"Wait until we try to get back to the nest!" the young man shouted to the older man. The machine gun nest was only a few hundred yards away over the rise of the trench, but it may as well have been a thousand miles for all they could do to get to it. Though not visible at the moment, it loomed large in the minds of the struggling ambulance workers who were trying to reach the wounded men inside.
"They're still there!" Brad yelled to Morley, over the din of mortar shells and bombs exploding. One black bomb, left over from the Napoleonic wars, landed dangerously close to the pair carrying their stretcher. It spun like a firework, sending sparks in a swirl that seemed in that moment to Morley like the centre of some great galaxy that was drawing him in. Brad shook him out of a temporary trance.
"We've got to move on!"
Brad picked up his end of the stretcher and started over the rise, not even heeding if Morley followed after. The old man, senses now regained, seized the stretcher's back handles and the two of them breached the little hillock which separated them from the stricken machine gun nest.
Bullets raked the ground in front of Brad's feet, stopping him suddenly and nearly causing Morley to pile up behind. However it was only a stray burst, and besides, as Brad realised, the mortar shells had so far minimalized their odds of survival that this new factor was hardly worth noticing. Had the frightened Morley been privy to this bout of reasoning he would not have been so quick to congratulate Brad on his insight. Still, the two of them scampered over the brief stretch of cratered ground, and surprisingly for both, finally made it into the machine gun nest.
(c) Jack Ruttan, 1998