Читать книгу The Sons of Adam - Harry Bingham - Страница 43

Every night, for four nights, Alan searched for Tom.

He came to know no man’s land as no one was ever meant to know it. He found corpses, he found dying men, he found the wounded of both sides. The dying men he shot or drugged into insensibility with morphine. The wounded he dragged laboriously back to the trenches, before squirming out once again. He called a thousand times for Tom. He abandoned caution. He stood up on moonlit nights. He used the light of flares to survey the shell-ruined landscape. He shouted for his lost brother at the top of his voice.

The Germans heard and saw him, of course. Alan could hear the German sentries echoing his call – ‘Tom! Tom Creeley!’ – followed by bursts of laughter and the muttered sing-song voices of the Bavarian regiments. By removing cartridges from the ammunition belts of the machine guns, they could even get their guns to rap out the same rhythm. ‘TOM, Tom-MEE, Tom CREEEE-LEEE!’ But there was no rifle fire, and even the machine guns didn’t seem to be directed at him. From kindness, compassion, or perhaps just indifference, the Germans let the lunatic Englishman roam up and down the devastated land.