A Test of Wills by Charles Todd

Author:Charles Todd
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Rutledge, 1914-1918 - Veterans, Police - England - Warwickshire, Mystery & Detective, Villages, Fiction, General, Mystery fiction, Historical, Warwickshire (England), Traditional British, Ian (Fictitious character), World War
ISBN: 9780061242847
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-12-07T06:13:10.835045+00:00

The machine gunner was still there, and the main assault was set for dawn. He had to be stopped before then. Rutledge sent his men across again, calling to them as he ran, and watched them fall, his sergeant the first to go down, watched the remnants turn and stagger back to their lines through the darkness, cursing savagely, eyes wild with pain and fury.

“It’s no’ the dying, it’s the waste!” Corporal MacLeod screamed at him, leaping back into the trench, faces turning his way. “If they want it taken out so badly, let them shell it!”

Rutledge, pistol in hand, shouted, “If we don’t silence it, hundreds of men will die—it’s our lot coming, we can’t let them walk into that!”

“I won’t go back—you can shoot me here, I won’t go back! I won’t take another man across that line, never again, as God’s my witness!”

“I tell you, there’s no choice!” He looked at the mutiny in the wild eyes surrounding him, looked at the desolation of spirit in weary, stooped shoulders, and forced himself to ruthless anger: “There’s never a choice!”

“Aye, man, there’s a choice.” The Corporal turned and pointed to the dead and dying, caught in a no-man’s-land between the gunner and the lines. “But that’s cold-blooded murder, and I’ll no’ be a part of it again. Never again!”

He was tall and thin and very young, burned out by the fighting, battered and torn by too many offenses and too many retreats, by blood and terror and fear, tormented by a strong Calvinistic sense of right and wrong that somehow survived through it all. It wasn’t courage he lacked; Rutledge knew him too well to think him a coward. He had quite simply broken—but others had seen it. There was nothing Rutledge could do for him now, too many lives were at stake to let one more stand in the way. Grief vied with anger, and neither won.

He’d had Hamish MacLeod arrested on the spot, and then he’d led the last charge out into the icy, slippery mud, challenging them to let him do it alone, and they’d followed in a straggle, and somehow the gun had been silenced, and there was nothing left afterward but to see to the firing party. Then he’d sat with Hamish throughout what was left of that long night, listening to the wind blowing snow against the huts they’d somehow rigged in the trenches. Listening to Hamish talk.

A hideously long night. It had left him drained beyond exhaustion, and at the end of it he’d said, “I’ll give you a second chance—go out there and tell them you were wrong!”

And Hamish had shaken his head, eyes dark with fear but steadfast. “No. I haven’t got any strength left. End it while I’m still a man. For God’s sake, end it now!”

The shelling had started down the line when Rutledge summoned six men to form the firing party. It rocked the earth, shook men to their souls, pounding through the brain with a storm of sound until there was no thought left.

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