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of them, all raw bones and sunburn. He should help them.
    “Blame the sniper, eh. Not me.”
    Sully is silent.
    William gets up. His head spins, but he steps out of his bench and makes his way over to help with Dwyer, nudging the ratings aside, taking him under the arms. Dwyer is solid, weighty with death. His jerkin is soaked with sweat and blood. His head rolls back. Pale blue eyes stare up at the pale blue morning sky.
    He has dealt with the dead before. But never a friend.
    William lays him down on the boards. The boy has the ghost of theboiler room about him, the film of grey around the fingertips, around the nostrils and mouth. His head lolls over to one side. He lies where the soldiers had been sitting. It seems like days ago. Another world.
    That poor girl back in Cardiff. His poor mother.
    Some kind of shabby order is restored. Wounds are dressed, rum dished out. William returns to his place, sliding in so his back is to Sully again, and his face towards the shore. He takes up the oar. His hands hurt. He looks out at the beach, the rocky gully, the scrubby clifftop where the sniper must be hiding; all is now sharp and clear in the cool morning light. Then he spots movement. A clutch of men scrambling and jostling through the bushes. Then the knot untangles, and sunlight kicks off a bayonet, and one man is being held, and fighting against it, struggling, desperate: the sniper, they’ve got the sniper. There’s no sound, no scream to be heard, not from this distance. William doesn’t see the blade go in, but he does see the man jerk back, and then crumple forward as the steel sinks deep and twists up and through his guts. The man goes slack. His captors let him fall. They stand around him, looking down. Then bayonets flash again in the morning light as they dig them down into him.
    That is good, William thinks. It must be good. But he feels sicker now.
    The men lean down and lift the body. It hangs limp from their grip. They carry it to the edge of the cliff, and swing it out over the edge. For a moment it seems to sail out into the air, but then gravity catches it and it falls; the body glances on an outcrop, rolls and slides and falls again, then catches on a patch of scree and slithers down it, streaking blood on the golden stone, losing momentum, coming to a halt and lying still, at an angle, feet higher than the head, the waves lapping at the rocks a few feet below.
    Behind him, he hears Sully’s dry lips tack apart, but he doesn’t speak.
    William says nothing. After a moment, he nods.
    This is the end, he thinks: this is the end of everything. He closes his eyes and the colours swim and flare. How can there be anything after this?
    But the day goes on. It heaves itself forward in lurches.
    They crawl their way back to the trawler, returning with the wounded and the dead. The guns pound out from the battleships; the
Goliath
is hammering the Turks’ inland positions. Shells scream overhead, makingthe men in the cutter flinch and duck. Killed by the percussion, dead fish rise to the surface, form a slick upon the water. They make the work heavy. Flies buzz and settle on the fish, and on the dead and wounded men, and the spilled blood in the boat.
    When they reach the trawler, they hoist up Clelland, who’s barely clinging onto life, and Spooner pale with loss of blood, and then Dwyer slack and heavy and unmanageable, his body shunted onto the higher deck from their shoulders. The cutter rocks beneath them as they work. Then Sully elbows his way in, blood streaking all his left-hand side, and two able seamen lean down to grab his arms and help him up on board, and as he’s scrambling his way up William hears his voice:
    “Where’s the fucking rum?”
    The gaps in the crew are filled with what remains of another shattered crew. They are given rum, and coffee, and biscuits. They are given new orders. To head back for the shore, to retrieve the wounded, to begin the evacuation.
    The dead have been laid in a