The Wraiths of War

by Mark Morris

  ‘Time to end this,’ he said, and switching the torch from his right hand to his left, he reached into the pocket of his cagoule and withdrew the heart. He held it up in a way that made me think of a wizard in a fantasy story, striking fear into his enemies by displaying the source of his power. He closed his eyes and his face settled into an expression of grim concentration. And then there was a… I’m not sure what to call it. A pulse? A beat? It felt like a deep, throbbing convulsion in the pit of my belly that seemed to temporarily empty me of all sensation, all thought.

  When I blinked what felt like a split second later I was amazed to see that the torch had reappeared in my older self’s right hand, and that the heart was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘What did I just miss?’ I said, and then I noticed that not only had the skeletal figure that had tumbled into the pit disappeared, but also that the dead German officer I’d been sharing the trench with was now back where he’d been before, and was no longer moving. He had reverted back to his previous and proper state – that of an inert mound of decaying flesh, bone and cloth.

  ‘Did you do that?’

  He shrugged, patted his pocket. ‘Not just me. I had some help.’

  ‘But you controlled the heart? I mean, you… directed its energy or whatever?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say control. I’d never say control. But… I guess so, yeah.’

  I felt a thrill go through me. ‘So… when did you learn to do that? When will I learn to do it? And what else can you make it do? Can you—’ Then, seeing the stubborn look on his face, I raised a hand, forced myself to stop. ‘All right, I know. I’m asking too much. You’re not allowed to say anything in case it fucks up the future. But… what can you tell me? What can you give me to make my life a bit easier – our life a bit easier?’

  He seemed to relent. He smiled, shrugged. But he said, ‘Not much. The thing is, when you get to my age, you only dare do what you know you’ve already done. You want to do more, but you can’t risk it. Every time you go back in time you’re scared you’ll fuck up. You’re scared you’ll say too much or do too much, and everything will unravel.’

  ‘Which must mean things are okay with you,’ I said. ‘If you don’t want to change things, I mean. It must mean things have turned out okay.’

  He smiled – a little bitterly? I wasn’t sure.

  ‘Or maybe it just means I’m scared of things turning out even worse than they have.’ Before I could respond he made a zip motion across his mouth with his fingers. ‘My lips are sealed. For both our sakes. There’s a line in the sand, and there’s too much at stake to risk stepping over it.’

  I sighed. I was freezing cold, and miserable, and desperate to get the heart back – but he was here, in front of me. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get what I could out of him.

  ‘But what if you are stepping over it? I mean, what if you’re stepping over it without knowing, and your memories are constantly changing to accommodate that without you realising it? Have you thought about that possibility?’

  ‘Of course I have. I’ve thought about everything. At your age, you’re still relatively new to all this, but me – I’m old. It’s become both an obsession and a way of life.’

  ‘And a trap?’ I said, maybe a little spitefully. ‘One that you can’t escape from?’

  He acknowledged this with a shrug. ‘Maybe that too.’

  I sighed – and then realised that something else had happened since he had used the heart to kill (or should that be re-kill?) the dead: the guns had stopped. Once again there was silence in No Man’s Land – aside, of course, from the constant scuttling of rats.

  ‘Did you undo what just happened?’ I asked. ‘Did you stop the dead or just take us back to before they came back to life?’

  ‘Both,’ he said. ‘As far as the Germans are concerned, they’ve just taken a couple of pops at you, but they’re not on full alert. You wouldn’t stand a chance of getting through their lines if they were.’

  I narrowed my eyes. ‘So is that what I do? Get through their lines?’

  His smile was both enigmatic and smug, and I thought to myself: I’m never going to smile like that. It’s so fucking irritating!

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘You’ve got the heart, so it must be. So am I untouchable now? I mean, if you’re me, and you’re helping me out, then that must mean I’m going to get through this, right? I’m going to be okay?’

  I was testing him, playing Devil’s Advocate. This was old ground, and I pretty much knew what he was going to say before he said it.

  ‘Don’t try and be smart, kid. You know that I know that you know it’s never that simple. Even at my age, there are still no hard and fast answers – that much I can tell you. You should never assume, you should never be blasé. In fact, yes, you should assume. You should assume that time is constantly in flux, which means that it can change in an instant. Yes, I got to where I am now, but I didn’t do it by being reckless. And I didn’t do it just by listening to me when I was you – don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s that simple. I did it by being careful, and by being lucky, but who’s to say that you’ll be as lucky as I was? Maybe you’ll fuck up and we’ll both blink out of existence. Maybe you’ll make decisions that change what I’ve got, where I am – or maybe you already have. How would I know? I mean, it’s not as if you feel your memories changing, is it?’ He reached out a hand and grabbed my arm. He looked fierce now, even angry. ‘There were times, kid, when I needed help and for whatever reason it didn’t come. Times when I got hurt, badly hurt – when I could have died, in fact. But you’ve had a few of those already, haven’t you, so you know all about that? What I’m saying is, just because I’m here now isn’t any kind of insurance that you will be. So be careful. Be fucking careful. And be lucky.’

  And with that, he was gone.

  EIGHT

  TRENCH WARFARE

  So what now? I thought.

  I was cold, wet, exhausted, and the way I saw it I had two choices: either I could go on or go back. But in truth, those two choices were only one choice. If I went back, I might lose the heart forever, because who knew when I’d get chance to look for it again, and where it might end up in the meantime?

  Added to which, although the older me hadn’t actually led me to the heart, he’d not only removed a couple of obstacles in my path to it, but had given me more than a hint that continuing with my self-imposed mission was the right course of action. What was it he’d said? He’d rolled back time so the Germans wouldn’t be on full alert, which would make it easier for me to get through their lines – something like that.

  A one-man mission to penetrate the enemy’s defences and retrieve a valuable artefact. It sounded like the plot of a Boy’s Own adventure story. But it was what I was going to have to do if I wanted the heart back. And I was going to have to do it on the double, while it was still dark. Leave it any longer and I’d be out in No Man’s Land when dawn broke, and hiding would be impossible.

  Shivering with cold, I looked over at the dead German soldier, who was once again lying in the position he’d been in before he’d started to stir. Did that mean the bullets I’d shot into him were now back in my gun? I checked and saw that they were. I puzzled briefly over how I could have a memory of an event that effectively had not now taken place – and then I put the thought from my head. I’d need my full wits and strength to concentrate on the here and now, on what was directly ahead of me. There was no point pondering on imponderables.

  Remembering what I’d been about to do when the dead German had first stirred to life, I moved forward and, bracing myself against the stench, began once again to peel his coat from his decomposing body. This time I managed it without incident, and a couple of minutes later was standing with the stained and stinking coat in my hand, shaking and concentrating as hard as I could on not throwing up. I had nothing left inside me except bile, and I knew that if I succumbed to the urge to puke it would do nothing but twist my guts int
o knots and drain me of more energy than I could afford to expend. I moved as far from the German as I could, though some of the stink of him, contained within the coat, came with me. Grimacing, I held the coat in both hands and shook it out as if it was a bed sheet I was trying to flap free of creases. It helped – but only a little.

  Although every instinct urged me to fling the coat as far away as possible, then wash my hands in one of the muddy pools dotted around the base of the shell hole, I gritted my teeth and shrugged it on. Not only would the coat keep me warm, but it would also effectively hide my British uniform if and when I managed to cross the German lines. If I was lucky, it might even wrong-foot any German soldiers I might come across long enough for me to take advantage of the situation.

  Luckily the coat was a decent fit. Not perfect – I’m tall but fairly lean, whereas the German had been shorter and stockier, which meant that the sleeves came up over my bony wrists – but good enough. When, bent over double with one hand on my belly, I had once again conquered the urge to puke, I straightened up and spat on the ground.

  Okay, I thought. Time to go.

  Digging my fingers into the muddy walls of the shell crater, I heaved myself up and out. As I ascended I moved as slowly as I could and kept my head down. It was an awkward manoeuvre, and tough on the biceps, which had to take the majority of my weight, but having been on guard duty many times over the past few weeks, I knew that what tended to catch a sentry’s sleepy eye at night were sudden, jerky movements – a fact that had caused many a scurrying rat to be blown to Kingdom Come.

  It took me a long time to slide up and out of the shell hole, and by the time I managed it I was knackered, and at first could do no more than lie spread-eagled on the ground, breathing hard and trying to recover. I’d like to have lain there for at least twice as long as I did, but after about five minutes the cold oozing up from the muddy ground once again started to seep into my limbs through my layers of clothing, and so I slowly and reluctantly raised my head and tried to get my bearings. Ahead of me I saw the shattered tree trunk I’d been heading towards earlier. I estimated it was now something like thirty metres away.

  How long had I been out in No Man’s Land? It seemed like forever, but it was probably no more than about ninety minutes. Possibly less, as far as Frank back in the home trench was concerned, when you took into account how the older me had helped by winding time back a little. No need to panic just yet then – I still had several hours of darkness ahead of me. Trying to stay calm, I moved forward on my belly, inch by painstaking inch, negotiating a route through the mangled bodies and darting rats and often lethal chunks of shrapnel.

  At last, having traversed a distance that would have taken me no more than a minute to cross on foot, I reached the tree stump. I paused here a few moments to catch my breath, my curled-up body pressed behind the stump for shelter as my lungs laboured and my ribs heaved. Once again, although my hands and feet and face were numb with cold, I was pouring with sweat inside my uniform. The muscles in my arms, legs and stomach were aching as if I’d been pumping iron for the last hour, and my head was swimming both with exhaustion and with the stink of decomposition from the coat, which was rising with the heat from my body and enclosing me in a reeking fug.

  Again, I waited until the cold started to creep through me, and then pressed on, though more cautiously than ever now that I was nearing the German lines. Just ahead of me, like thin, dark, looping scratches on the marginally lighter horizon, I saw coils of barbed wire rising from the rutted mud. Many a soldier, both from the German side and ours, had come a cropper on this stuff. If you ran into it in blind panic, as many did, you became ensnared, and therefore an easy target for enemy snipers. The trick, when approaching it horizontally as I was, was to take your time, to flatten it down bit by bit, keeping your movements slow and, most importantly, your mouth shut whenever you felt the hot, sharp sting of barbs scraping across your flesh. Eventually, if you were both patient and lucky, you would succeed in flattening a section of it down enough to be able to roll over it – though even at this point you had to be careful. If a stray upstanding barb snagged on your coat, you might end up pulling the wire taut and setting off a rattling chain reaction down the length of the coils, which would alert the enemy just as effectively as if you were to leap to your feet and wave your arms.

  It took me a good twenty minutes – my fingers as cold and numb as icicles even as the sweat trickled down my face and stung my eyes – to deal with the barbed wire strung across my path. The process involved delicately isolating each loop between the fingers of my two hands and then very carefully flattening and twisting each of those loops into corkscrew-like lengths, like the twist of wire at the top of a metal coat hanger, until I could squash them down into the mud. I had to repeat this process maybe a dozen times in all, taking care not to tug too hard on each loop of wire and make the whole coiling length of it jerk like a fisherman’s line. It was back-breaking work, not least because I had to do it flat on my belly with my chin resting in a pool of mud and my outstretched arms raised no higher than an inch above the ground, but eventually I managed to create an area wide enough to crawl over.

  Five minutes later, having successfully negotiated the German defences without raising the alarm, I came upon an upward-sloping ridge of mud, stretching to the right and left of me as far as I could see (which admittedly wasn’t far in the darkness) and topped with a layer of sandbags. I’d known the German trench must be close, but now that I could actually see it, no more than half a dozen yards in front of me, my heart quickened and my body started to shake with nerves. Once again, doubts assailed me. What the fuck was I doing here? Who was to say that the heart wasn’t lying out there in No Man’s Land somewhere, half-buried in the mud, and I had simply crawled past it in the darkness?

  Then I again remembered my older self’s words. He might not have said it outright, but hadn’t he strongly hinted that in order to get the heart back I would have to penetrate the German lines? But what the fuck could I do? I was one man against the entire German army! All right, so maybe that was exaggerating. Instead of panicking I needed to stay calm, think this through, break it down. What exactly was I likely to be faced with here? What obstacles would I have to overcome?

  If the Germans operated a similar system to ours, and I had to assume they did, they’d have somewhere between a dozen and two dozen men occupying each traverse – by which I mean a single section of trench, the trenches themselves being dug in a zigzag pattern to confine the blast of any explosives that might find their mark, and thus reduce the number of casualties. At this time of night most of those men would be asleep, with maybe only a couple of sentries on duty. So initially, if I were lucky, I’d have only two men to overcome. Which still made the odds two against one. But at least I had the element of surprise. Plus I was wearing a German officer’s overcoat.

  I crawled a little closer, moving so slowly now that a snail could have overtaken me. After reducing the distance between myself and the trench to only a couple of yards, I froze again.

  I could hear voices.

  There were two of them, and they were conversing quietly in German. I had no idea what they were saying. I’d never done German at school, and the only words I knew I’d picked up mainly (and ironically) from old war movies – ‘Achtung!’ ‘Schnell!’ ‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ ‘Heil, Hitler!’ Lying flat on my belly and listening to the voices for a minute or two – one light, almost boyish, the other deeper, more jovial, the words often accompanied by a rumbling chuckle – I was relieved to hear that they sounded both relaxed (which meant they must have decided the movement they’d seen and shot at in No Man’s Land earlier was nothing to get alarmed about) and that they were endeavouring to keep their voices low (which meant the other men must be asleep, as I’d hoped). It was odd to think I was only a few yards away from them, and that if I’d been so inclined I could have ended both their lives with a grenade or a couple of bullets. Odd and creepy too, because
on numerous occasions Frank and I had been in the same situation as the two German sentries, and my presence here was a reminder of how easy it was to become complacent, how close you could be to death without realising it.

  After a couple of minutes I retreated from the edge of the bunker, inching myself backwards and wincing at every tiny slurp and squelch of mud caused by the movement of my body. Once I was out of earshot of the German sentries (or at least, I hoped I was) I swivelled round and headed to my right, my intention being to drop into the trench some distance from the two men. I was now utterly plastered in mud from head to toe, but aside from the fact that it clung like glue, which meant that crawling through it was an enervating business, it didn’t worry me unduly, because most of the other men in the trenches were in a similar condition. After five minutes or so I reckoned I was far enough along the trench that I wouldn’t alert the sentries, whereupon I crawled up to the line of sandbags and after a quick peek to make sure there was no one about, I slithered up and over them.

  My heart was hammering now, the adrenaline rushing through me. I slid to the bottom of the trench, then clambered to my feet, my boots and the dead German’s stinking coat now so caked in mud they felt as heavy as lead. I did what I could to scrape off some of the filth, but it was a pretty hopeless task. I had nothing to scrape with except my hands, and they too were gloved in mud. In the end, hoping I wouldn’t have to move quickly any time soon – whether that be to fight or flee – I took a couple of deep breaths, then drew my revolver. Holding it by my side, concealed behind a fold of the mud-caked overcoat, I moved along the trench towards the two sentries.

  Be brash. Be confident. Act as if you own the place. I had no idea whether anyone had ever specifically given me that advice, or whether it was just one of those general life tips that you hear repeated every so often (the kind of approach interviewees and new employees and insurance salesmen are encouraged to adopt), but it was a mantra I was fully committed to right now. My best chance of success was to catch the enemy off-guard, and I knew I couldn’t do that by sneaking about like a thief.