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Thomas is not like Mr. Lang. He is not like Edward Courtenay (though he doesn’t rank the two in the same category, at all, because Lang is a madman and Edward just needed time, someone to care, and Thomas cared).
The war didn’t change Thomas, except for a new hole in the hand to show off. He may have left a piece of his hand behind in France, but that was the whole of it. He’s out of it now, and he can live like all the people who’ve never even seen war.
Thomas doesn’t run for cover when one of the kitchen maids slams a cupboard door.
He doesn’t go to pieces when one of the electric lights burns out and pops, covering the whole room in dark.
He doesn’t see Daisy cut her finger while chopping vegetables and have a stroke at the thought she might bleed to death, because he wasn’t fast enough at his job.
He doesn’t close his eyes and see the Somme, the ground suddenly made of bodies, men he can’t help (your guts are missing, we can’t save you, we have to get the men we can save, and we have to do it quickly) clawing at his leg and pleading to be taken back.
Thomas closes his eyes and sees nothing. Just the endless black of the inside of his eyelids, and he’s glad for it.
He gets no pity when he returns from the war, and he’s happy with that. In fact, nothing could be better. Everyone looks at Lang like he’s an invalid, because that’s what Lang is. He’s a madman who gave in. Everything that Lang saw, Thomas saw. In fact, Thomas probably saw worse– Lang likely never had to hold a man’s intestines in, to pry the razor-wire from a corpse so it could be hastily shoved into the trench in some kind of mock burial. Thomas did. Thomas did, and he’s just fine now.
Thomas is that little bit tougher than everyone else, but he didn’t start out that way. He built his own trenches around himself over the years, through every disapproving glance from his family, every “well, you ought to be this”, every time he was discarded and told he was nothing, for things beyond his control. He persevered. He fought, and he was still fighting. He’s living proof that it is possible to overcome hardships, and anyone who’s content to wallow in their own self-pity doesn’t deserve kindness. Anyone who isn’t happy with their lot, and yet does nothing to change it, are either too stupid or too lazy to be cared for.
Maybe that isn’t fair, but if there was one lesson Thomas learned early, it was that life isn’t fair. What happened to Edward wasn’t fair, the way Thomas was tossed into the trenches when he’d volunteered wasn’t fair, the fact that he’d worked his fingers to the bone only for his place at Downton to stagnate wasn’t fair. If you were having a rough time of it, you’d be stupid not to do anything and everything in your power to fix that.
So, Lang has no excuse to act the way he does. Not when Thomas had it just as bad, and came out all smiles and ready to work. Lang is letting himself get consumed by a war that’s miles away, in battles that are long over.
You can make yourself stop shaking, it isn’t that hard, just deep breathing. And for nightmares, you can go into town and get yourself a bit of sleeping syrup. The cost wouldn’t be much on a valet’s pay. If Thomas is working in the hospital and someone comes in with a gruesome injury that makes him remember something awful (and that happens more than he’d like to admit, the kind of memory that grips you hard and won’t let go), Thomas says he’d been daydreaming and goes on with his work like nothing happened. It’s easy.
No one has to know there was anything wrong with you. You could cry about it later, when you were safe and sound in your warm bed, mixing a bit of sleep aid in with some of the wine you have tucked away. Maybe Lang needs to take up smoking, to stop him chewing his lips so (how very unbecoming of His Lordship’s own valet). Sometimes Thomas chews right through the end of his cigarettes, but that’s only when he really got to daydreaming, which is becoming increasingly less often. He’s proud of himself for it, he was always proud of himself. And why not? No one else is going to be.
Thomas is moving on just fine– after seeing his fellow medic get his brains splattered not three feet from him, after realizing there would be no one to write to when the same thing happened to him, after the nightmares about being buried alive in the side of the trench, after Edward (Lt. Courtenay)… after realizing that no matter where he went, nothing would change. After all that, he’s getting on just fine.
And he’s doing it all on his lonesome.