by Terri Nixon
And there was the ladder. Unbroken, waiting. I closed my eyes briefly, pictured Will, and began to climb. As my head rose above the parapet I had to swallow a surge of nausea; terror took hold and threatened to push me back down and propel me back into Archie’s safe, comforting arms. But Will lay out here, just up ahead by the copse, Archie had said. My gentle, clever, courageous Lord William. Dead. And he’d died believing I had broken my promise and given up on him.
My hands slipped on the ladder, and I felt the sting of a splinter from the rough wood but managed not to hiss aloud in pain. No one had taken a shot at me yet; it seemed the rumours were right, that Will had managed to take out the last remaining sniper before he died. Died…oh God… Could I bear to see him, after all? See those beautiful, clear blue eyes staring up at the sky, the mouth I had kissed now falling open, slack and cold? I stopped, holding on to the last part of the ladder, almost praying for an invisible bullet to take me too. Then self-preservation took over and I threw myself forward, flat onto the torn and blasted ground of No Man’s Land.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The first flare almost made me shout. A hiss, a whine, and I shoved my face into the dirt before the light spilled across the land and could catch my white, terrified face. I pulled my frozen hands back up my coat sleeves and, lying there, breathing in the wet filth, I waited for the shot that would reunite me with Will, but it still didn’t come. I lay still, unable to see when the light had faded, and finding it harder and harder to breathe as the mud got into my nose, and I began to feel as if I was suffocating.
I knew for sure then that I wasn’t yet ready to die, despite the pain of grief that ripped at me, and the absence of anything hopeful to cling to, and I twisted my head to the side far enough to drag in a breath through my mouth, then turned back into the ground again. I had no need to rush, but at the same time every moment I wasn’t at Will’s side felt like someone was gradually unravelling me from the inside out. Only touching him now could stop it, and leave me with some part of myself intact.
My head still down, I concentrated until I had my bearings, picturing the location of the German trench in relation to my outstretched hands, and then began to inch forward over the pits and boggy mounds. The patches of grass that had survived the barrage were like little oases of cleanliness, and I used them to wipe mud from my eyes so I could see at least, but I had to fight the strong urge to do the same with my face and hands. The former German stronghold was silent, but a good distance before I reached it I saw the first huge coils of barbed wire. It was of a heavier gauge than the wire the British Expeditionary Forces used, and near my hand lay a set of wire-cutters, no doubt cast aside in frustration at their inability to cut through it. The bombardment didn’t seem to have done much to it either, the same sorry story as the Somme offensive last year; were lessons never to be learned?
A shadow moved up ahead and I bit back a cry and turned my face back down, heart thudding. From the corner of my eye it had looked as though a man were standing beside the wire, swaying from side to side as if he rocked a troubled child in his arms. I waited for a challenge, or the snap of a rifle and then oblivion, but heard nothing except the wind rustling in the trees of the nearby copse. Slowly, I raised my head again and looked properly. The shadow was in fact a silhouette, a darker patch in the darkness of the night, and he swayed because the wire did: the two were now one.
He was tall. Extremely so, and I realised who he was and couldn’t stop a moan from breaking free because at his side lay another shape, face down, his pack hanging open where he’d fumbled for his grenade with dying fingers. Behind me I heard a whisper, and it registered somewhere that it was urgently speaking my name, but I couldn’t turn to look back; Will lay a few feet in front of me and that awful unravelling was happening faster. If I didn’t get to his side I would die too.
I crawled to him, over mud and stones, feeling my skin tear as it fell on the twisted metal of spent shells; my hands and knees were a mass of blood by the time I reached him. I tried to roll him onto his back, desperate for the sight of his face, praying I would recognise him, that he hadn’t been hit there, at least. But he was heavy. His uniform and pack were weighed down with equipment, and water-logged by his lying out here in the wet for hours, and I couldn’t roll him over, I had no strength with which to do it.
I sobbed aloud then, throwing care to the bitter winds, what did it matter if I was heard?
‘Evie!’ the voice came again but I still didn’t turn.
‘I can’t move him, Archie. Help me!’
‘Damn you! What were you thinking?’ But he crawled up beside me and when I finally looked at him I saw his face was not angry at all, but desperately sad. ‘What are you trying to do?’
‘I couldn’t leave him out here,’ I said, my voice hitching. Will’s hat had fallen off as I tried to roll him, and the sight of his familiar dark hair, and the vulnerability of the back of his fair-skinned neck, lit by the sliver of moon, sliced through me like a blade. ‘Help me take him back, Archie? Please?’
A second later we both threw ourselves flat as another flare went up. Archie stirred first, after an age it seemed. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘the Bosche are well back, they’ve abandoned this post. The flares are just proof we’ve shaken them.’
‘Then say you’ll help me,’ I begged again. He looked at me, then at Will, and nodded. I realised I’d been so lost in my own grief I hadn’t spared a thought for his; he and Will had been close for a while, he must be feeling the loss acutely too. I touched his arm, but didn’t say anything.
Together we took hold of Will’s shoulder and rolled him. There was a sucking sound as the front of his uniform came free of the mud, and where he had been lying with his head turned to one side, the right side of his face was plastered in it. His eyes were closed, the lashes dark against the white of his clean cheek, and matted on the dirty side. His mouth was only partly open, showing a glimpse of half-muddied teeth, and he looked pale and very, very young.
‘Wh…where was he hit?’ I managed to say, and Archie patted his hands down Will’s body. ‘In the side, I think,’ he said. ‘Hard to say until we get him back into the light.’ He added more softly, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see the mortuary treat him with respect.’
Despite the gentleness of his tone, I hated the words he spoke, and looked back at Will’s beautiful, achingly familiar face. The thought of him going into the ground threatened to push aside all reason, and I realised how close I was to hysteria. I forced the image of him in one of those awful plain coffins from my mind; I’d think about it later, would have to, but for now I had to get him back behind our own lines where I could make sure his body was cleaned and cared for.
Archie was eager to get back now, too. I could see him looking worriedly around, peering through the dark. ‘You take his arms, I’ll take his feet. For heaven’s sake keep low.’ He spared me a look before picking up Will’s feet, and his voice was exasperated but full of affection. ‘Uncle Jack was right about you. Just don’t get yourself killed, he’ll never forgive me.’
After my terrified crawl through the shattered landscape alone, I felt almost nonchalant about the journey back, as though I could just stand up, throw Will over my shoulder and march back to the sap-head in full view of anyone who cared to take a pot-shot. But we bent low, inching our way, with me holding Will under the arms and Archie supporting his feet. My back screamed with the effort, each foot we covered felt like a mile, and it was hard not to grunt or exclaim aloud as our muscles strained and our breath shortened. I could feel the stitches at my neck pulling, but they held, and there was only the harsh, fiery pain of the healing wound, no fresh blood.
I went first, and backwards – Archie insisted, in case of enemy sniper fire which would find him before me – and stretched my foot out behind me at every step, knowing a mis-step could send all three of us tumbling into a shell-hole. The terror of mines was something I couldn’t afford to dwell on.
&nbs
p; At last we reached the sap-head again, and Archie told me to go down the ladder first. ‘I’ll lower him down to you, you just guide him, aye?’
‘It’ll be even more difficult carrying him through that mud,’ I whispered back. ‘There’s no duckboards there, remember?’
He hesitated, then nodded. ‘OK, once we’re down I’ll go and get a stretcher-bearer, I’ll need help to get him up to the collecting post.’
I climbed down the ladder, wincing at the press of the splinter I’d received on the way up a million years ago, and Archie carefully lowered Will to me, lying flat and holding onto Will’s webbing, grunting with the effort of controlling the slide. I felt Will’s body slither into my arms, and sank to my knees with him, holding his head up so it didn’t fall into the mud. It felt more vital than ever now to keep him clean, as if allowing more dirt to collect on his skin were a form of burial. I wasn’t ready.
I smoothed his hair from his eyes, wiping at the dirt as best I could, and Archie briefly squeezed my shoulder and went in search of some means to carry him away. I was only aware of the water lapping over my knees in a distant sort of way. The stinging cuts from shrapnel and stones hummed quietly in the background and I didn’t even think about how lucky I was to still be alive, beyond the ability to hold Will again. His head rolled back in my arms and I instinctively cupped my hand beneath his cheek and jaw, gently lifting it again, so I could look down into his face until the time came when I would have to surrender his body. As I did so I felt my skin tingle. All over. Every part of me suddenly leapt to life and, with my heart triple-thumping, I pressed my shaking fingers against his neck, just below the angle of his jaw.
I hadn’t imagined it. I opened my mouth to scream for Archie, then remembered how close we were to the German lines. Instead I lifted my fingers from Will’s cold skin, and then replaced them, suddenly terrified it had been my own thundering pulse I had picked up. It wasn’t.
‘Will?’ I whispered. There was no response, but I lowered my face to his parted lips and felt the faintest brush of his breath on my skin. ‘Will!’ A sound behind me in the trench made me turn in sudden terror, but it was only Archie and two stretcher-bearers. ‘He’s alive!’ I said, through lips that suddenly felt numb. What if this was the last breath in him? We had dragged him across that rocky, ruined ground…we might have killed him.
Archie dropped to his knees beside us, heedless of the water, and took Will in his own arms, feeling, as I had done, for the faint, thready pulse. He looked up at me, then around at the stretcher-bearers. ‘Right, quick, you two. Get him down the line and out. Now!’
Between us we got Will onto the stretcher, and then Archie’s arm came around me as we watched the men round the first difficult bend into the main trench. I slumped against him for a second, trying to make sense of the swift turnabout of emotions that rendered me utterly useless, then plunged after them, desperate not to lose sight of Will in case I never saw him again.
Archie and I followed the ambulance in his car, and my eyes were fixed on the hurriedly fastened canvas that flapped in the wind. Neither of us spoke…I wanted to thank him again for helping me, but when I rehearsed the words they sounded insulting and self-indulgent; he had helped Will, not me. He had risked his life to come after me, it was true, but in the end it was Will’s life he had saved.
By the time we reached the Clearing Station, Will was conscious. Sheet-white, and sweating, he breathed in short, shallow bursts, his eyes closed, his hair matted to his head and with one shaking hand he held a wad of dressing against his left side. Word of his return from the dead had flashed around, and the corporal I’d overheard delivering the news arrived, in a state of guilty relief, to tell his story again.
‘He was trying to lift Private Glenn off the wire. He had one hand up, see?’ He raised his left arm in demonstration, ‘and the sniper got Glenn, and then him. He managed to get to his grenade before he fell, and sent Jerry off. We was all sure he’d copped it too.’
The nurse cut away Will’s filthy, mud- and blood-covered jacket and jersey, glanced up at her VAD and snapped an order for fresh bandages and iodine. The VAD hurried away and I looked back at Will’s face; tight-jawed, eyes closed, brows drawn down. The bullet wound was visible only as a small, neat hole, but I had seen enough casualties to be able to guess at the truth behind that seemingly innocent mark. The bullet had hit him midway between hip and ribcage, and travelled across his body, but there was no exit wound, and when the sister gently palpitated his abdomen he groaned. I grabbed his hand, but he didn’t open his eyes.
‘Well, it looks as if your little act of negligence has cost this young man dearly,’ the sister said to the corporal, with some heat. ‘Leaving him out there has done him a good deal of harm.’ She looked at me, at my muddied state, at my clothes, and then at my hand holding Will’s. Her eyebrows went up.
‘My husband,’ I managed, and after the first flash of disapproval, her voice softened. ‘We can do our best for him here, but he’s going to need better care than we can provide. Surgery, obviously, and the sooner the better, but the after-care is going to be vital. Infection’s the biggest danger with abdominals, and he’s been lying out there a long time. We’ll get him as comfortable as we can, and give him something for the pain, then as soon as he’s fit to travel he needs to get out to the hospital.’
With his shirt cut away I could see scratches and scars I’d never even known he had, and once more I was hit by the realisation that our lives were utterly separate, joined only by our past. To pray for a future together felt like too much, all I could bring myself to hope for was that he had any kind of future at all. He opened his eyes at last, and looked down to see our hands still linked, and it seemed he wanted to say something, but the sister was cleaning his wound and laying fresh padding over it, and each gentle brush of her fingers seemed to slam into him like a hammer blow. His fingers ground into mine but I held on, taking comfort in the strength I could feel in his grip. Fighting strength. The sister finished applying the bandage, and prepared a morphine injection which he eyed with frantic hunger. As she slipped the needle beneath his goose-flesh-rippled skin he turned once more to me, and his face relaxed. ‘Thank you,’ he breathed, and then he was away.
‘Who told him you went out after him?’ Archie wanted to know, his voice sharp. ‘No one knows as far as I’m aware, and there could be trouble if anyone finds –’
‘That’s not what he meant, Arch.’ I stumbled over the words, trying not to break down. ‘He was thanking me for letting him go.’
We watched in silence as Will was lifted away, only to be replaced by another soldier, his face swathed in blood-soaked bandages with small, whimpering sounds coming from behind them. A shock of blond hair was all I could see of him, but the sound was very young, and the slight body trembled, drowning in a uniform that hung on a frame shrunken by hard work and poor diet. I felt terrible that my thoughts barely drifted across him before following the stretcher carrying Will; every one of these men deserved someone to hold their hand, to soothe their fears, to murmur comforting words as they fought their own intense battle against encroaching darkness…but I had no strength left, I could only be that person for one man now.
The hospital at Arras was underground. A labyrinth of roughly-hewn tunnels, accommodation for soldiers, signs pointing to exits and different areas, new tunnels joining up with existing ones, quarried hundreds of years before. There was electric light, running water…these things should have struck me with awe, but all I could see was the mud-encrusted soles of Will’s boots as they whisked him away from me and into one of the operating theatres, and all I could think about was whether that brief glimmer of life had been his last.
Archie walked beside me as we made our way back up to the surface. Both of us pushed up against the walls as groups of soldiers clattered past, heading for the exits on their way to the trenches, and surgeons and nurses hurried by on errands on which life nearly always depended. Once again I tried to
make myself remember that Will was just another nameless face to them, a young man to be tended and, hopefully saved ready to send back out there again, but all I wanted to do was scream at them that he was more than that, he was more important than all the others. But of course he wasn’t.
Archie was becoming more and more agitated; his replies to my questions were growing shorter, and his face was tense, his eyes dark and haunted-looking. It wasn’t until we emerged into the night and his face immediately looked to the sky that I realised why. It had been creeping into the small hours by the time Archie and I had got Will back to the sap-head, and although it was not yet growing light, it was late April and soon the sky would be brushed with the first light of dawn.
‘Archie?’ I spoke gently, but he jumped, and turned a white, strained face towards me.
‘I know Oli did a terrible thing,’ he said, his voice husky with the effort of control, ‘but he’s just a kid, Evie.’
‘I know.’
‘He doesn’t deserve to die.’
‘No.’
‘For God’s sake, it was his sister! If I’d known, and got to Drewe first, I’d likely have done the same thing.’
‘No!’ I grabbed his arm. ‘You wouldn’t, you know you wouldn’t. And if you had, well, you wouldn’t have gone off and left a friend to fight your battles for you.’
‘That’s just it, though. I am his friend. And what am I doing? Hanging around this place –’