The Sons of Adam. Harry Bingham

room, looking for danger. There was nothing. He uncocked his revolver and laid it down.

      But waking up had brought no peace. His heart was still beating a hundred and twenty beats to the minute and the sense of appalling tragedy was still with him. He’d have blamed his dreams, except that his sleep had been dreamless and the sense of disaster was stronger now he was awake.

      Alan remembered his quarrel with Tom. Pain and anger flashed through him. Tom’s conquest of Lisette had seemed like a deep and deliberate insult. Although Alan had been three-parts delirious when he’d assaulted Tom, he was still deeply angry. But the flash passed. The quarrel was just a quarrel. Tom would apologise and mean it. Alan would take back everything he’d said and he’d mean it too. The quarrel was nothing.

      Alan’s heart was racing with something else, something worse, something permanent. For a moment, he didn’t understand. And then he did.

       Tom!

      Something had happened to Tom.

      Alan leaped from bed, found his trousers, groped round for his boots, but couldn’t find them. He remembered that Guy had taken them in an attempt to stop him from wandering, but there was a pair of hobnailed peasant’s shoes lying in the stable below and they would do. He grabbed his tunic, found the shoes, and ran out into the street. His body was absurdly weak still, especially his lungs, but his co-ordination had improved. He walked carefully across to the offices of the transport captain, hoping to borrow a horse.

      The captain was there, bent over paperwork, swearing softly to himself. He looked up and broke into a smile. He liked Alan.

      ‘Well, well. Good evening to you, sir,’ he said, with a smart salute.

      ‘What?’ said Alan, returning the salute automatically.

      ‘I see you’ve got your just rewards at last,’ said the captain. ‘Thoroughly well deserved too, I might add.’

      Alan looked down at his shoulder. He’d become a major while he’d slept. He shook his head, puzzled. ‘I’ve got my brother’s tunic, I don’t know how. I suppose he must have taken mine by mistake. Look here, can I borrow a horse? I’ll give it back in the morning.’

      The captain whistled, sighed, looked at his infinite requisition dockets – but within ten minutes Alan had saddled up and was trotting his way through the darkness, heading for the front line, heading for Tom.

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      The shooting, when it came, was sudden and clamorous. The guns were barely thirty feet away. By the light of the dim moon, Tom saw the courageous Stimson almost literally disappear as his body was shredded by the hail of bullets. A flare, which followed a second later, was enough to reveal Shorty Hardwick dropping to the ground, as his legs were bloodily cut away from beneath him. The firing continued. Tom reached for a Mills bomb and threw it.

      That was the last thing he remembered.

       32

      Alan heard the shooting. It lasted for just a minute or two, then died. His horse began stumbling on the churned soil, rearing its head and sidling. He tethered the frightened horse to a shattered tree stump and continued by foot. The days of fighting had left the trenches in hopeless confusion. The ground was bare and shattered. The battlefield stunk of corpses and explosive.

      He hurried, slithering down the poorly built trenches, bending double because of the weakness of the parapet. He hadn’t wound puttees over his borrowed shoes and they soon filled with stony mud. His co-ordination and strength were better; only his lungs remained atrocious.

      He reached Tom’s section, and there he learned the dreadful worst. He heard of the brigadier’s murderous instructions. He heard that Tom had crept out into no man’s land with his two boys. That after half an hour of silence, the German lines had lit up with fire. That the nearer concrete gun post had opened up with its machine gun. That all three men were missing, presumed dead.

       PART THREE

      But these still have my garment

      By the hem

      Earth of Shiraz, and Rukna’s

      Silver stream

      

       S’adi (Sheik Moslih Addin, 1184–1291)

       33

      Alan stumbled from the dugout into the first chilly signs of dawn. Missing, presumed dead. The world was colossally altered. Alan could have lost both legs with infinitely more calmness than he could bear this hideous truth. Tom was missing, presumed dead.

      A sentry was standing on the makeshift fire-step, his face blank with tiredness. ‘Any sign of life out there?’ Alan asked him. His voice was harsh and the pain in his lungs still seemed to be as bad as ever.

      ‘No, sir, nuffin’.’

      ‘Any wounded at all? Any cries for help?’

      ‘Well, sir …’ The sentry shrugged, as though the request was incomprehensible. ‘You’re always going to get wounded, like, I s’pose. Can’t say as how I listens to ’em overmuch.’

      Alan wanted to strike the man hard in the face. His right arm actually ached to do it.

      ‘I’m going out,’ he said. ‘Please try not to shoot me when I return.’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      The sentry had wanted to add something about the folly of leaving the trench as dawn approached, but there was an aggression in Alan’s manner that stopped him. Alan scrambled over the parapet and wormed his way incautiously forwards, right out to the heart of the battlefield’s horrors. The ground was littered with fragments of wire, shell canisters, human beings. A human face, detached from its skull, had floated to the surface of a puddle, and lay face up, leering at the sky. Alan noticed nothing; cared for nothing. He reached the spot where he thought Tom’s raid had come to grief and began to call out.

      ‘Tom? Tommy? Tom Creeley?’

      He was being desperately foolish. He was within simple sniping distance of the German lines.

      ‘Tom? Tommy? Tom Creeley?’

      There was no sound at all, no human voice, no groan. The German rifles, which could have blotted him from existence in a second, held their fire.

      ‘Tom? Tommy? Tom!’

      There was no answer. How could there have been? Tom had assaulted the German guns. The guns had spoken. Their word was final. Tom was missing, presumed dead.

       34

      Headache.

      A crashing, pounding tyrant of a headache that swallowed all other sensation, all other feeling. For a long time, Tom lay with his eyes closed, aware of nothing but the monster raging in his head. But slowly, inevitably, life came back. Life and, with it, awareness.

      Awareness of being alive. Awareness of pain mixed with numbness all the way up and down his left leg. Awareness of finding himself safe