(2 A fd) There’s something about the quietness of this place. The way everything is so calm and you know exactly what time Mrs Peters lets out her cat, or when all the Mill workers will flood home in time for supper, that’s comforting. A far cry away from what we had on the Front Line. Oh, of course we had structure, a rigid one at that with military precision, but there was also always that fear, sitting in the back of your mind, that any second now artillery shells would come raining down, and you'd have to drop whatever it was you were doing at the time with only a second’s notice, and that structure would be broken. ad | don’t miss it. Or at least, | don’t miss the terror of it all or the horrible chaos of an attack. | don’t miss seeing my men ~ the ones | was supposed to be in charge of >dying, right in front Ease of my eyes. | don’t miss that but don’t think} shall be able-to-forget it. No. I'm not sure! “2a. y want to. If I could close my eyes, and let it slip out of my memory, | would lose an important, part of my life, there’s no denying that. | don’t want to deny it. It happened. It happened to me and all those hundreds of other lads and it ought not have all been in vain. It’s not something this country could ever forget. But sometimesdo-miss it. Awful as that sounds, there were some good times to be had. | met people | never would have met. | travelled to France, crossed the Channel and left Holme far behind me. And sometimes, if | was walking to the Front Line early that day from one of the support trenches, everything would be still. Almost as if the land was dead, but not quite. Only sleeping, There wasn't much beautyut}in no-mans-land but @Gtothe yemde_/ distance, right across the horizon, you could make out the outline of the hills, the countryside that was not yet tainted by all this madness. Reminded me of Holme. Reminded me of my wife. | missed her something terrible these last three years, seeing her only once when | got ira iitiepra confine reece) I did love to see her, | also had to leave her. All over again¥And while Twas here, people seemed so distant, like shadows and | couldn’t make out their faces. It was too bright here, my eyes weren’t used to it, and | would catch whispers of the shells whenever | let my mind rest too long. | must have been imagining it~ you couldn't hear the guns all the way from France — but they felt real, and close by too. aa I don’t hear them anymore. Now | know I’m never going back, | can’t go back, my mind doesn’t see the point of pretending. Of course, that's only when I'm awake. At night, |hear them, and I see other things as well. | won't describe them, they're too terrible for that, but I think my wife knows when | wake up in the dead of night, shaking and sweating like | had a fever, and I can see their faces, all of them, but | can’t tell her this, even though she knows. And she pretends she doesn’t. She lies stiff, unconvincingly asleep, grasping the sheets tight in her little hands, hardly breathing, while | try and calm myself. Sometimes I’m trembling so much that I can’t sit still and | have to get up and walk about. My pacing sometimes turns. into marching and there’s something very comforting about that, about knowing which foot you're moving and where you're putting it, knowing the lads on either side of you will be doing the exact same thing and you move forwards together. After a while, | would come back to bed, and my wife would still be lying like that, unmoving like a corpse, so | would have to wake her, just to check she were still breathing.| think it’s hard for her to understand that I've got an entire war in my mind, so she fusses about with the physical injuries, the ones she can see. They're all healing well now. The gas attack blistered my skin but once | was in a clean place the pus started to disappear and the soreness gradually relented. My skin is shiny now, like a baby, soft and new. And my eyes, | thought I'd gone blind when all the darkness rose about me, and men were screaming that they couldn’t see ~ thank God no damage was done, although it can be hard to focus es and | don’t think Ill ever be able to play cricket again. Not that there are enough men left in the village to make a team, but maybe after the war they/ll rally together and we can put the Milnthorpe club back in their place. ¢4eny- tev: ' hope so. It would be nice to see the boys all dressed in white again, holding nothing but a bat and guarding nothing but a wicket. Maybe I'lljoin them. My sight might get better yet and I could play. I'm not as fast as | used to be, and I’ve lost a lot of muscle, but I’m willing and a team player and it’s just a bit of fun after all. Yes. Once this war's ended, then we'll arrange some matches. | think that’s what we need/to cheer the village up. We'll doit. Once this war's ended. We'll doit. / nee yt’ gst? flues poten more powg