The Sons of Adam (15 page)

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.

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.

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.

But these still have my garment

By the hem

Earth of Shiraz, and Rukna’s

Silver stream

S’adi (Sheik Moslih Addin, 1184–1291)

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.

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 when everything in logic said he should have been dead.

He squeezed his eyes open. Above him there was a plank ceiling, sturdily and neatly constructed. Candlelight flickered on the boards. French mud poked between the cracks. The ceiling was a pleasure to look at. Tom let his mind wander among the only objects in his little universe: his headache, the pain in his leg, the planks overhead.

But life and understanding continued to return, bringing horror in their wake.

There was light coming from somewhere: a candle. Tom rolled over to look at it. It was stuck to the top of a British helmet, beaten crazily out of shape. Tom stared. The helmet was his, but why was it so badly misshapen … ? He felt his leg: it was badly wounded. The pain grew stronger.

He remembered more.

He remembered Stimson being blown away and Shorty Hardwick bloodily scythed to the ground. Stimson’s body had been between him and the shooting. Quite likely, Stimson’s death had been what allowed Tom to survive the onslaught almost unscathed. Poor bloody Stimson …

He closed his eyes again, possibly slept some more. When he woke up, his headache was still bad, but his mind was clearer. Clear enough to understand that the plank ceiling above his head was too neatly built to have been made by British hands. Clear enough to understand he was a prisoner of the Germans. Clear enough to remember that it was his twin, his brother, Alan Montague, who had wanted all this, who had sent him out to die, who had wanted him dead.

The friendship that had been the best thing in his life had turned to ash.

Every night, for four nights, Alan searched for Tom.

He came to know no man’s land as no one was ever meant to know it. He found corpses, he found dying men, he found the wounded of both sides. The dying men he shot or drugged into insensibility with morphine. The wounded he dragged laboriously back to the trenches, before squirming out once again. He called a thousand times for Tom. He abandoned caution. He stood up on moonlit nights. He used the light of flares to survey the shell-ruined landscape. He shouted for his lost brother at the top of his voice.

The Germans heard and saw him, of course. Alan could hear the German sentries echoing his call – ‘Tom! Tom Creeley!’ – followed by bursts of laughter and the muttered sing-song voices of the Bavarian regiments. By removing cartridges from the ammunition belts of the machine guns, they could even get their guns to rap out the same rhythm. ‘T
OM
, Tom
-MEE,
Tom C
REEEE-LEEE
!’ But there was no rifle fire, and even the machine guns didn’t seem to be directed at him. From kindness, compassion, or perhaps just indifference, the Germans let the lunatic Englishman roam up and down the devastated land.

‘Komm, Tommy, komm!’

Tom had hardly regained full consciousness before he was plunged further into nightmare.

With his good leg on one side and a burly German arm helping him on the other, Tom was escorted down a maze of trenches to a field hospital. He was given a brusque examination and a tetanus injection. Then he was marched off to a farmyard where four other British prisoners were being held under guard, before all five of them were marched further into German-held France.

By the time they reached the prisoner-of-war holding camp, Tom was on the point of collapse. His wounded left leg felt as though it were on fire, and big surges of pain washed up and down his body, like an ocean tide trapped in a goldfish pond. The camp consisted of a group of gloomy tin huts encircled by barbed wire. There was a brief search at the gate – Tom’s cigarettes were removed, over his objections – and he was sent to a hut marked with the Red Cross. A nurse took a quick look at him, decided he wasn’t going to die in the night, and let him collapse exhausted onto a straw pallet. He closed his eyes but couldn’t sleep. Depression assailed him.

He was a prisoner of war.

Alan had tried to kill him.

On either count, he’d have preferred to die.

Alan abandoned the search, which had become increasingly dangerous, increasingly pointless. Furthermore, he was exhausted beyond description. He didn’t in all honesty know if his body and lungs could bear another night of it. And then there was Guy. Alan got word of Guy’s wound and the hospital where he was being treated.

Alan faced facts. It was time to leave the front, to leave the battle, to give up on Tom for ever.

Two days later, Alan arrived in Rouen, at the school-turned-hospital where Guy was being treated. He made his way stiffly to the correct ward. Guy’s bed was empty: tumbled white sheets and nothing else. Alan stepped across to the booth where the ward sister sat.

‘Bonjour, madam. Je cherche Major Montague –’

Alan was about to continue, but the sister half turned to point, saw the empty bed, then interrupted.

‘Oh, là là! Comme il fume!’

She indicated a door out into what had once been the schoolyard. Alan walked out and found Guy sitting at ease in a cane chair, his bandaged leg covered with a thin green blanket and resting on a couple of packing cases marked ‘War Materials – Urgent’. He was wrapped in a cloud of cigar smoke and a three-day-old
Times
lay half read on his lap.

‘Guy!’ he said, feeling somehow anaesthetised and shell-shocked all at once. ‘How are you?’

The brothers embraced, as well as they were able, given Guy’s awkward sitting position.

‘Not bad, old boy, considering. Damn thing aches like the devil, that’s all.’

Although he had come to Rouen specifically to see Guy, now that he was here Alan could only think of Tom and Tom’s death, and the urgency of letting everyone in the world know, including Guy. But etiquette forbade him from raising the topic just yet. Guy was unwrapping some dressings and pointing out where the bullet had entered and where it had left, and exactly what damage it had done along the way. Alan found himself unable to understand anything his brother was saying. He didn’t even care particularly. The wound was minor and Alan had seen too many serious ones to be much perturbed.

‘How did it happen?’ he asked, when it was his turn to say something.

Guy shrugged the question away. ‘One of these things,’ he said. ‘Came clattering round the corner on my way back to the dressing station and ran right into the damned brigadier. He wasn’t best pleased with me, spattering his nice clean khakis with blood. Wanted a great big council of war that afternoon, and ordered me –
ordered
me, mark you – to get the wound cleaned and dressed, then report back to him for his precious get-together. I can tell you the doctors were a bit narked. They wanted to send me straight here; thought the brig’s attitude was a bit rich, frankly.’

‘Yes, I suppose.’

‘Not to mention that I was wearing
your
dratted tunic. I’ve had the thing cleaned, of course: you don’t want my blood all over it.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes? You
do
want my blood on it?’ Guy raised his eyebrows.

‘I mean no.’