Epigraph
London, March 1919
Riley Purefoy did not think very much about the war. He didn’t have to. It was part of him. If others mentioned it …
… but then they didn’t: neither the other old soldiers, who had, most of them, realised very quickly that nobody wanted to hear what they might have to say, nor the civilians, who drifted away at the same rate as the soldiers fell silent.
Phrases and scraps, from time to time, slithered back at him. There was a taste in his throat sometimes, unidentified. There was an insistent image of bits of coughed-up gassed lung on the floor of an ambulance, which brought with it the necessity of standing still for a moment. There were moments still, a year and a half after he had stumbled off the battlefield, when the silence confused him as dry land confuses a sailor’s legs. There was Peter Locke’s voice, saying: ‘Then you’re in charge, old boy.’ This last stuck with him, because he knew that however unlikely it seemed, this remained largely true. He was in charge.
Despite his physical damage, Riley was well equipped: a sturdy young man, clear-eyed. So as the months went by, when he did think of war, he thought more of future war, and how to prevent it; of the future children, and how to keep them safe from it, or of the future of his fellow wounded, and
