Soldier's Game by James Killgore

flash he looked again but the crater was empty. He felt a sudden choking fear.
    Either the body had moved or been moved. But Jack knew Tom was dead; he’d seen the man’s face. Then in the moonlight he caught a glint of metal. Keeping his eyes on that point until the next flash he saw three fingers sticking up from the soil, one wearing a gold wedding band. A shell must have struck near the edge of the crater collapsing the side and burying Tom where he lay.
    Jack took a sip of water and tried to calm his nerves. Someone would come for him; it was only a matter of waiting. He considered crawling up to the open ground but each time he moved, the wound in his knee sent hot stabs of pain up his thigh. Just before daybreak he lost consciousness and awoke again under a blistering sun.
    The snipers and machine-guns were well at work, firing on anything that moved. Jack could taste blood in his mouth from his cracked lips. He drained the last drops from the water bottle and made a low shelter to shade his face using his rifle and tunic. Tonight he’d have to move as there would be no surviving a third day out in the open.
    The next twelve hours were the longest of Jack’slife. By midday he grew delirious with thirst and began to hallucinate. Hearts manger John McCartney appeared at the edge of the crater in his suit and bowler hat.
    â€œCome on. Up you get, son,” he barked.
    â€œBut I’m shot,” Jack argued.
    â€œNonsense,” he replied. “It’s just a sprain.”
    Later it was Gracie crouched at the far edge of the crater, no more than a skeleton in pyjamas. He stared at Jack out of hollow black eyes but said nothing. All day he vanished and reappeared as though waiting for an end.
    Night fell and Jack began to feel a little more himself in the cooler air. He managed to rebind his knee and brace it tightly with a bayonet. He then took a breath and began to crawl. Just a few yards at a time, up and over the steep edge of the crater. Even that small distance left him exhausted from the pain. A quarter-moon lit the torn landscape. He took a rough bearing on the hills and began to move in what he figured was the direction of the British lines.
    Jack had gone only about thirty yards when a figure emerged from the darkness, moving towards him fast and low. There was no way of knowing if the Germans had reoccupied the line and thiswas now an enemy soldier. He fell back and lay motionless but soon found a bayonet pointing in his face. Death had finally come.
    But the soldier peered down and whispered, “Is that you, Jack?”
    Standing there above him, moonlight glinting off his spectacles, was Albert Ripley. Jack was unable to answer; he could only turn away and weep.
    Ripley left him with a full water bottle and ran to find help. Soon two men appeared with a stretcher and carried him to the forward command post. Here Colonel McCrae and a handful of Royal Scots fought off counterattacks in the confused warren of enemy trenches and redoubts. Jack and the rest of the wounded spent the next 24 hours in a German bunker thirty feet below ground. It had been untouched by the shelling and was wired with electricity.
    A day later the battalion was relieved from the line by troops from the 23rd Division. Jack was carried to a rear casualty clearing station before being taken to a makeshift hospital in a small village primary school. Drawings made by the long evacuated children hung on the wall opposite his bed – houses with curls of smoke from the chimneys, bright green gardens,stick-figure families.
    The nurses gave him laudanum, which dulled the pain but brought on vivid nightmares where soldiers that he knew were dead crowded around his bed like moths drawn to a flame.
    Over 800 men from the four companies of the 16th Royal Scots – the Hearts Battalion – had taken part in the assault on 1 July 1916. Three days later when the ragged battalion assembled again for roll call at