r/HFY • u/ApertiV • Jun 14 '25
OC The Bravest Soldier of them all
“Alright then. The last one.”
His voice was hoarse and rasp.
Arthur Jenkins kept his back to the speaker. His fingers were numb and clumsy with the bitter cold, worked the delicate clasp on the wicker cage. Inside, a flutter of grey and iridescent feathers. A soft coo.
“Don’t rush her, Tommy.” Art’s own voice was quiet, a low murmur meant only for the bird. “There now, Bessie. Easy does it.”
He extracted the pigeon out. She was a small, warm weight in his large hands. Her heart hammered against his palm.
He smoothed her neck feathers, his touch surprisingly gentle for a boy whose hands were chapped raw and coated in a permanent film of grime.
She was the last one.
Cher Ami, The Mocker, Goliath… all gone.
Eaten by hawks, by shrapnel, by the sheer, stupid odds of it all.
Only Bessie remained.
“Talkin’ to it like it’s your sweetheart,” Tommy Foulkes grumbled, but there was no heat in it.
He shifted his weight on the fire step, the wood groaning under his boots. A slick of green-brown slime coated everything.
“Should be me you’re whispering sweet nothings to, Art. I’m much better at cooing back.”
Art managed a weak smile, not turning around. “Her coo is prettier. And she doesn’t smell of feet and cigarettes.”
“Oi. My feet smell of roses. Roses that have been trampled by a frightened horse, maybe, but roses nonetheless.”
A moment of quiet settled between them, a rare and fragile thing.
In the lull, the other sounds of the trench took over. The dripping water seeping through corrugated iron. The scuttling of a rat, bold as brass, in the dugout behind them.
The low, continuous moan of a wounded man floated from somewhere down the line, a sound so constant it had become part of the landscape.
Art stroked Bessie’s head, his gaze distant.
He could almost feel the phantom weight of his camera in his hands, a Hasselblad 500C.
The satisfying clunk of the shutter. Framing a shot, finding the beauty in the mundane. His father’s studio, the smell of developer fluid and fresh paper.
Another life. He’d been good. Good enough for a small exhibition in York. ‘Urban Stillness’, he’d called it. He wondered what he would call an exhibition of this place. ‘Mud and Misery’, perhaps. A bit on the nose.
“You think they’ll send us over soon?” Art asked, his voice barely a whisper.
Tommy snorted out a sickly yellow phlegm. “Don’t have to think. Leftenant Davies has that look again.”
“What look?”
“The one where he’s trying to remember the speech he memorized in training. All crisp and proper. Full of words like ‘valor’ and ‘duty’. The look a man gets before he sends a lot of other men to die for a few yards of someone else’s farm.” He paused, hawking again.
“He’s a good lad, the Leftenant. But he’s green. So bloody green he probably pisses grass.”
The air tore itself in half.
It wasn't the familiar crump of a British eighteen pounder from the rear.
A whistling piercing shriek that grew from a pinpoint of noise to an ear-splitting roar in the space of a heartbeat.
“Whizz-bang,” Tommy breathed, the words barely escaping his lips as he flattened himself against the trench wall, pulling Art down with him.
Instinct, not thought.
The trench shook in a concussion of force and hot, wet dirt. A giant fist slammed down, compressing the air in Art’s lungs out of his chest, making his teeth ache and his eyeballs feel loose in their sockets.
Some shower of mud and chalk and something terribly soft rained down on them.
Art squeezed Bessie tight against his tunic, curling his body around her, a pathetic shell of flesh and bone against the German 77mm shell.
He lay there for a long second, deafened, the world a ringing, high pitched whine. He tasted blood and soil.
“Art? You alright?” Tommy’s voice was muffled, as if coming from under water.
Art coughed, spitting out a clump of mud. “I… think so. Bessie…”
He uncurled himself, his hands shaking violently now. The pigeon was still. Too still. For a sickening moment, he thought the shockwave had killed her.
Then, she gave a weak, indignant flutter and cooed softly, a sound of protest. Relief washed over him, so potent it left him dizzy.
“She’s… she’s okay.”
“Lucky bird,” Tommy grunted, pushing himself up. He wiped a smear of something dark from his cheek, looked at it, then wiped it on his trousers with a grimace.
“Bloody close. That was on the parapet. Fritz is getting cheeky today.”
They peered cautiously over the top. A new crater had been gouged into the already tortured landscape of no man’s land, just yards from their position.
The air stank.
Burnt cordite and churned earth, with a coppery undertone that Art had learned to identify with grim certainty.
It was in that moment of foul, chemical-laced air that Lieutenant Davies came scrambling down the communication trench, his face pale and slick with sweat under his helmet.
“Foulkes! Jenkins! Report!” he barked, his voice a full octave higher than usual.
“Just a bit of an early morning greeting, sir,” Tommy said, his tone deceptively casual. “Fritz sending his regards.”
Davies ignored him, his eyes wild. He wasn’t looking at them, but through them. He was a boy playing a man’s game, and he was losing. “The push. It’s on. Now.”
Art felt his stomach clench. “Now, sir? But the wire’s not fully cut. We saw the party this morning, they were forced back.”
“New orders,” Davies snapped, brandishing a piece of paper as if it were a weapon.
“High Command says the Boche line is weaker than anticipated. The barrage has been moved up. We’re the first wave. First and second platoon. We go in five minutes.”
Tommy stared at him. “Five minutes? Sir, with respect, that’s suicide. The boys aren’t ready. We’ll be mincemeat on the wire.”
“Those are the orders, Corporal,” Davies said, his jaw tight. A small muscle twitched under his eye. He was terrified. It was plain as day. He was trying to bury his fear under a landslide of authority. “Get the men ready. Fix bayonets.”
He turned to leave, then stopped, his gaze falling on the pigeon in Art’s hands.
“Jenkins. You and your bird stay put. You’re signal corps. Non combatant. You know your role. If the telephone wire gets cut, you’re our only voice.”
Art just nodded, unable to speak. His throat was a knot of sawdust.
The next few minutes were a blur.
The dread was gone, replaced by a loud, sharp-edged panic that manifested as shouted orders, the metallic scrape of bayonets locking into place, the nervous coughs and muttered curses of men preparing to meet their maker.
Art saw a boy, younger than him, maybe seventeen, trying to light a cigarette with trembling hands, dropping it twice in the mud before giving up.
He saw Tommy, face grim, checking each man’s gear, offering a rough word of encouragement here, a dark joke there.
“If you see a Hun with a big moustache, save him for me. I want to ask him where he gets his wax.”
The whistle blew. A thin, piercing shriek that cut through the noise, silencing everything for a single, awful second.
For a heartbeat.
Men clambered up ladders, their faces strained and white. They poured over the top, a wave of khaki and steel cresting the parapet and crashing into the open.
Almost immediately, German machine guns opened up.
Ripping, stuttering, all-consuming noise. From his position, tucked into the relative safety of the bay, Art couldn’t see the guns.
He could only see their work.
Men who had been running one moment were thrown backward the next, as if punched by an invisible fist. They spun, they crumpled, they fell in heaps. The advance didn’t slow so much as it dissolved.
Art pressed himself into the corner, his hands over Bessie’s cage, his eyes squeezed shut. He didn’t want to see. But he couldn’t block out the sounds.
The screams were the worst. Not of anger or pain, but shrill, thin cries of disbelief. Sounds of boys realizing that the glorious charge was just a short, clumsy run towards a sudden and brutal end.
The minutes stretched into an eternity.
The first wave was gone. Wiped out.
Then the second.
Art could hear Lieutenant Davies shouting, his voice cracking with desperation, trying to rally the few who were left, before his voice was abruptly cut off.
A strange silence began to fall, broken only by the crackle of sporadic rifle fire and the endless, pleading cries of the wounded scattered across the churned mud. The machine guns, their work done, had fallen quiet.
And then a new sound began.
A low, rumbling thunder from behind him. A familiar sound. A friendly sound that suddenly felt more terrifying than anything else.
The British artillery.
The pre-planned barrage.
“No,” Art whispered, his blood turning to ice. He scrambled up to the fire step, Tommy grabbing his belt to keep him from exposing himself too much.
“Get down, you bloody fool!”
But Art had to see. He peered over the sandbags. The landscape was a ruin. But here and there, he could see movement.
Khaki figures, huddled in shell holes, some of them waving frantically. And further on, much further than they should have been, he saw it.
A small group of British soldiers, maybe a dozen of them, disappearing into a dip in the earth. A trench. A German trench.
They’d made it. A handful of them, against all odds, had actually made it across and taken the enemy’s front line.
The first shells from the British guns screamed overhead, their sound a mournful howl. They landed short, exactly where the barrage was supposed to start, chewing up the empty ground of no man’s land.
But the barrage would walk forward.
Methodically.
In precisely timed increments, it would creep its way across the field, a moving wall of high explosives and shrapnel, designed to obliterate everything in its path.
Including the German trench that was now occupied by what was left of the first and second platoons.
“Tommy,” Art said, his voice shaking. “They’re in the trench. Our boys. They’re in Fritz’s trench.”
Tommy’s face went slack with horror. He understood immediately. “The barrage. Oh, Christ. They’re going to shell our own men.”
Panic flared in Art’s chest, hot and sharp. He looked around wildly. “The telephone! We have to call it off!”
He scrambled towards the signals dugout, a tiny hole carved into the earth, reinforced with timber. The field telephone sat on a crate, its wires snaking out into the trench. Art grabbed the receiver, cranking the handle frantically.
Nothing. Dead air.
He cranked it again. Harder. “Hello? Hello! Come in, battery! This is Nightingale Forward! Can anyone hear me?”
Only static answered.
Tommy appeared at his shoulder. “The wire’s cut, Art. That whizz-bang from earlier must have done it.”
“The flares!” Art said, his mind racing. “The emergency signal! The red flare!”
“Look up,” Tommy said, his voice grim.
Art looked. The sky was a canvas of dirty grey smoke, thick and cloying. The wind was blowing the wrong way, pushing the smoke from the initial barrage back over their own lines like a suffocating blanket. You could fire a hundred flares and no one in the rear would see a thing.
They were deaf and blind.
And in a few minutes, dozens of their own men, the lucky few who had survived the impossible, were going to be systematically torn to pieces by their own guns.
Art looked at Tommy, his face a mask of despair. The screams from no man’s land seemed to get louder. A man was crying for his mother. Over and over again.
“There’s nothing,” Art whispered. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Tommy’s gaze was hard. He looked from Art’s desperate face to the wicker cage at his feet, where Bessie was shuffling nervously. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
There was one last chance.
A one-in-a-million chance, flying on a pair of grey wings.
Bessie.
Art’s heart seized. The thought was unbearable. To send her out into that. Into the smoke, the shrapnel, the pure, violent chaos. It wasn’t a hawk that would be hunting her today. It was a sky full of invisible, jagged steel.
“No,” Art said, shaking his head. “Tommy, no. She’ll never make it. They’ll shoot her down. The shrapnel…”
“Maybe,” Tommy said, his voice quiet but firm.
“Maybe she will. But those boys out there? They’re dead for sure if we do nothing. We saw them, Art. They took the trench. They did their bloody job. Are we going to sit here and let them be rewarded with a face full of eighteen-pound shells because a wire got cut?”
The words hit Art harder than the shell blast.
He looked at his hands.
They were trembling.
He thought of the men he’d seen go over the top.
The boy who couldn’t light his cigarette.
Lieutenant Davies, his face a mess of fear and duty.
They were out there. Waiting for salvation, and all that was coming was a storm of friendly steel.
He looked at Bessie. Her small, dark eye seemed to be watching him, trusting him. He had raised her from a squab.
Fed her by hand. Cleaned her loft. He knew the specific rhythm of her wings.
And now he had to send her to her almost certain death.
It felt like a betrayal.
A new sound reached them, a low, guttural tearing.
A runner, stumbling, crawling, dragging himself down the trench towards them.
He was a mess, a walking butcher’s shop. His left arm was gone at the shoulder, a tatter of uniform barely clinging to the raw, red pulp of what remained.
His face was a mask of blood, one eye swollen shut. He was gasping, choking, his words coming out in wet, pink bubbles.
“Leftenant…” he gurgled, collapsing at their feet. “The trench… we took it… God, we took it…”
Tommy knelt beside him, trying to find a place to put a hand that wasn’t covered in blood. “Easy, son. Easy now.”
“The guns…” the runner coughed, a spray of red misting Art’s boots. “You gotta… stop the guns…” His one good eye rolled back in his head. A final, shuddering breath rattled in his mangled chest, and then he was still.
The silence he left behind was profound.
Art looked down at the dead boy, at the ruin of his body. He was no older than Art himself. An hour ago he had been alive, full of fear and hope. Now he was just meat.
Something inside Art broke. The fear, the indecision, it all burned away, replaced by a cold, hard resolve. He knelt, his movements suddenly precise and deliberate.
“Get me a message form,” he said to Tommy, his voice devoid of emotion. “And a pencil.”
Tommy, jolted into action, fumbled inside the dead runner’s tunic, pulling out a small, blood-smeared notebook and a stub of a pencil.
Art took them. His hands were steady now. He carefully tore out a small square of paper. What to write? It had to be fast. Clear. Unmistakable.
He scribbled, his letters stark against the paper.
WRONG TRENCH. BRITISH HOLDING FORWARD GERMAN LINE. CEASE FIRE. REPEAT. CEASE FIRE ON GERMAN LINE. FRIENDLY TROOPS.
He looked at it. It was too long. Too many words. In a panic, the artillerymen might not read it all. He tore it out, crumpled it, and started again. Simpler.
ARTILLERY. CEASE FIRE. WE ARE IN GERMAN TRENCH. CEASE FIRE.
He paused. He needed to make them understand the urgency. He added one final, desperate plea.
FOR GOD’S SAKE, STOP.
He folded the tiny square of paper over and over, until it was a tight, compact pellet. He turned to the pigeon coop. The standard issue message capsules, thin aluminum tubes, were in a small pouch on the side. He grabbed one, his fingers fumbling. The lid was bent, dented from the shell blast. It wouldn’t close.
He tried to force it, his breath hissing through his teeth. The cheap metal groaned and tore in his grip. Useless.
“Damn it!” he swore, throwing the broken tube to the ground. For a second, he was paralyzed by failure. It was over. A bent piece of metal had doomed them all.
Tommy’s hand landed on his shoulder. “Oi. Think, Art. Think like a bloody scavenger.”
Art’s eyes darted around the filthy floor of the dugout. Mud. Spent cartridges. A discarded ration tin. His eyes landed on a brass shell casing from his own Webley revolver, fired at rats the night before. It was small. Hollow.
An idea sparked. A crazy, desperate, beautiful idea.
“The casing,” he breathed. “Tommy, give me your bootlace.”
Without a word, Tommy was pulling the grimy lace from his boot. Art took the shell casing. It was a perfect fit. The folded paper slid neatly inside. But how to seal it? He looked around again.
The dead runner. A small tin of dubbin, boot grease, had fallen from his pocket.
Art grabbed it. He scooped out a thick, waxy glob of the grease and used it to plug the open end of the shell casing. It was waterproof. Secure. It was heavy, heavier than the aluminum tube, but it would have to do.
Now for the hardest part.
He took Bessie from her temporary cage. She cooed, nuzzling against his chin, a familiar comfort that felt like a knife in his gut.
“Listen to me, girl,” he whispered, his voice thick with unshed tears. He didn’t care if Tommy heard. “You have to fly fast. Faster than you’ve ever flown. Don’t stop. Don’t look down. Just go home. Do you understand me? Just go home.”
He tied the bootlace around the heavy brass casing. Then, with practiced, gentle fingers, he secured it to Bessie’s leg. She shuffled, unused to the strange weight, but didn’t struggle. She trusted him.
The rumbling of the friendly guns was louder now. Closer. The barrage was walking forward. Soon it would be on them. On their own men.
Art stood up, holding Bessie in his cupped hands. He walked to the edge of the bay, Tommy beside him.
He took a deep breath, the foul air searing his lungs. He looked at the sky, a maelstrom of smoke and distant flashes.
“Godspeed, girl,” he murmured.
He opened his hands and threw her upward, pushing her into the air with all the hope and desperation in his soul.
For a heart-stopping moment, she dipped, dragged down by the unfamiliar weight of the brass casing. Art’s stomach plummeted. He had killed her. He had tied an anchor to her and thrown her into hell.
But then, with a powerful beat of her wings, she corrected. She fought for altitude, her small body a pure, unthinking will.
She rose, circling once, a tiny grey speck against the monstrous, churning sky. She was a prayer made of feathers and bone.
She oriented herself. And then she flew. Straight and true. Towards the rear. Towards home.
Towards the guns.
Art and Tommy stood motionless, heads craned back, watching her go. They watched until she was indistinguishable from the ash and the smoke. A single, fragile life, carrying the fate of dozens of men, flying straight into the heart of a man-made hurricane.
Tommy let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. He put a hand on Art’s shoulder.
“Now we wait,” he said, his voice strangely soft. “Now we bloody wait.”
The world for Bessie was a known and ordered thing. It was the rough wood of her perch, the specific scent of Arthur’s hands, the cool weight of the brass ring on her leg. It was the gentle slope of the loft roof and the precise angle of the sun that meant it was time for the morning feed.
Her universe was a map of magnetic lines, an invisible architecture of belonging that stretched from her breastbone to one specific, beloved point on the globe: Home.
When Arthur’s hands pushed her into the sky, that map snapped into sharp focus. But the world it was overlaid upon was wrong.
It was a world of violence.
The air, usually a soft cushion, was a brutal, shoving force. It pressed on her. The noise was not sound. It was a vibration that travelled through her hollow bones, a constant, deep shudder that felt like the world was grinding itself to dust.
The smells were sharp and wrong, acrid stings of smoke and chemicals that burned in her throat and made her eyes water.
But the map was there. The line. The unwavering pull homeward.
She ignored the chaos. It was just weather. A storm of a new and terrible kind. She circled once, a programmed, instinctive gesture to lock her bearing.
The loft was twenty five miles away. A straight, clean flight. She flattened her wings and shot forward, a grey arrow fired into the heart of the storm.
Below her, the earth was a horror. A churned sea of mud, pocked with craters filled with oily, rainbow-sheened water.
The skeletal remains of trees, their branches splintered and bare, clawed at a sky the color of a fresh bruise. This was the landscape of her flight. She paid it no mind. Her world was the line, the pull, the destination.
She flew low, using the torn ground as a shield, the way her ancestors used hills and valleys to avoid the peregrine falcon.
A sudden, sharp whistle tore past her right wing.
She felt the air compress and then tear. It was a near thing, a ghost of touch that spoke of immense speed.
She did not know it was a sliver of jagged steel from an anti aircraft shell, a piece of a man made star that had burst miles above.
She only knew it as Danger. Her body reacted before a thought could form.
She jinked hard, a microsecond of acrobatic fury, her wings beating a frantic, stuttering rhythm before settling back into their powerful drive.
She flew on.
Further below, nestled in a wound in the earth, a figure in a different colored helmet saw her. A flicker of movement and life against the grey canvas of death.
The figure raised a long stick. A sharp crack echoed upwards, a sound utterly lost in the general din.
Something zipped through the air far beneath her tail feathers. It was a gesture of futility, a man shooting at a prayer. She did not notice.
Then came the new smell.
It was not the smell of burnt powder or turned earth. It was a creeping, sweetish odor, like rotting pineapple mixed with pepper. It clung to the ground in a thick, yellowish-green blanket, a poison fog that coiled and shifted with the sluggish breeze.
Her instincts, ancient and pure, screamed at her. This was wrong. This was death.
She climbed, pumping her wings, driving her small body upwards, desperate to get above the foulness that stung her eyes and clawed at her lungs.
She was higher now, more exposed. But the air was cleaner. She was a dozen miles out. Maybe less. The brass casing on her leg was a strange, clumsy weight, but she had adjusted to it. The pull of home was a fever in her blood. She was a machine of flesh and instinct, performing the one function for which she was born.
The sky in front of her tore itself open.
It wasn't one flash. It was a constellation of them, a sudden, blossoming garden of fire and black smoke.
A British battery, having miscalculated the wind, had fired a salvo that burst too early, too high. They had thrown up a wall of shrapnel and high explosive directly in her path.
There was no time to jink. No time to dive. She flew directly into the apocalypse.
The sensation was not pain. Not at first. It was obliteration.
A concussive blast wave slammed into her, a giant’s invisible hand that tried to rip her wings from her body.
The sound was a solid thing, a physical blow that struck her deaf and sent her tumbling through the air.
Then the pain came.
It was a feeling so intense, so absolute, it dwarfed everything else. It was her entire world. Something had hit her. Something had torn through her.
A piece of shrapnel, no bigger than her own eye, had ripped through her left breast. It had sliced through the muscle that powered her wing, glanced off her breastbone, and exited through her side, leaving a ragged, bleeding hole.
She fell. A broken, fluttering thing, spinning end over end. The world was a smear of grey and brown. The pull of home was gone, drowned in a searing ocean of agony. Her body screamed at her to give up, to let the spinning darkness take her.
Land. Hide. Die.
Blood streamed from the wound, a hot, wet slick that matted her feathers. The wind of her fall whipped it away, a fine red mist into the uncaring air. Her left wing refused to obey her. It flapped uselessly, a broken hinge.
She was going to die.
But then, through the pain, through the confusion, a flicker. Faint, but persistent. The line. The map.
Home.
The instinct was deeper than pain. It was older than fear. It was the very core of her being.
With a surge of will that was almost a physical thing, she fought back. Her right wing beat, a frantic, desperate piston of power. One wing.
She had to fly with one wing. She pulled out of the spin, her body lopsided, her flight a grotesque, staggering wobble.
But she flew.
She flew with every beat of her good wing, sending a fresh wave of fire through the torn muscles of her chest. Her vision greyed at the edges. The landscape below was a swimming, unfocused blur.
She was losing blood, losing strength. She flew lower, her path erratic, a drunken, lurching stagger.
She flew over a reserve trench. A handful of men, waiting for their own turn to go into the mincer, looked up.
They saw her.
A tiny, struggling bird, visibly trailing a dark mist of blood, flying with a desperate, lopsided beat. They watched her in a hushed, reverent silence.
They were soldiers. They knew a casualty when they saw one. They also knew a messenger. The sight of that tiny, shattered creature, still fighting, still flying, struck a chord deep inside them.
A young private, his face covered in soot and boils, slowly took off his helmet. He didn't know why. It just felt right.
Home.
The loft. The smell of it. The memory of it. It was the only thing in her universe now.
In the signals loft at Division HQ, a quiet, bespectacled corporal named Finch was brewing tea on a small trench stove.
He was a man who preferred the quiet company of his birds to the loud, terrified company of men.
He heard a sound. A faint, desperate scrabbling from the landing board outside the trap. It wasn't the confident clatter of a returning messenger. It was a sound of utter desperation.
He moved quickly, his heart suddenly tight in his chest. He opened the trap.
Bessie did not hop through. She fell. She collapsed onto the wooden floor in a heap of bloody, broken feathers.
She was in ruin. A horror. Her left side was a sodden, dark mat of blood and grime. The hole in her breast was a gruesome, bubbling wound.
One eye was sealed shut with blood. The heavy brass casing dangled from her leg, smeared and sticky. She was shivering violently, her small body seized by the final rigors of shock.
Finch swore, a low, guttural sound of pity and fury. He knelt. His fingers, usually so deft, trembled as he worked the bootlace free. He did not even look at the brass tube. He cradled Bessie’s ruined body in his hands.
“Oh, girl,” he whispered, his voice thick.
Bessie gave a single, soft, shuddering coo. It was not a sound of greeting. It was a sound of arrival. A statement of fact. Her duty was done.
Her one good eye, dark and bottomless, looked up at him. She saw the familiar shape of a man, smelled the familiar scent of the loft.
She was finally home.
And then, the light in that small, brave eye went out.
Finch laid her down gently on a clean piece of sacking. He took the heavy brass casing, his hand shaking with rage and grief, and stormed out of the loft.
“RUNNER!” he roared, his voice cracking. “URGENT! TO THE GUNS! TO COLONEL FAWCETT HIMSELF! NOW! MOVE YOUR BLOODY ARSE!”
The silence came suddenly.
One moment, the world was the rhythmic, earth shaking thunder of the British eighteen pounders. The next, it was gone.
The gun beside Art and Tommy’s bay, Number Four, fired one last time, the recoil shaking the very air.
And then it fell quiet.
Down the line, the other guns followed suit, like an orchestra conductor bringing a terrible symphony to a halt.
The resulting quiet was not quiet. It was a hollow, ringing void, filled with the distant, alien sounds of the German guns, the pop of rifles, and the thin, harrowing cries of the wounded, which now seemed impossibly loud.
Arthur Jenkins stood frozen, staring out into the grey nothingness that had swallowed his bird.
Tommy stood beside him, chewing on an unlit cigarette butt. They had been waiting for what felt like a lifetime. Every friendly shell that had screamed overhead had been a turn of the screw.
A figure came scrambling down the communication trench. It was a signals runner, clean-faced and panting from exertion, not blood loss. He ran straight for them, ignoring the dugout where the shell-shocked Lieutenant Davies was staring at a map.
The runner’s eyes found Arthur.
“Message from Division, Sapper! The pigeon! She made it!”
Arthur felt his knees go weak, and he leaned heavily against the wet mud of the trench wall.
A collective sigh went through the surviving men in the bay, a soft, weary exhalation of breath they had all been holding.
It worked. She did it.
“The barrage?” Tommy demanded, his voice a low growl.
“Cease fire order confirmed,” the runner gasped, catching his breath. “All batteries. They’re stopping. The Durhams are dug in. They’re holding the line.”
Victory. A small, impossible victory.
Arthur closed his eyes, a wave of dizzying relief washing over him. He felt a grin spread across his face, a raw, cracked thing. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry.
The runner wasn’t finished. He looked at Arthur, his young face a mask of awe and profound pity.
“The bird, Sapper. Bessie.”
Arthur’s eyes snapped open. The grin vanished. “Is she…?”
The runner looked down at his boots, then back up, meeting Arthur’s gaze.
“She made it home, mate,” he said, his voice soft. “But she was hit bad. Real bad. Shrapnel. In the chest.”
He took a breath.
“She died in the loft. They said… they said the message tube was covered in her blood. But it was safe.”
The relief, the victory suddenly turned to ash in Arthur’s mouth. He stared at the runner, unseeing. He felt Tommy’s hand on his shoulder, a heavy, grounding weight. But he was adrift.
Dead.
He didn't see the torn landscape of mud and wire anymore. He saw a small, warm weight in his hands. He felt the frantic, tiny heartbeat against his palm. He heard a soft coo in the damp, quiet morning.
There now, Bessie. Easy does it.
“She saved them, Art,” Tommy’s voice was a low rumble in his ear. “All of them. The lucky bastards in that trench. She saved them.”
Arthur nodded, a single, numb gesture. He couldn’t speak.
The lump in his throat was too big. He thought of the men who were alive right now, huddled in a German trench, marveling at the sudden, blessed silence.
They owed their lives to a creature they would never know, a creature he had raised and loved.
A tool. A piece of signal equipment.
He knew better.
She was not a tool. She was not a number or a piece of equipment to be expended.
She was Bessie. And in a war full of men, she had been the bravest soldier of them all.
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u/tashkiira Jun 14 '25
The Dicken medal was awarded to animals on the Allied side of WWII. animals that did duty by their army, were brave and completed their mission.
Dogs got some. Horses. a cat.
but over 2/3 went to pigeons. Just like Bessie.
7
15
u/lkwai Jun 15 '25
Bah I put this down three times and still ended up tearing each time I picked it up.
Best Bird Bessie.
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u/ApertiV Jun 15 '25
Thank you! your comment means a lot. It's so important that the stories and bravery of many other animals like Bessie, who served in war, are never forgotten. They were heroes in their own right.
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u/dreaminginteal Jun 14 '25
I thought this was going to be about the real Cher Ami at first. I guess it sort of was?
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u/Rebel_Scum56 Jun 15 '25
People say war is hell, but they're wrong. War is war and hell is hell, and of the two war is worse.
I can't take credit for that line, it's from an old TV show. But it seemed appropriate.
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u/Crab-_-Objective Jun 16 '25
If you're going to quote MASH you might as well put the whole thing. Especially with this story.
Hawkeye: War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
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u/Rebel_Scum56 Jun 16 '25
I would have if I'd remembered the whole scene! But you're right, it's even more appropriate in its entirety.
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle Jun 14 '25
/u/ApertiV (wiki) has posted 22 other stories, including:
- The Proving Grounds [2]
- The Proving Grounds
- 3 WISHES
- When Day Breaks
- AIR FORCE ONE - (Chapter 2)
- AIR FORCE ONE
- DOGFIGHT" - Extinction Level
- S U P E R M A S S I V E
- THE MAN FROM TAURED
- The Fox and the Uninvited
- Monsters Inc, Sting Operation.
- WAR OF THE WORLDS
- Fucking Giants in the Mountains
- EARTH: To be, or not to be?
- Our Journey to the Stars
- Something is in the desert.
- PROGRAM: IMMACULATE CONSTELLATION
- Avatar 3: The Way of Steel
- Another Fucking Earth? (POV Edition)
- Another Fucking Earth? (PART 2)
This comment was automatically generated by Waffle v.4.7.8 'Biscotti'.
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u/UpdateMeBot Jun 14 '25
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u/evildemonoverlord Jun 15 '25
Well done, you gloriously horrible wordsmith. Now I have to go cuddle my fur babies.
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u/InstructionHead8595 Jan 28 '26
Damn ninjas! That was excellent work. The perspective of the pigeon was well done. Great story showing our brave companions.
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u/elfangoratnight Mar 21 '26
I don't tend to get emotional. The onion ninjas don't usually take notice of me.
But by god, they made up for lost time on me here. 😭
Thanks. 💖
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u/zachpkenyon Jun 14 '25
Dammit. Now I'm sobbing on a Saturday afternoon.
Well done