The Sharp End

The Sharp End - Part One

Burke didn’t care as long as his message got through.

He reached beneath his shirt and pulled out the key he was wearing on a thin leather cord around his neck. He used one hand to keep the pigeon’s wings carefully clamped against its metal body and used the other to insert the key into a hole at the base of its “neck.” He wound it carefully fifty times, counting the turns aloud so wouldn’t lose track. Over–winding could cause the gears to jam up, an irritating flaw that Burke wished someone would fix.

When he was finished he had the other man slip the message into the slot that had been designed to hold it on the bird’s belly. Preparations complete, they moved into one of the bedrooms on the west side of the house, wanting the bulk of the structure between them and the enemy when they released the bird so it would have the best chance possible of reaching its destination. Burke could feel the tension in the wings as they strained against his hands, making it seem as if the bird itself recognized their need and longed to take flight on their behalf.

Moore stepped to the window and opened it, then pushed open the shutters. He took a quick look outside, then pulled his head back in and nodded to Burke. “It’s clear,” he said.

Burke moved to the window and gently lofted the bird into the air outside. The minute his hands released the wings they sprang outward and began flapping at a speed too quick for the eye to follow. It hung in the air just outside the window for a moment, looking like nothing so much as an oversized mechanical hummingbird as it oriented itself, and then it took off across the fields with a gentle buzz.

He watched it go for a moment and then put it out of his mind. It would either get there in time to warn the others that they were coming or it wouldn’t.

*** ***

They crept through the trees, edging closer to the farmhouse with every step. It was late afternoon and the setting sun cast long shadows among the trees, helping to mask their approach. They were almost to the edge of the tree line at the back of the property when the stillness of the forest was suddenly broken by the roar of a heavy machine gun.

Burke hit the dirt, instinctively trying to make as small a target of himself as possible. He recognized the sound of the gun as a Maxim 08, a favorite support weapon of the German infantry, and knew what those 7.92mm rounds could do to a man. A glance to the left showed Perkins and O’Leary face down in the dirt, looking as if they were trying to burrow deeper into the earth as the roar of the gun continued, but to his right Private Bennett stood frozen, his mind seemingly overcome with fear. Burke opened his mouth to shout when he saw Sergeant Moore rise up from the ground and yank Bennett down beside him.

Burke breathed a sigh of relief and then quickly followed it with another when he realized that their fear was unnecessary; the gun wasn’t even shooting in their direction.

So what was it shooting at?

He signaled for the others to stay put and then belly–crawled forward the last twenty feet until he lay at the edge of the wood with the farmhouse off to his right across a short stretch of open ground. More importantly, his position gave him a clear view across the long expanse of No Man’s Land that they were going to have to cross if they hoped to reach safety and as he looked in that direction it didn’t take him long to figure out what had spurred the machine gun crew into action.

There was a wounded man down there, trying to crawl to safety.

The gunners were firing intermittently, seemingly playing with their target as their shots came close without hitting him, kicking up rows of dirt close enough to make him flinch.

Eventually they would get bored of their sport and finish him off. Burke hoped to turn the tables and finish them off before they had the chance.

Burke crawled back to the others and carefully outlined what he wanted them to do. When he was finished, he sent O’Leary around the left side, Bennett around the right, and held Perkins back in reserve. Their jobs were to keep any of the machine gun crew from escaping out the side or front of the building in the event they managed to live through Burke’s attack. He waited until they were in position and then waved Charlie forward with him.