I put a hand out as two men from our division came past, their arms around each other. One was from the Lancashires. One had a head wound, the other a bloody arm with a rough tourniquet.
“Manchesters?” I said.
I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he nodded and said “I reckon as some made it through. If they can hold on.”
The other looked angrily at me, the whites showing all around his eyes.
“Scots dead on the wire, bare arses in the air,” he said. “Caught by their fucking skirts.” They moved away.
I knew his anger was at the whole world he’d found himself in, not me. I turned back to Isaac. He was pulling at his shirt around his neck as if trying to loosen it. His thin shoulders rose and fell jerkily, as if he were laboring to get his next breath.
Soldiers, northern lads mostly, were draped along the bank, filthy and bloody. Some staring into space, some asleep or maybe dead. They were usually a talkative lot even if you couldn’t understand much of it, but now they had nothing to say and eyes you didn’t want to see. The most communication between them was one private lighting another man’s cigarette. I was trying not to watch Isaac, and instead I saw how the hand of the man with the flame trembled so much that his companion had to steady his arm and guide the match to his cigarette.
“All that racket and they didn’t cut half the wire,” I said, but Isaac wasn’t listening.
Isaac had blood on the back of his hand. He simply seemed to have stopped. He was wasting the breath he had worked so hard to suck in by muttering something, and not in English.
“Don’t,” I said. “If you talk like that, it sounds German. You’ll get yourself lynched.” Then I took him by the elbow. “Come on. It’s not far.”
But he went on muttering, and I was half glad I’d be splitting off toward the front line in five minutes and Isaac could be someone else’s responsibility. We came up toward a bank. I was to circle south toward the entrance to the trench system. Isaac would only have to cross a small piece of ground and then find the battery in the wood that we could see straight ahead. No sign of the battery, and it wasn’t firing, but that was his orders.
“Good luck,” I said, and meant it. But when I turned, he was fumbling at the straps holding the bike and was standing with his cap off, looking puzzled and wiping his brow. I knew, just like that, we had to get the weight off him. I eased the bicycle off. It fell with a metallic protest, the top wheel spinning. Slowly Isaac’s knees bent and very tidily he folded up, almost like the bicycles themselves when they were being folded for carriage.
There he lay, knees drawn up, his eyes slightly open and unfocused, his breathing slow and noisy. A longer gap. Then another breath. I patted him on the cheek, but there was no response.
“Isaac,” I said, “get up. Bloody well get up.”
Nothing. I lay on my front on the bank and crawled up it. There was firing, but not toward our current position, although plenty where I was supposed to be delivering my message. I thought the ridge would allow me enough cover for a while, though after that I’d be in the thick of it.
I looked back to Isaac. I’d have to leave him and hope the first-aiders picked him up. His face was waxen. I took his legs and pulled him, as smoothly as I could, into a tiny patch of shade and then moved his cycle. It was hard work, for all that he was light. Plenty passed us, but nobody helped me.
But then I thought, what about his message? Possibly I could deliver both, but I needed to know which was more urgent. It was an offense to read them, but I had to make a decision. I presumed mine was the priority, as it was going to the front line. I opened Isaac’s message and it was about altering the gun elevation to give cover for a late-afternoon advance, the morning’s having stalled. I thought of the poor b*****s who couldn’t get through the wire and who’d be having our own shells land on them if the message didn’t get through. Then I saw that the battery commander was a Captain Chatto. Of all the times to remember a name, now was not the best, but it was an odd one and “my” Chatto, who had sent me off on the cyclist’s path, was a gunner too. Would I have thanked him for my present position? Well, he wasn’t to have known, back in Duke Street, how it would turn out.
I opened the other message. The one that was sending me to the front line. It was from the quartermaster’s office:
To Whom it May Concern: Please draw outline of Corporal Johnston’s foot and confirm size thirteen boot required.
Isaac’s occasional breaths sounded as if they were drawn through thick liquid. His lips were sticky with what looked like blood and mucus. His bright eyes were just glistening slits through almost-closed eyelids. I unscrewed his water bottle and tried to give him a sip, but it just ran away. A handful more soldiers came from the direction I was supposed to be going in. Two were dragging a third, whose tunic was dark and wet. The others were pale, and the last, who was trailing behind, had lost most of his uniform as well as his helmet. The group had to part to walk either side of us. One looked down at Isaac.