The Gathering Storm by Bodie Thoene, Brock Thoene Page B

earlier. A terrified young infantryman hefted his rifle just so before stabbing downward into the body of a foe across a barbed wire barricade. The scene of desperate combat, illuminated by a shell burst, was etched in Judah's vision. In indelible memory the soldier's knuckles were clenched white, veins standing out in hands and forearms. The motion was the same as a spear thrust, the very grasp Judah needed to depict.
    "'Scuse me, Cap'n Blood, sir." The diffident tone of Sergeant Mickey Walker disrupted Judah's image.
    Judah shook his head to clear it. He was not sorry for the intrusion. "What is it, Sergeant?"
    The remaining members of the Tin Noses Brigade still addressed each other by their ranks from the Great War. The fatigues worn by Sergeant Walker, late of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, had been innocent of rank or other designation for many years. However, at Tyne Cott cemetery the Irishman remained the ranking non-comm, just as Judah was commanding officer.
    "Sorry to interrupt, sir," Walker repeated, "but me and the lieutenant has been having a discussion, like." The Irishman paused to wipe a line of sweat from his forehead before it crept beneath his fake nose.
    "What about?" Judah inquired.
    "We was scrubbing the markers near the Cross of Sacrifice... .the captain knows the ones I mean; them as is for the boys who fell during the fight."
    The additional description of the location was not needed. During the Battle of Passendale, which some called the Third Battle of Ypres, the British had used a captured German pillbox as an aid station. Those who did not survive their wounds were summarily buried next to the field hospital.
    Later, after the war, the pillbox was surmounted by a giant stone memorial cross. The surrounding slopes displayed rank on orderly rank of headstones, but these first, haphazardly placed graves were left in their original locations. It was a tribute to the heroism of those men, and a reminder this hillside was a battlefield before it was a memorial.
    "Is there a problem?" Judah asked.
    "The lieutenant, sir, sees as how some of them stones is leanin' after last winter's rains. He think we should shift 'em; straighten 'em up, like."
    "And you disagree?"
    Walker adjusted the earpieces of the eyeglass frame that supported his artificial nose and plucked at the patch over his missing left eye. "I don't like to contradict an officer, sir, but he suggested I put it to you, like. I thinks them leanin' stones is part of the way they was left, a'purpose."
    "But we can't have them falling down, can we?" Judah chided.
    "None of them is in danger of that, sir," Walker returned. "'Specially with the ground gettin' so rock hard, an' all."
    "I'll walk over before supper and have a look," Judah said.
    "Thank you, sir," Walker said, saluting. He turned on his heel and exited the shed as if departing from an office in a proper headquarters.
    That's the way he had always been, Judah reflected. Back in the twenties, just after the last war, when the Tin Noses Brigade was much bigger, Sergeant Walker had always been a stickler for military tradition. The men whose terribly disfigured faces barred them from home and sweethearts and society found peace and acceptance among similarly injured comrades. Without an actual plan, they had coalesced around the Belgian cemetery like raindrops sliding down and collecting at the bottom of a windowpane.
    They found meaning in their lives as outcasts by serving their fallen comrades—maintaining the memorials and acting as guides for grieving family members.
    In those early days Sergeant Walker had been the only master stonecutter in the troop. Over the years he had trained a dozen others to chisel names into granite and marble with precision and economy of motion.
    Now the combined, long-term effects of poison gas, shrapnel, and depression had taken their toll. After two decades of failing lungs, septic wounds, and suicides, Walker was once again the only trained