Dreams and Thoughts - 1917

10 - Sixteen Hundred Men

"You alright, pal?" He's asked by one of the soldiers who were just sitting in front of him. "Where are you from?"

Another English soldier walks up. "He's probably got the wind up."

"Well, he's not one of ours."

"He's bloody soaked." Another soldier walks up.

"Fuck it, let's just pick him up and take him with us."

The mission had then slapped Will in the face hard. "Have to find the Devons." He said softly.

"What's he saying?"

"What's that mate?"

"The Devons, I have to find the Devons." Will groggily said with some urgency.

The men looked amongst themselves and looked back down at him. "We're the Devons."

Will looked up at them, and there was a look of some disbelief and relief on his face. "You're the Devons?"

"Yes, Corporal."

"Why haven't you gone over?" The blonde asked, still in disbelief. 

"We're the second wave." One of them replied. He thought he was too late... that he had failed already, but he hadn't. There was still time.

"They don't send us all at once."

"We're in D Company, we spent the night digging in. We go last."

Silent elation rang through Will, who now felt determination. He had time to save them... to do what Blake had wanted to do. What he wanted him to do. The fate of so many men was in his hands.

Blake's sacrifice couldn't go in vein. The hope that Pauline had given him so many times had to mean something. Their deaths were irrecoverable, but the normal lives these men had saved for them after the war could be given the chance.

There was little time.

They had been talking to him, but Will picked up little of what they had said. He looked up at them. "McKenzie. Where's Colonel McKenzie?"

"He's down at the line."

"Which way?" Will asked urgently, standing up from the tree.

"This way. We're headed up there now."

But there was no time to wait for them to walk with him. No time at all. Life wouldn't stop for him, it would leave him behind if he didn't keep up with it.

The blond took off down the line of men that were walking into the trench, which was only one-day-old by that point. He hears the men who had been talking to him calling out to him, but he doesn't listen to them, only continuing to push through the crowds of men. Some of them refused to move for him, some grumbling and some even pushing him back.

"Move! Let me by -- move! Let me through!" Will demands as they begin to enter the trench, and some of them let him through at last. He could then see the German positions in the distance, stretched out parallel to the English ones. The land in between was oddly lush and beautiful.

This would not last long.

He continued down the trench until he found a corporal with a group of troops loading their clips with ammunition. "Where's your commanding officer?"

"He's in the holding pen." The corporal replied, Will making no time to continue down the line.

It was like a ticking clock going off in his head. When it stopped, the men would've gone over. He needed to go quickly without wasting a single second, because every second was decisive on whether zero, one-hundred, or sixteen-hundred men would die that morning.