“Sir!” snapped the Corporal, calling his attention to flashes coming from the OP up on the hillside. Everson watched them for a moment, spat out an oath, pulled out his field glasses and raised them to his eyes.
A dust cloud rolled along the veldt. Was it the Khungarrii again, hoping to catch them with their guard down? He quickly scanned the field deserted by the alien army. He spotted the immobile chatts facing the oncoming storm with an almost preternatural patience. He focused on the dust cloud. It seemed to stretch right across his field of vision, obscured only by the foothills of the valley.
“Hell and damnation! It’s a bloody stampede.”
“Stampede, sir?”
“Animals, Corporal, thousands of bloody animals headed this way, driven before the storm. When they pass the head of the valley I want you to fire a flare. Understood?”
“Flare. Understood, sir.”
“Tulliver, get your machine off the ground, do it now before the thing gets trampled! I don’t want to lose it.”
“You’re not the only one!” He didn’t have to be told twice. He sprang down the stairs in several leaps and pelted off to the cleared take-off strip.
Everson trotted down the stairs and rushed out of the farmhouse, past the machine gun section. “Bernard,” he yelled. “Bloody stampede. Best hole up there and stay under cover. They’ll be here soon. Let’s hope they decide to go round instead of through, eh?”
“Maybe we can help ’em decide?”
“Be obliged to you!”
Everson jumped down into the sap and ran along the jinked trench back to the outer fire trench ring. At least down in the trenches the men should be safe; well, safer. Any animals that got beyond the wire weed should just jump right over them.
At the junction with the fire trench ring, he turned right. Privates turned and looked at the sight of an officer running as he darted past, body swerving round the sandbag traverses, looking for the first NCO he could find. It was Sergeant Hobson.
“Sergeant, there’s a stampede headed this way. Keep the men stood to. And for God’s sake, preserve your ammunition. Don’t fire unless you have to. Send runners and pass the message on. Everyone else to the dugouts. We can’t guarantee their safety if they’re in the open.”
“Sir.”
Everson ran on through several more bays and took a sharp left down Pall Mall, the first communications trench he came to. Scarcely slowing his speed for the tight confines of the trench, he wove down the zigzags, careening off revetments and almost colliding with a ration party bringing up hot soup.
“Gangway!”
“Christ, watch it you silly—”
Everson didn’t wait for their mortified apologies. The soldiers in the trenches and dugouts might well weather the stampede in relative safety, but there were the tents and huts in the middle of the encampment that would be vulnerable, most of those housing the sick and the wounded and several small clans of urmen. He had to evacuate them into dugouts. He didn’t want to think about the consequences if he didn’t.
He collided heavily with someone running the other way, winding himself. He looked up to see the kinematographer straightening his wire-framed glasses.
“God damn it, Hepton!”
“You’re in an awful hurry, Lieutenant.”
“That’s because there’s a bloody stampede headed this way.”
He caught the eager glint in Hepton’s eye as he pushed past.
“Alien animal stampede? I say, that’s excellent!” he heard him call back, from beyond another jink in the communications trench, as he put distance between them.
Everson shook his head as he ran on past the crossroads that connected with the support trench. The damn man was all about the sensational. Well, let him have his stampede. If he got trampled underfoot for his film, it was no skin off his nose.
He took a left turn into the support trench, the inner ring. Traffic here was heavier and he had to slow down.
“Private!”
“Sir?”
Everson jerked his head in the direction of the parados. “Give me a leg up.”
“Sir?”
“Now!”
The private, nonplussed but knowing better than to ask, linked his fingers together, palms up. Everson stepped into the cradle and the private boosted him up, over the parados sandbags, to the open ground in the centre of the ring of trenches. He made his way to the hospital tent with its shabby fading red cross. He strode in, sweeping the flaps aside.
“Lippett? Where’s Captain Lippett?” he demanded of the white-coated orderly.
Lippett stepped out from behind a hung blanket cordoning off a section of tent for private use — his office.
“Yes, Lieutenant, what can I do for you?”
“There’s a stampede headed this way. You need to get your patients down into the dugouts.”
“Stampede? But some of them can’t be moved.”
He had no time for this. “Now, Doctor!”
The Doctor spluttered at the impudence. Again, Everson didn’t wait for a retort and heard Lippett giving orders to the orderlies and ‘light duty’ injured.
Most of his men were disciplined enough to follow orders, but the new urmen platoons, Fred Karno’s Army, didn’t seem to grasp the idea. Everson caught sight of several NCOs barking furiously at urmen, who weren’t obeying. They should have been going down into the trenches. Instead, they were gathering portable possessions.
“Do I have to do every blasted thing myself,” he muttered, as he made his way over to them. “Corporal, what the hell is going on here? Get those urmen into the trenches.”
“They won’t go, sir. They keep shouting something and pointing at the veldt, sir.”
Everson turned on the nearest urman and threw his arms up in frustration. “What? What is it?”
The urman, now Everson looked at him, had a haunted look in his eyes, a look of barely suppressed panic restrained only by their awe of the Tohmii. He kept casting anxious glances at the horizon.
“What is it, what’s out there?”
“Dapamji!” It was an urman word for death. As if the very word absolved him of any loyalty to the Tommies, he herded his family away back towards the valley, pausing only to shout the warning again. “Dapamji!”
“Sir?”
“Let them go, Corporal. It’s out of our hands. Get down into the trenches.”
Across the encampment, he saw Tulliver’s aeroplane take to the air. That was one less thing to worry about.
A flare arced into the darkening sky with a whoosh and burst in a bright white bloom.
Everson could feel the ground begin to reverberate beneath his feet. The rumble of hooves and the snorts, whinnies and screams of animals in terror, filled the air and grew louder. There was little time left.
Sister Fenton, Nurse Bell and a couple of sentries were herding reluctant shell-shocked patients down to the dugout in the Bird Cage. Nurse Bell was attempting to round up several of the patients, but one man had other ideas. With a single-minded determination, he scrambled out through the barbed wire fencing that surrounded them, oblivious to cuts and scratches, and was now making for the front line. Nurse Bell made for the compound gate and gave chase.
“Jones! Private Jones, come back!”
Everson looked around the encampment. Most soldiers were too busy saving themselves, or their own, to notice or care about shell-shocked straggler heading towards the wire.
Above, caught by a gust of the steadily rising wind, the Union flag snapped and furled, briefly catching his attention. It embodied all the things he had been taught were right; King, Country, Duty. However, there were some things that he never needed to be taught. Some things were innate, tacit.