My Brother's Keeper (2 page)

‘Which means he's a damned good shot,' said the Lieutenant. ‘Send a runner to Battalion HQ too, Sergeant. We should tell Colonel Craig what's happened.'

‘I'll go, sir,' said Alfie, finding his voice. He felt the need to do something, anything, and he wanted to volunteer before the Sergeant chose someone else.

The Lieutenant nodded, then walked slowly off down the trench, his head bowed.

‘Barnes, why are you still 'ere?' the Sergeant yelled, making Alfie jump. He looked round at Ernie again, who squeezed his shoulder, more gently than before.

‘You cut along, Alfie,' he said, smiling. ‘We'll have breakfast ready for you when you get back. Bacon and eggs, sausages, a fried slice or two?'

‘He'll be lucky,' George called out. ‘It'll be bully beef and biscuit as usual!'

‘See you later, Alfie,' said Cyril. ‘And remember, keep your head down.'

Alfie hurried away in the opposite direction to the one taken by the Lieutenant, dodging round the other men, the buzz of what had happened to the Captain preceding him. After fifty yards of straight trench he came to a small bay set back from the front line. Just beyond that was the entrance to the main communication trench that would take him the hundred yards to the support line, and then the same distance to the reserve line, eventually emerging half a mile from Battalion HQ.

The trenches had been given the names of London streets by the men, to remind them of home, perhaps – it was a London regiment, after all. So the support line was Oxford Street, the reserve line was Piccadilly, and the communication trench was Charing Cross Road.

Alfie had only gone a few yards down the latter when he realised he would have to stop. His stomach churned and he threw up, last night's dinner of bully beef, biscuits and tea splattering onto the duckboards around his boots. He leant against the trench wall, his forehead on his arm, feeling hot and cold at the same time, the taste of bile in his mouth. His stomach was
empty, but his mind was full of a single image – the small bloody hole in the Captain's head.

Captain Wilkins wasn't the first dead man Alfie had seen in the last three weeks. There was no getting away from them on the Western Front. They were everywhere: in no-man's land, buried in the walls of trenches with arms or legs sticking out, rotting under the duckboards. Alfie had been horrified at first, and shocked when he'd heard men joking about the bodies. He wasn't sure he'd ever be able to do the same. But the awful truth was that he had almost stopped noticing them.

Seeing a man killed right in front of you, though, that was different. One minute Captain Wilkins had been there, walking and talking and full of life, and the next minute – no, the next second – he had been turned into the lifeless thing those men had carried away. And everyone had been so matter of fact about it! But then as the Captain had said, the Company had done plenty of fighting. Alfie's mates and all the others must have seen lots of men killed before.

A distant rumble of heavy guns made the duckboards tremble under his feet, bringing Alfie back to the moment. This won't do, he told himself, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He'd wanted to see
some action, and by golly, he'd seen it. What use would he be to his country if he fell apart every time something bad happened? What would his family think if they could see him like this?

‘Get a grip, Alfie,' he muttered to himself. He had a job to do, a message to deliver, and he was going to do it.

The communication trench came to an end in the cellar of a ruined house on the edge of a shell-blasted village. Beyond that were open fields and one of those long, straight French roads with lines of trees on either side. Battalion HQ was a ten-minute walk along it, in a mansion the Army had taken over, a large building of red bricks with tall windows, each flanked by green wooden shutters, and a roof of shiny black slates. A flight of steps led up to an imposing pair of doors guarded by two sentries.

‘Urgent message for the Colonel,' said Alfie, and they nodded him through.

He had marched past Battalion HQ several times on the way to the front line, and on the way back when the company was heading for the rest area, but he'd never been inside. It was impressive, like something from a story-book. Beyond the entrance
was a spacious hall half-filled by a wide staircase. There were doors that led to other rooms, he supposed, and officers everywhere, immaculate in proper, clean uniforms with shirts and ties and shiny boots, most of them carrying files or documents.

Alfie stood in the middle of the polished wood floor. He was suddenly very conscious of his own scruffy, mud-caked outfit and sick-stained boots, and uncertain where to go or what to do. One of the officers noticed him and came over.

‘Looking for someone, Private?' he said. ‘You seem lost.'

‘Yes, sir, thank you, sir!' said Alfie, whipping off his helmet and saluting smartly. You didn't have to salute the officers in the front line, but he knew he should here at HQ. This officer – a tall man with a hard face and red tabs on his lapels – looked like the kind who would insist. ‘Important message for the Colonel, sir.'

‘I see,' murmured the officer, who was a major, the next rank up from a captain, and one rank down from a colonel. ‘You'd better come with me, then.'

Colonel Craig was in the largest room off the hall. He was standing next to a long table covered in maps, pointing at one in particular and talking to
a couple of other officers. They also had red tabs on the lapels of their tunics, as did the Colonel. Alfie stopped in front of him and saluted even more crisply this time. He had never seen the Colonel up close before, only from a distance, at a parade when he'd arrived from base camp. The Colonel was tall too, and had a narrow face and grey hair.

‘Very sorry to bring bad news, sir.' said Alfie, who had thought hard about what to say. ‘But Captain Wilkins is dead, shot by a sniper after stand-to.'

‘What damned bad luck.' The Colonel frowned. ‘He was a good man, been with the Regiment a long time. Popular with the rank and file, too.'

‘I'm not sure that's always a good thing,' said the major who had brought Alfie to the Colonel. ‘Wilkins wasn't the most… aggressive of soldiers, was he?'

‘True, Sanderson,' murmured the Colonel. ‘Perhaps we should replace him with someone who has rather more fire in his belly. What do you think, Private?'

‘Me, sir?' said Alfie, surprised. Suddenly every officer in the room was staring at him. ‘Er… if it means I'll get to do some fighting, then I'm all for it.'

‘That's the spirit,' said the Colonel, smiling. ‘I know just the man for the job.'

Alfie could hardly wait to meet whoever that might be.

As Ernie had promised, breakfast was waiting for Alfie when he got back to the trench, although by then it was almost mid-morning. George and Cyril and a couple of other men were putting down new duckboards at the spot where the Captain had been killed. Ernie was in the dugout, stirring something in a tin on the primus.

‘Blimey, that smells good,' said Alfie, sitting next to him. ‘What is it?'

‘Why dear boy, it's a stew of the finest beef and vegetables,' said Ernie in a pretend posh accent. ‘Supplied to His Majesty's Armed Forces on active service by the esteemed firm of Maconochie and Co, as you can see on the side of this 'ere tin.'

‘Yeah, and not for free, neither,' muttered Cyril, taking his seat beside them. ‘I'd say Mr Maconochie is making a tidy old sum out of selling his stew to the Army.'

‘Good luck to him,' said George. ‘I just hope there's enough to go round.'

‘Me too.' Alfie couldn't take his eyes off the food. ‘I'm starving.'

‘Didn't they offer you anything to eat at Battalion HQ?' Ernie frowned as he ladled the stew into bowls. He added a slice of white bread to each one.

Alfie shook his head, but didn't speak as his mouth was already full. The hot, fragrant stew was delicious, and of course his stomach was empty. Ernie always made sure Alfie got something to eat, usually giving him a larger portion of whatever they had because he was ‘a growing boy'.

Alfie was certainly hungry most of the time. Occasionally their rations didn't make it from the rear to the front line, and an awful lot of scrounging and thieving went on. Luckily, Ernie was a dab hand at both.

‘That's no surprise,' said Cyril with a snort. ‘Those red-tabs are too busy stuffing their own faces to offer one of us anything. I heard they have three slap-up
meals every day, whatever they want, with wine for dinner. It's all right for some.'

‘Yeah, well, they need to keep their strength up, don't they?' said George. ‘It must be hard doing all that planning. Being here is a cushy billet compared to that.'

Cyril and George carried on in the same vein while they ate, Ernie chipping in from time to time. Alfie had often heard his mates say the same kind of things; it was clear they didn't have much time for the ‘redtabs' at HQ. But the officers he'd met this morning hadn't seemed so bad, not for toffs, anyway. Besides, somebody had to do the planning, and naturally it was the same out here as it was back in Blighty – the ones with the posh accents were in charge.

‘So tell us, Alfie,' said Ernie at last. ‘Who are we getting as our new captain?'

‘I don't know his name,' said Alfie. ‘But I do know he won't be like Captain Wilkins. The Colonel said it would be someone with more fire in his belly.'

The other three went still, their faces suddenly serious.

‘Oh no,' murmured George. ‘That's all we need.'

‘What's wrong?' Alfie looked from one to the other and back again. ‘It'll be good to have a captain
who'll liven things up a bit. I mean, how are we ever going to win this war if all we do is sit around in holes in the ground? We should be taking the fight to Fritz. Everybody at home thinks that's what we're doing already.'

‘Yeah, well, they haven't got a clue,' said Cyril. ‘They're not here. We are.'

Alfie frowned. Every time they got on to the subject of fighting the enemy he hit a brick wall. It must be to do with whatever had happened to the Company before he'd arrived. His mates never seemed to want to talk about it, and Alfie hadn't asked. Now he decided he would have to… but he wasn't going to get his chance just yet. Sergeant Jones was heading down the trench towards them, barking orders at everyone.

‘Right, you layabouts,' he said when he reached the dugout. ‘If you reckon you'll be sitting around on your backsides as usual today you've got another think comin'.'

‘Now there's a surprise,' said George. ‘No rest for the wicked, eh, Sarge?'

The Sergeant grinned. ‘Couldn't have put it better myself. I want this trench looking spick and span before the new captain arrives. Hurry up, jump to it!'

The lads grumbled and groaned, but Alfie knew they didn't really mind. The trench was where they lived for a week at a time, and it needed constant maintenance and repair to keep the men inside it safe. Even though Alfie complained about being stuck in a filthy trench, he knew it was the only way to stay alive. Modern weapons were far too deadly for armies to fight each other in the open as they had done in the old days. Machine guns could wipe out hundreds of men almost instantly.

But the trench also filled up with rubbish: empty tins and bottles and fag packets, ammunition boxes, bits of lost or discarded equipment. The battalion was divided into four companies, each spending alternate weeks in the front line or in reserve, and some companies were more untidy than others. The wind often blew stuff in from no-man's land too, and any rain turned soil into mud, undermining the sandbags and planks that held up the walls, swallowing the duckboards in the trench bottom.

There were rats as well, big, bold beasts scampering and scavenging everywhere. On his first night in the dugout a rat had run across Alfie's face as he'd been falling asleep, and he had nearly died of fright. He'd wanted to shoot it with his rifle, but that
would have got him into trouble. As far as the Army was concerned, bullets should only be used to kill Germans.

Most of the men took no notice of the creatures, and as with the dead, Alfie had grown accustomed to rats being constantly underfoot. He would never, ever get used to the smell of the trench, though – a foul odour generated by months-old corpses rotting in the mud, the unwashed bodies of living men and the stench of their waste. They had no way of getting clean and no toilets, just a couple of stinking latrine pits for the whole company at the end of short ‘sap' trenches leading back from the front line. Alfie loathed the latrines, and had nightmares about falling into one. But he had to use them like everyone else.

Sergeant Jones kept the men busy throughout that day, and for Alfie the time flew by. One job couldn't be done during daylight, which was why after the evening stand-to Alfie and Ernie found themselves repairing the parapet at the spot where Captain Wilkins had been killed. They worked well together, replacing any of the sandbags that had split open, making sure they left no gaps for snipers.

‘There, that ought to do it,' said Ernie. ‘Any sign of Jonesy?'

‘No, haven't seen him for ages,' said Alfie. ‘We can relax.'

Ernie sighed with fatigue. They were standing on the fire-step, but now he took off his helmet, pulled a cigarette from behind one ear, and knelt down in the shadows to light it with a match – everyone said the quickest way to get a sniper's attention at night was to be careless about such things. Ernie rose again and leaned back against the trench wall. He offered Alfie a drag on his fag, and Alfie shook his head.

The moon was bigger, but there was more cloud, so the darkness was deeper than it had been the night before. Suddenly there was a distant rumbling and bright flashes lit the sky, turning the underside of the clouds yellow and orange.