Free Armistice by Nick Stafford Page A

divulge that you heard it from me. Can you do that?”
    Philomena pondered this for a moment. “You want me to give you my oath that I’ll never let on that you told me what you’re about to?”
    â€œI’m not going to tell you unless you give me your oath,” said Jonathan.
    â€œI, Philomena Bligh, give you my oath.”
    â€œThat was too easy,” said Jonathan. “Look, if I tell you, you might be enraged, and you might want to do something, and in that frame of mind you might forget, or choose to set aside your oath to me. What I’m asking is that you do whatever you feel you have to do, but that you’re careful to ensure that I could not be your only possible source.”
    â€œDo you want me to say that I’ve never met you?” she offered; whatever it took to make him go on.
    â€œNo, that lie would be too easily apprehended,” said Jonathan. “What I mean is I need you to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to know that I’m your source, because what I’ll tell you, if I tell you, is disputed, and denied, and so far unprovable, and I’ve been threatened by a top-top lawyer with a slander suit and jail if I repeat it verbally, and a libel charge and jail if I ever write it and pass it on. So if I tell you what I might tell you, you mustn’t leave this cafe and go straight to people claiming that I’ve told you. You have to appear to have unearthed it yourself, or been told by someone other than me.”
    â€œI swear,” confirmed Philomena. “I understand, and I swear.”
    â€œYou can swear but you can’t really understand because I haven’t told you yet,” said Jonathan. He bent his head, indicating that she should bend hers, and, heads almost touching, in a lowered voice, he told her, “I’m trusting you.”
    She nodded, wondering if he was actually mad and there wasn’t going to be any import in what he might tell her.
    â€œIn Dan’s memory,” he added.
    They were so close she could feel the heat from his head.To see his earnest eyes she had to lean away sideways and turn toward him.
    â€œYes,” she said.
    â€œOkay, then,” said Jonathan, sitting back a little, checking around him. “A short while later, on the tenth of November to be exact, me and Dan were in a trench lying up. It was a German trench; marvelous construction. We were advancing. Everyone was talking about how an armistice was rumored for the next day, but nothing was confirmed. Dan and I had managed to arrange things in a sort of unacknowledged way so that we knew where each other was most of the time but didn’t mention it. You didn’t want to get too close to anyone. Well, you did and you didn’t. You wanted friends but they had a habit of dying, so you didn’t want them. He’d been hinting about the rift with his parents; he wasn’t going to take over the shop, was he?”
    â€œNo,” said Philomena, “he didn’t know what he was going to do.”
    â€œI was lucky,” said Jonathan. “My parents could afford to keep me in school, then I got a scholarship. Despite that I wasn’t clever.”
    â€œYou must have been.”
    â€œNo, I worked hard, feverishly so, because of what my parents sacrificed to invest in me.”
    â€œYou’re clever now.”
    â€œIf I am, I’ve been trained to be,” said Jonathan. “A lot of it is learning the accent. Contrary to what they would have you believe, the way the people who run things speak is an accent,rather than the ‘right’ way. This accent lends authority and gives the impression of intelligence. Anyway, from down the trench we could hear someone barking ‘ ATTENTION .’ It was a sergeant acknowledging a new officer, a captain. He looked a bit sheepish, this captain. Right uniform, right stance, but not completely at home in it.
    â€œWe’d got used to