Trench Rat
Short Story
The shelling had lasted the better part of an hour. Sirens went off behind me signaling another enemy charge and No Man's Land stretched out before me. It was an endless waste of mud pits and barbwire, strewn with bodies and unexploded artillery shells. Clouds of chlorine, dust, and smoke lay heavy like a fog.
I gripped the Lee Enfield tight to my shoulder. Masked figures, heavy coats flapping behind them, charged out of the gray. I aimed steady and squeezed the trigger. A Vickers machine gun talked across the charging Germans, and then more artillery exploded somewhere off to my left. I cycled the bolt and slammed another cartridge into place. I shot as fast as I could manage, picking out lone shadows which the machine gun had not touched. I cycled the bolt again and pulled the trigger—nothing.
I ejected the unspent round.
I started to reload.
Shrill whistles signaled the German retreat, and I prayed that tomorrow would not be my turn to charge across the waste.
This war was not a fight, but an exchange. Not politics by other means, but trade by another name. Body traded for body, life for life, in an unending game of chicken.
As the Germans retreated into the fog, I lay there gasping. Then for whatever reason, I picked the faulty cartridge up out of the muddy bank and wiped it off on my pants. A small dent lie in the place where the firing pin had fallen. I wondered what would have happened if I’d needed that round. And then I wondered if perhaps it wasn’t a good omen, for the German retreat had coincided with its failing. I brushed the thought away and stuck the charm in my breast pocket.
Supper was by candlelight. We sat around a barrel, the three of us. Myself, Private Wellington, and Lance Corporal Phillips. The candle flickered against a gentle breeze that blew west to east, and I knew, at least tonight, I wouldn't have to worry about the smell of musty hay, the smell of Phosgene.
I dipped a piece of hardtack in my coffee and ate it silently. I was hungry. Always hungry and never full.
"Bloody romantic," Wellington said. "If only Arthur had a pair of tits, this would feel just like home."
"If I had a pair of tits, I'd hardly find myself seated across from you," I said.
Wellington laughed. "I was quite alright with the ladies."
Phillips cracked a tin of bully beef and scooped it onto his crackers with his boot knife. "Wellington, you wouldn't know a bonnie from a brown bagger."
"Hey now, after five pints, a brown bagger can turn into a right bonnie," Wellington quipped. "It’s called the power of perception."
We smoked after that, and Phillips lit a pipe. He loved that pipe. Said it was his grandfather's and brought him good luck. I slipped a few pieces of hardtack into my pocket for later. My stomach had taken to burning in the middle of the night, and the doctor said it was probably an ulcer. But he couldn’t do much for it, just gave me a bottle of Magnesium pills which I’d already ran out of, and told me to relax, seemingly unaware of the absurdity of that advice.
Phillips reported for the first shift of night watch, and the rest of us retreated to our bunks. The dugout was dark, and I lit a match to find my bed. The others had already turned in, and I noticed several empty beds that had been filled only two nights before. I didn't know who they'd belonged to and didn’t really care. Wellington, Phillips, and Sergeant Campbell were the only names I still knew. You learn after a while that there's not really any point to learning names, much less retaining them. It’s easier to say goodbye that way.
I was woken in the middle of the night to a pressure on my chest, having just been dreaming about a giant beetle crawling across my face. My hands were frozen at my sides, and no matter how hard I tried; I simply could not lift them. Could not force them to grapple with the giant scarab scrabbling across my face.
Then I was awake.
And I stared at the utter blackness above me, and slowly contemplated the idea that fear had a tangible and knowable weight. That if only I concentrated and remembered to breathe, the weight of that god forsaken anxiety which made its home on my chest would leave.
Then it shifted.
I froze in panic. The weight was real. It was alive, and not a figment of my imagination. Not the shadow of anxiety leftover from my dream. I was awake, yet the night terror had not left me.
I reached into my coat pocket and slowly pulled out a match, lest my demon flee before I could see it. The weight shifted again. The blackness itself pressed in on me.
I struck the match on the edge of my cot, half expecting to see the incarnation of my scarab.
But! In the flames, weak and flickering light shone two tiny black eyes.
They glinted red. It was a rat. A jagged white scar ran across the top of its snout. It was a most hideous looking rat, clutching a piece of my hardtack in tiny pink hands as it hissed at the flame—and then at me.
I bolted upright, flinging the beast into the darkness and busting my head on a crossbeam in the process. A shower of dirt and dust fell down the back of my neck.
The smell of the stinking rodent lingered in my nostrils, and I felt dirty. Deeply violated, as if I'd just been covered in a most hideous grime, untouchable by even the most potent soaps. The grime of pure terror. The stink of shame, for I had not screamed, or even yelled when I pushed the rat off me, but squeaked. I had croaked the weakest most unmanly croak. The type of croak that calls all a man thinks himself to be into question.
The rat’s stench, imparted to my shirt, brought dry heaves, and I stumbled from my cot, and in socked feet ran out of the dugout, where I deposited what was left of my undigested rations.
I wiped my mouth and took two deep breaths, the acrid smell of my own vomit overwhelming that of the rat's stench. I was thankful for that, at least.
The stars winked above me. The night was clear. Awfully clear. I sat down on a crate nearby and lit a choker. I sat there for a long while, listening to the clear sharp darkness, and letting the chill of night cleanse me.
I had always been aware of the rats. But with enough careful focus, and rigid delusion, they’d faded into the background of both the trenches and the war. They had taken last place, or close to last, when measured against the German danger that lay out across those barren fields.
After a while, something scurried up the trench. Then from the other direction, I heard a slight scraping. The boards that lined the trench walls came alive with the sounds of rats on their own nocturnal march.
My stomach turned at their sounds. The squeaks, and the scrapes, and the pitter patter of tiny pink hands. Then a chill that took the form of tiny pink paws clambered up the rungs of my spine, and I knew that sleep would no longer visit me.
Morning found me in a sorry state. I was cold and worn out, having sat in that spot on the crate all night. I had not slept a wink, and if I had, it had never been long enough to be noticeable. The stench of the rat still hung heavy in my nose, and the drumbeat of their overnight march still echoed in my ears.
The shelling started early that day, and the Germans charged once more, and the battle was a welcome distraction.
At midday, the winds shifted, blowing east to west, and the alarm sounded for us to don our gas masks.
The Germans having opened up cannisters of chlorine and presumably phosgene, were letting it waft out over the battlefield. We took shelter in the dugout, which ultimately didn’t make sense, because gas would find you wherever you were. Regardless, that is where we sheltered.
I sat nervously in the gloom. The lenses on my mask dirty, the remains of mud and dirt creating phantom artefacts in my vision, and every time I moved, the mud on my lenses moved, and I thought for sure that I’d just seen something out of the corner of my eye. That horrible smell came back to me. I fidgeted nervously even though each nook and corner of the dugout was empty.
The other soldiers joked and groaned around me, one man wept silently to himself, another prayed. I could tell you none of what they said, for I was an island. The image of that hideous scarred rat from the night before plagued my mind. I had named him Scarface, and if I ever found him, I would kill him slowly. I spent the rest of the time down there, thinking of the most horrific ways for the creature to die—trapping him in a barrel and letting him starve, or maybe, burning him alive.
For the rest of my time at the front, I refused to sleep. Especially in the dugout. At night, I placed myself on the crate outside and struggled against the forces of dream for as long as I could holdout. If I did catch myself sleeping, I would wake with a start, immediately stand up and check my surroundings. This strategy seemed to work, for even when I lapsed momentarily, a rat never caught me unawares.
Once committed to a lack of sleep, every battle became a haze. Whereas before, the excitement, or dread as I suppose you could call it—the excited dread of battle—no longer visited me. Instead, time froze; and I sleepwalked through every encounter, through every round of shelling and incoming German charge. I fought utterly detached, too tired to care.
My senses, which were once attuned to the dangers of oncoming attack, were instead focused on locating the rats, and keeping track of every corner in the trench. I noted every blind spot, and marked off a place in my mind for every potential hideaway that a rodent could use in that earth bound labyrinth.
And then it happened, I got my first taste of blood. It was maybe a week after the night of terror, and it was sweeter than my first dead German. The battle had started early, and while I was supposed to have my eyes down range, I kept glancing at a hole in the trench wall beside me. A shell went off somewhere in front of me, and the explosion rattled my insides, bringing with it a heavy dirt rain.
Then I saw it, two beady eyes and a little pink snout peeking out of a hole, watching me as I cowered beneath the barrage of earth and German bullets.
I drove my bayonet at its eyes, but the little bugger disappeared back down into its hidey hole. I grabbed the trenching tool from my belt and paying no more mind to the shelling or the gunfire, hurled myself at that wall. I tore into the bank and revealed more and more of the hole. Two planks of wood, embedded in the mud, stopped me from going further, so I ripped through them, peeling the muddy pieces out with my bare hands and discarding them off to the side. I caught a splinter, and my hands were slick and gritty from the mud, but I didn’t stop.
Another shell went off beside me and knocked me flat on my ass. This was a minor inconvenience, one I hardly noticed, and immediately, I was back at it. A whistle blew somewhere up the line, and a stream of soldiers passed by below me.
Then I found it. Cowering over a pile of wood and paper shavings. It must’ve been a momma rat, because it hissed at me, cowering at the end of its tunnel and standing over the writhing pink bodies of its progeny. I smashed it with the shovel, and felt the crunch more than I heard it, and I didn’t stop, smashing and hacking until the whole nest lay in a muddy, bloody pulp. I don’t believe I would have stopped either, but someone wrapped their arms around me and pulled me down into the safety of the trench just as the whiz-snap of a bullet passed overhead.
“What’s got into you,” Wellington yelled. “What the fuck are you doing?”
I sat in the slop at the bottom of the trench, mud up to my elbows. Wellington looked angry and I couldn’t tell why. He had a finger in my face, and I remember being somewhat confused.
More dirt showered down around us, and by this point I had nearly forgot where I was and believed that my priest had been lying all those years. Hell was not hot. It was cold, and muddy. Water swelled up from the bottom of its deepest pits even as more of it fell from the sky. It was soggy, so soggy. So that it was impossible to walk without sinking up to your ankles. And the sky rained dirt and mud, and demons had two tiny black eyes, and long hideous snouts, and long gray tails, and little pink paws; and were made that much more terrifying for their small size, because it meant they could be anywhere and nowhere all at once.
Wellington dragged me up and pulled me back down the trench line, away from the fighting.
I awoke in a panic. How long had I slept? I didn’t remember dreaming, only the blackness. Where was I? The terrifying thing about sleeping and not dreaming, is that it makes a man draw associations to death and the very real possibility that there was nothing to look forward to after it except total obliteration. Where dreams make men believe in an afterlife, their absence convinces them of the dark.
“It’s ok,” Wellington said, from somewhere off in the shadows. He lit a match, illuminating the space between us, and then applied it to a candle. “You slept for almost fourteen hours.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“You freaked out.”
“Why’d you let me sleep?”
“You did that all on your own, chap.”
“I can’t sleep, not until the rats are dead.”
“Forget the bloody rats,” Wellington said.
We both sat there in silence.
When I could take it no longer, my secret came pouring out. I confessed to the horror of that night with the rat. I had not wanted to, for I thought it reflected badly on my constitution as a man of courage. And a man’s constitution means everything to him. But Wellington was understanding and listened to my tale in silence, never once offering any word of admonishment or even the slightest judgement. When I had finished, all he said was, “I hate them too, the dirty bastards.”
I lay there staring at the dirt ceiling, and the wooden crossbeams, basking in the new weightlessness of my confession.
Wellington made me a deal then, promising to keep watch for the rats while I slept, if only I would sleep. He said he would continue to do that for as long as we were on the front. He even enlisted Phillips to help to ease the burden. Phillips never said a word about it, and I was eternally grateful for their kindness. They were brothers to me.
We were rotated off the front lines two days later.
Franz stared at me from his perch on the duckwalk. His nose twitched, and beady black eyes appraised me. I lunged at him with the bayonet on the end of my rifle and he scurried off. I gave chase, clambering onto the muddy trench step, but he disappeared behind a weave of boards and sandbags.
I could of course not be sure whether that specific rat was Franz, or Ernst, or Friedrich. He could have also been Heinrich, Hermann, Karl, Otto, or Walter. There were a thousand of each, of every shape and size. I had run out of German names and so I presumed there were a thousand Hermanns, and a thousand Ottos, in just this trench alone.
It had been four days since our battalion had been moved backward from the secondary trenches to the reserve trenches. And although I missed the forward line if only for its promise of an easy and honorable death, at least here, I had time to hunt the rats without interruption.
"Corporal Evans," Sergeant Campbell hollered from some way up the line.
"Sir," I called back.
"Tell the men to tend their feet."
"Yes, sir," I answered.
“And make sure to do your own,” he added.
I worked my way up the trench, passing the Sergeant's words on to the Privates, and then continued on into the dugout where I had made my bunk. And by bunk I meant a few flat boards on a shelf carved into the side of the trench wall.
I pulled a bundle wrapped in wax paper from my pack. Inside was a pair of dry socks. I removed my own boots, and my already soaked socks, and dutifully applied whale oil to my feet.
I looked at my wet boots, one of which had a hole in the side of it from catching a stray nail. There was an absurdity to putting dry socks back into those boots. Keeping one's feet dry in a trench, that at any time had a foot of standing water inside of it, was as Sisyphean efforts go, perhaps one of the most hopeless. But perhaps, less hopeless than exterminating every rat that ran the trenches.
Wellington entered the dugout as I hung my wet socks from the rafters.
"I already killed four today?" he said.
"I'm behind," I said. "I only got two."
"It's hopeless you know," Phillips said, having entered behind Wellington. "They shag faster than you can kill them. They live off the filth. Off the stench. No matter how many you kill, another will take its place. The mud, the water, the disease—none of it bothers them. Kill one and you have just fed the rest of them. They eat their own, you know. You won't win.”
I turned back to my socks. It was the same speech every time. I knew he was right. Disappearing the rats was a delusion, and the truth in his words was why I hated them. But it was the only thing that brought me peace.
“Let it be,” Wellington said. “If we want to kill the rats let us kill the rats, it's not doing any harm.”
“You should be focused on the Germans,” Phillips replied.
“We are,” I said. “I killed an Otto and a Franz today.”
“Funny,” Phillips said. “That joke may work on the Sergeant, but not on me. The rats are a distraction.”
Wellington lay on the bed shivering. He was shivering and sweating, all at once. I dipped a rag in a pale of cold water and dabbed it on his forehead. His eyes were yellow and jaundiced. He had been in a bad way for the better part of two days.
It wasn’t trench fever, but something else; I suspected he had caught it from the rats. This caused me no small amount of distress, as it had been my idea to make sport of killing them.
“We need to get you out of here,” I said. “You’re getting worse.”
Wellington merely groaned. “You and Phillips need me—I’ll be alright.”
“We’ll be alright,” I said. I lied. I couldn’t bear the thought of Wellington leaving. I wanted him to get help, but not to leave. And if he got worse, if he died off in some hospital all alone... “Who knows you might find a nurse to feel sorry for you. Maybe even one that’s NOT a brown bagger.”
He laughed at that, a weak laugh, and I continued, “lots of handsome men dying these days. I hear it’s a buyers' market.”
A little time later, Phillips and I made the decision. We carried him on a stretcher that afternoon, making it all the way back to the reserve line, and we left him at the medical tents. He was awfully mad, and swore that he’d be alright, and that we should take him back.
It didn’t feel great leaving him there like that, leaving while he was sore at us. I wanted to stay with him, but the Sergeant had told us to come straight back.
We got word that Wellington was sent to a hospital and had taken a turn for the worse a few days later. We were rotated back up to the front lines after that, before we ever learned what happened to him.
Phillips still watched over me while I slept, and I did the same for him. He told me that I didn’t have to, that he wasn’t really that concerned about the rats. He said that it had only pestered me because I had left hard tack in my pocket.
This made sense to me, and even though Phillips never complained, I could still tell the diminished sleep had worn on him. It had made him slower, and so I told him I didn’t need him to watch over me anymore—that I would be good.
I really tried to be good too, but when it came time to sleep, I couldn’t find it. I lay there in the dugout staring up at the dark. My ears searching the void of it for any squeak or scrabble.
A week later, and it was our turn to charge the Germans. We waited silently in the trench, shoulder to shoulder, as the Officers and Sergeants made ready to give the order. The sky was gray that morning, as it often was, for it seemed an eternal winter had settled over the Western front.
Even the sun was one luxury too much.
As we stood there, in the gray light of morning, I saw him again. He scurried out across the parapet that hung over the dugout. Then he stopped before me and stared. It was Scarface, he appeared as if an omen.
I was about to lunge for him when the charge sounded, and then I was running up over the trench line and into the maw of that great deadly desert.
The Krauts fired back almost immediately, and to my left and right, fellow soldiers fell, never to rise.
Within seconds the empty waste sprouted earthen geysers and a thick fog of smoke, dirt, and chemical mist blanketed that lonely desolation. My ears rang, and then I stumbled. The snap of a round passed overhead. I fell in a puddle and wormed my way up against a little berm of earth created by some ancient shelling campaign. I pulled my mask up onto my face, choking and coughing. My eyes and skin burned, and my lungs filled with shards of glass.
Time dilated. The dead that had not rotted, were now mummified, baked into the landscape, like the forgotten inhabitants of a civilization long past, and the land’s terrain, having been reworked every new cycle by another cataclysm, lay forever ancient and simultaneously changed. There was no before or after. No Man’s Land had always been, and always would be. It lay covered in primeval fog banks, carpeted with the scattered remains of human sacrifices; and it stretched on every plane of existence off into eternity.
Then the charge was over, and somehow, I found myself back in the trenches. A private, who I would later learn was named Belgrade, stood next to me... over me, slapping my cheeks and telling me to keep my eyes open.
Belgrade told me that Phillips hadn’t made it.
The night was clear and cloudless. A full, silent moon hung above. Belgrade scrambled up the trench’s dirt wall and lay flat on his belly. I settled next to him and followed his outstretched arm to the tip of his finger, and then beyond, to the massive berm that rose up out of the black waste.
“There?” I asked.
“That’s where I saw him last,” Belgrade answered.
I shuddered.
“I can go with you,” he said.
“Thanks, but no. It would just be one more target.”
The boy said nothing. He was fresh faced, and this was his first turn at the front. He still had the spark in his eye, and an innocence to him. He was freckled, and sported overly long shocks of brown hair, that indicated an easy rebelliousness, the kind that made good men, and better warriors, but awful soldiers. He was an anachronism, a fairy creature. Something so naïve, I’d forgotten it existed. He was alive. He’d only just met me, albeit by dragging me out of that sad waste, but already he’d taken me for a brother. It was an odd thing, how quickly men can become brothers.
I started up but felt a tugging at my pant leg.
“Take this,” Belgrade said, and he handed me a flare gun.
“What for?” I asked.
“In case they get you.”
I took the gun and jammed it into my trouser pocket. I crawled forward then.
I made what seemed to be very slow progress towards the crater that held Phillips' body. It wasn’t until I checked behind me that I realized how far I’d gone. The trench line now being several hundred feet to my rear.
As I neared the crater, I pushed myself up to a crouch and scrambled forward on all fours, ignoring the mud, and the wet, and the cold. My whole body had numbed months ago; I no longer felt the cold and recoiled from the heat. If I was to ever thaw out completely, I imagined it would kill me.
The moment of truth came when I scrambled over the top of the crater’s berm, no doubt sky lining myself for but a second, and no rifle shot rang out nor touched me. Yay, no machine gun talked at me. I slid down inside the muddy crater and deposited myself next to a long dead body. In the dim light, I thought I saw it move.
The face was not Phillips. The skin was clammy and gray. The chest heaved upward and confirmed that I had seen what I had thought I’d seen, and the mouth of the dead corpse seemed to sigh, releasing an unearthly sound, somewhere between a squeak and a hiss.
I watched in horror as the chest cavity suddenly sagged, its phantom breathing cut short. Then from the opposite side of the body a slick wormy looking creature appeared. I scrambled backwards in terror, even as two of its fellows exited the corpse behind it. Rats, slick with blood and guts, the warmth of their bodies releasing steam to the cold of night. Then one of them gave a terrible hiss, and I scrambled backwards falling over yet another body.
This body had been long dead and was frozen solid. Its lips pale blue in the slight light, and eyes wide open as if horrified at what lay across the veil.
The sounds of the crater shifted into congruence then, the dull static of night, transmorphing into the sounds of rats softly feeding on the newly dead.
“Phillips?” I croaked.
I took a moment and gathered my courage. Clutching my rifle, I ran from body to body whispering Phillips’ name, and checking the faces of the fallen. Rats fled before me, but only momentarily, returning to their feast just after I’d passed.
A body lay face down. It was about the size of Phillips. I turned it over...
I was on my back. A cloud passed below the moon in thin wisps. My ears rang. Something had exploded when I moved the body. Perhaps an unexploded shell, or a boobytrapped grenade left by a dying man. I did not know, and only faintly cared.
I tried to move, but I could not. I struggled up onto my elbows and looked at my legs. They were a mess. A bloody mess, and in the same instant that I saw them, I felt them. They were on fire with a pain I’d never known possible.
The night swept me up.
The throbbing woke me. It brought me to consciousness. Waking was hard, and I had no idea how long I’d been out. Something tugged at my leg. I looked down.
They had already started on me or were trying to. They had not yet gnawed through my boots. I tried to move my legs, but they didn’t budge, and the rats seemed to pay no attention to the screaming torso that raged at them.
I took up my rifle, which had fallen next to me. I chambered a round and took aim at the nearest rat. I fired. The little creature squealed even as the satisfying thump of my bullet obliterated it. The rest fled as fast as they could.
I worked a tourniquet on each leg then, using my own belt for the first one, and then stealing another off one of the fallen.
Sometime later, they returned. They did not approach directly, but circled me slowly. There were more of them. Trying to follow their movements made me lightheaded. Or was that from the blood I had lost? I took aim at one of them and fired.
The flash and bang from my rifle left me deaf and blind, and I waited anxiously in that in-between place for what seemed like an eternity. My senses having been scrambled, I waited desperately for their return.
When they did, I could still see the rats. They circled, yet more of them. So many that the shadows themselves seemed to undulate with their passage. I gripped my rifle and chambered another round. I fired. Again, I was teleported to that in-between place. That place of bright blinding light, and brilliant heavenly ringing. But this time I found solace in my blindness, and peace in my deafness. This time I prayed that I could spend longer there. That eternity would last. But then I was back, again bleeding out in the mud, and the milling circle of rats moved nearer.
I fired again, and then again, and each time I did, my time in that in-between place seemed to last shorter and shorter, and each time that I reappeared the circle of rats had closed a bit more. At last, I pulled the trigger and nothing happened—heaven had shut its doors.
Panicked, I felt in my webbing for another charger, but there was none. Had they fallen out? Had I forgot to pack more ammo in my distress? I tried to remember, but it was all a haze. The afternoon. Meeting Belgrade. Finding out about the loss of Phillips. Among all of it, I had no recollection of replenishing my ammo.
I desperately felt the pockets of my uniform for a round, any loose round. I passed over the flare gun, and then I found one, a single loose cartridge. I loaded it into my rifle, and was about to fire again at that spinning wheel of rats… I had a moment of clarity.
I realized that firing at the rats would only leave me right back where I was, and no better off.
No, I could send myself to that in-between place for good. I could make my escape and never return. I turned the rifle around then and placed the barrel beneath my chin, which was quite hard to do with a rifle. Very carefully, I felt for the trigger. I don’t know why carefully. Maybe because I only had one chance to escape. The moon and stars seemed so much closer. The night was clear. All clear.
I pulled the trigger...
There was a mere click, the bullet dead in its chamber.
The moon and stars were still there. The rats still circled. My escape had failed.
I remembered the dud bullet that I had picked up out of the mud after my misfire. The one that I had surmised was an omen, and had left with the question of good or bad? That was the bullet I had just found in my pocket, and I realized now that the answer was bad.
I laughed then, a hearty laugh, for I’d given all of myself, and still fallen short. But I was not done for. What I could not do myself, others may be able to.
I remembered the flare gun in my pocket and thanked Belgrade silently.
With some effort, I turned myself over using only the strength in my arms. My legs were useless to me, flayed open as they were. So instead, I crawled, nay I dragged myself forward through the mud and the dead. The rats, although ravenous, were still scavengers, and they parted before me.
I gripped handfuls of dirt and mud and dragged myself forward until I reached the upward wall of the crater, and then ever so slowly I ascended. Several times I nearly lost consciousness, but each time the fear of doing so was enough to keep me awake. Until at last, I crested the edge of the berm and lay in full view of what I thought to be the German line.
I rolled over onto my back and fumbled for the flare gun. Beside me was a body, and I recognized first the pale wisps of blond hair that protruded from an ill-fitting helmet. I had missed it the first time, eager as I was to search the crater. It was Phillips. His eyes wide, but peaceful, shone like glass in the moon's light. By some miracle the rats had not started on him, his body unmolested. I reached out a hand and shut his lids.
“Well if I couldn’t bring you back, the least I could do was die beside you.”
I heard the clamorous squeaks and snarls of the rats as they worked their way up the embankment, falling over each other.
I palmed the flare gun and fired it straight up into the air. I fired it right at the moon, and watched it fly, waiting for it to leave the atmosphere.
An enormous hiss went up from the rats below me, and I imagined that they scattered beneath the dull red light.
Almost immediately a German Vickers spoke. I heard a horrible screaming from just inside the crater.
The canvas of the medical tent was a dirty, eggshell white. I stared at it, counting the speckles. The Doctor had told me that I would never again have the use of my legs. It was a miracle that I was still alive, or so I was told.
Belgrade had found me for a second time that day. I had lost consciousness after firing the flare. He and two others had already been halfway to the crater by the time the flare went up, drawn by the explosion that had disfigured me, and the subsequent gunfire. The Germans had tried to fire upon the position, but I had apparently not crawled towards the German side as I had meant to. Instead, I had crawled back to the side facing the British and my position on the side of the berm had shielded me from the German fire. The rats had not been so lucky. Belgrade had said that by the time the firing had stopped, and he’d snuck up to retrieve me, he’d never seen so many dead rats.
He found me lying just over the berm, short of breath, and unconscious. He had tried to pick me up, and drag me back, but my grip was so firm on the webbing of the body beside me that he could not remove it. He and one of the others dragged both of us back.
Phillips' body was laid to rest at Warlencourt.
Belgrade had told me all of it when I’d woke up in the hospital afterward.
Some weeks later, he missed a visit. I learned later that Belgrade had died trying to retrieve another body, one that belonged to one of the men that had helped save me.
I wondered at that. I often wondered what turns of fortune had brought me here. Was it good or bad? That dead bullet. What journey had it taken to find itself failing not once, but twice, and the second time when I had needed it the most. I thought of Phillips and Wellington who had watched over me as I slept. And I thought of Belgrade, who not knowing me, had saved me, daring to do so twice. Their sacrifice had all given me life, a life I was not sure I deserved.
I stared at the speckled canvas sky. I wondered if the rats were still fighting each other. I wondered if they still protected their young. If they still ate their own.
Eventually, I decided they did. And that they always would. I imagined Scarface was still alive, I doubted he could die.
The nurse came to administer my morphine.
“Can we skip this one?” I asked.
“Skip what?” the nurse asked.
“The Morphine,” I said. “I miss dreaming.”
“Oh, I didn’t bring Morphine,” she said. “I brought a visitor.”
“A visitor?” I asked.
“A Mr. Wellington is here to see you,” she responded.
Yep one of those where you keep reading faster and faster cause the end can't come soon enough. That's the good stuff, my man.
Gee thanks, there goes my sleep for the night