At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [38]
“Captain?” Barshey looked at Joseph.
“Of course.” Joseph led the way up the fire step, across the parapet and down onto the slimy mud on the other side. They had to be careful because the winding path through the craters and bogs changed with every bombardment. Bodies floated beside it, grotesquely swollen, and the stench of rotting flesh and effluent flooding over from the latrines was hanging in the almost motionless air.
They went in twos, one man to help the other if either lost his footing. They spread out to cover as much ground as possible. No one spoke. The misty rain would probably deaden sound, but it was not worth the risk.
Cully Teversham went with Joseph. He was a big man with ginger hair that even the army barber couldn’t tame and hands that dwarfed everything he held. He moved calmly, picking his way, testing the ground under his feet, always looking ahead and then to the sides.
A long spike of barbed wire caught around Cully’s leg and he stopped, bending slowly to cut himself free. Joseph helped, and they moved forward again.
Ahead and to the left they saw Geddes and George Atherton. They were no more than shapes in the gloom, identifiable only by Geddes’s stiff shoulders and the swing of his arms.
It was half an hour before they found the first wounded man. His side was torn open by shrapnel and one leg was broken, but he was definitely still alive. Awkwardly, slipping and floundering in the mud, they got him back across the parapet and to the dressing station behind. Then they went back to look for more. The mist was clearing, and in another hour their camouflage could be gone.
This time they were more certain of the path, and the urgency was greater. Joseph moved ahead, his feet sucking and squelching, tripping over occasional broken equipment, spent shells, and now and then part of a corpse. He was sweating. It was warmer and there were patches of blue sky above.
He saw the body before Cully did. It was lying on its side, looking as if it were asleep rather than dead. There was no apparent injury. Joseph quickened his step, slithered the last few feet, and bent over him. It was then he saw the crown on one shoulder. It was a major! He turned the man gently, trying to see who it was, and where he was wounded. It was Major Northrup.
Cully was at his shoulder. “In’t no good, Captain. Look.” There was no emotion in his voice. He was pointing at the man’s head.
Joseph saw. There was a small blue bullet hole in his skull, just above the bridge of his nose, exactly in the middle.
“Sniper,” Cully remarked. “Damn good shots, some o’ those Jerrys. Mind, I suppose he were pretty far forward. Clean way to go, if you’ve got to, eh?”
“Yes,” Joseph agreed. It was. Far better than being gassed, coughing your lungs up, drowning in your own body’s fluids, or being caught on the wire, riddled with bullets, and hanging there perhaps for days till you bled or froze to death. But that was not what was in his mind. Why had none of his own men brought Northrup back? Surely they had seen him fall? But no one had even reported him missing.
“Let’s get him back,” he said grimly.
“Yes, sir,” Cully said obediently.
It was an awkward journey and as the sky cleared and the heat burned through, the ground steamed gently. But the cover it offered was too little. Shots began to ring out, shells and sniper fire starting to miss them too narrowly.
They reached the forward lines, then the parapet, and rolled over into the shelter and filth of the front trench. Hands reached out to help them.
“He’s dead,” Cully said matter-of-factly. “Can’t do nothing for him, not now.”
“The major!” Stan Tidyman said in surprise. “Well Oi never!”
“Now we’ll have to get another one,” Tiddly Wop Andrews remarked. “Can’t be worse than this, though, can he?”
Barshey Gee fished a sixpence out of his pocket and slapped it on the fire step. “Sixpence says it can,” he said with a smile. “Oi’ll be happy to lose.”
The others laughed.
It was Joseph’s duty to report