Free Armistice by Nick Stafford Page B

slouching about when it was quiet. We could have stood up and greeted the captain, but we didn’t. We did sit up a bit straighter, though. There was a boy, a private, carrying his luggage. An old trunk. I could see it had labels: Cape Town, Shanghai, Khartoum. Me and Dan took an interest in Captain Anthony Dore, for it was he.”
    Philomena leaned forward, anticipating that he was about to give an explanation for his extreme reaction last evening to Anthony Dore’s name.
    â€œWe weren’t rude to him, apart from not getting to our feet on the very fine German duck boards, which wasn’t rude as such; more informal. But he and Dan took each other the wrong way from the start. Dore introduced himself: ‘I’m Captain Anthony Dore,’ and I stood up, but Dan didn’t. Dan said ‘Congratulations,’ and left a little pause as if that’s all he was going to say, as if he was congratulating Dore on being himself, or on remembering his own name. It was a real moment of uncertainty until Dan followed his potentially sarcastic congratulations with, ‘on joining the best bit of the line, sir.’ Which just about saved it, but still managed to point to the fact that Dore was the new man. I noticed too that Dan had coarsened his accent and I knew that this was becauseDore was so posh. ‘You are?’ Dore asked Dan. ‘Second Lieutenant Case, sir,’ said Dan, then added, ‘promoted in the field’; which again could have been interpreted as a bit of a dig at the captain; i.e. ‘I’ve earned my commission whereas you are just posh.’
    â€œI could see that they’d got off on the wrong foot so I introduced myself to Captain Dore much more politely but, I have to confess, I did play my native accent up a bit so Dore knew where we all were. He asked me if I was the senior officer present, which I was, along with him—but when I jokingly said ‘apart from you’ he took it the wrong way, and he asked: ‘What are your orders, at this moment?’—knowing that we definitely hadn’t been ordered to slouch in a captured German trench. There must have been some orders to be actually getting on with, something to do with winning the war.
    â€œAnyway, I caught Dan’s eye in the corner of mine and I felt like I was in church: the vicar’s paused in his very long sermon, it’s deathly quiet, and the old lady in front lets go a fart. In short, I got the giggles. Dan, in an effort to make me laugh out loud, said, ‘Standing orders are to win the war, Captain Dore.’ And I could barely hold it in, and Dore thought it was about him, which it was in a way. I managed to speak, to say that there had been a skirmish earlier, that is, explained why we were lounging about now; we were knackered. But Dan kept going, and said something stupid—with a completely straight face, like ‘They defend, we attack; we attack, they defend,’ declining defend. ‘I attack, we attack, they attack.’
    â€œDore interrupted but didn’t look at him and he asked me who held the ruin that was the only thing you could see from our trench. It had once been a farmhouse but now it was just bits of wall. The enemy had it that day, but it had been ours several times, I told him, and I saw something change in Anthony Dore and he said that we were going to make it ours again in the morning. I told him we’d left it because they’d brought up a captured tank and he asked whether ‘retreating’ had been good for our morale. He was suggesting we’d given in a bit too easily, that we lacked backbone, but I tried to stay calm as I explained that the decision to retreat hadn’t been anything to do with morale, it was a strategic decision taken higher up, but he cut me off saying that we had new orders to press on and occupy as much ground as we could because the Kaiser had abdicated. Now this was potentially very