Shoulder the Sky wwi-2 Read online

  “I know.” Joseph’s voice was little more than a whisper. “That’s why I’m here. I want to prove you couldn’t have, before I begin. Where were you when Prentice went over the top?”

  “Down a tunnel under the German lines,” Sam replied. “But I can’t prove it. Huddleston saw me go down, but he didn’t come with me.”

  Relief washed over Joseph like a blast of warmth. He even found himself smiling. “I had to ask,” he said aloud.

  “Leave it alone, Joe,” Sam repeated. “You don’t want to know!”

  Joseph stood up. “Maybe I don’t want to, but I have to. It’s my job. It’s about the only certain thing I can do.”

  Sam’s face was puckered.

  “Hannah sent me some Dundee cake,” Joseph offered. “Come and have some after stand-to.”

  Sam raised his hand in half salute, and acceptance, then went back to cleaning his rifle.

  Joseph knew it would not be easy. No one else wished to know what had happened to Prentice. He had been either tolerated or positively disliked by all the men. They answered Joseph’s questions out of deference to him, but unwillingly.

  “Dunno, Captain,” Tucky Nunn said bluntly. “Don’t see much out there, ’ceptin’ what Oi’m doing meself.”

  “Sorry, Chaplain,” Tiddly Wop Andrews said bashfully, pushing his hair back, as if it were still long enough to get into his eyes. “Nobody loiked ’im. After what ’e done to that sapper, nobody gave ’im the toime o’ day. Couldn’t say where ’e went.”

  “Oi saw ’im earlier on,” Bert Dazely said, shaking his head. They were standing with their backs to the trench wall. It was raining very lightly and the wind was cold. Joseph offered him a Woodbine and Bert took it. “Thank you, Captain.” He lit it and drew the smoke in thoughtfully. “ ’E were asking a lot o’ questions about how it felt to kill Germans. Oi said it felt bloody ’orrible! An’ so it does. You know Oi can hear them on a still day, or if the wind’s coming our direction?” He looked sideways at Joseph with a frown. “They call out to us, sometimes. Oi even got a couple o’ their sausages once. Left ’em out there, for us, an’ we left them a couple o’ packets o’ Woodbines and a tin o’ Maconochies.”

  “Yes, quite a few men do that,” Joseph agreed, smiling. “I’ve even had the occasional German sausage myself. Better than a Maconochie, I think.”

  Bert smiled back, but his face was serious again the moment after. His eyes were intense on Joseph’s. “If Oi swap food with them one day, an’ the next Oi’m goin’ over and killing ’em, what does that make me, Chaplain? What kind of a man am Oi going to be when I go ’ome—if Oi do? ’Ow am I goin’ to explain to moi children whoi Oi done that?”

  The easy answer was on Joseph’s lips, the answer he had already given many times: that a soldier had no choice, the decisions were out of his hands, there was no blame attached. Suddenly it felt empty, an excuse not to answer, an escape from himself.

  “I don’t know,” he said instead. “Would you rather have been a conscientious objector?”

  The answer was instant. “No!”

  “Then it makes you a man who will, reluctantly, fight for what he loves, and believes in,” Joseph told him. “Nobody said fighting was going to be either safe, or pleasant, or that there were not only risks of physical injury, but mental or spiritual, too.”

  “Yeah, Oi reckon you’re right, Chaplain.” Bert nodded. “You got a way of cutting to what’s true, an’ making sense of it. A man who won’t foight for what he loves, don’t love it very much. In fact maybe he don’t love it enough to deserve keeping it, eh?”

  “You could be right,” Joseph agreed.

  “Oi s’pose it’s a matter o’ deciding what it is you love?” He lifted up his head and looked at the sky. In the distance there was a flight of birds, south, away from the guns. He knew all of them, every bird and its habits. He could imitate the calls of most of them. “Oi think Oi know what matters to me—England the way it ought to be,” he went on quietly. “People comin’ an’ goin’ ’ow they want, quarreling and making up, a pint of ale at the pub, seed time and harvest. Oi’d loike to be married an’ buried in the same church what Oi was christened in. Oi’d loike to see other places, but when it comes to it, Oi reckon Cambridgeshire’s big enough for me. But if we don’t stop Jerry here, doin’ this to the poor bloody Belgians, boi the toime he gets to us, if he wants to, it’ll be too late.”

  “Yes, I think it will,” Joseph agreed, the thought twisting inside him with a pain that left him breathless. To think of the land he loved so fiercely, it was like part of his own being had been desecrated. It was unbearable.

  “Thanks,” Bert said sincerely. “You koind o’ make things plain, right an’ wrong.”

  Joseph drew in his breath to answer, then did not know what to say. It was his job here, to make sense of the chaotic, to justify the descent into hell, even to make intolerable suffering bearable because it had meaning, to insist that there was a God behind it who could make even this all right in the end.

  Men like Bert Dazely would not condone murder in any situation at all. What was there left to believe in if Joseph knew Prentice had been killed by one of them, and did nothing about it? It would tear that delicate, life-preserving thread of trust, and plunge them into the abyss beneath.

  If personal murder for vengeance, or to rid oneself of embarrassment or pain, were acceptable, what exactly was it they were fighting for? Bert had spoken of country things like the church and the pub, a village whose people you knew, the certainty of seasons, but what he meant was the goodness of it, the belief in a moral justice that endured.

  To allow Prentice to be murdered, and do nothing, would be a betrayal of that, and he would not do it.

  “Did you tell Prentice how you felt?” he asked.

  Bert shook his head. “None o’ his damn business, beggin’ your pardon, Chaplain. Don’t talk to the loikes o’ him about things loike that. He weren’t one of us.”

  Joseph already had a good idea exactly who had been in the area, or could have been so far as they were not known to have been somewhere else. Most men would be able to prove where they were on the front line, and most stretcher-bearers, medical orderlies, or other troops would have been no further forward than supply trenches, more probably in an advance first-aid post, or dugout.

  And someone must have seen Prentice, possibly given him permission and assistance to go over the top. Which raised the question as to why he had been there at all! Had it been his own idea, or had someone suggested it to him, or even lured him there? Whatever Joseph asked, he must do it so discreetly no one suspected anything but an interest in informing Prentice’s family of what had happened, and of course General Cullingford in particular. He still had to do that, at least as a courtesy. Someone else might have given him the bare facts.

  He must ask his questions quickly, or his reasons would no longer be valid. One did not pursue the fate of any one man for more than a few days, there were too many others. The whole regiment was his concern.

  He asked Alf Griggs quite casually where Prentice had been the afternoon beforehand, almost as if it were of no interest to him.

  “First-aid dugout, Plugstreet way,” Alf told him, lighting a Woodbine and shaking his head. He was a small, dapper man with the art of finding anything anybody wanted, at a price. “Bleedin’ nuisance ’e were,” he continued. “Followed the quartermaster around like a starvin’ dog for I dunno ’ow long, till ’e got told ter get out of it, or ’e’d be carved an’ served up fer dinner ’isself. Dunno w’ere ’e got ter after that.” He drew on his cigarette. “Wot does it matter, Chaplain? Poor sod’s gone west anyway.”

  “Just to give his family some idea of how he happened to get killed.” Joseph was horrified how easily the lie came off his tongue. “Not so easy to understand when it’s a journalist rather than a soldier.”

  “That one is not so easy ter understand ’ow ’e didn’t get trod on long before!” Alf said with a curl of hi
s lip. “Nasty little sod! Beggin’ yer pardon, Reverend, but bein’ dead don’t make a man good, just means ’is badness don’t matter anymore.”

  Joseph thanked him and went along the relatively straight route of the second-line trench to the stretch known as Plugstreet, after the nearby village of Ploegsteert. He found the first-aid dugout where a couple of stretcher-bearers were sitting having a smoke. A third was dozing, his feet sticking out in the weak sun, his boots unlaced. Near him the mud under the duckboards was nearly dry. The rain had stopped and the sky overhead was hazy blue, and just at this moment the guns were silent. There even seemed to be fewer rats than usual.

  Lanty Nunn opened his eyes. “Allo, Chaplain. Lookin’ for someone?”

  Joseph squeezed his way past and sat down, making himself comfortable. “Only trying to find out a bit more about how the journalist got killed,” he replied. “I expect the general will want to know—and his family. It’s not as if he had been a soldier.”

  “It’s not as if ’e’d bin any damn use at all!” Lanty retorted.

  Whoopy Teversham, who had been half asleep, sat up on his elbows. He had bright ginger hair and features like rubber, able to assume any expression. “Chaplain, you don’t want to tell the poor bastard’s mother ’e was a pain in the arse,” he said cheerfully. “Anyway, Oi expect she knew! Hell-bent on getting the story that’d make his name,” he went on. “Into everything, asking questions. Oi thought he was going to write it up like he’d saved the Western Front single-handed. He wanted all sorts of facts and figures; wounded, gassed, sent home to Bloighty, where and how the dead was buried. Guess he knows that now, eh?” He laughed abruptly, and ended up coughing.

  “Don’t mind him, Chaplain,” Lanty said dourly. “He don’t know no better!”

  Doughy Ward blinked, staring at Joseph with a frown. “Tell his family he went too far forward and got caught in cross fire. What does it matter? He’s dead.”

  “He was drowned, actually,” Joseph told him.

  “Yeah?” Doughy opened his eyes wide. “We don’t know what he was after up there, an’ to be honest, Chaplain, we don’t care. He were always poking his nose in, asking things what wasn’t none of his business.”

  “Did he say anything to you about going over the top?”

  “Didn’t listen to ’im. Told ’im to go to hell, actually.” He smiled.

  “Looks like he did, an’ all!” Whoopy said with a grin. “I’d have told him sooner, if I’d have known he’d go an’ do it!”

  “Not in front of the chaplain!” Lanty shook his head, looking at Joseph apologetically.

  Joseph thanked them and went on searching. No one was very eager to help, and he felt their irritation that he was spending his time trying to find out something which they saw as irrelevant.

  “He’s dead,” Major Harvester said tersely, his strong, bony face showing his weariness. “So are many better men. Do what you have to, Captain Reavley. Say all the right things, you can even be sorry, if you feel it’s your duty, but after that, get back to our own men. That’s what you’re here for. Prentice was a damned nuisance. He got under everybody’s feet. Well, it looks like he was in the wrong place at the wrong time once too often. I don’t suppose he’ll be the last war correspondent to be killed.”

  “I would just like to know how he got so far forward,” Joseph persisted. “He wasn’t supposed to be up there.”

  Harvester’s face hardened. “Are you saying someone was to blame, Captain?”

  “No, sir,” Joseph denied quickly. He was not ready yet to tell Harvester the truth. “I don’t doubt Prentice himself was to blame. I’d like to be able to prove it, if anyone asks.”

  Harvester relaxed. “You have a point. Sorry for jumping to the wrong conclusion. But I’ve still no idea how he got past the second trench, let alone the fire trench.”

  Nor could Joseph find any sentry for that night willing to say they had recognized Prentice among the figures going over the top. In the brief flares, one man with a rifle in his hands looked much like another. And it was perfectly obvious that none of them cared. They were not insubordinate enough to tell him to leave it alone and attend to the living, but their smoldering anger was clear enough.

  But someone had killed Prentice deliberately. It had not been accident or misfortune of war, but murder, and the wrongness of that was one certainty in the chaos and loss that Joseph could do something about. The difficulty of it, the fact that no one else cared, even his personal contempt for Prentice, if anything, sharpened his resolve.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Major Hadrian asked once more if there was anything he could do, then, tight-lipped and unhappy, he closed the door and left Cullingford and Judith Reavley alone in the room. Since the arrival of the British Army the small château, really what in England would have been called the manor house, had been used as divisional headquarters. It was late April, five days since the gas attack, and the situation was increasingly serious. The men in the trenches knew only their own stretch of a thousand yards or so, a platoon, a brigade, but Judith had driven Cullingford around the entire area, and she had seen how few men there were, how short they were of ammunition and the difficulty of getting it up to the front lines, along with everything else. The roads were jammed with troops, horses, refugees, ambulances, even wagons and dogcarts with household goods, terrified women and children seeing a lifetime in ruins.

  Cullingford stood in front of the window. The rain drifted in silver sheets across the land, spattering against the glass one minute, the sun making prisms of it the next. The pale light showed the fine lines in his face and the weariness around his eyes and mouth. He stood upright, a little stiffly, but then he always did. It was not only habit, it was part of his inner defense. He had come so close to breaking it: Once he had knelt and spoken to a gassed man, and stayed with him while he died, talking quietly, telling him it was bad, but they would win. He had had no idea whether it was true or not. The other time it had been an injured horse that had moved him beyond his power to hide. He had been in the cavalry in his youth. The loyalty of an animal touched him where he could not allow the emotion of a man to reach.

  He knew she had seen his tiredness, the times when he was too vulnerable to hide the fear of failure, the pain of guilt for other men’s deaths, and the fact that he had no more knowledge than the rest of them about what to do to prevent more slaughter, even final defeat. But he had to pretend, their faith depended on it. That was the job of leadership, to endure being thought callous; to defend your mistakes, even when you know them to be mistakes.

  They had never spoken of it. If they shattered the illusion of separateness with something as tangible as words, then it would have to be faced, and there was neither time nor strength for that.

  “Miss Reavley,” he said quietly, without turning toward her. “You told me that your father was killed just before the outbreak of war, and you implied that there was a conspiracy behind it, of great depth and dishonor. You said it was political rather than financial, and that if it had succeeded it would have altered Europe, perhaps even the world. I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. The loss . . .” He did not finish the sentence, it was too painful, too intrusive. “Were you exaggerating?” He asked only to dispel the last possible uncertainty.

  She had told him only the barest outline, and then in such broken sentences she was surprised he had remembered so much. They had been stuck at Hellfire Corner, the engine had stalled and darkness was closing in. It had taken her a quarter of an hour in the rain, under sporadic fire, to change and re-gap the spark plugs and jury-rig the commutator to get them as far as Ploegsteert, where they could get proper parts to replace the old ones.

  Afterward, when they sat drinking hot tea with rum in it, hands shaking, uniforms soaked and crusted with mud, she had realized just how close she had come to being killed. Heavy artillery fire had landed less than twenty feet away, sending earth and stones whining through the air
, clanging against the car, and shrapnel landing within inches of them both.

  He had said nothing, treating her as if she were a soldier like himself, and expected to remain calm. His absence of special treatment was the highest compliment he could have paid her. She knew it was not indifference; the warmth in his eyes made that thought ridiculous.

  It was after that, when they could relax for half an hour, before she went to see to the car, and he to receive Hadrian’s report on the other sectors, that she had told him about the fatal car crash, the missing document. She had not told him what it had said—that was too dangerous to repeat—nor that Matthew was still looking for the brilliant and terrible mind that had conceived it.

  He turned around to face her at last. There was humor in his eyes, but it was only on the surface. “You were very circumspect, but I believe that you know a great deal more than the few details you spoke of,” he said drily. But he was watching her, trying to gauge her pain and how far he must probe into it, and what harm that would do. “You said your father had been a member of Parliament. He would not lightly speak of England’s dishonor, or a conspiracy that would alter the world.”

  “No.” She stood very still. How profoundly everything she knew had changed in that time, less than a year. Last spring she had been in St. Giles, aimless, discontented, fretting against the bounds of a society basking in a golden peace she did not yet know to treasure. She had taken for granted the comfort of physical safety, clean linen, the smell of furniture polish, fresh milk, domestic duties, the boredom of the known.

  Now it was like a lost world, a dream in the mind shattered on waking, the loneliness of being grown-up, separate, driven by duty and reality, looking back with longing when a moment of peace allowed.

  He deserved honesty. “It was real,” she said. “I imagine it still is. My brother Matthew is certain we inflicted only a temporary defeat. It is another war, different weapons from this, only a few people who know they’re fighting it, the rest of us to be moved around like herds of animals, but it’s a shadow of this one. Except I think that’s not true, it is the real one, and we are the reflection cast, the unreality, pulled by it, not pulling.”