We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [5]
“When will your armies be in Germany?” the young man asked him shortly after midnight.
“I don’t know,” Joseph said frankly. “There’s still a lot of hard fighting. The war may be over before we actually cross the border.”
“But you will get there, tens of thousands of you—” He left the sentence hanging as if he did not know how to finish it. His face was sweating despite the cold, and his teeth were clamped together so the muscles of his jaw were tight, bulging under the gray-white skin.
Suddenly, with a sense of shame, Joseph knew that the man’s fear was not for himself. The desperation of his fighting had come not from hate or the hunger for a German victory, but simply from the driving fear of what would happen to his family when enemy soldiers poured into the homeland of those who had killed their comrades, their friends and brothers, and revenge for it all lay open before them. Perhaps he knew what had happened to Belgium in 1914, and had been repeated over and over in every town and village. It might have appalled him as much as it did British soldiers to see the beaten and bereaved people, the burned-out farms, and the eyes of the women who had been raped.
If the tide had gone the other way—and there had been years when it had seemed inevitable that it would—then German troops would be marching through the little villages of Cambridgeshire: St. Giles, Haslingfield, Cherry Hinton, and all the others. The enemy would walk the cobbles of the familiar streets where Joseph had grown up. German soldiers would be sleeping under the thatched roofs, tearing up the gardens, perhaps killing the beasts to provide food, shooting those people who resisted. Women he had known all his life would be confused and humiliated, ashamed to smile or be seen to offer a kindness.
He saw the fear in the German’s eyes now, and the bitter knowledge that he had failed to protect his women, perhaps his children. He would rather have died in battle. And yet what use was he to them dead? What use was he to anyone, a prisoner, and with only one leg?
Could Joseph tell him with any honesty that his women would not be violated, or his house burned? After four years of horror, inconceivable to those who had not endured it, and slaughter that numbed the mind, could he say the victors would not take payment for it in blood and pain? Some men retained their humanity even in the face of hell. He had seen it. He could name scores of them—living and dead. But not all the men had done so, not by a long way.
Should he comfort this young soldier lying ashen and broken-bodied in front of him by telling him lies? Or did he deserve the truth? A dubious honor.
What would he want himself? Would he want to think Hannah was safe, even if it were not true? And her children—the boys and Jenny? What about Lizzie Blaine, who had been such a friend to him when he was home wounded in 1916? The thought of her frightened and shamed by a German soldier was so hideous his stomach churned, and for a moment he was nearly sick.
He had not heard from her lately. He had tried not to count how long it was, but he knew: six weeks and two days. He had not expected it to hurt so much, but every mail call without a letter from her was like a blow to a place already aching.
The German was still watching him, uncertain now if he was going to answer at all.
“Where is your family?” Joseph asked him.
“Dortmund,” the man answered.
Joseph smiled. “It’ll be a long time before they get that far.” He tried to sound confident. “The worst will have worn off by then. There’ll be some discipline. They’ll be regular troops. Most of the volunteers will have gone home. We’re all tired of war.