Bruar's Rest

tightly packed together they couldn’t get room to use their arms. Above them, two medics suddenly appeared, shouting, ‘Stay where you are, the line has been breached further down.’ Someone enquired, ‘How many?’
    ‘Too fucking many.’ This was always the answer given.
    Bruar felt a hand on his back; he turned to see a ginger-headed man who said, ‘Some mother’s poor wee laddies. Cannon fodder, games for the fireside generals. I’m Sandy, what do you call yourself, laddie?’
    In the half darkness he whispered back, ‘Bruar. You’re a Highlander; which part?’
    ‘Wick.’
    ‘A Caithness man.’
    He’d acquired a friend. Through the sleepless night, both spoke for hours, exchanging tales of mountains, sea cliffs and the Scotland of their birth.
    When at last dawn crept over the eastern horizon with fingers of wispy grey fog curling around trees and barbed-wire fences, it became clear to the emerging soldiers that this enemy would not be beaten without a hefty loss of Allied life.
    ‘Get this mess cleared, we move out at six o’clock!’ snapped a weary corporal.
    The ‘mess’ had, until the night before, been young boys, some no more than sixteen, who had never thought beforehand that another army would feast upon their flesh; marauding rodents. Fatally injured soldiers lay in pools of blood; they too were hastily rolled aside to add extra rations to the rat’s larder. War was terrible, and Bruar for once agreed with Megan’s parting words—it was no place for those of tinker breed.
    The early sun failed to penetrate the battle fog, which was just as well; it would only add more horrors to the scene. By six o’clock they were on the move.
    ‘Where’re we going?’ Bruar asked his mate, Sandy.
    ‘I don’t know, but wait on me, I’ve my lassies to collect.’
    He was the signaller for his troop; the pigeon man. Soon both lads were making time pulling a cart of about thirty birds; these were essential in carrying messages from one part of the front to another.
    For the next few months, adrift in a sea of kakhi-clad men, they stayed together, darting from one nightmare scene to another, each watching the other’s back. In lighter moments they’d pretend that the Jerries were Vikings; they would scream out, ‘May the bog choke the life from you, Jerry!’ This brought laughter from listening comrades, and the odd ‘Bloody stupid Scots’ from Taylor, their Sergeant Major. These humorous moments made the madness bearable. Wherever they took bayonets in their hands, it didn’t matter; there were different places but the same scenario, they had to survive, nothing else. Survival was what held the British Army together, a deep bond of comradeship.
    This comradeship between soldiers is reckoned by scholars to go all the way back through history, as far back as the Romans, for example. However when a spoke enters a spinning wheel, that bond can break. It is not only enemy fire that can disturb a tight-knit unit; it can come from within the soldiers’ own ranks. Captain Rokeby, a judge in civilian life, was a powerful spoke which almost ripped the life from Bruar and Sandy.
    This is what happened.
    After several days of hard slog, marching through the grape-growing slopes of the Loire Valley in France, their platoon of sixty was to the rear of a column of hundreds, heading from the death fields of Flanders.
    Old men, women and children stopped filling baskets with grapes and waved at the dusty hordes passing through their land. Bruar slowed to watch them, as Sandy groaned at the state of his empty stomach. He curled his sore knuckles round the oiled shafts of his pigeon cart and flexed painful muscles, cursing at another bump in the road. ‘This lot sit in their straw boxes, and them with plenty wing power could easy fly above us, but instead I’ve to push these bisoms for miles. Breaking my back, this is.’
    Bruar didn’t respond; a young waif-like female had caught his eye. She was running on bare feet towards the soldiers, crying, ‘Bullee, bullee, you give me beef?’
    She had the same colour of eyes as Megan; her hair, black and curly, bouncing around her narrow shoulders, held him spellbound.
    ‘Stewart, get fell in.’ Taylor, like a mother hen, was watching every man, counting the rifles sticking from the bulging green Bergen packs each man carried on his back. They held sleeping sacks, food if any, socks and a handful of field dressings in case of injuries. But there was only