Free The First Casualty by Ben Elton Page B

you, moi friend?’
    ‘I have told you. I am a fellow idealist.’
    ‘Doze are hard men t’be messin’ wit, Inspector.’
    It was a desperate idea and Kingsley knew it, the longest of possible long shots. If English trades unionists despised an ex-policeman how much more so would Irish nationalists? They certainly would not be inclined to help him out of pity. Was it possible that he could convince them he had something to offer? Names? Intelligence? Even a short period under their protection might give him time to recover and search out some means of escape. And if they turned on him, what did it matter? He was a condemned man anyway and at least the IRB were patriots, soldiers in their own way. Prisoners not of greed but of conscience. Better to die at their hands than be kicked to death by pimps and thieves. Kingsley felt confident that the IRB would at least dispatch him cleanly.
    ‘Oi hope yiz knows what yiz is doin’,’ the orderly added.
    ‘Not really, no,’ Kingsley replied. ‘But in my current position I don’t think it matters much, do you?’

TWELVE
    Ypres salient, zero hour, 31 July 1917: the dawn of the Third Battle of Ypres
    Abercrombie could not seem to stop his throat from swallowing. Over and over again it gulped involuntarily as if some great object like a cricket ball had lodged itself inside and nothing could be done to shift it. He and his platoon had come up to the front shortly after darkness had fallen on the previous evening and had spent the night in this foremost trench of the British line.
    The hours of darkness had been terrible but splendid. Abercrombie, like every man in that line, had watched transfixed as the dark sky exploded and the German horizon ignited and burned under the force of three thousand British guns, each one hurling shell after shell after shell at the enemy. All night long the men of the Royal Artillery, who laboured just to the rear of Abercrombie and his men, had pushed themselves to the very limits of physical exhaustion in order to create a barrage that it was hoped would cut the German wire and pulverize their forward defences.
    Every soldier recognized the strange and awesome beauty of the night-time barrage; no Chinese firework master could ever have imagined such a show as the airborne inferno which exploded over Ypres on the evening of 30 July 1917. The thunder of it bludgeoned the eardrums and its lightning dazzled the eyes. Men crouched beneath it, numbed and battered, as the pressure changes created by the thumping explosions in the air around them deadened their senses whilst at the same time fraying their nerves. And all night long Abercrombie and his men, along with nine full divisions of British infantry, sheltered beneath this sulphurous sky. Hiding in the dirt, sandwiched between the monstrous majesty of their own guns and the snarling teeth of the German wire that they knew they must face at dawn. For no one in all of Flanders could now have been in any doubt that the next big British push was about to begin.
    In the hour or so before dawn, the guns grew quieter and it was possible for those who wished to speak to make themselves heard.
    ‘Better place a lookout for submarines, eh, sir,’ Abercrombie’s platoon sergeant quipped. It was an old joke in the waterlogged swamplands of the Western Front but never more relevant than on that morning, for all night the rain had poured as if Mother Nature, offended by the carnage, was trying to douse the violence of the British guns.
    Abercrombie did not answer. On any other morning in his military career so far he would have answered. He would have given the sergeant a smile and produced some bit of dry wit to comfort his men, showing them that their captain was cool and in control. But on this morning Abercrombie could not answer; the cricket ball which he seemed to have swallowed had now grown big as a football. He was having trouble breathing, let alone trying to speak. His wit, which was his