Chapter Text
THE WAR OFFICE, 23RD MARCH 1941
NOTICE OF PHYSICAL EXAMINATION
Please report to your local war office for a physical examination preluding official conscription.
CONSCRIPTION NOTICE TO ALL FAMILIES IN THE NORTH MANCHESTER AREA
The first time Bard says goodbye to his children for anything longer than a night or two was at a train station, the rain sleeting down outside the poor shelter of the roof overhanging the platform. It is a miserable day, but every day this Spring has been poor so far, stinging hail falling long into March, their narrow street freezing over long after the warmth of the season should have reached them. It has rained almost solidly for the last three days, and the streets are running with water, soaking into their shoes as they try and make the already long walk to the station last even longer, even a few extra moments together a blessing, right now.
At least they are going together, he thinks as he passes them their bags, the three small cases, battered and borrowed from neighbours, not even their own. Their own possessions are scant enough that they don’t need any more: the few things inside the cases rattle around as they take them from him, already on the train, the space inside another grim reminder of how little they have.
Now the train whistle is screaming, and Tilda is hanging out of the window of the carriage door. She looks scared and she looks defiant, angry and full of grief, her emotions too complex for someone that age to wear. Her goodbyes pour from her eyes as much as they do her mouth, and it hurts to have to wave goodbye to her.
He’d hoped, when they announced the new additions to the National Service act eighteen months earlier, that fathers who were the sole caregivers to their children would be exempt, but he had been wrong. Mothers in the same position, yes, but not fathers – he had hoped that the envelope, when it had arrived on his doorstep, would contain orders to join the men working in the coal mines, had almost expected that outcome, and the actual letter had left him half-faint for a moment as he had read it over.
There it was, in black and white, a declaration that he was deemed fit and young enough still to join the war effort on the western front. His children should have been evacuated months ago, really. Nearly all the children are gone, most of the schools are closed through lack of teachers. It was only a few well-placed old friends of his wife’s, old military types in the area, who had let Bard keep his children this long.
They had never approved of Bard, but they had loved his wife dearly, and would do anything that they could to keep what was left of her family together.
But not even they could keep him here at home forever, and people have been looking at him askance for months now anyway, wondering why he is still here, and not serving King and country overseas. There is anger in their eyes, and sadness too, for the sons and fathers that they have lost to gunfire, for the wives and daughters who have gone away to fight a war that doesn’t seem to be ending. He can’t hold their sorrow against them, but it has started to frustrate him none the less.
I have children! He wants to tell them, wants to yell aloud for the world to hear every time he sees someone with a white feather moving closer to him. Two girls, and a beautiful boy, and they need me! They don’t have anyone else. We don’t have anyone else!
He can’t make excuses now that his children are being sent to the countryside, for all that he wants to rage and demand that they make an exception for them. But the man always wants to be special: everyone always believes that they are so much more important than everyone else. But he isn’t, and though he doubts he’ll make any great difference on the front he knows that it’ll still be more than he would make waiting here.
Except to his children, of course. But he knows that they’ll be safer away from the crumbling residue of the city, from the air raids that wake them in the middle of the night, healthier away from the smoke pouring from ruined buildings and the factories that work at full pace now, day and night; they’ll be better off away from home. Too many bombings in the industrial city, too dangerous for little ones. And he doesn’t have enough, not really: they haven't introduced rationing yet but it is only a matter of time, what little they all have stretching thin, and he doesn’t have any land to grow anything extra – all they have is the stone flagged yard, narrow and dim, and a door that opens up onto the muddy canal bank. They’ll be going to a family with green land, and warm fires, and enough to spare.
And that’s okay, he tries to tell himself.
He’s been telling himself that every day ever since the inevitable came knocking.
It isn’t working.
He pretends that the smoke pouring from the engine is the reason that his eyes are stinging, and he leans up one last time to kiss Tilda through the open window; he reaches a hand in and squeezes Bain’s wrist, touches the edge of Sigrid’s jaw, the only part of them that he can reach through the narrow gap afforded to him by the rolled down glass in the carriage door.
He had pressed his father’s pocket watch into Sigrid’s hands as they parted, and she has promised to look after it. It came to him as the oldest, and now it is his turn to pass it on to his own first child, his beautiful girl. He knows that she will care for it. It’ll be better with her than it will be in the house, which is likely to be broken into whilst it is empty, by the desperate people left behind, and it will certainly be safer with her than on the front, with him.
Where he is going there won’t be any safety.
He knows that he has to go to war, even feels a small amount of pride at the fact that he would be following so many of his friends to the front, and he packs up the last of the house after he returns home trying only to think of that fact, rather than how empty the old place sounds without the running feet of three kids around the place. He takes his father’s old tobacco tin and slips the only photograph he has of his wife inside, the one where she started laughing half way through so that it blurred slightly around the edges, and regrets that he had never got around to getting a photograph done of his children.
When I get back, he tells himself, as he locks his door behind himself and heads off. Soon.
But it is a long time before he sees his children again, and when he finally does the last thing on his mind is finding a camera.
He’s sent off for military training, and he supposes that that isn’t the worst – at least he gets three square meals a day, something which was never a guarantee when he was working on the slowly declining canals, ferrying cargo from Liverpool to Manchester. Many a night he had gone hungry to make sure that first his wife, then his children had had enough to eat. He didn’t begrudge them that, but there was something satisfying about going to bed with a content stomach.
Paper was easy enough to get hold of here, and so he writes to his children almost every day. He’d been taught his letters, in his youth, but hasn’t had all that much call to use them since then, so it is slow going at first, before he gets the hang of it, and he’s certain that his work is peppered with mistakes that he doesn’t notice. Sigrid will, though, but then she’s a very smart girl, and he’s always made sure that she’d had her schooling, even when she wanted to quit so that she could work, and help him support the family.
“You’re my children,” he had told her, in that lilting accent that was part his Lancashire father’s, part his Irish mother’s. “And that means that I sacrifice certain things to make sure that you get everything that you want and need. Your job is not to notice that I do that, okay?”
She hadn’t really been okay with it, but at least she hadn’t left school.
April 29th, 1941.
Things here are not too bad, he writes. They’ve shaved my hair
and the three of you would laugh yourself silly at the sight of me
now, but at least it means I won’t be catching lice from any of the
other men, and that is nothing to be sniffed at, I’m telling you.
He writes to them with amusing anecdotes about the other recruits, where they have all come from, how Keith from the canals is here too, and how good it was to have a friendly face. He keeps the letters light hearted and happy, because he knows that they’ll be worrying.
He doesn’t tell them much about the actual training, figuring that that is for the best, really. He doesn’t tell them how it felt to hold a weapon in his hands for the first time in his life, how he breaks a sweat at the thought of having to raise it against another human being. He doesn’t talk about the fact that he’s good at taking it apart, cleaning the components, reassembling it again. He’s the best in the group, and that makes him feel a little ill. He doesn’t mention how Keith cries in the night, the first time they sleep after they learn how to aim and fire, using sandbags as dummies. He doesn’t describe how much he hates the way that the gun oil gets under his nails, or the texture of the uniform against his skin, or how much he longs for his own bed, his own house, the sound of his children running around the place. He doesn’t tell them because he knows that it is only going to get worse. He certainly doesn’t tell them about the nights he spends lying awake, staring at the bunk above him, terrified for what is shortly to come.
He does tell them how much he misses them though, because though that is another painful truth it is one that he would never try to deny to them.
They write back and tell him that they miss him too, and they tell him about the place that they have been sent to stay. Greenvale is a strange old place, Sigrid writes, a grand manor house, and they felt out of place at first, resentful that they have been sent away from their home and their father. She sends a sketch, and it doesn’t actually look all that grand or imposing – though Bard supposes that it would be to his children, who have only ever lived in their four-room little house that backs on to the canal. In comparison, this place might seem like Buckingham Palace.
She describes it in length, from the polished wood of the staircase to the kitchen cook, from the cat they keep to catch the rats, to the bedrooms – and we have a bedroom each, Da! – though he suspects that Tilda is already sneaking into her sister’s room and bunking up with her, if he knows his girls. It sounds like a nice old place to be sure, the house of a gentrified landowner, not quite aristocrat enough to be suffering at the slow decay of the lords of the land, but wealthy enough to support three additional children, apparently without too much concern.
There is just a father and a son living in the house, according to Sigrid’s thorough letters – a Mr Thranduil, who is a little odd but kind enough, though not very friendly, and his son Legolas, who it seems that Tilda is already following around with mopey eyes. He’s about Bain’s age, and eager to show them around the village, around the gardens, on the days when the rain doesn’t force them into staying inside.
She tells him that she keeps time on his watch, sets it every day to the great grandfather clock in Mr Thranduil’s hall, and that when she can’t sleep she rests it on the pillow next to her, listening to the quiet tick of it.
They never tell him that they are happy there – he knows that that is to make him feel better, rather than because they are not. He can tell that they are. Sigrid sketches little drawings in the margins, and Bain details every stream and tree that he and Legolas ford or climb, and Tilda writes down the name of every horse in every field that she comes across – most of them, he’s sure, made up by her, because he can’t imagine any sensible country farmer calling their horse ‘Canalboat’.
Or ‘Leap-frog’, for that matter.
They’re good kids, and he feels a little proud of them. They’re too sensible not to make the best of things, and it seems like they’ve landed on their feet in the house of this Mr Thranduil. Whoever he is, as long as his children remain happy, then he’ll forever have Bard’s thanks.
He’s supposed to get a day off once the far-too-brief training was over, but he hangs back from mentioning it to them, though he isn’t entirely sure why. He figures that he’ll just go and surprise them (he has the address, after all, and the village they are staying in has a train station). But in the end he is glad that he doesn’t mention it. The day before training is due to finish they are told that they are needed immediately on the front, that all leave is cancelled indefinitely.
“The final push, men!” calls the jocular officer at the front of the room, but his eyes are lined and tired, and his voice lacks some of the enthusiasm that Bard suspects that it must have held only a couple of years before. This war has gone on far longer than anyone would have thought. Even the most patriotic of men are starting to sway in the face of a seemingly endless fight.
He’s shipped off before he even has much time to think about what is going to come next, but he does have time to scribble off one last letter, cramming it through the slot in the post room early the next morning, just before they are due to assemble. He hopes that they won’t be too disappointed.
August 27th, 1941.
We’re off to the front today! It’ll be good to finally be done with all
of this training and get to where the action is. I’ll write to you
as often as I can, but we’re told that paper is short out there,
and that it may take a while for post to get through, so don’t fret
if you don’t hear from me for a while. Remember to be good, and
that I love all three of you, very dearly. Stay safe, and strong, and happy.
All my love, Da.
Their letters become even more vivid, the longer that they stay in Greenvale. He doesn’t know if that is because they are trying to cheer him up, or because they are just genuinely enjoying themselves, and he doesn’t ask, doesn’t really want to know the answer. The three of them are full of stories, of scrumping in apple orchards with their guardian’s son, of fishing in tiny brooks, having picnics in meadows. Mr Thranduil buys Sigrid a box of watercolour paints (something that Bard had always been trying to save up for himself, only every time he got close he needed to spend it on something else, on a bill or roof repairs or on food when there are slow weeks on the canal), and she sends him paintings of all the new things that she sees. Tilda presses wildflowers, and tucks them in the envelopes. Bain writes detailed and vivid descriptions of every friend he has made, every girl that he develops a crush on (and sometimes it seems like there is a new one every week).
He’s glad of those letters, he really is.
Some days, they are the only thing that gets him through.
The front is not what he expected.
The posters and radio broadcasts had told stories of camaraderie, of beating back the enemy on every front, of glorious victories, of raising the union flag to rousing choruses of God Save the King.
It isn’t like that at all.
Men die every day, men that he sleeps and eats beside. He knows all of their names, but after a while he starts making himself forget them, because that is the only way that he can really bring himself to get up every day. Keith bums him cigarettes, and though he doesn’t have much for a taste for them he smokes them anyway, for something to do. Three of the men he trained with are killed in their first month, one from standing on a landmine and another from enemy fire; the third is taken by infection from a minor wound in one of the field hospitals.
It’s not a lot, in the grand scheme of things. It’s only him and Keith left, by the end of 1941.
But they progress, slowly enough. The Red Army suffers as many losses as the British, and the German people are not unaffected, either. Stories come through the wireless every evening of bombings in Berlin, the shooting of men marked out with stars, deaths upon countless deaths. Bard sits there are lets the stories wash over him, but after a while he simply stops listening. There is too much to take in, otherwise. War is declared on Japan, but it is so far away that Bard finds himself unable to care. They get a wash of new recruits when conscription finally stretches to cover all men between the ages of eighteen and fifty, and Bard consoles himself with the fact that he would have ended up here anyway, no matter what.
It isn’t much of a consolation, if he is going to be honest with himself.
They’re told that the Americans have joined the war, but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. It’s still something to celebrate though, so they do, as best as they are able.
He spends New Years in a trench, the water soaking through his boots and rats screaming somewhere nearby. There is a new recruit that seems to have taken a liking to him. His name is Mickey, and he’s young and naïve, still convinced that they are making a difference, that everything is going to be alright. In some ways it is sweet to hear, but in other ways it just makes Bard feel even worse. Mickey seems able to get hold of anything though, rationing aside, and they share a bottle of liquor so rough that Bard isn’t convinced that it wasn’t distilled in the sink of some army hospital, bottled right here on the front. It tastes like death, but so does the air, full of smoke and the stench of decay, so he drinks it anyway. It burns, but that’s fine, really.
There are no celebrations. Keith’s watch is old, and he’s had to restart it several times, so they don’t even know if the time is right anymore. They raise their hands in a salute when the hands reach midnight anyway, and pass the bottle around again.
He hasn’t seen his children for almost a year, and he misses them, a constant ache in his chest that won’t leave him alone.
January 10th, 1942.
Things are going well, my loves. I’m tired and cold, but that is only to be
expected! The war goes well, and I haven’t been injured any more than a
few scrapes and bruises. I hope you’re all safe and warm, and that 1942
sees us together again.
They lose Singapore, and there is nothing any of the wireless newscasters can do to make it sound anything less than an utter failure, perhaps the worst in British military history. It saps the moral on the Western front, and they stop talking about it on the broadcasts almost immediately, as soon as they realise. Letters from home suddenly stop mentioning coal and electric, as if someone, somewhere, is making sure that there isn’t anything about it to read. Bard is suspicious, but he doesn’t bother voicing his concerns.
Another bundle of letters arrive from home, and there is a fourth this time, one that he had not expected.
It is polite, but a little cold, and is signed ‘Mr T Kingson, of Greenvale’. The mysterious Mr Thranduil has finally made himself known, though he doesn’t have a whole lot to say. Bard’s children are in good health, and are very well behaved. He is doing his best to accommodate them as best he can, and he thought that Bard might like to know. If he would like, Thranduil would be willing to send him reports of how they are doing, the minor things that a parent cares about that a child would never think to mention – school reports and colds, that sort of thing. Unspoken but implied is the fact that Thranduil himself would wish to hear such things about his son.
Bard finds it a little odd that he doesn’t just spell out his love for his child plainly, but he supposes that the wealthier among them can be a little stingier with their affection. Perhaps it is because they can afford to give their children other things, instead.
He tries, and fails, not to feel resentful.
It’s a strange letter, short and to the point, tucked in between the ones from his children, and it has come rather late considering that his children have been in Thranduil’s care for almost a year. He sends back that he would like to hear about them, if Thranduil is willing, and he doesn’t bother to say much more.
He focuses instead on the letters from his children. They must have been written back in January, but they don’t arrive until March. They talk about the snow, and the things that they build in it. Tilda found it all a great adventure, apparently.
He breaks three fingers on his right hand in May, and he is finally given an opportunity for leave, if only because he can’t wield a weapon until it is healed up. He travels back to Britain on a ship ferrying those too wounded to continue, and tries not to think about the way that some of them scream in the night, begging for mercy from a God that he is no longer sure if he is able to believe in. He doesn’t even bother going back to Manchester, back to his house – everything about that life feels a little strange to him now. As soon as he is released – and it is only for a day – he gets straight on a train and heads to York. He barely recognises the blackened ruins of the city, and tries not to think about what his own city might look like, now. He waits for an hour at the station for the connecting train, and tries not to breathe in the air too deeply.
It stinks of tar, and the acrid smell of fire consuming things that should never have been burnt.
The train takes him through the countryside at a slow and winding pace that leaves him more and more impatient with every passing minute. But it is his children’s turn to stand on the platform this time, and as soon as they see him they bellow their excitement, running towards him in the train smoke and throwing their arms around him.
He sinks to his knees, and tries his hardest to hold all three of them at once, but my god, they’ve grown so much just in the last year.
It hurts to see them, but it is a good pain.
They walk him around the village, a pleasant enough place that feels oddly empty with half of its occupants gone off to war. He feels still and uncomfortable in his uniform, and like something of a fraud when the women working the fields nod and smile at him, as if he is something to be proud of. This uniform isn’t him – this soldier isn’t Bard, not the man who has worked the canals since he was a child, not the man who married his sweetheart, not the man who keeps his children’s drawings pinned on the wall in the places where the wallpaper has started to peel.
Tilda shows him all her favourite hiding places, the best trees to climb: Bain regales him with the books that he has read from Mr Thranduil’s library, and it has so many books in it Da, more than I’ve ever seen in my entire life! Sigrid is mostly quiet, but she keeps her arm linked through his the entire time, as if she’s afraid that he might just disappear.
He goes up to the house before he leaves too, partly because he feels like he should but mostly because the children want to show him where they live now. It takes them longer than he expects to walk through the gardens, beautifully rambling as they are. He had pictured manicured lawns and neat beds of flowers, but instead he is pleasantly surprised by the old, twisting trees, the long grass, the sprawling flowers that pour over the borders onto the cracked stone flags of the pathway. There is a wildness about it, and he wonders if that is deliberate, or just because all of the men that might have worked as gardeners have left.
Sigrid’s drawing was quite accurate: it’s a beautiful old house, but as large or noble as Sigrid had described, though he does have to suppress the desire to go around to the back entrance. The windows are large though, to let in the light, and there is ivy growing up the old stone walls.
They lead him through the old, tall doors into a wide hallway, light and airy in the afternoon sunlight. It is too grand for the likes of him, really, but the children have barged in anyway, laughing, pulling him after them, and it has been so long since he has heard their laughter that he can’t bring himself to chastise them.
The door to what looks like a parlour is open, and it is then that Bard finally lays eyes on the owner of the house, the surrogate father to his children, the strange man with whom he has exchanged barely a handful of letters, all perfunctory, polite but cool. He’s a tall man, ash-blonde hair pushed back across his head, longer than fashion dictates, so that it brushes his collar, his features fine and handsome rather than strong. There is a certain power in the set of his shoulders that is evident even when he is sitting though, and he nods at Bard.
“Thranduil Kingson,” he says, introducing himself, but he doesn’t bother to stand, which smarts a little. Bard nods in return, aiming for polite but well aware that he is coming across closer to rude than he intended.
“Bard Bowman,” he answers, and something that might have been a smile flickers across Thranduil’s mouth for a moment, before his eyes turn instead to the children, something warm and fond and genuine in his gaze that hurts even worse than the snub of the introduction.
He cares for them, and that makes it very difficult to hate him, even though Bard would sorely like to.
Tilda clings to him when he has to go, and Bain’s lip starts to wobble, even though he has been adamant for years that he is too old to cry anymore. Sigrid kisses his cheek, and makes him promise with a fierceness so like her mother’s that he’ll come back soon.
It’s a difficult promise to make, because he knows that he might not be able to keep it.
He does it anyway, because he’s never been able to deny his girl anything.
Half his squadron is dead a week after he returns to the front, caught between enemy and friendly fire, left in the wrong place at the wrong time when communications fail and orders to move don’t come through in time. He’s pressed up against a tree, Keith is flat on his face in the mud beside him, and there is nothing that they can do as the bodies fall but stay as still as they possibly can and wait to die.
They creep back to their lines once night falls and the gunfire stops. Mickey’s made it too, though God only knows how, and his face is white, his eyes wide with a sudden fear. He’s always been too light-hearted, has Mickey, has never really understood his own mortality until today. But he’s shaking when they finally find a place to bunk down for the night, and Bard falls asleep to the sound of his crying, and the thought of his children laughing in dappled sunlight.
The days pass, and then the months after that. Soon another New Year goes by, another winter sets its claws in deep, and the letters become even more sporadic than they were before. All leave is still cancelled indefinitely, but they feel the need to keep reminding the soldiers, even though they couldn’t ever really forget. He understands it, even if he hates it. Soon enough it has been another year since he saw his children, and he doesn’t know how he has survived this long, when the days seem to stretch for years until men start to pray for the sunset. T
There is a note of sadness in the letters from his children now, and they have stopped asking him when he will be coming home next, as if they are sick of not having an answer, sick of opening each reply only to hear the same old bad news, I don’t know, my loves, and I wish that I did.
Bo arrives with a new shipment of recruits, and he joins their little band. He’s all of six foot five, wiry as hell, and the son Jamaican immigrants, a hint of the West Indies in his cockney accent that means he can’t help but sound upbeat even when he probably isn’t. Bard warms to him immediately, and not just because he tends to sing under his breath, low sweet songs from the radio back in England, and lilting gentle melodies that his mother taught him, from her own home.
Bo gets a lot of letters, too. All his brothers are out here on the front, and they write to each other on a daily basis, letters getting passed along the front moving a lot quicker than the ones that have to wait for shipment back home. But Bo understands the way that Bard keeps his letters close, understands the way that they have become a lifeline to him, doesn’t mock him in crueller moments for the way he will stare at a watercolour of a field he’s never seen for hours at a time, slowly and silently crying.
God, he misses home.
Not his old house, not really.
Home is where his children are.
Thranduil continues to write him letters, the occasional update, terse and to the point. It is always the more practical stuff that his children forgets, and Bard tries hard not to hate Thranduil for the fact that he can do that, for the fact that he is safe at home with Bard’s children and no part in the stinking mess that is this war. Bard writes that, one day, in a moment of self-indulgent anger that he knows he can barely afford, demands to know why Thranduil is safe at home when he has to be here. There is summer rain coming through the soles of his boots from a late afternoon shower, and there is blood soaked so deep into his jacket that he can’t get it off, and he can’t remember who it came from, and damn it if none of this is fair.
September 10th, 1942.
Are you a coward? Or are you just wealthy enough to buy your way
out of the war? Or is there something that I don’t know about you?
He sends it off, along with the gentle, dishonest letters to his children, and regrets it immediately the next day.
He doesn’t think Thranduil will bother to reply, and as the days stretch on to weeks, and then to a month, he begins to wonder what his moment of anger will have cost his children. Thranduil already provides so much for them, and if he takes offense to Bard’s letter, then that could be the end of that. He tries to forget about it, because his father always told him that there was no good worrying about things that you can’t change or learn any more about, but it proves as impossible to ignore as the grazes from bullets in his helmet, the origins of the meat that the rat nearby is chewing on, his bright eyes staring disconcertingly at Bard.
He re-reads the fragments of letters that he has kept, instead. He doesn’t get to keep many of their letters: paper is scarce here, and so he writes on the backs of theirs, and sends them home. He’s asked Sigrid to keep those letters for him, though, that evidence of correspondence, that despite the distance between them there was still some invisible line keeping them connected.
The tin is full of the pages that he did keep, though, where they drew pictures, the ones that make him smile, or sometimes weep. He keeps them in his father’s old tobacco tin, the one with the faded painting of a smiling sailor on the front, the one in which he keeps the photograph of his wife and the key to his front door back home, the few things he has left to ground him.
He buries himself in his correspondence. He used to find reading a chore, but now it is his only solace.
But then a letter comes back from Thranduil, tucked in the single large envelope that contains the notes from his children, the pressed flowers, the paintings and the drawings. The letter has been opened once already, by someone checking the information, but he has stopped caring about that a long time ago. He reads through the ones from his children, as slowly as he is able, making himself savour each word, knowing full well that it might be a months before he has anything new from them to look at.
Thranduil’s letter he avoids, for as long as he can, until he can’t bring himself not to look at it any more.
It’s a little longer than the normal ones, the first half addressing the usual topic of Bard’s children. The second part is shorter, and the letters are shaky in places, as if his hand has wavered.
November 2nd, 1942.
I served myself, in my youth, for many years, but suffered an
injury. They have no need for a cripple on the front, I think. They
will, no doubt, be sending enough of them home as it is.
He doesn’t mention Bard’s frustration, nor his rudeness at accusing Thranduil of buying himself out of conscription. Bard himself doesn’t comment on it in his reply either, though his hand hovers over the back of the paper for a while, trying to work out what it is he could even say at this point.
The guilt gnaws at him, but he doesn’t know what else to do.
The year continues to pass, slowly. 1943 is a strange year. Germany surrenders at Stalingrad, but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference to their morale on the Western front, although Bard supposes that he wouldn’t really know from this side of the line, anyway. The French Resistance begin to pass messages to the Allied troops, sneaking supplies and provisions over to their side of the line. The first reports of massacres in Poland reach them, and for a while that steels there resolve, but there is only so long a man can stand firm when he’s knee deep in mud and the blood of fallen friends.
Bard doesn’t feel like himself anymore, anyway. This isn’t his body. This isn’t him.
His children miss him.
The longing for home has reached an almost desperate pitch.
But Thranduil’s letters are calm, as if Bard has just gone away for the weekend. He seems to know exactly the tone that Bard needs to hear, as if none of this is happening at all.
March 16th, 1943.
Tilda was asked to sing in the church choir, and despite her
initial protests, I think she is happy about the prospect.
Things are starting to turn, slowly but surely, if the wireless is to be believed. First Italy declares war on Germany, then the Red Army frees Kiev. These changes are repeated so often that Bard grows sick of the sound of them, sick of the promise of some end to this war, and end that seems so impossible to him here. How much longer can all of this go on? How long will he have to bear it, now?
The nights grow longer once more, the days grow colder again, though the spring and summer had been so poor this year that they had barely been worth mentioning.
Bo continues to sing, though his voice is growing quieter now.
Mickey develops a cough that he just can’t seem to shift, though it doesn’t stop him from smoking as many cigarettes a day as he can get his hands on.
Keith goes days without speaking, sometimes, but Bard doesn’t talk all that much anymore anyway, so he doesn’t have much of a right to comment on that.
They drink French wine slipped to them by the resistance, brandy sometimes too, when they get their hands on it, and it is a damn sight better than the shit that Mickey used to find for them.
I don’t want to die, he breathes against the rim of the bottle. Please don’t let me die.
Time continues to pass, but the war on the front never seems to change, never seems to alter. Everything always stays the same, just more monotonous days of smoke and death.
But the one thing that has changed, it seems, is the relationship between him and Thranduil. That first, unforgivably rude letter has broken some unspoken barrier between them, and suddenly the strange guardian of his children has begun to open up, to tell Bard about himself unbidden, as if this is as much a form of therapy for Thranduil as it was for him.
There is a certain weight to his letters, and they anchor Bard down in their own way, as well.
22nd June, 1943.
I did not rise to meet you, when you came, as my leg causes
me great pain still, and some days it is a struggle. Please
know that it wasn’t a slight. At least, not one given deliberately.
That gives him a comfort, though it isn’t an apology of any kind.
He swallows at the thought of what must have happened to Thranduil’s leg, at the mention of shell shards. He’s seen what happens to the men that go into the hospitals on the front. Infection sets in before they’ve even had a chance to treat the injury.
Perhaps it is a ruin of scar tissue, twisted flesh.
Perhaps that’s better than the ruin of mind, the type of broken heart that Bard is slowly growing to understand will be all that this war will leave him with.
Thranduil’s signature is graceful, he thinks to himself as he stares at the letters, not really noticing that he spends as much time holding them as he does the ones from his children now, not quite understanding yet that these letters are as vital to him as the others that come in the same envelope. The signature is just like his children’s new foster father: elegant, refined. His own name is a scrawl, barely legible he’s sure. ‘All my love, Da’ comes out easily enough for his children, but it is a struggle each time to know how to end the ones to Thranduil. He settles in the end, on ‘Yours, B. Bowman,” but knows that it isn’t enough to convey what he is feeling, isn’t enough to pass on the gratitude he wants to express for the comfort that these letters bring him.
Because some of the letters are Thranduil opening himself up, as if he were just some dusty old book on a shelf that has been aching for a chance to let someone read it, has fallen open on the most important pages the moment that someone touched it. But other parts of the letters – because the letters are growing longer now, two or three pages each time – still talk about his children, only they are much warmer now, much more affectionate, as if Thranduil is no longer afraid of showing how much he cares for Bard’s children.
Bard likes that – it is reassuring, in a way, to know that his children are in a place where they are loved.
Some of them make him laugh, and that is a rare thing to happen these days – he keeps those letters, even though he knows that he should use the paper, preserve it for as long as he can. There is never enough of anything, out here. They reveal a cool and caustic wit that Bard had not expected from Thranduil, a humour that is somehow sharp and gentle at the same time. It is appreciated, far more than he thinks Thranduil will ever know.
18th October, 1943.
Bain and my son decided to try to ford a stream in the garden, and
they were very successful, although it did unfortunately mean
that half the vegetable beds were flooded. I console myself
with the fact that most of the produce had been harvested.
’44 arrives with as little celebration as the previous years, and he realises with a hollow grief that he arrived on the front in ’41, just how long it has been since he first was shipped out.
It’s a wet Spring that year, and that makes it even more miserable: he can’t remember the last time that he had dry feet, and starts to envy the men who run the tanks, because despite their stifling and stinking conditions, at least they are kept out of the mud.
The Allies bomb the soul out of Berlin, and sometimes Bard believes that he can hear the screaming from London, from Berlin, from Paris, echoing around his mind at night, but he knows that it is just the whimpering of the men lying around him in the dirt and the dark. All the stories on the radio are of the bombing of German cities, and he knows that he is supposed to feel encouraged by that, but it doesn’t make him feel anything at all.
But there was nothing really to do about the bad weather and low morale. They were finally making progress, pushing forwards, and by the time August came they had reached Paris, finally liberated the capital, and they celebrate with more French brandy and bread with real butter, the people empting their hidden stores in a gratitude that he doesn’t feel like he deserves.
He tells Thranduil this, tells him how wrong it feels to constantly have people telling him that he is brave, when in reality he knows that he is nothing but a coward. He isn’t strong. He wouldn’t be here, if he didn’t have to be. If he had a choice he would be back at home, with his children, pretending that none of this was any of his concern and sleeping easily at night.
Thranduil’s response is comforting, but at the same time almost makes him feel worse about himself.
31st September 1944
I have faced the trials of war myself. You may not think of
yourself as brave, but know that any man that stays, month
after month, that does not run away from it all, is brave in truth.
Even the men that run, that cannot bring themselves to stay
another day, are brave too, even if we deny them that description.
All people in war are brave, because every person has the potential
for bravery inside them. And war is the time that the potential
comes to fruit, even if it will grow to be a bitter one.
They push on, and in the October they finally cross the border into Germany. It doesn’t feel as dramatic or as important as it should: instead, it is just a step from one field into another, nothing more than a little more movement east. He wouldn’t even have noticed had some officer not stopped to stake a flag in the ground, the union flag sagging against the pole in the still day. An American flag is put down too, and a French one, and they all stand lifeless, no wind there to lift them high and proud.
They continue marching.
Winter sets in proper, again, and Bard wonders at the fact that he remembers the winters so clearly, but that spring and summer always seem to pass him in a blur, as if the better half of the year is just some strange dream before the colder months arrive.
He wakes up one morning and finds that a lacework of frost is decorating his helmet.
He smokes a cigarette, taking long, slow breaths, deep and sure, his hands shaking as he does so.
He hasn’t been able to stop them shaking recently, and he’s starting to wonder if they ever will.
They march through the day, eat meagre rations, and take the outlying villages that they come across. It is a miserable existence. He rereads his letters and tries to believe them when they tell him that the war will be over soon – in weeks, in fact! All they need to do is take Berlin, and the war will be over. Bard has never had much schooling, he’s never been much of a geographer, but he’s pretty sure that Germany is bigger than all that, and that it is going to take them more than a fortnight to reach the capital.
The boys have starting singing though, so he joins in, even though he can’t bring himself to feel particularly happy.
The only thing that makes him smile, really, is his tin, kept close against his heart.
The thoughts of his children.
The quiet confidence of Thranduil’s letters.
Home is far behind him, now, Bard thinks as they march on enemy soil. How sure is he that he will make it back there?
November 9th, 1944.
There is a boy in the village that keeps leaving Sigrid flowers from his family hot
house, but
as I’m sure you’d like to know, she throws them out the window
every time, and does not seem to have any interest in him at all.
The days are monotonous: they’d push further, moving ever closer to Berlin, taking small villages and larger towns, a constant grey blur of ruined fields and smoking buildings. Bard can no longer tell if the colour has been washed out of the earth, or if it is just him that can’t see them any more: everything seems pale, and dull. Even the blood pooling around the dead bodies that they come across, lining the streets, have dulled to a dark red-grey-black, a shade that was starting to seem no different from the shadows in his dreams, or the clouds in the sky above them. This was almost worse than it had been before, when death had been an almost-certainty: they met few enemy soldiers now, and those that they did come across were as tired as Bard himself felt, pale and scared, and young – so very young.
Victory was in reach, but no one felt particularly enthusiastic about it anymore. Perhaps the American soldiers did, a little more, but they hadn’t been here as long. For the most part they raised their flags outside each town hall with little enjoyment. There was some satisfaction to burning the Nazi flags in turn, but even that quickly faded.
The land around here just felt… hopeless.
Another New Year came and went, with much less celebration than the last one. This night is full of a strange sort of anger, some deep and violent potential that scares Bard. He watches the men out in the square of the town they have taken, their teeth bared and their laughter brittle. They make him nervous, and he stays in the room of the old and empty house that him and his friends have been drinking in for the rest of the night.
1945 now, and they still weren’t at Berlin.
Most of the German people had fled, but sometimes there were those who hadn’t, families who couldn’t afford to leave, those who simply weren’t able, or were so far in denial that they didn’t even look up when the soldiers knocked at their windows. It hurt to watch the way that their faces fell when they saw them march in to the towns, hurt even more to see the way that the victorious allied soldiers treated the towns, and the people left in them.
So he would volunteer to secure the town perimeter each time, knowing that most of the soldiers wanted to be in the thick of taking each location, so that they would get first dibs on any loot or women that they could find. Cigarettes were a valuable commodity these days – and that was nothing compared to the demand for chocolate or dirty magazines. Bard had tried one, once, but had felt nothing as he had leafed through the pages, as if he himself barely existed anymore.
A few of his friends – no, his brothers now – joined him on occasion, though he never asked whether it was to keep him company or because they felt the same way that he did. He doesn’t want to hear that it is the former, doesn’t want to know that he is the only one who has been left this way, the only one quietly falling apart each day that they get closer to Berlin.
Keith claps him around the shoulders, the scar that was fresh the first week that they were here faded now, a pale brown rather than red, and they head off. The fields that must once have been lush with growth have been churned to mud by tanks, barbed wire from fences that have been torn down curling through the great trenches left by the treads of those war machines, gleaming bright and silver from the rain the night before. There are the black husks of defeated tanks too, from both sides of the war, strewn here and there, left abandoned in the middle of the field. The fires that had wrecked them are long burnt out, and they are innocuous, weeds already starting to grow again around their tracks.
There is a dead woman down in the mud. The back of her head has been shot out. Bard wonders, just for a moment, who she was, and why she has ended up here, face down in the dirt, with only the crows to mourn her.
Mickey is older now, emotionally as well as in terms of age, but he’s still the youngest of them in every way that counts, and he stares up at the sky, obviously affected by the sight, as he always is, even after so many years.
Bo is whistling that slow, sad song, the one that he always comes out with when he’s feeling like shit. Bard knows it as well as he knows his own face in the mirror, even though he doesn’t know what it is called: they’ve had a lot of reasons to feel like death over the years that they’ve known each other.
Everything is still. In the distance, there is gunfire, probably from some town further along the front, the sound carrying far in the afternoon. There is no wind.
There is no birdsong.
Someone in the town behind them laughs, and a bottle smashes.
He reaches into his pocket. It has been months since a letter from his family came through to him, but he had taken the last one from Thranduil out that morning, and read through it. His children had been involved in the church Easter celebrations, and apparently Sigrid had been chosen to do a reading above all the other girls in her class. He tries to imagine them: Tilda with an Easter bonnet, Bain trying not to laugh on the back pews of the church, Sigrid standing serenely at the pulpit.
He’s there, with them in his mind, and they leave the church together, walking along beautiful country lanes to some great garden, where they sit in the sunshine and laugh: Sigrid sings for them, and Tilda and Bain challenge each other to climb the highest tree that they can see.
They’ve never had a garden in their entire lives: their house backs on to the canal and that is about as much nature as they’ve ever had.
There isn’t even a local park; the only times they’ve seen nature is down at their Grandfather’s allotments, or the odd day he’s been able to take them out of the city.
It must be Thranduil’s gardens that he’s trying to picture, he thinks to himself as he follows his friends through the mud, checking each half-ruined barn and outhouse, in case there are any enemy soldiers waiting to spring a trap (though with each passing day, that threat grows less and less likely).
The last lot of papers had come with a letter from Thranduil’s son, as well: it had just been half a page, scribbled, promising Bard that he and Bain were looking after the girls, and that he wished Bard well.
10th February, 1945.
And I hope you can come home soon, sir, and that
you remain safe. I have heard so many good things about
you, it would be an honour to get to meet you. I hope
you do not mind me writing to you – it is just that
I have become such friends with your children,
and I know how much they love and worry about you.
He’s a bright boy, according to his father, but unfathomably curious. Bard’s own children talk about him all the time in their letters. Bain had always wanted another brother. It’s a sweet note, a little oddly formal to have come from a child, but he appreciates it, almost as much as he appreciates the letters that Thranduil continues to send, laced with an acerbic humour and genuine affection for all four of the children in his care. It’s been months since he sent his reply, and he hopes that he gets another one soon.
Bard strokes the thick, expensive paper that Thranduil’s letters always come on, the softest thing that he’s felt in quite some time.
He wonders what his children are doing right now.
Perhaps they’re paddling in a stream somewhere; perhaps they are picking wildflowers.
He doesn’t remember anything after that: just the way that his friends laughed, the way that his fingers stroked the metal of the tin, the weak sunlight forcing itself through the heavy, overcast skies. By the time he wakes up, hours later, his ears still ringing from the explosion, those friends were all dead, and he’d been taken to the nearest field hospital.
But all he could think about, for the brief moment he woke up before the pain set in, was of long grass, and the taste of bitter apples.
They’re talking to him, something about his arm, but he doesn’t understand their words: the only thing he can understand is that they’re cutting his jacket off him, and no he doesn’t give a damn about his arm, they can’t take that jacket away from him-
He’s reaching for it, like a madman, and blood splatters across his face from an injury on his arm that suddenly hurts oh god it hurts like hell what have I done, what has happened-
But they can’t take that tin away from him, he needs that tin, it is stupid and he knows that it shouldn’t matter, but his letters are in there, his faded photograph, the smudged drawings of apple orchards and summer wildflowers from Sigrid, Thranduil’s impossibly elegant signature. He needs them, they’re his lifeline, they are the only thing that has kept him alive so far and damn it, he knows that he is crying and they’re holding down his arm, but please, for the love of god, please-
And a nurse seems to understand, she reaches into the shreds of what had once been his jacket and finds it, shows it to him, tucks it under the pillow where he can’t lose it, and forces a pill between his lips, trying to smile at him as she does so.
He falls unconscious.
He doesn’t hear the debate of the doctors, doesn’t hear the sound of plyers and tweezers and scalpels arriving at his bedside, doesn’t feel the blood and mire being washed gently from his arm. They start soon after, and he does feel that.
He is awake again, and god, he doesn’t want to be.
Everything is black, and agony, and he screams as hands hold him down and yell at him; they’re telling him to be patient, telling him to be still, telling him that he’s alive and he’s hurt and it is going to be alright and they are doctors and we need you to stop moving, we need to get the shrapnel out, for the love of god man stop moving if you don’t want to bleed to death, and-
He passes out again, for a while, and that is probably for the best.
He doesn’t know how long passes.
He wakes feeling strangely numb, and around him are the sounds that no soldier ever wants to hear: the call of nurses, exhausted but strong; the shouts of doctors and surgeons; the slow drip of blood onto the floor; the screaming of the men bedridden in here, men who are falling apart, literally. Worse still are the moans, the low and quiet sounds of the ones who know that they will not make it through the night.
There is a nurse above him, watching him critically.
He’s in a field hospital. He’s been injured. And that means that it is quite possible that he is going to die here, without ever having the chance to see his children again.
He becomes slowly aware of his body again: his mind had given him moments enough reprieve from the pain to assess where he was, but now it was all flooding back, the agony of his arm, the worrying numbness in his leg, the screaming pain that was his foot. What had happened? There was an explosion, wasn’t there? He’d been patrolling the outskirts of the town, just some small place, barely worth a mention on the map but for its strategic use on the intersection of two main roads. He’d been with some of his brothers. Mickey. Keith. Bo.
“My brothers,” he rasps, and his voice does not sound like his own. “I was on patrol, and-”
She smiles at him, and it is a bitter smile.
“It was a mine,” she says, and his heart sinks. “I’m sorry.”
She doesn’t need to explain. The fact that he has survived means that he was far enough away to get only shrapnel, not the force of the blast. He’d been standing at the end of their line. They were gone.
He cries, although he isn’t sure who it is for.
The darkness takes him again.
HONOURABLE DISCHARGE FROM THE BRITISH ARMED FORCES
AUGUST 2ND, 1945
THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT Bard Bowman HAS BEEN OFFICIALLY AND HONOURABLY DISCHARGED FROM HIS MAJESTY’S SERVICE FOLLOWING COMMENDABLE SERVICE IN THE LINE OF HIS DUTY. DISCHARGE IS FOLLOWING INJURY, DETAILS BELOW.
Shrapnel embedded in right forearm and hand, injury sustained to left thigh, broken left foot; injuries sustained following mine explosion
SIGNED, Dr S F Masters
It’s an official discharge, according to the officer that stops by his bed one afternoon, but he doesn’t really listen, and if he’s being honest with himself, he knows that he doesn’t really care anymore. He can’t think about anything but that crippling pain, the burning heat that is his right hand.
They didn’t get all the shrapnel out, a nurse tells him gently, one evening when it seems like he might be awake enough to really process what is going on. But they got most of it, at least. Bard does understand enough to realise the underlying implications of that: his arm might heal, but it would never be the same again. He drifts back into pained sleep wondering how he is going to work once all of this is over, once he has his children back with him. But things hurt too much to really think about the big picture.
The pain medication they have given him makes him feel strange, and he knows that they are having to ration it now so he doesn’t understand how what he is taking can feel so damn strong, leaving him swimming, barely aware of anything but his arm.
By god, it hurts.
The war ends before the transport to take him back to England even arrives, and isn’t that a joke? He made it so close to the end of the war before being injured: it’s typical of his luck. There are no celebrations out here. Perhaps the nurses look happier for a while, but the men around them are still dying, still screaming, still bleeding all over the floor. His arm feels different now, he thinks, a strange kind of pain that he can’t quite place. He can’t see the skin under the bandages they’ve wrapped it in, but he’s getting shooting pains in his fingers. He worries about them, when he isn’t too tired to care, all the way back to England.
He’s taken to a military hospital in York, and worse news comes then.
POST OFFICE TELEGRAM
JANUARY 3RD, 1942
THE WAR OFFICE REGRETS TO INFORM YOU OF THE DESTRUCTION OF YOUR PROPERTY [138 CANAL SIDE, MANCHESTER] IN AN AIR RAID ATTACK ON THE CITY. THE WAR OFFICE IS IN THE PROCESS OF ORGANISING ALTERNATIVE ACCOMODATION FOR YOU WHEN YOU RETURN FROM THE FRONT. WE ALL MUST REMAIN STRONG AND UNITED IN THIS GRAVE TIME. GOD SAVE THE KING.
He reads it with a strange sort of ambivalence. His house, their house, small and ramshackle as it had been, is gone: it was destroyed years ago, not long after he had left for war, and the telegram has just been waiting for his return. Do his children know?
There is a bitter, quiet part of himself that wonders if they held this news back from him intentionally, but he isn’t sure if anyone had had the time to even consider the feelings of one individual soldier.
His father’s desk, the one piece of furniture that he had been able to pass down to his son, is probably ashes. His mother’s cookbook, the cheap one that was twice as thick as it had been to start, padded out with amendments and additional recipes that she had stuck in over the years. Sometimes he had flicked through it, when he missed her, smiling at her acerbic asides about the cost of flour or the idiocy of the measurements on a recipe for shortbread. He doubted he’d ever see it again. The trunk of his wife’s dresses, the ones that he hadn’t quite been able to bring himself to sell: they’ll all be gone, too. The pictures his children had made, their school reports, the toys that they hadn’t taken with them. Everything that they had ever owned.
It’s all gone.
He doesn’t weep, he just folds the telegram up awkwardly, with one hand, and slides it into the tin that he still keeps in his pocket, having to wrestle with it for a moment before it will even pop open. He spares a glance, when he does, at the photographs and letters inside, and it strikes him that this is all that he owns now, in the entire world.
He still can’t move his arm properly, nor his hand. By the time he gets to York and they took the bandages off, the wounds were stinking with pus and infection. It leaves him feverous, delirious. They drain the wounds and bandage them again, but there are too many wounded soldiers and not enough nurses, even fewer doctors left: they give him his pills each day and he sleeps through the worst of the pain.
The pills leave him woozy though, and stop him thinking straight. Dreams shift into reality, and sometimes he lies there watching men he knows are dead cry in the corner. He always falls asleep before those apparitions disappear, leaving the sound of sobbing echoing through his mind.
He’s scared he might have to lose his arm.
He’s seen far worse happen in the hospital on the front.
No letters come for him: he isn’t even sure if his family have learnt what has happened to him, heard where he is, and he doesn’t know how to get in touch with them: he can barely hold a spoon, let alone a pen, and he feels too guilty to ask one of the nurses for help. But soon enough the infection gets worse, and he forgets everything but the pain of it.
His skin feels like it is on fire.
He drifts in and out of consciousness: it might have been for days, but it could also have been for years, as far as Bard is concerned. His dreams are vivid, and full of a terror that leaves him sweating, and cold. In his dreams his world is burning, there is fire all around him, and he cannot get out: Bain’s face dances in front of his, looking terrified, and Sigrid drowns in water that she cannot swim in. He can’t find Tilda. She’s never there.
The fire burns his skin, and everything crashes around him; a dragon with Churchill’s face laughs at him. He sees smoke creeping after him along the canals back home, chasing him, calling for him, searching him out. He’s still wearing his stinking uniform, and wakes almost retching and the stench of his own body, at the dried blood and shit and filth that has become a part of his daily existence.
When they give him his medication each evening the dreams ease, at least of a few hours. He imagines dappled sunlight in his children’s hair, tart fruit and laughter, the slow sound of Thranduil’s voice, only half remembered, reading the letters that Bard sends him aloud. Then the other dreams come back, and he can see only the faces of the men he has left behind on the front, the men who called him brother and who will never come home, and blood.
He cries in the night, sometimes for hours, but that’s okay – most people in this ward do, anyway.
But slowly, somehow, he starts to feel better. The nurses cluck and tell him that he has the constitution of an ox, but he knows that isn’t why. He just can’t let himself die here, not without seeing his children: he can’t break his promise to Sigrid, can’t go without kissing Tilda’s forehead one last time, can’t bear to leave Bain to grow up alone, not quite yet. They change his bandages again, and it still stinks, but it is more him and less infection now.
The doctors are happy. The wounds are finally closing up, leaving long ridges of vivid red scar tissue in their wake.
Bard watches the entire thing with a strange sort of indifference.
It hurts.
He’s moved to a recuperation facility once they beat the infection, but in his heart he knows that it is just another bed that he cannot move out of. It’s in an old country manor, and he wonders what happened to the lord that must once have lived here, before the war. Now, metal-framed beds line every dining hall and library, and all that is left of the family that came before are the faded marks on the wall where great pictures must once have hung. He asks for a bath, this time, and the nurse says that she will see what she can do, but the first week passes and she has clearly forgotten. He doesn’t blame her – she has the entire of the library to staff alone, just her, and there are patients in far worse condition than he.
The man in the bed next to him tries to strike up conversation occasionally: the skin of his face has been stripped away in fire, and he stares at Bard with one pale, green eye through a mass of bandages. It reminds him of his dreams, and he says little in response.
He still can’t use his hand to write a letter, still can’t do anything with it, and he’s been lying for so long that he isn’t sure if he can even walk. His legs feel like they’ve wasted away; he probes the second injury with his one good hand, the great slice in his right leg, only to find that it has healed over, too. He’s barely thought of it, focused too much on his arm.
Bard is back in England, and it has been two years since he has seen his children, and even now that he is here he cannot find a way to them.
He feels weak; he spends much of the day sleeping, filled with regret.
Everything hurts, but the worse pain is when he wonders if he will ever see them again, his brave girls and his beautiful boy, and if they will even recognise him when they do.
Are they even looking for him?
Do they think him dead?
Have they given up hope that he will return for them?
The war is over: it has been well over three months since he first stepped on that mine, and the parades celebrating their victory (only it still doesn’t feel like a victory to Bard, not in the real sense of it) have come and gone. No doubt his children waved the union flag and cheered the boys coming back home, not realising that their father was already here, oozing pus and half dead.
Maybe he is dead already, and this is just some long and painful purgatory.
Is he going to hell? Him and half the world, probably. War is over. They’ve buried so many man, so many women, so many children. There might have been a few bad men somewhere in that pile, but most of them, he thinks, must have been just like him. There because someone put a gun in their hands and told them they had to. War is over, war is over, victory is ours.
But the ghosts remain.
So do the dreams.
Then one day he wakes up and he is sure that it has finally happened, sure that the madness that threatened to take over him every day on the front has finally eased its slippery way through his defences, because that’s Sigrid’s voice, isn’t it?
She’s arguing with someone – no, he must be insane – she sounds so close though, sounds so near, and she’s using that tone of voice that her mother used to scold with when she would tolerate no argument. She sounds so fierce, and perhaps this isn’t hell after all, perhaps he was simply waiting to go in the other direction – so many people have died after all, it is only to be expected that there is a queue, and this can’t actually be Sigrid, not here, not in this place. She’s his girl, his baby, his first, his fierce little beauty, and she’s a long way from here.
She’s somewhere green, and happy, and warm. With Thranduil, and his son. Living a better life than Bard could ever have hoped to provide them with.
“Da!”
It shakes him from his stupor, and he opens his eyes now, because that is definitely Tilda, close by, and he tries to pull himself into sitting up but forgets, as he so often does, that he can barely use one arm, and half collapses back onto the bed with a bellow of pain, rolling onto one side, but that means that he is looking out across the makeshift ward and he can see her, his youngest, and she’s laughing and running through the line of cots. For a moment he feels guilty at the noise that they are making, the soldiers they are disturbing, but then he sees that though some of them are weeping, there are others that are smiling, and more that manage to do both.
Her hair is longer, far longer than it used to be, in a long braid that flies out behind her. There is Bain too, his brave boy, and his son is already crying at the sight of time. Sigrid isn’t far behind, taller than she was before and running to. Behind them is a blonde boy, looking nervous and familiar, and then there is a red-haired girl, standing back a little, behind Thranduil, who’s holding her hand and staring at him.
There is a brief moment, when the world seems to still, and the two simply watch each other. Thranduil isn’t smiling, but there is a relief in his expression that has no name or explanation.
Bard doesn’t have any time to dwell on that, though, because soon after he has his one good arm full of his little ones, and all three of them are crying now, and Tilda is flailing at his shoulders and shouting at him for getting injured; Bain has buried his face in Bard’s neck and seems unwilling to let go; Sigrid is peppering his shorn scalp with kisses. Right now he doesn’t give a damn about anything else in the world, just his beautiful children, laughing and crying together, and his arm is agony from when he tried to lift himself up but he can barely bring himself to notice.
They’re here. They’ve found him.
And they stay for quite some time. They make him tell them what happened, all that they don’t know, but he feels that it must have been a sorry tale, for he can remember so little of it, really. He doesn’t tell them about the pain, or the dreams, or the infection, but he does tell them that the pills have made him very woozy, and that he can’t write, which is why he hasn’t been in touch. Sigrid eyes his bandages – more of a dirty grey again now than white – with some concern, but they seem to buy his story that not all that much damage has been done.
He makes the mistake of looking across at Thranduil at one point though, who is stood by the end of the bed with the other two children, not quite a part of it all but not separate, either. The man certainly doesn’t believe his story.
But then, Bard supposes that it doesn’t really matter. He trusts Thranduil to spare the children the worst of it, just as he has been doing the last few years.
“We’ll see you very soon,” Sigrid promises him when the nurse finally shoos them away, and perhaps it is testament to the glow that has suffused Bard’s mind that he doesn’t stop to question that any further.
“Very, very soon!” Tilda chips in, her voice bright. Bain doesn’t say anything, but his eyes are starting to well up again, and so Bard just kisses the back of his hand and tries to wink at him, the way he used to when Bain was a little one and got nervous about doing something. Bain tries to smile in response, so he supposes that it must have worked, at least a little.
Thranduil nods at him, when they go, and it is only afterwards that Bard realises that he forgot to thank the man, for bringing Bard’s kids all the way here. He curses himself a little for that, but convinces himself that he’ll do it next time, that it won’t really matter that he didn’t remember.
He drifts back into sleep, for a little while, until he is woken by the nurses.
OLD LEES MILITARY HOSPITAL, YORKSHIRE
DISCHARGE PAPERS
9TH NOVEMBER, 1945
PATIENT: Bard Bowman
ADMITTED: 1st October 1945
INJURIES: broken foot (set and healing on admission), wound to left thigh (stitched and healing on admission), shrapnel wounds in right arm, recovering from infection to injury
SIGNED: Dr J. P. Jackson
Arrangements have apparently been made, though Bard wasn’t privy to them: he suspects, however, that even if a nurse had come to tell him at some point in the last few days that he was to be moved, he wouldn’t have really registered what was happening anyway. The visit from his children has forcibly shaken the life back into him, have made him open his eyes again properly.
He has to get well, doesn’t he? Not for himself, but for them.
He’s too golden after his last visit to bother asking them where he is being taken, but he does make sure to ask a nurse that they send a copy of his discharge papers and his forwarding location to his children. He tells the nurse the address in a voice that sounds almost like his own, enunciating each syllable clearly. He doesn’t need to check to make sure that he is right: that address has been fixed in his mind ever since his children first arrived there.
They lift him from his bed onto a stretcher, and he shudders a little at the colour of the sheets left behind, at the wrecked state of the remnants of his uniform. He supposes that officers probably get a better treatment than the rest of them: no doubt when Thranduil had returned from war, he had been cared for differently. He wonders, as they carry him out of the ward, what the man must have thought at the state of them.
He waves at the man in the bed next to him as he passes, the bandages still covering the wreckage of his burnt face, and resolves himself to being kinder in the future. But it is hard, at times when you have sunk to the lowest that you have ever been, to think of others.
It is dark outside now, and they load him quietly into a small country ambulance. It isn’t the great truck that he was moved here in, packed with soldiers that were deposited at various military hospitals. Tonight it is just him, and the two men driving and carrying, and it is peaceful. When was the last time he sat in the dark night and didn’t have to listen to the distant sound of screaming? He isn’t sure if he can remember, anymore.
Bard watches through the window, barely feeling the bumps in the road as they shake the bed of the ambulance. There is a haze of cloud, so he cannot see any stars, but the moon is bright and nearly full, the light of it burning through the overcast. The trees that line the road look almost silvery in that light, the bark of the bare branches rendered in a precious metal in the still of the night. It is quiet, and he drifts to sleep.
Somewhere, in the distance, a barn owl hoots.
The drivers share a cigarette, and talk quietly among themselves. They have transported many soldiers today, and this is their last journey.
Bard wakes some hours later, to find that they are driving through a village. It is a small place, and it mustn’t yet be too late in the night because there is a faint glow of light behind some of the windows. They’re still hanging up the blackout curtains, even though the war has been over for nearly two months now. He smiles, to himself, and it is a little bitter. Perhaps they don’t trust in the good news. He can relate to that. Or perhaps they don’t want to believe it: perhaps they have a son who hasn’t come home, and the longer they can pretend like the war is still going on, the longer they can remain hopeful that he will return to them.
He looks away.
There is blood from the field still under his nails, and he wonders if any of it could belong the sons of this small village. Hopefully at the next hospital he’ll finally be able to have a bath – and he doesn’t resent it, not really, he knows that there are too many soldiers and not enough facilities, but as long as the filth of the war is still on him he can’t help but feel like it still isn’t over, like it hasn’t really gone away, like it is still out there, looming and undefeatable, no longer a war of purpose or sides, just indeterminate and never ending violence against all men, ready to swallow him whole again.
The shadows of his dreams lurch out of the corners of the ambulance towards him.
He closes his eyes, and wishes that he still found comfort in prayer.
Bard has fallen half-asleep again when the ambulance finally stops, but the cool, winter air rouses him as the drivers open the door. He blinks, and tries to roll his shoulders to ease an ache, only to exacerbate the pain in his arm instead. He grits his teeth against it, refusing to scream. That is a strength that he did not have a week ago, he knows. He doubted that he had it a day ago. It comes from his children, from the re-found desire that they rekindled inside him. He has to be strong, for them. He has to be their father, again.
There are night blooming flowers somewhere close, he thinks, or perhaps just ones whose scent has lingered. It is late in the year for flowers though – it is strange that something should grow when the tendrils of frost are already threatening to curb the last of autumn’s growth. He shrugs off the thought, though – it isn’t really important, anyway.
He can’t see much of the house from the stretcher – most of the lights are off. But it is smaller than the one he came from, the stone work less ornate, and just as he is trying to work out where he might be the front door swings open, the light from the hallway pooling on the drive, golden around them. He raises his one good arm to block the light from his eyes, appearing too suddenly, too brightly.
The voice that greets them is familiar, though it takes him a moment to place it.
He is carried up the steps, and he is too tired to ask Thranduil why he is here, or what is going on, but Thranduil seems to understand, and just shakes his head: later.
They carry him through to a room, somewhere on the ground floor. The house is quiet, and still, and cool, but there is a fire burning in this room, one that has been recently stoked, and he finds himself almost shuddering in the warmth of it. He protests when they try to lift him on to the bed.
“Uniform,” he tells Thranduil, his voice hoarse now. “I’m filthy, I’ll ruin the sheets.”
Thranduil just shrugs, as if this is of no concern to him, and gestures for the drivers to continue. He commands the room, and they listen to him, not to Bard, and it is enough to make him start crying, silently, though he isn’t sure why he is.
Thranduil sends the drivers away, leading them out of the room and back to the ambulance, and Bard lies on his back in the bed, far softer than any of the ones that he has ever slept in, and watches the firelight play across the ceiling. Soon after Thranduil returns, but he still does not say anything: he just sits by the bed, close enough that Bard can see him but not so close that they might have to talk, and watches the fire. Bard watches him, the soft shine of his hair in the dim light, the hard line of his profile, the frown that rests across his brow.
It is the last thing he remembers seeing before he drifts, slowly, to a troubled sleep.