Chapter 18: And Many Men Died of the Waters

BETWEEN PASSCHENDAELE RIDGE AND YPRES, FLANDERS, BELGIUM

November 1917

“Kill me. Oh, Christ, will someone kill me?”

Freddie turned to look, and Winter walked into him.

There was water everywhere. Some of the water was on fire. Freddie was about to put the voice down as a product of his disordered brain, when something moved amid the sickly red-black shimmer. It’s him, he thought, cold. It’s him, it’s him. Winter swore and his voice pulled Freddie back to reality. It was a living man, not a dead one, floundering in the not-quite-liquid earth. Freddie’s flailing mind offered words: People, mud-bespent, in that lagoon. All of them naked…Freddie told his mind to shove it. The man might as well have been dead. He was going to drown in the mud.

“Kill me, will you?” he gasped, reaching a sticky arm.

They couldn’t, unless Winter was a dab hand at throwing pocket knives.

“Please,” said the man, thrashing. He sank a little more. They had to get him out, Freddie thought. He couldn’t leave someone else behind. Floating…

“Winter—” he said. He knew it was foolishness. They didn’t have rope, they didn’t have anything, and surely this man’s comrades had already tried…

But Winter didn’t say no. He was looking at, of all things, a dead mule. The flesh was gone around the muzzle and the eyes were pecked out. It still wore its harness. “We can try,” Winter said, as though Freddie had asked a whole question, as though he knew why Freddie couldn’t leave this man drowning. He knelt stiffly by the mule. Freddie, puzzled, dropped beside him. The shells still fell, screaming like the damned. But Winter ignored the shellfire. He began undoing the girth, flinching a little as he put pressure on his bad arm. “Get the harness.”

“I—all right,” Freddie whispered, fumbling at the buckles. Inaudibly he whispered, “Thank you.”

“Can’t just pull him out,” Winter said, as he worked. “Wants an angle to—end the suction.” He lifted his good hand briefly to illustrate.

“How?” Freddie said.

In answer, Winter called to the stricken man. Even Freddie could hardly distinguish Winter’s accent, in the all-pervading roar. Winter said, “Listen to me. You must—be calm. You must move carefully.”

“All—all right,” said the man.

“Take your pack,” said Winter. It was barely visible, half-sunk beside him. “Pull it in front of you. Slowly…slowly.”

The panic came back to the man’s face. “Throw me a rope!” he cried, and then gulped mud, coughing, sinking lower.

“Wait,” said Winter, and again there was that authority.

The man stilled.

“Your pack,” said Winter.

The man pulled his pack round, and Winter said, “Lean on it. Try to get your weight off your feet.”

The man did, but the pack sank almost at once, and then the man was thrashing, until Winter snapped, “Stop.”

Miraculously, the man did.

Winter cast about, seized a fallen entrenching tool, threw it to the smudge. “Push it straight down.” Another shell screamed and fell. Close. Christ, so close. “Next to your feet,” said Winter, his careful pronunciation eroding.

“It won’t hold!” cried the man.

“It will let in air,” said Winter. Finally the strain could be heard in his voice. A single stray shell could have killed them all right then. “Break—break the pull. The suck. Of the mud.”

The man pushed the spade down, and then he leaned forward again to where his pack was sunk below the surface, spluttering all the while. As he did, his legs kicked up, the angle of his body changed, and that was when Winter threw him the length of leather straps. The man seized it, choking, his head and shoulders barely above that hungry surface. “Slowly,” snapped Winter, and then the man was slithering over his submerged pack toward the side of the shell hole. Winter was pulling grimly with both arms, the good and the wounded. “Iven,” he said. “When he’s close enough, get down and take his hand. The harness is going to part.”

So Freddie threw himself flat, and Winter bared his teeth with pain, as he held the makeshift rope alone. Freddie’s groping hand met the drowning man’s just as the harness buckle broke, and Freddie slung his other hand forward, and they two were clasped, wrist to wrist, just as Winter snatched Freddie’s collar. They all writhed backward and ended up in a heap on the duckboards.

No one moved, for a moment. The stranger looked as though he were sunk in some insane dream. “It’s all right,” Freddie said, and felt hysterical laughter bubble up. He bit blood from his tongue to stifle it.

Winter’s eyes were already on the eastern horizon, looking for dawn in the seething sky. “We must go.”

The Tommy’s head came round. Winter had forgotten his careful intonation. His accent had been unmistakable. But the Tommy didn’t say anything.

Winter said again, more carefully, “We can’t stay here.”

“Where are we going?” asked the Tommy, like a child.

Freddie didn’t know how to answer. He pointed them west, along the duckboards.

“Come on,” Winter said, his eyes still on the horizon. Was that light in the east dawn, or was it just the German guns, firing from the heights?

The three of them started to walk.