It chittered something to its hidden companions and retreated before anyone could draw a bead on it. It had seen no corpses to scavenge, no unguarded food, so why take the risk?

‘Sensible beast,’ said Ivan.

‘I hate those scuttling little frakkers,’ Anton said. ‘Caught a bunch chewing on Nardile’s corpse last night. They’d pulled out his guts and scooped out his eyes. One of them was nibbling on an eyeball like it was a grape.’ We all licked our lips at the thought of grapes, even Ivan who only has metal and plastic lips.

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

‘I armed an incendiary grenade and rolled it in among them. One of them tried to eat it too, greedy little swine. Then one of his mates tried to throw it back at me, I swear. He knew what it was for.’

‘Did it get you?’ I stifled a mock yawn.

‘Would I be sitting here telling you about it, if it had?’ Anton said.

‘I’m not sure I want to be sitting close to a genius who uses incendiaries in his own trenches and can almost be outsmarted by a rat.’

‘The key word is almost,’ said Anton. He sounded almost proud.

Behind him the chanting of the heretics had picked up again. I felt the hair on the back of my neck start to rise. For all I knew it might just be their evening prayers, but I doubted it. It was normally a sign that they were getting ready to attack. Or rather that their priests were whipping them up for an offensive. There was something about that mushy language that set my nerves on edge. It was as if the speakers’ mouths were filling with phlegm as they chanted – the mere sound of the words suggested illness and disease.

Anton was on his feet. He cupped his hands over his mouth and bellowed, ‘Could you keep the noise down? We’re trying to have a cosy little chat over here.’

By pure chance there was a momentary silence from the distant trenches. ‘Thank you,’ Anton bellowed.

The chanting started again.

‘I swear they do that just to annoy me,’ Anton said.

‘Yes,’ Ivan said. ‘This war is all about you. Always was. Always will be.’

‘I’m tempted to take a few of the new boys, head down the line to the Great Bog and make my displeasure known,’ Anton said. About a kilometre away, our trench system blended near imperceptibly into their trench system. If you followed the so-called Grand Trunk Road you’d get there, provided you negotiated the sprawl of barbed wire, trip-mines, booby traps, mud-holes, spore pits and rats’ nests that made movement in the abandoned trenches so treacherous. The Great Bog was a hideous swamp of latrines, cesspits and abandoned emplacements constantly fought over. Right now it represented our front line. Tomorrow it might well belong to the heretics.

‘You know the rules,’ I said. ‘We stay here until we are told to do something different. Or until the heretics come and ask us to leave. We don’t need to go embarking on any of your wild little adventures.’

‘You used to be a lot more fun before you became a sergeant, Leo,’ Anton said. ‘There was a time when you would have been leading the charge, not sitting there moaning about it.’

‘I think you are confusing me with someone else,’ I said. ‘Someone idiotic.