Bruar's Rest

that, the injured need help.’
    Sandy touched Taylor’s arm and said, ‘Sarge, that’s the first time I heard you say a sentence without that word.’
    ‘What word?’
    ‘Bloody.’
    ‘Just saying it as I see it, man, as I bloody see it.’
    The sun had dropped below a pink horizon as they pulled the last man free of the water line. Capes lay draped over the dead as the injured were stretchered off to waiting ambulances. Seagulls screeched and squawked high above them, diving at the severed limbs and broken bodies still scattered throughout the tide-line. One swooped down, Sandy threw some sand at it, then saw something moving in the water. ‘Sergeant, there’s a man, we missed one.’ Both pulled the body free of the water, turning him on his back to look for signs of life.
    ‘He’s alive!’ Taylor ripped at the soaked tunic and rubbed the exposed chest. The man groaned and they both shouted for a medic. Sandy moved closer to get a better look. Night was closing fast, but that face, that body, had a familiar look—it was Bruar, barely alive! ‘Thank God, he’s made it, Sarge! My mate’s all right.’
    ‘No man, he’s not,’ said a naval doctor, taking control. ‘He’s got a beating heart, but look at his face!’
    Taylor recognised the muddy face, with motionless eyes staring from porcelain sockets, as belonging to Bruar, but it was not the young Highlander both men knew.
    ‘Stretcher-bearers, shell-shock, over here, quick!’ The doctor then spoke quietly to Sandy. ‘The war for this lad is well and truly over.’ He refused to accept what he was told, and said, ‘He’s built like an ox, this is nothing to him. He’s tinker-bred, lives in the wilds.’
    Two men, naked to the waist and covered in dried blood, rolled Bruar onto the stretcher and rushed him off to wait for an ambulance.
    ‘Doctor, save his life, I’ve never known such a decent bloke,’ Sandy pleaded.
    ‘Listen, I can sew wounds and amputate limbs, but I can’t treat what that soldier suffers from. It’s enough to say that those corpses spread along the shore are the lucky ones. That sad bastard still breathes, but for the rest of his life won’t know a thing about it. Come now man, surely you’ve seen all this before!’
    Sandy clenched his fists, looked at his mate lying among the chaos of the scene and promised, ‘As God’s my witness I’ll get through this and come back to find you at the end of it. If I don’t, I’ll search for Megan and tell her how much of a hero you were.’
    From the back of a trundling lorry he watched the shoreline fade from view. Sore, stiff and lonely, he gave little thought to tomorrow, it was just another day, another battle. But for the half-bred tinker who had shared his war, the battle had finished.

E IGHT

     
    S pring came, and with it every day saw Megan climb up on the high hills, trying vainly to blot the lack of Bruar from her mind. Doctor Mackenzie failed to bring any letters. Instead there was only the news of yet more and more battles, with the inevitable destruction left in their wake.
    Her campsite companions continued to spend the nights with loose women—females, she had decided, who could only be lonely and weak.
    ‘You won’t catch me giving myself to men,’ she sternly told her father-in-law one morning, slapping steaming hot porridge into a bowl held between shaking hands. ‘When your son comes home, and mark my words, he will any day now, he’ll find the same clean wife waiting just as he left her.’
    ‘Lassie, I am sick and tired of you going on about me and O’Connor with the plough wives. Now shut up and fetch me a bucket so I can wash.’
    ‘Fetch your own bucket, you filthy excuse for a man!’
    Big Rory stood up and shook his head. She almost felt sorry for him, as he said, ‘I never thought the day would arrive when a good-daughter spoke in those tones to her man’s father.’
    ‘Well, good-father, perhaps if you hadn’t been such a fornicator and drunkard...’
    He lifted a hand to strike. ‘I’m fond of a skirt, aye, but I’m no drunk!’
    ‘No drunk? Why the hell are your hands shaking so violently? Look at them, you’re spilling the porridge all over yourself like a half-dead old man.’
    ‘Megan, please take your impudent face up the hillside and chant to the bloody eagle. I’m sure he must have some other omen to share with you.’
    Megan glared daggers at him through pools of tears.
    He knew how important the ancient ways were