The Blunted Lance by Max Hennessy

Author:Max Hennessy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Blunted Lance
ISBN: 9780755128013
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2012-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

When the 19th were relieved six days later they were mere shadows of the soldiers who had gone into the line. They moved like phantoms, a ghostly trickle of men in which the will to move struggled with the wish to sleep.

An infantry battalion whose identity Dabney didn’t even bother to enquire took over from them, fresh soldiers, clean and unstained with mud or blood, their packs neat, their rifles clean.

‘Well played, the Clutchers,’ one of them said. ‘Are we downhearted?’

The yell went up immediately from the men round him. ‘NO!’

One of the exhausted Lancers lifted his head and stared at them with red-rimmed eyes from a haggard black face. ‘You bloody soon will be,’ he observed.

Dabney’s face was foul with dirt and his clothes were torn and covered with blood. He was dazed, a hundred years older and grimmer, but unhurt. Leduc stumbled alongside him, also untouched. He was licking his lips and his tongue seemed curiously pinker and cleaner because of the filth on his face. He looked taut and distressed and he carried a pack that was full of the identity discs and pay books of the dead.

The whole place reeked of the acid fumes of high explosive, the smell of death and the stink of human excreta, because they had never been able to dig latrines. Here and there on the grass were flecks of dried blood where they had dragged a wounded man to die, and behind the line was a group of neat mounds in which they had buried the grey-faced dead. It had been a dismal job in the slow-falling rain.

‘Poor devils,’ Leduc had muttered as the padre intoned a prayer. ‘Their graves are full of bloody water.’

As they stumbled back to Mortigny, men wearing bandages startlingly white against the grime of their faces were supported by their friends. A man with his arm in a sling had his other arm round the shoulders of a weeping boy far less badly wounded. ‘There, there, mate,’ he was saying. ‘You’ll be all right.’

Mortigny was full of relieved regiments, infantry and cavalry all mixed up together, wandering about in aimless fashion, all too tired to care. Most of them were bowed and limping, muddy ghosts who looked in their stained uniforms as if they’d been buried and dug up again. Scores had gone to sleep on the pavement, their backs against the walls, indifferent to the appeals of NCOs and officers. Food had been brought up and those who were awake munched thick sandwiches of bread and bully beef, their faces brooding and enigmatic, their mouths pursed round the stumps of Woodbines.

The wounded were being gathered in a field behind the Mairie. The anaesthesia of shock was wearing off now and pain and thirst were setting in among the torn bodies. A doctor, wearing a bloodstained apron, moved among them giving injections of morphia and anti-tetanus, and the whole area under the Red Cross flag stank of carbolic, ether and chloroform.

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