My Brother's Keeper by Tony Bradman

Chapter One

A Great Adventure
    Alfie Barnes peered into the darkness shrouding no-man’s land and wished he were taller. Like the rest of the men in his section he was in position on the trench’s fire-step, but he could only just get his head up to the level of the sandbagged parapet. As for using his rifle if they were attacked – well, that would be almost impossible.
    He could hear the usual rumbling of the big guns in the distance. Ours, not theirs, he thought, having learned the difference over the last few weeks. There was a burst of machine-gun fire somewhere, a sound that made him think of thick cardboard being ripped. That wasn’t close either, but Alfie still gripped his rifle more tightly.
    â€˜Hey, Ernie!’ he said to the man on his left. ‘Can you see anything?’
    Ernie turned to look at him. Only a silvery sliver of moon and a few faint stars shone in the night sky, so Ernie’s face was in shadow beneath his canvas-covered helmet. Their breath formed small clouds of white mist in the cold air.
    â€˜Pipe down, Alfie!’ Ernie hissed. ‘Do you want to get us killed?’
    â€˜Keep your hair on, Ernie,’ muttered Cyril, the next man along. ‘Old Fritz ain’t interested, mate. He’s still tucked up nice and warm in his dugout.’
    â€˜Oh yeah?’ said George, the man beyond Cyril. ‘You never know with Fritz. A whole division of Prussian Guards might be creeping up on us right now.’
    Alfie turned back to examine no-man’s land, excitement suddenly coursing through him. Maybe this was it, the moment when he would actually do some fighting – after all, that was what he’d joined up for, wasn’t it? Half an hour before dawn every day the two hundred and fifty men of the company had a ‘stand-to’ along the three hundred yards of trench they occupied, then again at dusk, the most likely times for an assault. But there had been no attackssince Alfie had arrived in the line, and his excitement seeped away as he realised nothing was going to happen this morning, either. The sky was slowly growing lighter in the east, a pale sun casting its feeble glow on the shell craters and tangles of rusting barbed wire that separated the British and German trenches. There were no living men in no-man’s land, only the scattered, rotting corpses of the dead.
    â€˜You’re an evil swine, George,’ said Cyril. ‘Always teasing the lad.’
    â€˜You don’t care, do you, Alfie?’ said George. ‘You like it, really.’
    George looked round Cyril and Ernie to wink at Alfie, and the boy grinned. It was true, he didn’t mind. Most men felt it was their duty to tease young lads – such was the natural order of things. Alfie had suffered worse back in England, or Blighty as his new mates had taught him to call it. His dad was a porter in Covent Garden market and had got him a job there when Alfie had left school at the age of twelve. The other porters had teased him relentlessly, but it had all been in fun.
    There was more light now, the sky turning a bruised grey, and word came along the line to stand down. Alfie slung his rifle over his back and jumpedoff the fire-step, avoiding the deep puddle of mud filling the trench bottom at that point. He followed his mates to the dugout they shared, a shallow cave scooped in the side of the trench and half screened off with an old bit of sacking. Inside were four empty ammunition boxes they used as seats and some planks they took it in turns to sleep on.
    â€˜Do your stuff, Alfie,’ said George, lighting a fag. ‘I’m dying for a brew.’
    Ernie lit one of his roll-ups and Cyril puffed at his pipe. They’d all been on at Alfie to smoke since he’d arrived, and he’d tried it once, but didn’t like the way it had made him cough and feel dizzy. He filled the kettle with water from a five-gallon petrol can and set it on the blue