A Question of Honor by Charles Todd Page A

urine. The walls were haphazardly shored up, sloping toward the top, and above my head was the barbed wire strung all along the top several feet out. What appeared to be caves dug out of the earth with flaps of burlap over them held the effects of officers in two I glimpsed, and in a third, a man bent over a field telephone, giving coordinates. I realized that he’d had to do it as quickly as possible or our own guns would be shelling our own men.
    The smell was overwhelming on this warm afternoon. I’d smelled it before on the filthy bodies of wounded men and the orderlies who brought them in. A miasma of everything from stale cigarette smoke to the sweat of fear to urine and unwashed clothes, to something that I couldn’t quite identify, the sweetness of rotting things.
    We came to a ladder, flat against the dirty wall.
    “Can you manage that, do you think, Sister? I’ll look the other way.”
    And before I could think about it too long, I climbed up on the firing step and scrambled up the ladder.
    The barbed wire was flattened, had been for the attack, and I saw a landscape that was as bleak and destroyed as anything I’d ever set eyes on. One or two tree stumps were the only things to give it any sense of reality, and I glimpsed what might have been the foundation of a farm building where a shell had blasted the earth away. There were dead men in the shell craters and littering the ground, and my guide said, “Best not to look, Sister. There’s been no time to collect them.”
    I walked on, not able to imagine what was sticking to my boots as I went, and some seventy yards away, we came to the first of the German trenches, a shallow one where a machine gun had been set up. The men manning it were dead. I’d heard that very few machine gunners or their crews from either side wound up as prisoners. I could believe it now.
    We reached a second line of trenches, and my orderly, casting about, found a reasonably sturdy ladder leading down. The rolls of barbed wire on this side of No Man’s Land had already been pushed to the far side of the trench line, to protect against any surprise attack. But the Germans were quiet.
    I was astonished by what I saw when I reached the end of the ladder and could look around.
    It was so different from the British trenches that I could hardly take it in. It was as if ants had built a human-size world here, with trenches, latrines, rooms for men and officers, rough stairs down to even lower levels. A veritable city.
    And the dead were here too, but not the mud, not the dead rats or bits of men. There were boards to walk on, doors into the cubbies, and down below were dormitories, mess rooms, planning rooms—I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. And below that, according to my guide, was the bunker, which protected the German soldiers from the shelling. Our men, standing in their open trenches, had nowhere to go. And it explained to me why so often an attack after heavy shelling could be met with such fierce resistance on the part of the Germans.
    All this while the orderly was leading me down another set of stairs. I saw almost at once that one of the supporting beams had come down, bringing a part of the upper portion of the trench down with it, and under all the debris, hardly visible, was an English officer.
    I knelt in the wood splinters and dust and torn earth and called out. “I’ve come to help,” I said just as someone on the far side of the debris field switched on a torch, followed by two more.
    I could see him then, grateful that he wasn’t someone I knew. His face was lined with pain and streaked with sweat, which had plastered his fair hair against his forehead.
    “If you take my arm, I’ll shoot myself,” he said raggedly. “I mean it.”
    He moved his other hand, and I saw his service revolver, drawn and ready to use.
    “I can hardly judge how bad it is, Lieutenant,” I said briskly. “Not from here. So we’ll have no threats at this stage.”
    “Just so we