We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [17]
“’Course it was,” Oldroyd agreed, ignoring his lunch of bread and cheese. “Do you think I don’t know that?” There was a challenge in his voice.
That was exactly what Mason had thought, and anger at the old men who stayed at home burned hot inside him. The delusions of glory and the ignorance of what real death was like in the mud and terror of the trenches were what made wars like this possible. “Where exactly would you like to have been?” he asked, and then wished he had not. The cruelty would serve nothing. Oldroyd belonged to the past. It was pointless to try to drag him into the harsher light of the present. He would die of old age soon, still understanding nothing.
“One place?” Oldroyd asked, thinking about it, his face pursed up, eyes almost lost in the folds of his skin. “I would like to have walked into Jerusalem last year with Allenby. I could just about imagine it from what you wrote, but you saw it, you were there. December 11. You didn’t say much about his big cavalry victory at Megiddo last month. Reckon Aleppo and Damascus won’t be long. But Jerusalem is different; it’ll always be different. Went in as a man should, to the Holy City.” He looked at Mason. “Jaffa Gate, wasn’t it, with that big, square tower above it, and the crenellated walls? Crowded with people, you said. All looking down at one Englishman, alone and on foot.”
“Did I say that?” Mason thought it sounded overemotional, sentimental, and he despised himself for it.
Oldroyd was watching him intently now, judging. “Yes, you did. Did you lie?”
Mason was too tired to be offended. He picked up his bread to eat it. “No. That’s how it was. It just sounds…predictable.”
“Shouldn’t it?” Oldroyd asked. “Did you expect differently?”
“I don’t think I expected it to happen at all.” Mason was quite honest. “After so much dust and blood it all seemed ridiculously pedestrian, exhausted and aching men doing things we have become desperately used to. No trumpets, no drumrolls, just a bald, middle-aged Englishman in an army uniform. Apart from his badges of rank, he looked like anyone else.” He bit into his bread and continued with his mouth full. “I was actually thinking about the future of the Middle East after the Turkish Empire is gone. Who will rule what, and how? Will the ordinary people be any better off, any freer from hunger or oppression?”
“Heroes are ordinary people, Mason,” Oldroyd told him. “They’re not ten feet tall. It’s the inside that’s different, not the outside. You could walk past Christ in the street if you weren’t looking for Him.” He sighed. “Come to think of it, most of us do.”
“Maybe that’s why we usually put Him on a cross,” Mason said grimly. “At least that’s different. Although I think it’s peculiarly appropriate as a symbol of humiliation and pointless suffering. No wonder Europe worships Him. We see ourselves, our whole race, in one image of the ultimate defeat.”
Oldroyd leaned forward, his hands clenched, his face so grave that his skin was tight across the sharp bones of his cheeks beneath his sunken eyes. “It’s what a man fights for that defines who he is, boy! And a man who doesn’t love anything enough to pay what it costs doesn’t deserve to have it. Sometimes it costs pain and blood and terror. Sometimes it’s years of quiet weeping. Sometimes it’s waiting in the dark, without giving up.” He blinked, as if seeing other times and people for an instant. “My grandfather fought Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. My father and I fought in the Crimea, Battle of the Alma, 1854. I was twenty-three. Heard General Campbell tell us, ‘There’s no retreat