The Wall

There was a hand coming out of the trench wall at the level of Finch’s shoulder, and he hung his lantern on it.

He’d stopped seeing it as a hand months ago. It was a hook now, gray and swollen and curled in a way that held the lantern’s wire loop. The man it belonged to was in the wall, packed into the wet earth by a shell that buried him and his section in one second. The parties dug out what they could reach and left the rest, because you cannot dig a graveyard out of the wall you stand behind. The wall was mud and timber and men. Finch knew three of them by the boots that still showed.

“It’s the smell,” Pryce said, wiping his mouth. He had been sick again, six days in the line and still sick. “I can’t get used to the smell.”

“Don’t,” Finch said. “The day you stop smelling it’s the day there’s something wrong with you.”

The smell was the trench itself. The latrine sumps and the chloride of lime they threw down to fight the sumps. The sweet thick reek of the men in the wall and the men on the wire and the men in the shell holes nobody could reach, who swelled and burst and went down into the mud everyone drank from when the water ran out. And rat. The rats were the size of cats and fat for a reason Finch didn’t let himself name. Once that winter they’d eaten the soft parts of a wounded man before the bearers reached him, and the man had been awake for it.

A rat ran over Pryce’s boot. He kicked at it. It barely moved. It had no reason to fear him and it knew it.

They’d lost Hollis to the mud on Tuesday. Not to a shell. To the mud. He stepped off the duckboard in the dark and went in to the chest, and the mud closed on him like a mouth and wouldn’t let go. Four of them pulled on his arms for an hour. Something tore in his shoulders, and an officer came and looked and said leave him, that’s an order. He was three days dying. You could hear him at night, past the parapet, until you couldn’t. His head still showed above the mud, and Finch didn’t look at it. He’d learned not to look at a great many things, and the not-looking was the worst thing the war had given him.

The guns started at four. Not their guns. The German guns, walking shells up the line in a slow search, and Finch was flat on the fire step before he decided to move, a fistful of Pryce’s collar dragging the boy down beside him. The first landed long. The second closer. The third came down on the traverse forty yards off, and the wall there stood up and turned inside out, and the air filled with mud and timber and the men who had been buried in it, raining down among the living. A forearm. A boot with the foot still in it.

Pryce was screaming. Finch put a hand over the boy’s mouth, hard, because a scream travels and catches, and a trench full of screaming men is a trench that dies.

“Far,” Finch said into his ear. It was a lie. The lie was what the boy needed. “That’s far. You’re alright.”

The barrage ran two hours. It was aimed at the map square where men were known to be, and inside that square the difference between the living and the burst was nothing a man could earn.

When the guns lifted, the silence was worse, because the silence meant the next thing. Whistles came down the line. The officers’ whistles, the call to climb the ladders and go out into the open where the wire waited and the machine guns had the range measured to the yard.

Pryce had gone quiet. His eyes were fixed on the ladder.

Finch looked at the boy. Six days. Praying without sound, his lips moving on the same few words. Finch had taught himself not to spend breath on the ones who wouldn’t last, because grief was a luxury the line didn’t stock.

He spent it anyway.

“Stay on my left,” Finch said. “You run where I run. You don’t stop for the wire. You don’t stop for a man down, not for me, not for your own brother. And you don’t look at what’s on the ground. There’s things out there that’ll stop your legs if you look, and the ones that stop don’t come back. You run, and you don’t look. Say it.”

“Don’t stop. Don’t look.” The boy’s voice shook. “Run where you run.”

“Good lad.”

The whistle came along the line toward them, trench by trench, growing. Finch put his boot on the ladder. The rung was cold and slick.

The boy was looking at the hand in the wall, the lantern still hanging from it, burning low.

“Eyes front,” Finch said. “Nobody out there can help you. Only me, and only if you run.”

The whistle reached their officer. The man raised it to his lips, and his face was the gray of the men in the wall, and Finch understood that the officer knew exactly what he was sending them into and had no choice but to send them. That was its own kind of horror. The kind with a chain of command.

The whistle blew. They went up the ladder into the gray, the old man and the boy, and the morning took them. Behind them the lantern burned down to nothing on the dead man’s hand, and the wall waited with all the patience of the earth for whatever the day would send back down to be packed into it.