His uncle praised his resilience in getting away; he had it on good authority that the rebel group they’d encountered had almost certainly used nerve-gas agents. Possibly he had been exposed to them, which was why they were keeping him under observation for a little while. Did Owain have anything to report that might suggest such an exposure? Anything he recalled that he hadn’t yet mentioned? The field marshal’s tone was gentle and unthreatening. Without prejudice to yourself, my boy. Owain considered before shaking his head and insisting that he was fine.
Shortly before his discharge from hospital, his uncle visited again. He told Owain that he’d made a good recovery and that everyone was pleased with his progress. However the medical experts considered it prudent that he be taken off frontline combat duties for a spell. It was standard procedure, no reflection on his calibre as a soldier. In fact, he was being promoted to major in recognition of his services. To ensure a thorough convalescence Sir Gruffydd had arranged a posting to his staff in London.
Owain was both relieved and humbled. Though he knew it was irrational, his predominating emotion was a sense of failure, a feeling that he had abandoned van Oost and the others, had fled from the field like a coward. It shamed him to contrast himself with his father, who had been awarded the Valour Cross for his part in the defence of Istanbul. His father was a war hero, whereas Owain had a growing conviction that he himself would never be a frontline soldier again.
The fog was gone, dawn a bruised light seeping through mottled cloud. Decades of warfare had led to pollution and ionisation of the upper atmosphere so that the skies were seldom truly dark by night or free of murkiness by day.
Owain walked briskly along the riverbank, where ice-locked freighters and barges lay abandoned until the spring thaw. In recent years winters had become long and bitter, summers short and torrid.
He entered a large park that was empty apart from the verdigrised statues that flanked its paths. They were life-sized representations of military men, generals and admirals and air marshals, their heads and shoulders crusted with bird droppings. I scrutinized their faces and names as we passed but recognised none. The snow-bracketed plinths held inscriptions celebrating achievements that meant nothing to me, covering campaigns that ranged from West Africa to the Arctic Circle over more than half a century.
I managed to get Owain to pause beside a statue I finally did recognise. It was a bronze of Field Marshal Montgomery, cited for his achievements in leading amphibious landings along the Baltic coast in December 1943. From Owain I gleaned that Montgomery’s divisions had bolstered those of the German Army Group North threatened by a Soviet winter offensive.
Britain had entered the war on the German side; France, too. Hitler had died in a plane crash soon after the invasion of the Soviet Union began. Peace terms were arranged following an anti-Nazi coup in Berlin—peace and a withdrawal from occupied territories in the west in exchange for military assistance in the east. Sixty years later the successors of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army had fought themselves to a standstill.
There was a loud crack overhead and a jet swept past at low altitude. It was gone as quickly as it had come. I had no idea why Owain had come here from his bed, except perhaps to escape his own memories. Now he was stirring, and I found myself being pushed into the hinterland of his mind as he reasserted himself. He’d found a scrap of paper in the pocket of his coat. Marisa had written that she would be exercising the dogs in St James’s Park at noon the following day. It was the last thing I saw before Owain swamped me so completely that I was extinguished.
My father used to say that military history was the refuge of scoundrels, a judgment that was typically sweeping. He had a special distaste for what he called “fantasists”—historians who did not stick scrupulously to the facts but were prepared to speculate on alternative outcomes. He always had a prodigious appetite for disapproval, and I’m certain he despised my career path. He himself was a distinguished though not uncontroversial historian who had made his name with a study of the interwar years, published before Rees and I were born. He’d married my mother, Magda, when he was forty. She was sixteen years younger, the daughter of a former German army officer, a widower who had immigrated to England in 1951. She died in a car crash when I was six.
