The Road to Grantchester

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They start another charge, ten yards apart and no two abreast. The Bren gunners fire first and then the riflemen advance, each man carrying four hand grenades. Sidney runs in a darting motion, throwing the first grenade on command and the other three as soon as he can. Each one weighs heavy in his hands. He worries about them slipping in his sweat, his own manual dexterity, getting the pins out in time. He doesn’t want to blow his own legs off. He’s seen Gascoigne do that already. The only thing he has to do is to keep on running, firing his rifle when he has finished off the grenades, moving left when he is out of ammunition. The man next to him has his jaw blown off. There is no time to reload. He can’t stop. If he stays on the move, he tells himself, if he keeps breathing, if he changes direction, he will be safe.

Between the bursts of explosion and commands he can just make out Germans shouting ‘Grenade! Grenade!’, firing from their machine-gun positions before throwing their own and scrambling for cover.

Sidney concentrates on the immediacy of attack, defence and survival. He knows he has to feel more alive than he has ever felt before just to keep on living. He sees an object thrown in his direction: a grenade silhouetted against a blaze of gunfire. It lands three feet away but he is gone by the time it explodes. He runs back low into cover, vaulting sandbags and barbed wire, throwing himself down on to the ground, bruising his right side, exhausted, breathless, relieved and yet exhilarated.

‘I’ve never seen you move like that,’ says Kendall. ‘You know you run like a girl?’

‘And you can bugger off too,’ Sidney replies. ■

About the author

Since the publication of Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death in 2012, the books in James Runcie’s “Grantchester Mysteries” series have been translated all over the world. In October 2014, ITV/PBS launched Grantchester, starring James Norton as Sidney Chambers. The fourth series will air later this year. The Road to Grantchester is published on 21 March by Bloomsbury, £14.99. James Runcie lives in Edinburgh.