Soldier No More by Anthony Price

anyway, and after that he knew too much to be allowed to risk his skin.” He paused. “And Charlie, of course.”
    Ada Clarke sighed. “Only half of my Charlie came back, sir. He left half of hisself back in Dunkirk … and I sometimes think it was the half I knew best—“ she caught herself quickly, with a half-glance at Roche, the stranger “—but you’re right, sir—you and Mr Deacon and Charlie … and Master David, of course—we mustn’t forget him!”
    “We certainly mustn’t,” agreed Wimpy, not looking at Roche.
    “I never thought to see him go, that the war would go on so long, to take him as well as Mr Nigel—and I was sure that he was going to get killed too, he was that keen and pleased to go, being just a boy and not knowing any better … You know—“ she embraced them both with a proud look “—I pressed his battle-dress just the same as I did for you, sir … and Mr Nigel … except Master David had a better one, what he’d got from a Canadian friend of his, he said … that last leave he had, before the old Wesdragons went off to France—“ she nodded at Roche to emphasise the occasion “—that was just right after the Normandy landings they went—he was in the tanks, Master David was.”
    “The ‘Wesdragons’ being the West Sussex Dragoons,” explained Wimpy, almost as proprietorial as Mrs Clarke.
    “That’s right, sir. It’s the cap badge, you see—Master David explained it to me. It’s supposed to be a horse, because they used to be on horses in the old days, but it doesn’t look like no sort of horse that ever lived, it’s that badly done. So they reckon it’s part horse and part dragon—the dragon being the proper badge of Wessex. It’s all part of tradition, and tradition’s very important, to my way of thinking—like doing a thing the old way, like it’s always been done, which is the way it ought to be done—the proper way … And, of course, he said, a dragon’s just right for them in their tanks, because it’s all covered with scales—like in the window in the church, of St. George and the dragon—and they’d got all these iron plates to keep the bullets and suchlike out, you see.”
    “Huh!” murmured Wimpy. “All except 88-millimetres, and the odd Panzerfaust , anyway … and suchlike.”
    She frowned to him. “What’s that, sir?”
    Nothing, Clarkie, nothing—just a thought, that’s all.” Not so much a thought as a memory: they were practically wiped out in the bocage, south of Caumont ….
    Roche observed the two very different faces, the sharp ferrety features of the schoolmaster and the red-cheeked middle-aged countrywoman, as they watched each other, sharing overlapping recollections of past fears—fears they had shared for very different reasons, the one because he knew the perils lying in wait for young tank commanders, the other because she had seen so many of them march away, never to return. And there was a third face, the one in the file, to be superimposed on those unrealised fears, hard and young and arrogant, quite unlike either of these—quite unlike the young ‘Master David’ he might otherwise have imagined from their evident affection, and yet the face which united them nevertheless: a broken-nosed, rugger-playing face.
    “Ah… well, he did come back, sir, Mr William.”Ada Clarke might not know a Panzerfaust from a hole in the road, but she had understood Wimpy’s meaning in the end.
    “He was invulnerable, certainly.” The schoolmaster’s agreement was strangely grudging. “But it was also a post-war version of him, Clarkie.”
    “Well, you wouldn’t expect him to be the same, would you, sir?” Ada Clarke chided him sympathetically. “Growing up in the war…just waiting to take part—watching the other boys go before him, like young Mr Selwyn in the RAF, that was killed … and then seeing all those terrible things in those camps, that they showed on the films on VE-Day—“ she turned to Roche suddenly