The Storms of War by Kate Williams

Author:Kate Williams [Williams, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2015-06-09T22:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

Pozières, France, Spring 1916

There wasn’t much you could do about the rats, horrible things as big as cats. He wouldn’t admit it to the men, but he had become rather fond of a little one who scuttled around his bed at night. Sometimes, in the morning, he woke up and saw its nose twitching, right next to his head. He was even more embarrassed to admit it, but it reminded him a little of Celia when she had been young, standing eagerly by his bed. ‘Michael! Come out and play!’

The lice were something else altogether. One morning, Michael woke up and felt something itching on his back. Within two days they were all over his skin and under his clothes, and even when he shook them out, they were still there, because they had swarmed their way into the seams and stayed there, running up and down, making him itch. He tried to rise above it, embarrassed, for he knew that lice thrived on lack of cleanliness. The men scratched, but he would not. After one particularly bad night, he told Wheeler, ‘I can’t bear it any longer. Please, don’t tell anyone.’

Wheeler looked at him. They were lit by just the single candle. It threw shadows on the wall, over their faces. ‘Take off your shirt,’ he said.

‘What?’

So far they had done little more than kissing, as they had by the fire step on Christmas night. Even though they spent nearly every moment together, touching each other was almost impossible. If ever they were even close to holding hands, Bilks seemed to appear, start talking about duties. It was unbearable. At night, Michael threw himself into bed on his stomach, let Wheeler run through his mind hotly, rubbing against the sheet, ashamed of himself, unable to stop.

Four times Wheeler had been sent out on sentry duty; twice Michael had crept out to speak to him. There, looking out on no-man’s-land, they had held hands, kissed again, but Michael had not stayed long. At Christmas, Bilks and the men would not have noticed his absence; by February, everyone was watching each other. So Michael crept back after fifteen minutes or so, his body flaming, hardly caring to duck when the guns fired, for he could live for ever, surely.

There were so few opportunities, the tiniest touch was enough. Michael did everything to try to increase them: offered to take over Bilks’s role of distributing the rations, passed around the grog, joined the building parties just to stand next to Wheeler and give him pieces of wood. Their fingers met, and sometimes – exquisitely – parts of their hands. They brushed past each other and Michael felt the thin material of Wheeler’s shirt. He thought of people in love. They got married and then they could spend every minute touching each other. He and Wheeler could not really be in love. What they had was something entirely different. He could not imagine being able to touch Wheeler whenever he liked, all the time.

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