The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus by Sean McLachlan

Author:Sean McLachlan [McLachlan, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-24T22:00:00+00:00

13

As soon as Moustafa showed Augustus the note the Apaches had left, reality shattered.

The crude drawing of the firing squad became a real one. The Frenchman stood lashed to a post, a defiant look on his face. When he had refused a blindfold, the French officer had put one on him anyway, but while it could hide the contemptuous gleam in his eyes, it could not hide the fanatical pride graven on his features.

“Do you have any final words?” the officer asked. It was Captain Fortier, who had held the line next to his own detached unit of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.

“I forgive the working men who do this deed, and condemn the tools of the ruling class who make them do it!” the man shouted.

“What did he say?” Mark asked beside him. He was the only other Tommy on the firing squad, the rest being French poilus like the man they had to execute.

“Nothing,” he muttered.

Captain Fortier stood aside, raised his saber.

“Ready, aim, fire!”

The saber came down.

They fired. He had decided to deliberately miss, but at the last instant shifted his aim and put a bullet dead between the man’s eyes.

The other shots ripped apart the prisoner’s chest, all save one, which lodged in the post several inches above the man’s head.

The man slowly crumpled, seeming to deflate, the ropes going slack. Blood poured down his face and chest.

Captain Fortier strode up to the executed man and tapped at the bullet hole in the post with the tip of his sword. He gave the two Tommies a suspicious look but when he asked the question he asked it in French.

“Who missed on purpose?”

The only answer was silence.

Captain Fortier walked slowly down the line. Mark stood on the far right and the officer passed him first. He stared at Mark for a moment, who held his gaze, and the officer continued to where he stood. He couldn’t bring himself to look at his French counterpart. He could only look at his hands, hands that had never trembled before but now could barely keep a hold of the rifle. Sweat poured down his face. He felt like he was going to be sick. That brought more fear, the fear of heaving up his half-digested bully beef and spattering it all over Captain Fortier’s shiny boots.

He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“You didn’t miss, did you?” The words came out almost kindly.

All he could do was shake his head.

“Executions are never easy,” Captain Fortier said as if from a father to his son. “But they are vital to maintain the fighting spirit of the army. You saw what this man did. You saw how he tried to turn my regiment into some rabblerousing workers’ collective. Why, if he spoke English he would have tried to do the same with your regiment.”

The gorge rose in his throat, and he just managed to turn enough away that his breakfast ended up on the grass and not on the captain.

“Easy there, easy,” Captain Fortier said, his fine, upper class Parisian French sounding oddly beautiful in this ugly scene.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.