She halts, looks back, and waves at him again.
He smiles back, the cheerless window framing his face, The train is too crowded to wave back; so he smiles, fingering the little silver cross she gave him that morning. “God loves you,” she sobbed. “I love you.”
“I love you,” he whispered back in the dawn light. The cross gleams idly in the cold neon light. It is a scanty bauble, no more than gilded rust; but at the moment it is worth more to him than all the gold in the world.
The train rumbles, the horn blows. A dismal breeze blows crumpled bits of newspaper from a sleeping beggar’s hand. The clanking begins, loud and discordant, and the iron beast begins to push itself away. She can only watch, fresh tears streaking down her face. The face at the window too is streaked with tears, but he tries to hide them in his shame. He is soldier now. He cannot weep among his brave comrades.
It is cruel.
The train puffs and pushes itself away from the lonely station. Away from his world, away from her. He will remember this moment forever, even in death; the lonely station under the grey dawn; the cold, barren wind playing with the trees; the soft stink of the train, an undercurrent of sweat and tears. And her, beyond it all, beautiful even in her sorrow.
He will remember this as he goes to battle, the cross hidden in a dark pocket with his ammunition. It is not in God her trusts in her. The memory of that bitter parting still echoes in his head as the men die, and the machine-gunners let loose their deafening torrent; as the tanks crawl over grime and corpses, as he clutches his gun with a frantic heart and thinks of her.
Two years later, a clean letter greets the dawn on an equally clean doorstep. She opens the door, and picks it up. It is a letter from his commander. She reads it. The words rush at her, clean and uncaring on the stiff white paper.
He was shot down in the trenches, up North, far away from his friends and family. They found him dead by the bloodstained walls of a captured bunker, his blood mingles with that of his enemy. Twelve bullets in his chest. They do not mention the ones in his head, his arms, his legs. He died in honour, they say unashamedly, he died for the nation.
And in his hand he held a tarnished, bloodstained cross.
He died alone behind enemy lines, fighting. For what? A dream, of freedom, of glory, of righteousness. Now the dream is shattered, the dreamer stilled. He lies dead, forgotten, another buried casualty the world will never know.
Far away, beneath the bloody dawn, the letter falls to the ground, and she weeps.
