‘Your machine? It has returned this Lincoln to his correct time?’ She hunched to scramble inside and joined Devereau, looking out through the firing slit at the British officer and his white flag. She glanced to her left at the British officer, thirty, forty feet along the trench, then quickly scooted across the gap between her archway and the low duck-down entrance to the fort. The faint glow of light coming from the row of computer monitors spilled across the concrete floor, littered with the wounded and dying. He was about to turn round and repeat that for the British officer’s benefit, but caught sight of the silhouette of Maddy, crouching in the entrance to the archway. ‘Tell him we’re not in the mood to take prisoners.’ĭevereau grinned.
One side of his grey tunic was black with blood. A shot had winged him as he’d tried to provide some covering fire for Becks. He was slumped on the dirt floor between two other wounded men, clutching his side. Shall we call it a day, gentlemen?’ĭevereau turned to Wainwright. McManus nodded, planted the bayonet in the dirt beside him. ‘We can hear you well enough from there!’ ‘Stop right where you are!’ a voice replied. ‘You chaps in the bunker, can you see it?’ ‘I’m approaching under a white flag!’ he called out. He wanted to crouch down and get a closer look at her. Then fighting with her bare hands until, finally, she too had gone down. Firing until the thing had eventually overheated and jammed. Handling an Armitage & Burton Gatling gun on her own. The young woman had held the entire regiment at bay for the best part of five minutes. Through his field glasses he had seen her earlier. He stopped for a moment to study the body in the middle. He stepped past a thick cluster of bodies, many of them British. Instead they chose this open ground? It made no sense. Fighting passage by passage, room by room, his men would have taken a heavy toll reclaiming the ruins from them.
Why here? Why a last stand right out here in this godforsaken wasteland? It would have made far more sense setting up a defensive position in among the ruins of the factory buildings on the far side.
It stood in the looming shadow of an enormous bridge support, alongside something else, another hump, like an eskimo’s igloo but made of tumble-down bricks instead of blocks of ice.
The bunker was little more than a mound of piled dirt and sandbags over a framework of wooden beams, something clearly erected in haste by these men. In his other hand he carried a lantern to be sure that the men huddled inside the bunker at the end of this long, curved trench could clearly see his approach. He held the white flag above him, a handkerchief tied to the tip of a bayonet. These chaps, even mutineers, deserved better. Captain McManus walked slowly down the curved trench, stepping as best he could on dirt and not on the limbs, torsos, faces of dead men.
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