The Victors by Max Hennessy

Author:Max Hennessy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

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It was impossible to wait for my father to recover and equally impossible to wait for him to die. The doctor made it very clear to me that there wasn’t much hope, but I had to go back. My father held my hand for a while without speaking, his eyes on my face as though trying to imprint it on his memory, and I sat like that until he fell asleep, then I tiptoed downstairs, picked up my bag, kissed my mother and left.

In London everybody seemed to know what was happening in France. ‘There’ll be another push,’ a man told me in the buffet at Victoria station. ‘And this time it’ll take us to Berlin. You see. There’ll be casualties, of course – a lot of ’em – but you’ve got to disregard those, like that damned crowd in parliament who’re always shouting for a negotiated peace.’

‘What are you shouting for?’ I asked.

‘Unconditional surrender,’ he said firmly. ‘Put the Kaiser in the Tower. We mustn’t give up until then, no matter what it costs.’

‘Are you likely to be called into the army?’ I asked.

‘Not me. I’m reserved.’

‘I thought you might be,’ I said.

With all the other old sweats humping their kit in stained ill-fitting uniforms, I went to join the leave train. I felt vaguely like a ghost, the ghost of Martin Falconer who’d joined up in 1915, still too young to vote but not too young to be killed, and I was only too glad to be away from all the background of hysterical flag-wagging and Keep The Home Fires Burning that was stirred up by people who were never in any danger of having to do anything else.

The war was making cynics of us all.

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