Shoulder the Sky wwi-2 Read online

  “Always?” Joseph said quickly.

  Sam squinted through the smoke. “I was at school with him. He was three years behind me, but he was a crawling little weasel even then. Always watching and listening to other people, and keeping notes.” The shadows around his eyes were accentuated by the lantern light inside the dugout. It was too deep for daylight to brighten anything beyond the first step inside the door, and the high walls of the trench blocked most of that. “I’ve got enough grief for the men I care about,” he added, his voice suddenly husky. He brushed his hand across his cheek. “God knows how many there’ll be of them.”

  Joseph did not answer. Sam knew he agreed, a glance affirmed it without words.

  There was a sound outside, a child’s voice asking in French if anybody wanted a newspaper: “Times, Daily Mail, only yesterday’s.”

  Joseph stood up. “I’ll get you one,” he offered. “Then I’d better go and see to the bodies.” It was his duty to prepare men for burial, and after a bad night there was often no time for anything but the briefest of decencies. Identification was checked, tags removed, and any personal belongings, then the bodies, or what was left of them, were buried well behind the lines. That was the least one could do for a man, and sometimes it was also the most.

  He stood up, Sam watching him as he went, smiling. Outside he bought a paper from the boy who looked about twelve, and told him to take it to Sam, then walked back along the supply trench to the Casualty Clearing Station where the bodies had been taken. It was a soft, bright morning now, mist burned off except for the wettest stretches where the craters were still deep. He could hear the occasional crack of a sniper’s shot, but mostly it was only the sounds of men working, someone singing “Good-bye Dolly Grey,” and now and then a burst of laughter.

  He reached the Clearing Station and found three men busy. The casualties had not been heavy last night, and there were only five dead. Joseph went to help the burial party because he felt obliged to pay some respect to Prentice, for his own sake. It was a kind of finishing. He was the one who had found him, he had brought him back. To walk away now, and then return to say the appropriate words over the grave, seemed an evasion.

  There were two orderlies in the makeshift room—Treffy Runham, small, nondescript, always tidy; the other was Barshey Gee, Charlie Gee’s brother. He looked tired, dark rings around his eyes as if he were bruised, no color at all in his skin. They worked quickly, cracking bad jokes to cover the emotion as they made the dead as decent as possible and retrieved the few personal belongings to send back to those who had loved them. They looked up as Joseph came in.

  “Mornin’, Chaplain,” Treffy said with a slight smile. “Could ’ave bin worse.”

  “Good morning, Treffy,” Joseph replied. “Morning, Barshey.” He moved straight over to help them. He had done it often enough there was no need to ask what was needed.

  Barshey looked at him, eyes haunted, full of questions he dared not ask. Joseph knew what they were: Should he wish Charlie dead, out of his agony of mind as well as body, or was life sacred, any life at all? What did God require of you, if there was a God?

  Joseph had no answer. He was as lost as anyone else. The difference was that he was not supposed to be. He didn’t fight, he wasn’t a sapper like Sam, or a doctor, an ambulance driver or anything else. All he was here for was to give answers.

  He looked at the bodies. One was Chicken Hagger. There were tears in his tunic and his flesh, as much of it as he could see, and several bullet holes. He must have been caught on the wire. It was a horrible death, usually slow.

  Barshey was watching him, but he did not say anything.

  Joseph walked over to Prentice’s body. They had left him until last, possibly because the others were men they had known and cared about, almost family. Prentice was a stranger. This was nothing like a usual civilian death, shocking and unexpected. Nor was anybody looking for someone to blame, as with Sebastian Allard, and Harry Beecher in Cambridge last summer. Here it hardly even mattered how death had happened; there was nothing to learn from it, no questions to ask.

  Even so, Prentice’s body was unusual in that there were no marks of violence on him at all. He had not been shot, or blown apart by explosive or shrapnel, he had simply drowned in the filthy water of a shell hole. There were no tears in his clothes, except from when Joseph had dragged him over stony ground. There was no blood at all.

  Not that that made him unique. Other men had drowned. In the winter some had frozen to death.

  All Joseph could do was lay him straight, clean the mud off his face, and tidy his hair. The fact that he had drowned had distorted his features, and the bruises from the beating Wil Sloan had given him were still dark and swollen, his lip cracked. But then no one was going to see him, unless it was decided to ship him home. That was a possibility, since he was not a soldier. Perhaps he had better wash him properly, even his hair. Today there was time for such gestures.

  He fetched a bowl of water and rinsed out the mud and the rank smell from the shell crater. Barshey Gee helped him, holding another basin underneath so they did not slop the floor.

  “What’s that?” he asked as Joseph put a towel around Prentice’s head and started to rub him dry.

  “What?” Joseph saw nothing.

  “You left mud on his neck,” Barshey replied, his voice was cold. Someone must have told him about the incident in the Casualty Clearing Station. They shouldn’t have done. It was a pain Barshey could have done without.

  Joseph unwrapped the towel and looked. There were dark smudges at the back of Prentice’s neck, just below the fair gold hair. But he needed only a glance to see it was bruised skin, not mud. Another look showed him very similar marks on the right as well. They were roundish shapes, two on either side. He heard Barshey draw in his breath quickly, and looked up to meet his eyes. He did not need to say anything to know that the same thought was in his mind. Some-one had held Prentice down, keeping his face in the mud until it had filled his lungs.

  “Could someone do that?” he asked, hoping for denial. “Wouldn’t he struggle? Throw them off?”

  “Not if you had your weight on ’im,” Barshey answered, huskily, his eyes not moving from Joseph’s. “Knee in the middle of his back.”

  Joseph rolled the body over, standing beside him to prevent him from falling onto the floor. He lifted the jacket and shirt and looked at the dead flesh of his lower back. The marks were there, just small, no more than abrasions, and little pinpricks of bleeding as if he had tried to free himself, and chafed the skin on fabric pressed hard against him.

  Barshey swore quietly. “Here, Treffy. Come and look at this! Somebody held ’im down with ’is face in the mud, on purpose, till ’e drowned. Whoi the ’ell would anyone do that? Whoi not just shoot ’im?”

  “Don’t know,” Treffy admitted, biting his thin lips. “Maybe ’e loikes to be personal. Or he was close to our lines, and wanted to be quiet?”

  “What’s wrong with a bayonet?” Barshey demanded, his eyes angry and frightened. “That’s what they’re for.”

  “Maybe ’e’d just lost a friend, or something?” Treffy suggested. “Just needed to do it with ’is ’ands. Best not tell anyone, don’t you think, Chaplain?”

  “Yes,” Joseph agreed quickly, pulling Prentice’s tunic down and rolling him over again onto his back and smoothing his hair into place. He had not liked the man, he understood Barshey’s feelings only too well, and Wil Sloan’s too. Even better did he understand Sam’s. The trial of Edwin Corliss had been a nightmare, and without Prentice it need never have happened. Sam at least would not grieve, he would probably bless whatever German had done this.

  “Yes,” he said again. “Better not tell people. There’s no need.”

  Joseph left the Clearing Station to go to speak with the other casualties of the night, the wounded and the bereaved, men who had lost friends. Almost everyone belonged to a household, groups of half a dozen or so men who worked, ate, slept, an
d fought side by side. They shared rations, parcels from home, letter and news, a sense of family. They wrote to each other’s parents and girlfriends; often they knew them anyway. Sometimes they had grown up together and knew and loved the same places, had played truant from school on the same summer days, and scrumped apples from the same farmer’s trees.

  In the trenches they sat huddled together for warmth, told ridiculous jokes, shared one another’s dreams, and pains. They risked their lives to save one of their own, and a death was personal and very deep, like that of a brother.

  He sat in the trench in the sun with Cully Teversham, who was busy running a lighted match over the seams of his tunic to kill the lice. He did it with intense care, his big hands holding the fabric gently, keeping the flame exactly the right distance away not to burn the threads.

  Joseph was listening, as he did so often, but now, more than in the past, he was afraid that he would not have any answers. If he said there was meaning to it all, a God of love behind the slaughter and the pain, would anybody believe him? Or would they merely think he was parroting the words expected of him, the things he was sent here to say, by people who had not the beginnings of an idea what the reality was like? What kind of a man looked on living hell like this, and mouthed comfortable, simple phrases he did not even believe himself?

  A dishonest man, a coward.

  Cully let the match go and lit another. “Is Charlie Gee going to make it?” he asked. “It ain’t roight. Oi just got to loike ’im. We never knowed the Gees till we come ’ere, Whoopy an’ me. Tevershams and Gees never spoke. All over a piece o’ land, years back, it was. Don’t even know roightly what ’appened. Something to do wi’ pigs on it. Dug up everything worth ’aving. But that’s pigs for yer. Everyone knows that.”

  Joseph said nothing, just listening.

  “But they’re alroight, Charlie an’ Barshey are,” Cully went on, keeping his head bent, the sun bright on his ginger hair. “An’ that newspaper man ought never to ’ave bin in that Casualty place, let alone go sayin’ what ’e did. Whoi don’t they do something about that, instead o’ nailing that poor bastard what got ’is hand tore to bits, eh?” He looked up at last, awaiting an answer from Joseph.

  What was there to say? The truth was no use, and lies were worse. He could not tell them that he knew no sense in it, he was just as afraid as they were, perhaps not of maiming or of death, but that all his life he had striven to have faith in something that was beyond his understanding, and at the very worst, was a creation of his own need? What did he worship, except hope, and a desperate, soul-starving need for there to be a God?

  He worshipped goodness; courage, compassion, honor, the purity of mind that knows no lies, even to oneself; the gentleness to forgive with a whole heart; the ability to have power and never even for a moment misuse it. The grace and the strength to endure, the fortitude to hope, even when it made no sense at all. To be found dead at one’s post, if need be, but still facing forward. That was the answer he gave himself, and pieces of it he gave to others.

  “I don’t think they have the answers any more than we do,” Joseph told him. “Major Wetherall will do everything he can for Corliss, and it doesn’t matter about Prentice anymore.” He looked up at the narrow strip of sky above the trench walls, the wind whipping mares’ tails of cloud across it. Sometimes it was all the beauty they could see, a reminder of the rest of the world and the glory and purpose they fought to hold.

  “I’m glad that bastard’s dead,” Cully said, dropping the spent match in the mud and regarding his tunic skeptically. Apparently it satisfied him, because he put it back on again. “Is that wicked?” he asked anxiously.

  Joseph smiled. “I hope not!”

  Cully relaxed. “He was pretty damn unlucky! He must’ve run bang into the only Jerry around there, ’cos we were to the east of where ’e was and Harper’s lot were to the west. Don’t know how any Jerry got through.”

  Joseph was puzzled, but he thought little more of it until later in the evening when he was helping Punch Fuller light a candle to heat tea. He overheard a conversation that made it clear there had been a patrol between the German line and where he had found Prentice.

  “What time?” he asked.

  “Well, I dunno, Chaplain,” Punch said, his eyes wide. “Line held, that’s all I know. We lost Bailey, and Williams got hit in the shoulder, but no one got past us. I’d stake my life on that!”

  It was Prentice’s life Joseph was thinking about. “But there must have been one German got through,” he argued. There had to be. Maybe that is why Prentice was drowned rather than shot? It began to make sense. A German had been caught, probably out on a reconnaissance of the British lines, and he was alone so he couldn’t afford to make any noise at all, or he’d attract the attention of the patrol.

  “Why’s that, Chaplain?” Punch asked.

  “I found one of our men dead,” Joseph answered. “About twenty yards out directly in front of Paradise Alley.” He named the length of trench as it was known locally.

  “Then you must have found the Jerry, too,” Punch said with certainty. “No one got back past us.”

  “He must have waited till you went, and then gone.”

  “We didn’t come back till dawn,” Punch assured him. “That’s how we lost Bailey. Too damn slow. If a Jerry’d got up out of the mud and gone back, he’d ’ave passed right through us. Believe me, that didn’t ’appen. We’d all ’ave seen him, us, our sentries, and theirs.” He turned to Stan Meadows beyond him. “Isn’t that right?”

  Stan nodded vigorously.

  “I must be mistaken,” Joseph told him, and bent his attention to the candle in the tin, and the mug of tea. He was not mistaken, but he did not want anyone else to start thinking what was now racing through his mind. It was ugly, bringing back hard, painful memories of Sebastian’s death, the surprise and suspicion, the broken trust and the knowledge he had not wanted. Death was grief enough; murder was a destruction of so many other things as well. It stripped away the protection of small, necessary privacies, and exposed weaknesses that at other times could have been guessed at, and then left to be forgotten.

  Was this murder again? In the general carnage of war, had someone taken the opportunity to kill Prentice, in the belief his death would be taken for granted as just another casualty?

  Who? That was something he did not even want to think about.

  What would happen now if he told Colonel Fyfe what he had found? Everyone would know. The trust between men would be destroyed, the friendships that made life bearable; the bad jokes, the teasing, the willingness to listen, even to silly things, anxieties that were foolish, dreams that would never happen, simply in the act of sharing. The certainty that one man would risk his life for another was what bound them into a fighting force.

  Suspicion of murder, and the questions that went with it, would poison that, and the cost here would be even greater than it had been in Cambridge. If he told Fyfe, an investigation would begin, justice might be found, or it might not, but at what price? Wil Sloan? Even Barshey Gee? Or one of the sappers who had been Corliss’s friends? And if it were not found, if they never knew, then what shadow would be over them all, perhaps endlessly?

  But surely among all the things he could not help, could not even ease, this was one small certainty he could. Prentice had been killed deliberately, by one of their own. The morality of that could not be changed by the fact that Prentice had been arrogant, insensitive, even brutal. To say that it could was to set himself up as an arbiter of who could or could not be murdered with impunity!

  The fact that justice was impartial was one absolute in a world descending into chaos. Truth was one certainty worth pursuing, finding, and clinging on to. Whatever the work or the pain involved, he had a purpose.

  He did not speak to Colonel Fyfe. When he knew the cause and could prove it, that would be the time to act.

  There were many things he needed to know. The very first was the one he dr
eaded most, and perhaps in his heart was the reason he had to find the truth. He could not forget Sam’s rage at the court-martial of Corliss. The whole thing had been merciless, and it would never have happened had Prentice not pushed the issue. Perhaps Corliss had lost his nerve. He would not be the first man to have been pushed beyond his limit, and for an instant cracked. Men covered for each other. The moment of terror was kept secret. There were few men who did not understand.

  Corliss was Sam’s man, his to punish or to protect. That was what loyalty was about, and Corliss had trusted him, as his other men did.

  How could he ask Sam? How could he now protect him? Only by proving that he could not be involved, before he began any inquiry.

  Sam looked up from cleaning his rifle. “Was he?” he said without emotion.

  “Yes.” Joseph sat down beside him, ignoring the mud. “I have to find out who did it.”

  “Why?” Sam lit a cigarette.

  “You can’t go around murdering people, just because you think they deserve it,” Joseph replied.

  Sam smiled, his black eyes bright. “Better reason than because they’re German.”

  Joseph did not smile back.

  Sam’s face darkened. “Leave it alone, Joe,” he said quietly. “Lots of people had pretty good reasons for hating Prentice. This isn’t peacetime England. Better men than Prentice are being killed every day. We have to learn to live with it, and face the fact that tomorrow it could be our turn, or that of someone we love, someone we’d give our own lives to protect. Have you seen Barshey Gee lately? He knows what happened to Charlie. He’s his brother, for God’s sake!”

  “Are you saying Barshey Gee killed Prentice?” Joseph’s mouth was dry.

  “No, I’m not!” Sam snapped. “I’m saying he’ll be suspected. So will Wil Sloan, or any of my men. Or me!” He stared at Joseph unblinkingly. “I’d see him in hell, with pleasure.”