Читать книгу The Sons of Adam - Harry Bingham - Страница 41

Alan stumbled from the dugout into the first chilly signs of dawn. Missing, presumed dead. The world was colossally altered. Alan could have lost both legs with infinitely more calmness than he could bear this hideous truth. Tom was missing, presumed dead.

A sentry was standing on the makeshift fire-step, his face blank with tiredness. ‘Any sign of life out there?’ Alan asked him. His voice was harsh and the pain in his lungs still seemed to be as bad as ever.

‘No, sir, nuffin’.’

‘Any wounded at all? Any cries for help?’

‘Well, sir …’ The sentry shrugged, as though the request was incomprehensible. ‘You’re always going to get wounded, like, I s’pose. Can’t say as how I listens to ’em overmuch.’

Alan wanted to strike the man hard in the face. His right arm actually ached to do it.

‘I’m going out,’ he said. ‘Please try not to shoot me when I return.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The sentry had wanted to add something about the folly of leaving the trench as dawn approached, but there was an aggression in Alan’s manner that stopped him. Alan scrambled over the parapet and wormed his way incautiously forwards, right out to the heart of the battlefield’s horrors. The ground was littered with fragments of wire, shell canisters, human beings. A human face, detached from its skull, had floated to the surface of a puddle, and lay face up, leering at the sky. Alan noticed nothing; cared for nothing. He reached the spot where he thought Tom’s raid had come to grief and began to call out.

‘Tom? Tommy? Tom Creeley?’

He was being desperately foolish. He was within simple sniping distance of the German lines.

‘Tom? Tommy? Tom Creeley?’

There was no sound at all, no human voice, no groan. The German rifles, which could have blotted him from existence in a second, held their fire.

‘Tom? Tommy? Tom!’

There was no answer. How could there have been? Tom had assaulted the German guns. The guns had spoken. Their word was final. Tom was missing, presumed dead.