The First of July(99)

The man came on, stumbling a bit on the uneven ground, looking up once as a small plane came over. It was only fifty yards between the track and the edge of the wood.

The messenger paused—he’d obviously seen something he didn’t like. He was fumbling around with the gun clips.

“Keep going,” Benedict said, as much to himself as anyone else.

The cyclist stepped forward, warily now; he was within hailing distance and had obviously seen Benedict and Smith, as he altered direction down into a slight declivity; but then, from the far side of a single crater, a handful of gray shapes appeared. Germans, carrying their rifles, and looking momentarily surprised by the single figure in front of them. Perhaps they had come to silence the gun, and here was a madman, standing still in the middle of the field with the protruding bicycle, looking like some Indian god with extra limbs. Benedict took out the nearest German with a single revolver shot. Smith’s rifle fired beside him and two more went down.

“Christ,” he said. “Down!” he shouted to the messenger. “You’re not a bloody scarecrow.” Shots were being fired in their direction now.

Two Germans were crawling to the shelter of the crater. Smith fired again and the Germans kept their heads down.

“Get down!” he yelled to the cyclist. “Don’t just stand there, you blithering fool!”

It was as he shouted, or he thought it was then, that suddenly everything about them, the wood, the gun and the half-naked gunners, the Germans, the hapless messenger and his message, disappeared in a rush of sucking wind and falling earth and a numbness that slowly became a terrible, roaring pain in his ears and chest, and burning in his arm.

Later, his face stinging, he was aware of his nose and mouth being full of earth, and he coughed to clear them, his tongue clearing grit off his teeth. He couldn’t have been out long, as while he began to realize what he was and where he was, there was still a patter of falling earth and leaves and, as he tried to turn, he was covered by a layer of twigs.

A hand touched him. It was Smith, squatting beside him, his mouth moving. His words were distorted. Smith’s face was cut and scratched, one eye closing already, but he looked substantially uninjured. He was feeling for Benedict’s pulse, turning him over.

Benedict winced. The pressure on his chest was reducing—it had been a shell, he was certain, and must have been very near to have blown the wind out of his lungs. He coughed up some phlegm. Spat onto the grass. He propped himself up on his good arm; the other didn’t respond, and distantly he felt a deep ache below his shoulder. Tried and failed to see the gun. Where the barrel should have been was nothing at all. It was very quiet and strangely light.

“The gun?” he said, and his own voice reverberated oddly in his head.

Smith shook his head. “Gone,” he mouthed. “All gone.”

Benedict lay back and looked up to see that the canopy of trees, which had protected them in the morning, had been blown away, transformed into a landscape of shattered branches and savage spears of wood, and above that the sun, burning down on them.

“Germans?” he said, remembering the exchange of fire immediately before the big explosion.

“Gone. A mine, I think. Home goal.” A grim smile from Smith.

“Messenger?” Again the word echoed around his skull.

Smith shook his head.

Benedict got up with difficulty, leaning heavily on Smith’s arm. Once standing, he could see through the blasted tract of what had been woodland: there was nothing left of the men from his battery, the men he’d been working with, around the clock, for the last week. The gun barrel had been dislodged. The shells, piled under the trees, had, amazingly, not exploded. Perhaps they were all duds, he thought. There would be an irony in that. But the shell in the breech had clearly gone off. What might be a decapitated and shriveled man sprawled close to his position. A single gunner lay some way away, pinned under a massive fallen tree, only his legs protruding, and grisly fragments of the others hung from nearby branches.

Slowly Benedict felt his nerves starting to deliver messages to his brain. Blood was running down his right hand and dripping down his uniform, and he was ashamed to feel faint, yet he couldn’t raise his arm. He must have swayed, because Smith held him and lowered him to the ground.

Smith gazed down at him, studying the injured arm. Benedict examined his side; he couldn’t get a clear view, but he could see flesh and, he thought, bone, as well as fragments of uniform and welling blood. His ears were singing and his head spun: red blood, a mash of green vegetation, and that blue sky. He turned his head to avoid the dazzling light and the heat of the sun. When Smith had fastened a tourniquet around Benedict’s arm, he gave him a sip of water. Benedict turned away, feeling slightly sick, but Smith mouthed “Bleeding. A lot. Must drink.” He undid Benedict’s tunic and looked relieved that there was no other injury.