Re: Jack and Louis: warzone - No. 17
Jack had read about war. The old kind, fought over lines of territory and the exchange of fire beyond fences. About men who had died not from artillery fire or gunshots but of the slow, seeping rot of mud thigh-deep and phlegm rattling in lungs, of exhaustion and old technology ill-suited to prolonged battle-grounds.
He'd seen modern war, instead. The dust acrid up his nose over the smell of fresh-made rubble, of chemical residue that hung in the air. The wail of civilians caught up inevitably in it, the sweet smell of singed flesh and the heavy-metal of blood.
He had moments to determine that what faced them both was the former, the kind of inevitable death that stretched over yawning scarred ground, before Louis had thrown his body-weight on top of Jack's own. Bloody foolish man: if a bomb was close enough to take them both out, it would whether Louis was on top of him or not, but it was brave and it had occurred to him in that split-second before impact, which it had not done to Jack.
He was too selfish to think of self-sacrifice. Water soaked them, and the jacket was worse than useless now, it was drenched and it clung to his shoulders and back and arms in clinging wet folds. As they untangled themselves with difficulty getting purchase on the mud, Jack looked at Louis with enough time to glimpse his head turn and then back at him.
And good god, if the byplay with the door handle wasn't enough to set hares running, the gold gleam of Louis's eyes on a battlefield rose all the hairs on the back of Jack's neck in leery symphony. The words didn't help. He'd known Louis when the Scots was thicker, stronger. He'd never heard Irish out of that mouth but he could place it immediately, brogue.
"Louis?" But he was near-certain whatever - whoever - he was talking to, abandoned on a bloody battlefield with was arguably not his friend. "We need to get out of the line of fire. Where's the fence? We need to aim behind it. Preferably on the sodding Allied side." First things first. Then he could deal with whatever this was.
Jack scanned wet horizon for the line of barbed wire that looked most solid, an abrupt delineation of death in sloppy ground.
"That way." And god help them both if they hit Germans.