Using his good arm, nose to the brackish, vile-smelling mud, he dragged himself across the flat ground in front of the parapet and down. Inch by inch, seeping scarlet into the shining slime, boy and dog clawed their way towards each other.
There were only yards between them now. Stanley was trembling uncontrollably, each deafening squelch rattling his nerves. His hand clenched a torn bit of clothing, a sleeve perhaps, that made him start as though he’d seen a ghost. Stanley reached forward and with one last desperate stretch he had Soldier’s head in his hands, was pulling him close.
Soldier wrenched free. With the last of his strength he rose, his forelegs slithering as he tried to sit, lift his chest, raise his head to his master. The slender jaws were open and grinning, his eyes brilliant. Senseless with pain and love, Stanley could not move to retrieve the message. Soldier raised his snout a little higher. Still the boy made no move. Soldier pawed the ground, his tail flipping. Stanley’s gut convulsed, his words strangled and choked.
‘Good boy, good . . .’
He snapped the cylinder off the collar with a sharp twist. ‘Down, boy, down. Lie.’ Stanley turned to the row of slouch hats cresting the parapet. He raised his good arm and hurled the cylinder over, saw Hamish catch it, then turned and slipped a soggy biscuit fragment into Soldier’s jaws.
Early evening, 24 April 1918
Aquenne Wood
Cursing the pain that seared his arm, he eased his coat off and spread it out. Gently he inched it under Soldier, pulled the dog and coat under him, knotting the sleeves behind his back. Carrying the dog in a hammock beneath him, Stanley crawled towards a shallow runnel that lay a few feet away.
‘Adjust your sights to the hollow tree trunk to the forward right,’ he heard someone yell to the gunners. Stanley crawled on. Soldier’s message would have identified the hollow trunk that hid the sniper with the deadly aim. Cradling the wounded dog, Stanley edged into the runnel.
‘Blast it. Give it all you’ve got,’ came the instruction to the gunners.
Five minutes passed. When the firing stopped and Stanley looked out, not a shard remained standing.
‘Adjust your sights. Two o’clock. The eastern edge of the Monument. Give it all you’ve got.’
Stanley heard again the pounding of his own artillery
‘For you, Tom,’ he said. ‘For you.’
The runnel was perhaps three foot deep, just enough to shelter a boy and a dog. They lay side by side, Stanley combing Soldier’s mud-choked coat inch by inch with his fingers. Soldier’s arteries hadn’t been hit, the bleeding was only superficial. There was a bullet wound on the left flank, a round, deep puncture. On the right hind leg another three in a cluster. They must wait here, mustn’t risk moving Soldier till they were rescued.
Stanley rested his head next to Soldier’s, feeling his warm breath, watching as linesmen crawled forward over the slime making hurried repairs. Stanley saw fresh troops saunter up in endless ranks, with a confident swagger, not through the communication trench, but over the top – Australians – their slouch hats silhouetted in the moonlight.
The moon rose higher, a full, red moon. When would he and Soldier be rescued? A wounded dog would be a low priority, Stanley’s own wound a low priority. The counter-attack would go ahead, but still the wounded and the dead would be left where they lay.
At ten to ten, an officer moved along the trench spooning out the rum ration.
‘Open up. Open up. Open up.’ Brigadier-General Glasgow rose and stood, clear against the night sky. ‘There’s no time for reconnaissance and you don’t know the ground but you’ll surprise an exhausted enemy. Don’t stop till you’ve taken the Monument, then hold on, at all costs.’
As far as Stanley could see in either direction, a single file of men rose from the moon-silvered ridges and crests of trenches.
‘Go forward, kill every bloody German that you see. Goodbye, boys – it’s neck or nothing.’
Stanley watched the Australians saunter off, rifles cocked, as casual as if going after rabbits. A Company detached itself from the main body. It drew up in absolute silence and halted level with the runnel. Every head turned. In perfect formation, they raised their rifles.
‘To you, soldier dog,’ they shouted as one. ‘To you, soldier boy.’ As one, each fired a single shot to the sky, lowered their rifles and, again, in perfect formation and with dazzling gallantry began a jog down the stiff slope, to join the main advance.
In an instant a hundred enemy flares shot up like Roman candles making the plain as light as day. The Australians, roaring and running now like a Viking horde, plunged towards the Monument and the burning buildings of the village. More German SOS shells rose. Leaving fantastic firework trails, they arced and stayed suspended before bursting into a brilliant light and floating dreamily to the ground.
Stanley’s arm was burning hot, yet he was shivering. Soldier was scratching one forepaw with the other, scraping them on the ground. He must feed Soldier more of Fidget’s biscuit. He fumbled in his pockets but Soldier was too distracted, his frantic paws scrabbling and scratching at the earth bank.
Gas! Gas had poisoned the mud between his pads, was burning him like acid. In the brilliant white light of a flare, Stanley saw Soldier’s eyes, gooey and gummed together. He put his head to Soldier’s chest and heard the hissing, crackling breath. The water, the thick, stale air of the runnel, were poisoned. Stanley gulped the damp night air but his head was too heavy, there were stones in his chest. The ditches and dykes and the shell holes, they were all deadly.
How long would it be before someone rescued them?
Crazy flashes slashed the plain. The wild onslaught ran onward. The town flared up under a shell like an evil pyre, making of the moon a ball of fire, of the plain a field of blood, bathing the slope in ghastly crimson.
Stanley’s aching fingers released their grip on the crumbling bank. His bad arm was throbbing and pulsing from shoulder to fingertip. He was shivery, with fits of hot and cold, so tired he neither knew nor cared where he was. The ground was falling away beneath him. They might be buried alive, he and Soldier, while Amiens was saved, while Paris was saved.
There was a new, stabbing pain in Stanley’s chest, knives in his throat. Why were the sky and the earth darker than before? Was it the darkness that was burning his eyes, blistering his throat? If only he could pull down the woolly sky, wrench fistfuls of it over him to muffle the groans and wails of wounded men, the faint despairing moans that pierced the night. He must let his streaming eyes close. Sleep, sleep would ease his pain.
Stanley drifted in and out of wakefulness.
He was forced out of sleep by violent choking. Did someone have a hand down his throat? Stanley’s empty body convulsed and he retched until there was nothing left inside except darkness and needles. Now there was poisoned water too, rising, flooding his chest, forcing its way up, brackish and vile into his throat, his mouth. Darkness and needles and poisoned water filled the burning space behind his eyes and pressed him into oblivion.
Before Dawn, 25 April 1918
Aquenne Wood
Cool fingers held Stanley’s wrist, then rested on his forehead.
‘Half dead. No more ’n a child.’
Stanley tilted his face towards the voice and tried to open his gluey eyes. His right arm jerked to his eyes and rubbed them.
‘Don’t touch or you’ll make them worse.’
Stanley’s arm was restrained and moved to his side.