As I Lay Dying

Twenty

1917

"What are we drinking to?"

Luke grins up at me, pausing in the act of pouring more brandy into the tin mug.

"Dunno. You somehow surviving the last 5 months? Managing to get a bottle of brandy in past Goodham? Being alive?"

"Alright." I smile tiredly back at him. Every bone in my body, every muscle seems to ache constantly.

5 months. Without Luke I wouldn't have survived. He's the one who managed to persuade the others in our battalion to aim their anger at cut rations away from me and towards Darlington. He started up the silent mutiny. Darlington fully expected me to feel the wrath of my fellow soldiers, but in treating them badly he's only served to make them hate him more.

Thanks to Luke, they seem to think that helping me is the best way to take a silent stand against Darlington.

They sneak out to cover parts of my watch and give me precious hours sleep. Even our line Sergeant, who barely speaks to us but seems to hate Darlington as much as the rest of us, will secretly arrange for me to suddenly have urgent work to do near the machine gunners so that I'm not part of the constant rush over the top. I can't say they are all warmly dispositioned to me in the way they were to Jimmy, but life under our current Officer is harsher than ever and they seem to think that in helping me they resisting him.

Last week, to Luke's utter glee, and despite his protests of innocence I'm not entirely sure he didn't have a hand in it, Goodham climbed into his bunk to find his mattress covered in worms and slugs. His shriek of rage rang out through the pitch black night so loudly that I'm surprised the Germans didn't use it to make pinpoint a good mark.

I'm not interested in childish pranks. I don't care how I'm given the most demeaning tasks, humiliated in front of the other men at every opportunity because Darlington has played his hand too hard. Before he arrived, I didn't care. I survived but I was dead inside. Now a small flame has been ignited within me. He's inadvertently given me a spark of life, a reason to stay alive.

He took everything I had in my old life. Refusing to be beaten down further, refusing to yield to him has given me a new found reason to live. Dying because I wanted to was one thing, dying because he wants me too is quite another.

"How's the leg?" Luke's voice cuts through my reverie.

"Painful." I grimace. "But I'm grateful for it."

"Reckon he nearly wet himself with delight when he heard you'd been injured. He thought you were a goner for sure."

We grin at each other. My leg wound in the last battle was horrific, worse was the time in the medical bay, having shards of tiny shrapnel pulled out of my exposed flesh. I can't walk properly yet but the relief at being in the reserve trench at long last was unbelievable.

"Have you heard from Jim?" Luke leans back against the mud wall, sipping his brandy looking for all the world like a king.

"Not for a couple of weeks." I frown. "His battalion lost a lot of men in a night raid, Sergeant Johnson amongst them." I pause, thinking of the pale, prematurely aged Sergeant who had once tried to help me. I can't help the stab of guilt that tells me it cost him his life in the long run.

"I'm sick of place." Luke says suddenly.

"What you've only just realised that?" I laugh. "Welcome to the club."

"No I mean it. If it wasn't for you I'd do a runner."

"What?" I stare at him. "The punishment for desert-"