We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [106]
“I suppose so,” Joseph said slowly. “The change could come slowly, as it has for everyone, and perhaps the thought of going home has made him realize how deep it is.”
Matthew looked puzzled.
“Take Judith, for example,” Joseph tried to explain. “She isn’t the only one, but can you imagine how an average man would feel faced with a wife like her?”
“I know she’s my sister, but I always thought she was beautiful,” Matthew replied. “And rather fun. Awkward—but you get used to that. Underneath it she’s pretty decent, if you’re being serious. And you are, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Very. She’s also bright and articulate, and she’s got more courage than most men I know. She’s a better driver, and can mend an engine with almost anything that comes to hand. She’s steady under fire, can give first aid to the wounded or the dying. She’d probably shoot a man if she had to, and I can’t imagine her fainting or having a fit of the vapors like our aunts and grandmothers.”
“I know. We’ve all changed,” Matthew agreed.
“Do you know it, really?” Joseph pressed. “I think I’m only beginning to see how much. Are we going to be able to deal with it with some courage and grace?”
Far over their heads a reconnaissance plane circled slowly and banked hard, swinging off to the east, looking like a dragonfly over an endless marsh of zigzag ditches in the mud. “It isn’t that sudden, Joe,” Matthew pointed out.
“He may not have had much chance until recently,” Joseph reasoned. “If he were at the front line, and not injured, he wouldn’t see anyone except the occasional ambulance driver. Maybe not even that.”
“You mean this was his first opportunity?” Matthew asked. “Could be. Before then his violence was very properly turned toward the enemy.” He winced.
Joseph knew what he was thinking, but there was no time now to dwell on the effect of war on young men. Certainly there was nothing they could do about it. “We have to find out what happened to someone that made his rage or sense of helplessness explode.” His memory reached back over the distress he had seen even in the last few years, the letters men had received from home about the loss of other members of their family or close friends. The grief was hard and deep-scouring. But it was deceit that tore men apart, wounding irreparably: the sweetheart who could not or would not wait, the children they barely knew, the babies born whom they might never see. Worst by far were the wives who betrayed.
Matthew watched his brother’s eyes squint narrowly in a sudden burst of sun, dazzling where it caught the water in a series of craters, rippled by the east wind till the light danced. “Don’t you know, Chaplain, if you really think about it?” he asked quickly. “Who’s been cheated and left by a woman he loved, and should have been able to trust? Who’s been belittled or laughed at? Everyone’s been changed by what they’ve seen out here, even more by what they’ve done. Nobody is going to go home the same as they were before. Who has a wife that can’t accept that?”
Joseph thought of them, one after the other, hearing again in his mind the tight, quiet voices of men for whom the gulf had become too great, whose friends were now strangers to whom they could no longer explain themselves, no longer share the laughter or the pain of the things that lay deepest. Perhaps it was the ultimate price of war, the change to the living more than the loss of the dead.
“It’s Dante again,” he said aloud. “Rewarded not for what we do, but by it—and by what we see, and what we see others do?”
Matthew said nothing.
“The Inferno,” Joseph explained unnecessarily, wondering if some of Dante’s wasted landscape of hell might look a bit like this. Did the River Styx look like this slow-moving mud, filled with human remains from battles won and lost? That would symbolize despair very well. What about the forward lines now, all rage and noise, flame of gunfire and shattering destruction, the landscape of anger?
What about the uniquely human sins of corruption and betrayal? How