Harry Bingham - The Sons of Adam

‘No, sir, nuffin’.’

‘Any wounded at all? Any cries for help?’

‘Well, sir …’ The sentry shrugged, as though the request was incomprehensible. ‘You’re always going to get wounded, like, I s’pose. Can’t say as how I listens to ’em overmuch.’

Alan wanted to strike the man hard in the face. His right arm actually ached to do it.

‘I’m going out,’ he said. ‘Please try not to shoot me when I return.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The sentry had wanted to add something about the folly of leaving the trench as dawn approached, but there was an aggression in Alan’s manner that stopped him. Alan scrambled over the parapet and wormed his way incautiously forwards, right out to the heart of the battlefield’s horrors. The ground was littered with fragments of wire, shell canisters, human beings. A human face, detached from its skull, had floated to the surface of a puddle, and lay face up, leering at the sky. Alan noticed nothing; cared for nothing. He reached the spot where he thought Tom’s raid had come to grief and began to call out.

‘Tom? Tommy? Tom Creeley?’

He was being desperately foolish. He was within simple sniping distance of the German lines.

‘Tom? Tommy? Tom Creeley?’

There was no sound at all, no human voice, no groan. The German rifles, which could have blotted him from existence in a second, held their fire.

‘Tom? Tommy? Tom!’

There was no answer. How could there have been? Tom had assaulted the German guns. The guns had spoken. Their word was final. Tom was missing, presumed dead.

Headache.

A crashing, pounding tyrant of a headache that swallowed all other sensation, all other feeling. For a long time, Tom lay with his eyes closed, aware of nothing but the monster raging in his head. But slowly, inevitably, life came back. Life and, with it, awareness.

Awareness of being alive. Awareness of pain mixed with numbness all the way up and down his left leg. Awareness of finding himself safe when everything in logic said he should have been dead.

He squeezed his eyes open. Above him there was a plank ceiling, sturdily and neatly constructed. Candlelight flickered on the boards. French mud poked between the cracks. The ceiling was a pleasure to look at. Tom let his mind wander among the only objects in his little universe: his headache, the pain in his leg, the planks overhead.

But life and understanding continued to return, bringing horror in their wake.

There was light coming from somewhere: a candle. Tom rolled over to look at it. It was stuck to the top of a British helmet, beaten crazily out of shape. Tom stared. The helmet was his, but why was it so badly misshapen … ? He felt his leg: it was badly wounded. The pain grew stronger.

He remembered more.

He remembered Stimson being blown away and Shorty Hardwick bloodily scythed to the ground. Stimson’s body had been between him and the shooting. Quite likely, Stimson’s death had been what allowed Tom to survive the onslaught almost unscathed. Poor bloody Stimson …

He closed his eyes again, possibly slept some more. When he woke up, his headache was still bad, but his mind was clearer. Clear enough to understand that the plank ceiling above his head was too neatly built to have been made by British hands. Clear enough to understand he was a prisoner of the Germans. Clear enough to remember that it was his twin, his brother, Alan Montague, who had wanted all this, who had sent him out to die, who had wanted him dead.

The friendship that had been the best thing in his life had turned to ash.

Every night, for four nights, Alan searched for Tom.

He came to know no man’s land as no one was ever meant to know it. He found corpses, he found dying men, he found the wounded of both sides. The dying men he shot or drugged into insensibility with morphine. The wounded he dragged laboriously back to the trenches, before squirming out once again. He called a thousand times for Tom. He abandoned caution. He stood up on moonlit nights. He used the light of flares to survey the shell-ruined landscape. He shouted for his lost brother at the top of his voice.

The Germans heard and saw him, of course. Alan could hear the German sentries echoing his call – ‘Tom! Tom Creeley!’ – followed by bursts of laughter and the muttered sing-song voices of the Bavarian regiments. By removing cartridges from the ammunition belts of the machine guns, they could even get their guns to rap out the same rhythm. ‘TOM, Tom-MEE, Tom CREEEE-LEEE!’ But there was no rifle fire, and even the machine guns didn’t seem to be directed at him. From kindness, compassion, or perhaps just indifference, the Germans let the lunatic Englishman roam up and down the devastated land.

‘Komm, Tommy, komm!’

Tom had hardly regained full consciousness before he was plunged further into nightmare.

With his good leg on one side and a burly German arm helping him on the other, Tom was escorted down a maze of trenches to a field hospital. He was given a brusque examination and a tetanus injection. Then he was marched off to a farmyard where four other British prisoners were being held under guard, before all five of them were marched further into German-held France.

By the time they reached the prisoner-of-war holding camp, Tom was on the point of collapse. His wounded left leg felt as though it were on fire, and big surges of pain washed up and down his body, like an ocean tide trapped in a goldfish pond. The camp consisted of a group of gloomy tin huts encircled by barbed wire. There was a brief search at the gate – Tom’s cigarettes were removed, over his objections – and he was sent to a hut marked with the Red Cross. A nurse took a quick look at him, decided he wasn’t going to die in the night, and let him collapse exhausted onto a straw pallet. He closed his eyes but couldn’t sleep. Depression assailed him.

He was a prisoner of war.

Alan had tried to kill him.

On either count, he’d have preferred to die.

Alan abandoned the search, which had become increasingly dangerous, increasingly pointless. Furthermore, he was exhausted beyond description. He didn’t in all honesty know if his body and lungs could bear another night of it. And then there was Guy. Alan got word of Guy’s wound and the hospital where he was being treated.

Alan faced facts. It was time to leave the front, to leave the battle, to give up on Tom for ever.

Two days later, Alan arrived in Rouen, at the school-turned-hospital where Guy was being treated. He made his way stiffly to the correct ward. Guy’s bed was empty: tumbled white sheets and nothing else. Alan stepped across to the booth where the ward sister sat.

‘Bonjour, madam. Je cherche Major Montague –’

Alan was about to continue, but the sister half turned to point, saw the empty bed, then interrupted.

‘Oh, là là! Comme il fume!’

She indicated a door out into what had once been the schoolyard. Alan walked out and found Guy sitting at ease in a cane chair, his bandaged leg covered with a thin green blanket and resting on a couple of packing cases marked ‘War Materials – Urgent’. He was wrapped in a cloud of cigar smoke and a three-day-old Times lay half read on his lap.

‘Guy!’ he said, feeling somehow anaesthetised and shell-shocked all at once. ‘How are you?’

The brothers embraced, as well as they were able, given Guy’s awkward sitting position.