"India Edghill - We Are the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Edghill India)

WE ARE THE DEAD....
By India Edghill

“The war will be over by Christmas.”
—Famous last words

****

In Flanders fields

IF HE SURVIVED THE NIGHT, tomorrow would be his fourth Christmas Day in
the trenches. He had survived three Christmases in this purgatory of mud and noise
and blood they called the Western Front. Three ice-cold Christmas Eves, three
frozen Christmas mornings. Surely he could manage to live long enough to mark one
more anniversary of the birth of the Prince of Peace?

Already he had outlived his two brothers, his best friend, and half his
classmates at Trinity. He had even outlived his youngest sister. Lily had been a VAD
nurse; sacrosanct. A nine-inch shell had killed her and taken half a field hospital ward
with her. That had been last spring, just before the brief cease-fire that had
celebrated Easter.

Simon firmly closed away the memories of the endless dead and he tried
desperately to forget the count of his survival. It was bad luck. Instead, he bent once
more to his self-imposed task: the creation of a star. A Christmas star; a beacon to
mark the turn of another frozen year. For this year, this dead Christmas of 1917,
there was to be a tree. Somewhere in the mud and despair in which they existed,
Sergeant Bunter had found — no one had dared ask how — a holly tree. More of a
bush, really, if one were honest, and a bush more dead than alive at that. But some
of the holly leaves still greweth green —

“And parts of it are excellent,” as Peter had gleefully remarked upon
confrontation with the wretched object.

“So they are,” Simon had said, and, “Well done, Sergeant.”

And so for once they would keep a proper Christmas. Each man of Simon’s
squad had been told off to produce a suitable ornament for the miraculous tree —

“No questions asked or answered,” Peter had carolled, and then giggled in a
girlish fashion that would once have appalled Simon.

But such conventional reactions belonged to the living, not to the walking
dead. Peter had come to France only two months ago, arriving at Simon’s hard-won
section of the trenches on November First —
 “All Saints Day,” the newcomer had informed Simon, and handed him the
paperwork without which Those Above thought the war could be neither fought nor
won. “But I’m no ghost, I assure you,” he had added with a too-clear-eyed glance
around the room Simon’s men had dug deep into the mud of France.