Free Silence for the Dead by Simone St. James Page B

a little, and a shuttered blankness came carefully down. “Do I know you?”
    â€œYou can’t be here,” I said. “Not you.”
    Jack Yates.
Brave Jack
, the papers called him, the hero of the war. Newsreels flashed in my mind, imprinted on those rare nights I’d gone to the cinema with a few other girls: Jack Yates at a navy dockside, his long coat open and flapping in the wind, his hair blowing, a smile on his face, shaking the hand of Winston Churchill. Jack Yates on the steps of a swank party, posing with Lloyd George’s arm around his shoulders, and the caption
Our brave soldiers saluted by none less than the Prime Minister!
Newspaper photos of Jack standing at the Dover shore in uniform, his puttees high on his long legs, his hands clasped behind his back.
Send Me Back to the Front, Brave Jack Says.
    I stepped closer and he slid his feet from the sill and stood, facing me. He was a head taller than I, and something about him took all the air from the room. We’d all adored him, my girlfriends and I, each of us thrilling a little at the pictures of him, at the stories.
    He’d been a soldier, an ordinary private—an uneducated boy from Somerset, orphaned and raised by foster parents.
Truly from nowhere,
the papers marveled, because it was impossible to imagine that someone without a title, someone who had to work for a living, could matter. Thousands of men like that died every day, our sweethearts and husbands and brothers and cousins, and none of them mattered a damn.
    But not Jack. In the thick of battle, when his CO and all the officers of his dying battalion had been killed, lowly Jack had led the remaining men on a complex sortie across No Man’s Land, a half-mile stretch littered with barbed wire and bodies. He’d brought them into enemy lines, holding two trenches alone until reinforcements came. When it was over, the Germans had retreated from that section of the line, and a mile of the Western Front had been reclaimed for the Allies. All because of one man, who had not lost a single soldier in the entire suicidal operation.
    The newspapers had loved him. He’d been given the Victoria Cross, had been feted everywhere, was seen in every newsreel.
Brave Jack Asks the Women of England: Are You Doing All You Can?
The girls at the factory wanted to marry him, but when I told that to Ally, she only laughed, saying she’d had enough of soldiers with no money.
    I looked into his face now. “You didn’t go mad,” I said. “You never did. Not
you.
”
    He rubbed the back of his neck and was silent for a long moment. “Do I know you?” he asked again.
    â€œTrafalgar Square,” I said. “I was there.”
    The hand dropped. “Ah.”
    â€œI froze my arse that night, watching you. Me and my friends.”
    â€œYes, well.” He moved to brush past me, and I breathed the scent of him, an unfamiliar tang that went straight to my bloodstream. My own smell must have been much less pleasant, but he made no mention of it. His arm, where it brushed mine, was warm. “I’m sorry about your arse.”
    â€œThat wasn’t a madman,” I said, “speaking on the platform that night. We were moved to tears.”
    It was true. Even I, who hadn’t cried perhaps in years, had cried that night in Trafalgar Square, where we’d gone to see Jack Yates speak as the winter of 1917 settled in. It was supposed to be a recruitment speech, a war bond speech, the kind we’d heard countless times in the past three years.
England will endure. England will not be defeated. Your brave soldiers need you.
But Jack’s speech had been different. He’d been over there, he’d fought, he was one of us, and he was the only one, in those four long years of propaganda, who spoke to us with honesty. Who had actually meant what he said.
    â€œIt was a written speech,” he said to me.
    â€œOf course it was. And you