Overseas by Beatriz Williams

Author:Beatriz Williams [Williams, Beatriz]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Romance, Fiction, General, Time Travel
ISBN: 9781101584903
Publisher: Putnam Adult
Published: 2011-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

I quoted, into my soup. “Excuse me, but no man is that patriotic.”

“You’ve memorized it?”

“I told you, I wrote an essay on it in high school.” I looked up at him and smiled, a little ruefully. “I had to compare you to Wilfred Owen.”

“How did I come out, in your estimation?”

“I think I stumped for Owen,” I admitted. “I thought ‘Overseas’ sentimental, especially laid next to those froth-filled lungs of Owen’s. But you were writing during the first part of the war, before the Somme, and he wrote at the end. That was the point of the essay, you see…” My voice dwindled. “But I liked yours the most. I thought it was the most hopeful, the most redeeming, especially that bit at the end about defeating eternity. Poor Owen’s just miserable. There’s no compromise, nothing to soften the blow. Nothing to hope for.”

“Well,” Julian said meditatively, “the war itself was bleak and horrible. Either you saw a higher purpose in it, or you didn’t.”

“Did you?”

He considered. “I suppose so. Partly because I was doing my duty, not just to my country but to the men I commanded. And partly because I was a silly young ass, after all, just out of university, thinking myself jolly splendid in my uniform. It suited that rather barbaric streak to my nature. Going from the quite rigid civilization of my earlier life, its petty proprieties, its various hypocrisies, to going without washing for a week at a time. Up all night, running raids and repairing wire and that sort of thing.”

“Weren’t you scared? Horrified?”

“Well, yes. Of course. Shell fire particularly; most nerve-racking, that. Incessant bloody noise. And the beastly snipers taking potshots at all hours. But you see, I was one of those lucky chaps that could stand it, more or less.”

“I’m not sure I buy that. I don’t see how it couldn’t affect you.”

He ran one finger along the stem of his glass. “Look, I didn’t say it didn’t affect me. But I don’t brood about it. I don’t know why; perhaps because I never fought a major action, only damned little raids and patrols. Perhaps because I’d been stalking deer and shooting birds all my life; I hadn’t any illusions about what happens when one fires a gun and hits something. Or perhaps because it was all overshadowed by what came after. Really, Kate, what do you want me to say? That I’m wounded inside and I need you to heal me?” He said it lightly, teasingly, but I caught a faint note of warning in his voice.

I leaned forward, unimpressed. “So why did you write the poetry, if you didn’t need to get things off your chest?”

“Kate, everybody wrote poetry. My formal education, you understand, consisted largely of memorizing endless sections of verse, epic and otherwise. I could jolly well recite you every bloody word Milton ever wrote. Virgil, in Latin. The entirety of Henry V. ‘Once more unto the breach’ and all that. So it was more or less

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