The Listener
by Restless Thoughts

Summary: Luke comes home from WWI a broken man. He doesn't want to talk about what he's seen or done. And then he meets Elvie, the girl his mother took in. Luke thinks he has found the friend he is looking for. The problem is, Elvie can't talk.

A/N: This idea came to me when I was reading Pauline Chandler's Warrior Girl.

As I sit on the train home, I have a mixture of feelings brewing in my stomach. With each chug and whistle, I am one inch closer to home. What will Mother say when she sees me? What does the village look like now? In one of her letters, Mother said that there are so many men going to France, the fields are unturned, the hedges untrimmed. And she had continued, But we have all adapted to the absence of the men and boys. The thing you need to do now, my dear son, is to concentrate on coming home.

I can't believe it -- I've made it. There are many who didn't. Mother often told me in her letters things like Billy May is not coming home, or Arthur Lindsay's parents are mourning the loss of their son. At night, while I tried to sleep in the trenches, I would often think of whether I would live to see the next night. And now, here I am. No more fighting, no more worrying, no more waiting, no more bleeding.

I am here.

I press my forehead against the cold glass window. I see a man staring back at me, in the window. His cheeks are gaunt, his eyeballs too big for their sockets, and his eyes... hollow, dead. When I blink, the man blinks, too. When I take a breath, the man takes a breath, too. Have I truly changed that much? I was sixteen when I left. I had no oppurtunity to wrangle any leave. My mother has not seen me for four years.

They all lied, the policticians did. They made us believe we'd be wearing scarlet. They made us believe that war was going to be a lark. They made us believe that as long as we could hold a gun, kill straw dummies with our bayonets, and run, we'd be alright. They made us believe that little girls would be handing us flowers, officers would be praising and decorating us, that we'd be fighting gallantly on fields of green.

Well, it was completely different when we landed in France. We wore khaki; and our uniforms were so big when we first got them that we swopped around until they actually fit. War was not a lark. We could all hold a gun, we could all kill straw dummies, we could all run; yet we all died. We didn't kill straw dummies in France. We killed men and boys that actually bled. No little girls handed us flowers; the people had all left town when the fighting kicked in. Officers yelled at us and called us worthless. Hardly any of us got decorated. And the fields of green was actually muddy No Man's Land.

There are many things I should not have done in France. When the officers were in a good mood, they allowed us to visit the village's pub. There you could get the best beer outside England, and the best chips, too. Sometimes, we'd flirt with the girls working there. I gave my first kiss to a girl in France. I don't know her name, she doesn't know mine. All I knew was that she was real pretty.

I killed my first man at Ypres. We were ordered to charge, and so we charged. All yelling obscenities at the top of our lungs, we charged toward the German trench. I shoved my bayonet at the first man I saw. I took him by surprise. When he started moaning, I saw him. I saw a scared boy, not much older than me, clawing at my uniform, his eyes wide. Blood. I cried that night. I see that boy in my sleep, I see him when I am awake, I see him as I'm walking.

Once, Charlie Parsons saw the letter I was writing home. "What's this, Dunham? A letter to your mama? Aww, how sweet. We should all hear it." He snatched up my letter, and with the rest of the men cheering him, he read it with a great gusto. "Dear Mother, how are you? I'm fine. Don't believe the rumours that we don't have enough to eat, and that men are dying like flies here--" Charlie Parsons threw my letter down in the mud and ground it under his heel.

"You bastard!" he screamed at me. "You're writing home and telling them all lies, all bloody lies!"

I think Parsons would have beaten me up if several men had not seperated us.

Charlie got to go home three months before the war ended. He got shot through the thigh, and his thigh-bone was shattered. But he wasn't feeling too sorry. He had waved at us and said, "See you, boys."

Mother told me to be strong, to pray constantly. I did that, when the war first began. But after a while, as I saw men dying--innocent soldiers--I gave up. How could this all happen if there really was a God? I asked myself. I stopped praying, my faith all gone.

I don't know how I got through it all. Better people than I died in France. Like Archbishop died in France. Archbishop, who was always singing What a friend we have in Jesus and praying. His real name was William Dumfries. We all called him Archbishop because he seemed so holy, compared to all of us. He died in Ypres, where my German died.

The train pulls to a stop. The conductor shouts out the name of the station. I pick up my suitcase and walk out of the train. The platform vibrates as the train disappears. There is only one woman on the station's platform: Mother. She doesn't cry. She comes up to me, puts her hand on my cheek and says, "Luke... Welcome home."

I am home.