The Captain and the Cavalry Trooper

by Catherine Curzon

  “Sorry…so sorry.”

  What a thing for a lad to say as he lay injured, in a war he had never asked to join.

  “Robert…hold me… I’m scared.”

  “Keep talking.” He dropped down to the ground, his leg dragging. “I’ll find you!”

  “I dreamed of you last night…” Jack coughed and another pained sigh escaped him. “I tried to reach you…but I couldn’t.”

  “This time, you’re going home.” Thorne finally made his way through the smoke, mud slicking his entire body from chest to toe, and he pitched headfirst into the shell hole where they were.

  Now he could take Jack’s hand, holding it tight. Apollo stood over him, frozen, a smear of blood on his white shoulder. “Both of you.”

  The heat in his leg was growing, though, and so was the pain, but this was more important than him. This was Jack, this was Apollo—they were the only things worth a damn out here. They wouldn’t breathe their last in this hellish place.

  “I was never good enough to deserve either of you,” he whispered.

  Jack’s voice was a slow rasp. “What…do you mean? You are a good—a great—man…honorable Cap…Captain…Th-Thorne…”

  Thorne tried to stand, but he realized that his leg wouldn’t take his weight, even the touch of his foot on the ground sending pain lancing up his body. Instead he stayed on his stomach and, with a monumental effort, managed to drag Jack onto his back. He took Apollo’s reins and looped them around his shoulder then, letting out a gasp of pain, pushed himself up to all fours.

  And so, his injured leg dragging uselessly, the weight of Jack against his spine and the unsteady horse walking alongside, the usually immaculate Honorable Captain Robert Brereton Thorne crawled through the filth and blood of no man’s land. Around them the world shook and the shrapnel flew but still he struggled on, a foot at a time, toward the trenches.

  Jack shivered and gasped in his agony. Thorne could feel the blood from Jack’s wound seeping onto his body, garlanding him like wet flowers. Each breath was labored, each more of a struggle than the last.

  Then, with no effort at all, his voice light, Jack said, “I can hear my mother calling me. It’s cold…so cold… Am I going home?”

  “Only…as far…as Shropshire.” Thorne stopped, sinking down a little, the insistent flame in his leg burning afresh. Yet Apollo did not stop but continued forward, leaving him with no choice but to go too, tethered as he was to the animal’s reins. He could hear voices shouting now, but he couldn’t tell where they were, or what they were saying. He could only keep on moving, a creature of dirt and blood that had risen from the earth itself, creeping agonizingly closer to safety.

  “In my pocket… Look in my pocket, promise me, Robert.”

  Delirium. Nonsense. But he felt Jack’s hand sweep for a moment against his hair.

  “It’s in my pocket. Then you’ll know that I…”

  Trooper Jack Woodvine fell silent.

  “No! Jack, no!” Thorne heard his own frantic voice and moved with a renewed determination. He crawled on, gently singing their song, lost now on that smashed record, as though that alone might keep Jack alive. The world was swimming, smoke stinging his eyes and the noise of the bombardment deafening, with sanctuary somehow growing farther and farther away with each passing moment.

  Then a hand rose up out of the earth, and his first instinct was to recoil from this creature of the pit, this open grave, but the hand was too quick, its grip too firm. Only as he was dragged over the edge and eased down into the dugout did Thorne realize that the hand belonged to Bryn and there, staring in horror and wonder, was a cluster of familiar faces. They went to catch the reins from his shoulder and Apollo slid and slipped down into the trench with them but Captain Thorne was already emerging. He heard his own voice, sure despite the hoarseness, telling Bryn, “Get him right back as far as you can, he’s got a shrapnel wound. If anybody tries to take him, tell them I’ll have them cashiered!”

  “Yes, sir.” In haste, Bryn dispensed with a salute and shoved his way past the men from the chateau, Apollo’s reins tight in his hands.

  The stretcher bearers arrived almost at once.

  With fingers to Jack’s neck, they pronounced him to be still alive and lifted him carefully onto the stretcher. Jack stirred with the movement. He half-opened one eye and fixed it on Thorne. His mouth shaped some words that could not be heard and the bearers carried him away.

  “You next, sir!”

  “It’s a scratch. My soldier comes first.” As if to prove it, Thorne rose to his feet once more. Pain blazed up from his leg but he gave no indication of the agony, merely snatched up a rag and wiped the mud from his eyes before he bellowed, “Fetch me Marsh’s horse, now!”

  Then he was heading for the stables, sheer nervous exhaustion driving him on, cutting through the pain and keeping that foot rising and falling despite the injury to his calf. Apollo was the fastest horse in the regiment, of course, but Tsarina wasn’t far behind, and with Captain Edmund Marsh currently languishing in hospital with his leg hanging off at the knee, he wouldn’t be calling for his horse anytime soon.

  Thorne unfastened his tie and pulled it tight around his boot in a makeshift tourniquet for the wound that still seared in his shin. This time he wasn’t too proud to use a mounting block, and in truth doubted he could take his swing up into the saddle without one. Yet here there was no block to be had and it took the helpful hand of a trooper to hoist his captain’s foot up so that he might take his place atop the midnight-black mare. Thorne didn’t even know the man’s name but he barked a command of, “Help Pritchard with Apollo. Keep him calm, keep him safe!”

  Then he kicked Tsarina with a gentle force, urging her on after the ambulance.

  Thorne arrived at the Dressing Station just in time to see a figure on a stretcher being loaded into the back of a motor ambulance. The soldier was half-mummified in bandages, but his chestnut hair, slightly too long by regulation standards, made it all too obvious that it was Jack.

  Thorne called his name just as the doors slammed shut and the engine growled into life. The ambulance accelerated through the mud, its large-spoked wheels churning over the mire.

  They were taking him to the Clearing Station.

  The ambulance had a head start and a two-horsepower engine. But Captain the Honorable Robert Brereton Thorne had the second-fastest horse in the regiment and a soul that burned with fire.

  Through woods, through copses the ambulance drove, through the burned-out husks of hamlets, where people somehow still lived. Flat farmland passed by on either side, Tsarina foaming at the mouth but still carrying her rider onward.

  At last, the Clearing Station came into view. It had once been a farmhouse, its barns and stables now converted into wards, the field behind full of row upon row of hastily built huts. A train rattled by, its desolate whistle echoing over the fields.

  The ambulance drove beneath a stone archway and into the yard with its outrider just moments behind. Tsarina’s hooves clattered and echoed and Thorne pulled her up sharp amid the medics who hurried here and there, the walking wounded who looked on dazed from the sidelines and the nurses, brisk and focused as they crossed the cobbles.

  Thorne remembered his injured leg too late as he threw himself from the saddle. As soon as his foot hit the ground his leg buckled beneath him and he caught Tsarina’s reins, somehow forcing himself to stay upright. He felt a warm cushion of liquid beneath his sole, his boot soaked with his own blood and, within the limb itself, the insistent stab of shrapnel. He knew that he looked like a madman, a mud-caked, bleeding figure with wild eyes, but he could see only the ambulance containing the man whose heart he had broken, and he cared for nobody but his gypsy.

  But the damned leg…

  And Jack’s last request— ‘Look in my pocket.’

  No, not his last request. Thorne blindly handed the reins to a nurse, stumbling again but still keeping his balance somehow.

  “Easy now�
�” The doors of the ambulance were opened, Jack on his stretcher lifted out. A thin groan of pain escaped his parted lips, his eyes rolling under his struggling eyelids.

  “Excuse me, sir.” A nurse had her hand on Thorne’s elbow. “This way, sir—how did you get here on horseback with that wound?”

  “It’s nothing—” He tried to pull free, but she tightened her grip and somehow, somewhere along the ride, Captain Thorne’s strength seemed to have bled out. Yet still he dragged his useless leg toward the ambulance, taking the nurse stumbling with him.

  “Jack!” Thorne called his name desperately. “I’m with you, Jack!”

  The figure on the stretcher reached one arm toward Thorne, fingers clasping at empty air as he was carried toward the entrance.

  With an effort, Jack moaned, “Don’t leave me—I’m scared!”

  “Sir, there’s another ambulance on its way.” The nurse’s grip hadn’t faltered. A cold breeze whipped her white headdress against Thorne’s cheek. “You can’t stand about here, and we need to take a look at that wound.”

  “Robert!”

  Jack disappeared into the building, his voice left on the icy wind.

  “You don’t understand.” Thorne looked at the nurse, aware only now of the smell of no man’s land that he carried with him, of smoke and gunpowder and filth. “That’s my boy.”

  This time he managed to yank his arm free of her grip. He followed Jack and his stretcher bearers into the hospital, pausing on the threshold as he looked this way and that for any sign of where they might have gone. At the realization that the hallway was as briskly busy as the yard and Jack had disappeared, panic began to well in Thorne’s gut.

  “Jack!” He seized a passing medic by the shoulder, leaving a filthy handprint on the man’s tidy uniform. “Where did they take my boy?”

  The tall man’s gentle blue eyes met his.

  “Jack, you say? There’s a lot of boys here called Jack.”

  “He just— It’s his shoulder, they have to be careful— He broke—” Thorne swallowed hard, fighting against the tears that welled in his eyes. “He wanted me to check his pockets.”

  A hand alighted on the small of Thorne’s back, guiding him along the corridor.

  “They brought in a young man with a lump of shrapnel in his shoulder only moments ago—you must be strong—he’s lost a lot of blood. I’m about to scrub up to operate.” The surgeon raised an eyebrow as he looked down at the handprint on his sleeve. “The nurses are preparing him for theater. If you have any information on his medical history—a break, you say?—then we need you to tell us. Just go up to the third door on the left. That’s where he is. And you must see a medic about that leg, young man.”

  Thorne could only nod in the face of this gentle calm. Then he made his slow, agonizing way along the hallway and through the door that the doctor had indicated.

  Jack was a shivering figure on a wooden trolley, a gown half-covering him like a shroud. The nurses had snipped off the bandages from the Dressing Station, the brutal damage to his shoulder revealed, his pale skin torn where once Thorne’s kisses had traveled. His filthy, bloodied uniform had been cut into tatters to free him, the useless rags flung onto a chair. Jack murmured under his breath, hiccups of pain and fear escaping his soft mouth as the nurses bustled around him.

  Thorne began to push his way through the figures who were crowding around Jack. Yet he seemed to suddenly be dragging lead weights in his boots, to be caught in quicksand. Again and again he gasped Jack’s name, the shrapnel in his leg somehow having transferred itself like a red-hot lance into his heart.

  “Who is this man?” The imperious matron turned on Thorne. “We’re preparing the patient for surgery—you need to leave at once!”

  But Jack was reaching for him.

  “My pocket…”

  “Now shush with all this nonsense about your pocket, young man!” She sounded as if she was quelling a cantankerous child. Then she rounded on Thorne.

  “Do you know the patient?” It was an accusation more than a question. Thorne ignored it, reaching for Jack’s hand, but the matron grabbed him by the pips on his arm and marched him out of the room. “I really don’t care if you’re a captain or a brigadier, you’re not bringing all that mud into my prep room!”

  “He broke his shoulder before— He needs me with him!”

  “Broke it?” Her fierceness seemed to ebb. “And it’s the same one that’s injured? Do you know how long ago?”

  “1916.” That much he could say with certainty. “It wouldn’t heal, it still gets weak— Let me see him!”

  The matron placed her palm on Thorne’s chest.

  “Captain, I must ask you not to come any further. We can’t have you and your mud around him, he needs to be clean for surgery. I’m not a dragon, sir—I only have the patient’s best interests in mind.”

  Thorne looked down at her hand, clean and pale against his filthy uniform. It seemed to draw the fight out of him and he stumbled, only the impact of his shoulder on the wall keeping him from falling altogether.

  “In his pocket—” It sounded weak, pathetic. “He said I had to look in his pocket—”

  “Wait here, please, Captain…” She rustled into the room, and Thorne heard her make a curt announcement about Jack’s old fracture. When she returned, she was carrying a bundle.

  She passed it into Thorne’s arms.

  “Now take his uniform. He has twittered on and on about his pocket—I shall be very disappointed if all that’s in there is a bag of barley sugar!”

  One of the nurses came out into the corridor. “He’s unconscious, Matron.”

  In a bark that would not have been out of place on a parade ground, the formidable woman ordered, “Get him to theater—on the double!”

  The nurses hurried the trolley out of the room. Jack lay upon it as still and as pale as a knight carved on a tomb. He was dashed along the corridor and vanished out of sight.

  “You bloody look after him,” Thorne told her, clutching the humble bundle tight to his chest. “Please, please look after him.”

  “I wish more officers were as caring as you, sir. Now—would you like me to look at your leg?”

  “No—” He dropped his face to rest against the bundle. “It’s nothing—”

  The matron looked him squarely in the eye, then gave a smile of recognition.

  “It’s Viscount Brereton’s boy under all that mud, isn’t it? I once knew your uncle. Now come along and let me look at this leg of yours.”

  “Everyone knows my uncle,” he whispered, his face somehow managing to conjure a very faint smile. It was only then that Thorne realized, to his horror, that a tear was threading its way down his mud-caked face. With a quick movement he dashed his hand over his eyes and straightened. “My leg, yes. Took a bit of shrapnel, me and my horse—”

  And that almost undid him again, the thought that he had brought Apollo out here, had betrayed the trust the horse had placed in him.

  “I tried to tourniquet it—”

  “Lean on me, Captain—arm about my shoulder, that’s it… Hobble just down here to my office. We’ll soon have you fixed up, don’t mind about that. The three of you were all injured at the same time, then?”

  “Apollo got out, he was terrified. Jack, he could always keep him calm, nobody else—” The captain drew in a deep breath and leaned heavily on her. “We got caught in no man’s land, they were shelling us.”

  The matron tutted as if she had just found a footman making eyes at her daughter. She opened the door to her office, a sparse, plain room.

  “On the chair, Captain Thorne. Boot off.” She produced a pair of long-bladed scissors from a drawer. “Don’t look so worried, I’m only going to cut up the seams of your joddies!”

  Thorne managed to remove the boot with his shaking hands. Freed from the makeshift tourniquet and the tight leather, a fresh jolt of pain jabbed at him, this one stronger than any other. He couldn’t help but give a gasp at the
sheer agony of it and his hand on the bundle grew tighter, his knuckles showing white through the dirt. He vaguely tried to apologize for making such a show, but the words wouldn’t come through his gritted teeth.

  Matron was unfazed. She brought a jar down from a cupboard. “A morphine lozenge for you, I think. Open wide, Captain.”

  “I won’t take it,” he told her firmly, shaking his head. If he could feel pain, he knew he was still alive, still here. He couldn’t be numb.

  “If you insist on suffering through, that’s up to you.”

  “I do.”

  She brought his foot onto her knee and knelt in front of him, wiping away the blood and filth to see the wound more clearly.

  “Ah, there it is!”

  She reached for tweezers from a ceramic kidney dish.

  “Be a brave soldier for matron—I’ll have this little bastard out in a jiffy.”

  Thorne nodded tightly, clenching his hands into fists as he waited.

  With a sure, swift move, matron held aloft the lump of lead.

  “There we are! Troublesome little sods, aren’t they?”

  She carefully palpated his calf and announced, “That’s it. No more in there. You might need a stitch or two, but a bandage should see you right. Just as well you have such…such well-developed muscles.” A delicate flush came to matron’s face. “You might limp for a while, and I can’t see you going back into a trench any time soon. Bite your lip, Captain—time for the iodine!”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  On a bench outside the hospital, soldiers with bandages and crutches shared their smokes and tall tales. Silent among them was Captain Thorne. He could hear the arrival of the ambulances—the lads from the chateau had gone over the top.

  ‘Look in my pocket, promise me.’

  So Thorne did exactly as Jack had asked of him. Such a simple act, for a boy who might even now— So much blood, the fabric in tatters. In the pockets, Thorne found ends of string from the stables and small, shiny pebbles from the stream. Was this what Jack had wanted him to see, reminders of the happy time they had shared?