We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [4]
Harrison looked sideways at him. The light was broader now, cold and white, and they could see each other’s faces. He lit a cigarette, cupping the brief flame in his hands. “Everything’s changed at home. Women do half the jobs we used to have. Couldn’t help it, the men were away or dead. Or crippled, of course! But it’s still different.” He stared at the dregs of his tea. “God, that tastes foul! But how long will clean water and no more guns be enough for us, Chaplain? We’ll be strangers, most of us. We’re heroes at the moment, because we’re still fighting, but what about in six months, or a year? One day we’ll have to deal with the ordinary things. We’ll get used to each other, stop being polite and careful. When I’m home on leave now people can’t do enough for me. I’m given the best in the house.”
Joseph said nothing. He knew exactly what Harrison meant, the intended kindness, the meaningless conversations, the silences they couldn’t fill.
“I still have nightmares on leave,” Harrison said softly, blowing out smoke. “I can hear the guns even when they aren’t there. I think of the men who won’t come back, and I see that terrible stare in the faces of too many who look as if they’re whole, until you see their eyes. We’re frightened we’ll be killed in the last few weeks, and we’re frightened of going home and being strangers and alone, because we don’t fit in anymore.”
He waited several minutes before answering. Everything Harrison said was true. Joseph tried not to think about the emptiness of going back. He was needed here, desperately needed, so much that the burden of it was sometimes crushing.
“I know,” he said at last. “We’re all afraid of the future, because we don’t know what it will be. But we can’t let men kick a German prisoner to death, whatever they feel. If we are no better than that, in God’s name, what have ten million men died for?”
“I’ll talk to them,” Harrison promised. He pinched out his cigarette, then threw the dregs of his tea away. “It won’t happen again.”
The following day, October 12, Joseph was back in the Casualty Clearing Station as prisoners continued to come through the lines. Most were marched back into camps, where they would be held as the Allied army moved eastward over the old battlefields toward the borders of Germany. The few who were seriously wounded were kept in the clearing stations until they could be moved on without risking their lives.
There was sometimes information to be gained from them, but it was of little use now. The terrain had been fought over back and forth and was known intimately, every dugout, every trench. Only the craters changed as the guns fired ceaselessly, churning up old clay, old corpses, the wreckage of armor. The movement of regiments varied too often for yesterday’s prisoners to tell what tomorrow’s deployment would be.
Joseph spent much of his time translating between the prisoners and doctors. His German had been fluent even before the war. He had spent time there studying, and he cared for both the land and its people. Like any other Englishman, he’d found the idea of fighting Germany troubling and unnatural. He knew that the soldiers on the other side of the lines were too much like the men from his own village whom he talked with every day. It was the governments, the tide of history, that made one country different from the other.
He had been behind the lines last year and seen the suffering of the ordinary people, the hunger and fear. He remembered the German soldiers who had helped him. They had shared Schnapps and sung songs together. Hunger, fear, and wounds were the same in any language—and weariness, and the love of home.
Now he was standing in the Resuscitation tent, trying to reassure a prisoner with an amputated leg. Rain beat intermittently on the canvas. The man was not much more than twenty, his eyes sunken with pain and the shock of being suddenly mutilated, his country beaten, and himself among strangers. Nationality seemed an irrelevance.
Joseph knew that he