When Shadows Fall Read Online Free PDF

see—”
    Adam swallowed hard and turned back to Blevins. “Please, Captain. Please. For the love of God, don’t do this.”
    Blevins winced, pain evident in his eyes. “It’s not my call, Lieutenant. The colonel has to make examples. You know that yourself. Otherwise the whole army would—”
    “ Ready ! ”
    Suddenly the twelve-strong firing squad stooped to their weapons, picked them up, armed the mechanisms, and turned.
    “No, Jesus,” Adam struggled against Blevins’s pinioning hands.
    “ Aim ! ”
    The squad lifted the rifles to their shoulders and picked their beads.
    “Captain, please,” Adam begged, his eyes fixed upon the posts at the far end. “Captain, don’t let them—”
    “ Fire ! ”
    Timmy’s body jolted under the sudden battery of bullets. The report echoed over the yard as his skull opened out in a fine spray behind his back. Silence followed, sudden and stark. Nobody moved. His white blindfold slipped and drifted towards the ground, delicate as a dust mote upon a spring zephyr.
    “ Turn about. Quick march ! ”
    The twelve men shouldered their rifles and marched out, past the unblinking, untouched expressions of the gathered officers. There was no trumpet, no drum, no solemn afterword. Three unmoving corpses hung limply from the posts across the yard.
    Adam shoved Blevins so hard that the latter tumbled headlong over a row of wine casks. Colonel Mallory looked again, and this time glared directly at him.
    “You! Lieutenant whomever-you-are. You will conduct yourself in my presence. You are a disgrace and a—”
    “I’m going.” Adam pulled the Lee-Enfield rifle from his shoulder and tossed it at Blevins. “Keep it, Captain. I have no more need of it. I don’t think I can ever fire that thing in your favour again.” With recrimination in his ears, he stormed out of the farmyard, found his horse, and rode back towards Villers-Bretonneux.
    Timmy Hannigan’s diary was still in his haversack. Timmy’s last mark upon the earth. And Adam remembered his promise.
    He couldn’t let that diary out of his sight again.

    Despite his remonstrations, Adam did indeed fire his rifle in the service of Captain Blevins once more.
    At the end of March, the German divisions pushed into Villers-Bretonneux and drove out the Allies with artillery, mustard gas, and tanks. Adam was ordered to join the counterattack and follow the Australian brigades who were instigating a pincer movement to surround the German positions. The battered village was already a slaughterhouse as the German machine-gun nests took their pound of flesh from the advancing troops. Adam’s platoon soon found themselves pinned behind a ruined church tower, all of them half-deafened by the relentless gunfire.
    “I see the gun posts ahead,” Adam yelled to the men around him. “Christ, they’re making short work of us. We’re going to have to take out those damn posts.”
    “How, sir?” Private Rourke shouted back. “We’re hemmed in here like bloody sheep.”
    Adam laid down his gear and retrieved two Mills bombs, cast-iron grenades grooved like miniature pineapples. Rourke shook his head.
    “Sir, they’ll shred you before you can ever get close.”
    “Move yourselves across the square,” Adam ordered him, “and smother the bastards with as much lead as you can manage. The distraction will give me time.”
    “But sir—”
    “Just do it, for Christ’s sake. All of you. Go!”
    He waved them on and took a moment to watch them sprint to the cover of the overturned carts and stone walls. Then he looked up ahead and saw the flash of machine-gun fire where the German positions were. He began his charge.
    Nothing came near him for several seconds as the German gunners projected all their efforts towards the men in cover. Adam ran on, pulling the pin from the first Mills bomb, arching his arm high and watching the grenade sail through the air. He pulled the second pin, moved closer to the next gun post, and threw again.
    It