Captured Moments

CHAPTER THREE: SEPARATE WORLDS

LONDON

The barracks at Aldershot stretched across the Hampshire countryside like a small city of concrete and discipline. In the pre-dawn darkness, Landon lay awake on his narrow cot, listening to the symphonic snoring of thirty other men dreaming their own versions of war and home. The wool blanket scratched against his chin, so different from the soft cotton sheets at the small pension where he'd stayed in Saint-Rémy. His camera bag – now stored carefully under his bunk instead of slung constantly over his shoulder – held more than just photography equipment now. Between rolls of film and lens cloths, he'd tucked away small treasures: dried lavender from their last walk together, ticket stubs from the Avignon train station, and most precious of all, his collection of photographs of Marie.

"Oi, Pearce," whispered Thomas Bedford from the next cot. "Can't sleep again?" Thomas was a baker's son from Kent, with gentle hands that seemed at odds with the rifle calluses he was developing. His wife Jane wrote him daily about their coming baby, her letters full of domestic details that made the war preparations seem surreal.

"Just thinking," Landon replied softly, pulling out the most-handled photograph from his breast pocket. Even in the dim light filtering through the barracks windows, he could make out every detail – he'd memorized them all. Marie in the lavender field, that last golden afternoon. The sun had caught her hair just so, turning the dark curls to amber and bronze. Her smile held all the sadness and love and fear they couldn't put into words.

"Christ, she's pretty," Thomas observed, propping himself up on an elbow. "French, you said?"

"Half-French. Like me." Landon carefully returned the photograph to its envelope. "Her father runs a bookshop café in Provence. That's where I was working as a photographer before..." He gestured vaguely at their surroundings.

"Before this bloody mess," Thomas finished. "You know what the worst part is? The waiting. All this training, all these preparations, and for what? They say Hitler might back down over Czechoslovakia. They say Chamberlain might actually manage peace."

"Do you believe that?"

Thomas was quiet for a moment. "Nah. Not really. Jane's father fought in the Great War. Says you can smell it coming, like a storm. Says all of Europe stinks of it now."

The conversation died as heavy footsteps approached – Sergeant Mills doing his early morning rounds. Both men quickly feigned sleep. Mills was a veteran of the last war, his face mapped with scars and his voice permanently hoarse from German mustard gas. He took particular pleasure in drilling the "soft" young men under his command into proper soldiers.

The day began as they all did now – with the brutal shock of the 5 AM bugle. Landon's photographer's hands, once steady with delicate darkroom work, now struggled with the swift assembly of his rifle. His fingers, which had so carefully adjusted camera settings to capture the perfect light, now had to learn the coarser mechanics of warfare.

That morning's training was bayonet practice. Under a pewter sky threatening snow, they repeatedly charged straw-filled dummies, the sergeant's voice barking corrections:

"Pearce! Stop thinking about it and MOVE! This isn't one of your fancy photographs – this is killing! When you stick a Jerry with that bayonet, you don't get to frame the shot!"

Landon thrust forward again, trying to imagine the dummy as a real person and finding he couldn't. Instead, his mind kept wandering to the darkroom in Saint-Rémy, to Marie's delighted laugh when she'd successfully developed her first photograph...

"PEARCE! Twenty extra laps around the parade ground! And get your head out of France!"

Later, muscles screaming from the punishment runs, Landon sat on his bunk writing his daily letter. The pencil trembled slightly in his exhausted hand: