The Wraiths of War (31 page)

Then suddenly it was time.

It felt like late afternoon, 5 or 6 p.m. maybe. We were ordered to stand, to get in line, to make ready. The men had the self-absorbed, slightly glazed look of footballers in a dressing room about to run out onto the pitch. A quick battle with Jerry and then home in time for tea.

The bombers went first, their mission to crawl forward and lob their bombs in and among the German pillboxes, try to create as much mayhem as possible. While they were doing that, those in the front line would provide them with covering fire from within the trench before going up and over the top themselves. Then the rest of us would follow, wave after wave, the idea being to pour forward more men than the Germans had bullets, or at least the ability to fire them.

‘They’re cowards at heart,’ our officers assured us. ‘Soon as the Boche realise what’s happening they’ll turn and flee. We’ll do this with minimal casualties.’

Military spin doctoring bullshit, of course. Though some of the men might have believed it. We lined up like children in a school dinner queue, waiting our turn. Some way ahead of us – too far for us to see what was happening – a distant voice shouted an order. For long seconds there was silence… then the firing began, from both sides. Which meant the bombers were on their way.

We kept shuffling forward, until eventually we could see the men ahead of us, scaling the wooden ladders which had been set up against the long, muddy wall of the trench, plunging forward once they reached the top. Then starting to run – or rather wade – through the debris-strewn quagmire beyond, rifles at the ready.

‘Don’t start firing until you get a clear shot,’ we’d been told – though how many would panic in the heat of battle and start blazing away with their friends and colleagues still in front of them? How many British soldiers would be killed not by a German bullet, but by a British bullet in the spine or the back of the head?

The noise was tremendous, the rain of explosions and bullets from both sides like a continuous, demonic screech of rage and fury. I felt a tingling like electricity inside me.
This is it
, a voice kept repeating inside my head. It was a voice full of disbelief, excitement and unalloyed terror.
This is it. This is it
.

But what if it wasn’t it? What if something went wrong? What if Frank and I got separated? What if I got hit? What if, in this timeline, I died?

Or would that never happen? Would the heart rescue me? If a bullet was heading in my direction, would the heart snatch me away, to another place, another time?

The line of men ahead of us started climbing the ladders. The ginger boy, Barclay, was among them. I watched his mud-caked boots clumping up the wooden rungs. Smoke drifted over the parapet, like wraiths eager to snatch away those about to sacrifice their lives. The smoke smelled acrid, metallic. As it caught in my throat, I coughed; it tasted like blood. Barclay became swathed in smoke, and then he disappeared over the top. The last I saw of him was the heel of his left boot. I wondered what sights had filled his vision as he’d gone over, what horrors he was looking upon now. In a few moments I’d find out.

Climbing the ladder I was overwhelmed by the momentousness of the occasion. I couldn’t get my head round the fact that the day I’d been grimly moving towards was finally here, and that in an hour or a few hours from now I could be a hundred years in the future, back with my loved ones, clean and warm, sipping the best cup of tea I’d ever tasted, sleeping in my comfortable bed.

But then another thought chased the fantasy down: What if today
wasn’t
the day? Frank had told me he’d died at the Battle of Passchendaele in August 1917, but the Battle of Passchendaele wasn’t a single skirmish; it was a campaign stretching over four months. So what if Frank
wasn’t
destined to die today? What if he was destined to die next week, or the week after? I had to prepare myself for that eventuality, had to be mentally ready.

All these thoughts whizzed through my head as I climbed the ladder.

And then my head was above the parapet, and I was looking out over the battlefield.

Smoke. Mud. Hunched shapes running. The flash of explosions and gunfire.

And bodies. Strewn across the ground, twisted into such unnatural shapes that they didn’t look human.

My gaze slid and jittered. Adrenaline revved my engine into overdrive, sped everything up, suppressed my emotions, erased my ability to think calmly and logically, while at the same time it boosted my instincts, my primal responses.

I went over the top and started to run, my hurtling thoughts carrying my cumbersome body along with them. My senses seemed to condense into a basic state – no frills, no subtleties. Tunnel vision; a roar of noise; the weight of the gun in my hand; the smell and taste of smoke and metal.

Did bullets whizz by me? Did they miss me by millimetres? If so, I wasn’t aware of them. The situation narrowed further, became unreal, like a computer game. Dark, moving shapes ahead of me. One of them fell, then another. I couldn’t see my destination, or what direction I was running in. All was haze, a shifting of light and dark.

Where was Frank? I should stay with him. I looked to my left, then my right, but couldn’t make him out. All the running figures were nothing but black shapes wreathed in smoke.

Shit. I felt the beginnings of panic. Tried to tell myself to calm down. I looked to my left again, willing my mind and vision to clear. The future could depend on this. I couldn’t afford to—

I ran into something. Or something smashed into me. I felt the impact in my right temple. My first crazy thought was that someone had hit me with a hammer. Whatever it was, it was powerful enough to spin me round. My body whirled like a top. Then I was falling. I hit the mud with a smack and seemed to keep on sinking, to slip right through the mushy outer skin of the earth. I put my hands out, but there was nothing there. I saw the sky beneath me. Was I dreaming? Had the heart snatched me away?

The barrage of gunfire, the roar of explosions so continuous they sounded like one unending burst, started to twist themselves into new shapes. I listened, convinced that something – the War itself, maybe – was trying to communicate with me. Was that a voice? What was it saying? After a moment I realised it was louder on my left side, and focused my concentration in that direction.

And all at once the blur of sounds became sharper. And I realised it
was
a voice. And the voice was yelling into my ear: ‘Alex! Speak to me, mate! Speak to me!’

I didn’t know my eyes had been closed until I opened them. I thought I’d been fully aware, thought I’d been falling upwards and trying to slow myself down by grabbing the edge of the sky. It was only when my eyes opened that I realised those thoughts made no sense, that they must have been part of a dream. But if I’d been dreaming that meant I’d been asleep, so where was I now? In bed? In which case, why was I so cold and wet? And why was my head hurting? And why were insects scurrying over my face, filling my eyes and stinging my eyeballs?

No, not insects. Mud. The voice was saying, ‘Hold on, Alex. Hold on.’

Then something was brushing at me. Fingers. A hand. Brushing the mud off my face, picking flecks of dirt out of my eyes. My eyes still felt gritty, but now I could see Frank leaning over me, concern on his face.

‘Wha,’ I said, and felt mud in my mouth. I spat it out and tried again. ‘What happened?’

Hearing those two words, Frank started to grin. ‘You got shot, you daft old sod.’

‘Shot?’ I tried to shake my head, but it hurt like buggery. It felt as though my skull had been broken into several pieces and the sharp edges were rubbing against one another. The pain made my eyes water, which at least washed out more of the mud. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not me who gets shot.’

‘Well, you did,’ Frank said. ‘Right in the noggin.’ He must have seen the expression on my face, or maybe it was his own relief that made him laugh. ‘Don’t worry. It was a glancing blow. Ricocheted off the edge of your helmet. Made a right dent, it did. I saw you spin and go down. Bang! Thought you was a goner.’

I was recovering now, starting to remember where and when I was, what I was supposed to be doing. The roar of battle was still going on. Men were running past us, their feet thumping through mud. I tried to rise, but the mud held me fast. Frank slid a supportive hand behind my back.

‘Give yourself a minute,’ he said. ‘I don’t reckon—’

Then he stopped talking, and suddenly, shockingly, the life went out of his face. I saw it go, like an invisible mask. He sagged, went limp, then toppled forward, right on top of me.

I caught him, wrapped my arms around him. ‘Frank!’ I shouted. ‘Frank!’ My right hand was on his back, and all at once I realised how wet and slippery it was. I held it up, raising it above his left shoulder to look at it. It was bright red, drenched in blood.

Using all my strength, I heaved myself on to my left side, Frank’s limp body rolling off me. Now our positions were reversed. He was the one lying on his back in the mud and I was kneeling over him. And now I could see the hole in his chest, just left of centre. Blood had been pouring out of it like water from a punctured bag. The fronts of our uniforms were sodden with it. I realised the bullet must have entered his body through his back and exited through his chest, passing through his heart en route. What was it he had said to me about his own death?
‘Bull’s-eye, right in the heart. Snuffed out without so much as a by-your-leave.’
Something like that, if not those exact words.

Well now here we were, at that moment. When he’d related his story on the tube, it had been in his past and my future. Now it was in both our presents, and it was up to me to play my part.

Around us the battle raged on, but I felt as though we were enclosed in our own little bubble. My head throbbing from the bullet that had glanced off my helmet, I reached into my pocket with a hand covered in Frank’s blood and withdrew the heart. I pressed it to his chest, as if plugging the hole, and held it there, closing my eyes and letting my mind go blank, trying to focus on nothing but siphoning my energy through the heart and into Frank. I didn’t know if that was what I was
supposed
to do; I was operating purely by instinct.

I pictured the underside of the heart softening, changing. In my mind’s eye I saw tendrils extending outwards, cautiously at first, probing at the ragged, wet edges of Frank’s wound, and then sliding forward, into his body. I saw the tendrils working away busily inside him, like the nanites in my own body that were even now fixing whatever minor damage was causing the throbbing percussion in my head. I saw them repairing Frank’s ruptured heart, sealing his wounds, patching him up. And then, once his body was whole again, I imagined life-energy pulsing from the heart and rippling along the tendrils, filling his body and bringing him back to life.

It was a simplistic image, perhaps even a crude one, but all at once I felt Frank’s body twitch beneath me. I opened my eyes, and a second later Frank’s eyes opened too, and stared into mine.

I saw no gratitude there, though, nor even confusion. What I saw was pain and regret and terrible knowledge. He said, ‘What have you done?’

It wasn’t an accusatory question – his voice was dull and emotionless – but even so, I felt a need to justify myself. ‘I’ve brought you back, Frank,’ I said. ‘You were gone, but I brought you back. I’ve given you a second chance. Don’t be afraid.’

I lifted the heart from his chest and put it in my pocket. There was no longer a wound underneath. After a moment Frank slowly raised a hand and put it on his chest where the heart had been. ‘Where have I gone?’ he asked.

‘You’re here, Frank,’ I said, and I gripped his shoulders as if to assure him he still had a physical presence. ‘You’re alive. You’re back with me.’

He moved his head from side to side, a measured but emphatic denial. Though his face was expressionless a tear trickled from his eye and forged a route through the mud on his bony cheek.

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing inside, Alex. The best part of me’s not there any more. There’s just darkness now.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ I said, though what I really meant was that I didn’t
want
to believe it. ‘You’re alive, Frank. You’re whole. You’ve just… had a bad experience, that’s all. But you’ll be okay.’

Frank’s hand, the one resting on his chest, suddenly reached up and grabbed my sleeve. ‘I’m scared, Alex.’

‘There’s nothing to be scared of. I’m with you. We’ll be okay.’

His eyes closed briefly, then opened again. Beneath the mud his flesh was so pale. ‘I was always scared, Alex. Shit-scared. I joked around, but underneath…’ He grimaced briefly. After a moment he said, ‘It was you what kept me going. You looked after me. You didn’t know you was, but you was. You were a mate to me. The best.’

‘I’m still a mate. We’ll always be mates.’

‘Yeah, we will,’ he said. ‘Always. But what you did… I know you did it for the best, but… maybe you shouldn’t have done it.’

I felt as though he’d reached into my chest and squeezed. A sick, fearful shame swept over me. What had I done? How thoughtless and selfish had I been? What right had I to make Frank part of my story, to use him like this? But at the same time, had I had any choice in the matter? Hadn’t it been a
fait accompli
before I’d even been aware of Frank’s existence?

‘I’ll take us away from here,’ I said. ‘We’ll put all this fighting, all this death, behind us. I’ll take us somewhere peaceful.’

‘There ain’t nowhere,’ he muttered. ‘Not for me.’

‘There is,’ I said. ‘I promise there is.’

I took the heart from my pocket again. Put my left arm around him and held him close, so close that the rims of our steel helmets clunked together. I squeezed the heart and wished us away from there. The noise of battle receded…

The very air around us seemed to change, to settle; that’s how I knew we had moved. I felt a warm breeze slide over me, brush across my face. I would have opened my eyes then if I hadn’t felt the familiar bite of nausea in my belly, threatening to burst like a grenade and tear me apart. As the nanites rushed in to do their work, I instinctively curled up my body, locked down my senses.