The First of July(106)

Eventually he feels strong enough to crawl to the edge of the crater, dragging his useless, disobedient limb. He looks for a spot that provides cover, pulls out his binoculars, and scans the disturbed ground around him as quickly as he can. The day is ending. Within a foot or two of the crater is Pickard, staring at him like a gorgon, eyes and mouth open, flies at his lips, hair corkscrewing outward. He forces himself to shift his gaze away. Turns his head slightly, although every movement grates, to see over the corpse. Beyond him is a landscape of sleeping figures, some graceful, some ugly. His vision is hazy. He screws his eyes up and releases them a few times, then moves the binoculars as fast as possible from side to side. He can’t risk holding a position for more than a few seconds in case some lucky German sniper gets his head in their sights. But something catches his eye, and he turns again to identify the movement. It is a first-aider, virtually on his stomach, the red cross visible on his sleeve, dragging a pack as he crawls from one man to another, apparently feeling for signs of life and not finding any. A couple of puffs of chalk rise to either side of him, but he crawls on, unhit.

“Bloody lunatic,” says Jones, who has appeared next to him.

Harry sees Jones put two fingers in his mouth and whistle. The first-aider goes flat, then raises his head and eventually changes his direction. They duck down. Waiting. There is nothing except distant machine-gun fire, much more sporadic now. Perhaps all sides are finally glutted. Eventually Harry thinks he can hear a dragging noise: it might be hope, or it could be something worse; his revolver is in his hand. A few more small explosions of earth along the crater edge and the crack of rifle shots. Then the man is over the rim and rolling in to join them, his bag coming to lie a foot or so away from his body.

But then he moves, blows his lips out and says “Champion.” And Harry almost laughs, except that it hurts. The man lies winded for a few seconds but then sits up and retrieves his first-aid kit, brushing it down carefully.

“I am the first-aider. How many alive and injured?” He scans the crater.

“Four,” says Harry. “Hutton”—he points to Private Hutton, who lies with his head in his brother’s lap, legs straight, feet pointing outward, bleeding from nose and mouth; then to young Pierce, who is not one of them, who has a name only because Jones looked at his identification disc and who, in truth, he is not sure about.

“Lieutenant Pierce. Jones here. He’s in bad shape. And my leg’s been hit.”

“It’s nothing,” says Jones, touching the long cut down his head and neck. “Cuts on the head; everyone knows they’re buggers.”

The first-aider stoops to get to Private Hutton, shakes his head. Hutton’s brother continues to stroke his brother’s hair. Harry can’t remember which brother is which. Is it Albert or Stanley who’s dead?

“What’s your name?” Harry says to the newcomer.

“Higgs, sir. Gordon Higgs. I’m a searcher. I am a first-aider,” he says, unnecessarily. “I search and bring aid. That is my job. Wherever God takes me, which is always unexpected. For instance, I saw a man today who had been attacked by his own bicycle.”

Jones exchanges a glance with Harry, a glance that says: that explains it, the man is actually mad. They are stuck in a crater with dead men, parts of dead men, injured men, and now a madman.

Higgs moves, shakes his head too at Lieutenant Pierce, who ends the day as he began it, eyes open, gazing upward.

Harry lies back as Higgs touches his leg, preparing himself for pain, but Higgs’s hands are strangely gentle, almost anesthetic as they pass over his immobile limb. He simply says “Right, we’ll keep this boot on, sir. Boots make good splints. I’ve run out of morphine, I’m afraid.”

“I’ve got a mint, sir,” says Jones and brings out a crushed paper bag of grubby sweets. “We stay put and wait for stretcher-bearers, I reckon,” he says, wincing as Higgs probes his scalp for more than the flesh wound Jones admits to.

Despite Jones’s protestations, Harry pulls himself up to the ridge on the edge of the crater. It is dusk, becoming safer; the explosions are dying away. What takes his eye is the little church steeple across the fields. Was that their objective? Was that where they were supposed to be? Just there?

Jones is pulling, hard, on the hem of his tunic, like a bored child. “Too long, sir. Too long. Get down.”

Six hundred meters away, Gefreiter Werner Franck, armed with a Mauser Gower 98, fitted with an optical sight, has been waiting for the officer’s head to reappear. He nearly had him last time. He waits and he waits. He is tired and thirsty, and soon it will be dark and too late. He traces the words on his belt buckle with his fingers—he does that every time, for luck. Gott Mit Uns.