Page 47 of These Old Lies

Charlie exploded with little warning, seeming to surprise himself as muchas Ned.

Gently, Ned withdrew from Charlie’s body and crawled up to put his head on Charlie’s shoulder, feeling more than a little smug. “May I at least consider this your Christmas present?”

“Not a chance.” Charlie pulled Ned in closer and kissed him. “You know how long that hat took me to make?”

16 A Bargain with the Devil

Third Battle of the Scarpe May 3, 1917 / Ned

The German machine gun fire was unrelenting. Ned and his men had gone over the top in the early hours of the morning, hoping the darkness would provide an advantage to the BEF. Instead, it had been almost immediate chaos, platoons mixing together and splitting off randomly as they scrambled to survive. Ned had found his section a low trench to take cover in and ordered them to rest, or as much as anyone could rest with their hands on their guns, ready to defend their position while the shells flew overhead.

Ned’s mind decided to take this moment to ruminate over the gigantic amount of paperwork that was waiting for him back in the reserve lines. He wondered abstractly whether Achilles ever needed to do any paperwork. The Greeks were in Troy for what, a decade? They did a lot of capturing and raiding and the like, but did they have to send back regular reports on rations? Or on trench foot? Maybe he could get some contraband drink off Charlie later to help him plough through it.

Ned wanted to shake his head at himself. Contraband? He certainly hadn’t turned out to be the officer he had aspired to when he’d insisted on joining the BEF. Although it was probably fair, since he wasn’t the officer they thought they were getting either.

Leaning further against the mud wall of the ditch, Ned tried to get a bit more comfortable. Much better than paperwork was losing himself in some pleasant daydreams of Charlie. His Charlie. Hearing his name on Charlie’s lips was the only thing that made him feel human.

He really should be more concerned about their affair. Getting caughttossing off together would not be a laughing business for either of them. Corporal punishment and demotion if they were lucky, court martial with prison time and social ostracism if they weren’t. But while over the past year Ned had discovered he could order men to their death, he’d also learned he could not keep his own cock in his pants even when he really knew better. The ancient Greeks would have a lot to say about that.

Ned had managed to settle into a reasonably comfortable position when he spotted his orderly, Corporal Matthews, crawling towards his section.

The solemn expression on the man’s face reminded Ned of the day he had been assigned his orderly. They had both been so green, so earnest, and so completely terrified. Ned had been mortified when Matthews had found him vomiting up the contents of his stomach before their first time being sent to the front, right up until the moment that Matthews had stepped beside him to do the same. Matthews had quietly stood watch when Ned wept for his brother, had cleaned the blood of men Ned couldn't remember killing out of his uniform. Ned didn’t think Matthews knew his biggest secret, though.

Ned hoped he could help the man find a good job after the war was over, perhaps in his father’s parliamentary office? If they both survived, of course. As the thin figure drew closer, Ned immediately noticed something was wrong. There was an assertiveness to Matthews’ expression that was rare for the soft-spoken bookkeeper.

Matthews met Ned’s eyes. “Corporal Villiers has gone missing from his section.”

Twenty years of aristocratic education was all that allowed Ned to keep his face frozen. “And?”

“The order was given to retreat. Everyone else turned back, but he kept moving forward.” Matthews shifted uncomfortably. “He looked mighty bad. Like a man with his own mission in mind.”

What the fuck was Charlie doing? This whole offensive had been a catastrophe. There was nothing to achieve in continuing to advance.

Ned knew he should do nothing, thank Matthews and remind him that Corporal Villiers was part of another section. Instead, Ned found he was already grabbing his rifle. Fuck the rules, fuck duty. Achilles would have gone after Patroclus. Charlie would have gone after him.

“Where was he last seen?” Ned asked.

“I can take you,” Matthews replied without hesitation.

Ned nodded. “At once.”

???

“He’s near the factory,” Matthews called back to Ned as they crawled through the muddy hellscape.

It took Ned a few minutes to understand what Matthews was saying. It was easy to forget that the battlefields had once been places with daily life and industry, where men had come to work. Dimly, Ned could remember being told that capturing the factory building near Rohart had been one of the day’s objectives, and sure enough, on the horizon was a bombed-out building of brick.

Knowing Charlie may be dying somewhere on this muddy hellscape made Ned want to take full advantage of his size and run across the fields. It ached in his bones to slowly crawl on his stomach through the mud. This must have been some outbuildings at one point, although shelling had reduced them to a macabre set of burned pillars, jutting out like stakes in the ground.

Only the looming factory gave him any sense of direction and distance. The trenches were more serpentine than anyone liked to admit, and the shelling remade the landscape every five minutes.

A better man than Ned would have noticed the death and horrors around him, would have stopped and looked after the other wounded. Would have seized his rifle and fought for every foot of ground the BEF was trying to seize.

Ned kept crawling, ignoring the cramp in his back, the scratch on his face from a piece of barbed wire, the dirt grinding into his palms. If this turned out to be another of Charlie’s schemes—the stubborn idiot disobeying orders to prove he could—Ned was going to have his hide.

Suddenly, Matthews disappeared from view, and it took Ned a moment to see he had darted behind a few shards of walls remained from the factory. Matthews stuck his head up and beckoned for Ned to move faster. Overhead, shells whizzed and banged, but so far he and Matthews seemed to haveescaped the German snipers’ notice.

As Ned darted around the corner, his stomach dropped. Lying against one of the walls was Charlie’s body, curled on its side. Ned shouldn’t have been surprised; the battlefield they had just crossed was littered with dead and dying men. Yet this was Charlie Villiers, the corporal who had survived the bloody months of ’14, the gases of Ypres, and the slaughter of the Somme.