The Sons of Adam. Harry Bingham
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Sons of Adam - Harry Bingham страница 29
Название: The Sons of Adam
Автор: Harry Bingham
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Триллеры
isbn: 9780007383986
isbn:
He closed his eyes again, possibly slept some more. When he woke up, his headache was still bad, but his mind was clearer. Clear enough to understand that the plank ceiling above his head was too neatly built to have been made by British hands. Clear enough to understand he was a prisoner of the Germans. Clear enough to remember that it was his twin, his brother, Alan Montague, who had wanted all this, who had sent him out to die, who had wanted him dead.
The friendship that had been the best thing in his life had turned to ash.
Every night, for four nights, Alan searched for Tom.
He came to know no man’s land as no one was ever meant to know it. He found corpses, he found dying men, he found the wounded of both sides. The dying men he shot or drugged into insensibility with morphine. The wounded he dragged laboriously back to the trenches, before squirming out once again. He called a thousand times for Tom. He abandoned caution. He stood up on moonlit nights. He used the light of flares to survey the shell-ruined landscape. He shouted for his lost brother at the top of his voice.
The Germans heard and saw him, of course. Alan could hear the German sentries echoing his call – ‘Tom! Tom Creeley!’ – followed by bursts of laughter and the muttered sing-song voices of the Bavarian regiments. By removing cartridges from the ammunition belts of the machine guns, they could even get their guns to rap out the same rhythm. ‘TOM, Tom-MEE, Tom CREEEE-LEEE!’ But there was no rifle fire, and even the machine guns didn’t seem to be directed at him. From kindness, compassion, or perhaps just indifference, the Germans let the lunatic Englishman roam up and down the devastated land.
‘Komm, Tommy, komm!’
Tom had hardly regained full consciousness before he was plunged further into nightmare.
With his good leg on one side and a burly German arm helping him on the other, Tom was escorted down a maze of trenches to a field hospital. He was given a brusque examination and a tetanus injection. Then he was marched off to a farmyard where four other British prisoners were being held under guard, before all five of them were marched further into German-held France.
By the time they reached the prisoner-of-war holding camp, Tom was on the point of collapse. His wounded left leg felt as though it were on fire, and big surges of pain washed up and down his body, like an ocean tide trapped in a goldfish pond. The camp consisted of a group of gloomy tin huts encircled by barbed wire. There was a brief search at the gate – Tom’s cigarettes were removed, over his objections – and he was sent to a hut marked with the Red Cross. A nurse took a quick look at him, decided he wasn’t going to die in the night, and let him collapse exhausted onto a straw pallet. He closed his eyes but couldn’t sleep. Depression assailed him.
He was a prisoner of war.
Alan had tried to kill him.
On either count, he’d have preferred to die.
Alan abandoned the search, which had become increasingly dangerous, increasingly pointless. Furthermore, he was exhausted beyond description. He didn’t in all honesty know if his body and lungs could bear another night of it. And then there was Guy. Alan got word of Guy’s wound and the hospital where he was being treated.
Alan faced facts. It was time to leave the front, to leave the battle, to give up on Tom for ever.
Two days later, Alan arrived in Rouen, at the school-turned-hospital where Guy was being treated. He made his way stiffly to the correct ward. Guy’s bed was empty: tumbled white sheets and nothing else. Alan stepped across to the booth where the ward sister sat.
‘Bonjour, madam. Je cherche Major Montague –’
Alan was about to continue, but the sister half turned to point, saw the empty bed, then interrupted.
‘Oh, là là! Comme il fume!’
She indicated a door out into what had once been the schoolyard. Alan walked out and found Guy sitting at ease in a cane chair, his bandaged leg covered with a thin green blanket and resting on a couple of packing cases marked ‘War Materials – Urgent’. He was wrapped in a cloud of cigar smoke and a three-day-old Times lay half read on his lap.
‘Guy!’ he said, feeling somehow anaesthetised and shell-shocked all at once. ‘How are you?’
The brothers embraced, as well as they were able, given Guy’s awkward sitting position.
‘Not bad, old boy, considering. Damn thing aches like the devil, that’s all.’
Although he had come to Rouen specifically to see Guy, now that he was here Alan could only think of Tom and Tom’s death, and the urgency of letting everyone in the world know, including Guy. But etiquette forbade him from raising the topic just yet. Guy was unwrapping some dressings and pointing out where the bullet had entered and where it had left, and exactly what damage it had done along the way. Alan found himself unable to understand anything his brother was saying. He didn’t even care particularly. The wound was minor and Alan had seen too many serious ones to be much perturbed.
‘How did it happen?’ he asked, when it was his turn to say something.
Guy shrugged the question away. ‘One of these things,’ he said. ‘Came clattering round the corner on my way back to the dressing station and ran right into the damned brigadier. He wasn’t best pleased with me, spattering his nice clean khakis with blood. Wanted a great big council of war that afternoon, and ordered me – ordered me, mark you – to get the wound cleaned and dressed, then report back to him for his precious get-together. I can tell you the doctors were a bit narked. They wanted to send me straight here; thought the brig’s attitude was a bit rich, frankly.’
‘Yes, I suppose.’
‘Not to mention that I was wearing your dratted tunic. I’ve had the thing cleaned, of course: you don’t want my blood all over it.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes? You do want my blood on it?’ Guy raised his eyebrows.
‘I mean no.’
‘Are you all right, old fellow?’
‘Guy, look, I need to tell you right away. You may not know. It’s Tom. He’s dead.’
Guy’s face was initially impassive, before changing to something СКАЧАТЬ