One of the unseen wounded was sobbing like a child.
Winter said, harsh, “Or tell me why the hell no one built proper defensive emplacements. Do you like sitting in holes? Something in the Anglo character?”
“Emplacements? Like that pillbox, our bloody headstone?” Freddie’s voice was equally ragged. Someone shrieked from a neighboring shell hole.
“How many of your men fight ill because they walked up and down duckboards all night in the dark and then slept in a crater?”
“All of us,” said Freddie. “They say it ruins the fighting spirit of the men to sleep in safety.”
Winter laughed, something terrible in the sound. “The ones saying that aren’t the ones in the craters, are they?”
· · ·
Finally the daylight began leaking away again. “At full dark,” Winter muttered. Freddie merely nodded. Neither of them would survive another night out. The corpse had begun to bloat. In thegathering shadows, they dragged themselves to the lip of the shell hole. Winter missed his grip and slid back. Freddie grabbed for him before he could go into the water; struggling mightily, he got them both onto the flat ground. “Winter?” Freddie whispered.
Winter shook his head and dragged himself to his feet.
Freddie turned back once, almost against his will. But the dead man was invisible in the renewed darkness. As they began stumbling toward the back area, Freddie realized why the wounded men had fallen silent. All those shell holes were full to the lip now with rain.
On another day, in another place, they’d not have got away with it. Their uniforms were indistinguishably filthy. They’d no rifles. Someone would have asked them what they were about, and what coherent answer could Freddie have given? But no one asked. It was nearly pitch-dark by then, rainswept, and every man still alive was hardly human. Just a bundle of impulses, living on nerves.
Freddie tried to distract himself, to remember Halifax. His books. They wouldn’t come. He tried remembering Laura instead: those early days, when she was in training in Halifax, the raging letter she’d sent him from France, when he wrote her that he was joining up. He’d thought, at the time, that it was the most hateful thing she’d ever done, writing that letter.A man died in my ward today,she wrote.He was called Culpepper. Do you know what happened, when they picked him up? The orderlies weren’t careful, moving him, didn’t know how big the wound was. His body fell in two pieces, Freddie, and they had to carry him away so, with the slime trailing…
He’d been furious at the time that she’d say such things to him. He knew why she had, now. He hadn’t listened.
He remembered her as she’d been in ’16, posted in France, giving him first aid classes every time he got leave. “For God’s sake!” he’d snapped. They’d had a free afternoon and gone to Deauville together. It was August, and the sun was warm. The send and suck of the sea reminded him of Halifax. He was trying to sketch it, sea bleeding into sky, gulls wheeling, and still Laura was beside him, lecturing about tying up arms. She’d got him a special kerchief, withdifferent methods of bandaging printed right on the cloth. He still hadn’t even seen proper combat. “Can’t a man draw in peace?”
“If you tell me—” she began, and some gesture of hers called attention to her left hand, bandaged in two places, strangely stiff under the wrapping.
“What happened to your hand, Laura?”
“Nothing,” she’d said. “Name me disinfectants, Freddie.”
He’d recited, dutifully, “Alcohol, iodine, carbolic. Rum in a pinch.” Then he kicked seawater onto her skirt and she splashed him back, and for ten minutes they were children again.
Perhaps it was the memory of light on water that drew his attention back, for of course there was light on water everywhere here. Scarlet and green, oily blue-white. Something gleamed particularly bright in the nearest shell hole. He turned his head to look.
The dead man stared back at him. The water stirred, rippled, and then, slowly, the dead man stood up. Water poured off him. His lips were black. The rats had been at him.
Freddie, staring helplessly, took a step toward the water. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Freddie felt the impact of a thin shoulder, heard someone swear. A half-familiar voice was saying“Iven.”Freddie took another step toward the shell hole. “Gott im Himmel,” said the voice, right in his ear, savage, “will you listen to me?”—and then a fist came clipping across his jaw, hard enough to split his lip. Freddie came back to himself. The dead face was just a gleam of light. Winter had an arm round his chest; Freddie’s heart was shaking like a fist under his soaked jacket. And the water that Winter had kept him out of wasn’t water at all, but the indescribable substance that shelling had made of the ground, viscous and sucking, deadlier than quicksand. He’d been three steps from dying. They panted, leaning on each other.
“Don’t look at the water. Watch your feet. Only that,” said Winter, when he could speak. “Do you hear me?”
Freddie nodded.
“Come on,” said Winter, shoving Freddie ahead of him. Freddie concentrated on his steps. Words from his past, flapping like laundry,useless sounds, ran through his mind:Before me there were no created things, only eternity, and I, too, am eternal. Abandon all hope…
“Walk, damn you,” Winter said.
Freddie, without a will of his own, did.
Until a voice spoke out of one of the shell holes. Freddie’s steps stuttered at the sound of it. “Kill me,” said the voice. “Oh, Christ, oh, fucking hell, please will someone kill me?”
CALAIS TO DUNKIRK, NORD-PAS-DE-CALAIS, FRANCE
March 1918
