Nobby stumbled and fell, and Prof picked him up.
“Not now, there’s a good chap,” he rasped. “Be terribly inconvenient.”
The clumsy private dusted himself off and mumbled an apology.
Gutsy rolled his eyes at Atkins. He shrugged his shoulders in return. Nobby suffered from a natural-born clumsiness and was the bane of many an NCO’s life, which was how he ended up in Atkins’ section as a replacement. Atkins wondered how he managed to fall over in the first place since he never raised his eyes from his feet.
“Going to be one hell of a scrap,” said Gazette, cradling his rifle.
“Aye,” admitted Atkins.
“First decent one we’ve had since we got here, if you don’t count the trench raid on Khungarr. I hope we’ve not got soft and flabby. The Lieutenant’s a good man, but I think the troops may be getting away from him a bit.”
“Aye. He needs something to bring ’em along. This may just be it,” said Atkins. Inside, he felt the familiar pull in his stomach as the tide of fear sucked at his soul with its insidious undertow. “Or it may be his undoing.”
“Holy Mary, mother of God!” yelped Gutsy, snatching his foot back from a large crimson growth almost the colour of the soil. It shrank back into itself. “It moved! The damn stuff moved!”
“What the hell is it?” Atkins asked Napoo.
“Urluf, good djaja,” replied the urman with an eating mime.
Some of the urmen quickly harvested the mass, tearing chunks off and eating it on the run, passing the lumps around young and old until it had all been consumed.
Gazette nudged Gutsy with his elbowas he jogged past. “You know that stuff the mongey wallahs have been putting in the broth to pad it out, that you thought was bully beef?”
“Uh huh.”
“That’s it.”
Gutsy gave a dry retch. “And I thought onions in me tea was disgusting enough.”
“Well the MO said it was fit to eat.”
“What does he know? He’d give a number nine pill to cure the shits.”
ATKINS PUSHED HIS men and their wards on as hard as he dared, driven by the awful, insistent gnashing and drumming. Ahead of them across the plain Atkins could see the hills start to rise as they ran towards the valley. From their current position, the stronghold was still out of sight, beyond the spur.
“Who’s the replacement that knows iddy umpty?”
Mercy smirked. “That’ll be Chalky.”
Atkins hung his head. “Bloody hell.”
Chalky was summoned.
“I want you to get your mirror out and send a message to the hill-top OP. Warn the dozy buggers, if they haven’t already seen them, that there’s an entire chatt army headed their way. I reckon we’re only an half an hour or so ahead of the bastards, if that.”
“Yes, Corporal!” he said snapping a salute and turning smartly to carry out his orders.
Atkins groaned. “Blood and sand, anyone’d think I’d just gazetted him.”
He felt a tug at his leg. Tearing his gaze from the ominous dust across the veldt, he looked down to see a young urman child pulling at his trousers. He looked around for a parent. His eyes met those of a fair-haired Urman woman, who beckoned the child away from him. It was only when he looked again, as the child threw himself round her legs, that he noticed the roundness of her belly. She was with child. A desperate longing filled him, an ache he could not ease.
THE HILLS GREW larger, although much more slowly than Atkins would have liked. At last, they rounded the foothill and came to the valley mouth. He heard the faint, reassuring sound of a bugle on the wind.
Prof slapped Nobby on the back and they began marching with renewed vigour towards the mouth of the valley. “There you go, lad. Home soon.”
Atkins stopped and counted his men past, along with forty-three urmen.
“Come on! Get a move on. We haven’t got all day,” he urged.
The party made for the encampment at the double, while the noise behind them droned on incessantly until he wanted to stop his ears up.
They reached one of the main paths radiating out from the stronghold, trampled down by the passing of many feet. Through the tube grass, the odd blood-red poppy bloom caught his eye, until they found themselves walking through a drift of poppies populating the charred cordon sanitaire.
Atkins could see frantic activity now as, beyond the wire entanglements, platoons moved up communications trenches to man the fire trench. All along the front line, barrels of guns and tips of bayonets flashed cold in the light as the NCOs bellowed orders.
Over to his left, he heard the impatient putter of the aeroplane’s motor as it ran up. At each new sight, each new sound, his optimism that they could hold the line grew.
The clashing beat of the massed Khungarrii army’s approach began to echo off the valley sides, amplifying it and momentarily dousing his confidence.
He had to stop and get his bearings.
“Well, don’t just stand there, Corporal!” bellowed a familiar voice. Sergeant Hobson beckoned from the trench parapet beyond the wire weed entanglement. He pointed to a section some hundred yards along to his right.
Wire weed had been trained over a small wooden tunnel to provide a temporary sally port under a ten-yard-deep stretch of entanglement. The wire weed writhed lethargically as Atkins ushered the urmen through. They had to crawl on their hands and knees through the tunnel. For every urman that stopped, getting clothes or skin caught on the spreading weeds, for every child that had to be bawled at and pushed through the barbed thorns, the Khungarrii came closer. At length, the last of the urmen were through and were being escorted back to the safety of the trenches and the encampment beyond. He glanced back over his shoulder to see the Khungarrii army stretching to fill the entire valley mouth.
Without warning, the wooden tunnel collapsed, the wire weed falling to the ground on top of it. Some nervous private, whether through fear or incompetence, had yanked the shoring struts that held up the tunnel. Their way back to the trenches was blocked.
1 Section were stranded in No Man’s Land, between their own front line and the approaching Khungarrii army.
BACK BEHIND THE lines, in one of the tented Casualty Clearing Stations, Nurse Edith Bell and Nellie Abbott, the FANY, prepared for the first waves of wounded to come in, setting out trays of clean field dressings commandeered from soldier’s kits and bandages made from boiling old ones and cutting up the flannel shirts of the deceased.
“So how are you and Alfie the tanker getting on?” asked Edith casually.
Nellie scowled at the insinuation. “That’s Mister Perkins to you. We’re good pals we are, and don’t you go getting other ideas,” she protested, before confiding, “but he is nice, isn’t he? And I do worry about him so. The Ivanhoe was due back yesterday. It only has a range of twenty-three miles on full tanks of petrol, and—”
“Goodness, Nellie, if only you could hear yourself. You sound like a man. It isn’t feminine to talk about things like that. No one will thank you for it.”
“Perkins will.”
“But you can do better than that, Nellie.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Well, on your head be it.”
“I ain’t too worried, though. He’s in the safest place, isn’t he? Nothing can get to him in there. That’s why Everson sends ’em out, ain’t it?”