What We Did for Love by Natasha Farrant

Author:Natasha Farrant [Farrant, Natasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-62324-030-1
Publisher: Enslow Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2014-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

II

Heading north, wrote Alois on the platform at Montauban. The station about him teemed with activity. Railway porters staggering under the weight of metal trunks, hawkers, girls in high heels wearing too much lipstick, all mingled with the sea of gray uniforms, the kit and arsenal being loaded onto the train. Alois Grand had learned a long time ago to do no more than what was expected of him. He did not help but sat on his own kit bag with his writing pad on his knees. Cigarette smoke stung his eyes as he leaned forward to write.

A week of rest and decent cooking and we are a different unit, with fresh blood come to swell our ranks. We old-timers look more grizzled than the new recruits, but we are just as fit. The Captain says it will be good to do some real soldiering again, after Russia. We are going to fight the Americans. We will lose—everyone knows we will lose—but we will be close to home, and soon I will be with you again.

The train was ready to leave. Alois’s carriage was overcrowded and dark, but he had claimed a seat by the window, and he carried on writing, using the tip of his cigarette to light the page while all around him his fellow soldiers drifted off to sleep.

Things I’m looking forward to about coming home, wrote Alois. Good coffee. Your schnitzels. Cinnamon rolls on Sunday mornings. Civilian clothes.

The train ground to a halt. The men in the carriage stirred. Some of them got up to pee. Alois kept on writing.

Remember when Wolf had scarlet fever? he wrote. And you were nursing him, and one of the things you did was you picked a rose to put by his bed. I asked you what the point was and you said, it won’t cure him, but it might make him feel better. And when he woke up he smiled because the first thing he saw was that rose. More and more I think that it is these small gestures that matter most. The things we have done, my darling, that I hope you never know! And yet every morning our Captain shaves in a bowl of hot water. Every day another comrade reads his Bible, and every day I write to you. Small things, but they remind us who we are.

I never looked at the people I killed, but when I sleep, my dreams give them the faces of my beloved—you, Wolf, my parents. I am coming back to you so tainted, so tainted. . . . My love for you both is the only good thing left about me, and yet how can I touch you with these bloody hands? I have made a pact with myself. No more killing between here and home. I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I want—ah, impossible! I want to be good.

They were on the move again, and Alois was growing drowsy.

Soon, he wrote. He folded the letter and slipped it into the breast pocket of his uniform.

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