The western sky grew sullen, and when he felt that it was safe to move the deserter began to inch his way down, lower into the crater, keeping his head below the rim. The rats squealed, reluctant to abandon their feast, and watched him with glittering eyes as he fumbled amongst the dead soldiers’ packs and pouches. He found a few crumbs of salted pork that the rats had somehow missed and some lumps of a dark, waxy substance which could have been chocolate or the remains of a candle but which he ate anyway since experience told him that there would be little difference in taste. There was a letter from a loved one addressed to ‘My darling Everett’, which he kept since paper was good for lighting fires. He also found a leather case about the same size and shape as a large notebook, which contained a brush, a few blocks of watercolour paint, and a packet of daubings on pieces of thick cartridge paper. Anaemic landscapes, for the most part – pale hills and flowering trees – this trench-bound Constable’s idyllic memories of his homeland. The deserter tossed them into the stagnant water at the bottom of the crater. None of that existed any more. They were lies. Lies got men killed. Lies like ‘it’ll all be over by Christmas lads!’ and ‘just this one last big push and we’ll break them!’ and ‘for God and the King, boys!’ He peered into the dead man’s face – the half of it that wasn’t a pulped ruin of skull and brain, all that remained of Everett’s loves and artistic aspirations reduced to the one remaining eye rolled up so high in its socket that it looked like a boiled egg.
His stomach growled again.
He couldn’t remember anything from before the trenches. Every time he tried to think further back than that – to home and family, assuming that he had either – he was met with the monstrous anger of the guns roaring continuously, like a great standing wave threatening to overtopple and crush him if he got too close. He had tried to point this out to Captain Milburne, but since his memory for killing was intact that was all that seemed to be required, and he’d been ordered to pick up his rifle and return to his post. Both post and rifle were long gone, obliterated by the enemy guns, along with his rank and his name, but they hardly mattered.
What mattered now were boots, lucifers, field glasses, weapons, and especially ammunition. He was going to need a sufficient tribute if he hoped to be accepted by those whom he had come in search of rather than simply killed out of hand.
The Wild Deserters.
The Grey Brigade.
The No-Men.
It was said that they lived in the remains of old dugouts and the cellars of shattered buildings in No Man’s Land, and that they emerged by night to scavenge amongst the dead, even going so far as to eat the flesh. Some, it was whispered with ghoulish glee by veterans to wide-eyed new recruits, preferred it fresh rather than bloated and maggot-ridden, and would lure an unwary man away from his post to butcher him like a beast. Others told stories of them appearing like angels out of the drifting smoke to give mercy to the dying and rescue the wounded, returning them to their lines before disappearing. None, that the deserter had ever heard, had been ordered to march to their deaths in a hail of bullets and shrapnel by fat, complacent generals who sat safely distant having their cocks sucked by French whores and dining on three square meals a day. The Grey Brigade had no generals or officers, it was said.
The deserter shouldered his satchel of loot and set off, coughing like a hag, into the cratered waste to find his new company.
* * *
There was a purity to No Man’s Land that the deserter admired, in the way that one might admire a piece of machinery engineered perfectly for its purpose, without fripperies or useless ornamentation. It was a landscape that could not have been better designed to take life, and in this it succeeded beautifully. One did not walk through No Man’s Land – to do so would risk a sniper’s bullet. You squirmed up the slope of one crater and peered over its lip into the other, trying to see what awaited you as you slid down into the next, often half-swimming in mud and blood, and sometimes, if you were lucky, on a more solid carpet of corpses. Every yard of progress was a negotiation with barbed wire, splintered wood and bone, mud so deep it could drown a horse, and scum-covered water that hid razor shards of metal. Entrails garlanded the wreckage. Dying men sobbed and implored him as he passed. Others dragged themselves blindly through the mud, shattered legs trailing behind them like worms. He ignored them all, just one more worm amongst so many. As night deepened, one side or the other would fire off the occasional flare, and in the shifting shadows of its descent the corpses seemed to move too, twisting like things rolling in deep ocean currents.
There was a place that had once been a wood – the trees now little more than broken, jagged pillars – and he aimed for this as it seemed as good a place as any. A flare was dying behind him, and as it fell with the wind its glare threw long spokes of shadow that swept the ground around him.
And then, without transition or warning, three of the stumps were men.
They hadn’t moved an inch or done anything to signal their existence to him; one moment they were simply there, in the same way that a picture of a young woman will be that of a crone, or a candlestick becomes two faces. They were motionless in the light of the falling flare, and there was something breathtaking about
