Free Lord of the Nutcracker Men by Iain Lawrence

here,” I said, thinking it was Sarah. “Go home.”
    But a man's voice answered. “I have nowhere to go.”
    I looked up from the trenches. Behind the wall stood a sergeant, his legs and waist hidden behind it, his elbows on the stone. In his teeth was a pipe that wasn't lit, and his cap was pushed so far to the back of his head that it seemed it might fall off.
    “What's your name?” I asked.
    He took the pipe from his mouth. “What's yours? You tell me first.”
    “Johnny Briggs,” I said.
    “Ah. James must be your father.” The sergeant stiffened, glancing up at the house. “He's not here, is he?”
    “No,” I said. “He's in France.”
    “Oh. Poor James.”
    “Do you know him?” I asked.
    “I used to. When I was a boy I played in this garden.” He pointed at me with his pipe. “Right where you are. I played there with James.”
    “Did he have his little gun?” I asked.
    “Why, so he did.” The sergeant stroked his cheeks. They were covered with thin white hairs that made his skin look oily.“Yes, I'd forgotten that, his little gun.”
    “That's him,” I said, pointing down at my trenches, at the figure my dad had made.
    “That wooden-headed chap? Yes, that would be James.”
    “He's holding his little gun,” I said.
    “He was never without it,” said the sergeant. “He used to lie there, or kneel there, and tell me to come over the wall.”
    “Why?”
    “So he could pick me off.” The sergeant chuckled. “He was the British and I was the Boer. Sometimes I was a Zulu, not that it mattered in the end. I always came over the wall screaming like a lunatic, and he always picked me off.”
    It made me giggle, the thought of my father being a boy.
    “Where is he, in France?” the sergeant asked.
    “Well, look,” I said, pointing again. “In the trenches, see? Right at the front.”
    “It's a very long front,” said the sergeant. “In parts of it, there's no fighting at all. The Germans stay in their trenches, and the British stay in ours, and between them there's grass and trees, there's rabbits and birds. But in other places …” His eyes darkened. “They go at it tooth and claw. Go at it night and day, across a waste of slime and mud. You sleep with your rifle in your hands, your bayonet fixed. You hurl your shells at Fritz, and he hurls his shells at you, and the noise can drive you mad.”
    “
That's
where my dad is,” I said.
    “Then ‘poor James' he is,” said the sergeant.
    “Is that where you were?
    ” “Somewhere like that.”
    “Are you going back?”
    He shook his head.
    “Why not?”
    “I fought, I lost, and that's the end of it,” he said.
    “Why did you lose?” “
    Because they beat us.”
    “Won't the army make you go back?”
    “I don't see how they can.” He tapped his pipe on the wall, then slipped it into his pocket. “Even the worst of butchers runs his meat only once through a mincer.”
    He lifted his hand again, and there was something else in it. He pitched it over the wall, into the garden, and I scrambled to fetch it as it tumbled over the mud.
    I scooped it up from the trench. “Oh, golly!” I said. It was a brass cartridge, a bullet casing.
    I turned to thank the sergeant, but he was gone. Even when I stood up I couldn't see him, as though he had vanished into the forest.
    I held the cartridge up to my lips and blew across the opening. It made a lovely high whistle that echoed back from the house and the wall, from the trees of the forests and orchards. It filled all of Kent with a wonderful tingle, the same sound as a lieutenant's tin whistle, the sound that would send soldiers over the top.

C HAPTER 9
    November 25, 1914
    Dearest Johnny,
    There is a great lot of fighting to the north of us. We can hear the shelling, and feel the blasts of the big Jack Johnsons. When the wind is right we smell the smoke and powder. The night sky sparkles with gun bursts.
    On our right, the French took a pounding. Yet here the old hands say it's