Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [136]
The shells are getting closer. Time to choose whether to stay in the open trenches and risk shell fragments, or to get into the dugout and chance being buried.
The sergeant’s brewing tea on the fire step, a nonchalant Woodbine hanging off his lip. He reminds me of old man Bloom, who kept a hut in the woods to keep an eye for poachers. The gamekeeper had a cough, too, like the sergeant has, though I suppose his came from the cigarettes and wood smoke instead of mustard gas like Sergeant West’s. What I’d give for a nice lungful of wood smoke now, clean and honest. I’d not even mind if
4 March
Three weeks ago, the shells suddenly got near enough to make me close this journal and button it into my pocket, and at that very instant, before I could even get to my feet, the world erupted and buried me alive. I woke on the stretcher a different man.
It makes me smile, to think that at the first sight of Hélène I thought she was a man. Her back was to me, of course—no-one looking into her eyes would ever make that mistake, no matter how scrambled his brains!—and she was wearing a heavy leather jacket with sheepskin at the collar. Then she turned to me, checking that I wasn’t going to be thrown to the floor when we hit a pothole, and thus undo all the work the bearers had gone to. I’ve never seen eyes like that, green as the hills she was raised in. Heaven only knows what she saw. I could’ve been a Chinaman for all she could tell, or old as her father or ugly as sin. I was clotted with France, hair to boot-lace, and stinking of battle.
18 March
A brief flurry of changes, and back I am, in the trenches again. Different trenches, same war.
Two days’ quick leave, after hospital and before reporting to my new regiment, and I used it to pay a visit to an aunt who had extended the invitation long ago. I had not seen Aunt Iris since I was in short pants, and her marriage to my uncle Marsh seems to exist in name only, so I had expected a certain amount of discomfort all around. Instead, I came away feeling that I had gained a blood relation, so easy was she to talk to. There were areas into which we did not go—I have my secrets and she very obviously has hers (if indeed one can have an obvious secret; still, I should say her friend Dan is one of those), and I have found it impossible to speak openly about what the War is actually like. No-one who has been through the trenches speaks freely with a person who has not done so. When the War is over, a great divide will cut through England.
Nonetheless, Iris seemed to read between my words, and to understand much that was unsaid. She fed me—how, with the restricted civilian rations, I neither knew nor asked—and clothed me and made me feel as if I had another home.
Whole, dry stockings! And two nights cradled by lavender-scented linen! Her flat gleams in my mind as an island of plenty, and of peace, and of all that is good in the world.
So, after a few brief hours behind the lines with my new regiment we came forward, and here I sit again, writing on the pages of my Egypt-leather journal while the shells fall in the distance.
But oh! What a difference from one month ago, for now I need but close my eyes and green eyes gaze back at me. And, is it not fate that my new posting is even closer to hers than the old?
24 April
Terrible news—the entire unit is to shift down the Line, near Reims. Good for the men, of course, since it’s a quiet sector for soldiers stretched near to breaking by the continual onslaught of the months past. But that’s miles away, miles beyond reach of my fair Hélène. I will find a reason to visit the aid post tomorrow (reasons are always so plentiful—shall it be my feet, or the festering cut on my arm, or the cough?) and wait for her to come in. I must see her once before I go,
2 May
The deed is done.