Goodbye for Now: A breathtaking historical debut. M.J. Hollows

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      They all stood in silence, with hats and caps doffed under arms, focusing their vision on their shoes. Meanwhile the bishop droned on in his fashion, extolling the virtues of sacrifice.

      He stared with them, trying not to dredge up the memories of the past. I have lived through hell, but in that I am not alone, he thought. Bile stuck in his throat and he desperately tried to swallow it away. No one noticed, or if they did they attributed it to his grief.

      Everyone had suffered and sacrificed, not just the soldiers. He wondered how his brother might be now. How much he would have been changed by the war. They had both endured their own private hells, and as the dead would keep their solace, so would the living. No one would ever truly understand their plight and those that had experienced it didn’t need the others to remind them. That was what the nightmares were for.

      So he stood there, in silence, with their neighbours and people from the nearby streets, waiting for the bishop to finish his sermon, for the memorial to be revealed.

      Somewhere in the distance a baby cried. No one reacted, empathising with the child, who was probably too young to know what was going on but was joining in nonetheless.

      The bishop stopped and was replaced by a Major young enough to have been a junior Lieutenant at the outbreak of war. His voice broke as he began reading out the names of the lost, Morgan, Norris, Oliver, the endless torrent of the dead. They were just names now. Their legacy, the brass plaque that was being unveiled.

      He patted his coat pocket, remembering the bundle of letters that he kept there. That’s where they would stay, sealed, but not forgotten.

      The Major continued reading out the names of the fallen, some of whom he knew, others he had never met.

      When he could bear to think of him, he had spent most of the war angry with his brother. Not angry, that wasn’t strictly the right emotion. They had never really understood each other. They were very different people, with different stories. He had had high hopes for his brother, they all had, yet he threw it all away. He chose his path. When he should have turned to his family he turned away. It was hard now to remember him as they were when they were children. Too much had happened. His name had not been spoken aloud since. They all missed him, but it was too painful a memory.

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