Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

Joseph plunged forward, sliding in the mud, grabbing for the wooden props to hold himself up. Another flare of light. He saw quite clearly Captain Holt lurching toward him, another man over his shoulder, deadweight.

“He’s hurt!” Holt gasped. “Pretty badly. One of the night patrol. Panicked. Just about got us all killed.” He eased the man down into Joseph’s arms and let his rifle slide forward, bayonet covered in an old sock to hide its gleam. His face was grotesque in the lantern light, smeared with mud and a wide streak of blood over the burnt cork that blackened it, as all night patrol had.

Others were coming to help. There was still a terrible noise of fire going on and the occasional flare.

The man in Joseph’s arms did not stir. His body was limp and it was difficult to support him. Joseph felt the wetness and the smell of blood. Wordlessly others materialized out of the gloom and took the weight.

“Is he alive?” Holt said urgently. “There was a hell of a lot of shot up there.” His voice was shaking, almost on the edge of control.

“Don’t know,” Joseph answered. “We’ll get him back to the bunker and see. You’ve done all you can.” He knew how desperate men felt when they risked their lives to save another man and did not succeed. A kind of despair set in, a sense of very personal failure, almost a guilt for having survived themselves. “Are you hurt?”

“Not much,” Holt answered. “Couple of grazes.”

“Better have them dressed, before they get poisoned,” Joseph advised, his feet slipping on the wet boards and banging his shoulder against a jutting post. The whole trench wall was crooked, giving way under the weight of mud. The founds had eroded.

The man helping him swore.

Awkwardly carrying the wounded man, they staggered back through the travel line to the support trench and into the light and shelter of a bunker.

Holt looked dreadful. Beneath the cork and blood his face was ashen. He was soaked with rain and mud and there were dark patches of blood across his back and shoulders.

Someone gave him a cigarette. Back here it was safe to strike a match. He drew in smoke deeply. “Thanks,” he murmured, still staring at the wounded man.

Joseph looked down at him now, and it was only too plain where the blood had come from. It was young Ashton. He knew him quite well. He had been at school with his older brother.

The soldier who had helped carry him in let out a cry of dismay, strangled in his throat. It was Mordaff, Ashton’s closest friend, and he could see what Joseph now could also. Ashton was dead, his chest torn open, the blood no longer pumping, and a bullet hole through his head.

“I’m sorry,” Holt said quietly. “I did what I could. I can’t have got to him in time. He panicked.”

Mordaff jerked his head up. “He never would!” The cry was desperate, a shout of denial against a shame too great to be borne. “Not Will!”

Holt stiffened. “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely. “It happens.”

“Not with Will Ashton, it don’t!” Mordaff retorted, his eyes blazing, pupils circled with white in the candlelight, his face gray. He had been in the front line two weeks now, a long stretch without a break from the ceaseless tension, filth, cold, and intermittent silence and noise. He was nineteen.

“You’d better go and get that arm dressed, and your side,” Joseph said to Holt. He made his voice firm, as to a child.

Holt glanced again at the body of Ashton, then up at Joseph.

“Don’t stand there bleeding,” Joseph ordered. “You did all you could. There’s nothing else. I’ll look after Mordaff.”

“I tried!” Holt repeated. “There’s nothing but mud and darkness and wire, and bullets coming in all directions.” There was a sharp thread of terror under his shell-thin veneer of control. He had seen too many men die. “It’s enough to make anyone lose his nerve. You want to be a hero-you mean to be-and then it overwhelms you-”

“Not Will!” Mordaff said again, his voice choking off in a sob.

Holt looked at Joseph again, then staggered out.

Joseph turned to Mordaff. He had done this before, too many times, tried to comfort men who had just seen childhood friends blown to pieces, or killed by a sniper’s bullet, looking as if they should still be alive, perfect except for the small, blue hole through the brain. There was little to say. Most men found talk of God meaningless at that moment. They were shocked, fighting against belief and yet seeing all the terrible waste and loss of the truth in front of them. Usually it was best just to stay with them, let them speak about the past, what the friend had been like, times they had shared, just as if he were only wounded and would be back, at the end of the war, in some world one could only imagine, in England, perhaps on a summer day with sunlight on the grass, birds singing, a quiet riverbank somewhere, the sound of laughter, and women’s voices.

Mordaff refused to be comforted. He accepted Ashton’s death; the physical reality of that was too clear to deny, and he had seen too many other men he knew killed in the year and a half he had been in Belgium. But he could not, would not accept that Ashton had panicked. He knew what panic out there cost, how many other lives it jeopardized. It was the ultimate failure.

“How am I going to tell his mam?” he begged Joseph. “It’ll be all I can do to tell her he’s dead! His pa’ll never get over it. That proud of him, they were. He’s the only boy. Three sisters he had, Mary, Lizzie, and Alice. Thought he was the greatest lad in the world. I can’t tell ‘em he panicked! He couldn’t have, Chaplain! He just wouldn’t!”

Joseph did not know what to say. How could people at home in England even begin to imagine what it was like in the mud and noise out here? But he knew how deep shame burned. A lifetime could be consumed by it.

“Maybe he just lost sense of direction,” he said gently. “He wouldn’t be the first.” War changed men. People did panic. Mordaff knew that, and half his horror was because it could be true. But Joseph did not say so. “I’ll write to his family,” he went on. “There’s a lot of good to say about him. I could send pages. I’ll not need to tell them much about tonight.”

“Will you?” Mordaff was eager. “Thanks… thanks, Chaplain. Can I stay with him… until they come for him?”

“Yes, of course,” Joseph agreed. “I’m going forward anyway. Get yourself a hot cup of tea. See you in an hour or so.”

He left Mordaff squatting on the earth floor beside Ashton’s body and fumbled his way back over the slimy duckboards toward the travel line, then forward again to the front and the crack of gunfire and the occasional high flare of a star shell.

He did not see Mordaff again, but he thought nothing of it. He could have passed twenty men he knew and not recognized them, muffled in greatcoats, heads bent as they moved, rattling along the duckboards, or standing on the fire steps, rifles to shoulder, trying to see in the gloom for something to aim at.

Now and again he heard a cough, or the scamper of rats’ feet and the splash of rain and mud. He spent a little time with two men swapping jokes, joining in their laughter. It was black humor, self-mocking, but he did not miss the courage in it, or the fellowship, the need to release emotion in some sane and human way.

About midnight the rain stopped.

A little after five the night patrol came scrambling through the wire, whispered passwords to the sentries, then came tumbling over the parapet of sandbags down into the trench, shivering with cold and relief. One of them had caught a shot in the arm.

Joseph went back with them to the support line. In one of the dugouts a gramophone was playing a music-hall song. A couple of men sang along with it; one of them had a beautiful voice, a soft, lyric tenor. It was a silly song, trivial, but it sounded almost like a hymn out here, a praise of life.