Page 27 of These Old Lies

Maybe it was only an accident that Charlie’s first day of field punishment was the same day as the division's re-entry into the ongoing disaster of the Somme. Sometimes the war didn’t need any help to be awful.

The 1st Londoners, like the rest of the BEF, were scrambling for every inch of land. When the order had gone out to ‘hold the line,’ Charlie had almost laughed. Reality was so fluid that gains between the two sides sloshed back and forth like water in a bathtub.

After ten days, No Man’s Land was a nightmare come to life. There was no time to bury the dead, and corpses gathered in heaps. The rain was unending, and the stretcher bearers worked with eight men to each stretcher, and each ambulance required six horses to drag it through the mud.

Dimly, Charlie was aware that he was halfway through his punishment. He’d spent a week and a half dragging the dead and dying off the battlefield, eating and sleeping in the snatches of moments in between.

Now the division was preparing for yet another offensive attack. Charliewas more aware than ever that all it took was a single sniper bullet and it was angels and the pearly gates. Or worse—the echo of a shell round and becoming one of the mangled injured.

“Villiers!” He turned around to see Matthews coming down the line, wobbling slightly on the duckboards under the weight of his pack, glasses askew. “I heard you were sitting up here.”

“Thought I would take a moment of peace and quiet.”

Matthews snorted in laughter. “I was thinking you were hiding from the shouts of joy that Henderson’s girl accepted his proposal.”

“About time he got a response.” Charlie tried not to feel a twinge of sadness that he had missed that moment; he would’ve liked to see Henderson’s face.

“Well, be warned. He is already asking people what they should serve at the wedding breakfast.”

“That’s enough to drive me to go into No Man’s Land voluntarily.” Charlie said as he offered Matthews a cigarette.

???

Battle does funny things to one’s brain. Ned had told Charlie a story once about these Vikings called berserkers, but Charlie didn’t really know why Vikings were relevant to going into battle. Once the rush of battle hit him, certain things became very clear and focused while others became fuzzy and blurred. Afterwards, he would never be able to recount the battle in anything more than a flash of moments. His memories would dissolve into fragments, like the patchwork quilts his mother made, each memory detailed but distinct from one another. They could be stitched and arranged together any which way.

???

The mud crunched under Charlie’s boots as he went over the top.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a red poppy pushing through the mud. There was something very disturbing about those little flowers, how they could bloom surrounded by so much destruction. So fragile—high stalks, blood red petals that caught in the wind too easily. How was it thatthey came back first?

His boot trampled the blooms as he ran forward.

There were always too many screams to know where to start. He looked at one poor bugger and figured there were too many insides on the outside for him to be alive, or to be alive much longer. Wasn’t he the chap with the good corner bunk? Charlie moved on.

Barbed wire caught on his uniform and ripped a hole in his trousers. Fuck.

“Keep going, you bastards! We need to take down the fucking machine gun!” Charlie knew that accent, but surely Lieutenant Pinsent wasn’t actually swearing?

Maybe Charlie was rubbing off on Ned. The thought made him laugh.

A man moaned as Charlie hobbled back to the BEF lines—why were both of them sweating so much? Or was it blood?

It was hard to move fast when you only had three legs between you.

The blast. Thrown through the air and wondered if this was what it was like to fly.

He landed in the mud. Too scared to move because he might find he didn’t have anythingtomove. Pain shot down to his toes and relief washed over him. He still had his legs and feet, at least.

A call for a stretcher bearer. He peered up from the crater and saw three lads in worse shape than him about fifty yards away. He knew he should wait for the other bearers, wait for the stretcher at least.

Motivation pulsed through him. Was it strange he preferred this to fighting Jerrys? What kind of man prefers to spend his days bringing in the dead and dying versus fighting the enemy? Once or twice he even helped a few blond boys who said ‘danke.’ He didn’t even feel guilty about it.

He crawled toward the lads.

“Hold on!” he yelled.

He didn’t know if they heard him. The shelling was deafening, a drumbeatwithout end.