by John Masters
Cate laughed. ‘Just the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Miller. I’ll only see His Majesty if he makes a state visit to Kent.’
‘He will, sir, he will … But you’ll still be living here, sir, in the Manor? You won’t have to live in London?’
‘Oh no. We’ll be back on Wednesday … then we sail for America ten days later … then home to the same old life … paying bills … milking cows … mending hedges …. hunting a few days … church on Sundays … trying to keep Probyn Gorse out of mischief …’
The stationmaster seemed reluctant to leave them and go on about his business, whatever it had been. He said, ‘It hasn’t changed much, has it? Yet, everything’s changed. Danged if I know how that can be, but it’s so …. isn’t it, sir?’
‘Yes,’ Cate said. ‘But I can’t express or explain it, any better than you can.’
‘I wonder, sometimes,’ the stationmaster said hesitantly, ‘if we could ’a done any better – in the war, I mean. Might it be that if we’d all done better … been better, like … then we’d have our Charlie and Jerry here still, and you’d have Mr Laurence. I can’t sleep at night, thinking, did we do all right? Was there any more we could have done? We won, but here we are, and everything’s different, because Charlie and Jerry and Mr Laurence aren’t… them and a million more, that ought to be.’
Cate said, ‘We did all right, Mr Miller – your generation and mine. The young did better and we have to hand over to them now … to Sir Guy and Lady Rowland, to Captain Woodruff, Fletcher and Betty Gorse … I don’t know what’ll happen, but they … Charlie and Jerry and Laurence and the rest of them – they’ll shape the future just as much by their deaths as by their lives. You and I will never forget them, because they were our sons. And England can never forget them, because they were its blood, and still are.’
The signal wires running along the ground under the edges of the platform creaked and the signal dropped with a heavy clang, the light changing from red to green. The Hedlington train came chuffing up the slight gradient, its side rods clanking, a dim light cast forward from the single indicator lamp on its buffer beam.
‘All stations to Hedlington!’ Mr Miller cried. ‘Walstone! Walstone! All stations to Hedlington!’
The Cates climbed into an empty first-class compartment, and took facing corner seats. They looked at each other, serious, silent, loving, as the ancient engine determinedly chuffed and clanked through Felstead & Whitmore, Cantley, Scarrowford, to Hedlington, London, and the future, the Great War at last left behind, yet eternally with them, with the land on which the rails lay, and with the people in the surrounding darkness.
Family Tree
A Note on the Author
John Masters was born in Calcutta in 1914. He was educated in England but in 1934 he returned to India and joined the Fourth Prince of Wales’s Own Gurkha Rifles, then served on the North-West Frontier. He saw active service in Waziristan in 1937 and, after the outbreak of war, in Iraq, Syria and Persia. In 1944 he joined General Wingate’s Chindits in Burma. He fought at the Singu Bridgehead, the capture of Mandalay, at Toungoo and on the Mawchi Road. John Masters retired from the Army in 1948 as Lieutenant-Colonel with the DSO and an OBE. Shortly afterwards he settled in the USA where he turned to writing and soon had articles and short stories published in many well-known American magazines. He also wrote several novels and was especially praised for his trilogy of the Great War: Now, God be Thanked, Heart of War and By the Green of the Spring. He died in 1983 in New Mexico.
Discover books by John Masters published by Bloomsbury Reader at
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Now, God be Thanked
Heart of War
By the Green of the Spring
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain in 1981 by Michael Joseph Ltd
Copyright © 1981 John Masters
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eISBN: 9781448214792
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