The Ironclad Prophecy Read Online Free PDF Page B

made for the encampment at the double, while the noise behind them droned on incessantly until he wanted to stop his ears up.
    They reached one of the main paths radiating out from the stronghold, trampled down by the passing of many feet. Through the tube grass, the odd blood-red poppy bloom caught his eye, until they found themselves walking through a drift of poppies populating the charred cordon sanitaire.
    Atkins could see frantic activity now as, beyond the wire entanglements, platoons moved up communications trenches to man the fire trench. All along the front line, barrels of guns and tips of bayonets flashed cold in the light as the NCOs bellowed orders.
    Over to his left, he heard the impatient putter of the aeroplane’s motor as it ran up. At each new sight, each new sound, his optimism that they could hold the line grew.
    The clashing beat of the massed Khungarrii army’s approach began to echo off the valley sides, amplifying it and momentarily dousing his confidence.
    He had to stop and get his bearings.
    “Well, don’t just stand there, Corporal!” bellowed a familiar voice. Sergeant Hobson beckoned from the trench parapet beyond the wire weed entanglement. He pointed to a section some hundred yards along to his right.
    Wire weed had been trained over a small wooden tunnel to provide a temporary sally port under a ten-yard-deep stretch of entanglement. The wire weed writhed lethargically as Atkins ushered the urmen through. They had to crawl on their hands and knees through the tunnel. For every urman that stopped, getting clothes or skin caught on the spreading weeds, for every child that had to be bawled at and pushed through the barbed thorns, the Khungarrii came closer. At length, the last of the urmen were through and were being escorted back to the safety of the trenches and the encampment beyond. He glanced back over his shoulder to see the Khungarrii army stretching to fill the entire valley mouth.
    Without warning, the wooden tunnel collapsed, the wire weed falling to the ground on top of it. Some nervous private, whether through fear or incompetence, had yanked the shoring struts that held up the tunnel. Their way back to the trenches was blocked.
    1 Section were stranded in No Man’s Land, between their own front line and the approaching Khungarrii army.
     
     
    B ACK BEHIND THE lines, in one of the tented Casualty Clearing Stations, Nurse Edith Bell and Nellie Abbott, the FANY, prepared for the first waves of wounded to come in, setting out trays of clean field dressings commandeered from soldier’s kits and bandages made from boiling old ones and cutting up the flannel shirts of the deceased.
    “So how are you and Alfie the tanker getting on?” asked Edith casually.
    Nellie scowled at the insinuation. “That’s Mister Perkins to you. We’re good pals we are, and don’t you go getting other ideas,” she protested, before confiding, “but he is nice, isn’t he? And I do worry about him so. The Ivanhoe was due back yesterday. It only has a range of twenty-three miles on full tanks of petrol, and –”
    “Goodness, Nellie, if only you could hear yourself. You sound like a man. It isn’t feminine to talk about things like that. No one will thank you for it.”
    “Perkins will.”
    “But you can do better than that, Nellie.”
    “What if I don’t want to?”
    “Well, on your head be it.”
    “I ain’t too worried, though. He’s in the safest place, isn’t he? Nothing can get to him in there. That’s why Everson sends ’em out, ain’t it?”
    An orderly thrust his head into the tent.
    “Nurse Bell, it’s the shell-shock patients. They’ve got the wind up, well, more than usual. I can’t do nuffin’ with them. They’ll respond to you.”
    Edith glanced at Nellie. They both looked over at Captain Lippett, the Medical Officer, who was deep in conversation with Sister Fenton.
    “You’d better watch it, Edi. You know how Lippy feels about the poor souls.”
    Edith shot