The men had embellished the tale of their arrival, until Jeffries had glowing red eyes and magic bolts coming out of his fingers. As a result, his Church Parades were better attended now than they had been on the Somme, but it gave him little comfort.
He watched a wiring party at work beyond the front line trench. It was dangerous work, as was everything on this world. Barbed wire was in limited supply, but they had found a lethally barbed creeper they called wire weed that made a living substitute. The men, wearing old sniper’s armour for protection, weren’t so much laying it as cutting back the writhing vines, training it over wooden x-frame knife rests to fill gaps in the barbed wire entanglement in front of the fire trenches.
Walking over a small footbridge across the support trench, the Padre wrinkled his nose. The sweaty feet, cordite and corpse stench of the Somme had long since faded, to be replaced by the acrid tang of animal dung. Gathered from the veldt, huge tarpaulin-covered heaps of it had been left to rot down. They told him it was a saltpetre experiment, an attempt to make their own gunpowder. That, however, was still some months off yet, if they succeeded at all.
The sun, that was not their sun, was just rising above the valley sides and beginning to take the chill off the morning air, and the poppies were beginning to open.
He had been surprised to see the poppies when they first appeared. They all had. Their seeds, long buried in the Somme mud, had somehow survived. In the warm climes offered by this foreign world, they had germinated and flowered, dispersing their seeds on the wind so that now a carpet of red flowed across the scorched cordon sanitaire around them and onto the alien veldt beyond in an invasion all of their own. The poppies spread out, like the red of the British Empire across the maps of the world in his old atlas. To the men, they were a cheering sight. A sign of hope. It was as if God had sent a message to say he had not abandoned them after all.
Poppies hadn’t been the only things to appear. Potatoes had sprouted too: after all, before the war, before the trenches, the Somme was rich farming ground. They cleared some land beyond the encampment for agriculture. They planted the potatoes there and some native vegetables. It all went well until the alien weeds came and the new plants had literally fought each other for dominance until the entire area had to be razed.
It had put him in mind of the Old Testament story of Joseph and the Pharaoh’s dream, of seven thin and shrivelled ears of wheat swallowing up the ripe ones. That unsettled him deeply, reminding him of his own vision, the terrifying hallucination brought on by the Khungarrii in a heathen ritual he had been forced to undergo, along with Jeffries. The vision itself had faded as the drugs had left his system; he had tried remembering it, but he could not. He was left with an unsettling sense of terror and despair. Recently, he had begun waking with night terrors, things that receded and vanished from memory as he awoke in a sweat. Things that made him afraid. He was terrified his vision was coming back to haunt him.
He was shaken from his thoughts by Sergeant Dixon across the parade ground, barking out instructions to a platoon of heathen urmen. Nicknamed ‘Fred Karno’s Army,’ after a popular song, they were dressed in skins and customised pieces of armour shaped from the chitinous shells of various creatures. They were drilling with spears instead of rifles, much to the amusement of the Tommies on work parties nearby, who had stopped to watch the entertainment.
The NCO was teaching them the rudiments of drill, forging into shape a ragtag army of urmen refugees who, displaced by recent Khungarrii attacks, had sought sanctuary here. For the urmen, it would give them the tools they needed to defend themselves against the Ones. It also served to bolster the numbers of the Pennines themselves.
On one side of the parade ground stood the single-storey log building that was the small hospital. Huddled around it, groups of tents served as wards and surgical theatres. A group of soldiers stood waiting to be seen by the MO.
Across the small parade ground, in isolation, was a barbed wire compound, ‘the Bird-Cage,’ where those poor souls suffering emotional shock from the Somme, or from finding themselves here, could be kept safe. Some shook uncontrollably, and others rocked themselves incessantly, or cried or howled in torment. A few sought to hide themselves, however they could.
The Padre said a silent prayer for them, trotted down into the reserve trench and headed for Lieutenant Everson’s dugout.
Approaching the gas curtain, he heard a woman’s voice tinged with exasperation. He knew the voice well. Only three women had the misfortune to accompany them to this place. Edith Bell had been one of those kidnapped with him and taken to the Khungarrii edifice. She, Corporal Atkins and Lieutenant Everson had confronted Jeffries, who then gutted the Khungarrii edifice and destroyed their sacred library, setting them all even more at odds with the creatures that ruled this world than they had been before.
Lieutenant Everson sounded just as frustrated. “Nurse Bell, I’m sorry, but I have over five hundred men under my command. It is becoming clearer day by day that we cannot depend on being returned by whatever forces brought us here. If we are to return, then it will have to be under our own cognisance. That map of his you saw. You said yourself he went to a lot of trouble to get it. It’s obviously important. The sketch you gave us was helpful, but short on detail. Anything else you can give me, anything at all, will be most valuable.”
Bell sighed heavily. “I know that, Lieutenant, and I have tried. I have wracked my brains. And I can assure you, if I remember the slightest thing you’ll be the first to know.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“Then give me more aid for the shell-shock patients,” she asked. “Captain Lippett has no time for them. He believes they’re nothing but shirkers and malingerers. They’re ill. You can’t keep them in the Bird Cage, like prisoners! You just can’t!”
“Nurse Bell, Captain Lippett is the Medical Officer here. I don’t think he’d appreciate you going over his head. Please do try and stick to the proper channels,” said Everson with a sigh. “Do I have to tell Sister Fenton?”
Padre Rand coughed politely outside the rubberised canvas flap that formed the dugout’s door.
“Enter!”
He stepped inside. Everson was at his desk. Scattered in front of him was Jeffries’ coded occult journal and various maps and papers they had taken from his dugout. Sat opposite, Nurse Bell took the opportunity to end her interview. She stood up, brushed down her nurse’s apron over her part-worn khaki trousers and bobbed a slight curtsey to Rand as she passed him. “Padre,” she said curtly, pulling the canvas door aside and stepping out into the light.
Everson looked up from behind his desk, sweeping a hand across the papers and journal before him.
“No matter how many times I look at this stuff, I come up with nothing. Nothing but that damn Croatoan symbol with which Jeffries seemed to be obsessed. The rest I can’t make head or tails of, even after three months.”
The Padre felt for him. Lieutenant Everson was a good officer, respected by the men, but where the blame for bad decisions might be passed back up the line to Battalion HQ or the General Staff, here the buck stopped with him. He was the highest-ranking infantry officer left. Whatever credit he had with the men was running out. He had turned more and more frequently to the scattered papers looking for answers, as another might turn to the bible or the bottle.