The Grimm Dossier

Chapter 26 - The Silence of Dead

What happened about 2 years ago...

Egyptian Sudan
Sudan provinces, Nubia
Nubian Desert
7 July 1896, 4:43 p.m.

Benjamin blinked and wiped his arm across his face, wet with sweat. The burning desert sun provided a dry, blistering heat in a cloudless sky. Sand hung in his eyelashes, scattered all over the skin on his face and elsewhere in every crack of his body and equipment. Several times their rifles had already gone on strike because the sand had jammed the loading mechanism. Here, at the end of the world, meticulous care of their equipment and especially their weapons was therefore vital for survival. It might have decided today whether one lived or died bleeding to death like a mangy mutt in the desert sand.

Something was reassuring about it. Cleaning the weapon, putting it back together, and knowing that the tool for survival would work when it mattered. It, along with other unremarkable little things, gave him a deceptive sense of security. More or less, at least. For security was an illusion in this place. There was no security in war, not even in the small settlements. A fortnight ago, an elderly local had given them bread and shortly afterward the first ones spat out bloodstained shards. Thick red drops smeared on the bread, drying from the heat and turning it an ugly brown.

Benjamin paused in his movement and stared at his comrade, from whose mouth the roughly chewed chunks fell to the ground. How he gasped and tried to scream, but choked and gasped on his blood. Benjamin remembered the sickening crunch of the broken pieces in his mouth, between his teeth. One of his comrades did not survive the attack, two suffered serious injuries. Fortunately, more had not eaten of it. And although this memory would always haunt him, if only because it taught him how quickly death could come in the most inconspicuous of moments, it was not these shadows that kept him awake. It might sound simple. But like everyone else, it was the gunfire and the uncertainty, along with the casualties of the battles, that wore him down.

It could happen at any time of the day or night. While one was snoozing, fast asleep, trying to bury one's legacies somewhere. While one was cleaning the gun, cooking, or tending to a wounded man in the military hospital. When they played cards or read letters from home to each other, sharing welded them together in a different way than anyone could ever understand. When another lover didn't answer when she stopped writing so often. When their mothers' tears blurred the ink in the letters or a thick envelope arrived with pictures from home, they shared these things with each other just as they shared the last of their snuff, alcohol, and cigarettes.

One moment they were handing their comrade a worn, already partially tattered book. The next, all hell broke loose with thunderous gunfire. And always, in the end, motionless bodies remained in the sand. Theirs or the Mahdists'. Death made no difference, nor did the vultures. Sometimes they didn't even have time to bury or retrieve their dead comrades. Let alone secure at least some of their property so that their parents had something to bury...

Benjamin wiped at his beard, which was already overgrowing his face more wildly than was good for him. He had not been able to wash or shave for days. Nor had he slept enough. In his hand, he turned the silver flask that his friend had given him shortly before his death. It was such a small, inconspicuous, actually not-so-valuable trinket. A flask like there were dozens, hundreds, or thousands. Only especially of the kind in which the engravings were a little more careful instead of cheap, as you could get them at any pawnbroker. Still, it was the most valuable thing he owned at the moment. Intertwined engraved letters formed a "P" and an "R" on the bottle: Percy Richmond. His thumb stroked the initials.