Dead Man's Land by Robert Ryan Read Free Book Online Page B

Staff Nurse Jennings. There’s gauze or similar from the dressing occluding the trachea.’ Or what was left of it.
    T
here’s something else.
    The voice in his skull was so burnished and clear, he almost looked over his shoulder for the speaker. But that would have been ridiculous. He knew it could not be his old friend. It was just an echo of times past.
    Y
ou are looking but not observing. Or rather, not observing with all your senses. Think, Watson, think.
    Then he had it, the sensation almost overwhelmed by dozens of others. He concentrated on it alone, slowly isolating it, stripping away the competition, pinning down the few stray molecules in his nostrils. He could smell burned garlic.
    W
e
l
l done, Watson,
the voice said, rather patronizingly. Nevertheless, as he worked the compacted material free of the windpipe and the poor wretch made a gurgling sound in his throat, he allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction. Which then faded as he remembered what the burned garlic indicated. Yet another perversion of the art of war.
    ‘Pre-op,’ he said to the nearest orderlies. ‘Adrenaline chloride on the wound to stem bleeding. And ask the anaesthetist to use a rectal infusion of ether. I’ll add it all to his label.’
    Watson extracted a stubby pencil from his pocket and wrote the instructions in blocked capitals. ‘Understand? Rectal. Plus GSE.
Glandulae suprarenalis extractum
. That’s the adrenaline chloride. And I want any shrapnel extracted saved and delivered back to me.’ He wrote that down, too.
    He watched as the stretcher was slid off the table, to be immediately replaced by another. He scanned the label attached to the man’s sleeve, next to the ‘wounded’ stripe, which showed the poor devil had been hit before. ‘PAW’, it read, and gave his name and rank. He was with the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Not, Watson noted, from the battledress trousers, a kilted regiment; how those that did wear the tartan managed in the cold and filth of the trenches beggared belief. Watson looked at the abdominal dressing and at the red stains creeping around the side of it.
    ‘Major Watson. Hello, sir.’
    He looked up to see a face full of anguish that he didn’t, for a moment, recognize.
    ‘De Griffon?’
    The man nodded and his face relaxed into the broad, open one Watson remembered from his time in Egypt, where he had been investigating the mechanics of the new blood transfusion methods in field hospitals. De Griffon’s unit had been one of his first guinea pigs. ‘Good Lord, what are you doing here?’
    Robinson de Griffon’s head was moving back and forth, as if he were watching an accelerated game of tennis. ‘Looking for my men.’
    ‘Your men?’
    ‘Yes. The Leigh Pals. “A” Company.’
    ‘In this part of the line?’ Watson asked.
    ‘We are, yes.’ He gave a nervous laugh. ‘Small world, eh, sir?’
    In Watson’s limited experience of them, wars made for very small worlds. It was astonishing to him how often he ran into old colleagues from the Berkshires. ‘What’s happened?’
    De Griffon took off his cap and ran a hand over his wayward hair, smoothing it down for a few seconds. ‘We were on our way back from the front when a stray shell hit one of the columns. Damned bad—’ He turned to Jennings and shrugged apologetically. ‘Sorry. Bad luck. Two dead. Shipobottom, Carlisle, Morris, all quite seriously injured. Hoped they might be here.’
    His lower lip quivered slightly and Watson thought he might cry. He noticed that de Griffon had been promoted since he last saw the young man. He was now a captain. How old was he? No more than mid-twenties, surely. And unlikely to have known anything like war, given his cosseted background. De Griffon was a far cry from one of the ‘Temporary Gentlemen’ they talked about. Still, his heart was clearly in the right place and rapid promotion was, he supposed, another feature of this conflict.
    ‘I haven’t seen Shipobottom here, no.’ Watson