A Question of Honor by Charles Todd

It was easy to point a finger at Wade, coming as he did from his parents’ home in Agra, leaving their bodies to be found by servants.
    But what was the truth?
    Night after night I fell asleep without finding any answers to my questions.
    And there was Simon. He had taken me to see Mrs. Standish and to speak to the Middletons. But he had not wanted to do it. He had wanted to leave the past in the past, to accept the fact that Lieutenant Wade had perished. He hadn’t wanted to put my father and my mother through the anguish of reliving that week in India. And I rather thought he didn’t want to relive it either. He’d been Regimental Sergeant-Major. My father had been Colonel. How had they gone so very wrong in their reading of one of their own?
    I could understand that.
    At the same time five people had lost their lives because of this one man. And if he had survived the Khyber Pass and made his way across Afghanistan’s very difficult terrain, there was still his debt to society, unpaid.
    Of course it wasn’t my responsibility to bring him to justice.
    On the other hand, I dealt every day with life and death. I’d watched men die who would have given everything they owned to live one more week, one more month, one more year. There was the young Corporal who had just learned he was the father of a son. The Lieutenant who had just had word that his brother had been killed, and now he was dying as well, leaving his parents with no one to care for them. The Sergeant one day away from his leave who was planning to go home and be married. And none of them had seen the dawn. It was heartbreaking, it was real, it was impossible sometimes to forget.
    Who were the three people in England? And why had they deserved to have their lives cut short?
    I found myself thinking about them more than once. A father, a mother, a daughter. How old was that daughter? Ten? Fourteen? Twenty? Had it been a matter of unrequited love? Had Lieutenant Wade wanted to marry her and been turned down?
    The doctor at our station commented that I had circles under my eyes, and he sent me back to my cot to sleep another two hours. I knew it wasn’t a matter of enough sleep. The war was crammed into a corner of France, and broad as the Front was, most of the activity funneled down to Calais or Rouen. It was not unlikely that I’d encounter Lieutenant Wade again. As a patient, as one of a column of men moving up or falling back, whatever the tide of fighting brought in its wake. He could so easily see and recognize me before I was even aware he was there.
    I had to put him out of my mind and get on with what I had come to France to do, save as many men as I possibly could. What’s more, we had learned so much about treating wounds since I’d gone into training, and I was learning still more. It mattered more than a ten-year-old murder.
    We fought a losing battle with the numbers being brought in, and then just as quickly as they had multiplied, they dwindled. This was something we had come to expect in trench warfare, where first one and then another sector felt the brunt of an attack. And then the probe moved on, always testing, always trying to find a weak point where an attack could succeed. It was done on both sides of No Man’s Land, of course, but we only saw the outcome on our own side.
    One afternoon we found ourselves with barely enough wounded to support continuing to keep the aid station open. In fact, the fighting seemed to have moved well beyond us, and we tried not to feel too cheerful about this, for fear the tide would turn. But accustomed as we were to an ever-changing Front, to see it static for even a few days lifted our spirits. A sign of hope.
    I was sent back to the Base Hospital with a half-dozen ambulances, the last of our severely wounded, and because they needed more hands, I was kept on there. There were a large number of amputees in the recovery wards, and I had some experience working with them. Not long afterward, I was on