English. She’s a teacher, at a school in a small village not far from Stratford—that’s how we met, when I was on the exchange course. We got engaged just before I was recalled to Germany, in June—I was in the reserve.” He took back the photograph of his girl and pulled another from his tunic.
“I have a favor, Hal,” he breathed softly. “This is a photo of me in uniform. Sam, of course, has never seen it—she hasn’t heard from me since war broke out.” He turned the photo over and held it out to me. I shied back, but he kept his hand out. “Her name and the name of the school she teaches at are on the back. Can you see she gets it? It would mean such a lot, to her and to me. I can surely never send it, but you can. I haven’t written anything, like a note. That would be dangerous, if it were found on you. Or if it were intercepted in any post that you sent to her.”
When he saw that I looked doubtful, he took a step forward. “We were very much in love—but will our feelings outlast this war? Will I outlast this war? She didn’t fall in love with me when I was one of the enemy, and if she had a photo of me, as I am now, maybe that will help clear her mind. She will have to keep the photo secret, of course. How could she live in England if she had a German fiancé? If the photo—the uniform—frightens her, turns her against me … well, that’s cleaner, honest, we will know where we stand, she can start putting me out of her mind. But I shall never forget her and the first thing I will do when this war is over is go looking for her. This photo will tell her all she needs to know.”
He still held out the snapshot. “Will you do it? Will you see that she gets this? Please. As a Christmas favor.”
He put the photo of his girl into his tunic pocket, and as he did so I was reminded of the disparity between Wilhelm’s gift—the three cigars in my tunic pocket, which I had accepted—and the pathetic plum pudding. Agreeing to do as he asked would make up for the disparity, a gesture that would reclaim some British honor in this exchange.
So I took the photograph and put it in my tunic pocket alongside the cigars.
THE TRUCE LASTED THROUGH BOXING DAY, though there was no more fraternization, not in our sector anyway. At midnight, however, the war resumed. To begin with, it was weird, shooting at men you’d enjoyed a smoke with. But then the bombardment started up again, the whistle of bullets filled the air at other times, and, inevitably, blood began to flow. The horror and madness resumed where they had left off.
A week later our unit was ordered to make a push for the small village of Plumont. We advanced under cover of dark and, at about eleven forty-five P.M. on Sunday, 3 January 1915, I took a bullet in my groin and the shooting war ended for me. The bullet that found me fractured my pelvis, I went down in a mudflat, and later I was told that I might have drowned but for a lance corporal who found me, saw that I was still breathing, and pulled my unconscious head out of the freezing water. I had passed out from loss of blood and pain and only came to hours later in a hospital tent outside Douai.
“It wasn’t easy for that lance corporal,” said the medical orderly who told me all this when I recovered consciousness. “But he said he owed you one. Man called Beddoes, or Meadows.”
The blood loss was stanched, the pain was stultified with drugs, and I was invalided home, via Calais, Folkestone, and Farnham, to a hospital in the Vale of Evesham called Sedgeberrow. There, my pelvis was reconstructed—to the best of the surgeon’s ability—and when the pain was under control my parents were allowed to see me. They had been to the hospital just after I had arrived, as had Isobel on a separate occasion, but I had been too sedated to realize I had visitors.
I didn’t know what to expect of my mother and father on their second trip. After all, my injuries were hardly life-threatening. Was my mother, who had been against the war from the start,