Downton Abbey: All Is Fair In Love And War

Trouble Can Come With It

The Great War,
April 1915

Whistles were blown and screams could be heard. Shots fired and blood splattered. In the midst of a rare battle Thomas carried wounded after wounded from the battlefield.

"Run Corporal!" Albridge shouted from the other end of the stretcher as bullets went flying around them. Thomas didn't need to be told to run but there was no mockery left within him to answer back. His nerves had dispersed his cheeky responses and everything else that had distinguished Thomas from the rest. This attack felt pointless, like the sparse ones before, because it all led to the same thing — soldiers dead and no new land gained. It was all the same.

A body crashed against Thomas and he stumbled in his step; his foot sinking into mud caused by the constant rain. He was cold, but at least he was alive — or as close to being alive as you could be at the front. Thomas had lost count over how many bodies he had carried, pulled, and dragged out of the heat of the battle. He had lost count of how many screams had been silenced before they had reached safety — he had lost count of how many bullets had missed him.

They reached their trench and slid down it, falling into the mud and the stretcher broke in half. The soldier upon it groaned in pain and Thomas pushed himself up from the mud he had fallen into and the wet dirt now covered his face and uniform. Albridge shouted at him for help as he tried to lift the man they had carried, but Thomas Barrow could not hear him, he heard nothing. All he saw was death and despair around him. He was then pulled to his feet by Albridge who shook him and screamed in his face before he became another scream silenced by a bullet straight through the back of his neck. The blood spewed out, covering Barrow who stood there paralysed. Albridge fell down, his body slid down Thomas' and covered him in even more of the red substance.

Thomas was frozen in his spot as men ran around him, shouting, firing their rifles, being thrown around. Then, eventually, the camp went quiet, an eerie nothing now laid upon no man's land. The entire front went back to dead silence. Thomas had not moved even a centimetre and before his feet laid the two men dead, next to the broken stretcher. The attack had ended and men were crawling back to take cover.

"Thomas! Thomas!" Thomas heard a voice of comfort, and for a brief moment his head thought of something else — he thanked god that Matthew Crawley was still alive.

"My dear friend, are you wounded?" Matthew said with deep concern as he took a hold of Thomas' shoulders but he got no response and Thomas stood there trembling from cold and fright.

He was pulled by the Lieutenant's soft hands towards the medic dugout that was packed to the brim and a field medic examined the former footman who had not changed facial expression in hours — it was frozen stiff like his body and heart.

"He is not wounded, not physically at least, Lieutenant Crawley" The medic said and then turned his attention to a soldier screaming in agony.

Matthew nodded and took Thomas by his arm to lead him out from the dugout when the medic spoke again, while cleaning a saw off for an emergency amputation. "Don't let the shell shock take him, let him know that he and Private Albridge rescued soldiers with a fierce determination, and many at that."

Matthew gave the medic another nod in reply and led Thomas towards his own dugout. Shell shock could take the best of men, and Thomas surely had shown him that he was one of them— so different from the footman he had frowned upon at Downton Abbey, a snarky man with self-righteousness. The months of friendship had taught Matthew that first impressions were not always to be trusted. They had shared many cups of tea, cheap whiskey when and stories of Downton in Matthew's dugout. Stories of the servants, stories from upstairs. War truly broke barriers and Matthew now held a great affection, greater than he dared to admit to himself, towards the most unlikely of characters — Thomas Barrow.