I have to breathe now. I can’t run without breathing. Half-blinded by my mask I trip and fall, crashing my head against the trench wall, knocking myself half-senseless. My gas mask has come off. I pull it down, but I have breathed in and know already it’s too late. My eyes are stinging. My lungs are burning. I am coughing, retching, choking. I don’t care where I’m running so long as it is away from the gas. At last I’m in the reserve trench and it is clear of gas. I’m out of it. I wrench off my mask, gasping for good air. Then I am on my hands and knees, vomiting violently. When at last the worst is over I look up through blurred and weeping eyes. A Hun in a gas mask is standing over me, his rifle aimed at my head. I have no rifle. It is the end. I brace myself, but he does not fire. He lowers his rifle slowly. “Go boy,” he says, waving me away with his rifle. “Go. Tommy, go.”
So by the whim of some kind and unknown Fritz I survived and escaped. Later, back at our field hospital I heard that we had counterattacked, and had driven the Germans back and retaken our frontline trenches but, from what I could see all around me, it was at a terrible cost. I lined up with the rest of the walking wounded to see the doctor. He washed out my eyes, examined them, and listened to my chest. Despite all my coughing he pronounced me fit. “You’re lucky. You can only have got a whiff of it,” he said.
As I walked away I passed the others, those that had not been as lucky. They were lying stretched out in the sun, many of them faces I knew, and would never see again; friends I had lived with, joked with, played cards with, fought with. I looked for Pete amongst them. He was not there. But Nipper Martin was, the last body I came to. He lay so still. There was a green grasshopper on his trousers. When I got back to rest camp that evening I found Pete alone in the tent. He looked up at me, wide-eyed, as if he had seen a ghost. When I told him about Nipper Martin he was as near to tears as I’d ever seen him. We exchanged our escape stories over a mug of hot sweet tea.
When the gas attack came, Pete had run like me, like most of us, but with some of the others he had then regrouped in the reserve trench, had been part of the counterattack. “We’re still here, Tommo, we’re alive” he said. “And that’s all that matters I suppose. Unfortunately, so is Horrible-bloody-Hanley. But at least I’ve got some good news for you.” He waved a couple of letters at me. “You’ve got two of them, you lucky devil. No one back home writes to me. Hardly surprising I suppose, because they can’t write, can they? Well, my sister can, but we don’t speak, not any more. Tell you what, Tommo, you can read yours out to me and then I can pretend they’re written to me as well, can’t I? Go on. Tommo. I’m listening.” He lay back, put his hands under his head and closed his eyes. He didn’t leave me much choice.
I have them with me now, my very last letters from home. I tried to keep all the others, but some got lost and others were so often soaked through that they became unreadable and I threw them away. But these I’ve looked after with the greatest of care because everyone I love is in them. I keep them in waxed paper in my pocket, close to my heart. I’ve read them over and over again, and each time I can hear their voices in the words, see their faces in the writing. I’ll read them aloud again now, just as I read them to Pete that first time in the tent. I’ll read Mother’s letter first because I read it first then.
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