One Good Turn Read Online Free

wash. He had found that the whole of his back was burned, as if he had been out in the fields for too long without a shirt. In two patches, the burning was more serious and his blisters covered raw flesh and pus.
    A doctor had come in, taken a quick look at the weeping wounds and put a dressing on them. The prisoner knew why he hadn't taken more care: a firing squad was going to shoot him the morning after next. There was no point in wasting dressings on a man who was about to die, when there were men who could be saved elsewhere. Proper men. Proper heroes. Men who deserved to live.
    The prisoner had also been unchained. He had moved an old chest, so that he could stand on it, underneath the broken airbrick. The light fell on his face and made him feel alive. And he liked trying to make out what the sounds were in the street outside: the rolling crunch of wagon wheels, the steady tramp of men marching, the murmur of French, the rare sound of birds.
    Take two, do, take two. Take two, do, take two.
    That was a woodpigeon.
    Teacher, teacher, teacher.
    That was a great tit.
    All of a sudden he heard a voice in his head. 'And the yellowhammer, he goes: a little bit of bread and no cheese.'
    That was his father.
    A picture, as clear as day, appeared in his mind. His father was talking to him at the ford by the big gate onto the moor. He loved the ford when he was little, loved the way the brown, peaty water curled around the stones and washed away the mud of the sheep and cattle.
    Dartmoor. That was it. He was from Dartmoor, and his father had a small farm on the edge of the moor outside the village of Lydford. They had a flock of sheep, a few cows and a couple of Dartmoor ponies because his mother loved them.
    The memories lit up the prisoner's mind like a shaft of golden sunlight. They were almost too vivid to bear. He could see his mother making clotted cream to sell to the hotel down by the station; and himself, as a boy, dipping his fingers through the crust when she wasn't looking and letting the velvety taste melt on his tongue and slip down his throat. He remembered saddling up Mouse, his own pony which he had hand-reared, and riding out for long days on the moor, and he heard the curlews calling from the valleys and saw the rooks and the buzzards circling overhead.
    He remembered the harsh winters, wading thigh-deep through the snow to feed the cattle and check on the sheep. He remembered taking the job in the squire's stables where he mucked out, and helped look after the two great hunters the squire kept. Castor and Pollux they were called, and there weren't two other horses like them in Devon.
    He was sixteen when the war started. Everyone had a father, a brother, an uncle or a friend who was caught up in it. But when the army started recruiting in Tavistock, the nearest town, his mother wouldn't let him go. The squire said the same thing when he caught the boy moping behind the stables and asked what the matter was.
    'Don't be such a bloody idiot,' he snapped. 'War is war and to be avoided at all costs. I lost my brother in South Africa. Know how he died?'
    'A Zulu warrior?' the boy asked hopefully.
    'No.'
    'A Boer?'
    'No. Nor was it the Queen of Sheba. It was dysentery. Do you know what he was doing? He was running a place called a concentration camp and the dysentery swept through it. And who was in the camp? Boer women and Boer children: held there so the army could burn their farms and shoot their animals. That's war,' the squire said. 'Only a fool wants to fight.'
    'But I want to do my bit. I want to have a go at the Hun.'
    'A few years ago the Hun was your brother,' the squire growled. 'Prince Albert, our own King's father, was a bloody Hun. The Queen was a bloody Hun. The bloody King's a bloody Hun, if you ask me.' He stormed off, hitting the nettles with his walking stick. 'They're all bloody Huns!'
    This had just left him even more miserable. How could he not fight when so many others of his age were joining