Читать книгу The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals - Elizabeth Smart - Страница 8

This is the scene outside, and it seems to synchronize with the scene within, for it is not at all what a five-year-old child would have seen, chasing his ball in a still-green Kensington Gardens; or what an old man would muse on, sitting in his club, having weathered both kinds of war, and forgotten them all.

But these two categories are outside the story, merely the cosy covers of the book.

What is to happen now?

Out of this weary landscape, girding your strengths around you, you are to step through a couple of decades with your children on your back, singing a song to keep them optimistic, and looking to left and right. For the right and not for the left.

Left right, Left right.

Are you a friend to me, sergeant-major con-science, strictly insisting on keeping in step with the true, the true, the true that you once knew, and not the invented possibilities that reeled in front of your reeling mind when the lightning lit up everything?

You expected a bill, and a bill is what you get. This is the bill. Now pay it.

Left right. Right turn. March into this meadow, heaving your heavy rucksack full of the future, and see what the present brings.

I am friendless, covered in mud, cowardly, weak, untrained. But signed up for the duration.

You brought it upon yourself. You have only yourself to blame.

True. True. Perfectly true. Too late to desert. Too late to heave off your crippling kit and head for the hills. The problem now is how to put one foot forward, never mind best, just foot, foot, foot. Forward. On. Just keeping your feet from going numb. Just keeping them functioning.

In what direction?

Just avoiding the bogs, snipers, snares, enemy propaganda. Taking cover in skirmishes. Using techniques of camouflage. Lying low when the tanks roll out of the woods, squashing all before them.

A couple of decades will see you out of this bondage. A couple of decades will bring honourable discharge.