Odd Partners

by Mystery Writers of America

  There were no sounds either, except occasionally the scurrying of rats’ feet. He hated rats. But at least if they were alive it meant the air was fit to breathe. Gas you couldn’t see was the hidden enemy. That’s why the miners carried little animals, like mice or canaries. They were small enough to fall unconscious before a man would. They were sent down only a certain number of times, and if they survived, they were pensioned off. Too bad the men didn’t get to do the same.

  He should have brought a stick. It was the simplest of devices to detect if anyone was digging close by. Just push it into the ground and put the other end between your teeth. You’d feel the vibration if there was anything near you. Such a simple thing, but there were few sticks of any sort near the front of these trenches. Nothing lived, no plants, no birds, except carrion creatures, of course. Plenty of them. And mud. Everywhere mud.

  There was no sense of time down here. It could have been yesterday that he and Alec had been here, telling silly stories to hide the fact that they were scared. There had been a bad collapse, and three sappers were killed. One of the lower tunnels was completely flooded. They had all escaped that, then got caught when a support gave way and fifty yards of roof caved in. It had seemed to happen in slow motion, and yet was probably a matter of only a minute or two. He remembered running and falling. It was Alec who had helped him up.

  Where the hell was Richards? Jack must have been under no-man’s-land by now. He was breathing too fast, fighting the claustrophobia. Was it really summer outside? He was going upward again, but it was definitely wetter now, the dripping coming faster and little trickles of water carving through the mud on the floor.

  He passed a tunnel off to the right and followed it a little way until he came to the last set of wooden supports. He looked up, slightly above eye level, to see if he could find the DR carved. What did D stand for? David? Donald? Douglas? Who had named him? His mother?

  He put the thought out of his mind.

  Sean, who had taught him so much, had taught him better than that. The ghosts of the dead are not always with you. What makes you think you are so damn important? They’ve got their own business to mind. Jack remembered Sean laughing. He had a very individual laugh. Always sounded surprised. “Who’d want to stay around here?” he had said, and laughed some more.

  He was gone, too. Gas. Better not even to think about it. Did anybody expect to walk away from this? Too many that he cared for had fallen already, and who knew how long this would last. He did not want to remember Sean, and yet down in these dripping tunnels, with the sound of gunfire faint above him, how could he not? He could see Sean’s smile, hear his voice saying, “Don’t do it, boyo,” with the lilt to it that so many Welshmen carried, like a kind of music in itself.

  Lost down here. Not even bodies to send home. There was something ludicrous in weeping because you could not bury a friend, because he was buried forever deep in the earth.

  He heard a rumble of gunfire above him, and then another. But it was not that that froze him rigid against the wall. It was a much smaller sound, and much closer. A rat? No. He knew the scrabble of a rat’s feet. This was soft, the movement of a much heavier weight. The weight of a man.

  Jack stood frozen on the spot. Then quickly he doused his lamp. The darkness became almost solid. Not even a deepening of shadows, but a total absence of light everywhere.

  There was the sound again, just a footfall, but now he was sure it was a man. How far was he from no-man’s-land? Near enough to the German trenches? What was Richards thinking? More scared of being thought a coward than of dying alone down here. What the hell had they said to him? And why? Why would you do that to anyone?

  The footfalls seemed closer now. Definitely a man. There was a long, straight run ahead, slightly uphill. Definitely getting close to the enemy lines. If they passed by a German tunnel, or worse, a dugout with men in it, he would hear them talking. He could speak a little German. They sounded so ordinary. So like his own men. Quite a lot of the words were even the same: house, man, hound…the familiar things.

  Were the soft footfalls any closer? They sounded like it. But sound was distorted underground. He might be a long way off. Forty or fifty yards. If he kept traveling without a light, they might actually bump into each other! That thought made him break out in a sweat.

  Could it be Richards? Changing his mind and returning, please heaven!

  Suddenly, a light appeared ahead and to the right. Somebody coming along a connecting tunnel. Richards?

  The man reached the main tunnel too quickly. The farthest rays of his lamp touched Jack’s feet. The man stopped and spoke suddenly, “It’s no good. The water’s getting deeper.” Only he said it in German. Jack could understand that easily. “Good” and “water” were nearly the same in both languages.

  Seconds ticked by.

  Above them there was a rumble, as if a train were going overhead, except they both knew it was heavy shellfire.

  A clod of earth shook loose and fell from the roof. One of the supports six feet away cracked and bent a little. A trickle of water appeared.

  Jack gulped, but his mouth was dry.

  He looked at the man at the same moment that the man looked at him. He was German, a short, stocky man, as miners tended to be.

  “Water?” Jack asked in German. “Wasser?”

  The man answered in German, then translated it into English. “Yes. Behind me. Which means it’s coming this way. Not much yet, but it’s increasing.” He looked sideways and up at the support that had cracked. He did not need to say what he feared. If the support gave way under the weight of the crossbeam, the whole roof could collapse here. And would alter the weight and the balance of the rest of the tunnels.

  Jack relit his lamp and held it higher. A couple of grains of dirt fell on him.

  “Did you come down for this?” the German asked. “It’s a long way from you. Is it worse your way?”

  “No. A young man came down here. I want to get him back.”

  He saw the disbelief in the German’s face.

  “It’s the truth. It’s just not all of it,” Jack explained. He needed to make the man believe him. “We’d better see if we can find a strut to reinforce this. If it gives, we’re both lost. And anyone else who’s down here.”

  Indecision flickered in the German’s eyes.

  Jack understood. He would have felt the same. Richards was a reality to Jack, but to the German he could be an invention.

  Jack held his hands out, clearly empty. “If I were here to sabotage your tunnel, I’d have brought something to blow it up after I’d gotten the hell out of the way!”

  The German smiled. He had a good face, nice teeth. “We say all you English are mad, but not that mad! That side tunnel doesn’t go very far, we could take one of the uprights from there and add it to this.”

  “Dangerous,” Jack said, thinking of the difficulty of removing an upright without jarring the whole thing and bringing half the roof down.

  “If that tunnel goes, it doesn’t matter. A cave-in here would take out the entire passage,” the German pointed out.

  A larger piece of dirt dropped onto Jack’s face, then a trickle of water. He put out his hand. “Jack Barrick.”

  The German took it and gripped it hard. His hand was strong, callused. A miner’s hand. “Karl Bucholz.” He turned and gestured for Jack to follow him.

  Ten yards into the side tunnel, they saw the first set of supports. The earth was soft around it. The Germans, on higher ground, often faced this problem of more friable earth. It was easier to dig, and made their tunnels easier to fall.

  Could Richards have come this way?

  “How far does it go?” Jack asked.

  “Twenty meters,” Karl replied. “Your runaway is not down there.”

  So Karl had understood him! He must have gone along this way befo
re Jack had reached this far. Silently they began working together to loosen the upright. It was slow, digging and gouging with knives, but it was all they had.

  “Where are you from?” Jack asked.

  “Little village in the Saar Valley. You?”

  “County Durham. Bishop Auckland.” With both of them working, the wood was coming loose.

  “Not Wales?”

  “No. Not valleys at all. Big, high, open land. Sometimes think you could touch the sky.”

  “Only touch the sky if it falls on you,” Karl said with a twisted smile. “And sometimes I think it’s going to.”

  “Been here long?”

  “Since the beginning.”

  “Me, too,” Jack replied. “I suppose that makes us veterans? I don’t want to be a veteran at twenty-three.”

  “Better than the alternative,” Karl said dryly. The wood was really coming away now. A heavy shower of dirt came with it. “What’s the matter with this young man of yours? Why’d he come here? Running away from something?” He said it with more pity in his voice than contempt. Perhaps he, too, had his own ghosts. What man with any imagination hadn’t?

  Jack did not answer, but concentrated on getting the heavy timber out of its bed without bringing down the rest of the arch. In the wet earth, the whole thing would collapse soon enough.

  Karl took the weight of it on his back. Jack shifted quickly to take the other end. They moved it as gently as they could, back along the way they had come. He could feel the muscles knot in his neck. His clenched teeth eased a little, until at last they reached the next set of supports and were back in the main tunnel.

  Without speaking, they set about putting it in place, upright, to shore up the weakened timber, which was already looser. They were born to the same craft, the same heritage of mining, with its courage, loyalty to their own. The same history of disaster and survival.

  At last it was in, as far as they could get it. Karl nodded with satisfaction. “Good.”

  “As good as we can make it,” Jack agreed.

  “Then we’d better go and find your runaway.”

  “I’d rather go alone,” Jack replied. It sounded abrupt.

  “Can’t let you do that.” Karl smiled, but there was no yield in him.

  “I’m not going to…” Jack began, and realized it was pointless. What was he going to do when he found Richards? Say that he had to come back? That people didn’t really believe he was at fault for what had happened? They were just thoughtlessly cruel, or too afraid to make sense? Wanted to see someone even more frightened than themselves?

  Karl was looking at him steadily.

  “He’s got a canister of gas,” Jack said slowly, measuring each word. “I’ve got to get it from him before he opens it…”

  Realization slowly came to Karl’s expression, imagination of the disaster, of the terror that drives out all sense. He had been here for nearly two years, just as Jack had, and had seen it all. He must have seen friends die. He, too, would have lain awake in the freezing mud, wondering if this was his last night alive. Every day someone died. For what? Home, family, a place you loved, a chance at life? All the things you hadn’t tasted yet?

  Karl was the first to break the silence. “We’ve got to find him. He doesn’t really want to do this.”

  “I’m thinking,” Jack replied. “That side tunnel only goes fifty yards in. I didn’t pass him. You didn’t. We might be able to work out where he is.”

  Karl thought for a moment or two. “Has he any sense of direction—underground, I mean?”

  “I don’t think he’s ever been underground before. He’s not a sapper. He’s only been here a couple of weeks.”

  “But is he a miner?”

  Jack felt the desperation rise inside him. “No,” he said quietly. “He’s from Hertfordshire, near London.” He refused to let his imagination see the wooded countryside, sunlight on the grass, the quiet farms he imagined Richards was from. This was a bloody, useless, senseless goddamn tragedy. He had to find this boy and get him back to their own lines so he could be killed next week or the week after. It was meaningless, a gesture of defiance against insanity, a few more days of being alive.

  Karl said nothing, but Jack believed he understood. He wanted to think that he did.

  They walked one behind the other, Karl leading them toward the German lines. They moved slowly, looking for anything that might tell them if Richards had passed this way. Mostly it would be some mark or other that he would recognize on the way back; that was on the assumption he intended to come back. Jack saw another roughly scratched DR and pointed it out to Karl, but it was just before the side tunnel off to the left.

  Karl brought an iron coin out from his pocket and tossed it. Jack called tails. The rusty ten pfennig side came up in Karl’s palm.

  They went down the side tunnel—Jack’s choice. That was when it happened. They were both looking so hard at the support struts they did not notice the loose soil at the side until it slid out in front of them, giving way, and Karl found himself up to his knees in water.

  Jack lunged forward without even thinking. For a moment Karl was not a German, he was just another sapper, like Jack, caught in an underground river.

  The water rose quickly, pouring in from the side, filling the dip in the ground. Jack grasped Karl and pulled him back again, scrambling back up the slight incline the way they had come. The earth crumbled behind them, and water gushed in.

  For long seconds Karl was dead weight. Then he recovered his control and pushed himself forward up the incline. Minutes later, they were both on more or less firm ground, shaken, wet, and ice cold, but safe, for the moment.

  “I guess he didn’t come this way,” Karl observed wryly.

  “He could be ahead of us…”

  “Not in the last hour, or he’d have been the one who dislodged that and brought it down.” Karl climbed to his feet, offering Jack a hand. “Do you think he’ll really open that canister?”

  “God knows,” Jack said honestly. “He’s…” He dropped his voice, almost as if he didn’t want to say, didn’t want anyone to hear him. “He’s young…other men’s opinions of him matter too much. It’s easy to say that what’s inside is what counts, but when you’re far from home, knowing you might never go back, friendship is about the only decent thing left, all that means anything.”

  His mind went back unwittingly to when he had felt the first real weight of war. He had seen a man he knew blown apart from shellfire. One moment he was a human being, funny, irritating, laughing at anything because he was afraid. A moment later, he was just blood and unnamed bits of body on the ground, no dignity, no life, but still warm.

  How did you deal with that, except by staying close to the living, feeling that you belonged, you were part of something that mattered, that somebody else cared what happened to you and would remember you, even if there was nothing recognizable left?

  Did Karl know all this as well as he did? Had he, too, once been so young, so terribly overwhelmed by horror and needing to belong? Comradeship was the only thread back to sanity, the only meaning in the darkness.

  What had those fools said to Richards that had sent him off to find gas and go into the tunnels? Had their own fear driven out every decency in them? It could. He had seen it before. What did you fight it with? He wanted to beat the hell out of them. That was his own rage, not a cure. Should he let them think they had killed him? Did they care? They would one day, if they lived.

  “You’ve got to believe in something,” he said. “At least that you are not alone. Comradeship. A light that you’ve seen somewhere, even if it’s gone out now. Remember where it was.”

  Karl listened in silence. A single touch on the arm to acknowledge that he understood. No words were necessary in either language. They made their way back along the tunnel and off into the one to
the left that they had not tried. It was slow going, much of it not recently used, and every few steps needed testing to see if the ground was still firm. There were patches that were alarmingly wet.

  “What are you fighting for if not some kind of truth?” Karl asked quietly.

  Jack swung round. “What? You bloody…”

  “German,” Karl supplied for him. He was smiling.

  Even in the lamplight in this filthy tunnel, Jack could see that. It was a real smile, at absurdity. There was both pity and kindness. His anger went as suddenly as it had come. He felt empty.

  “There’s another DR,” Karl observed. “What are you going to say to him?”

  “What?”

  “What are you going to say to him?” Karl repeated.

  Jack needed to answer, not to Karl, to himself. He turned and started to think about it.

  It was getting wetter under their feet.

  Jack was choked with anger that he could do nothing to change what was in the dark down here or in the light above. It was all too much. It went on senselessly week after week, month after month. Now it was year after year.

  They heard a brief sound ahead, a splash louder than a piece of earth falling would have made, unless it was a very big one.

  They both froze. Was it Richards? And even more urgent, did he still have the gas canister?

  Karl gestured for Jack to go ahead. Filthy as they were, Richards, if it was him, could tell a British uniform from a German one. God willing he would hesitate before hurling the gas at another English soldier.

  For another ten minutes they moved silently forward, slowly, testing each step before they put their weight on it. Increasingly, the soil gave under them. They were going slightly downward. Then Jack saw the figure ahead of him. It had to be Richards. He must have heard them. He swung round, the canister of gas in his hand. His face was white, his body rigid. He slowly raised his hand to show the canister.

  Jack stood still. “Richards, it’s Jack Barrick. You can’t let that go in here—”

  “Yes, I can,” Richards called back. His voice was high, as if his throat were too tight, even painful. “All I have to do is open it, and throw it…”