A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [90]
Beneath the broad brim the eyes seemed to bore into Rutledge’s, as if judging him.
Rutledge looked away and took the car out of gear, setting the brake. He turned to consider his companion.
As if sensing his attention, the other man struggled back to alertness.
“I know who you are.” Rutledge spoke with more confidence than he felt. “You’re a German officer. That much has come back to me. I don’t know why you should be in Britain, much less here in Kent. I don’t know why a man should stab you without provocation. If I’m to decide what to do with you, I need the truth.”
The man said nothing. And in the lengthening silence, under the barrage of Hamish’s complaint, Rutledge was thrown back to another time—another place . . .
THERE HAD BEEN speculation since the beginning of the month, the first of November, a year ago now. The Allies had made great strides—the Germans were in disarray—Berlin had been taken over by a Revolutionary council—the Kaiser was to lead his troops out of France to restore order at home—there was widespread famine in Germany—negotiations for a truce had begun—broken down—It was impossible to separate truth from rumor.
The only certainty was that the fighting and dying hadn’t stopped.
And then, on 11 November, word came down just after nine in the morning that a document had finally been signed and an Armistice would go into effect at the eleventh hour of that day. Not a victory. A truce to end the stalemate.
The news had left Rutledge in emotional turmoil. Torn between an unspeakable relief for his men and an overwhelming weight of guilt for failing so many of them—the thousands who hadn’t lived to see this day—he moved in a fog of mental exhaustion. Faces, living and dead, seemed to crowd his mind, and the wording of the kind letters he’d written to parents of men he hardly knew, killed before they had had a chance to serve as more than cannon fodder, seemed to float in his brain. For more than two years, he’d seen himself as a dead man, like them; it was only a matter of time before he joined them. And now the war was ending. While he was still alive—
As watches moved slowly toward the appointed hour, the fighting never faltered. And then—without fanfare or flourish—it ended. Men were standing in the trenches, half dazed by the silence, uncertain at first, some openly weeping. Exhausted, weary beyond the ability of sleep to renew their spirit, they were wary of celebration, lest it lead to another disappointment, another grief. Numbed and unprepared, they had nothing to say.
Then one or two men climbed warily over the top for the last time, moving to stand by the first rolls of wire, staring across the devastated landscape that was once the rolling green farmland of northern France, before tons of shells and thousands upon thousands of bodies had been ground into the earth by the madness of war.
Men began to touch each other, began to laugh with nervous humor, began to acknowledge that they were alive, that they had survived—and then looked around as if half expecting to find the shades of the dead staring sadly back at them. Soldiers came to wring Rutledge’s hand and thank him for bringing them through. Others were hugging each other in a rising euphoria, and then stopping, as if not knowing what they should rightfully be doing. Ashamed of feeling at all.
A few Germans had come out of their trenches, staring at the English lines, their faces grim, their shoulders slumped with despair and relief.
Someone called across No Man’s Land; someone responded in the other lines. And then it was quiet for a time, as if men who had fought so long and so hard had nothing else to do with their lives, and felt the emptiness of nothing behind them, nothing ahead of them.
Rutledge began to issue orders, parroting the instructions he’d been given. A single voice pitched to normal levels sounded strange without the backdrop of battle or the silence of anxious waiting. One by one his men turned to listen to him. These soldiers who would, if the war had gone on for another week, another