Death of a Young Lieutenant
By B.R. Stateham
A hot summer sun. Interminable heat.
Grey smoke from raging fires of burning farmsteads lifted into the air.
He grinned and ran an oil-stained hand through his curly hair. Standing up, straddling the heavy German motorcycle, he half turned and stared at the burning bridge and the wide canal it once spanned. A wide canal cutting through the flat Belgian countryside. A piece of luck if he ever saw one.
Perfect.
If he could get across himself.
Blipping the throttle of the cycle nervously, he turned again and looked over his right shoulder. A mile away was the ghost-like apparition of a company of German cavalry. A Hussar’s company wearing the huge, furred hat called a Colback and dressed in field grey with bright yellow braided loops around their right epaulettes caused him to say a few choice profanities under his breath. The Boche horses were sweating and covered in the light-coloured Belgium soil. Signs they had been ridden hard.
The horsemen looked unshaven and equally unkempt. He watched, standing and straddling the bike, as the whole company of Hussars materialized out of the darkness of the mass of trees like forest wraiths. Several of them began to look at the ground intently while others scanned the distances in each direction. One of the horsemen stood up in his stirrups and pointed toward his direction. As if moved by one hand, the two hundred or so horsemen altered course and began whipping their steeds even more to reach the captain before he escaped.
A grin spread across his thin lips again just as curly hair fell across his right eyebrow. A boyish, mischievous grin. A grin which made women want to cuddle and forgive him of his sins. A grin which made even hardened old soldiers—pessimists to the core—nod their heads and grin back. A grin which could make even a serial killer want to become a close bosom friend.
It had always been that way with Jake. That grin. A sudden impish smirk lit up his face and melted even the coldest of hearts. Because of that grin, he could make friends with anyone. Make’em good friends. Life-long friends. Friends that would do anything for him.
He blipped the cycle’s engine a few more times as he turned to look at the burning bridge again. He was in the flat, irrigated, low country of Belgium. Barely five miles away from the French border. On either side of him was an expanse of rolling farmland burnt brown from the incredibly hot summer’s sun. In front of him was the irrigation canal. Eyeing it, he thought it was maybe twenty feet wide, cutting the country neatly in half for more than two miles in either direction. The water was deep and tepid. The perfect obstacle to stop advancing cavalry if one could figure out how to get over to the other side. Almost everywhere one looked, towering columns of black smoke from burning farms and destroyed villages twisted and billowed into the wind as they rose into the sky. They were grim testaments of the approaching Teutonic war machine as it continued to sweep through the Low Countries.
The opening three weeks of the war had not gone as planned for the Allies. At the start, the French and the British collected their armies and went strutting through the countryside, singing patriotic songs and acting as if this war would be a summer’s vacation and nothing more.
Genre: Mystery/Detective
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B.R. Stateham
Biography.
About the author – My name is B.R.Stateham. I am a seventy-four-year-old kid who never grew up. I write dark noir police-procedural and even darker fantasy sci-fi. And although I look like a second cousin to Frankenstein, I’m just as stubborn. Over the years, I’ve tried to do two things with my writing. First, I want to clarify and make my imagination more visual as it is transcribed onto the written page. I do not like the ‘bare bones’ approach to writing fiction. Just telling a starkly plain story with no visual cues to stir the reader’s imagination seems akin to a scam perpetrated on the reader.
The balance between too much imagination and too little is a battle that is always constant in a writer’s efforts. But, as in almost everything else, years of experience help tremendously in finding that balance. Secondly, telling a story with short, clear sentence structures is another nut to crack for any writer. The natural tendency for a writer is to write long, meandering, complex-compound sentences that stretch on forever and seemingly never end (like maybe this one?). Too long a sentence, and the reader becomes lost. Too little in a sentence or too stark in its construction, the reader is like a man in a small boat out on a storm-tossed sea bobbing up and down and distinctly ill at ease.
Well . . . so much for a writer’s woes. I plan to keep on writing what I love to read. Since I can’t find the writing style I like to read–I might as well write it. Maybe you might find that you want this particular style as well. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.
B.R. Stateham
