Maclean by Allan Donaldson Page B

Sweet, and he must have had some kind of staff job somewhere to have enough pull to get permission to do what he was doing. It wasn’t a healthy time to be chasing around out there looking for bodies, but Bolton was only a captain and Macleod was only a lieutenant, and they were two majors and English besides.
    You wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds out there in daylight, so they sat around in Bolton’s dugout until it got dark, and it was arranged that Macleod and a couple of the boys who had buried the English lieutenant would go out for him. The English lieutenant who had come along with the father and who looked as if he had never seen a trench before either, wanted to go too, to demonstrate his bravery no doubt, but Bolton refused that at least, saying he didn’t know the ground and would be a danger to his men.
    So Macleod and the two boys sneaked out of the communication trench through one of the holes that had been blown in it. They took a little lantern covered over with a ground sheet that they could use to make sure they had the right body without showing any light the Germans might see. But the Germans saw something anyway, and ten minutes later there was a great rattle of machine gun fire.
    â€œThem fuckin’ pongos are gonna get us all killed,” somebody muttered.
    But there wasn’t any mortaring, just the machine gun fire, and after a while that let up, and just when it was beginning to look as if Macleod and the others had been caught by the machine guns, the word went along the trench that they were back.
    He had been there himself in the little crowd that had gathered just where the communication trench came into the support trench. The two boys came in dragging the body on the ground sheet followed by Macleod. The body had been out there for a week and half by then, and the face was getting rotten, but you could tell who it was all right if you knew him. The Englishmen had never seen any of this before, nor even imagined it—the dirt, the slime, the rubbish, the stink, let alone what a week-and-a-half-old body looked like that had been machine-gunned and left to rot in the mud.
    The three of them stood there looking down at it. The lieutenant, the stupid bastard, saluted it. The father just looked. Then he dropped down on his knees on the duckboards and started to cry. “My son, my son, my son.” As a staff officer, he had probably filled the boy full of bullshit about King and Country and the charge of the god-damned Light Brigade. Still you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. It went on and on. He just collapsed. After a while, the other major got him to his feet, and they got the body onto a stretcher, and a couple of the boys went off down the trench with it with the Englishmen shuffling along behind like drunk men. Crazy.
    He’d never had the faintest idea what that battle was about, and neither had anybody else he’d ever talked to. When histories of the war began to come out, he found one in the Legion and looked through it, but all he could find out about what was going on around Festubert at the time was a reference to some “brisk” skirmishes. Whatever all the killing had been about that day, it evidently hadn’t qualified as history. Maybe somebody had delivered orders to the wrong people, and it only got noticed after a couple of days. Maybe some general on one side or the other had decided that things had been too quiet and that soldiers would lose their edge if more of them weren’t getting killed.
    He found a bottle, their third bottle, once again in his hand. It had been going back and forth, and he had been drinking without noticing. Now there was left in it only one small swig. He tipped it, and rolled the warm, sweet wine around in his mouth before swallowing it.
    All that stuff was a long time ago, and long gone, and he had survived when there had been many times he never thought he would, when he saw himself lying