William reached a section of trench that had been blown to smithereens. It looked like a giant hand had scooped up a thousand tons of mud, men, weapons, timber and water, then flung them back at the ground. He saw the bottom half of a body protruding from a bank of earth . . . its feet were shaking, trouser legs rippling and ripping as something pulled it further in.
Then he was out of the trenches and into no-man’s land, and everything was being destroyed. In a swirl of colors – apple blossom and setting sun and poppy red – he caught a glimpse of rolling hillsides of gorse and grass. He could smell the loamy scent of moorland in the air, taste summer on the breeze, see sheep boiling the hills higher up . . . and the artillery barrage blew it all apart.
Something grabbed his feet and he looked down.
There was a girl wrapping herself around his lower legs, working herself tight like a snake. He could not recall her name, but he knew that she worked in the baker’s shop back home. He thought that perhaps he had loved her at one time.
She looked up at him. “Come home, my darling, my sweet. Come back to the valley. We so need a poet.” But then the ground broke apart as another shell struck home, and the girl vanished into mud, and the night was completely dark at last.
There were explosions and shrieks, but they were muffled. Something had a hand clamped across his mouth and nostrils, over his ears, arm pressing into his throat and choking off the scream he was desperate to vent. He sucked in a difficult breath and smelled mud and rot and age. Filthy water seeped into his mouth and trickled down his throat, like an icy finger tracing his lifeline straight to his heart.
He wondered how long he had been buried down here. Sometimes a barrage would seem to go on forever, so it could be anything from seconds to days. He hurt all over, but he could still shift his limbs, he could still feel the hurt. That was a good sign, at least.
He pushed his arms and legs, shoved out from where he was curled up like a sleeping baby, trying to distinguish up from down. Fresh air suddenly washed across his face, a cool night kiss tainted with a tang of smoke and its constant companion, death. William pushed some more, heaving with his shoulders, dragging himself from beneath the showering of mud and into the waterlogged trench.
He could not help rolling into the water. He closed his eyes and held his breath, stood quickly, shaking off the rancid mess like a wet dog.
Confusion settled upon him. Where the hell was he? Where were the others, just what had happened?
And then he saw.
Liggett had never been a polite man, but now his arrogant self was spread around the remains of the trench. There were bits and pieces here and there, but it was his head that William recognized, face reddened by blast-heat but still undeniably Liggett. Whatever blood had leaked from him had been consumed by the earth. Here, everything was a constant shade of dirt.
A line of inhuman creatures walked across the shattered horizon. Humped, slow-moving, paying hardly any attention to the massive conflict around them . . . and then William saw that they were medics evacuating no-man’s land of the injured and dead. It took him only seconds to identify them, but in that time his imagination had given them glowing red eyes and a lumbering, hippopotamus gait.
He shook his head, looked back down at Liggett. He tried to imagine the dead corporal blinking, his severed arm waving. Grotesque and insensitive, perhaps, but sometimes the craziest notions kept William alive. Thinking about odd things meant, ironically, that he could forget about a whole lot more.
“Potter!” someone shouted.
William ducked as a new volley of shells fell a hundred yards away, then the voice called out again.
“Potter! Over here!”
He tried discerning which direction the voice was coming from, then made his way along the ruined trench. Mud sucked at him, the collapsed walls loose and moist. The night was almost permanently lit now by a flurry of flares. One of the sides must be charging across no-man’s land in the wake of the barrage . . . and sure enough, the cackle of machine-gun fire commenced out of sight, mowing down soldiers in hysterical patterns.
William kept low. Above the background roar of the battlefield he heard the bee-buzz of bullets tearing the air overhead. And above even that, the cries of already-forgotten men falling into freshly-blown graves.
“Potter!”
It was Winston. He was huddled at ajunction of two trenches, hunched down like a beggar-boy on a London street. Something stirred at his feet, a shape whipping back and forth in the wet mud like a landed fish.
“It’s Crown Sergeant Sterling. We were running for help after the shell fell, we’d lost you and Liggett—”
“Liggett’s dead.”
“Oh.” Winston paused briefly, but death was no surprise. He went on: “We only got this far. The tail end of that first volley caught us here, and . . . look. Look, Potter!”
Those last words were cried, not spoken, and in the monotone of the flare light Potter could see Winston’s eyes. They glittered, but there were no tears. And then he looked at where Winston was pointing.
Sterling was stuck up to his waist in a hole in the trench bottom. Water swilled around his chest. His eyes bulged from his face, his arms skirted across the surface of the water as he twisted . . . or was twisted by something, because he was dead. He was as dead as anyone William had seen, his throat was gone, the front of his uniform was glistening a different wetness to the rest of the place, a rich syrupy mess in the sodium glare of flares.
“What the hell . . .”
“I’ve tried to pull him out, but he won’t budge.”
“He’s dead,” William said.
“No, no, he can’t be, he’s trying to get out. Look, if we grab an arm each—”
“He’s dead!” William frowned, closed his eyes and strove for home. Even trying to do so calmed him, though the image was as elusive as ever. He supposed it could be worse. It could be that he was able to think of the valley where he was born, like imagining the purity of Heaven in a never-ending Hell. Small mercy.
A shape leapt across the trench.
Another, merely a shadow blocking out the star- and flare-light, following the first into no-man’s land.
“Winston!” William hissed.
“I dropped my rifle,” Winston gasped, voice barely audible now that a new barrage had begun to shake the ground.
This time, William thought the shells were aimed in a different direction. Something felt different; not better, just different. A new kind of promised pain.
“Me too. Get down, and—”
Something else leapt, hit the wall of the trench and slithered down into murky water.
William froze. The soldier was yards from him, struggling to bring his rifle to bear, whining deep down in his throat like a dreaming dog. His nose was running, his mouth slack and dribbling dark saliva onto his tunic. He sneezed.
“Wait, who are you?” William said, more to establish a language than anything else.
“What are you?” the man shouted.
“William Potter, 3rd Infantry.”
The man laughed and lowered his rifle. “You’d best follow me then, or they’ll get you too.”
“Is there an offensive? Are we storming the Hun’s trenches? In the night, with a barrage still underway?”
The man shook his head and slumped back against the rough earth, letting its slickness lower him into a sitting position. All the time he talked he looked back the way he had come. And he kept his rifle pointed that way, too . . . back at their own lines.
“Who cares about the Hun?,” he said. “Who fucking cares? And the barrage? We’re not shelling the enemy, you fool. We’ve turned the guns around to—”
Winston screamed. It was a sudden, irrational exhalation of terror and pain, heartfelt and automatic. By the time William had spun around, his friend was already splashing on his stomach in the bottom of the trench, hands and feet throwing up fans of dirty water. He hadn’t been hit by a bullet or shrapnel; whatever had struck him down was still happening, still whipping his body back and forth.