Freddie said, “I’ll— I can bandage your wound. If you’ll tell me where.”
A hesitation. “Left upper arm.”
At least Freddie was good at bandaging. Laura had ruined several of his precious hours of leave, drilling him until he could stanch a wound efficiently, disinfect it, and tie it up. He crawled around awkwardly to Winter’s other side, found the arm by touch. Felt his jacket soaked—although that could be water as easily as blood. Under the wool, Winter was bone under skin, his body held rigid. He didn’t move when Freddie slit the sleeve enough to get at the gash, fumbling in his own jacket for bandages. All soldiers carried them, already soaked with iodine. He wrapped the wound by feel. It had to hurt. Winter didn’t make a sound. At least now it would stop bleeding. “You should have said something before,” Freddie said, hearing, with pain, his sister in his voice. He tied off the gauze.Christ, why are we still alive?“You’ve probably been bleeding this whole time.” How long had it been?
“Perhaps.” Winter’s voice was still dry, although not so steady as before. “I was not wanting to draw things out.”
Freddie sat back. “Why did you tell me, then?”
“You are a boy. It would be cruel, to make you hear me die.” They were near enough to speak into each other’s ears, and Freddie found himself reluctant to move away. Winter’s body was the last warmth in his whole world.
Freddie’s exhale was almost a laugh. “Not a boy.”
“No? How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.Youcan’t be much older.”
“I am thirty-five,” said Winter. He’d a deep, measured voice. Freddie wondered if he was—had been—an officer. Didn’t dare ask. Noncommissioned, maybe. He wanted to draw the conversation out. Anything was better than the silence, leavened with the war booming on, endless, outside.
“And from Munich?”
“I had a farm. In the mountains. Meadows. Cattle.” The deep voice dropped until Freddie could hardly hear. “Honey. Black pines, with the sun slanting in.”
Freddie said, “Well—Halifax doesn’t look like that. But we have the sea. I love the sea. Once, when I was in school, I tried to choose a different word every day for it, for the color on it. I’d pick a word and then mix up colors—how I scrounged for paints. It was easy, at first. Silver, I said, and mauve and sable. Smalt. Lapis. Rose. Pigeon’s feather. Iron. I let myself have any time of day, you see. Dawn or dark or noon. That helped. But by the end I was making up words, and none of my colors looked anything like. Bloody pretentious little thing I was, really—I’ve my list somewhere, in the box under my bed at home…Wait. Where’d you learn English?”
“I was a waiter.”
“I thought you had a farm.”
“The farm was my father’s. I went to England. I was a waiter in Brighton. I learnt English there. Many of us were in England, before the war. We went home to enlist. The Tommies used to cryHeywaiter,where the line was close together, and their snipers would shoot the men who moved.”
Freddie found himself laughing—giggling almost. “Really? Hey waiter, and—and some poor dupe’s head pops up—Yes, mister?—andblam. Really? This war’s like a two-penny vaudeville, honestly.” He was hiccuping, almost in tears. He slumped against the wall beside Winter and tried to get hold of himself.
Winter said, austerely, “My father was ill when I went back to Bayern. He is dead now. I gave the farm to my cousin before I enlisted. He promised to give it back. If I lived.”
They were both silent.
Then Winter added, low: “Iven, there must be a little air coming in, for we are not dead.”
The thought of being there until they died of thirst or drank the slime at their feet was beyond contemplation. “I suppose so,” said Freddie. His mouth felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton. “I—I think I can kill you, if you want. Could we—could we do it at the same time?”
“Kill each other? What if one person died and the other didn’t?”
Freddie said nothing. He was so thirsty.
“I have told you what I—who I was,” said Winter. Perhaps he was as afraid as Freddie to let the silence return. “Now you. What did you do in—Halifax?” He pronounced the word with care.
“I was a harbor clerk,” said Freddie. “I painted pictures. Some of them were decent. And I write—I wrote—poems.”
Winter said, wry, “We all did. Barracks were a—hellish choir of verses—once. Tell me one of your poems.”
“I—” said Freddie. “I can’t.” There was a gulf—a chasm—between the man in the pillbox and the boy in Halifax who’d sketched and scribbled things in his notebook. Even the soldier he’d been three weeks ago, on rest, standing in a barn doorway, looking out at the October rain. He’d crossed some invisible barrier. Wilfred Iven was dead. “But—I—I could recite one.”
“Recite, then,” said Winter.
Freddie groped for words. The darkness seemed to press on his eyeballs.Poetry?In this pit, at the edge of death? Poetry was nothing.Theywere nothing.
Then he thought that even useless words, written for another world, were better than the silence. He licked dry lips and said, “RememberParadise Lost? After the Fall? Satan woke up in the dark. My mother used to say that the devil limps because he fell from heaven.”
