The Trench Soldier
Page 16
He was still unconscious the next day when, at last, the British succeeded in taking the trench from the Germans.
A Tommy stretcher team carried him back to the field hospital where a doctor was about to pronounce him dead when he realized that the exposed red flesh was maintaining its color.
"I don't know what's happening here," he muttered, "but I can't count him off as dead while his metabolism is still functioning. There's nothing I can do for him, though. Just put him aside until he dies."
The next day Casca was still alive, although the doctor could not detect either heartbeat or breathing. But the torn red meat was clearly still hanging onto life, so he had the incinerated body bandaged to keep it clean and again set it aside.
A conference of doctors agreed that Casca was not quite dead, and as there was nothing else they could think to do, they listed him to be repatriated to England.
"It's only a matter of where he's to be buried, but if he's still in this state when he gets to the boat, he might even make it home to be put in the ground."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
When the ambulance train arrived at the coast, Casca's body had still not commenced to rot, so it was loaded with a number of other drastically wounded onto a small freighter, the Shropshire Maid, that was sailing for Southampton.
It was a fine spring night with a bright moon in a cloudless sky. Casca with a number of other wounded was placed on deck, lashed to the deck cargo of crates of oranges.
The little ship was contributing mightily to Britain's war effort, running supplies from England to France, and returning with wounded men and cargoes of food. The owner and captain was also getting extremely rich in this process and willing to run the submarine blockade.
Until November of 1914, the U-boat policy had been to board intercepted vessels, allow the crew time to take to the boats, and then sink the ship. In February of 1915, however, the German government declared the waters surrounding Great Britain to be a military area and announced that henceforth enemy merchantmen found in this area would be sunk without warning. This announcement followed the Allies' infringement of international law in November when they had similarly declared the North Sea a military area in the enforcement of their blockade of German ports.
Captain Jacobsen was not concerned unduly. His ship was small and unimportant and was registered in Liberia.
But a submarine commander, Hauptman Wolfgang von Ritter, was almost at the end of his seventeen-day mission and had not yet made a kill. He decided not to risk a miss and the waste of a torpedo by trying for an attack while submerged. He brought his ship to the surface and approached the unarmed merchantman.
Jacobsen's crew were keeping a sharp, seamanlike lookout, but they did not see the black U-boat on the black sea. The first they knew of its presence was a great explosion as the submarine's cannon scored a direct hit near the bow.
The crew raced to the davits and tried to crank down the two heavy lifeboats that were carried on either side of the superstructure. The ship was listing heavily to port where it had been hit, and the starboard side boat proved impossible to launch. The port side boat was dangling in the air when the second cannon shell hit, blasting another hole in the hull and opening it wide to the sea.
In a matter of minutes the ship was sinking beneath the waves, a handful of crew members and a few of the wounded soldiers swimming for their lives until they tired in the cold water.
EPILOGUE
When, an hour later, another British ship came upon the floating wreckage, the crew found only the wounded soldiers floating on the orange crates. They hauled them on board, but none showed any sign of life.
This freighter, the H.M.S. Abyrton, was on an urgent mission carrying war materiel and a few troops. The captain wanted to get clear of the submarine-infested waters as quickly as he could. He rang the engine room telegraph for full speed ahead and put the matter of the corpses on his deck out of mind.
There was no time to heave to for a decent burial service, and the captain read a few hasty words from a Bible as the weighted bodies were thrown back into the sea from the moving ship.
The burial detail was startled to find that Casca's body was still warm despite its time in the cold sea.
Concussed, his skin burned to charcoal, and nearly drowned, Casca was yet kept alive by the curse of the prophet he had executed two thousand years earlier.
"Captain, I think this man may be alive," the bo's'n said.
"Well, just as well we didn't throw him over. He sure isn't very alive, though, is he?"
"No, sir. I suppose he'll die soon enough."
"Well, we'll have to carry him along with us until he does die, and we'll put him over the side then. We can't stop to put him ashore, bo's'n. We have our orders for Gallipoli."
Continuing Casca’s adventures, book 22 The Mongol
A slave of the savage Tatars, Casca is a champion in the blood-sports that make his masters rich…a rare prize for those who wager for his skills…and a nightmare for those who face him in a fight where only one survives. Then Casca is stolen by a Mongol rebel – a young outcast among his own people. Only blood and power can quench the burning thirst of his ambition. With Casca at his side, the rebel unites a people and cuts a bloody swath across Asia into Europe. Nations fall beneath an army horde that knows no mercy…
And an empire rises from the slaughter.
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