My Brother's Keeper by Tony Bradman

Author:Tony Bradman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Stained with Blood

Alfie climbed the ladder up to the parapet then started slithering forward on his front, his rifle slung over his back. The ground was uneven and bumpy, mostly mud with occasional patches of sliminess that Alfie didn’t want to think about. He knew there were plenty of bodies in no-man’s land, some quite close to the trench, and he hated the idea that he might actually find himself crawling over an old rotting corpse.

More clouds covered the moon now, the darkness seeming to press down on him like a physical weight. Alfie could barely see the soles of Ernie’s boots ahead of him, or the other men. They were moving quietly, but not quietly enough for Alfie. He heard every breath, every rustle, every clink of metal. How could Fritz not hear it all too? Every gun in the German trenches must be aimed at them, ready to fire…

There were plenty of obstacles as well. First, the barbed wire protecting their own trench. The ‘path’ cut through it turned out to be quite narrow: Alfie’s sleeve was caught by the rusty barbs and he had to tug fiercely several times to release it. Then they had to crawl into and out of a series of shell craters, the bottoms filled with foul-smelling sludge or stagnant water. Finally they reached the wire in front of the German trench and crept through the gap made by the wire-cutting party.

Ernie stopped suddenly and Alfie bumped into him, scraping his nose on one of Ernie’s boots. Somebody nearby was speaking quite loudly, and Alfie was about to hiss at whoever it was to shut up before he realised the language wasn’t English. He froze. Two German sentries were talking to each other in the trench less than ten yards away. The clouds parted briefly to reveal the rest of the raiding party motionless as well, then Alfie saw Captain Johnson gesture to the two men closest to him. They nodded, slid forwards silently, and climbed over the German parapet.

Seconds later one of the men appeared at the parapet and beckoned to the raiding party to follow. Alfie jumped into the trench with the rest and saw the dead bodies of two Germans, one very young, sitting propped against the rear wall, their faces ghostly white, the fronts of their field-grey uniforms stained black by the blood still flowing from their gaping throats. For a moment Alfie couldn’t take his eyes off them, mostly because they seemed so… ordinary. They were the enemy, of course – the monsters he knew as Jerry, Fritz, the evil Hun – but now he was close he could see they were men too, like his mates or the porters back home. Like him, in fact.

Things were happening around Alfie. Captain Johnson gave orders for the raiding party to split into several smaller groups: a couple to secure each end of this trench, one to accompany him down the nearest communication trench, another led by Lieutenant Reynolds.

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