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horrible, don’t you?”
     
    E LIZABETH HAD FALLEN asleep, her head against his shoulder. He was no more than two miles or so from her house as the crow flew, and Rutledge could feel the weariness of the long day turning to drowsiness of his own as he drove. Fighting it, he concentrated on the road ahead—and swerved as he realized too late that a man was standing at a crossroads, almost in his path.
    As the lamps of his motorcar pinned the figure in their bright beams, he would have sworn in that instant that it was the face he’d seen the night of the Guy Fawkes bonfire.
    Elizabeth came awake as the motorcar veered wildly. She said quickly, “What’s wrong—?”
    Rutledge’s heart rate seemed to have doubled as he fought the wheel to bring the car back to the road. He had all but killed the man!
    “Someone—in the road—I didn’t see him until I was on him—”
    He must stop, he told himself disjointedly—be certain the man was all right—the wing had missed him—given the idiot a shock perhaps as severe as his own—but done the man no harm —there had been no contact—
    Yet he didn’t want to go back—he didn’t want to find that the figure on the road had existed only in his dream-filled brain as he had drifted unexpectedly into sleep.
    “I don’t see anyone in the road.” Elizabeth said it doubtfully, turning to look over her shoulder. “Are you sure, Ian? There’s no one there—Ought we to go back?”
    Hamish said, “You must go back! You canna’ leave him to bleed to death in a hedgerow!”
    Rutledge was already slowing the motorcar, and with some difficulty turning it on the narrow road. Dread filled him, a deep and abiding belief that if he was right, there would be no body and no sign of one.
    And when they reached the crossroads again, although he searched for a good ten minutes, no one was there—
     
    R UTLEDGE WAS AWAKE before dawn, standing at the windows looking out over the back lawns of Elizabeth Mayhew’s house. It was a pretty view, even in the early morning mists. Flower beds laid out asymmetrically formed a pattern that led the eye down a grassy walk to a bench overlooking the small pool at the bottom of the garden. In summer the beds held a wonderful variety of blooming plants, but an early frost had blighted summer’s growth, leaving behind only the skeletons of what once was.
    But what he saw at this moment was not a Kentish garden; it was the blighted landscape of France. It seemed he could still hear the guns, using up their stockpiled shells in a mad frenzy of noise and destruction. It was as if there was to be no Armistice in a few hours. The rattle of machine guns, punctuated by the sharper fire of rifles, added to the din, and men were still dying, and would go on dying until the eleventh hour. He had tried to husband them, to stop the waste of life and the long, long lists of the wounded, but he could hear the cries of pain and the screams of the dying and the scything whisper of bullets overhead.
    A political decision it had been, not a battlefield victory: The Armistice would commence on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, at the eleventh hour of the morning—11 November, 1918, eleven A.M.
    It had held no reality for Rutledge. He had stood in the trenches, Hamish alive in his mind, and stared across the bleak, tortured land he had known intimately for four unthinkable years. And the Scot’s words kept forming in his head: “I shallna’ see this eleventh hour, I shallna’ go home with the rest, I shallna’ prosper in the years ahead. And you willna’ prosper, either.”
    Better to be dead. Better to walk out into that machine-gun fire and be dead, than to go home to nothing. . . .
    He could hear the voices around him, men who had survived, talking tentatively about what would actually happen here. But not of home. Not yet. No one could quite grasp an end to the bloody Great War. There was neither jubilation nor hope, only an odd reluctance to think