Page 48 of These Old Lies

Ned was crawling as fast as he could now, sliding and slipping as he raced to get to Charlie, mouth open in a silent scream. Charlie was so still. Charlie was never still.

As he kneeled beside Charlie, the screeching and bangs of distant shelling faded into the background. He reached down to brush the brown curls from Charlie’s face one last time. His eyes were closed, so at least Ned didn’t have to see the light extinguished from them.

Ned expected he would feel grief and sorrow in time, but right now Ned was simply grateful. Grateful that they could recover a body, that Charlie’s family would have a grave to visit. Grateful that over the last year he’d been witness to Charlie’s quiet heroism, laughed at his jokes, been shaken by his insights, and had known in a small way this extraordinary man.

Matthews was on the other side of Charlie’s body and was tugging at his collar. Ned looked up to snap at his orderly to have some respect when Matthews yelled, “He’s alive!” His fingers pressed against Charlie’s throat.

Ned’s own heart started to beat again. Charlie was alive.

He found himself pulling at Charlie, frantically working with Matthews to uncurl Charlie’s arms and legs, searching for an injury, a chance to stop the flow of blood. And there was blood. A lot of it. Its cold stickiness was seeping into the knees of his trousers.

It felt like hours before Matthews raised Charlie’s right wrist to Ned showing a line of deep red, dyeing the whole sleeve of Charlie’s uniform crimson. Ned reached the left wrist and found its jagged twin.

“Bind his left hand, we need to slow the bleeding.” Matthews reached into a bag with a red cross on a circle of white and passed bandages to Ned.

As Ned did his best to wrap the strip of cloth around Charlie’s bloodywrists, he noticed that there were no puncture marks from barbed wire on his sleeves. How on earth had Charlie managed to get those deep cuts on his wrists without tearing his uniform to shreds? He had only seen that once before.

Oh Jesus, Ned thought. Or maybe said aloud.

A shell whistled through the air and they both leaned over to cover Charlie’s body from the flying debris. Thinking would have to be done later.

Together he and Matthews arranged a way to carry Charlie, his arms slung over their shoulders. It wouldn’t allow them to be as low as they needed to be, but there was no other choice. They had to pray the German snipers had a sense of mercy.

As they pulled Charlie up, he started to moan, sending a jolt of relief through Ned. Charlie was alive. Now they had to keep him that way.

???

Standing in the dressing station, glaring at the orderly binding Charlie’s wounds, it dawned on Ned how much trouble he was potentially in. He had abandoned his post to retrieve a corporal who wasn’t even in his own section. Pushing the storm of emotions aside, Ned nodded formally to Matthews and forced himself to walk out of the tent.

For once, he had been spectacularly lucky. The battle’s total chaos, with the German counterattack and subsequent BEF retreats, meant that no one had noticed who had returned from where and in what groupings. The command was still trying to find whole platoons of men who hadn’t been heard from in hours. His absence was barely noticed, even by his own section, who were too worn out to do more than collapse into sleep.

There was no way Ned could sleep, and so only a few hours after leaving the dressing station, he was again lurking outside of it. A lifetime of hiding in plain sight had taught Ned that the biggest mistake one could make was to draw attention to oneself, but tonight Ned was too exhausted to come up with a deception. He simply waited until the orderly was tending to men at the other end of the tent to sneak inside. Charlie was still on the stretcher where they had left him, slightly off to the side from the other injured men.

Ned hunched down beside him. He was unconscious, damp with sweat, and the stretcher shook with his constant shivering. Ned had assumed thatCharlie was around his own age, but seeing the softness that edged his face, Ned realised Charlie was likely several years younger. Very gently, Ned pulled the blanket up tighter around Charlie, brushing the soft brown curls out of his eyes, remembering doing the same gesture in the pit, thinking he was dead.

Ned had planned to wake Charlie, but he couldn’t bring himself to disturb any peace Charlie had found. “Please don’t die,” he whispered instead.

Ned had loved before. He’d actually written poetry about past affairs. His first kiss had been in the grass in Christ Church Meadow, after six months of glances across the dining hall. When it came to Charlie, Ned had always been a bit ashamed of himself. Their encounters were sophysical, Ned unusually driven by his basest desires. But Ned had never tried to separate emotions from sex, and he had wanted to keep that part of himself, even in the trenches.

So even though it was the most dangerous thing he could have done, Ned let himself fall for Charlie. With each little conversation, each shared cigarette, each moment Ned revealed all the intimate parts of himself he’d hidden from the rest of the world, he fell a little harder for Charlie, even as Charlie decreed their time together as merely a way to survive. Was it only ever going to lead to heartache? Of course. Ned had known that from the very moment he’d asked Charlie to call him by the name he used for himself.

Ned leaned in so close that his lips almost brushed against the delicate shell of Charlie’s ear. “I have no right to ask you to stay for me, but please don’t leave me alone. Please, Charlie. I promise the hospital won’t be so bad, it might even be some ancient French chateau. You can take a picture and show me you playing the lord. I bet there will be plenty of nice-looking nurses for you to flirt with. Maybe some nice-looking orderlies. I won’t even care. You might get convalesced back in London for a bit. And then…”

Then Charlie would come back to the front. Ned couldn’t say the words.

What sort of fate was that? In the darkness of the dressing station, surrounded by the moans of a dozen injured men, Ned confronted what he had known since binding Charlie’s injuries. A man simply doesn’t get matching slits on the insides of his wrists by accident.

It had not been the first time Ned had seen men seek a permanent way out of Flanders, but he never would have guessed Charlie would be so desperate.

Or would he? Charlie had been in the division at least at long as Ned. He had dug trenches for days, marched halfway across the country, and had admitted that he didn’t even remember how many times he had gone over the top. Charlie had watched friends die in his arms. Had spent a gruesome three weeks straight on the front as field punishment, which Ned had never been able to get a straight answer about. There had been that night of drinking, and that look of pure terror before the fighting at the Scarpe. Hadn’t Charlie mentioned something about not sleeping? Doctors at home were writing about something called shell shock. Sufferers were sent to sanatoriums.

Ned could almost see Charlie quirk his eyebrow at him.

Officers were sent to the sanatoriums. Wealthy people. Not a working-class boy from London. Certainly not one that had already committed the treasonous act of self-harm. What had Charlie told him? The French sent men who had committed self-harm over the top without their guns? Mother England would be doing the same if a man in a state like Charlie was sent back to the front. Maybe next time Charlie would simply walk into the gunfire.

Charlie moaned and twisted in his blanket, bringing Ned back to the dressing station's misery. Ned had signed up for the Expeditionary Force with visions of self-sacrifice and heroism dancing in his eyes. What had Ned really done? He was an administrator for death.

Yet being an administrator had its own advantages. His father had explained to him all about how a safer post could be arranged. Who would need to be convinced, who would sign the papers. If others could arrange it for Ned, surely he could arrange it for Charlie? Charlie could drive a motor. Didn’t the general staff have drivers to get them around the battles? He wouldn’t be out of danger entirely, but the general staff never got properly close to the action.