In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard

Author:Robert Goddard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical Mystery, Early 20th Century, WWI, 1910s
ISBN: 9780552162968
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2010-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

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seven

Iwent straight to the railway station and waited for the next train down the line. There, where the troika bells on Lucy’s harness had first summoned me, unsuspecting, into Meongate’s taut enactment of a private war, I began at last to trace the path I’d overlooked till then. I was the only passenger on the platform, waiting in the brooding stillness while the affable old porter manoeuvred a trolley in the shadow of the station canopy: nothing else moved, nothing stirred, nothing verified the sensation I nevertheless felt—I wasn’t alone, save by the trick of time, wasn’t free of others who’d begun a journey there. Nor, now, were they free of me.

When the train duly came, and I boarded it, the sensation grew.

It chugged and clanked southwards, its lurching progress became a metaphor in my mind for the reluctant approach of an uncomfortable truth. I shared a compartment with a child and his demure governess, who was at constant pains to prevent him asking why I wasn’t in the Army. I was wearing mufti and they weren’t to know, but even her embarrassment didn’t stir me, didn’t break the mood of uncertain, fatalistic familiarity. As on that first long train journey across Normandy to the Front, I had no idea what was growing ever and slowly nearer, only a presentiment, a shade of a suspicion that it was worse than I thought yet, in some strange way, exactly what I expected.

At Fareham, I changed to another train, full of boisterous sailors returning to Portsmouth. Once again, I was immune to their mood, alone in my world of motionless turmoil. While they 178

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