At Some Disputed Barricade (9 page)

“But, sir, Major Northrup told us—”

“To hell with Major Northrup!” Morel snapped back, his voice shaking. “The man’s a bloody idiot! I’m telling you to get the horses out and rejoin your platoon.”

The corporal stood where he was, torn with indecision. Mason could see that he was terrified of what Northrup, who outranked Morel, would do to him for disobeying his order.

Morel saw it, too. He made an intense effort to control his fury. His face softened into pity so naked Mason felt almost indecent to have seen it. He wanted to look away, yet his own emotion held him. He was involved whether he wanted to be or not. Equally, he was helpless. This was one tiny instance of idiocy in a hundred thousand times as much.

“Corporal,” Morel said quietly, ignoring the rain running down his face. “I outrank you and I am giving you a direct order. You have no choice but to obey me, unless you want to be court-martialed. If Northrup questions you, tell him that. I’ll answer for it; you have my word.”

The corporal’s face flooded with relief. He was no more than eighteen or nineteen. “Thank you, sir.” He gulped.

Morel nodded. “Do it.” He turned away, then, realizing Mason was still there, he faced him. His eyes were hard and belligerent, ready to attack if Mason criticized him.

Mason looked at him more closely. Everything about him spoke of a terrible weariness. He was probably in his mid-twenties, a public school boy, and later, judging by his accent, a student at Cambridge. A wounded idealist, betrayed by circumstances and blind stupidity that no sane man could have conceived of.

Mason thought of all the Frenchmen, also betrayed and slaughtered. Would the man in front of him mutiny, too? There was a rage in him too fragile, too close to snapping.

“Who are you and what do you want?” Morel demanded.

“Richard Mason, war correspondent,” Mason replied. “Who is Northrup?”

Morel let out his breath slowly. “Major Penhaligon was killed on the first day of Passchendaele. Northrup’s his replacement.”

“I see.”

“I doubt it.” Morel glanced up the road the way the ambulance had gone. “You’ll have to walk. Follow the stench. You can’t get lost. Although it doesn’t matter a damn if you do. It’s all the same.”

“I know.”

Morel hesitated, then shrugged and turned away back to his own men and the staff car still parked on the edge of the road. After the driver cranked it up, Morel climbed in and they drove off.

Mason started to walk.

How should he write up this incident? Should he record it at all? It was a classic example of the idiocy of some of the officers now in command and, as always, it was the ordinary men who paid the price. Thanks to Judith’s intervention, this one would only have two smashed legs. He might even walk again, if it hadn’t caught his back as well. Others would be less fortunate.

He could see Judith in his mind’s eye, ordering the soldiers to lift, stand, hold. Her voice had been perfectly calm, but he had seen the tension in her. She knew what she was doing, and the risks. If one of the horses had slipped or she had lost control of it, the gun carriage would have rolled back into the crater and crushed the soldier to death.

She had not seemed to give reason even a passing thought. Morel’s fury had had no visible effect on her. She could have been a good nanny watching a small child throw a tantrum, simply waiting for it to pass before she told him to pull himself together and behave properly. It had not entered her head to rebel against the madness.

Why not? Did she lack the imagination? Was she conditioned to obedience, unquestioning loyalty no matter how idiotic the cause? Perhaps. John Reavley had stolen the treaty, and she was his daughter. Joseph Reavley was her brother. Maybe sticking to ideals regardless of pain or futility, in defiance of the evidence, was considered an evidence of faith, or some other virtue, in the family? She had been taught it when she was too young to question, and now to do so would feel like a betrayal of those she loved.

Mason’s feet hurt in the wet boots, and he was growing cold in spite of the exertion of walking. Two years ago Joseph Reavley had followed him from the shores of Turkey right to Gibraltar, then out into the English Channel. After the U-boat had sunk the steamer, they had ended in the same open boat in the rising storm, trying to make for England.

Would Joseph really have let them both drown rather than surrender his ideals to fight to the end? That one article, had Mason written it, might have ended the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of men, God knows how many of them dead in the two years since.

Yes, Judith was probably just like Joseph.

Mason remembered with surprise how he had believed Joseph then. For a brief time he too had understood the reasons for fighting. They seemed to embody the values that made all life sweet and infinitely precious. Indeed, was life worth anything at all, worth clinging to without them?

How many more had given their lives, blindly, heroically, since then? For what?

What would happen if he wrote that honestly, put quixotic sacrifice in its place? It was meaningless in the long run, no comfort to the hundreds of thousands left all over Europe, whose sons and husbands would never return, lonely women whose hearts were wounded beyond healing. Judith would think him a traitor—not to the cause, but to the dead, and to the bereaved who had paid so much.

He realized only now, in the wind and rain of this Flanders road where the stench of death was already knotting his stomach, that her disillusion in time would be a pain he would never afterward be free from. It would be one more light gone out forever and the darkness would be closer around him than he could bear.

Joseph came out of his dugout at the sound of Barshey Gee shouting almost incoherently. Gee swung around as he saw Joseph. His face was red, his thick hair sodden in the rain.

“Chaplain, you’ve got to do something! The major’s told us to go back out there and get the bodies, roight now!” He waved his arm toward the front parapet and no-man’s-land beyond. “We can’t, not in that mud! In the loight. Doesn’t he know we’d do it if we could?” His voice was hoarse and half choked with tears. “Jesus! Fred Arnold’s out there! Oi’ve known him all moi loife! Oi got stuck up a tree—scrumping apples in old Gabby Moyle’s orchard. It was Fred who got me down before Oi were caught.” He drew his breath in in a gasp. “Oi’d go if there were any chance at all, but that mud’s deep as the hoight of a man, an if yer get stuck in it you’ve no chance. Jerry’ll pick us off like bottles on a wall. Just lose more men for nothin’.”

“I know that, Barshey,” Joseph said grimly.

Barshey was shaking his head.

“Oi refused an order, Chaplain. We all did. He can have us court-martialed, but Oi won’t send men out there.” His voice was thick with tears.

“I’ll talk to him.” Joseph felt the same anger and grief hot inside him. He had known Fred Arnold, too, and his brother Plugger Arnold who had died of his wounds last year. “Wait here.” He turned and strode back toward the officers’ dugouts where he knew Northrup would be at this time of day.

All dugouts were pretty similar: narrow and earth-floored. There was room enough for a cot bed, a chair, and a makeshift desk. Most officers made them individual with odd bits of carpet, pictures of home or family, a few favorite books, perhaps a wind-up gramophone and several recordings.

Entrance was gained down steep steps and doorways were hung with sacking to keep out the rain.

“Yes, Chaplain?” Northrup said as Joseph answered the summons to come in. Northrup looked harassed and impatient. He was sitting in the hard-backed chair in front of the desk. There were half a dozen books on it, which were too worn for Joseph to read the titles. There was also a picture of a woman with a bland, pleasant face. Judging by the age of her and the resemblance about the set of eyes and the high brow, it was his mother.

Joseph disliked intensely having to speak, but he had no choice.

“Sir, I understand you ordered Corporal Gee to lead a rescue party to find the dead or wounded in no-man’s-land.”

“Of course I did, Captain Reavley.” His voice was faintly patronizing, even if he did not intend it. “We can’t leave them to die out there. Or fail to bring back the bodies of those who have. I regret that the corporal refused a direct order. I’ve given him half an hour to get his courage back, but if he doesn’t, I’ll have to put him on a charge. This is the British Army, and we obey orders. Do you understand me?”

Joseph wanted to tell him that the French command had driven its own men to mutiny, but he knew it would be disastrous to do that now. Northrup was thin-skinned enough to regard it as a personal insult and react accordingly.

He kept his temper under control with difficulty. “Sir, I’ve known Barshey Gee most of my life, and served beside him since 1914. He’s one of the bravest men in this regiment, and if he could have gone out there without sacrificing his men pointlessly, then he would have. One of his closest friends was lost last night….”

Northrup’s face was hard, his pale blue eyes hot with anger. “Then why doesn’t he get out there and look for him, Chaplain?”

Joseph had to struggle to keep his voice level. It was hard to breathe without gasping. “Because it’s been raining for a week, Major Northrup,” he said with elaborate patience that grated in spite of his effort to be civil. “The men are being sucked down into the mud and drowned! The craters are ten or twelve feet deep and no one can keep their footing for more than a few minutes. A soldier with full equipment hasn’t got a chance. He’d be stuck fast, a sitting target. He’s not willing to sacrifice more men pointlessly.”

“Recovering the wounded is not
pointless,
as you put it, Captain Reavley.” Northrup’s face was white, his hand on the desk pale-knuckled and trembling. “I would have thought that, as a chaplain, you of all people would have known that! Think of morale, man. That’s your job. I shouldn’t have to do it for you!”

“I am thinking of morale, sir.” Joseph’s words came between clenched teeth. “Court-martialing one of our best soldiers because he won’t lead his men on a suicidal mission is going to do infinitely more harm than the losses overnight.”

Northrup glared at him. His certainty had evaporated, and he was doubly angry because he knew Joseph could see it.

“Sir!” Joseph started again, unable to hide his emotion. “These men have been here for three years. They’ve endured hell. Every one of them has lost friends, many of them have lost brothers, cousins. Their villages have been decimated. You know nothing of what they’ve seen, and if you want their respect, then you must also show them the respect they deserve.”

Northrup remained silent for several minutes. Joseph could see the struggle in his face, the anger at being challenged and the fear of weakness. “Other men have gone out,” he said finally. “That puts paid to your argument, Reavley.”

“And have they come back?” Joseph asked. He sounded challenging and he had not intended to be. He sensed Northrup’s need to prove himself right and that he might dig himself in if he felt threatened, and yet he had gone too far to stop.

“Not yet,” Northrup said defiantly. “But Eardslie’s a good man, an officer. He didn’t refuse to go.”

Nigel Eardslie was another of Joseph’s students from St. John’s, before the war: a sensitive, intelligent young man, a good scholar, and a close friend of Morel’s. Suddenly the argument with Northrup was pointless. What did it matter who won it or who lost it? All he could think of was Eardslie and his men out in no-man’s-land in the mud.

“It’s not raining now,” Northrup added, as if that vindicated him.

“It’s not the rain that matters, it’s the mud!” Joseph snapped. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll see if I can help.” He did not bother to explain any further. Northrup was out of his depth and afraid to show it. Joseph saluted and left, pushing the sacking aside and climbing the steep steps up to the air again.

It took him nearly half an hour to make his way to the forward trench. The duckboards were awash, some floating knee-high in the filthy water. Others were almost waist-high, clogged with the bodies of dead rats, garbage, and old tins. The leg of a dead soldier stuck out from the gray clay of the wall. There were patches of blue sky overhead, but Joseph was cold because he was wet to the skin.

Going uphill slightly, he came to a relatively dry stretch and several groups of men cleaning equipment, telling bad jokes and laughing. One had his shirt off and had scratched his flesh raw where the lice had bitten him. Another had coaxed a flame inside a tin and was boiling water. Some were reading letters from home. Five of them could not have been over seventeen. Their bodies were slight, smooth-skinned, although their faces were hollow and there was a tight, brittle tension in their voices.

A hundred yards farther on he came to a connecting trench. Huddled along it, their backs to the walls, were a dozen men. He recognized Morel. He was standing a little apart from the others, bracing himself against the earth, his head back in a blind stare upward. The angles of his body were stiff, almost as if he were waiting to move, yet afraid to.

Joseph felt his chest tighten and his breath grew heavy in his lungs. He tried to go faster but the duckboards had rolled and were broken, and his feet could get little purchase in the mud.

No one took any notice of him when he stopped. He knew most of them. Bert Collins was there, caked in mud, his right arm blood-soaked. Cully Teversham and Snowy Nunn stood together with Alf Culshaw, who was smaller, narrow-chested, dapper when he had the chance. He always managed to scrounge whatever you wanted from rations—for a consideration, of course. He looked grim and tired, and there was a bandage wrapped tightly around his left arm. Stan Tidyman for once was not talking about his favorite food. He was shoulder to shoulder with George Atherton, who could mend anything if you gave him pliers, a bit of wire, and the time. The last one was Jim Bullen.

It was Cully who saw Joseph first, but there was no smile on his face. He did not even speak. No one saluted or came to attention.