Justin Go - The Steady Running of the Hour

He stepped back and tried to level his pistol at the German’s bare head. He pulled the trigger but his hand was shaking. The bullet clipped the man’s scalp, tearing off a chunk. He moaned and whimpered, raising his hands above his face as if the soft flesh of his palms were any protection. Ashley moved closer and fired again. The bullet tore through Kameraden’s finger and went into his eye. There was much blood. Kameraden slumped over.

Ashley crouched in the shellhole and watched another flare go up. The German machine gun was traversing the horizon wildly. A few grenades went off in the distance. Ashley bent over the mud and vomited his supper. It had been biscuits and bully anyway, and he was damned sick of biscuits and bully. Ashley spat and drained his canteen with a long drink. He wiped his face on his tunic sleeve.

Ashley waited half an hour until the guns went quiet. He crawled slowly back to the forward sap and tumbled in beside the sentry.

In the dugout Ashley shifts onto his side in his bunk. He takes the letter from his tunic pocket. He knows the words by now, but it pleases him to see the handwriting, the arcing shapes on the page.

1 October 1916

Dearest —

I write from the pebbles of Selsey Beach. Without you London is an empty shell — I have only the Sussex Downs & the seashore to make me whole again. There is a sound here that is not the roar of the ocean, nor any signature of God’s labour — they say it is the thud of guns in France, a hundred miles away — but the distance renders it soothing.

Is it selfish to note that I’ve had no letters from you for three days? Probably the post is to blame, but if you haven’t sent word, please do. My heart keeps vigil in two places — whatever piece of France you lay your head upon at night, and the patch of road between the Post Office and the house.

I have assembled 3/ 4of the requested items — but I doubt there remains in all of England such a torch as you describe. The man at the Army & Navy Stores gave me second best, and you shall see the result yourself. I managed the wire-cutters, at least. I go back to London on Saturday to gather a last few surprises & I shall post the parcel then. Beside it every F & M hamper that ever was shall be emerald with envy.

Ashley, I don’t allow myself to miss you. For I am terribly wise & patient & every other fine thing — as you make me over again through your love. Nor do I wait for you — not wanting to count the hours & days we lose apart. The day you left I pulled the stem on my watch and put it in my jewel-box. The hands stand sentry at half-seven in the morning — the Universe, and I, your modest love, slumber peaceful until your return.

Your Imogen

There is a voice at the dugout’s entrance. Boot heels rap on the steps, descending as Ashley folds the letter away. Jeffries comes in, taking off his gas mask bag and tin hat and hanging them on a huge nail. Jeffries is B Company commander, at twenty-six the oldest officer in the company. His blond mustache is so fair as to be nearly invisible. The other officers joke that he is a German agent.

Jeffries sets his revolver on the table and calls to Ashley.

— Spymaster? You awake?

— I am now.

— Your eyes were open.

— I sleep with them open, Ashley says. I close them only when I’m awake.

Jeffries snorts derisively. — Got any rats today?

— They’re about, but I’ve not been hunting. May have heard one a moment ago.

Jeffries eyes the muddy floor with faint interest. He sits down before the table on an upturned crate.

— Heard about you and Kameraden. Awfully decent of you to go over.

— Ought not to have.

Ashley tosses the overcoat from his body. He rises from the bunk.

— Three days, Ashley says, he’s been moaning about his wife. Telling her how he’ll kiss her, what presents he’ll bring to her and the children. He spoke to us too, you know, telling us how he’d been to London once and saw Buckingham Palace. One night he even spoke to God. Think it was God, at any rate. Said he’d done his best, but he hadn’t done enough. He swore he’d never killed a man, had only wounded a few.

— Is that so? I always thought he was reciting poetry—

— It was poetry, much of the time. Love poems. I think they were to his wife.

Jeffries nods. He takes out a leather tobacco pouch and a small meerschaum pipe. He packs the bowl and lights it with a long match.

— Then last night, Ashley continues, he starts begging for us to kill him. Says he knows one of us speaks German. One of us is a kind man who will come over and send him west. I felt he was speaking to me.

— The spymaster grown sentimental over the Hun? I don’t believe it.

Ashley sits down at the table. He yawns and rubs his eyes.

— So I went over last night. Found him awake but done for. His guts a puddle of blood. He’d lived off the water in the shellhole for three days, though it was brimming with corpses. He could speak at first. I gave him a drink from my bottle. Then I tried to carry him. We didn’t get far. I shot him in the next shellhole. Missed the first time, took off part of his head. It felt like pure bloody murder.

— Don’t be absurd. Decent of you to go over at all.

— Possibly. Yet there was something else about it. At Crécy—

There is a faint shuffling on the other side of the table and both soldiers jump to their feet. On the dirt floor a rat licks a half-empty can of Maconochie that has been left as bait. Jeffries grabs his revolver from the table and fires twice. The shots from the large-caliber Webley ring loud in the dugout, the dirt geysering up as the bullets strike. The rat bolts along the wall into the darkness. Both men sit down.

— I say, those buggers are improving.

— Natural selection, I suppose, Ashley remarks. We killed the slow ones and only the quick ones are breeding now. We ought to stud them. We could race them at Epsom Downs.

— Why not over here, at Chantilly? After all, the Continental horses are otherwise engaged.

Ashley grins and sets his revolver on the table.

— Brilliant, Ashley agrees. They’d be our legacy to the French. Fitter rodents. Fleet of foot. The veritable flower of their race. We’ll start the first studbook right here.

Jeffries takes a box of cartridges from a shelf. He releases a tab on his pistol and tilts the barrel down. The bullets in the revolver’s cylinder extrude outward and Jefferies replaces the two spent cartridges with those from the box.

— Sorry, Jeffries says. That beast interrupted. You were saying—

— Crécy.

— Of course. The battle or the town?

— The battle.

— Hundred Years’ War?

— That’s right, Ashley says. Beginning of the end of knighthood proper, all that bosh. English longbows mowing down the flower of French chivalry.

Jeffries sets the pipe back in his mouth.

— Shame we can’t re-create that.

Ashley grins. — Rather. But the part I was thinking of was after the battle. Ordinarily the victors would take the enemy knights prisoner and ransom them. But some of the French were too badly wounded for this. So the English sent out footmen to kill these wounded knights. This wasn’t meant to happen.

— Only other swanks ought to have done it, Jeffries offers. Not peasants.

— Precisely. At any rate, I was thinking of how these footmen used daggers.

Ashley takes a bayonet from a shelf. He holds the blade before the candle on the table.

— The daggers were long — longer than this — and came to a fine point. The old miséricorde, the mercy giver. Plate armor was too hard to pierce, so you’d lift the wounded knight’s arm and plunge the dagger through the armpit into the heart.