Things seemed to have gone quiet up above as he stopped, the men behind him holding
their breath for him to listen. He thought he had heard something
through the earthen walls enfolding them but, as the seconds trickled
by, the stillness reassured him and he began to crawl on. The air
was thinner down here, making it a struggle to keep going, the
exertion of pulling themselves along by their elbows slowly draining
their strength. The explosives in his satchel were pressing against
his side as he tried to shuffle through the ground works.
The boys were nervous, the tension even more palpable than usual.
The number of explosions had increased a lot in the last few weeks.
The cave-ins had taken friends from all the men and the most
experienced diggers had succumbed to the German offensive. Bran was
nervous too. His boys weren’t like the diggers - men who had
worked in mines and dig works for years before the war. They were
fearless, those large men with their gruff northern accents and their
dislike of the upper class officers. His lads were just normal
Tommie’s; they were young and scared and didn’t like going
underground. It wasn’t natural. They felt trapped.
He stopped again, swearing he felt movement through the ground. His
sudden stop halted the other men as the boy at the back, barley
eighteen, began to whimper. ‘Quiet’, the harsh whisper chastised
him as Bran froze; the sound of breathing seemed loaded and clumsy as
it became trapped between the walls of the tunnel. The other men
trusted Bran’s judgement. He was a bit of a legend among the
trenches, his knack for coming back alive when all around him died
was enough cause for the men to listen when he talked. It was this
that went against him with his superiors. They did not like the men
raising lowly captains to higher stations than themselves. The
superstitions of the lower ranks was a constant pain for the
officers, their men not wanting to obey direct orders because they
had a “bad feeling” about it. It had to be stamped out and talk
of this Irish soldier, with his ‘good luck’ and ‘sixth sense’
about things, angered them all the more.
Bran pulled the glove from his right hand with his teeth and sank his
fingers into the dirt of the floor beneath his belly. He shut his
eyes to concentrate. Nothing seemed to move. Then he felt it, a
dragging close by. He squeezed his eyes all the tighter, straining
his ears. The vibration he sent out was miniscule, undetectable but
he saw what he needed to. He turned his head awkwardly in the tight
space until he could see Jones in the harsh lamp light. The
perspiration from the heat and the fear was running in droplets from
his brow down his nose. He signalled with his hand to go back as the
boys began to silently crawl backwards on the long ascent to the top.
As they got higher the tunnel became wider allowing the men to walk, if hunched down, as they awkwardly plodded ever upward, the relief added to by the
fresher air the higher they crawled. ‘Say it and stop sulking
Jones,’ Bran chastised as he struggled with the bag he carefully
protected at his side.
‘There’s going to be trouble about this. They will have your
head for turning the lads back’, Jones groaned in his heavy
Newcastle accent. He faced Bran, looking into the bright blue eyes
of the man he respected but could not understand. The other boys
pushed onwards, eager to get back up top, allowing Bran and Jones the
privacy to speak.
‘There was nothing to be done. There is a German tunnel. It’s
about to intersect ours just ahead of the point we were crawling to’
Bran explained, becoming impatient with Jones’ worrying. ‘I’m
not sure if they were aware of our tunnel but they were either going
to come through the walls at us or plant explosives themselves. I’m
not putting the lads at risk for nothing.’ Jones got the puckered
skin between his brows that came when he thought for too long about
how Bran knew these things. He took a deep breath of the thick
pungent air as he looked at the dirt streaked face of his captain.
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