Ian Rutledge drove through the countryside with Hamish restive and moody in the back of his mind. Around them in the car the warm air carried the heavy smell of new-mown hay.

The scent of phosgene…

Will any of us ever be free of that memory? Rutledge asked himself. Of the silent destroyer that had rolled across the battlefields of the Front in clouds of gas? One learned quickly enough to tell them apart-mustard or phosgene or CNS. But familiarity had made them more terrifying, not less-knowing what they could do.

“It’s no’ the gas I can’t forget,” Hamish said roughly, “but the haying. August ’Fourteen. I did na’ know there was an archduke getting himself killed somewhere in some place I’d no’ heard of. The hay… and Fiona dusty with it on the wain, and the horses dark with sweat God, it was fair, that August, and the MacDonalds swearing like wild men because they couldna’ keep up wi’ one MacLeod…”

“Yes, you told me that, the night-” Rutledge began aloud, and then quickly stopped. Corporal Hamish MacLeod had talked to him about the August haying the night he’d died. In France. Odd that memory turned on something as simple as the smell of new-mown hay!

And yet he was accustomed to answering the voice in his head out of old habit. The Somme. A bloodbath for months, the toll climbing astronomically, and men so tired that their minds simply shut down. Assault after futile assault, and the German line still held.

Set against such appalling losses, one more casualty was insignificant. Yet in the midst of such horror, the death of a young Scottish corporal had incised itself on Rutledge’s soul.