[Hameln Mannschaftslager, Germany - 5:21PM 13/11/1918]
"Hoffwn ddweud dee-olch o galon i bawb a fu'n fy nghefnogi drwy'r flwyddyn, oherwydd heb eich help, eich amynedd, a'ch caredigrwydd, ni fyddwn wedi gallu cyrraedd mor bell." (I would like to say heartfelt thanks to everyone who supported me throughout the year, because without your help, your patience, and your kindness, I would not have been able to come this far.) I said proudly, It turns out learning another language was easy if one had enough time.
The man sitting opposite me winced.
"Not Dee-olch.Diolch." He dragged the sound from the back of his throat, the ch rough as gravel. "Come on, you're almost there; it should sound like you're clearing rainwater out of your chest."
I frowned and cleared my throat before trying again. "Dee-olk."
"Closer," he sighed in a strong Welsh accent, "but it still sounds like you're choking on gruel. Eh, at least you can hold a conversation now."
There wasn't much to do in this place; after all, most men here were disabled in some manner and were unable to do hard labour near the front, so mostly it was just sitting around keeping ourselves occupied.
The man opposite me had been a coal miner in Ystradgynlais before the war. He too had been captured at the Somme.
The modern part of me had found it ridiculous that a "Welshman" couldn't speak Welsh. Of course I knew that was primarily due to heavy suppression of the language since the Tudor period. Also, the fact my dad was Irish and my mum was a Cardiff native probably also had something to do with it; after all, Cardiff, despite being the largest Welsh city, was predominantly English-speaking after the importation of large amounts of English factory workers in the 1800s, so it wasn't like I needed to speak it.
Either way, though, both the older Gwyn and I had nothing better to do, so he was teaching me Welsh, and I was teaching him arithmetic. Neither of us was the best teacher, but with almost two years you can eventually drill it into someone's head.
We were interrupted by a guard entering with a large sack with the word "Post" on it, which was apparently the German word for, well, post…
My gaze was following the soldier handing out letters one by one as he removed them from the sack; my fingers gently fidgeted with the edge of the coarse blanket I had been sitting on as I rubbed my fingers back and forth. The general atmosphere was permeated with men chatting; it would have been its own kind of tranquil if it hadn't been for the general sense of tension over the last few days.
"Pam wyt ti'n meddwl eu bod nhw wedi bod mor llawn tension yn ddiweddar?" (Why do you think they've been so tense lately?) Gwyn leaned over and asked me.
I thought for a moment before replying, "Dwi ddim yn gwybod, rhaid bod rhywbeth mawr, fel arfer maen nhw'n aros dim ond ychydig ddiwrnodau cyn dweud wrthym bethau pwysig." (I don't know; it must be something big, though. They usually wait only a few days before telling us important stuff.)
The war probably ended two days ago, not that I was going to tell anyone I knew that, though I think everyone can feel it.
I mean, the fact that the war ended on the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day was drilled into me in primary school during the early 2000s, so of course I know it. Hell, people who showed no interest in history still probably remembered that fact.
And as much as I was an ardent believer in the butterfly effect, meaning that even minor actions could change an outcome drastically, I was also aware that the British command specifically withheld signing the ceasefire until that exact time for posterity or something like that. So I doubted any of the minor interactions I had had with anyone would have changed things that much yet.
Being in a POW camp tended to slow down news, though, so now it was simply a matter of waiting.
I was sure that even with the war coming to an end it would be at least a few months before I was home; after all, if I remember correctly, the German government is barely holding itself together due to a combination of grain blockades, socialist protests, separatists protests, and veterans protests. Oh, and let's not forget the so-called "Spanish" flu, which basically every country in Europe but Spain is pretending is not real due to wartime censorship, and I know for a fact things are only going to get worse in the following waves of the pandemic.
I morbidly chuckled to myself over the fact that whether it be the Black Death, the Spanish Flu or Covid, humanity seemed to never handle intangible threats properly.
"Dim un eto?" (Still none???) Gwyn said, breaking my pondering as he sat back down next to me with a letter in hand, to which I simply shook my head forlornly.
I hadn't received a single letter in the last two years or so since arriving here. Not from my family nor from Kitty. I had written, of course, but gave up after the seventh, which had received no reply. I knew it was probably something like censorship, or the Red Cross messing up, or simply there probably being dozens of Edward Sullivans in just Bute itself, let alone the greater Cardiff area.
But that little persistent worm of doubt inside my head kept whispering that maybe they didn't care; after all, I'm no longer fully Edward, and maybe they picked up on that.
My mind spiralled; maybe Kitty had finally given in to her parents, maybe she had moved on, forgotten me entirely. Maybe that was for the best…
Shut up, I shouted in my mind, mentally slapping myself.
This was just semantics…As far as I'm concerned, I am Edward "Teddy" Sullivan. I grew up in Cardiff. My dad, Patrick, is a dockworker who immigrated from Mayo over twenty years ago. My mum Mary is a loving, kind and stern woman. I have three siblings: Margaret, Jack and Billy.
The number of times I had repeated that to myself would concern any psychiatrist, but then again, a person having the memories of two individuals isn't necessarily normal.
A part of me guesses that maybe I went crazy after being hit by that artillery shell, maybe…
…it was the other way round; I had been t-boned by a lorry or something, and now I was hallucinating in my final moments before death. But both felt all too real.
Memories of growing up on the South Coast, being an only child, heading off to uni, becoming a chemical engineer, getting a job at a plant in Oxford, meeting Claire, getting married, holding my son in my arms for the first time, and kissing them both goodbye that last time before I ended up here.
I took one long, shuddering breath as I fought the urge to cry. This was why I tried my best not to think about it. A part of me desperately wanted to go home, to that house on Rusper Drive. To hold them again.
I chuckled to myself. A lot of people would be happy to have this knowledge, to know what was going to happen. After all, everything I can remember about the First World War has played out roughly the same. I mean, I can't confirm exact dates until I'm out of this place, but the general outline seems identical.
A part of me wondered: had I doomed all the people in the future to never exist simply by being here? Or was I supposed to be here? How exactly had I even got here? Why me, of all people?
Then again, I knew the answer to that, didn't I?
As much as part of me wanted to try my best not to change the timeline, I couldn't, could I?
I have and help prevent at least some of the billions of deaths that are going to happen over the next hundred years. I looked down at my hands, noticing the slight sheen of sweat on my palms.
Someone might compare the situation I'm in to the debate between a realist and an absolutist: whether to preserve what I once had but am now incapable of getting back, or to work with what I have.
After all, I have no clue where to even begin when it comes to time travel. Though I do remember something about it being technically possible if you played around with big enough numbers. Physics was never my strong suit, though.
I was obviously developing some serious mental issues from all this, but it wasn't as if psychiatry was advanced enough for me to get any real help for a long time.
Then again, who was to say that I, as in my modern self, was even gone? What if all that had been transferred was a copy of me into this timeline, and I am still alive and kicking back in the 2020s?
Maybe this whole load of anguish I was suffering through was simply powerlessness: knowing that somehow, something had done something I was utterly unable to even fully comprehend.
I was broken from my quickly spiralling thoughts when a tray dropped somewhere nearby.
The reaction was immediate.
A cry tore through the room, raw and frightened. A bedframe rattled hard enough to scrape across the floorboards.
"Christ…hold him!" came a faint cry from outside the room.
A few minutes later one of the orderlies, a young man with bright blonde hair and his sleeves rolled to the elbow, hurried toward me.
"Sullivan," the man said breathlessly in a light German accent. "Need your help."
I pushed myself up, reaching automatically for my cane. "What is it?"
"It's the Evans boy. The one in the next ward over." The orderly lowered his voice, leaning in. "The blind one. He's in a state after that noise and won't let anyone near him. I don't want to be forced to have the guards deal with it; they'll hurt him, and you have your ways…"
I nodded once, solemnly. "Alright."
The walk across to the next ward was short, though the familiar ache in my leg throbbed with every step. I swear I'm going to be forced into engineering just to make a better leg for myself. I guessed it was the bed by the far window since there were two other orderlies and a few fellow prisoners standing around it.
"Where is he?" I asked.
One of the orderlies gestured under the bed. I sighed before gripping the side of the bed frame and straining as I got down on the floor.
He was there, clearly half out of it, his fists clenched and his breathing coming in fast, panicked bursts.
He was young. Perhaps not even eighteen. Both his eyes were wrapped in a fresh white bandage that made the fear in the rest of his face all the harder to look at.
"No!" Evans gasped as he seemed to take the sound of me getting down onto the floor as someone was trying to grab him. "Don't…don't touch me…"
"It's alright," I said softly.
The boy froze.
I stayed where I was, close enough to be heard but not close enough to crowd him.
"It's Sullivan," I said. "From the next row over."
Evans swallowed hard, his chest still heaving. "What was that?"
"Tray hit the floor. That's all."
For a moment the only sound was the ragged pull of Evans's breathing.
I eased myself down into a more comfortable position between him and the neighbouring bed, the cane resting against my knee.
"Frightened the life out of me too," I added.
That got the smallest, strangest laugh from the younger man.
"No, it didn't."
"Did a bit", I said, dryly. "Thought the Kaiser had come through the wall himself."
Another breath came. Less sharp this time.
I let the silence sit for a few seconds before speaking again.
"You know where you are?"
Evans hesitated. "Hospital."
"That's right."
"In Germany."
"That too."
The boy's hands loosened slightly as he loosened the tight foetal position he had been in while lying on his side.
I kept my voice level, conversational even, as if they were talking over tea instead of two prisoners sitting on a cold floor.
"You can hear the wheels, can't you?"
Evans frowned beneath the bandages. "What?"
"The cart in the corridor. Comes by every evening. Left wheel squeaks."
We both listened.
A faint squeeeak… pause… A squeak drifted through the open doorway.
"There," I said. "Hear it?"
A slow nod was all that he replied with.
"That means it's just past supper. This means in ten minutes Davies in the bed one over from mine will start snoring so loud that I bet you can hear it from here. I swear that man could win a competition to see who's the loudest against a sawmill."
That earned a weak huff.
"And Jenkins," I went on, "will start complaining that the tea tastes like boiled socks."
Evans's shoulders began to drop, the panic bleeding out of him bit by bit.
"Loud noises feel worse when you can't place them," I said quietly. "Our mind starts filling in the blanks with all the worst things."
The younger soldier was silent.
Then, in a much smaller voice: "I thought I was back there."
Teddy knew exactly what he meant by there.
The barrage. The screaming. The dark.
"Aye," I said softly. "I know."
He let that truth settle between them.
"But you're not there now. You're here. Safe enough as any of us get." He nodded toward the sounds around them. "Listen to the room. Beds. Men breathing. Cart in the hall. Nothing's changed. Do that while focusing on your breathing."
Evans took a long, shaky breath.
Then another.
By the third, it almost sounded normal.
One of the orderlies gave me a grateful look from across the room, but I only waved him off.
Evans turned his bandaged face slightly toward my voice.
"Thanks."
I picked up my cane and stood, and one of the other men who slept in this ward quickly helped me up.
"That's what I'm here for," I said.
(Author's Note: Mannschaftslager is a non-labour prison camp for other ranks, also known as non-commissioned officers; it was often where lower-ranked soldiers that were unable to perform physical labour were sent. Most of the POWs captured at the Somme were sent to the one at Hameln in central Germany.)