Mr. Pierce never used to swear when he first came out. When Mr. Summerskill, his pal, called him on it, his mess servant heard him say, “I blame the soldiery. Salt of the earth, but rough-and-ready ways.” He should have worked with Mr. Nugent back in Duke Street.
“Sorry, sir,” said Perkins, in a voice that made it clear that Mr. Pierce was, despite the influence of the soldiery, wet behind the ears, and everybody knew he was scared of the new colonel.
Brave now, though. Tugging at his Sam Browne. Standing up straight. Looking five years older and every bit the officer about to lead his men where other men have failed and no bit of schoolboy left in him.
Pierce looked at Isaac. “There’s been considerable success in the south,” he said. “The 30th has met nearly all its objectives. The Liverpool and Manchester pals have taken a whole sector of the German front line. They’re through and into Montauban, or as good as. You’ll need to put on a bit of speed to catch them, Meyer. Wires have been cut by shelling.”
“Not so good farther north, though?” I said.
“It’s not clear,” he said. But his eyes were moving from side to side. My old dad used to say you could always tell a man who was lying about his means to pay a bill, by if his eyes was yessling about like that.
“I’ll go to the pals,” I said as we pushed off. “You go to the gunners.”
Sherwood Forest was a piddling little copse with a big gun sticking out of it. It was much nearer us and farther from the front, whereas the pals could be anywhere, judging by Summerskill’s reports. I thought Isaac might just get to the copse, but in his condition he’d never make it as far as the front line, with or without being shot, so what would be the point?
Isaac took my message, I took his. We followed each other out onto the track. I rode in front, slow enough that Isaac could keep up until we got to Shadow Corner where we’d go our separate ways. Shadow had been château, which was French for castle. There wasn’t any castle left now, of course. Not so as you’d notice. We stopped once we were beyond the junction, which was a favorite of Fritz’s for shelling, and Isaac showed me on my map which was my best route.
“It’s longer but safer,” he said and cleared his throat thickly; for a minute I thought he’d choke right there, but he spat to one side. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t breathe with it. There’s a gentle slope and you’ll have some cover. If you turn here, you’ll be straight in the back of the trench system. Let me mark your map.”
Which he did. He didn’t seem keen to move on. “Be careful you don’t go too far south, or you’ll be joining the French Foreign Legion.” He gave me a weak smile as he traced the line of the French sector with a grubby finger. “Or get stuck in the Somme marshes. Listen out for ducks.” There was a sweetness about him when he smiled. Even with his glasses taped up. Even now.
It was a lot quieter, but that was saying nothing after the racket this morning. I looked around me—it was too exposed—and Isaac started in on one of his coughing fits. Some wounded men passed between us, and none of them gave either of us a glance. Not that far down the road a shell exploded. I hadn’t seen any Manchesters; did that mean they’d gotten through? Or were they all dead?
A shell screamed over us and exploded behind us somewhere—someone else’s bad day, and not far away.
Isaac mounted, riding so slowly that the front wheel wobbled and I thought he would fall off, though eventually he got going. But only fifty yards away, the road had been hit. There were dead horses, parts of them, and dead men; one of them, his head, at least, looked Chinese. But there was no road, just a crater.
“We’re going to have to carry the bikes,” I said, and wondered, not for the first time, what cyclists had ever done to the top brass that when the going got tough, we had to be burdened with a bloody bicycle on our shoulders. If you were in the cavalry, you didn’t have to heft your horse about, piggyback, if it was injured or the ground was too muddy. It was clear: you rode the horse, never the other way around.
I struggled to help Isaac with getting his machine on his back. I hardly dared let go of the two of them. He swayed. We walked on, bent slightly forward, going far too slowly for my liking, but there was all kinds of human traffic coming against us now, all of it dark and weary and stained. Clumps of men. We turned into the better cover of a so-called sunken road, where the remains of thorn bushes provided some meager shade. Isaac had to stop to cough, one hand on the side of his chest, the other to his mouth. I held him by his arm, as I thought him likely to fall, and helped him unscrew his bottle, and he drank. Wiped his hand across his mouth. Where his hand had been was a brown smear.