Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [29]
“Get up!” Sam shouted again. “The gas sinks! It’s on the ground.”
“We’ve got to help!” Joseph protested, swiveling around and pushing against Sam’s weight. “We can’t leave them!”
“We can’t help anyone if we’re dead.” Sam yanked him along by one arm. “In the supply trenches we’ll have a moment.”
Joseph did not understand him, but at least Sam seemed to have some idea what to do. Gas? Poison in the air? He stumbled to the next corner, and the next, bumping into the uprights, lurching left and right. He could already taste something acrid in the air. His eyes were watering. Men were stumbling everywhere. The shelling was getting louder. It must be closer. Any minute German soldiers would appear—towering over the parapet, shooting them like trapped animals.
He reached the supply trench and ran along it, his feet slipping on the wet boards, splashing mud, until Sam hit him from behind and sent him flying. He found himself on his hands and knees, rats scattering ahead of him.
“Take your scarf or handkerchief—anything, and piss on it!” Sam ordered. “Then tie it over your nose and mouth.”
Joseph could not believe it.
“Do it!” Sam’s voice exploded, high-pitched, close to panic. “For God’s sake, Joe! Do it! It absorbs the gas, or at least the worst of it!” He suited the action to the word himself, tying the wet cloth around his face like a mask. “There’s no time to look for stretchers, and there’ll never be enough anyway.”
Joseph obeyed, feeling sick, frightened, and absurd, but he was too accustomed to the smells, the physical indignity of trench life to be revolted. He followed blindly after Sam as they turned and made their way forward again, and down the slight incline. At the first opening they fell over the body of a soldier lying on his back, dead hands clawing at his throat, his face twisted in agony. There was froth and bloody vomit on his lips. It was Roby Sutter, one of Tucky’s cousins. He had been nineteen. Joseph had bought cheese from his father’s farm.
Ahead of him Sam was still moving, bent forward, head just below the parapet. The gunfire was heavier, and there were more shells. Earth and clay exploded up in huge gouts, shooting sideways, fan-shaped. The gas was drifting. He could see its dirty, green-white swathes in the air. If there was a raiding party coming over it would be any moment now. Sam turned raising his arms, swinging them round to indicate forward.
They found two more men still alive, one wounded in the shoulder, propped up against the trench wall. Blood was streaming down his chest and arm, but he was breathing quite well. The other was unconscious, his face already gray. Joseph bent to the wounded man just as there was another burst of shell fire, this time closer to them. The dirt rained down within a few yards.
“I’m going to get you back,” Joseph said firmly. “But I’ll have to carry you. I’m sorry if I hurt you.” He had no idea if the man heard him or not. As carefully as he could, he eased him over his shoulder and straightened his back, not upright—in case he offered a target where the forward side of the trench had collapsed inward—but bent, as if heaving coal.
He heard Sam go onward, leaving the gassed man where he was.
About a hundred yards later, just as Joseph felt as though his spine was breaking, he met more troops coming in. Their faces were pale, frightened, their eyes wide. Immediately behind them were the stretcher-bearers.
He gave the stretcher-bearers his man—still bleeding, but alive—then turned and went back the way he had come. It was worse. More gas was drifting across the mud and craters between the lines. It was patchy, like a real fog, here and there in whorls torn rugged by the wind, leaving the dead trees poking up like gravestones above a drowned world. It lay like a pall, following the low ground until trenches that had been shelters became graves, bodies piled grotesquely, suffocated in their own blood and fluids.