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It must be the circumstances that cause him to miss it. Henry prizes himself as a good reader of men – crews aren’t simple machines, as some officers prefer to think. Like tides, their shifts and moods must be monitored and understood if disaster is to be avoided.
Disaster has come for them all the same.
Perhaps it’s that he’s made for sailing, not walking an endless shore of stone. Perhaps it’s that Edward Little is an easy man to miss. An adequate lieutenant, most of the time, but unremarkable. Henry didn’t have many officers to choose from when he decided that enough was enough, damn the captain, some of them must survive – but even with a choice, he would have picked Little. The man prefers following orders to giving them, and that suited Henry. He even made it easy, holding a vote. Not making him choose.
Little doesn’t bring any surprises, at first. One might have thought that pressing on was his command from the start, the dogged way he sets about it. No change of heart, no accusations – he leads the remaining men with the determination of a ball fired from a gun. He walks, and anyone who can’t keep up is left behind. When he casts himself down, those that have matched his pace do the same. If one of the stragglers reaches them during the night, then he re-joins the group, but if there is no sign by the time Little hauls himself up, then that man – and any man who can’t bring himself to rise – is considered lost.
It doesn’t take Henry long to realise that Little is driving the men until they drop. He gets the impression that Little is trying to push himself to the same, only something in him refuses to let go. He’s even restless, tossing and turning in the tent he and Henry share at night – a laughable nod to rank – rather than collapsing like a corpse and not moving until dawn, as the rest of them do.
Henry doesn’t ask him to slow their pace, doesn’t ask him to wait for those who fall behind. This was what he wanted. What was necessary. Waiting for dying men only shortens the odds for the rest of them.
Doesn’t it?
Exhausted, with his bones turning to sand beneath his skin, Henry knows he’s a coward. He wanted Little to lead the men, because then the blame, the guilt, would rest with him. Now, he’s too tired to stop it. He tells himself that he’s as fit as Little, that his nerves don’t howl every time he puts weight on his putrid toes, that he rises just as easily as he had yesterday. Even if his eyelids are so scabbed that he can do little more than squint dizzily, even if his muscles are consuming themselves for hunger, he’s not one of the sick. He won’t be left behind.
‘Can you hear birds?’ Edward asks one morning as they walk ahead of the men, startling Henry with the direct address.
Henry shakes his head, dry-throated. The wind and the shale are the only sounds that trouble them now, the relentless tramp of footsteps like grinding teeth. Birds. This is hardly the bloody English countryside.
‘No.’
Edward hums. His lips are cracked so deeply that it makes Henry wince to look at, all fissures and black scabs, but they don’t seem to bother him. Two, three hours later, Edward repeats the question, and a third time as they set up their pathetic excuse for a camp. He asks the next day, and the day after.
This, then, is what Henry had missed. They are all going slowly mad, but Edward’s seems of a rarer variety. He has a watch chain that he toys with as they walk, winding it around the fingers of his left hand like a promise.
The men die more quickly, abandoning each other, eating each other, but every morning Edward addresses them like they’re still on the ships, not seeming to realise or care that they are miles from the sea, and that the men are too exhausted to listen. He leads as if he has forgotten all else behind them, and everything ahead. Perhaps he has.
‘Can you hear birds?’ Edward asks. Henry has lost track of which time it is, tenth, twelfth, hundredth. Time is fluid now, shifting. Edward must fall silent eventually, find the effort too much. His cracked lips are seeping. They will sting.
‘Yes,’ Henry says this time, because Edward will only ask again in a few hours. Perhaps Henry can pretend, too, that he can hear birdsong. Can smell grass, warmed by the sun.
Edward nods, satisfied. He is digging the watch chain into the pad of his finger, opening up the dry skin like a lip to the cold air.
‘Press on, then,’ he says, and Henry obeys.