for a quick recce.’

‘
A quick recce!
’ His response was too loud and too shrill, and I gritted my teeth and glanced towards the shelter, knowing that if the others came to see what the commotion was about my chance would be gone.

To his credit, Frank responded to my grimace, his voice dropping to a murmur, though his tone was still urgent and anxious – like that of someone trying to persuade a potential suicide not to jump off a bridge.

‘It’s pitch black out there, Alex. It’d be like looking for a needle in a bleedin’ haystack.’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘It’s pitch black. Which means that if I’m careful the Germans won’t see me.’

‘But you’ll
never
find what you’re looking for!’ His face was flushed, his voice tight with frustration. ‘Can’t you see that? Can’t you get that into your thick head?’

‘I have to try,’ I said stubbornly. ‘I owe it to my family.’

‘You owe it to them to stay alive, more like.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be fine,’ I promised him. ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’

Frank shook his head. ‘This is madness, old chum. You’re as tapped as Pykey was. You know I can’t let you do this, don’t you?’

‘Oh? And how will you stop me? Knock me out and tie me up?’

‘Yeah, if I have to.’

I gave him a look.

‘All right, maybe not. But you’ve got to see how crazy this is! In fact, it’s more than crazy, it’s…’ He wafted a hand in the air, unable to think of an appropriate word.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I told him again. ‘I’ll take it nice and slow. Jerry won’t even know I’m out there. And I’m pretty sure I know where the heart landed. I saw Pykey throw it.’

‘But it’s different in the dark,’ Frank said. ‘You can get turned around till you completely lose your bearings.’

‘I won’t get lost,’ I said. ‘Straight there and straight back. I promise.’

I could see I was wearing him down. His shoulders were slumping. He looked defeated.

‘You’ll die, Alex.’

‘I won’t, I promise. I’ll be back.’

His head had drooped. He wouldn’t look at me now. ‘Well… it’s been nice knowing you, mate.’

‘I’ll be back,’ I told him again, unable to stop myself saying it like Arnold Schwarzenegger in
The Terminator
.

If my using what sounded like a German accent puzzled him he didn’t say so. In fact, he didn’t say another word, just turned his back on me and dragged his ground sheet tighter around his shoulders. It wasn’t a show of pique; he simply couldn’t bear to watch me scale the ladder and disappear into No Man’s Land, as Pyke had done a few hours before me.

I thought about reaching out, patting him on the shoulder, but in the end I turned away too and began climbing the ladder. Outwardly I might have seemed calm, but my insides were in turmoil, my guts roiling with anxiety and fear.

Frank was right, of course. This
was
madness. And the chances of finding the heart
were
infinitesimal. But I had to try. I had to trust that things would work out okay, and that this wasn’t simply one of a multitude of potential alternative timelines. I had to believe that in this reality I wasn’t destined to be shot and killed by a German sniper.

At the top of the ladder I paused a moment, and then slithered up and over the sandbags lining the lip of the trench. In many ways this was the most dangerous part of the exercise. If a Jerry soldier had his gun trained on our trench at this moment I’d make a pretty bulky target. But I had to hope that the Germans were like us – concerned, in the early hours of the morning, only with keeping warm and getting a bit of much-needed kip. By the time I’d negotiated the sandbags without hearing the familiar crack of an enemy rifle (though, to be fair, a killing bullet would almost certainly have reached its mark before I heard a thing) and had slid on my belly into the muddy depression in front of the trench, my heart was hammering so hard it felt as if something was trying to burrow out of the ground beneath me.

I lay there a few moments, panting, my face so close to the ground that I could have stuck out my tongue and lapped at the freezing mud. And it
was
freezing, a thin crust of ice having formed over the deeper puddles that speckled the quagmire dividing the zigzagging lines of the Allied trenches from the German ones. At least the earlier rain had stopped, though the cold, smoky fog that drifted constantly across No Man’s Land left not only a greasy film of moisture on your skin and clothes, but also a lingering odour of sulphurous decay.

After a minute or so had passed with no apparent activity from the German trenches I cautiously raised my head. Much of what I could see was black, though here and there certain shapes that bulged from the surface of the mud were given sketchy definition by the background glow of the distant German searchlights that constantly scoured the night sky for the approach of enemy aircraft. It helped too that I’d seen No Man’s Land in daylight, through the crude periscope we used to save us having to stick our heads up above the lip of the trench. That, at least, enabled me to get my bearings, to identify not only certain landmarks, but also potentially troublesome – even lethal – obstacles.

Although what stretched before me was basically an expanse of severely churned mud, I knew that it was scattered with often partially submerged debris. There were the blackened remnants of trees that had been smashed to burning splinters by shell fire; there were twisted jags of metal ordnance that could slash a man’s body open if he crawled over them without realising; there were broken weapons and dented metal helmets; there were coiled stretches of barbed wire…

And, of course, there were bodies. Lots of bodies. Some whole, or mostly whole. Some mangled, or in pieces.

One of those bodies, and not so very far away, belonged to John Pyke. I couldn’t see it, but I knew that he had managed to progress – what? – thirty or forty yards before being cut down in a hail of gunfire? Which meant he would be lying somewhere in front of me now, dead and probably still bleeding, his limbs twisted, his face slack, his eyes greyed over and full of mud. Rats would probably be scampering over his body; he’d be a feast for them.

I felt sick. I’d never liked Pyke, but it was still awful to think that less than eighteen months ago he’d joined up to fight for his country, dreaming no doubt of glory, of returning home a conquering hero, and now there he was, lying out in the mud like so much rubbish, the life smashed out of him.

Did he have family? It was likely. It was likely that someone at home – parents, brothers or sisters, a girlfriend – loved him and was anxiously hoping and praying he’d get through, that he’d be all right. How long before they heard the devastating news? A few days? A week? A month? And what would they hear? That he’d died bravely? That he was missing in action?