Shoulder the Sky Read online

  Silence again, except for the wind and the slap of the waves.

  “Thank you,” the captain said quietly, then he turned back to the U-boat. “I’m coming!” He climbed over the rail and started down. “Good luck!” he said gravely. “There are compasses on the boat. Go northwest.” And the next moment he was gone.

  The other crewmen appeared, only shadows. One of them held his arm awkwardly as if it were injured. They were indistinguishable one from another in the darkness. The two bodies on the deck still did not move.

  “Into the boats,” someone ordered, his voice steady with authority. “There’s no time to argue, just do it!”

  There was sudden, swift obedience, fumbling now to see without the light. At least two of them seemed to be hurt, and there was another lying behind the engine housing forward. There were nine men alive. They divided four into one boat, five into the other. It was awkward, slippery, knuckle- and shin-bruising work climbing and then dropping into the shifting, swinging boats, unshipping the oars and pulling away from the steamer.

  Joseph had one oar, someone he could not distinguish had the other. The man with the injured arm was in the stern, his good hand on the tiller, and someone apparently more seriously hurt lay on the boards at the bottom. Joseph pulled as hard as he could, trying to fit in with the rhythm of the other man, but it was difficult. The boat bucked and twisted in the choppy sea.

  He started to count aloud. “Pull!” Wait. “Pull!” The other man obeyed, and suddenly the oars bit and they began to create a distance between them and the steamer. He had no time even to think where the other boat might be.

  Then it happened. The cannon on the U-boat fired and the steamer erupted in a gout of fire. The noise was deafening and the shock of the blast seared across the water. An instant later there was a second shock, far greater as the boat exploded, yellow and white flames leapt up into the sky. Metal, wood, and burning debris flew high in the air, lighting up the waves, the stark outline of the steamer, broken-backed, already beginning to settle deeper. The other boat was fifty yards away off the bow. Mason was pulling at the oar beside Joseph. The U-boat beyond was temporarily hidden.

  In the glare Mason smiled. “Can’t seem to lose you, can I?” he said wryly. “I suppose I should be grateful, at least you saved us all going down with the ship. You’re more use than most priests. Keep pulling!”

  Joseph put his back to the oar again. The ship was still burning fiercely, but already the sea was rushing in and it would plunge within minutes, creating a vortex that would suck in everything close to it.

  “If you’re waiting for me to say something nice about war correspondents, keep hoping. I’ll try . . . when I have time,” he answered.

  Mason gave a bark of laughter and threw his weight against the oars again.

  They rowed in silence, skirting wide around the sinking ship, which exploded twice more, sending steam hissing high in a white jet, then erupting in red flames just before it tipped and slid with a roar into the black water, and within moments was gone, nothing but a few pieces of wreckage remaining. The U-boat had vanished. The other lifeboat was just visible, about half a mile away.

  The two other men in the boat had not moved appreciably, neither had they spoken. Now the one with the injured arm bent over awkwardly and spoke to the man who was half propped up against the side, his head resting against one of the ribs of the hull.

  “How are you doing, Johnny?” he asked, his voice strained, gasping with his own pain.

  There was no answer.

  “Somebody help me!” he begged. “I think he’s out cold! We’ve got first-aid stuff in the locker, and there should be a lantern, and food and water, and a compass.”

  Joseph handed the oar to Mason, who moved to the center of the seat and took over. The boat slowed a little, but it was possible for one man to manage, as long as the weather got no worse.

  Joseph opened the locker, feeling in the dark, fumbling a little until he located the lantern and, shielding it from the wind with his body, got it alight. Then he could see that indeed there was a first-aid box, several bottles of water, hard rations of biscuits, dried beef, and bitter chocolate, and even a couple of packets of Woodbines. The matches he already had, from lighting the lamp.

  The first thing was to see how badly the crewmen were injured. He looked first at the man lying on the boards. He had been shot twice, once in the upper thigh and once in the shoulder. Both wounds had bled badly and he was barely conscious.

  “Can you do anything for him?” the other crewman asked anxiously.

  “I’ll try,” Joseph replied. He had very little real medical knowledge, but this was not the time to say so. He certainly would not even think of attempting to take a bullet out by lamplight on the floor of a pitching boat, but he could roll up cloth into pads and do everything possible to stop the bleeding. It might be enough.

  “Hold up the lantern,” he asked. “What’s your name?”

  “Andy.” In the yellow light he looked no more than nineteen or twenty, fair-haired, a blunt freckled face, now pasty white.

  Joseph worked as well as he could, but it was difficult and the clothes around the wounds were soaked in blood. Even when he pressed on them, the injured man barely groaned. He was sinking deeper and there was nothing they could do about it. When he had bound him up, Joseph tried to get him to take a little water, even just to moisten his mouth, but he was too far gone to swallow.

  After that he did what he could for Andy. His upper arm had been shot through and it was bleeding badly as well, but the bone was intact. When he bound it as tightly as he dared without cutting off the circulation, it seemed to stanch the bleeding, even if it was no help for the pain.

  He returned to take the other oar from Mason. The wind was stronger and they were having to work much harder to keep the boat moving, and headed against the waves so it did not turn sideways to them and risk being swamped.

  There was a faint paling in the northeast of the sky, as if dawn were not far off. The other boat was nowhere to be seen.

  “I suppose you’ve still got your story about Gallipoli?” Joseph asked.

  “Of course,” Mason replied.

  “And you’re still determined to hand it in?”

  “You’ve already argued that one, Reverend.” He used the word with mild sarcasm. “You preach your gospel, I’ll preach mine. You want to protect people from the truth, for what you think is the greater good. I think they have the right to know what they’re signing up for, what the battle will cost them, and what chance they have of winning anything worth a damn.” He dug into the water and pulled, hurling his weight against the oar.

  “You’re going to tell them the truth about Gallipoli, how many men are dying, and how?” Joseph pressed.

  “Yes!”

  “And what you think our chances are of winning and making it through to Constantinople?”

  “No chance at all. Nor of getting the Russian fleet out of the Black Sea. And even if we did it would make no damn difference in the end. We’d probably give Constantinople to the Russians anyway,” Mason said.

  “And that our generals out there are ill informed and for the most part incompetent?”

  “For the most part, yes. You want to protect them? That’s naive, Reverend, and dangerous. Your pity for them, God knows why, is getting in the way of your intelligence. Maybe your religion requires you to be compassionate and see the good in everyone, but He gave you a brain as well, presumably in the hope you’d use it! Do you really think any man’s reputation is worth what those soldiers are paying for it?”

  “I’m not trying to protect reputations!” Joseph dug just as deeply with his oar. It was taking all his strength and the exhausted muscles in his back and arms to hold the boat to the wind. Mason must feel the same. He had carried just as many wounded men. “I’m trying to keep up hope and courage at home, for very good reasons, and a rather longer view than you have! Few men set out on a battle they don’t belie
ve they can win.”

  “Few of them are stupid enough,” Mason agreed tersely.

  “And are you going to tell them what will happen if they don’t fight?” Joseph had to raise his voice against the rising noise of the wind and the water in order to be heard. The light must have been broadening a little behind him to the northeast because he could see the stippling on the backs of the waves and the pale crests were creaming now and then. His feet were numb with cold.

  “With no army we’ll be forced to surrender,” Mason answered him. “The slaughter will stop. It’s a war we should never have got into. England has no quarrel with Germany.”

  “Whether we should have or not doesn’t matter now,” Joseph told him. “It’s past. Right or wrong, we can’t undo it. Germany has invaded Belgium, the land has been bombed and burned, the people driven out, thousands of them killed, their farms and villages destroyed. Are you going to tell them to surrender to the soldiers that have despoiled them, bury their dead, then carry on as before?”

  “Of course I’m not going to tell them anything so damned stupid!” Mason said angrily. “Belgium will suffer, it already has, but isn’t that less evil than the whole of Europe plunged into chaos and death? We are on the brink of destroying the finest young men of an entire generation for what? Can you justify what’s happening?”

  “I’m not trying to.” Joseph was staring at the two crewmen in the stern. Andy seemed to be asleep, although he stirred now and then, and once Joseph had seen him open his eyes. The other man was lying next to him, half cradled across his knees, Andy’s uninjured arm supporting his head, but he had not moved in over half an hour.

  “Take the oar,” Joseph said abruptly. It was light enough now to see Mason’s face, the weariness and the strain in it, wet from spray. He understood what Joseph was thinking. He took the oar.

  Joseph moved forward carefully. The boat was pitching and if he stood he might lose his balance, perhaps even go over the side. On his hands and knees he reached the wounded man.

  Andy opened his eyes: wide and frightened, full of pain.

  Joseph put the back of his hand to the other man’s neck. He could feel no pulse at all. His skin was waxy-white in the creeping daylight.

  Andy’s good arm tightened around him. His face asked the question, but he did not speak.

  “I think we could let him lie on the bottom,” Joseph said, having to speak loudly to be heard above the sea. “Be more comfortable for you. That weight would send your legs to sleep.”

  “I don’t mind!” Andy protested.

  “You might need your legs, when we reach land,” Joseph answered. “And it won’t help.”

  Andy blinked, his face crumpling.

  “I’m sorry.” Joseph touched him briefly. “Come on.”

  Andy still hesitated, then slowly eased himself sideways and helped Joseph move the dead man’s body so it lay out of his way and where the oarsmen would not bump it. Then he inched back to where he had been before, careful to take exactly the same position, and pulled the piece of canvas over himself. “I’m sorry I can’t help,” he apologized.

  Joseph broke off a piece of the chocolate and gave it to him. “There are only two oars anyway,” he replied.

  He went back to his place again and he and Mason rowed in silence for a while. The white light spread across the horizon behind them, still without color. The wind was harder, and rising. It was getting more and more difficult to make any headway against it.

  “Where do you come from?” Joseph asked Mason. He was anxious to know, and he needed to find some opening, some corner of emotion in Mason he could use to carry his argument. He must not give up, no matter what it cost. This was the ultimate test.

  “Beverly,” Mason replied. “Near Hull, in Yorkshire. Where do you?”

  “Selborne St. Giles, just outside Cambridge,” Joseph said. “Have you always been a journalist?”

  “Nothing else I ever wanted to do.” Mason smiled bleakly. “Don’t tell me you always wanted to preach, I couldn’t bear it! Some time, even if it was in the cradle, you must have wanted to do something else!”

  “My father wanted me to be a doctor. I tried, but I felt so useless in the face of the pain, and the fear.”

  “So you chose the pain and fear of the spirit instead?” There was surprise in Mason’s face, but it was not without respect. “Was your father upset?”

  “Yes. But he’s dead now.”

  “So is mine. He died while I was in Africa . . . reporting on the Boer War.” He said the words with anger and a grief that clearly still hurt him. He was looking not at Joseph but at the sea rolling away behind them, now beginning to be touched with color, but a heavy gray, only undershot with blue.

  “That’s where you learned to hate war,” Joseph observed. It was barely a question.

  “It’s not a noble thing,” Mason said, his lips tight. “It’s vicious, stupid, and bestial! It brings out the worst in too many men who used to be decent. There is immense courage, pity, honor, and all the things that are finest in human nature in some, but at the price of losing too many. The sacrifice is immeasurable. And it’s a cost we have no right to ask of anyone—anyone at all!”

  Joseph was quiet for a while. It was becoming difficult to hold the oars. The boat was bucking as the waves caught it from different angles and his strength was failing. He began to think of all the things he valued most, not what ought to matter, but what really did: his family, the people he loved who formed the frame of his life within which everything else took meaning. What was laughter or beauty or understanding if there was no one with whom to share it? What was achievement alone? So many things were made only in order to give them to someone else.

  Friendship was at the root of it all, the honesty without judgment, the generosity of the spirit, the tenderness that never failed. In a way it was the end of fear, because if you were not alone, everything else was bearable.

  He thought of Sam. If he and Mason didn’t make the shore, then at least he would never have to go and find Sam and tell him he knew he had killed Prentice. He was surprised how much of a relief that was.

  His hand slipped on the oar, as if he had already half let it go. Mason jerked around, fear in his face for an instant, until he saw Joseph tighten his grip on it again.

  What would Sam have said to try to persuade Mason not to write his article on Gallipoli? What arguments were there left? He had tried everything he could think of. None of it was enough. What if he failed? Finally he faced the thought he had been avoiding for the last two hours. There was only one way to be absolutely certain that Mason did not publish his piece, and that was to kill him. Could he wait until they were within sight of land, and he could manage the boat alone, then calmly take the oar and strike Mason with it, so hard it would kill him? He had no need to ask himself, he knew the answer. But was that humanity, even godliness? Or was it cowardice?

  What if a ship were to see them before that, while he was still dithering, and pick them up? The decision would be taken out of his hands. No. That was dishonest. He would have left it too late, and missed his chance. Anyway, justification or excuses were pointless. If morale in England were destroyed, the reason Joseph Reavley failed to act would be utterly irrelevant.

  “You would tell all of the men who might enlist and go,” he said aloud. “And then many of them would change their minds. Their families would be relieved—at least most of them would. How about the families of all those who are already there? Or who have died in France, or Gallipoli, or at sea? How do you suppose they would feel?”

  “Probably angry enough to demand that the government answer for it,” Mason replied, struggling to keep hold of the oar. “Pull, damn it!”

  “We can’t pull against this,” Joseph replied, jerking his head at the waves. “One misjudgment and we’ll be tipped over. We need to turn and go before it.”

  “Where to, for God’s sake?” Mason demanded, his voice higher pitched, exhaustion and panic too
close to the surface. “Out into the middle of the Atlantic?”

  “Better there, and above the water, than the English Channel, and under it,” Joseph replied. “Even south of here we’ll still be in a shipping lane. We don’t have a choice.”

  “Can you turn it without capsizing?” Mason demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Joseph admitted. “But we can’t go on like this. We can’t hold it. We’ll have to be fast.”

  “What about the wounded man? If he goes over we’ve lost him!”

  “If the boat goes over we’re all lost!” Joseph shouted back. “Together! When there’s a lull. Wait for it! You lift out, I’ll pull.”

  “A lull?” Mason yelled with disbelief.

  The wind gusted, then dropped.

  “Now!” Joseph bellowed, lifting his oar high, digging it round and feeling the boat turn, yaw wildly, pitch almost over as the wave slapped against the side, then as Joseph dug again, throwing his weight against it, come round with the wind and the current behind it.

  Mason gasped, pushing his hair out of his face with one hand and grabbing at the oar to plunge it in the water again. Now the boat was running before the wind, but it still needed both of them with all their weight and strength to keep it from turning again.

  Joseph’s heart was pounding so hard he felt giddy. He had come within feet of drowning them all, Andy as well as Mason and himself. Relief left him shaking. He clung to the oar as much to regain his control as to wield and pull it. But something in him had resolved.

  “I can’t let you publish that piece,” he said clearly. “That is, if there really is a publisher?” He had to know.

  “Of course there is,” Mason said without the slightest hesitation. “Some of the provincial newspaper owners believe as I do. They think people have a right to make their own decisions, knowing what they’re going to face.”

  “Aren’t they afraid of being charged with treason?” Joseph asked. “The Defense of the Realm Act is pretty powerful. Or are they going to do it anonymously, so they won’t have to answer for it?”