Dead Man's Land by Robert Ryan Page B

as the officers’ ward, with twin rows of bedsteads facing each other. There was only one heater, though, along with an as-yet unlit potbelly stove, and there was a bite to the air.
    ‘Major Watson! Is tha’ you, sir?’
    He turned to his right. It took him a second to recognize the sergeant as the man’s left eye was heavily bandaged and it obscured most of his face. The nose was unmistakable, though.
    ‘Sergeant Shipobottom?’
    ‘Aye, sir. It’s Shipobottom. ’Ow do?’
    ‘Your captain said you’d been injured. But we didn’t have the opportunity to chat further. What on earth are the Leigh Pals doing here?’ He spoke up, as always when dealing with the mill workers, whose hearing had been ruined by the constant clatter of machinery. It made them very adept lip readers, a useful skill in the trenches.
    Shipobottom pointed at his dressing. ‘Ah took one in the stomach. And a shell splinter in m’ eye—’
    ‘No, no, man,’ said Watson with a laugh. ‘I mean here. Belgium. You were in Egypt, last I saw, marked for the Dardanelles.’
    ‘That’s right, but we were away about a month after thee, sir.’ There was a time when Watson had been unable to understand the thick ‘Lanky’ accent of the Leigh Pals, or ‘the Lobby Gobblers’ as they were sometimes known, but a few months as their temporary MO – where, for a shilling a time and a tot of rum, they had acted as willing subjects for his transfusion experiments – had cured him of that. One curious side effect of the war was that it had thrown together men of different regions and classes who would never have had cause to converse before. This breaching of national (and to some extent, class) boundaries, Watson had come to believe, could only be a welcome development. Even if it made for difficult conversations sometimes.
    ‘Are you all right, sir? No more of that ague?’
    ‘I am, thank you.’ Watson had come down with a mild case of malaria, debilitating enough to have him repatriated. ‘Quite recovered. No recurring fevers yet, fingers crossed. So you shipped here straight from Egypt?’
    ‘Aye. Like you said, we expected Dardanelles, like . . . but they brought us t’ this place. Get us green ones used to trench life, so they say.’
    Watson caught a whiff of something on the man’s breath. ‘Have you been drinking, Shipobottom?’
    The man gawped at him, his expression as comical as his name, which he claimed was derived from ‘man-who-looks-after-sheep-in-meadow-with-a-stream-at-the-bottom’.
    He looked ready to deny it, but then relented. ‘Aye. Just a drop, like. Don’t tell on me, sir.’
    ‘I won’t. But it’s not a good idea right now. Not in here. No more. Understood?’’
    ‘Aye.’
    ‘And how are the men?’
    He looked sombre. ‘Bearing up. We lost Captain Leverton, though. A right shame it were.’
    ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ It was true. He had been a fine officer, a good few years older than most. Maturity was in short supply in the British Army. ‘How did he . . . ?’
    ‘He got some gypo disease. Terrible it was in the end. Reckon you could’ve saved him.’
    Dysentery, enteric fever and, as he knew, malaria, were rife out there. ‘I’m sure they did everything they could.’
    Shipobottom’s unbandaged eye looked doubtful. ‘They’ve given yon de Griffon a field commission to captain. We all thought it must be because his family is bow-legged with brass. Rich, like. And a nestle-cock we reckoned. But no, the lad done well. I reckon he’ll keep the promotion, n’ all.’
    ‘I’m sure he will. He seemed very concerned about you.’ He knew de Griffon was from a well-to-do family, but he had a common touch that the men liked. What was a nestle-cock, though? Someone used to a little mollycoddling was his best guess. ‘And here in France? You’ve seen much action?’
    ‘Nah. The guns, like. Always the bloody guns throwin’ shells at us. Worse thing being the trench foot. Some of the boys, they