«letters to the somme»

two or the other.

“You have nothing to worry about.” Clara tosses her head with a snort.

It is break time at the hospital for the nurses, and Rose is out back with her new friend Clara, who is Jack’s girlfriend. Clara is different from Mary, who Rose has known all her life. She is the rebellious daughter of a wealthy merchant, and of course she found a kindred spirit in wicked, handsome Jack.

Clara is smoking a cigarette, sucking the smoke in lazily, blowing it into the air in a languid fashion.

Rose coughs.

“The Mail doesn’t usually take this long, though. It’s been a month, Clara, what’s taking so long?” She sighs, nibbling her lip.

“I’ve heard something about a shell going too far back at the Somme, transport lines destroyed or something like. Relax, Jack hasn’t sent me a letter for weeks.”

But the tiny pucker between her eyebrows gives it all away.

Luke is learning to walk with crutches in the convalescence garden. Usually, he would be sent to a convalescence home, but he is doing so well he doesn’t need to. Sometimes Rose visits him on her rounds, and he is getting better and better every day. She found him talking enthusiastically about football to a man in a smart suit smoking a cigar once. Chelsea.

He is struggling along with his crutches, wincing every time his wounded ankle touches the ground. His arm muscles are strong and carved, his cheeks rosy with exercise.

“Hallo, Rose!” He grins happily, and sits down on the bench near him, exhausted.

How can he be so cheerful? How has Luke, who has been through five times what all of them have gone through, be smiling, and happy?

“No news from James?” The smile slips from his face slightly. Rose, face twisted into a frown so she can’t cry and embarrass herself, shrugs, shielding herself with a stack of linen.

“Don’t worry. These things happen.”

Rose then remembers Mary’s face when she saw Luke in the hospital.

And she pictures James instead of Luke in that bloody, infested mess on a sterile white bed.

“Shh, don’t cry.” Luke says awkwardly as she sits down on the bench and starts to weep. If it is true, how cruel it is that only less than two months ago the ring she is wearing on her left hand was just slipped on on the happiest day of her life?

If it is true, how will she live?

Oh Lord.

“You need to stop worrying. You can’t help him here.” Luke says bluntly, and Rose looks up at him with wet, wide eyes.

“Try not to think about it.”

Easier said than done.

After Luke swings off on his crutches again, Rose has a thought. When she goes home that night, cycling her old, rusty bicycle back to the gloomy street of Waterloo, it’s all she thinks of.

Pray. It has worked before, hasn’t it?

Unless he is dead.

He can’t be dead. Rose chides herself, trembling.

She lights a candle before going to bed, and clasps her hands together on her little, worn prayer book.

“I have not always been right. I may have broken rules or committed sins. I am sorry for anything I did when I was a child. But to kill James as punishment is cruel, and I do not know if you are there or not, actually. You are supposed to love everyone equally; you are supposed to be all-powerful, are you not?” Rose sighs, squeezing her eyes shut completely.

“But men are dying, and you daren’t do anything. It is two or the other, isn’t it?” She sighs again, and rests her forehead on her clasped hands.

“Please protect my darling from all harm. Amen.”