Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [66]
Judith moved her gaze quickly, not wanting to see. It was absurd, but the sight of Cullingford with someone who was almost certainly his wife, reminded her of the reality of life outside the war, life the way it ought to be, and that she had no part in it with him. She belonged to battle, extreme hardship, not the way they longed for life to be again.
The clock on the mantelpiece struck seven. Beyond the windows a slight breeze stirred the leaves of a silver birch tree. At home in St. Giles there would have been starlings in the sky, swirling up behind the elms and swinging wide out over the fields. But that was in the past. It belonged in dreams, preserved where it was safe and the present could not touch it.
Twenty minutes later Prentice’s younger sister, Belinda, came home from the volunteer work she had been doing making up parcels to send to soldiers at the Front. She resembled Prentice also, but she was darker, her face had the same intelligence and eagerness, but it was softened by a kind of inner calm he had not possessed.
When Judith was introduced her weariness vanished. “You’re actually at the Front?” she said with fierce admiration, her eyes alight. “There with our men?”
Judith felt a mixture of pride and embarrassment. “I’m not actually in the trenches, although I know pretty much what they’re like. We don’t go further forward than the Casualty Clearing Stations where they bring the wounded back for us to collect.”
Belinda’s shoulders were tight, her face tense with her imagination. She had not yet sat down. “Is it very dreadful? I used to think of it as heroic, but Eldon said it isn’t, it’s filthy and degrading, and lots of the men are blown to bits without ever having a chance. He said that if we here at home had any idea what it was like, no one would join up to go there, because it’s for nothing. It would be quicker to catch a bus to the local abattoir along with the cattle.” She was searching Judith’s face, hungry for an answer. It was easy to imagine the quarrels they had had over it, her dreams, his anger. Now she was left with nothing but confusion, and no one to help her resolve the truths she needed to know for herself, not only to help her grief, but to continue now.
There might be someone else she loved out there in the trenches; if there was not now, there would be.
Judith composed her answer carefully. “It can be pretty shocking when you first get there,” she said to Belinda, avoiding Mrs. Prentice’s anxious eyes. “The smell is awful, he’s right about that. It tears your stomach, even when you get used to it. And there are rats, lice, fleas, all sorts of unpleasant things. Casualties are high, but we save most of the wounded.”
Belinda sat down slowly, her hands folded in her lap. She did not take her eyes off Judith’s face.
“But what it seems he didn’t tell you about is the friendship,” Judith went on. “The loyalty, the knowledge that the men beside you will share everything they have with you, food, warmth, shelter, jokes, laughter and pain, their lives if need be. Perhaps as a correspondent he didn’t see that, but it’s there in the front line. And the courage and sacrifice are there. That’s not just propaganda. The difference is that it is real, not words; and no words can tell you what it’s like, however passionate or clever. Maybe one poet will capture a little of it one day. Maybe the cold and the pain and the fierce, brave, kind, funny love of one man for his friends can’t even be told.”
There were tears on Belinda’s face, and she was not ashamed of them.
“I wish he could have known that,” she said, swallowing huskily. “I suppose he wasn’t there long enough.” Her words were brave, but her eyes betrayed her fear that it