“Oo—er—O Jesus, the blarsted noise again ... don’t let ’em—don’t lemme go—I ain’t a coward, sir, ’streuth I’m not—bin two years in the trenches—but them guns fair do somefink to the inside of me ’ead.... Ow—er——” he fell writhing and vomiting to the ground beside Richard, as the barrage appeared to have enclosed a stray Gotha, and shook the four sides of the world with triumphant yelps and rumblings.
“Shell-shock,” muttered Richard. “Corporal by his stripes and—by Jove! Military Medal”—as a twist of khaki tunic into the moonlight revealed a strip of ribbon sewn on to the man’s meagre chest.
He was suddenly guilty and ashamed of his own arrogance of calm. This sort of wreck was what the war made of some of its heroes; “this is what the war ought to have made of me” ... he should have been blind with the St Dunstan’s men: broken like the little cockney soldier from France, cowering here beside him. His mind and body and five senses whole and immune, were dishonour.
Richard knelt and took firm grip of the twitching wrists. “It’s all right,” gruffly. “Listen—they’re getting away towards London; we shall have quiet for a bit.”
“Till they come back,” sobbed the man, but he trembled less violently, and presently drew himself up to a sitting posture.
“Discharged ‘fit’ from ’orspital larst week,” he whispered, lips trembling to a rueful smile. His peaked, freckled face was glistening with sweat, and his fingers still tore at the grass; but he was making an effort at control. “Doc told me I shouldn’t get another o’ these ’ere attacks, but—I dunno—it’s the s’noise wot did it. I was walkin’ over quiet-like from Benfleet—luvly evenin’ an’ all—when that bloomin’ siren went and gave me fits an’ I begun to run.” His voice conveyed apology, and Richard flushed crimson.
“It’s all right,” he repeated awkwardly; “where do you want to get?”
“H’under cover,” said the Corporal with distinct emphasis. “We’re nearer Leigh, I b’lieve, than Benfleet; might make a dash for ’ome sweet ’ome before.... Oh, Gawd! don’t, don’t,” as a fresh growling outbreak from the Sheerness guns signified the approach up the Thames of a second batch of raiders.
Cover? Richard looked round the landscape; it was entirely exposed; not even a tree; nothing humped from the flat marshes except a few old derelict boats reversed in the mud; one of them at the foot of the slope where now they lay.
“Better than nothing!” It might at least be suggestive of shelter to his companion, even if of no actual protection from shrapnel. Richard leapt down from the wall, and plunged up to his knees in mud, tugged at the boat with all his welded strength of shoulder and muscle.