Author's Note: Hey guys! Sorry it's been a little while since the last update – I was busy writing a friend's birthday oneshot, and I lost my motivation for this a little bit because I wasn't sure if anyone was actually reading it. But yeah, I got my muse back and I'm quite proud of this chapter! This is about Mathias's war experiences, so if you're not comfortable with blood etc, please do tread carefully. Enjoy the chapter!

April 1915

Christmas had come and gone, and the war was still not over. New countries seemed to be entering the fray all the time, dragged in by old alliances or leaping at the chance to exact revenge on a long-standing enemy. Mathias found it impossible to get an overarching sense of the conflict, which was rapidly becoming a world war, from his lowly vantage point in the trenches. Newspapers arrived there sporadically, always days old and crumpled, and he envied the journalists in their London offices, able to take a serenely political view of the war as they typed out orderly accounts of the continuing chaos and casualty lists to be pored over by anxious men looking for boys they went to school with, boys they played football with, boys who once fell to the ground screaming and pretending to be wounded in childhood games of soldiers. They fell forever now, fell in their terrifying multitudes. A single tap of a typewriter key and one dead man became ten, another and he was a hundred, a third tap and the man became a thousand. 'A few hundred' indeed, Mathias thought bitterly. And still they died. Married men died. Fathers died. Boys of sixteen died. Mathias had known one of them not even shaving yet, another who wrote to his father asking him to send the cricket scores. Both dead now. There was nothing here but death.

Mathias had read, or been told, that the great booming shells could be heard in Kent, and sometimes further inland. He wondered if they could be heard by the London journalists as they mapped in ink and blood the ebb and flow of the fighting. He wondered if they could be heard in Cambridge, their hollow thumps echoing through the quads and halls of the ancient university. He wondered if Lukas ever thought of him, and if he was ever first in the common room to lay claim to the newspaper with its daily messages of death. What might he feel as he read the casualty lists, scanning them for Mathias's foreign name among the Smiths and Johnsons and Millers? Maybe he wasn't even in Cambridge anymore. The universities were emptying, the students enlisting as officers or even just ordinary soldiers. Nonetheless, Lukas didn't strike him as the sort to want to fight. There was talk of introducing conscription. He'd probably hang on until then.

Mathias hated himself for thinking about Lukas. After all, he thought, it wasn't as though Lukas would be thinking about him. He'd got his bit of rough trade, and now he was probably with someone rich and stupid, someone who'd spoil him. But, fool as he was, Mathias couldn't stop torturing himself with thoughts of how different things could have been. In the moments between waking up and kit inspection, or the silence between attacks of shelling, or by the light of an illicit midnight match, he wrote letters – or, rather, began them. Dear Lukas, he would write, then decide it wasn't quite the right tone. He would write simply Lukas and then realise that it sounded too blunt, like a telegram. He tried Darling and Sweetheart and My Love and then crossed them all out, furious at his own sentimentality. Once, ludicrously, he began a letter with Dear Mr Bondevik, but the formality was so contrived as to be ridiculous. It was impossible to return to social conventions after all they had done. At any rate, all the worry about forms of address hardly mattered. He never got further than that. What was there to say? We are dying here, helpless as flies stuck on paper, and I am waiting to die myself. He finished his Iliad and gave it to another man, traded it for a packet of cigarettes. It wasn't half as good as Dorian Gray.

...

Sometimes, if they were lucky and it was quiet, the men were given leave to go into the nearby village a mile or so behind the lines. It was one of those quintessentially French places, the buildings all ochre-coloured with elaborate ironwork around the windows and the smell of fresh bread and pastries unspooling from the open doors of the boulangerie and patisserie. It was calm there, the inhabitants apparently determined to carry on with their lives as normally as possible, but Mathias saw their fear when the shellfire rang out in the distance – saw it in the tightening of hands round shopping baskets and the sudden silence of children stopping their nursery rhymes halfway through a verse. At any rate, it was rare for the soldiers to visit during the day. They came at night, mostly. None of them were particularly interested in the croissants and pains au chocolat in the windows of the patisserie, and nor did they stop to admire the small village square with the crocuses just beginning to bloom in the springtime air. No, they came for the cheap, acidic wine and the chance of some comfort from the village girls.

This particular evening was no different. Mathias had cultivated a small group of friends, men he liked well enough, and they would strike out together of an evening to go drinking. The bar was riotous, full to the rafters with English and French soldiers, shouting and smoking, holding up their empty jugs and demanding, with various degrees of fluency and success, that they be refilled immediately. Patriotism was not a valid currency, and the soldiers were charged as much as any customers – more, if they couldn't speak French. There was a small group of surly regulars, now forced into a distant corner of the bar, who stared resentfully at the soldiers and blew out irritated clouds of pipe smoke every few minutes, but they were always consciously ignored. Between the tables, wading through the crowds as though they were knee-deep in water, came the girls. A few were particularly popular, others less so, and there were some Mathias never saw more than once, although he hardly paid them any mind. His friends, like most of the soldiers, were half-mad for want of female company, and often made fools of themselves as they flirted and propositioned in French bad enough to be non-existent.

"Here miss, my friend... my friend... er... mon ami here, he thinks you're very... very, er, belle? Is that the word? Pretty, I mean."

"I'll buy you a drink, how about that? Wine... tu voudrais du vin?"

The girls would smile indulgently, patiently going along with the soldiers' attempts at seduction, then turn to talk and laugh amongst themselves in their own language. Sometimes they gave the soldiers what they wanted, other times not. It always gave the men a good laugh when one of their number was turned down, but tonight Mathias found himself not particularly caring about the outcome. Besides, he had his own interests to pursue.

He stood outside, in one of the pools of amber light that filtered through the old leaded windows, trying to light his cigarette. In his mind lingered the image of a man he had seen killed the previous day, split open with a bayonet. His skin had been very white under its mask of mud, the red leaching out of his cheeks and lips as though all his blood was rushing to the site of the wound. He blinked and saw Lukas, beautiful Lukas, giving him that unreadable half-smile on the night of the party. The images stayed with him, the sacred and the profane. But which was which? The draughty orphanage chapel came back to him, the vicar's voice putting the fear of God into the children every Sunday. Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by his blood. Surely the dead man had been cleansed of his sins through his sacrifice – that, or there was no justice in all of Heaven and Earth. But then again, what could be more disgusting, more unnatural, than death at the hands of another person? Mathias's hands were shaking again, and he gave up on his cigarette.

"Vous avez froid?" a voice asked him, a man stepping out of the shadows.

"English." Mathias replied. His tongue lay heavy and stupid in his mouth.

A relieved laugh. "Oh, thank God – so am I! Just thought I'd show my parents they didn't waste all those school fees after all." The stranger came up alongside him, distractedly fiddling with the cigarette he had in his mouth, taking it out and then replacing it. He jerked his head in the direction of the bar, from which muffled voices and the occasional shriek of female laughter could be heard. "Tired of the girls?"

Mathias instantly became more alert. These coded exchanges were what men such as him used to identify each other. He'd had a good few of them over the last few months – anything to get Lukas out of his head. "Never cared for them in the first place." he said.

The man smiled. "I'm the same myself."

Mathias nodded in acknowledgement. Every word here was loaded with meaning. "What did you ask me, anyway?"

"I asked if you were cold."

Mathias sighed deeply, sending out a frosty cloud into the sharp night air. Every part of him was numb, an aching fog of fatigue burning behind his eyes. "Yes, I suppose I am."

…

You couldn't always tell beforehand if you were going to get a talker or not. Mathias didn't much care for the talkers, the men who loitered after their assignations, wanting to pour their hearts out to a stranger. Mostly, the men you picked up or were picked up by would leave as soon as it was over, swearing and smoking as they stood up and stretched and raked their fingers through hair that was tousled and sweat-matted from their exertions. Others would be moved to unexpected tenderness once the charged heat had dissipated, wanting a kiss or some other chaste gesture of affection before they went out into the night again. There wasn't really a 'type' that you could say with certainty would turn out to be a talker, but they themselves were the worst sort. They craved more than the sex that was so easy to come by, and would sit on the bed, or in a chair, or lean against a wall if there was nowhere else, and then all the things they had never said would overspill in an awful rush of chaotic feelings. Mathias would listen, and sometimes reply, and wish that they would leave him to his misery.

"When do you think it'll all be over?" they would often ask, their stricken faces turned to him as if they expected him to know the answer. They would search him, probe him – "What are you going to do after? What did you do before?" He would tell them, without shame, that he had been a servant. It didn't matter anymore. There was something unifying in their suffering, the grim camaraderie and the blackest of black humour that they shared to make bearable the days where you saw a smooth-faced boy with his whole torso blasted open by a shell. Society was no longer important in this place without laws and points of reference. They were all rough trade here.

"Did you have anyone at home?" someone once asked him, a young man from Manchester who had already confided that he would wake confused in the night and search the empty horizon for the reassuring bulk of the factory chimneys.

"Yes," Mathias replied. "He didn't care for me. He just wanted a bit of rough trade – you know how these boarding school boys are. I doubt I'll ever see him again."

"I understand," the young man replied. "There was a nice lad I used to see sometimes, then my mother found out. I ran off to the army first chance I got, see, because she didn't want any queers dirtying up her house. That's what she said, at any rate."

"I never had a mother." Mathias said bluntly. They smoked together, then went their separate ways. He wasn't bad, that one, for a talker. It was only later, in the darkness of the trench and the silence of the sleeping men, that he felt a horrible stab of guilt for talking about Lukas like that. He never loved you. He never loved you, the voice in his head chanted over and over. Never, Mathias told himself, never. And yet that half-smile rose in his mind, and the tremor in Lukas's voice as he asked him to come upstairs, and the tears that had glimmered at the corners of his eyes as Mathias left.

Mathias shook his head to clear it. Just for show, all of it. Lukas had seen his chance with him and seized it. He was probably crying because it hurt, or because he was afraid his mother would find out. He probably hadn't given Mathias another moment's thought once he'd cleaned himself up and got all packed and ready for Cambridge. Besides, Lukas would never understand what he was feeling now. There was no way to explain the jarring shock of seeing a disembodied hand caught in the barbed wire as though to point the way for those who would follow, and nor was there any way to explain the horrible, surging sickness that had come over him as he had stepped in what seemed like a puddle but was in fact, a body in the first stages of putrefaction, and found that he was ankle-deep in the liquefying organs. There was no way to describe the scourging feeling as he had thrown up every last thing he had ever swallowed, no words for the dryness of his lips and throat after – and worst of all, the dryness of his eyes. There was no way to tell anyone, even his fellow soldiers, the revulsion he had felt after finding himself unable to shed a tear for the poor man. And how would Lukas, labouring through his books and crossing the quads wrapped up in his college scarf, understand the necessity of the mindless comfort the men all sought from the women or each other? What would he know of the underlying urgency to it, the need to feel the quickening in the blood, the hardening, the gathering of all their energy to this one purpose? It was only through this act, common to all animals, that they were able to feel human again, and capable of love, even if the love was empty and hollow and meted out to strangers. He cried then, his face buried in his hands, another sobbing man whose breakdown went unremarked in these days of madness.

"Lukas," he whispered through his tears. "Oh, Lukas, if only you could see what's become of me."

…

June 1916

The war was slowly advancing through France, the numbers of dead rising with every mad dash 'over the top' and every shell launched into No-Man's-Land. All around, the fields lay violated, stripped to their bare mud, and the only things that broke up the despairing vastness of the view were dead trees and the occasional abandoned farmhouse. No matter where you were, it was the same. But now there was talk of breaking out of the routine. News filtered down to the front lines of Important Decisions being made by the top brass, concerning the Big Push – an assault that would send the Germans scampering all the way back to where they'd come from. Few of the hardened soldiers like Mathias believed all the rhetoric so easily swallowed by the boys and conscripts, but it was impossible to shake off the feeling that things would, indeed, be different this time.

In advance of the expected battle, Mathias was given a few days' leave to return to England. After almost two years in France, he wasn't exactly sure what to do with it. Initially, he went to London to visit a friend who'd been invalided out after losing a leg. They sipped tea together and chatted about how things were. The friend had found a job balancing the books for a little tailor's in Wapping and was walking out with a nice girl who worked in the baker's across the road. Mathias told him about the planned Big Push, and they agreed that it was unlikely to be as important as the officers were claiming. After that, he went straight to King's Cross, eschewing all the sightseeing opportunities of the city, and, as though compelled by an invisible force, boarded a train for the place he knew so well. People always seek out what they know, he mused as the countryside flashed by, even if it's the worst thing for them and the last thing they need.

The bus to Lille Skarstind started off full, then gradually emptied. There were several other soldiers in the uniform of the local regiment – the one he himself had joined – who got off at the various scattered villages along the way, going home to relieved mothers and fathers and siblings, perhaps with a flower plucked from the roadside to give to their sweethearts. Mathias slipped into a sort of trance, thinking of the man he'd killed the month before. It had been hand-to-hand fighting – he had had no choice but to kill him – but the images still rose unbidden to his mind with the solidity of memory rather than the wateriness of imagination. He had stabbed him with his bayonet and felt it pierce... something, he didn't know what. It was a long time since the training camp and the sawdust dummies they had all mercilessly attacked until they could do it blindfolded. In, twist, out. In, twist, out.

"Are you alright there?"

Mathias blinked slowly, surfacing from his memories. The bus had stopped and the engine was silent. There were no other passengers and the driver had turned in his seat to address him. "What?" he asked, disorientated. His mind was still in turmoil.

"Are you getting off here, lad? This is the last stop." The driver spoke again, and something in the gentleness in his tone told him that this man was a father. Perhaps his own son was over in France. Perhaps he had already lost him.

Mathias stood up uncertainty, hauling his bag up from the floor. "Yes, I..." he swallowed and started again. "I wanted to get off here anyway." Still unsteady, he made his way to the doors at the front of the bus, and the driver looked at him with an expression of concern.

"You don't look too well," he said kindly, putting a hand on Mathias's shoulder. "You're as white as a sheet. Tell you what," he continued. "There's a lovely tearoom on the corner there. Get yourself something to eat, and the bus'll be setting off again in an hour, how about that?"

Mathias nodded. "Thank you." he mumbled, negotiating the narrow steps down to the ground again.

It was Sunday afternoon, and Mathias was worried he'd see the cook or one of the maids from Lille Skarstind enjoying her time off. He was beginning to realise that coming here had been a mistake. What was he planning to do? Go up to the house again? But he had had nowhere else to go. Asterley Hall was like a mirage to him now, and there was nowhere he could go that held even a moment's worth of happy memories. Better here than in France, he supposed.

At any rate, there probably wouldn't even be anyone at Lille Skarstind. Conscription had been in place for four months. Lukas, a student, would have been one of the first to go – he was barely twenty years old, and hardly in essential employment. Then Arthur, a little older but childless, unmarried and, again, not in essential employment. Emil, newly eighteen, would be going too, but it was Mathias's understanding that the young ones wouldn't be formally called up for a few months yet. His uniform conferred some benefits in the civilian environment of the teashop. He was served before people who had been waiting longer than him, and the waitress offered to bring him a newspaper.

It was a nice treat to sit with a cup of sugary tea and a cream bun, and Mathias found the tight knot of anger and fear, his constant battlefield companion, loosen in him a little. The waitress brought his paper and, almost reflexively, he found himself turning to the casualty list. Since conscription had come in, he had found himself searching for Lukas and Arthur every day. King, Kingsley, Kingsman... Mathias scanned the list. No Kirklands today. So Arthur was safe, for the time being. He took a bite of his bun and flicked his eyes back to the 'B's. Boling, Bolton, Bond, Bonner... No Bondeviks today either. All at once, Mathias felt a sickness rising in him. All these names that he had flicked through in his search for Lukas – all of them belonged to real people, men his age and younger boys. What right did he have to be cherry-picking from the list? What made Lukas, who had never concerned himself with Mathias anyway, any more worthy of his notices than the other names printed there? What made Lukas more important than, say, George Pilling, or Daniel Painter, or any of the names he could have pulled from the three narrow columns? He had killed men, several men. He had never known their names, and there was no guarantee that anyone else had either. A terror seized him, a conviction that, somewhere, the men whose blood he had sponged out of his uniform were lying unidentifiable in graves with numbers rather than names.

Not wanting to appear too frantic, he stood up and made his way to the small toilet at the back of the building. It was mercifully empty, and as he looked at himself in the mirror over the sink, he found it impossible to meet his own eyes. There was something dead in them, as though all the death he had seen and caused was collecting in them. And yet he himself had not yet sustained so much as a scratch. More memories flashed in his mind, obscuring his reflection. Shell-holes deep enough to drown in. Rats, slick with mud, slithering over him at night. A man with his entire lower jaw shot away, a friend trying to pour a few drops of water into his open throat and panicking because he simply couldn't angle the bottle correctly. Again, he felt the scourging sickness. The sugar from his bun coated his mouth, thick and cloying, and it all came rushing out of him again. The door opened and an older man stepped in. He caught sight of Mathias, still coughing and gasping, swilling his mouth out and splashing water on his face, then gave him a fleeting look, looked away again and left the room. So this was how it would be in the future, Mathias thought – praising the soldiers for their bravery and sacrifice, then choosing to look away from their suffering.

When the bus came, he rode it all the way back into town, then rented a room for a few days and waited to go back to the fighting.

...

August 1916

The promised battle had come, and come with a vengeance. Even here, several miles behind the lines and safely out of harm's way, the shells and shots continued to crack and boom with the continuousness of a pulse. Or not. A pulse was a fragile thing, as Mathias had learnt over the past few days. It was like a fraying thread, and the instant it snapped, there was nothing that could be done to repair it. Mathias shifted position slightly, moving more on to his back than his side to lessen the pain. Someone at the other end of the ward began to cry out, words lost in the screams. There was a sympathetic bolt of pain from his own wound, and he let his fingers trail gently over the stitches. He had been unbelievably lucky to survive, and as the throbbing began to subside, his mind drifted back over recent events.

It had taken him a few moments to realise he had been shot, as if he was a toddler just beginning to walk, unsure of why he had fallen. He had brushed it off as having simply tripped in the pitted ground, and it was not until he had begun to stand up that he had seen the blood beginning to seep out onto his uniform. He had looked at it in confusion, a numb sense of shock freezing his mind. Here was the blood, but where was the pain? He was certainly bleeding an awful lot. Reflexively, he had pressed his hands to the wound in his abdomen and watched in horror as the blood continued to spurt out through his fingers. There had been a taste of metal in his mouth, and when he had opened it, more blood had splashed out. At that moment, the pain had hit him, set him gasping and sent tears springing from his eyes.

The hospital was calm after the chaos of the casualty clearing station. He didn't remember much of the terrifying few hours he'd spent there, hovering between life and death, surrounded by screaming men. He might have cried out himself at some point, they thought. They had put someone else's blood into him, because he had had so little of his own left – a transfusion, the nurse had explained. They had taken him to be operated on, to have the bullet extracted and him stitched up, inside and out. "Pretend you're just having a tooth out." the surgeon had said to him, covering his mouth and nose with the chloroform mask. He was lucky, he knew that much. There weren't many men who survived a wound like his.

There was a nurse moving through the ward, stopping at each bed to give the man in it a small piece of card. Mathias sat up and watched in confusion. What was going on? Were they being sent home? He hoped not. The last thing he wanted to do was go to England – and, in his condition, a stormy journey across the Channel wasn't going to do him any favours. When the nurse reached his bed, she handed him one of the cards, and he scanned it anxiously. It was a notification of injury card. There was a space for a name, an address and a signature – the rest was pre-printed, except where you had to tick whether your wound was 'slight' or 'serious', whatever that meant. But who would he send it to? He imagined addressing it to Lukas and, in his mind's eye, saw him picking up and – what? How would Lukas react if he knew Mathias was injured? If he knew that he was the person he had chosen to tell? But Lukas would be in the army by now – maybe wounded, maybe dead. Mathias bit down on his bottom lip to steady it. It was high time he gave up on this silly infatuation. Lukas had never loved him, never would, and most probably didn't care tuppence either way for his welfare. With a sinking heart, Mathias handed the card back to the nurse and told her he had no one at home.