Parents...3

This follows on from Parents...2.

It runs to 3,000 words and should have warnings for battlefield setting, injury, death, and discussion of both mortality and expectations of the/an afterlife.

Valentine Trugrove was working his way across a battlefield. He wasn’t dressed for it by any stretch of the imagination. For a start, if he’d started the day thinking that he would be doing this, he wouldn’t have put on a pair of dress shoes. If he’d known he was going to wind up wearing a pack, then he wouldn’t have worn a velvet coat – the pile over much of the garment was never going to be the same again. His trousers were made of velvet too but he wasn’t going to look at what state they were in until later, much later. Things could have been worse though, the ground underfoot lacked the squelch he’d come to associate with battlefields after several unfortunate episodes in his past, but then no artillery had been employed here and thus the ground hadn’t been churned and underlying utility pipes hadn’t been broken.

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