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“I understand that you have been through a lot, Lance Corporal, but you saved many men here today. Take a moment, if you want, but I would like to see you in my quarters shortly.” McKenzie nodded at him curtly before turning, paused, and then continued back towards the trenches.
His tone was substantially softer than it had been earlier, perhaps dampened by the nearby presence of the medical tent. Despite his best efforts, Schofield had not accomplished the goal he had set out to do. The Colonel might praise him all the world but too many lives had been lost for him to celebrate.
This damned war. Every inch of ground drained another pint of blood, and for what?
He recalled the hesitant way he had started the previous day’s journey - had that caused his lateness? Could he have prevented his failure if he had just listened to his friend? Mistake after mistake had been made in enemy territory. Surely if he could just try again he would still be here with him.
“Hey, cheer up, lad!” - a passing soldier called out, playfully prodding him with a foot. He should have jolted upright. Instead he remained where he was, wordlessly sat leant against a tree. When the boy spoke again, Schofield gave him a weak glare, and they locked eyes for a moment.
Cynicalism was not the natural inclination of these men. It was not the spirit he had met when he had first arrived in France nearly three years ago. As the unnamed man’s grin shifted into a sympathetic look, Schofield was reminded of the enthusiasm himself and many others had held only that short time ago. His comrades calling for him to catch up, the soldier nodded almost imperceptibly and turned to leave, the bounce in his step depleted slightly.
That energy had once been his, a common belief in the cause initially binding him to his allies. Memory of the patriotic zeal with which he had signed up seemed almost unreal now for a thousand reasons. The unkept promise of victory within four months invigorated an entire continent’s worth of young men who sent themselves off to die. He had survived against the odds, but the vacancy through which he had communicated his loss to the soldier seemed to be all that was left for him now.
Schofield sat in silence, listening to the groans and cries emanating from the medical tent. As boots battered the grass to deliver more bodies to the war doctors, he became ever more acutely aware of the magnitude of his failure. All these deaths were his fault. Every footstep he heard marked another shortcoming in his mind, and as a solitary pair of feet drew closer to him he thought of the two that had been conspicuously absent since yesterday and that would never walk again due to his failure to save-
“Will.” The familiar voice startled him.
“Blake!” he cried out as he whipped his head around to look at his friend.
“Joseph is fine,” Lieutenant Blake replied.
Laying his eyes upon the man he had only met that day, Schofield’s mind reeled. A brief moment of hope had been crushed as he added yet another stupid mistake to his mental tally. His face fell, despite his best efforts to hide it, and Joseph Blake gave him a rueful smile.
“I just wanted to check in on you. I, understand-” He hesitated before continuing. “...how are you faring?”
A long pause followed. “Fine. Just, thinking about home.” Schofield tapped the box in his pocket and gave an unconvincing smile. He was certain Blake could see right through him.
“Yeah, I get it. I do it a lot, too.”
Just like his brother.
Blake interrupted the unspoken conversation by breaking the silence. “I saw the Colonel have a word with you earlier. Might I ask what that was about?”
“Oh. He just wants to see me in his quarters. God forbid it’s another fucking message.” He surprised himself with the force he put into his speech.
The standing man seemed to be much more selective with his words than Schofield had been, and he felt guilty. Every time he spoke he let slip just how much he had been affected by the previous day’s events, and every time he did so he was implicitly comparing how much each had been hurt. His acquaintance must resent him already.
“I see. I can walk you back that way if you want?” Blake reached down and offered a hand to him. Despite the difference in facial hair, the resemblance to the scene of just twenty-four hours ago was not lost on Schofield. But if Blake - Joseph - could see its impact, he gave no indication.
Schofield choked out an unclear grunt, lost in his own thoughts, confused as to what he wanted and uncertain as to what was going through the other man's head. Did he have any idea what he was thinking? Was he taken aback by his inability to speak now? How could he keep fucking up even after it was all done?
Blake crouched down next to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. He looked searchingly at Schofield, and, as their eyes met, something seemed to click.
"I get it. This war affects us all differently. But if there's anything I can suggest, it's this: don't dwell on it."
The words of that officer - ' it doesn't do to dwell on it ' - played back in his mind. As the other man stood up without him, Schofield couldn't help but withdraw into himself, doubting whether he was understood at all, or whether despite their shared loss they were failing to communicate entirely. But the following sentence recontextualised the entire conversation for him:
"You know, I would do well to take my own advice." The following pause was laid with melancholy, the silence more deafening than a shell. "And Will, it's okay to take a moment. We all have to sometimes."
Boots softly thumping against the grass, Joseph turned and left towards the trenches. A brief moment of clarity for Schofield promptly clouded over again as he considered his interaction. Each piece of advice was coherent on its own but he wondered if, despite his seniority in rank, the older man had it wrong too? After all, dwelling on the past was not exactly an evitable action. Why else would one need to stop for a moment to reflect? The very basis of his conversations with the Lieutenant was the memory of his brother.
On that note, he remembered his commitment to write a letter to Tom's mother, and kicked himself again for being so mute during the conversation. Hoping to catch Joseph, he hurriedly struggled to his feet and made to run after him. Lightheadedness prevented him from continuing far, though, and he was likely to be long gone anyway, so when Schofield regained his balance he trudged onwards at a much dampened pace.
Stopping briefly to ask a passing soldier for directions, he appreciated once more his surroundings. The trenches themselves were monotonous, almost robotically consistent, but the beautiful landscapes behind were genuinely stunning. Perhaps it was simply the contrast, though.
As he passed the medical tent, he wished he had taken up Blake's offer again. Instead of speaking aloud, he mentally noted how ridiculous it was to place doctors whose job it was to preserve life adjacent to soldiers whose job it was to take it. Each new contradiction he noticed in this place seemed more obvious than the last.
In the absence of company, he returned to the beginnings of yesterday's mission in his head as he descended into the trenches once more. He briefly considered the possibility of being given yet another message to carry, but he doubted it - not for lack of creative cruelty on his commanders' part, but because going over the top here had already proven to be an insane task.
Traversing No-Man's Land the day before had been an unenviable experience, though. Not because it was his first - he had participated in the Somme, after all. No, it had scared him because he had met no resistance. Precisely due to his experience, he was shaken by how much land the Germans had given up for no apparent purpose. Perhaps he should have realised then...
As Schofield arrived at McKenzie's bunker, he was quickly ushered inside. He supposed that word had spread of his mission, and his clothing (or what remained of it) did stand out among a sea of identical uniforms - uniforms that made it so that each soldier would sooner spot an enemy amongst them than see the humanity of each other.
He immediately came face to face with the Colonel. McKenzie had an unreadable expression, but as he recognised Schofield he reached out his hand before the Lance Corporal could salute.
"I am glad you could see me here again. Don't worry, this will only take a moment." McKenzie shook Schofield's hand, and the two men regarded each other for a second.
"I don't think I ever truly got to thank you. This morning's attack was a disaster. Thank you for your brave efforts to avert it." McKenzie meant well, but his words only served as a reminder of his mission's ultimately unsuccessful conclusion.
"I have personally undertaken to see that you are rewarded for your conduct. As a result, I am pleased to inform you that you have been promoted to the rank of Corporal, and to mark your achievements you will be awarded a medal." The Colonel could not have known, but this felt like a direct insult.
"It wasn't just me, Sir. I was accompanied by another man," Schofield interjected.
"Just two men? Christ. They should have sent twenty."
He mentally replayed the scene in the German dugout from yesterday. He had been the expert in the room. But he had failed then, too. If only he'd just stopped rummaging through the supplies, if only he'd noticed the tripwire sooner, if only he had shot the bloody rat it would have all been fine.
Even so, Blake had saved his life. In a collapsing bunker, the novice had dug through piles of rubble and dust to find and save his friend, delaying himself in a desperate effort to help him. Despite Schofield's blindness, he had put himself at risk to save him. And after all that, he had given up his water to help rinse his eyes of the damned dust. If that wasn't deserving of the medal he had wanted, nothing was.
"He saved my life, sir. I think- If I may, I would suggest awarding him a medal as well." Schofield's heart accelerated.
"I understand that he was killed in the line of duty? Well, I suppose that, given the significance of his role in helping the message to get through, he does deserve commendation."
It felt like a hollow victory.
Earlier, he had thought that the Colonel understood the true nature of this war. But now he understood that McKenzie was just a military commander - he would never grasp the impact it had on the troops that were actually fighting.
All the generals were like this in reality. They sat in their shielded bunkers, miles behind the front lines, waiting for men to throw themselves upon barbed wire and bullets over a few scraps of land.
The message he had carried was not important because of the lives he would have saved. He had only been tasked with it because it was strategically significant. As McKenzie had wondered aloud earlier, why else would they only have sent two soldiers? Schofield now realised the answer: in order to minimise losses if they didn't make it.
He was here to defend the realm. Well, what realm was he defending now? This hellscape carved into a continent was the realm of no-one but a madman, a murderer. It often seemed that the men leading his side of the war were more deserving of the mantle of ‘enemy’ than the Huns.
That was the basis upon which, two and a half years ago, a spontaneous peace had broken out amongst the constant fighting. The Christmas Truce, as it had come to be known, was often romanticised. At its core, however, a truth had been realised that day - a truth that was opposed by some generals, who in subsequent years ordered artillery barrages to prevent its re-emergence. That truth was that every soldier, no matter the colour of their uniform, was a human, and that there was never a good reason to kill an innocent person.
But the Hun that killed Blake didn’t believe it.
Soldiers didn't always need a good reason to kill each other. That was the whole basis of war. In a way, the truth of 1914 was now an outdated innocence, replaced by yet another layer of purposelessness and cynicalism.
His mind returned to his task yesterday. What was the point of it all? He had set out to save lives, but every moment spent panicking had been a moment wasted and another life lost.
“I can arrange for you to be sent on leave home.” McKenzie's voice cut through his thoughts.
He had already been home. “No. Sir.”
He didn’t know what he wanted to do. As long as this bloody war dragged on there would be no satisfaction for anyone, not general nor soldier, Brit nor Hun.
But he knew that there was work he could do here to ease the pain of the war. He could find that poor French girl who had been so kind to him. He could assist with burying the dead - an honour Tom would never receive. And he could fulfil his promise and write that letter to Tom's mother.
He knew that if he took leave he would never be able to live with himself. The disaster McKenzie had referred to was his fault, and he had to pay for it. Every moment was an opportunity to help the world - and after his failures yesterday, he never wanted to take a moment for himself ever again.