A Lonely Death

22

R utledge crossed the frontier between France and Belgium and soon after found a deeply rutted road through devastated countryside that led in the direction of the River Somme, approaching it from what had been the German lines. The land was healing, after a fashion, grass and weeds struggling to reestablish themselves. Nature seemed to find a way to cover up the scars of tragedy. But men had marched down this road to kill other men, and the land was rough and desolate, as if no one cared to live here where so many had died. He couldn't blame them. If ghosts walked anywhere, surely they did here, and he felt that nothing grown in such bloody soil would ever prosper again.

He could see across the twisted landscape to where he and so many others had fought, and yet he found his sector of that fateful night hard to recognize. Rains had washed down trench walls, the stench had gone, and somehow it all seemed so much smaller in scale now. Without the men who had served here among the wire, the hellish pits of shell craters, and the tools of war, whether guns or tanks or trenches, it seemed to have changed. He stopped the motorcar at one point and got out, listening. There should have been shouts and the cries of men, the whistle of shells and the chatter of machine guns, the deafening roar of battle, the deeper throb of aircraft overhead. Instead, there was only a light wind, hardly stirring the ridged and torn landscape.

He could still name the men he'd led to their deaths here. As he walked, he thought he could see their faces, but it was only the tightness in his throat and the tension across his shoulders that made him light-headed.

It wasn't long before he found the place he'd been searching for. He'd always had a good sense of direction, and even without markers he knew it was here.

Looking down, he saw the lace of a boot sticking through the soil next to a struggling clump of grass, and he felt ill. How many times had a heel or a buckle marked all that was left of a man who had been living and breathing seconds before? He'd been told that farmers in some places still dug up the dead with their plows. He'd seen them lying rotting in the sun, shrouded with the first snowfall, twitching in the pelting rain.

The revolver was heavy in his coat pocket, well oiled and loaded. He was not likely to miss. And Hamish, he realized, had been silent since he left the motorcar, waiting.

He took the weapon out and held it in his hand. Its feel and its weight were familiar, comforting.

He was raising the revolver, his head bowed for the shot, his eyes closed, when the image of that single boot lace came to him.

It would be obscene to kill himself here, he realized. To add one more body to the thousands upon thousands who littered this land. A desecration to fire a revolver here in this stillness.

Even France had failed him. After a time, the revolver still in his hand, he turned back toward his motorcar, and then drove back the way he'd come.