them and refused to leave.”
“We?” His voice was hoarse. “Are you speaking figuratively? You weren’t there?” he insisted. He did not want it to be true because of the danger to her, but as much as the knowledge of how close she had come to death, he did not want her to have been part of Cavan’s heroism.
“Yes, I was there,” she replied as if it still surprised her. “We were caught off guard. We didn’t expect the attack. It was well behind the lines.”
He was stunned. A shell exploded to their left, flinging mud up against the side of the ambulance and across the windshield. They lurched badly. Judith swore and wrenched the wheel over, trying to right them again. He leaned across and put his weight against it, his hands touching hers.
“Thank you,” she said matter-of-factly.
He did not reply, moving his hands away again and straightening himself in his seat. Suddenly he was acutely conscious of her, the mud and bloodstains on her gray dress, the curve of her cheek, the startling strength in her arms.
Ten minutes later they reached better roads which were still waterlogged, but without the shell holes, and they picked up speed. The rain eased until it was no more than a fine mist like a veil across the headlights, forever shifting and parting to show trees black against the sky. When they moved through villages, they found that a few buildings were burned out but most still stood, windows curtained against showing light. No one was in the streets.
“Have you been in France?” she asked him.
“Not lately,” he replied. “I was on the Eastern Front, up in Russia.”
“Is it as bad as they say?”
“Probably. Kerensky’s trying hard, but he’s changing too little. The time for moderation is gone. They want extreme now, someone more like Lenin or Trotsky. The hunger’s appalling.” He told her of individuals he had seen —the poverty, the hollow faces, the emaciated bodies. He said far more than he meant to, needing her to feel what he had, both the anger and the pity. He glanced sideways at her face, trying to read the emotions in it as she listened to him, seeing her expression fleetingly as they passed the lights of other vehicles. “Everybody’s sick of the war,” he finished.
“Only a madman wouldn’t be,” she replied, leaning forward to peer through the gloom. “But some things are necessary. Fighting is terrible. The only thing worse is not fighting.” There was no doubt in her voice, no wavering.
“Is it really better to fight?” he challenged her. “Always? Even at this cost?” His voice was harsher than he had meant it to be because his own certainties had been torn away, leaving him naked, and he hated it. “And do you really know enough about the French to judge?” The instant the words were out he regretted them. He wanted her as she had been the first time he had met her, ignorant and brave, luminous with her own belief, even if it was absurd, and wrong. It was what made her beautiful. “I’m sorry….” he started.
“Don’t apologize. Not to me. At least you have the courage to say what you believe.”
Should he answer her with the truth? He had seen the conditions in France, the unimaginable losses, the destruction, and it lacerated him with pity.
He did not want a division between them. He wanted her to care for him, to love him, but what use was that if he hated himself? What could he win with lies?
“It isn’t always the enemy you have to fight,” he said, weighing his words. “The French had reason for what they did. Enemies can be behind you as well as in front. The soldiers were mostly peasants, not revolutionaries at all. They objected to unfair rations and curtailed leave. New recruits were treated with favor while long-serving men were sent back to almost certain death, knowing their families at home were left to go hungry. Those who were excused from military service profiteered at their expense. Leave for agricultural purposes was based on political favoritism. They were willing to fight, and to die, but they wanted justice. I don’t see that as cowardice, or disloyalty.”
She remained silent, accelerating the ambulance over the smoother road. The rain had stopped and there were rents in the clouds. The moonlight showed the summer trees, heavy boughed and glistening as the headlights caught the wet leaves.
“I didn’t know that,” she said at last. “Poor devils. Do you think they’ll be executed?”
He heard the pity in her voice, but no anger that he had shattered her illusion. He reached out his hand to touch her, lay his fingers on her arm, then changed his mind and withdrew it. He did not want to risk being rebuffed. He knew how it would hurt.
“Only a few,” he answered her question. “Enough to make an example.”
She said nothing. A few minutes later they pulled in at the hospital. From then on everyone was busy helping to unload the wounded. The amputee was still alive, but very much weaker, and in great pain. The only thing that Judith or Mason could think about was getting him out of the ambulance and into a bed as easily as possible.
After the men were all unloaded, Judith was standing with Mason when Wil Sloan emerged from the side door of the hospital ward into the cobbled yard. He looked almost ghostly in the lamplight.
Judith went over to him and locked her arm in his, leading him across the yard to the ambulance. “Let’s see if there’s somewhere open for a glass of wine and a sandwich,” she said.
“It’s half past one in the morning,” he pointed out with a tiny smile.
She gave a shrug. “So we’ll find someone who’ll let us use their kitchen to make our own. We’ve got to sleep somewhere. Can’t go back to the trenches until I’ve cleaned the ambulance and got some more petrol anyway.” Mason had followed her. “Do you want to go back?” she asked him.
“Better than walking,” he replied. “Unless, of course, you’ll be shot for giving a civilian a ride?”
She gave him a quick smile. “We can always poke you with a bayonet, and put you in the back,” she offered. “Then you’ll be genuinely wounded!”
He was too tired to think of an answer.
Mason woke at five to find Wil Sloan’s hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently. It was already daylight and the ambulance was clean and refueled. There was time for bread and tea, and then they were in the yard beside the ambulance and ready to go again.
Judith looked tired. In the morning light, which was harder and colder than the dusk of yesterday, he saw the fine lines in her face and the shadows around her eyes. She was twenty-six, but she could have been ten years older. Her dress was plain gray and completely without adornment. The hem was still crusted with mud, but now he could see that the bloodstains were old and had already been washed many times. They were too soaked into the fiber ever to be removed.
She saw him watching her and gave him a tiny, self-conscious smile.
He remembered their first meeting with a catch in his throat that was as sharp as pain. It had been in 1915, in the Savoy Hotel. She had been dressed in a blue satin gown that had hugged her body and she had walked with a grace that had forced him to look at her. She had been angry, mistaken about almost everything, and utterly beautiful, enough to charm any man and stir forgotten hungers inside him.
Now the feeling was quite different. It was nothing to do with laughter or conquest, but a need within himself for something tender and clean, and immensely vulnerable, still capable of pain, and hope.
“Not quite the Savoy, is it?” she said drily, as if she had read his thoughts.
He felt the heat in his face. He wanted to look away from her, and could not. She would be gone too soon!
She was embarrassed also. “Come on!” she said quickly. “Get in!”
They spoke of general things. She asked him more about other battlefronts he had seen and he found it easy to tell her. He felt no more need to hide his feelings or his knowledge of casualties. He tried to describe the ravaged beauty of northern Italy with its exquisite skies over Venice and Trieste; the courage of partisan fighters in the mountains of Albania, particularly some of the women he had seen, struggling to get medical supplies to the wounded.
He even found himself explaining some of the moral dilemmas he faced as to how much or little he should tell the truth of certain events in his articles.
She listened with interest—and understood enough to offer no solutions.
It was a windy day with only a light rain. When they were two or three miles from the front, they saw a gun carriage on its side and a soldier standing beside it waving his arms in desperation. There were three others behind
