He knew very well that it had become something of an obsession, this celebration. Hamish harped on the date, as did the newspapers, giving him no peace.
For weeks he’d watched the preparation of the temporary structure that London was building to honor the nation’s casualties of war. In fact, seeing every stage had been unavoidable as he came and went at the Yard. The permanent memorial would not be completed until the next year, but much had been made of the eventual design and placement.
A Cenotaph: a monument to the dead buried elsewhere…
And so many, so very many of them were: a sea of white crosses in foreign ground, some with names, some with no more than the bleak word Unknown. But he had known them; he and officers like him had sent them out to die, young and inexperienced and eager, dead before he could recall their names or remember their faces… Dead before he’d had the chance to turn them into real soldiers, with some small hope of survival. Dead and on his conscience, like weighted stones. And no time to mourn Nor did he need a Cenotaph standing close by Whitehall and Downing Street as a focus for his grief and loss. He-like countless others-carried them with him every day. The men he had served with, shared hardship and fear with, bled and suffered with, were as sharp in his memory and his nightmares as they had been before they died. As was the recurring voice that lived in his mind. A reminder in every waking moment of the Scots he’d led and the one Scot he’d been forced to execute during the horrendous bloodbath that had been the Battle of the Somme.