The Sharp End

The Sharp End - Part One

“Now you stand watch until the Lieutenant tells you otherwise,” Moore growled at the three of them. Bennett, Perkins, and O’Leary, jumped to do as ordered.

They’d be a good squad,

Burke thought, if they weren’t so damned green.

He turned to his sergeant and, in low voice the other men couldn’t hear, said, “I’m thinking we make a break for it now, before we get hemmed in even worse. Thoughts?”

The other man shrugged. “Don’t see that we have much choice, to be honest. We can’t stay here now.”

Moore was right; they couldn’t. Eventually the missing patrol would be noticed and men would be sent out to find what had happened to them. The cottage Burke and his men were holed up in would be searched, the bodies found, and then all hell would break loose. Burke’s squad had to be long gone before then.

“Good! We’re in agreement. Now we just need to figure out how where going to pull this off. Here’s what I’m thinking…” Burke said as he pulled out the map on which he’d scribbled some notes earlier and walked through his plan with him.

“We’re here,” he said, pointing to ridgeline marked on the map with only a number, 263, as identification. The position looked down upon the German position to the east, which was why it had been selected as their observation post in the first place. South of the ridge, on the other side of a small copse of woods, was the remains of Vapour Farm, where the 5th Canadian had been positioned earlier. Unfortunately the farm was now in the hands of a German machine–gun crew who were using it to cover the approach to the newly–relocated Allied lines far to the southeast. Between the two was a wide stretch of ground that looked like Hell itself. Artillery fire from both sides had ripped and torn at the earth until the once–gentle farmland looked as if a family of enraged giants had excavated it with their bare hands. Scattered throughout were the abandoned trenches and fortifications that the Allied army had occupied less than a day before, many of which were no longer recognizable as such due to the destruction wrought upon them.

Then, of course, there were the dead.

They lay where they had fallen; tangled in the wire, half–buried in the trenches, scattered to the four winds by the destructive power of high explosives.

Oddly enough, Burke was worried more about the dead than he was about the living.

He’d heard the rumors, just like every other man in the unit. Corpse gas, they were calling it. Worse than chlorine, worse even than mustard, the strange grey–green gas supposedly had no impact on the living but rather resurrected the bodies of the dead, turning them into flesh–hungry zombies with insatiable appetites.

At first Burke dismissed the reports as nonsense. He was an educated man; he knew how the horrors of war could affect even the strongest of minds, how they could make men see things that weren’t really there. But then the trickle of reports became a steady flow and Burke began to wonder. When men from battlefields many miles apart began to report the same strange sightings, it was enough to make even an educated man take notice.

He was just a lowly lieutenant. He didn’t have access to the kinds of information the upper brass had, but he knew he wasn’t the only one beginning to wonder if the higher–ups were keeping something from them. Morale was at an all–time low, one of the reasons Haig had pushed for the offensive in the first place. He wanted to “give the boys something to cheer about,” or so the explanation went. Burke could just imagine how the men would react if the brass were to officially announce that along with the overwhelming numbers of German troops, the Allies would also soon be facing battalions of the walking dead.