The First of July(100)

He spoke again. Benedict could watch his mouth moving and guess at a few words, but still only one or two syllables were clear.

“Back. Way. Luck,” he heard. Smith pointed. Then he sensed Smith’s arms around him in a sharp smell of sweat. The corporal’s legs braced as he pulled Benedict to his feet and, supporting him, his arm around his waist, started to walk.

Benedict experienced only a moment’s anxiety as they left the cover of the trees and he looked south to where the bodies of the Germans lay. Then he turned his gaze toward the messenger: he and his machine lay crumpled in the sunlight in the center of the strip of pasture. Smith shook his head. Benedict pulled away slightly in the direction of the cyclist, and Smith shook his head again, resisting Benedict’s efforts. He made a slicing motion across his throat.

“No point,” his lips said.

But we must check, Benedict thought or perhaps said, knowing he was being obstinate. Still Smith held his ground, and Benedict struggled to detach himself.

Eventually Smith, looking anxiously down the field toward the distant German lines, relented and they altered their path to pass the dead soldier.

“Jesus,” said Smith.

The man was not dead. Benedict felt the pain leave his own injured arm and fill his body. The messenger was alive, his eyes open, blinking as their shadow fell over him. He was bent backward over his folded cycle. He looked very pale, a little puzzled, and, from the movement of his heels and the fingers of one arm spread to the side scrabbling in the dirt, he was trying to get up. But two spokes protruded clear through his body and one handlebar was partly embedded in his side. Freckles of blood spattered his face. The metal spokes quivered with his every attempted movement, and blood seeped around them. There were already flies feasting on it.

“Lie still,” Benedict said. “You’ve been hurt.” Was he shouting? He could no longer calibrate it. “We’ll send stretcher-bearers.” He wanted to kneel down and help the injured man, but extracting the metal from him, or rather, as he looked down, removing him from the metal frame on which he was impaled, would probably cause him agony as well as hasten his death.

The man was trying to focus on them, his eyes squeezed up against the pain or possibly the sun.

His lips formed one word: “Nora.”

“It’ll be his girl, I expect, sir,” said Smith, turning his head aside to speak directly in Benedict’s ear.

“Don’t you worry about her,” Smith said in a loud, clear voice. Even Benedict could hear his words. “We’ll get a stretcher out to you just as soon as we can. You keep thinking about Nora and how you’ll soon be home with her.”

Something about the injured man reminded Benedict of somebody. Another of many soldiers he had known and would watch die?

The man was trying to speak, trying to lick his lips. Smith kneeled down and, more tenderly than Benedict would have thought possible, said “Don’t try to speak.” He supported the man’s neck with his hand and gave him a little water.

“Message: Alter range. Wire intact,” said the dying man with a terrible clarity.

Smith stood up slowly and was silent.

The wire. Benedict felt his face contort. The wire. After all that time, all those shells, they’d got it wrong.

He took out his handkerchief. Smith tipped water on it and covered the injured man’s face to give him some protection from the sun. Apart from a smudge of blood, the handkerchief was as beautiful, as stupidly well-ironed, as crisp and unused, as on the day Benedict had bought it in Duke Street a year ago.

They moved away, lurching like a pair in a three-legged race. They had reached the edge of the sunken road, when simultaneously he heard the crack of a rifle and Smith fell away from him. Benedict collapsed, sickeningly, onto his injured arm. Smith was on the ground, a hole visible above his ear, blood pooling under his head. He was clearly dead. Benedict looked back across the field, seeing one of the Germans rising from the crater halfway across. He picked up Smith’s rifle, fired it unsteadily with his left hand, and, to his surprise, the German went down. He felt for a pulse in Smith’s neck. Nothing. The corporal’s pupils were fixed.

“Thank you,” he said softly, and remembered pointlessly that it was Smith’s birthday. Then he staggered on, joining a trail of walking wounded but very alone.

By the time he was seen at a first-aid post, he was light-headed and could no longer feel much pain. He tried to get the orderlies to send out stretcher-bearers to the young soldier, impaled and roasting in the sun all on his own in the middle of a field, but it was chaos. The stretcher-bearers were overloaded; injured and dying men were being carried in from every direction—some on the backs of men only marginally less damaged than those they bore. He could no longer even give clear directions, no longer remember the coordinates of the field-gun position.