The First Casualty by Ben Elton

greatest weapon and also his trusty shield, had, at this moment of supreme testing, been denied him.
    Abercrombie wanted to be strong but his strength was draining from him, down through his waterlogged boots and into the mud below. During the night he had managed to collect himself for a moment and find the strength to give support to a subordinate. Stamford had passed along the trench escorting an observation team from the artillery. The young man’s face had been a picture of terror, enduring as he was his first artillery barrage. Abercrombie had offered him his hand and as Stamford had taken it, Abercrombie had squeezed it gently and their eyes had met as they had not done since their night together in London. Stamford had smiled and seemed a little calmed.
    Abercrombie was glad that he had managed to give some comfort to the boy who loved him but now he doubted he would ever be able to give comfort to anyone again. Least of all himself, for he feared that he would not have the strength to give the order to advance and so would be disgraced. Something had changed inside him. He had heard that this was not uncommon amongst men who had seen a year or two of constant service. Some brave men just stopped being brave. Abercrombie feared that he was such a man.
    He hugged himself to mask the shaking, and the football in his throat just kept getting bigger.

THIRTEEN
    Silence after battle
    It was evening once again. The evening at the end of the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres, a battle that was to rage with increasing hopelessness for the next two months. General Haig had set the objective for that first day as the village of Passchendaele, some four and a half miles from the British starting point. Instead, about a single mile had been covered and at cruel cost. Nonetheless this represented a greater advance than almost any previous British assault of the war and the General Staff at least had pronounced the day a qualified success.
    Abercrombie was in no position to celebrate this small victory, for he found that he had been struck dumb. Eight hours earlier he had managed with a supreme effort to dislodge the ball in his throat sufficiently to give him enough voice to count off the final minutes before the assault began. The rum ration issued to every man in that last half-hour of waiting had done its work and loosened his choking throat, and he had been able to blow his whistle and wish his men luck before forcing himself upwards over the parapet ahead of them.
    But after that he was silent.
    He had done his duty and led his men into the withering machine-gun fire, proceeding in an orderly fashion towards the enemy line. He had taken one or two flesh wounds but had escaped serious injury, unlike the majority of his company, who had fallen around him.
    He had arrived at the German wire with the bedraggled remnants of the British first wave and had been involved in the bayonet work and hand-to-hand fighting which occurred as they took the forward line of enemy trenches.
    He had fought a decent enough battle, but now, however, sitting in the field dressing station to which he had staggered after the position he had occupied had been relieved, he knew that he was finished. Incapable of further action of any sort, he could not speak, he could scarcely hear and, as the organized chaos of blood, men and bandages proceeded around him in the crowded dugout, he wondered if he would even have the strength to walk towards the medical officer when his turn came to be diagnosed.
    ‘So, Captain. Lucky and not so lucky for you, I’m afraid,’ the MO said when finally he was seen, and an orderly was applying disinfectant to the shallow bullet wound he had taken in the shoulder. ‘Lucky, in that five inches to the left and this bullet would have killed you, unlucky in that three inches would have scored you a Blighty. As it is, back in the line tomorrow, I’m afraid.’
    But Abercrombie knew that he would not be in the line