They have given the regiment leave, which we have surely earned with our magnificent display of backwards marching all the way through northern France.
He put the pen down for a moment, reaching for the right tone. The enemy had run them ragged, from the first failure in the Ardennes to the final evacuation at Dunkirk. The Germans had had more concentration, more conviction, more force. When one thought of the enemy it was with a queer mix of fear and admiration. It was absurd that one could not simply hold up one’s hand and say: “Look here, well done, I think that will do for now.”
I am slightly injured in the arm, but still surely a better batsman than you. Also they have made me Captain. You are to think of me as a blazing comet, inbound, in an officer’s uniform with a wound medal.
Splinters of glass were still working themselves out of him—he had got the arm up just in time to shield his face when a window had blown out in Mont-de-Piété. It was nothing. More than pain, it produced an unwelcome feeling of separation from the people around him. He supposed he ought not to be surprised. The product of war was solitude, after all—the lover bereaved, the conversation truncated—so it was hardly amazing if a near miss left one feeling a little disconnected.
As for you, I trust that Caesar is a vigilant chaperone and . . .
In a group of poor positions dug into the beach at Dunkirk, less than a week ago, Alistair had huddled with his men. Shells had screamed down and exploded on the beach at unpredictable intervals. Smoke blinded everyone: a sharp amalgam of black soot from ships that were stricken, and white chemical smoke that the British destroyers were laying in a screen. It made a lachrymose fog that reddened the men’s eyes and left their throats raw.
Alistair stood above the lip of his dugout. “How do you like this weather?” he called to his senior sergeant, Blake.
“Very seasonal, sir,” the man shouted from the next dugout. “With your permission, I might take a few of the men along the beach for ice creams.”
“Very good,” called Alistair. “See if you can pick up some deck chairs while you are at it. We could rent them out here quite tidily.”
“Captive audience, isn’t it sir?”
Alistair nodded. “Get HQ on the radio and have them send us a Punch and Judy booth. If you behave, I shall let you be Judy.”
He waited for Blake’s comeback, but Blake collected shrapnel to his body and crumpled sideways without fuss. Alistair tensed his muscles and readied himself to jump out of his dugout and help Blake. But here he was, sitting in a train carriage, writing a letter to Tom. He rubbed his temples, coaxing himself back into the present.
. . . that Caesar is a vigilant chaperone and that . . .
Alistair’s men had been on the beach for two days. Mingled with the smoke was the stink of feces and urine. There was no possibility of establishing proper latrines, so they used their own dugouts. Bombs hit the beach fifty to the hour, whistling down through the haze from bombers unseen. At longer intervals the yellow-nosed Messerschmidts burst over the coastal dunes with no warning—so low that one could make out the rivets—and tore up the beach with their cannon. Sand lifted in gouts, to fall again in an endless fine rain. Men died with their gaze open to heaven and sand accruing on their eyes.
. . . is a vigilant chaperone and that your dancing is improving.
He leaned his forehead against the train window, breathing hard. He watched the green fields rush by. Only this was real, he told himself: this ripening wheat, that flint-walled barn, those ewes. What he had not understood, before battle, was that time could become a ribbon to be looped and pinned back to its center, the petals of a black rosette.
I won’t cramp your style with that girl of yours, so I shan’t stay at the garret. I shall stay at Robertson’s—that little hotel on Shooter’s Hill Road. Call for me there when you get this.
The train hissed into Charing Cross. Alistair folded the note for Tom into its envelope, took his duffel bag from the rack, and stepped down onto the platform.
It was hot in London. He walked north from the station—at noon, by his watch—but no clocks struck. The bells were blanketed in their belfries, to be rung only if the enemy invaded. Such plans were a comfort to civilians, he supposed, although having met the Germans in their present humor, Alistair felt it unlikely that bells would make much difference whether silenced, rung or melted down and made into metal plates for tap shoes.