Aftermath: Chapter 1
Aftermath, Chapter 1
As George awakened, he could tell it was light, wherever he was, by the vibrant red orange filtering through his eyelids. He couldn’t place the reason why he wasn’t sleeping in the dark on his bunk in the trenches, but he was reluctant to open his eyes and discover where exactly he was. Experience told him the act of looking around him would result in pain and temporary blindness. That happened when he simply stepped out from the dugout barracks into the trenches. Instead, George let out a sigh and opened his ears to the world around him. He was surprised to hear nothing.
Grimacing, George forced his eyes open with a groan. As expected, the sudden intake of light immediately caused a headache. George squinted as he waited for his eyes to overcome their assault, gradually discerning a rising tower of smoke somewhere above him. A wave of dread washed over him as his brain began to piece together what had happened that morning, and where he was.
He remembered standing in line with Captains Blackadder and Darling, and Private Baldrick mentioning that he had one last cunning plan. There was the shrill screech of the whistle when Captain Blackadder raised it to his lips and blew, against all reasonable judgment. And then they had had scrambled up the ladders and charged over the top.
Now he, Lieutenant the Honourable George Colthurst St. Bartleigh, was simply there, lying in the mud of Passchendaele, watching smoke rise over the battlefield.
Was he dead? Was this hell? Maybe he had been dead for years, killed long ago at the very beginning of the war and sent to hell. It was the only way he could explain the deaths of all his friends from Cambridge, his life in the trenches, the fact that they had actually gone over the top. Or perhaps worse, he wasn’t dead at all, but was trapped in a living endless hell, never to escape.
George lost track of how long he lay there, thinking about everything and nothing, marvelling over how his brain was suddenly filled with knowledge that he wasn’t aware of learning, watching the smoke rise and never hearing a sound. It could have minutes or hours, separate from the normal course of space and time. Out of the corners of his eyes, he occasionally caught sight of another soldier running past, gun in hands. He found he had no energy to stop them, couldn’t bring himself to care about what would happen to them. Maybe if they were stupid enough to look at the whole damn war the way he had, they deserved his fate: lying in the muddy slop wondering what the hell they had been thinking when they joined up.
It was this thought that brought George’s mind to the subject of Captain Blackadder, and his constant scheming to escape the trenches and the front lines. The Captain had never held any naive ideals or victorious delusions about the war and what they were in for, had wanted nothing to do with charging across No Man’s Land. He wondered if his superior had survived the insanity of charging through barbed wire and gunfire. Curiosity got the best of him, and George pushed himself up on his elbows into a sitting position.
For the first time since waking, George’s eyes were not locked on the sky, and the sights that they gathered sickened him. Bodies lay in the dust and debris of the shooting as far as he could see. He was grateful not to recognize any of the dead and unconscious lying near him. A body about ten feet in front of him was missing its head. Horrified, George glanced down at his feet only to be greeted by a sight that was to him, even worse.
He only had one foot.
His right leg ended below his kneecap in a mess of bandages and dried and cauterized blood. On either side of his knee in the dirt was black dust he recognized as gunpowder, and it dawned on him that someone, possibly Baldrick, Darling, or Blackadder had had the sense to pour the explosive over the wound and light it on fire prevent him from bleeding to death. A used match he found a couple of feet from his body was proof. Hastily wrapped and tied bandages protected the worst of the wound from infection and soaked up blood from smaller non-life threatening cuts and nicks to the area. He found it odd that the stump of his leg didn’t hurt, but thanked his lucky stars for this small relief and continued to check his body for other injuries.
As his check progressed, George found several minor cuts and scrapes that he recognized as shrapnel damage, occasionally finding metal embedded within the wounds. He became aware of each of them aching once they were discovered. It must have been a shell that took his foot off and cut him up. He had been enlisted long enough to know that if a man were hit in the right place, a severed nerve would mean loss of feeling and use in a limb. A shell exploding also explained why he couldn’t hear. He had been told stories of chaps who never heard again after close shell explosions. It looked as though the fellow who was missing his head had taken the worst of the damage, probably saving his life.
Captain Darling winced at the sound of another shell exploding as he crawled on knees and elbows through the mud. He would give anything to be back in England with Doris instead of on the continent, almost certainly in the last hours of his life. He wasn’t even sure why he still moved forward toward the jerry lines. Maybe it was just a desire to die with honour instead of abandoning his comrades. Maybe it was a fear of what Blackadder would say if he were to see him running, tail between his legs, back to the trenches they came from. He could never live it down if Blackadder fought and died in battle while he deserted his country.
So he continued forward, rifle clutched in a death grip for what felt like an eternity. As he moved on, he became somewhat immune to the constant explosions, to the whistling of bullets moving past, the distant retort of machine gun fire. He heard what was happening, but he had no reaction. Where when they first climbed the ladders and he was overwhelmed with fear, he had now been taken by a grim determination. There were no distractions that could pull his mind from its task.
Thus, it was a nasty shock when he realized there was nothing but thin air beneath his elbows, a millisecond before he tumbled head first into a shell hole.
It was an even worse shock when a cushiony something broke his fall and let out a scream.
Darling couldn’t move for surprise. He felt himself being pulled back off his cushion and his rifle being yanked from his death grip.
“Don’t worry, Captain B,” said an incredibly familiar voice. “I’ll protect you.”
“Oh, excellent. I can expect to live a grand total of three seconds then.”
Darling blinked, his mind slowly connecting the voice of the man holding him to the name he had just given, and the name to the second voice. Looking down at the grime covered lump that had broken his fall, he suddenly recognized the man lying there.
“B-Bl-Blackadder?” He managed to stutter out.
Captain Edmund Blackadder stared up at him, letting out a noise of disgust as Baldrick released the other captain. “Dear god, Darling. Weren’t you shot already?”
Darling’s eye twitched. It always twitched at the mention of his surname. Doris had been careful never to call him Darling. She hated that twitch as much as he did.
“No.”
“So should I be expecting that idiot George to drop in on me too, or were my eyes telling the truth when I saw that shell take him down?” Blackadder asked, his question punctured by a sharp intake of breath as he shifted his position.
“I shouldn’t think so.” Darling said, frowning. Poor George would be lucky to get back to the trenches alive. It seemed like a lifetime ago that he had tripped over the unconscious lieutenant and taken a moment to make sure he wouldn’t bleed to death from his missing leg.
“So I really did see a shell kill him. I had rather hoped it had been a different tall, bumbling idiot,” Blackadder mused, once again adjusting his position. “So much for the Trinity Tiddlers.”
“Well...he was alive when I last saw him...” Darling began, but his attention was drawn swiftly from his thoughts of Lieutenant St. Bartleigh. For the first time he noticed a growing mass of red discolouring Blackadder’s uniform and the mud collected there. He dropped to his knees, staring in horror. “Blackadder, you’ve been hit.”
“Gosh, you’re sharp.” Blackadder growled, rolling his eyes. “Must be all that time you spend pushing pencils that does it.” Nonetheless, he allowed Darling to pry his arm away from the wound it protected.
“I’m already dead,” he stated in response to Darling’s widening eyes. “It’s funny...before we went over the top, we thought we were afraid of death.”
“We aren’t afraid of death?” Darling asked, looking for clarification on Blackadder’s part.
“No, it was willingly walking to death because of stupid fat Melchett that we were afraid of. Death itself isn’t so bad.” Blackadder explained. “Now that the time has come...it’s a relief. No more waiting. No more scheming. No more hell.”
“You sound almost happy, Captain B.” Baldrick observed, moving from his position staring out over the edge of their shell hole to stand next to Darling.
“Balders, at this point anything that will get me out of this godforsaken place will make me happy.” Following this sentence, Blackadder was overtaken by a coughing fit, which spattered his hand in fresh blood.
“Blackadd-“ Darling began to offer, what, he didn’t know, but the man himself cut him off.
“Watch yourselves out there,” he said, his voice quieter than it had been before. He was losing too much blood; his brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen. It was taking more and more effort to be coherent, to be conscious-to be alive.
“Ending up like me and George may get you out of here...” Blackadder paused, struggling to keep his thoughts together. “You may get out of here...but even I would rather see England again... just the trenches even...”
His eyes closed. Darling and Baldrick stared at each other wondering if that was it, but Blackadder’s eyes struggled open again, slowly, weakly.
“Goodbye...”
It was the last thing the Captain said, and when he exhaled his breath, he did not draw another. Darling knelt and shut his comrade’s eyes.
“Goodbye, Captain Blackadder.”
“G’bye, Captain B.” Baldrick echoed.
The pair stood in silence for a moment before clambering out of the hole and back into the mud left by yesterday’s rains, and together continued towards the village of Passchendaele.
George knew without trying that he would have no chance of walk-hopping back to the trenches, to help. It didn’t take him very long at all to realize that his leg didn’t work well enough to crawl properly, and he didn’t have the strength simply to drag it through the mud. Maybe if there were less of it, if it hadn’t been churned up by a thousand doomed feet...
it wasn’t going to work.
He finally resorted to a strange sort of hopping crabwalk, moving backwards toward the trenches, with his right knee hooked over his left leg. It was only slightly less tiring than crawling and dragging the leg behind him, but it was easier to manoeuvre through the mud and over half-sunken bodies.
He was stopped for the fifth time to catch his breath, when another young man tripped over him and fell head first into the mud. George choked back a laugh and massaged the shoulder the kid had tripped over. What was wrong with him that he was sitting there missing half his leg and he still thought someone slipping in the mud was funny?
The kid looked barely 18, George noticed as he watched him push himself into a kneeling position as he looked for his rifle. George picked up the yet unused weapon that had landed next to him and offered it up to his comrade in arms.
“Back here.”
The kid spun around, almost falling back onto his arse. He looked at George in horror, eyes wide.
“I know, I’m a complete mess.” George chuckled. “Are you alright?”
The kid continued to stare at him as though he had grown two heads. George suspected he was possibly the first wounded man the boy had encountered, and combined with the sheer terror of going over the top, it was too much for him to process.
The lieutenant chose to make light of the fact that the soldier, a private, hadn’t answered his question yet. “Well, it’s no matter. I couldn’t hear how you are anyway. Shell, you know.”
The kid nodded dumbly, finally accepting the rifle George had been holding out for the past minute. He looked over his shoulder at his unit, some slowly advancing, others being struck down. George followed his gaze. The small number of men left advancing suggested the majority of his unit had been gunned down upon their emergence from the trenches. As he watched, two more were gunned down. George could tell they were dead when they hit the ground by the way the fell.
The kid tried to run to their aid, but George’s instincts took over and he lunged for the private’s uniform, dragging him down into the mud and covering his own unprotected head (he hadn’t seen his helmet since he awoke) with an arm. The kid stopped struggling when they felt the compression wave from another shell wash over them, followed by debris falling on and around them. George released his hold and they both sat up again, looking round. The private was the last of his unit.
“You couldn’t help them.” George stated. Just like he couldn’t help his friends. Whether they were alive or dead, he had no power to save them, not in his current state.
The private stared at him long and hard, but finally seemed to accept what he said as true. He seemed to make up his mind about something, and George was relieved to see that he appeared to remember what he had said about not being able to hear, and he began to communicate with gestures. He first pointed at himself, and then motioned towards the jerry lines.
The lieutenant shook his head, realizing the private was asking him if he wanted him to continue forward, without his unit. “I think not.” He replied to the unspoken question. “Why don’t you help me to the field hospital, and we can help anyone else that might need a trip there that we meet on the way?”
The kids face lit up, suddenly full of hope that he would not die the way his friends had.
George smiled. “What’s your name, private?”
The kid began to speak his name, but stopped midway through and instead wrote out the name ‘James’ in the mud.
“It’s nice to meet you, Private James,” said George, holding out his hand. “Lieutenant The Honourable George Colthurst St. Bartleigh, at your service.”
Private James shook George’s hand and removed the bayonet from the muzzle of his rifle. He helped the Lieutenant to his feet, pulling the officers right arm over his shoulders. He handed over his weapon for George to use as a crutch, and together they step-hobbled off, making their way toward their trenches.
As George awakened, he could tell it was light, wherever he was, by the vibrant red orange filtering through his eyelids. He couldn’t place the reason why he wasn’t sleeping in the dark on his bunk in the trenches, but he was reluctant to open his eyes and discover where exactly he was. Experience told him the act of looking around him would result in pain and temporary blindness. That happened when he simply stepped out from the dugout barracks into the trenches. Instead, George let out a sigh and opened his ears to the world around him. He was surprised to hear nothing.
Grimacing, George forced his eyes open with a groan. As expected, the sudden intake of light immediately caused a headache. George squinted as he waited for his eyes to overcome their assault, gradually discerning a rising tower of smoke somewhere above him. A wave of dread washed over him as his brain began to piece together what had happened that morning, and where he was.
He remembered standing in line with Captains Blackadder and Darling, and Private Baldrick mentioning that he had one last cunning plan. There was the shrill screech of the whistle when Captain Blackadder raised it to his lips and blew, against all reasonable judgment. And then they had had scrambled up the ladders and charged over the top.
Now he, Lieutenant the Honourable George Colthurst St. Bartleigh, was simply there, lying in the mud of Passchendaele, watching smoke rise over the battlefield.
Was he dead? Was this hell? Maybe he had been dead for years, killed long ago at the very beginning of the war and sent to hell. It was the only way he could explain the deaths of all his friends from Cambridge, his life in the trenches, the fact that they had actually gone over the top. Or perhaps worse, he wasn’t dead at all, but was trapped in a living endless hell, never to escape.
George lost track of how long he lay there, thinking about everything and nothing, marvelling over how his brain was suddenly filled with knowledge that he wasn’t aware of learning, watching the smoke rise and never hearing a sound. It could have minutes or hours, separate from the normal course of space and time. Out of the corners of his eyes, he occasionally caught sight of another soldier running past, gun in hands. He found he had no energy to stop them, couldn’t bring himself to care about what would happen to them. Maybe if they were stupid enough to look at the whole damn war the way he had, they deserved his fate: lying in the muddy slop wondering what the hell they had been thinking when they joined up.
It was this thought that brought George’s mind to the subject of Captain Blackadder, and his constant scheming to escape the trenches and the front lines. The Captain had never held any naive ideals or victorious delusions about the war and what they were in for, had wanted nothing to do with charging across No Man’s Land. He wondered if his superior had survived the insanity of charging through barbed wire and gunfire. Curiosity got the best of him, and George pushed himself up on his elbows into a sitting position.
For the first time since waking, George’s eyes were not locked on the sky, and the sights that they gathered sickened him. Bodies lay in the dust and debris of the shooting as far as he could see. He was grateful not to recognize any of the dead and unconscious lying near him. A body about ten feet in front of him was missing its head. Horrified, George glanced down at his feet only to be greeted by a sight that was to him, even worse.
He only had one foot.
His right leg ended below his kneecap in a mess of bandages and dried and cauterized blood. On either side of his knee in the dirt was black dust he recognized as gunpowder, and it dawned on him that someone, possibly Baldrick, Darling, or Blackadder had had the sense to pour the explosive over the wound and light it on fire prevent him from bleeding to death. A used match he found a couple of feet from his body was proof. Hastily wrapped and tied bandages protected the worst of the wound from infection and soaked up blood from smaller non-life threatening cuts and nicks to the area. He found it odd that the stump of his leg didn’t hurt, but thanked his lucky stars for this small relief and continued to check his body for other injuries.
As his check progressed, George found several minor cuts and scrapes that he recognized as shrapnel damage, occasionally finding metal embedded within the wounds. He became aware of each of them aching once they were discovered. It must have been a shell that took his foot off and cut him up. He had been enlisted long enough to know that if a man were hit in the right place, a severed nerve would mean loss of feeling and use in a limb. A shell exploding also explained why he couldn’t hear. He had been told stories of chaps who never heard again after close shell explosions. It looked as though the fellow who was missing his head had taken the worst of the damage, probably saving his life.
Captain Darling winced at the sound of another shell exploding as he crawled on knees and elbows through the mud. He would give anything to be back in England with Doris instead of on the continent, almost certainly in the last hours of his life. He wasn’t even sure why he still moved forward toward the jerry lines. Maybe it was just a desire to die with honour instead of abandoning his comrades. Maybe it was a fear of what Blackadder would say if he were to see him running, tail between his legs, back to the trenches they came from. He could never live it down if Blackadder fought and died in battle while he deserted his country.
So he continued forward, rifle clutched in a death grip for what felt like an eternity. As he moved on, he became somewhat immune to the constant explosions, to the whistling of bullets moving past, the distant retort of machine gun fire. He heard what was happening, but he had no reaction. Where when they first climbed the ladders and he was overwhelmed with fear, he had now been taken by a grim determination. There were no distractions that could pull his mind from its task.
Thus, it was a nasty shock when he realized there was nothing but thin air beneath his elbows, a millisecond before he tumbled head first into a shell hole.
It was an even worse shock when a cushiony something broke his fall and let out a scream.
Darling couldn’t move for surprise. He felt himself being pulled back off his cushion and his rifle being yanked from his death grip.
“Don’t worry, Captain B,” said an incredibly familiar voice. “I’ll protect you.”
“Oh, excellent. I can expect to live a grand total of three seconds then.”
Darling blinked, his mind slowly connecting the voice of the man holding him to the name he had just given, and the name to the second voice. Looking down at the grime covered lump that had broken his fall, he suddenly recognized the man lying there.
“B-Bl-Blackadder?” He managed to stutter out.
Captain Edmund Blackadder stared up at him, letting out a noise of disgust as Baldrick released the other captain. “Dear god, Darling. Weren’t you shot already?”
Darling’s eye twitched. It always twitched at the mention of his surname. Doris had been careful never to call him Darling. She hated that twitch as much as he did.
“No.”
“So should I be expecting that idiot George to drop in on me too, or were my eyes telling the truth when I saw that shell take him down?” Blackadder asked, his question punctured by a sharp intake of breath as he shifted his position.
“I shouldn’t think so.” Darling said, frowning. Poor George would be lucky to get back to the trenches alive. It seemed like a lifetime ago that he had tripped over the unconscious lieutenant and taken a moment to make sure he wouldn’t bleed to death from his missing leg.
“So I really did see a shell kill him. I had rather hoped it had been a different tall, bumbling idiot,” Blackadder mused, once again adjusting his position. “So much for the Trinity Tiddlers.”
“Well...he was alive when I last saw him...” Darling began, but his attention was drawn swiftly from his thoughts of Lieutenant St. Bartleigh. For the first time he noticed a growing mass of red discolouring Blackadder’s uniform and the mud collected there. He dropped to his knees, staring in horror. “Blackadder, you’ve been hit.”
“Gosh, you’re sharp.” Blackadder growled, rolling his eyes. “Must be all that time you spend pushing pencils that does it.” Nonetheless, he allowed Darling to pry his arm away from the wound it protected.
“I’m already dead,” he stated in response to Darling’s widening eyes. “It’s funny...before we went over the top, we thought we were afraid of death.”
“We aren’t afraid of death?” Darling asked, looking for clarification on Blackadder’s part.
“No, it was willingly walking to death because of stupid fat Melchett that we were afraid of. Death itself isn’t so bad.” Blackadder explained. “Now that the time has come...it’s a relief. No more waiting. No more scheming. No more hell.”
“You sound almost happy, Captain B.” Baldrick observed, moving from his position staring out over the edge of their shell hole to stand next to Darling.
“Balders, at this point anything that will get me out of this godforsaken place will make me happy.” Following this sentence, Blackadder was overtaken by a coughing fit, which spattered his hand in fresh blood.
“Blackadd-“ Darling began to offer, what, he didn’t know, but the man himself cut him off.
“Watch yourselves out there,” he said, his voice quieter than it had been before. He was losing too much blood; his brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen. It was taking more and more effort to be coherent, to be conscious-to be alive.
“Ending up like me and George may get you out of here...” Blackadder paused, struggling to keep his thoughts together. “You may get out of here...but even I would rather see England again... just the trenches even...”
His eyes closed. Darling and Baldrick stared at each other wondering if that was it, but Blackadder’s eyes struggled open again, slowly, weakly.
“Goodbye...”
It was the last thing the Captain said, and when he exhaled his breath, he did not draw another. Darling knelt and shut his comrade’s eyes.
“Goodbye, Captain Blackadder.”
“G’bye, Captain B.” Baldrick echoed.
The pair stood in silence for a moment before clambering out of the hole and back into the mud left by yesterday’s rains, and together continued towards the village of Passchendaele.
George knew without trying that he would have no chance of walk-hopping back to the trenches, to help. It didn’t take him very long at all to realize that his leg didn’t work well enough to crawl properly, and he didn’t have the strength simply to drag it through the mud. Maybe if there were less of it, if it hadn’t been churned up by a thousand doomed feet...
it wasn’t going to work.
He finally resorted to a strange sort of hopping crabwalk, moving backwards toward the trenches, with his right knee hooked over his left leg. It was only slightly less tiring than crawling and dragging the leg behind him, but it was easier to manoeuvre through the mud and over half-sunken bodies.
He was stopped for the fifth time to catch his breath, when another young man tripped over him and fell head first into the mud. George choked back a laugh and massaged the shoulder the kid had tripped over. What was wrong with him that he was sitting there missing half his leg and he still thought someone slipping in the mud was funny?
The kid looked barely 18, George noticed as he watched him push himself into a kneeling position as he looked for his rifle. George picked up the yet unused weapon that had landed next to him and offered it up to his comrade in arms.
“Back here.”
The kid spun around, almost falling back onto his arse. He looked at George in horror, eyes wide.
“I know, I’m a complete mess.” George chuckled. “Are you alright?”
The kid continued to stare at him as though he had grown two heads. George suspected he was possibly the first wounded man the boy had encountered, and combined with the sheer terror of going over the top, it was too much for him to process.
The lieutenant chose to make light of the fact that the soldier, a private, hadn’t answered his question yet. “Well, it’s no matter. I couldn’t hear how you are anyway. Shell, you know.”
The kid nodded dumbly, finally accepting the rifle George had been holding out for the past minute. He looked over his shoulder at his unit, some slowly advancing, others being struck down. George followed his gaze. The small number of men left advancing suggested the majority of his unit had been gunned down upon their emergence from the trenches. As he watched, two more were gunned down. George could tell they were dead when they hit the ground by the way the fell.
The kid tried to run to their aid, but George’s instincts took over and he lunged for the private’s uniform, dragging him down into the mud and covering his own unprotected head (he hadn’t seen his helmet since he awoke) with an arm. The kid stopped struggling when they felt the compression wave from another shell wash over them, followed by debris falling on and around them. George released his hold and they both sat up again, looking round. The private was the last of his unit.
“You couldn’t help them.” George stated. Just like he couldn’t help his friends. Whether they were alive or dead, he had no power to save them, not in his current state.
The private stared at him long and hard, but finally seemed to accept what he said as true. He seemed to make up his mind about something, and George was relieved to see that he appeared to remember what he had said about not being able to hear, and he began to communicate with gestures. He first pointed at himself, and then motioned towards the jerry lines.
The lieutenant shook his head, realizing the private was asking him if he wanted him to continue forward, without his unit. “I think not.” He replied to the unspoken question. “Why don’t you help me to the field hospital, and we can help anyone else that might need a trip there that we meet on the way?”
The kids face lit up, suddenly full of hope that he would not die the way his friends had.
George smiled. “What’s your name, private?”
The kid began to speak his name, but stopped midway through and instead wrote out the name ‘James’ in the mud.
“It’s nice to meet you, Private James,” said George, holding out his hand. “Lieutenant The Honourable George Colthurst St. Bartleigh, at your service.”
Private James shook George’s hand and removed the bayonet from the muzzle of his rifle. He helped the Lieutenant to his feet, pulling the officers right arm over his shoulders. He handed over his weapon for George to use as a crutch, and together they step-hobbled off, making their way toward their trenches.