The rain fell with unrelenting vigour, quickly drenching Tacit and Isabella, turning the trench floor to a clinging bog. There was a stink about the place, of defecation and decay, a putrescence which was as thick as it was fetid. It embraced you like a rag, filling every pore, every orifice, clinging like a parasitic layer, a thing neither gas nor liquid, a spectre of death become real.
If there had ever been any drainage in the trenches, it had long become blocked with the detritus of war. Puddles had become pools which, after heavy rainfall, became running rivers. The pair of them tried to walk either side of the river but always found themselves slipping back into the filthy brown water. Eventually it was easier to splash along it rather than try to avoid it and risk twisting an ankle in the mud. Any shelter provided by occasional small sections of corrugated tin roofs directed the falling rain into the trench.
It was a tortuous journey through that labyrinth of twisting and turning tunnels full of injured, often quiet, soldiers, filthy caked specimens, faces scorched by gunpowder and smoke. On several occasions, soldiers, numbed and senseless with shock, stumbled forward through the rain, blindly grasping out to the Inquisitor and Sister, pleading and praying for salvation, only to be shouted at by their Sergeants to “Get your filthy hands off them and get back into place. You’re beyond salvation, you infested little worm!”
With every step there were objects to avoid, splintered pieces of wood, discharged and ripped clothing, cartridge cases, bits of equipment, a semi-buried limb, as well as deep hidden holes and the river growing ever deeper in the middle of the trench. Every now and then, a large rat would scurry across the trench in front of them, diving into a hole alongside the entrance to a dugout or an officer’s bunker, two wretched creatures living together, side by side.
“You okay?” Tacit asked Isabella, as they eventually emerged from the far side of the complex of trenches, drenched to the skin and shivering. Ahead of them lay the ruined outline of Fampoux.
She nodded, her teeth chattering, and drew her sodden clothes tight around her.
“No place for a woman,” Tacit grunted, dispiritingly.
Isabella shivered and gulped at the cleaner air outside the trench. One wouldn’t call the air fresh, for there was the lingering malevolence of rot and feculence about it, but to breathe away from those corridors of death was as cleansing as having the rain wash the dirt and grime from their clothing.
“Come on,” muttered Tacit darkly, “we need to press on.”
They walked, side by side, up the rutted and blasted track, to the first rubbled house on the outskirts of the village. Green foliage climbed up a spoiled wall of the house, its feelers finding plenty of purchase within the crumbled exterior of the building. Isabella stopped and looked down the length of a street where entire buildings had been blasted to piles of stones.
Suddenly there came the sound of light feet running quickly in the rain soaked ruins of the streets. They moved with a lightness and an urgency, incongruous with the weight of war. The boy with the broad white smile charged around the corner. Immediately, Tacit drew back, his body low and coiled, his mind instantly suspicious, fearing an attack. Isabella struck him playfully on the shoulder and strode in front of him.
“Keep your gun away, Tacit!” she warned jokingly, turning to greet the boy.
“Hello young man!” she called in perfect French.
“Hello pretty Sister!” the boy called back. “Have you come to bless the troops?”
“Yes,” replied Isabella. “That, and other things.”
“So, you’ve come to get rid of the wolves as well, then?”
The question struck her dumb, like a hard glancing blow. “The wolves?” asked Isabella recovering, sensing Tacit’s fierce eyes on the boy. “Yes. We have,” she said.
The boy smiled more broadly than ever. He stood up straight, as if to attention. “Then follow me!” he called. “I will show you!” He dashed off up the street.
“Wait!” Isabella called after him, trundling into a short – and within three steps – aborted run. The boy took no notice and flew from view. The Sister stopped and called again, peering back to Tacit with a shrug. “Youthful enthusiasm,” she said.
Tacit grunted and clutched the handle of his case tight so that his knuckles turned white. He was too wet and cold to chase children. They would have to come back and find him. If there were wolves here, they would make their presence known eventually, in their own way. Wolves weren’t subtle in how they revealed themselves.
He walked with slow methodical steps up the road, realising he’d not packed nearly enough bottles of brandy to sustain him, particularly in the cold. The realisation made him scowl and he muttered irritably under his breath.