Chapter One

Flanders, September 1917

T he first time Josef Shepel met the man who would change his life, it was among the dead at a forward dressing station in the Ypres Salient.

He’d been working all night, rattling along the rutted road with the ambulance headlights dark. And nothing to guide him but the poor sod slogging along ahead of them holding a white handkerchief behind his back. Must have done half a dozen trips already and there were still nearly twenty stretcher cases awaiting evacuation to the clearing station.

Josef squinted at the brightening horizon as he climbed out of the ambulance and stretched his aching back. After a long night, the pre-dawn grey was welcome even if it did open up the threat of German guns. To his left rose the dark shape of the bombed-out farmhouse the Royal Army Medical Corps had co-opted, its windows and doors long ago blasted away and its walls pockmarked by shrapnel. Ahead, the skeletal remains of barns and woodland emerged from the night, stark silhouettes against a paling sky.

With a shiver, Josef reached for his cigarettes.

Corporal Johnston was barking at the SBs, getting the worst of the casualties loaded into their van. It would take twenty minutes, probably, so Josef slid around the side of the farmhouse in search of five minutes’ solitude. Leaning back against the wall, he closed his eyes and took a long drag on his gasper, releasing a weary smoky breath. This was his fifth—no, sixth—night without sleep, driving the ambulance back and forth from the clearing station to the dressing station. And there hadn’t even been a big push, just the usual grinding attrition of the salient.

A sudden flash of brilliance startled his eyes open. On the horizon, a sliver of clear sky had allowed a spear of sunlight to pierce the crouching clouds, lighting their bellies in russet and scarlet. Like fire, or blood. Beneath them stretched the scarred, alien landscape of the battlefield, distant but visible beyond the ruins of the farm buildings and a forest of limbless trees.

And at Josef’s feet lay the dead.

He hadn’t noticed in the dark. Hidden from the road, behind the farmhouse, was the dying ground. Men brought back from the lines who hadn’t survived the journey, or hopeless cases passed over by doctors stretched beyond their limit trying to save those who stood a fighting chance. There were, perhaps, thirty men on the ground before him, covered in blankets or just their coats.

God but it was a pitiful sight.

Taking the cigarette from his lips, Josef felt a surge of sorrow, swiftly followed by fury for these sons and fathers and brothers and lovers left here like meat to rot. Oh yes, fury was so much more useful than helpless aching compassion. Heedless of the risk, Josef reached for the camera he kept hidden in his breast pocket. Sliding it out of its case, he flicked open the catch, relishing the smooth release of the lens on its struts. In this bright dawn sunlight, he could take his shot. Crouching, he adjusted the aperture and shutter speed, then lifted the camera to frame the photograph. He centred it on the deathly face of a young man with closed eyes and slack bloodless lips, his gored arm thrown across his chest. Behind him, the bodies stretched out in ramshackle ranks, but they’d blur in the photograph to draw the eye to the image in the foreground. Holding steady, Josef pressed the shutter release and listened to its satisfying click and whir. He just hoped nobody else heard the telltale sound. Glancing over his shoulder, he quickly lifted the flap to scratch the date onto the autograph film and expose it to the light. But, damn it, that had been the eighth and final exposure. Luckily, Josef always carried a spare film in his pocket.

Tucking his smoke into the corner of his mouth, he quickly wound the film on and opened the back of the camera. It took a moment to retrieve the spool from inside the film and the new film from his pocket. He’d done this a hundred times or more, and the fiddly job didn’t take more than a minute. Once the camera was closed again, he wound the film on until the first exposure was ready. Checking he was still alone, Josef moved closer to the bodies and tried for a different angle. This time, the silvery sunlight limned the pale faces of the dead, rendering them ghostly. If the photograph captured that, it would be spectacular.

He was just slipping the camera back into its case when he heard a hoarse whisper.

“Water.”

His head shot up, and he met the gaze of the very man he’d photographed. His eyes were a strange, glassy blue.

“For God’s sake, water...”

Josef’s heart wrenched. Shoving his camera back into his pocket, he swung his canteen around from over his shoulder as he stepped over another man’s body to reach the poor bastard still living. Kneeling, Josef unstopped his bottle and lifted the man’s head. “Easy, there,” he murmured as the man cried out in pain, setting the bottle to his dry lips and watching as he drank greedily.

God, but he looked young. Younger than Josef’s twenty-six years, certainly, his waxy skin clear and boyish beneath its pallor. His uniform was dark with blood over his abdomen, and there was a nasty wound on his left forearm where the sleeve had been torn away. Already blackened and putrefying, it stank like the devil.

It was a miracle, or perhaps a tragedy, that the lad was still alive.

When the water started to trickle, undrunk, from the boy’s lips, Josef lowered his head back down. His mouth moved, then, as if he were speaking. Josef leaned closer, trying to hear, almost gagging on the stench from the wound. He thought the boy might have a last message for his mother; they often did.

“Don’t,” he whispered, “leave me...”

Josef’s throat thickened. “All right,” he said and reached down to press his palm to the young man’s cheek. “I won’t.”

“They come—” Fingers scrabbled weakly for Josef’s wrist. “—for the dead. Don’t let...” He gasped with pain, then moaned low in his throat and sank back.

“Hush now.” Josef stroked a hand over the young man’s forehead, brushing his mousy hair away from his face. “I’ll stay with you. I promise.”

The boy didn’t respond, although his face was still scrunched in pain, drifting in and out of consciousness.

“I say,” called a crisp voice from behind him. “Is that chap alive?”

Startled, Josef twisted around. A figure stood on the far side of the bodies, silhouetted against the dawn. Josef raised a hand to shade his eyes and recognised the shape of an officer’s uniform and cap—as if the cut-glass accent hadn’t already given it away. “Yes, sir,” he said.

He expected to be ordered back to work and braced himself to refuse until the boy was past caring, but to his surprise the officer started to pick his way through the dead men towards him. Josef rose to meet him. He was a tall, well-made man with refined, aristocratic features and the arrogant bearing to match—yet the effect was softened by a troubled expression as he looked down at the suffering man. “Ah, poor boy,” he said after a moment’s pause, and bent to examine him.

Josef noticed he wore an armband of the RAMC and captain’s stars on his shoulder. “Are you a doctor, sir?” he said, crouching too. He didn’t hold out much hope for the wounded soldier, not after lying here all night, but if this man was a doctor...

The captain didn’t answer, seemingly absorbed in examining the wound on the man’s arm. He reached out a gloved hand to lift the arm, making a face at the stench but, nonetheless, studying it closely.

Josef averted his gaze. He’d become hardened to horrific injuries, but whether it was the stink or the black putrefaction, something about that wound made him shy away. Instead, he studied the captain. Beneath his forage cap, Josef saw a glint of dark hair in the sunlight, his square jaw and straight nose rather perfectly drawn, and strong thighs stretching his trousers tight where he crouched. Not that Josef had time for men of the captain’s sort—no more than they’d have time for a socialist troublemaker like himself—but he couldn’t help noticing. Even when his mind should be on other things.

Guiltily, he turned his attention back to the wounded man. Poor sod appeared insentient now, but nonetheless, Josef brushed his fingers over the boy’s forehead again and into his hair, the way his mum had done when he was a lad and sick in bed. Josef wanted him to know he wasn’t alone. “He asked me not to leave him,” he explained to the captain. “I’d rather stay until...Well.”

“He spoke to you?”

Surprised by the sharp tone of query in the captain’s voice, Josef looked up. “He did, yes, sir.”

“What did he say?”

“Umm...nothing much.” Disturbed by the intensity of the captain’s gaze, he looked back at the boy’s face. He had become very still now, but his chest still rose and fell with a tenacious hold on life. One thing he’d learned here was that men clung on until the last knockings. You wouldn’t credit how long a man could keep breathing with his guts spilling out.

The boy moaned, and Josef bit his lip against another twist of pity. God, but this was unbearable. Usually, he poured his feelings through the lens of his camera, letting his photographs capture the pain so he didn’t have to feel it, but this boy’s chill skin was under his fingers, and there was no ignoring that.

“Tell me,” the captain pressed. “Tell me everything he said.”

The note of command in that cool aristocratic accent felt like the touch of a hot iron to a raw nerve. “Why?” Josef snapped. “What does it matter to you?”

Silence.

When Josef glanced up, he found the captain regarding him with a single, cocked eyebrow. Clearly, he wasn’t used to having his orders challenged. But Josef wasn’t a soldier, and he wasn’t particularly fond of following orders.

“I should like to know,” the captain said after a moment. He set the man’s wounded arm down over his chest. “But if you have some reason for keeping it secret, then I shan’t pry. You and he were...friends?”

There was a slight emphasis on ‘friends’ that put Josef on guard. “No,” he said quickly. “I never saw him before today. Don’t even know his name.”

“No?” The captain looked doubtful. “Then you’re always so tender with your patients?”

Josef looked down at his hand, still stroking the lad’s hair. “Who’d do less? He’s just a boy.” The captain didn’t reply, and after a moment, Josef said, “He was rambling. Delirious, I suppose. He asked me not to leave him and said...it was something like ‘they come for the dead’. He was afraid, I think, of being taken away prematurely as...as a...”

As a corpse. Poor bastard.

When he glanced at the captain, to see if he’d understood, the man’s mouth was pressed into a tight line. The sun had disappeared behind the bank of steely cloud, and the cold light turned the captain’s colour to ash. “Hellfire,” he spat with vehemence. “Hellfire and bloody damnation.”

Josef was astonished by the outburst, but before he could respond, the boy gave a thin, pitiable cry, convulsed badly, and fell still, blood erupting from between his lips. His strange blue eyes were half open but unseeing, and Josef stopped the movement of his hand, letting it rest on the boy’s fine hair.

The captain felt for a pulse and let out a breath. “He’s gone,” he said softly, and swept a hand over the boy’s eyes, closing them. “That’s a mercy, at least.”

“Ha!” Angry tears pricked Josef’s eyes and thickened his throat. “A mercy, you call it?”

“I do, yes.” The captain rose fluidly to his feet, and Josef looked up at him, squinting against the cloudy sky. “There are worse things than death.”

Josef pushed himself to his feet and found himself not quite eye to eye with the captain, who was rather tall. “Like what? Dishonour? Cowardice?”

He was sick of hearing that bullshit from people who should know better.

“I meant suffering, of course.” A pause. “Your kindness to him was a mercy, too.”

Josef glared, then looked away, scratching a hand through his tangled curls. Stupid, to take out his fury on this man; he didn’t even know him. His anger drained away in a rush, leaving only the hollow exhaustion that lay beneath. “I wish...” He sighed and shook his head, unable to find the right words. He wished what? That this bloody war would end? God, he wished it had never started, but what use were wishes? If he wanted things to change, he’d better go out and change them.

“I wish too,” the captain said, surprising him again. “But here we are.”

Josef turned back around, and the captain smiled tightly. “Winchester,” he said and offered his hand to shake. “RAMC.”

Surprised, it took Josef a moment before he took the captain’s proffered hand. “Shepel. Red Cross.”

“Well.” Winchester held Josef’s eye. “Take some advice, Shepel, and stick with your pals when you’re out after dark. Can’t be too careful.”

“Careful of what? It’s a bloody war.”

Winchester smiled. “Just stay out of the shadows.”

Strange advice and Josef didn’t know what to make of it, but he didn’t have time to ask because at that moment Corporal Johnston poked his beaky nose around the corner of the farmhouse. “Shepel! Move your bloody arse. We’re heading back.”

Josef cast a final look at the boy at his feet, resting in peace now, he supposed. Or as close to it as possible in this hellish place. He regretted not being able to photograph him again, to record his passing, but with Winchester standing right there, it was impossible. Instead, he gave the captain a nod of farewell and headed back toward the ambulance. There were still a dozen stretcher cases waiting outside the dressing station, and he knew he’d be back again before he saw breakfast or a place to lay his head.

He glanced once over his shoulder as he turned the corner, to see Captain Winchester bending over the dead man. As Josef watched, the captain pulled somethingsmall from his pocket—a coin?—and touched it to the man's mouth. Then he straightened, gazing down for a moment before tugging the blanket up from the boy's legs to cover his body and face. For some reason, that simple gesture touched Josef. He wished he’d thought to do it himself.

***

It was several days before Josef saw Captain Winchester again.

He was in the resuscitation tent when it happened, bringing a casualty in straight from the ambulance for an emergency transfusion. Pale as a ghost he was, as Josef helped transfer him from the stretcher to the cot, and the doctor began the business with needles, tubes, and a bottle of blood. They were the stuff of miracles, transfusions. Although Josef didn’t much fancy the idea of another man’s blood running through his veins—seemed unnatural—there was no arguing with the results. He’d seen it bring men back from the dead.

He was moving aside, giving the doc space to work, and rolling his aching shoulders—you wouldn’t credit the dead weight of a man in a wet and sodden uniform—when he heard Winchester’s voice. “Over here,” he said. “Look.”

Josef glanced up and saw Winchester bending over a bed on the far side of the tent, examining a man who lay motionless. Unlike some of the other tents, filled with the moans and groans of the wounded, the resus tent was silent as the grave, and Josef could easily hear Winchester’s words even though he was speaking quietly. But the man he was talking to made Josef look twice: a tall, rangy Indian sepoy with a fine moustache and a deep frown beneath his turban as he looked where Winchester pointed. He gestured to the patient and said something in a language Josef didn’t understand. To his surprise, Winchester nodded and replied in kind. They carried out a hushed conversation for a few minutes, none of which Josef could understand but which was clearly heated. When Winchester finally straightened up, he said, “Nevertheless, I believe we have to take action.”

“That,” his friend replied, in an accent no less plummy than Winchester’s, “is what you always say.”

Winchester grunted, turning toward the door to the tent. In doing so, he caught Josef’s eye. Bugger. It was too late to pretend he hadn’t been watching, so Josef brazened out the uncomfortable moment by lifting a hand in a wave. “Morning, Captain.”

“Shepel.” One corner of his mouth lifted, and Josef felt a flush of pleasure at being remembered. Which was galling; he made it a point of principle to care nothing for the good opinion of brass hats like Captain Winchester. “Staying out of the shadows, I hope?”

“Not so much,” he said, bending to retrieve his stretcher from the floor. “I find I prefer them to the enemy guns when I’m out and about at night.”

Winchester looked him over with aristocratic assurance and turned to murmur something to his companion. Josef instantly found himself subject to the other man’s scrutiny, which was scalpel-like in its precision and sharpness. He made a comment to Winchester, eyebrows lifting, and Winchester shrugged. “Why not? Life’s short,” he said and touched his cap to Josef in a rather un-soldierly manner, and the pair of them strolled out of the tent.

Josef watched the flap settle back into place, then carefully set the stretcher back down next to his patient, who was already starting to lose the grey cast to his skin. With a glance at the doctor, still busy with the transfusion, Josef made his way through the rows of beds to the man Winchester had been examining.

He lay on a heated pallet, his face sickly and body lifeless. One arm and both legs were covered with loose dressings, none of which did anything to mask the stench rising from the wounds. Josef glanced about, saw that the doctor was still busy with the transfusion, and gingerly lifted one corner of the dressing on the man’s thigh. He reared back, dropping it almost instantly. What the devil? The same black putrefaction that he’d seen at the dressing station crept along the man’s leg.

He retreated a step, revolted. More than revolted, disturbed .

He’d seen mustard gas wounds. That stuff could burn away half a man’s face, but this was something different. He’d never seen anything like this rancid rot until the other night. Was it a sickness—or some terrible new weapon?

Either way, you could bet the brass hats would keep it hidden from the fighting men. Truth was bad for morale, you see. And God knew nobody at home would read about it over their morning tea because the censors had seen to that at the start of the war. The only newspapermen at the front these days were a handful of government propagandists.

At least, the only official ones.

Josef put his hand to the breast pocket of his jacket, settling his fingers reassuringly over the little VPK camera hidden there. He wished he could take a photograph of the man’s wounds, but it was too dangerous in such a public place. Two years ago, he’d heard about a respected journalist, working for a national newspaper, being threatened with the firing squad before being shipped home from France. Josef doubted the army would be as lenient with him—a socialist from Spitalfields—and didn’t fancy putting it to the test.

No, a photograph here was out of the question. But that didn’t mean he would let it drop.

Heading back to collect his stretcher, he lingered for a moment until he could see the doctor was finished administering the transfusion. Reaching down for his stretcher, Josef said, “He’s looking better.”

“Aye,” the man said, with a soft Scots lilt. “He’ll do.”

Josef smiled. “That’s good news.” He nodded, casual as you like, toward the man Winchester had been examining. “How about him? Doesn’t look so good.”

“Bearman? No.” The doctor rubbed a hand over his weary face. “He came in last night, raving. Poor lad spent eighteen hours in no man’s land before his company could retrieve him. We’ll do what we can.”

Eighteen hours in no man’s land. Poor bastard. “What causes that, then?” Josef said. “That kind of infection?”

The doctor gave him an old-fashioned look. “What do you think? You wouldn’t keep swine in the conditions these boys endure. They’re infected the moment they’re wounded.”

Not like that, Josef wanted to say. That wound was different, sinister in a way he couldn’t explain. And as the salient’s only independent reporter, Josef felt a duty to investigate.

Had he known then where his investigations would lead, he might have made a different decision. As it was, Josef made a point of keeping his eye out for Captain Winchester, and when he saw him next, in the bar at Toc H, he saw his chance to dig deeper. Saw it and took it.