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tideline across the beach.
    From inland come the whizz and thump of artillery, and the whistle of shrapnel. The barrage is constant and huge and it makes the air shudder.
    The boat approaches the jetty: a snaking raft of lashed-together pontoons, thick with wounded soldiers. They look like one great long straggling creature: a green-grey, bloodied, sullen thing, unsteady on its feet, hunched under the noise of battle. As William’s cutter comes alongside and moors up, the creature gathers itself together, presses forward. Then men spill out from its flank, like maggots bursting from a skin.
    Bloodied bandages, a sling, a man limping along with his arm around a fellow’s neck, another carried on a stretcher. They step down into the boat, settle in whatever space they find. A sergeant with half his head covered in field dressings picks his way between the bodies and takes his seat near the prow. William finds himself searching faces, wondering if he landed any of these men earlier. But all he has to go on are the pale ovals in the morning dark, the sound of their breathing. There’s no way of knowing.
    Stretcher-bearers set a lad down just near him. The boy lies there, his blue eyes open, his head bandaged. The dressings are dark and wet with blood. There’s a pimple on his chin. It’s this, an angry Vesuvius of a pimple, which makes William’s chest tighten so that he can hardlybreathe. It could be the lad from Spiteri’s, who fancied that whore, that woman, and the memory is vague with drink and sharp in moments and makes him flinch inwardly. That postcard, written, addressed, stamped, unsent. It’s in his sea-chest, slipped into the gap between his folded clothes and its battered tin flank. There was the garden, he remembers, and before that, the cathedral. His thoughts loop back to the picture: the soldiers, the prisoners, the executioner, the blood in the dust, the woman standing, waiting, to carry the severed head away.
    The boy’s head rolls a little as the boat sways. William wants to say something, to offer some comfort, but can’t think of anything.
    They pull away, low and heavy in the water. The boy blinks every so often; he looks puzzled. He doesn’t make a sound. He doesn’t look like he’s in much pain: he just frowns up at the bright Mediterranean sky, as if he can’t quite remember something. William’s mouth is dry, and he’s short of breath.
    “Where you from?” William asks, but either the boy doesn’t hear him, or he can’t. William remembers, from the action at Ostend, that the shelling can blow out their eardrums. All they can hear is a muffled roar, the sound of their own blood.
    The boat heaves out into the clear water, heading back towards the grey shapes of the battleships. The sounds of gunfire fade over the distance. Close to, there’s the creak of the oars, the grunt of tired rowing, and the moans and whimpers and the hard breathing of the wounded.
    Then somebody laughs.
    William blinks up, looks round. Just catches other men looking round too, or men so deep in their own pain that they can’t register anything else. Then William spots him. A private, sitting near the stern, facing towards William. He’s shaking with laughter. His cap is hanging low over his eyes, his mouth is open, and his face in a spasm; the laughter is shaking him like a fever. His arm is wadded with field dressings, but he’s really laughing. William can’t make sense of it. Has he completely lost his marbles? And then he realises: it’s a Blighty wound. The lad knows he’s taken a lucky shot—been hit badly enough, but not too badly—and that he’ll be heading back. Shipped off to Malta, to the hospital like a temple on the golden cliffs. To be given tea and bread and milk and oranges. To take the air on the clifftops, to sit in the cool whitewashed rooms, the sunlight through tall windows.
    One of the army officers snaps a command—
Act the white man, son
—and the laughter stops, but the quiet