“I ought to tell you,” Tom said as Matthew lit his cigarette, “Sophie and I are engaged.”
He regarded Matthew with a faint smile, his eyebrows slightly raised as he waited for a response.
“Congratulations,” Matthew said.
“I’ll tell you something else, Lawson,” Tom added as he drew on his cigarette. “I don’t like you.”
Matthew cocked his head.
“But it’s not because you’re a Jew.”
“Oh?” He wondered if Tom was aware of how much that seemingly innocuous statement revealed.
“No, it isn’t.” Tom managed to sound magnanimous. “To be perfectly honest, it’s because you’ve never liked me.”
Matthew stiffened at that, and then he inclined his head in acknowledgment. It was true, after all, in the main.
“You’ve judged me from the beginning,” Tom continued with a rather boyish determination, sounding more like a hurt child than a hardened soldier. “I don’t know what you are, where you come from exactly, but I know you’ve thought I was some stupid yokel fresh from the farm, wet behind the ears, finger itching on the trigger.”
“Those were not my exact views,” Matthew returned dryly. “I am from a small town in Germany, as it happens.” Fraustadt was a market town, nothing more. “I am as much of a ‘yokel’ as you are.”
“What have you thought, then?” Tom asked, sounding tired rather than belligerent. “Because you’ve looked down on me, Lawson. I know you have.”
Matthew sighed. He did not wish to enumerate the ways he’d found Tom—and a hundred or more men like him—disappointing. He knew it revealed something in him, as much as in the men whose lives could seem so petty and small—and why shouldn’t they be? Most of them hadn’t suffered very much at all. They had a certain right, or at least a leniency, to be a bit small-minded.
He knew he could not explain how Tom’s brashness, his foolish bravado, his silly swagger and his blustering certainty that he knew what he was talking about, irritated and angered him in increasing measures, as much as he tried to blank it all out. He could not tell this truculent man-child that he had no idea about anything, because Matthew knew that wasn’t fair.
Tom had fought for four months. He’d seen his fair share of battles, of violence—more than Matthew had, now that he was kept behind the front lines for interrogations.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, even as it occurred to him that perhaps he and Tom Reese were nothing more than products of their separate upbringings; that Reese could not help being who he was, just as Matthew could not prevent it, either. They’d both been brought to this moment, so why should they hate each other for it? And he didn’t hate Tom anyway; he didn’t feel enough for that.
“Well, it matters to me,” Tom answered, his voice rising. “Sophie and I will be getting married. And if you have any intentions towards that mousy sister of hers—”
“Don’t,” Matthew said quietly. There was no menace in his voice, but Tom’s eyes widened for a second and he shrugged.
“Maybe you don’t have any intentions, then.” The sneer in his voice made Matthew’s become more lethal. Maybe he hated him, after all.
“My intentions towards Lily are none of your concern.”
“They are if we are to be brothers-in-law.”
Matthew was silent. Amazingly, this rather unappealing possibility had never even occurred to him. Perhaps because he didn’t know whether either he or Tom, never mind Sophie or Lily, would make it to the end of the war. Or perhaps because Sophie and Lily were so entirely different in their natures, that he occasionally somehow managed to forget they were sisters. He did not relish the idea of being brother-in-law to Tom Reese, but neither could he credit it as a real possibility now.
“Let’s make it to the end of the war,” he said. “And then we shall see.”
Tom set his jaw. “It won’t be long now, and I for one intend to stay alive.”
“As we all do, I’m sure.”
Tom shook his head, his expression turning grimly purposeful. From outside, they could hear the steady sound of shells falling, like a hard rain. Matthew had become so accustomed to the noise that he found it was silence that was now strange.
“I can tell you this,” Tom said. “I’m not going to die in some godforsaken foxhole or on some damned bridge I’ve never heard of, just months before Hitler finally decides to call it quits.”
“You may not have a choice,” Matthew pointed out mildly. “Although I am sure you will do your best, as will every other man, to stay alive.”
Tom looked as if he wanted to say more, but then he didn’t. He gave an angry jerk of his head as he flicked his cigarette out the window. “You’re needed, by the way,” he said as he turned to leave. “We captured some stupid sod wandering around, claiming to be a deserter. He’s lucky we got to him before his own damned army did.”
What became known as Operation Market Garden—the securing of the way into Germany from the Netherlands—turned quickly into a disaster for the Allies, with the British Airborne losing three-quarters of their troops as the Germans became the aggressors once more in a conflict that seemed to stretch on forever.