Then we see Wilkie lying higher up the slope, too close to the lip of the crater. When Charlie calls out to him he doesn’t reply. Charlie goes to him and turns him over. “It’s my legs,” I hear the captain whisper. “I can’t seem to move my legs.” He’s too exposed up there, so Charlie drags him back down as gently as he can. We try to make him comfortable. The Hun keeps praying out loud. I’m quite sure he’s praying now. “Du lieber Gott,” I hear. They call God by the same name. Pete and Nipper are crawling over towards us from the far side of the crater. We are together at least. The ground shudders, and with every impact we are bombarded by showers of mud and stone and snow. But the sound I hate and fear most is not the sound of the explosion — by then it’s done and over with, and you’re either dead or not. No, it’s the whistle and whine and shriek of the shells as they come over. It’s the not knowing where they will land, whether this one is for you.
Then, as suddenly as the barrage begins, it stops. There is silence. Darkness hides us again. Smoke drifts over us and down into our hole, filling our nostrils with the stench of cordite. We stifle our coughing. The Hun has stopped his praying, and is lying curled up in his overcoat, his hands over his ears. He’s rocking like a child, like Big Joe.
“I won’t make it,” Wilkie says to Charlie. “I’m leaving it to you to get them all back, Peaceful, and the prisoner. Go on now.”
“No sir,” Charlie replies. “If one goes we all go. Isn’t that right, lads?”
That’s how it happened. Under cover of an early-morning mist we made it back to our trenches, Charlie carrying Wilkie on his back the whole way, until the stretcher bearers came for him in the trench. As they lifted him, Wilkie caught Charlie by the hand and held it. “Come and see me in hospital, Peaceful,” he said. “That’s an order.” And Charlie promised he would.
We had a brew up with our prisoner in the dugout before they came for him. He smoked a cigarette Pete had given him. He’d stopped shaking now, but his eyes still held their fear. We had nothing to say to one another until the moment he got up to leave. “Danke,” he said. “Danke sehr.”
“Funny that,” Nipper said when he’d gone. “Seeing him standing there with not a stitch on. Take off our uniforms and you can hardly tell the difference, can you? Not a bad bloke, for a Fritz that is.”
That night I didn’t think, as I should have done, of Little Les lying out there in the German dugout, with a hole in his head. I thought of the Hun prisoner we’d brought back. I didn’t even know his name, yet, after that night cowering in the shell hole with him, I felt somehow I knew him better than I’d ever known Little Les.
We are back at last at rest camp, most of us anyway. We soon find out which hospital Wilkie is in, and we go to see him as Charlie had promised. It’s a big chateau of a place, with ambulances coming and going, and crisp-looking nurses bustling everywhere. “Who are you?” asks the orderly at the desk.
“Peaceful,” says Charlie smiling — he loves playing this joke. “Both of us are Peaceful.”
The orderly does not look amused, but he seems to have been expecting us. “Which of you is Charlie Peaceful?”
“I am,” says Charlie.
“Captain Wilkes said you would come.” The orderly is reaching into the desk drawer. He takes out a watch. “He left this for you,” he says, and Charlie takes the watch.
“Where is he?” Charlie asks. “Can we see him?”
“Back in Blighty by now. Left yesterday. In a bad way. Nothing more we could do for him here, I’m afraid.”
As we walk down the steps of the hospital Charlie is putting the watch on his wrist.
“Does it work?” I ask.
“Course it does,” he says. He shows it to me on his wrist. “What d’you think?”
“Nice,” I reply.
“It’s not just nice, Tommo,” Charlie says. “It’s wonderful, that’s what it is. Ruddy wonderful. Tell you what — if anything happens to me it’s yours, all right?”
The mouse is here again. He keeps stopping and looking up at me. He’s wondering if he should run away, whether I’m friend or foe. “Wee, sleekit, caw’rin tim’rous beastie.” I don’t know what half the words mean, but I still know the poem. Back at school Miss McAllister made us stand up and recite it on Burns Day. She said it was good for us to have at least one great Scottish poem in our heads for ever. This wee beastie is tim’rous all right, but he’s not Scottish, he’s a Belgian mouse. I recite the poem to him all the same. He seems to understand because he listens politely. I do it in Miss McAllister’s Scottish accent. I’m almost word perfect. I think Miss McAllister would have been proud of me. But the moment I finish he’s gone, and I’m alone once more.
Earlier they came and asked if I wanted someone to stay with me through the night, and I said no. I even sent the padre away. They asked if there was anything I wanted, anything they could do to help, and I said there was nothing. Now I long to have them all here, the padre too. We could have had singsongs. They could have brought me egg and chips. We could have drunk ourselves silly and I could be numb with it by now. But all I’ve had for company is a mouse, a vanishing Belgian mouse.
The next time they sent us up into the line it wasn’t back to our “quiet” sector, it was into the Wipers salient itself. For months now Fritz had been pounding away at Wipers, trying everything he could to batter it into submission. Time and again he’d almost broken through into the town and had only been driven back at the last moment. But the salient around the town was shrinking all the time. From the talk in the estaminet in Pop and from the almost constant bombardment a few miles to the east of us we all knew how bad it must be in there. Everyone knew they had us surrounded and overlooked on three sides, so that they could chuck all they wanted into our trenches and there was nothing much we could do about it, except grin and bear it.
Our new company commander, Lieutenant Buckland, told us how things were, how if we gave way then Wipers would be lost, and that Wipers must not be lost. He didn’t say why it mustn’t be lost, but then he wasn’t Wilkie. We all felt the loss of Wilkie very keenly. Without him we were like sheep without a shepherd. Lieutenant Buckland was doing his best, but he was straight out from England. He might have been very properly spoken, but he knew even less about fighting this war than we did. Nipper said he was just a young pipsqueak, and that he belonged back at school. And it was true, he seemed younger than any of us, even me.
As we marched through Wipers that evening I wondered why it was worth fighting for at all. So far as I could see there was no town left, nothing you could call a town anyway. Rubble and ruin, that’s all the place was, more dogs and cats than townspeople. We saw two horses lying dead and mangled in the street, as we passed by what was left of the town hall; and everywhere there were soldiers and guns and ambulances on the move, and hurrying. They were not shelling the town as we came through, but I was as terrified then as I ever had been. I could not get those horses and their terrible wounds out of my head. The sight of them haunted me, haunted all of us,