“Take your pack,” said Winter. It was barely visible, half-sunk beside him. “Pull it in front of you. Slowly…slowly.”
The panic came back to the man’s face. “Throw me a rope!” he cried, and then gulped mud, coughing, sinking lower.
“Wait,” said Winter, and again there was that authority.
The man stilled.
“Your pack,” said Winter.
The man pulled his pack round, and Winter said, “Lean on it. Try to get your weight off your feet.”
The man did, but the pack sank almost at once, and then the man was thrashing, until Winter snapped, “Stop.”
Miraculously, the man did.
Winter cast about, seized a fallen entrenching tool, threw it to the smudge. “Push it straight down.” Another shell screamed and fell. Close. Christ, so close. “Next to your feet,” said Winter, his careful pronunciation eroding.
“It won’t hold!” cried the man.
“It will let in air,” said Winter. Finally the strain could be heard in his voice. A single stray shell could have killed them all right then. “Break—break the pull. The suck. Of the mud.”
The man pushed the spade down, and then he leaned forward again to where his pack was sunk below the surface, spluttering all the while. As he did, his legs kicked up, the angle of his body changed, and that was when Winter threw him the length of leather straps. The man seized it, choking, his head and shoulders barely above that hungry surface. “Slowly,” snapped Winter, and then the man was slithering over his submerged pack toward the side of the shell hole. Winter was pulling grimly with both arms, the good and the wounded. “Iven,” he said. “When he’s close enough, get down and take his hand. The harness is going to part.”
So Freddie threw himself flat, and Winter bared his teeth with pain, as he held the makeshift rope alone. Freddie’s groping hand met the drowning man’s just as the harness buckle broke, and Freddie slung his other hand forward, and they two were clasped, wrist to wrist, just as Winter snatched Freddie’s collar. They all writhed backward and ended up in a heap on the duckboards.
No one moved, for a moment. The stranger looked as though he were sunk in some insane dream. “It’s all right,” Freddie said, and felt hysterical laughter bubble up. He bit blood from his tongue to stifle it.
Winter’s eyes were already on the eastern horizon, looking for dawn in the seething sky. “We must go.”
The Tommy’s head came round. Winter had forgotten his careful intonation. His accent had been unmistakable. But the Tommy didn’t say anything.
Winter said again, more carefully, “We can’t stay here.”
“Where are we going?” asked the Tommy, like a child.
Freddie didn’t know how to answer. He pointed them west, along the duckboards.
“Come on,” Winter said, his eyes still on the horizon. Was that light in the east dawn, or was it just the German guns, firing from the heights?
The three of them started to walk.
BETWEEN DUNKIRK AND COUTHOVE, FRANCE TO BELGIUM
March 1918
The sun had set. Nota proper sunset, though, more like the sky was wounded and bleeding out its light. The lorry swayed along the rutted road. Laura wished she hadn’t smoked a cigarette. Her throat ached. The gunfire was louder still, a distant drumroll beyond the horizon.
“Are we close?” Pim asked Mary.
“Less than an hour perhaps, if the road’s all right. Lord, the guns. Iven, you don’t think Fritz is planning another attack? How would they? I heard they were eating plaster and turnips in Berlin, after three years of blockade.”
Her eyes half-closed, Laura said, “Their only chance is to attack before all those well-armed, well-victualed American boys come out in force. They have to know it.” Surely she’d find out what happened to Freddie before then. And she’d go home. She’d saved enough lives.
Home,whispered a sly voice in her mind.Where’s that? The cellar-hole in Veith Street? The Parkeys’ spare bedroom?
And then she jolted upright. “Aeroplanes,” she said. A higher pitch than a lorry, a propeller rattling, unmistakable.
“Probably ours—” Mary began just as an explosion ripped the night. Pim’s head swiveled round, her eyes huge in the shadows. “Just a stray bomb,” Mary said. “We’re all right.” The noise of the aeroplanes got louder. Laura found herself concentrating on the motion of her lungs. In. Out. She’d been here before, crouched beneath an iron rain. But she had no task now, no one to nurse, nothing to do but listen and live. It wasn’t easier. Then she caught sight of Pim, face stark with bewildered terror. Always, Laura Iven had found her courage when others needed her. She said, “It’s all right, Pim.” Pim was shaking so hard her teeth might well crack under the strain. Never mind her fever, Laura put an arm round Pim’s shoulders and pulled her into the shelter of her body.
