At Some Disputed Barricade wwi-4 Read online

  He moved his leg, kneading the muscle to get rid of the pain. He should have realized that if anyone finally rebelled against the slaughter it would be Morel. Joseph’s job had been to try to teach eager, intelligent young men such as he to think for themselves! University was only partly about acquiring knowledge. Mostly it was about learning how to use the mind, refine the processes of thought.

  He felt the steel against his cheek, cold as ice. He froze. Somehow the Germans had gotten a raiding party through the lines. Then he realized that if that were true, the men smoking a few yards from him would have been the first to be seen. He relaxed and tried to turn and see who it was, but the pressure increased.

  Morel stood up and came toward him. He stopped about five feet away and struck a match. It flared for only a moment before the breeze blew it out, but long enough for him to recognize Joseph.

  “What are you doing here, Captain Reavley?” he said coldly.

  The rifle barrel moved away from his cheek, now that the man holding it knew who he was, and Joseph rose to his feet also, easing his aching muscles. It was strange how in the broken woods, earth bare even in high summer, they faced each other like strangers. All memory of being master and pupil had vanished.

  There was no corresponding ease in Morel’s stance. His face was almost invisible. It raced through Joseph’s mind to behave as if he had heard nothing of their talk of mutiny, but he knew Morel would not believe him. Even were it true, he could not afford to take the risk.

  “Captain Reavley?” Morel repeated, his voice harder.

  “I was looking for Snowy Nunn,” Joseph replied. He outranked Morel and he was several years older, but he was a noncombatant, a chaplain rather than a fighting soldier. And perhaps out here in the woods, without a gun, that was irrelevant anyway. If Morel was really thinking about mutiny then all discipline and respect for rank were already gone. Would he shoot a chaplain, a man he had known for years?

  Death was all around them, hundreds of men, sometimes even thousands every day. What did one more matter? Unless it was your brother—like Tucky Nunn? Then it ate inside you with a grief almost like madness, as if your own life were being torn apart. Friendship was the only sanity left.

  “I know he came out this way,” Joseph went on.

  “Come to say a prayer?” Morel asked sarcastically, his voice shaking a little now. “Don’t waste your time, Captain. God’s gone home; the Devil is master here. Don’t bother telling Snowy that. He knows.”

  “Don’t decide for me what I am going to say, Morel,” Joseph responded curtly. “That is arrogant and offensive.”

  A star shell went up and burst with a brief flare, showing the slight surprise on Morel’s face, and then the anger. “And you were just—” The rest of whatever Morel said was lost in the roar of gunfire less than fifty yards away. The light died and they were in darkness again.

  Joseph made up his mind quickly. “Are you planning mutiny, Morel?”

  “So you heard!” Morel said bitterly. “I think you’d have left me some doubt. That wasn’t very clever, Chaplain. I should have realized that when it came to it, you were just as stupid as the rest. I used to admire you so much.” There was a regret in him now, a loss so deep it was as if all the world he had loved had finally slipped from his grasp, the very last vestige gone in this ultimate disillusion.

  “You called me chaplain,” Joseph reminded him. “Had you forgotten I am a priest? What you tell me in confidence I cannot repeat to anyone at all.” He breathed in and out quickly. “Let’s see how stupid you are, Morel.”

  Snowy had stood up as well, but he did not move. He was facing toward them although it was impossible to tell how clearly he could see them.

  “Not stupid enough to trust one chaplain with a loyal conscience and not enough brains to see that this is just a futile slaughter now.” Morel’s voice was sharp with emotion. “We won’t win, we’ll die for nothing. Well, I won’t! I care, Chaplain, whether you do or not! I won’t see these men sacrificed on the altar of some idiot general’s vanity. I don’t believe in God. If He existed, He would put a stop to this. It’s obscene!” He spat the word as if it were filth on his lips. “But I care about my men, not just the Cambridgeshires, but all of them. We’ve already lost Lanty and Bibby Nunn, Plugger Arnold, Doughy Ward, Chicken Hagger, Charlie Gee, Reg, and Arthur.” His voice dropped. “And Nigel. The only good I know of is to be sane, not to kill and not to be killed.”

  “That would be best,” Joseph agreed, struggling to keep himself steady. Morel had named all the men from his own village deliberately. “But that’s not on offer right now,” he said. “Your choice is whether to trust me and let me walk away, or shoot me, and then shoot all the others who saw you do it. Is that what you want for them?”

  “I won’t shoot them!” Morel said derisively. “They’re in it just as much as I am.”

  “Oi in’t,” Snowy said from close to Morel’s back. “Not if you shoot Captain Reavley, Oi’m not. That’s murder.”

  Joseph waited. There was a lull in the gunfire and he could hear the wind sighing in the branches. Then the crackle of machine guns burst out again and the deeper roar of the heavier shells from far behind the lines. One exploded five hundred yards away, sending the earth flying forty feet into the air.

  “Some poor bastard’s got it,” Morel said quietly. “Aussies along that way. I like the Aussies. They don’t take damn stupid orders from anybody. Did you hear about them striking up their band every time the sergeant told our boys to drill in the sun, just to keep them busy? The Aussies couldn’t play ‘God Save the King’ to save themselves, but they made such a row banging and squealing on every instrument there is that the sergeant had to give up. I hope that’s true.”

  “Yes, I heard,” Joseph answered. He smiled with a bitter grief in the darkness, but no one saw him.

  “Is it true?” Morel asked.

  “Yes.” He had no idea, but he wanted it to be, not only for himself but for all of them. He looked at Snowy, who had moved a step closer.

  Morel was still hesitating. Should Joseph take the risk of moving to ease his limbs? One of the other men, indistinguishable in the dark, had his rifle in his hands, pointed loosely toward Joseph.

  Snowy turned to him. “Goin’ to shoot me, too, are you? What for? Going over, or not going over? Or you just want to shoot someone, an’Oi’m an easy target what won’t shoot back? ’Cos I won’t. Not at me own mates.”

  “Get out!” Morel said sharply. “Get out, Reavley, and take Nunn with you.”

  Joseph grabbed Snowy by the arm and, almost pulling him off his feet, set out as fast as he could over the rough ground, snarled with tree roots, back toward the trench again and the cover of its walls.

  “Thank you,” he said when they were finally safe below the parapet.

  There was no life in Snowy’s voice. “Couldn’t let ’em shoot you,” he said flatly. “Moi fault you were out there.”

  “Just came to see if you wanted company.”

  “Oi know,” Snowy replied. “Oi seen you do it for hundreds of other men. There in’t nothing you can say. Tucky’s gone. Reckon we’ll all be gone in another month or two anyway. Good night, Chaplain.” And without waiting to see what Joseph might say, he turned and walked down the connecting trench toward the supply lines, keeping his balance on the duckboards with the ease of long practice.

  It was a fairly quiet night, just the usual sporadic shelling and occasional machine-gun fire. Joseph never forgot the snipers and as the summer dawn came early, he kept his head well below the parapet in the forward trenches.

  Fresh water and rations came up and the men stood to. There were all the usual drills, inspections, cleaning of kit, patching up of walls breached during the night. It was still hot and the lice were making men scratch their skins raw.

  The mail came, and those with letters sat in the sun with their backs to the clay walls and read. For a few moments they were in another world. Fred Arnold, the
blacksmith’s son from St. Giles, roared with laughter at a joke and turned to Barshey Gee next to him to pass it on. They were friends. Both had lost their brothers here, in this regiment.

  There were other brothers as well, Cully and Whoopy Teversham. At home their family had a long and bitter feud with the Nunns over a piece of land. Out here it was all absurdly irrelevant.

  Tiddly Wop Andrews, good looking but painfully shy, was reading a letter for the third time, blue eyes misty. It must be a love letter at last. Perhaps he could write what he could not say aloud. Joseph had tried many times to help him put his feelings into words, but of course he would not say so now. The men teased each other mercilessly, perhaps to break the tension of waiting for the next burst of violence.

  Punch Fuller was sitting with his back to the clay wall and his face up to the sun. He would get his large nose burned if he was not careful. Joseph told him so.

  “Yes, sir, Captain,” Punch said, and took no notice at all. He had long learned to ignore remarks about his most prominent feature. He closed his eyes and continued to make up even bawdier verses for “Mademoiselle from Armentières” than the classic ones, trying them out to himself in a surprisingly musical voice.

  Joseph came to the end of the connecting trench and walked toward his dugout. Officers had a little privacy, cramped but comparatively safe under the ground. Gas was the worst threat because it was heavy and sank into any crater or hole. But it was unlikely to land this far back.

  Just before he reached his dugout he met Major Penhaligon, his immediate commander. Penhaligon was about thirty, eight years younger than Joseph, but today he looked harassed and hollow-eyed. He had cut his cheek shaving and not had time to deal with it. A smear of dried blood marked his skin.

  “Ah, Reavley,” he said, stepping in front of Joseph. “How’s Snowy Nunn? Did you see him? That was too bad. Tucky was one of the best.”

  Tucky’s cheerful face was as clear in Joseph’s mind as it must have been in Snowy’s. They were alike, with blunt features and fair hair, but Tucky had had the confidence, the brash good humor, always ready to seize a chance for anything. He had been wiser than some men thought him, steadier in a crisis. He had helped Joseph more than once with a word of advice, a well-timed joke, an earthy sanity that reminded men of home, laughter, the things that were worth loving.

  “Yes, sir,” Joseph replied. Death was death. It should not be harder for one than another, but it was. “Snowy’s taking it badly.”

  Penhaligon had no idea what to say, and it showed in his eyes. He felt it his duty to try; both brothers were his men. He struggled through the weariness and the knowledge of the campaign ahead of them for something to say that would help.

  It was Joseph’s job to break the news of loss to people, and think of a way to make it endurable when they would never really get over it, without unintentionally sounding as if he neither understood nor cared. It was his job to steady the panic, create courage out of terror, help men believe there was a purpose to all of this when none of them had any idea if there really was. He had no right to leave it to Penhaligon.

  “I talked to him,” he said. “He’ll be all right. Give him a little while, but…keep him busy.” Should he say more, ask Penhaligon to give Snowy some duty that would guard him from Morel’s path?

  “We’ll all be busy soon enough,” Penhaligon said with a twist of his mouth. “There’s going to be a pretty big push forward, starting in a day or so.”

  “They’ve been saying that ever since the spring,” Joseph replied truthfully.

  “Mean it this time,” Penhaligon told him, his eyes steady, trying to see if Joseph understood him beyond the mere words. “Afraid you’ll have a lot to do.”

  The morning sun was hot already, but Joseph was chilled inside. He wanted to tell Penhaligon that the men were not ready, some of them not even willing anymore. He had no idea how many others there were like Morel.

  Joseph became aware that Penhaligon was watching him, expecting him to speak. He wanted to warn him about Morel, but he had given his word that it ranked as a confession and was sacred. But Penhaligon was commanding a unit with an officer in it who was trying to subvert the entire campaign. Did what Joseph had overheard amount to mutiny? Or was it still only an exaggerated example of the kind of grumbling that was everywhere? The men were exhausted, emotionally and physically—and casualties were almost uncountable. What man of any spirit at all would not question the sanity of this, and think of rebelling against a useless death?

  “Chaplain?” Penhaligon prompted him. “Is there something else?”

  “No, sir,” Joseph said decisively. Morel had not spoken of any specific intent, simply complained of the violent senselessness of it all. Men had to be free to do that. Even if he thought of anything like refusing to obey an order, he was a Lancashire man born and bred, the Cambridgeshires would never follow him against other Englishmen. “Just thinking about what lies ahead, that’s all.”

  Penhaligon smiled bleakly. “It’ll cost us a bit, but apparently it’ll be a real strategic advantage if we take Passchendaele. Damned if I know why. Just one more wretched hell, as far as I can see.”

  Joseph did not answer.

  The advance began the next morning, July 31. Judith Reavley stood with the men eating their last hot breakfast before the ration parties returned. Her stomach, like theirs, burned with hot tea and the fire of a tot of rum. At ten minutes to four, half an hour before the summer sunrise, the whistles blew and she watched in awe and misery as almost a million men moved forward over the plowed and torn-up fields, slick with mud after the occasional drizzle of the last few days. They threw up pontoons over the canals and poured across the water and up the other side. They moved on through the few still-standing copses of trees and small woods. The noise of guns was deafening and murderous fire mowed down whole platoons, tearing them apart, gouging up the earth.

  By midmorning it began to rain in earnest, and a mist descended so that even four or five hundred yards away she could see that the outline of Kitchener’s Wood was no more than a smudge in the gloom.

  Two hours later she was struggling to drive her ambulance over the sodden, rutted land to get it as close as she could to the makeshift first aid post to which the wounded were being carried. The road was bombed out and there was nothing but a track left. The shelling was very heavy and in the rain the mud was getting worse. The heavy clouds made it gray in spite of it being close to midday. She was afraid of being bogged down, or even tipping sideways into a crater and breaking an axle. It took all the strength she had to wrestle with the wheel and to peer through the murk to see where she was going.

  Beside her was Wil Sloan, the young American who had volunteered at the beginning of the war, long before his country had joined only a matter of months ago. He had left his hometown in the Midwest and hitched a ride on the railroad to the East Coast. From there he had worked to earn his passage across the Atlantic. Once in England he had offered his time—his life, if need be—to help the troops in any way he could. He was not the only one. Judith had met several American drivers and medical orderlies like Wil, and nurses like Marie O’Day, doctors, even soldiers who had enlisted in the British Army, simply because they believed it was right.

  Since January America itself had joined the Allies, but there were no American forces in this stretch of the line.

  She knew there were shadows in Wil’s life. His blazing temper had run out of control more than once before, and had finally forced him to leave his home. He had never told her how serious the breach had been, but he had hinted at it. Perhaps because they were close enough friends that honesty compelled him, he could not pose to her as an unblemished hero.

  Now he was sitting beside her, calling out warning and encouragement alternately as they bucked and slewed over the rough ground, trying to discern through the mist and rain where to stop for the wounded.

  “There!” he shouted, pointing to what looked like a level spot slightl
y below a rise in the slope. There was a mound of some sort, and a man standing near it, waving his arms.

  “Right!” she answered, but her voice was drowned by a shell exploding fifty yards away, sending mud and earth up like a gout of water. The debris fell on them, battering the roof and sides of the ambulance and flying in, striking both of them through the open part of the front above the windshield and the door.

  She kept on with her hand on the accelerator. There was nothing to gain, or lose, by stopping before they reached the post. Finally she slithered to a halt, a few yards short of the level she had been aiming for. Almost immediately a soldier was beside her, shouting something she could barely hear, and gesticulating behind him.

  Wil leaped out and splashed through the mud and rain to start helping the first wounded into the back. He would take only those too badly injured to walk. They could carry five, maybe six at the most. God only knew how many there were. He could do something to stanch bleeding—pack a wound, put on a tourniquet—but that was about all. If an artery was lacerated very often a man bled to death and there was little anyone could do about it. But if a limb was torn off completely, the artery constricted and the blood loss was far less. If they could prevent him dying of shock, there was a good chance of saving him.

  Now Judith kept the engine running while Wil and several other men loaded in the wounded. As soon as they gave the signal, she could turn and begin the difficult journey back to the nearest clearing station. She had already made two trips, and she would go on as long as she could, all day and all night if necessary. She did not think that far ahead. One ambulance had been blown to pieces already today, killing everyone in it, and a crater had broken both axles of another.