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you!” retorted Nellie. “I can do anything you can. Don’t treat me like no porcelain doll, then. I’m responsible for myself. Or do you just want me to stay here and cook meals, wash uniforms and tend wounds, is that it? ”
    “No!” said Atkins defensively. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just that –”
    Everson coughed. “It’s done, Atkins. She goes with you. I need you to find the tank and its crew, both in one piece, and get them back here. We can hang on for a few days, a week maybe. The chatts think it’s their god of the dead; it may be the only thing that can save us. I’m relying on you.”
    Atkins recovered his composure while Nellie fixed him with a belligerent stare.
    “If the tank can be found sir, we’ll find it. Leaves a trail a blind man could follow, so we should be able to track it. And we’ll bring it back if we have to push it all the way.”
    The tank weighed twenty-eight tons, so that was highly unlikely, but Everson appreciated the sentiment. “And take Napoo, because Christ knows what you’ll find out there and I don’t want to lose another patrol.
    “And take that chatt, Chandar, with you. He seems well disposed to you. We can’t keep him here and we can’t send him back. I have some surprises for his friends and I don’t want to take the chance that he’s spying.”
    “But sir –” began Atkins.
    “It’s done, Atkins. Find that bloody tank. And keep an eye out for Jeffries.”

 
    INTERLUDE TWO
     
    Letter from Private Thomas Atkins
    to Flora Mullins
     
     
    17th February 1917
     
    My Dearest Flora,
    Sometime I feel daft sitting here and writing letters that I don’t know you’ll ever get, but I feel like if I stop writing you’ll just drift away and I’ll lose you forever. Maybe it would be better not to torment myself, to lay down this burden, to forget that you and Blighty exist at all. Some blokes already have, like so many Hun souvenirs that chaps carry round with them from posting to posting until one day they just become too heavy and they chuck them.
    You may never read these, but while I write them, I feel like I’m talking to you, like I’m close to you. If I ever stop writing, then not only have I lost you but will have lost part of myself, too, so here I sit, carrying on.
    The days have settled into a routine here, although we are having a spot of bother with some of the locals. I don’t think they like what we’ve done with the place. Mind you, if you saw it you’d hardly recognise it yourself. Lovely new trenches. Dry warm dugouts. It’s like the Ritz.
    The new lads in the section seem grand. I do wish Chalky would lay off, though. Not strictly his fault. The others egg him on a bit. I don’t know, you do one thing and people go on and on about it. But that’s what it’s like around here.
    We’ve got orders to go and find the tank. You can’t put anything down around here without it disappearing. Most people blame Mercy when that happens. To be fair, if anything has gone missing he’s usually had a hand in it. I don’t think they can pin the tank on him this time, though. It’s all a bit of puzzle. They should have been back yesterday. Things might have been a lot easier if they had, but there you go, C’est la guerre, as Gutsy says. Still, how hard can it be to find?
    Ever yours,
     
    Thomas

 

     
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
    “A Wilderness of Ruin...”
     
     
    Two days earlier...
     
    T HE CANYON HADN’T been carved by turbulent river waters. It was a brutal crack, a rift torn suddenly in the skin of this world by some groundquake that sundered the land in ages past. The walls rose almost vertically for hundreds of feet and only in the heat of the day did the alien sun penetrate the bottom-most depths, where great blocks of stone lay strewn where they fell.
    The only scraps of vegetation to be seen were large patches of blue-green matter, scattered over the rock-face like lichen, attached to the rock and formed of small blisters of