Shoulder the Sky Read online

  Cullingford felt the room swim around him, as if it had been rocked by heavy artillery fire. It was a physical blurring, even though it was created by an emotional shock. It was real, Prentice was blackmailing him! There was no smile on his face, no wavering in his bold, clear blue eyes. He meant it!

  There was also no defense. Cullingford had never said or done anything even remotely improper with Judith. He had never touched her, not even called her by her Christian name. It was all in his imagination, in the momentary meeting of eyes, things that had not needed words: a great sweep of sky across the west, gilded by the fading sun, cloud-racks of searing beauty that hurt and healed with the same touch; understanding of laughter and pain; the knowledge when to be silent.

  His guilt was deeper than acts, it was a betrayal of the heart. And yet the loneliness had been slowly killing him. He had protected Nerys at a cost to himself greater than he had realized before. Perhaps it was his fault, too, for allowing her to live in a world cocooned from reality, but he had left it too late to change it now. Nerys was at home, in another life. Judith was here, she was the one who had seen the grotesque ruin of no-man’s-land, the mud, the ice-rimmed craters with the limbs of dead men poking up as if in some last, desperate hold on life. He did not need to reach after impossible explanations for her, or speak with words that were too raw still to bear it.

  “I only want a letter,” Prentice was talking again, unable to wait. “Just something to stop them hedging me in. I’m doing my job! And of course I’ll share anything I get with the other correspondents.” He put his good hand in his pocket, in a possibly unconscious imitation of Cullingford’s stance when he was at ease, moments he might have remembered before the war. “Thanks. It’ll help a lot.”

  Cullingford would like to have thrown him out, possibly even physically, but he could not afford to. There was steel inside Prentice. He wanted to succeed. If he were prevented in a way he imagined unfair, he would bring down anyone he felt to blame. He would not care who else it hurt, but that it included Cullingford would please him. Cullingford had never liked him. He had tried, and failed. Perhaps he had not tried very hard; he was not a man to whom relationships were easy. Only Judith had crashed through his self-protection guard. She had put no artificial limits to her own feelings, no bounds at all to what she was prepared to know or to see. And then when she was hurt by it, her very hold on endurance, the courage to hope and purpose threatened, it was his strength she needed.

  “I’ll give you a letter of authority,” he conceded, hating himself for such surrender. “But you can still be arrested if you get in anyone’s way.”

  “I daresay that’ll do,” Prentice replied with the sharp relish of victory in his voice, making it high and a little abrupt. “At least for now. Thank you . . . Uncle Owen.”

  Cullingford did not look at him. It was only when the letter was written and Prentice had put it rather awkwardly in his pocket with his one hand, and then gone out, that Cullingford realized that his muscles were clenched with the effort of self-control and the anger inside him was making him hold his breath.

  Hadrian was standing in the doorway waiting for instructions. His face was watchful, his eyes unhappy. How well did he really know Prentice? Well enough to have believed blackmail of him?

  “If Mr. Prentice comes again,” Cullingford told him, “I don’t want to see him. In fact, so help me God, if I never see him again it will suit me very well!”

  Hadrian stared at him, his face dark with emotion. “Yes, sir,” he said quietly. “I’ll see to it.”

  Cullingford turned away, suddenly embarrassed. He had not meant to reveal so much. “Will you tell Miss Reavley to get the car ready. I need to go to Zillebeke in half an hour.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hadrian said.

  Sam Wetherall sat on the fire-step in the sun, a packet of Woodbines in his hand. It was nearly five o’clock. He was smiling, but the sharp, warm light picked out the crusted mud along the line of his jaw, and the deep weariness around his eyes.

  “There was Barshey Gee sitting there cleaning his rifle,” he said wryly, “and holding this long philosophical discussion with the German captain, all very reasonable and patient, explaining to him how he was wrong. Apparently he’d been doing it for days. The German was lying with his head and shoulders sticking out of the ground about a foot below the top of the parapet.”

  “Days?” Joseph stared at him in horror.

  Sam shrugged, grinning. “Oh, he was dead! No one had dared to climb over the top to dislodge him.” He raised his eyebrows. “Which brings to mind, Jerry’s awfully quiet this afternoon. Wonder what he’s up to?” He cocked his head a little sideways, listening.

  “It’s been quiet for a while.” Joseph realized he had heard no sniper fire for more than an hour. That was not unusual when there was a Saxon or South German regiment opposite them. They, like some of the English regiments, were inclined to live and let live. However there were others who were far more belligerent, and there had recently been a change on the German side, so this was unexpected.

  Sam stood up, bending his head to keep it low, and moving over to Whoopy Teversham, standing on sentry duty. “What can you see?” he asked.

  Whoopy was concentrating on the periscope in his hands and did not look away. “Not much, sir. Word is this lot’s pretty tough. Oi ’aven’t seen a thing. Could be all asleep, from anything Oi can tell.”

  Sam took the periscope from him and stared through it, his shoulders hunched and tense. Slowly he swiveled it around to look right along their own lines, then across no-man’s-land again. He gave it back to Whoopy and stepped down onto the duckboards. “Wind’s changed,” he said with a shrug. “Blowing our way.”

  “I know that,” Joseph answered ruefully. “Smells different.”

  Sam rolled his eyes. “You can tell one lot of dead men from another?”

  “Of course I can,” Joseph replied. “You don’t have to carry a rifle to have a nose. And the latrines are behind us, not in front.”

  “The subtlety of it,” Sam expressed mock admiration.

  “Oi can’t see the trenches!” Whoopy interrupted sharply, his voice touched with alarm. “There’s a sort of cloud! Only it’s on the ground, and Oi think it’s coming this way. Bit to the north of us, up Poelkapelle.”

  “What do you mean?” Sam demanded, his voice edgy. “What sort of cloud?”

  “Greenish-white,” Whoopy replied. “It’s koind of drifting over no-man’s-land. Maybe it’s camouflage, hoiding a raiding party?” Now there was alarm in his voice as well, high-pitched and urgent. He swung around the butt of his rifle to clang on an empty shell case, and at the same minute gongs sounded along the trench to the north and west.

  Men scrambled to their feet, seizing weapons, preparing for a wave of enemy troops over the top. Joseph saw Plugger Arnold with his odd boots, and Tucky Nunn. Then there was silence, a long breathless waiting.

  Joseph stood as well, crouching a little, back to the wall. An afternoon raid was unusual, but he knew what to expect. There would be a shout of warning, shots, shellfire, wounded men, some dead. He would be there to help carry those they might save. Trying to maneuver a stretcher in the short, narrow lengths of duckboard, around the jagged corners was ghastly. But they had been built precisely so an enemy could not get a long range of fire and decimate a score of men in one raking barrage. It was worth the sacrifice. Most of them they would carry on their backs.

  No one moved. Not a duckboard tilted or a foot squelched.

  Then he heard it—not a fusillade, but gasping, a cry strangled in the throat, gagging.

  Sam swiveled round, his face ashen. “God Almighty!” he said, his voice choking. “It’s gas! Run!”

  Joseph froze. He did not understand. How could any soldier, let alone Sam, give the order to run?

  Then Sam’s shoulder hit him hard in the chest and almost knocked him off his feet. He bent to a crouch, more by instinct than thought.

  “Ge
t up!” Sam shouted at him. There were other noises now, yells of rage, terror, half words cut off in the middle, the terrible sounds of men retching and choking, and beyond them the rising barrage of gunfire.

  “Get up!” Sam shouted again. “The gas sinks! It’s on the ground.”

  “We’ve got to help!” Joseph protested, swiveling around and pushing against Sam’s weight. “We can’t leave them!”

  “We can’t help anyone if we’re dead.” Sam yanked him along by one arm. “In the supply trenches we’ll have a moment.”

  Joseph did not understand him, but at least Sam seemed to have some idea what to do. Gas? Poison in the air? He stumbled to the next corner, and the next, bumping into the uprights, lurching left and right. He could already taste something acrid in the air. His eyes were watering. Men were stumbling everywhere. The shelling was getting louder. It must be closer. Any minute German soldiers would appear—towering over the parapet, shooting them like trapped animals.

  He reached the supply trench and ran along it, his feet slipping on the wet boards, splashing mud, until Sam hit him from behind and sent him flying. He found himself on his hands and knees, rats scattering ahead of him.

  “Take your scarf or handkerchief—anything, and piss on it!” Sam ordered. “Then tie it over your nose and mouth.”

  Joseph could not believe it.

  “Do it!” Sam’s voice exploded, high-pitched, close to panic. “For God’s sake, Joe! Do it! It absorbs the gas, or at least the worst of it!” He suited the action to the word himself, tying the wet cloth around his face like a mask. “There’s no time to look for stretchers, and there’ll never be enough anyway.”

  Joseph obeyed, feeling sick, frightened, and absurd, but he was too accustomed to the smells, the physical indignity of trench life to be revolted. He followed blindly after Sam as they turned and made their way forward again, and down the slight incline. At the first opening they fell over the body of a soldier lying on his back, dead hands clawing at his throat, his face twisted in agony. There was froth and bloody vomit on his lips. It was Roby Sutter, one of Tucky’s cousins. He had been nineteen. Joseph had bought cheese from his father’s farm.

  Ahead of him Sam was still moving, bent forward, head just below the parapet. The gunfire was heavier, and there were more shells. Earth and clay exploded up in huge gouts, shooting sideways, fan-shaped. The gas was drifting. He could see its dirty, green-white swathes in the air. If there was a raiding party coming over it would be any moment now. Sam turned raising his arms, swinging them round to indicate forward.

  They found two more men still alive, one wounded in the shoulder, propped up against the trench wall. Blood was streaming down his chest and arm, but he was breathing quite well. The other was unconscious, his face already gray. Joseph bent to the wounded man just as there was another burst of shell fire, this time closer to them. The dirt rained down within a few yards.

  “I’m going to get you back,” Joseph said firmly. “But I’ll have to carry you. I’m sorry if I hurt you.” He had no idea if the man heard him or not. As carefully as he could, he eased him over his shoulder and straightened his back, not upright—in case he offered a target where the forward side of the trench had collapsed inward—but bent, as if heaving coal.

  He heard Sam go onward, leaving the gassed man where he was.

  About a hundred yards later, just as Joseph felt as though his spine was breaking, he met more troops coming in. Their faces were pale, frightened, their eyes wide. Immediately behind them were the stretcher-bearers.

  He gave the stretcher-bearers his man—still bleeding, but alive—then turned and went back the way he had come. It was worse. More gas was drifting across the mud and craters between the lines. It was patchy, like a real fog, here and there in whorls torn rugged by the wind, leaving the dead trees poking up like gravestones above a drowned world. It lay like a pall, following the low ground until trenches that had been shelters became graves, bodies piled grotesquely, suffocated in their own blood and fluids.

  The shelling went on, the noise deafening, shrapnel everywhere. Joseph found more men alive, struggling and wounded. He helped where he could, keeping the urinated scarf over his nose and mouth, tying it so it would not fall off while he used his hands. He lost count of the men he lifted, struggling to keep his balance in the mud, and carried or dragged back to medical aid, and some sort of cleaner air. His muscles screamed with the effort of their weight. Often he slipped and fell over. His own lungs were bursting, but he could not stop, there were always more men down. Some he thought might live, some died even before he could get them help.

  He did not know how long it was before he saw Sam again through the smoke and the gas. He lurched toward him, calling out. A shell exploded near them, knocking him off his feet. Part of the parapet caved in, filling the space between them with a cascade of earth and half-buried corpses, some weeks old. Now there was no shelter anymore.

  “Help me dig him out!” Sam shouted through the gunfire, and Joseph realized there was a live man under the rubble as well.

  If he was wounded, the shock of that would have killed him. If he was gassed there was no hope anyway, not under that slide of clay. He started to say so.

  “Shut up and dig!” Sam yelled at him. “The poor sod was all right before that!”

  Joseph’s head was throbbing and his vision was blurred. The trench floor seemed to undulate, but the firing wasn’t heavy enough to move the ground like that. The gas had a smell different from latrines or decaying bodies. He obeyed, digging clumsily with his hands, afraid that even if he could find a shovel, he might strike living flesh with it.

  He was digging frantically, heaving great clods of wet clay and flinging them anywhere he could, aware of Sam a couple of yards away on the other side, doing the same. Then he felt the ground lurch and the inner side of the trench erupt in a flying wall of dirt that knocked him flat on his back. More weight landed on his legs, and staring upward he saw what looked like a row of giants with human bodies and the heads of pigs. It wavered as if he were seeing it all under water. The noise was deafening, and one of the pigs fell on top of him.

  When he opened his eyes, his face was covered. There was something not only over his nose and mouth, but around his head and he could see only dimly. Panic seared through him. He put up his hands to tear it off, and received a sharp blow to his forearm, stinging with pain. One of the giant pigs was in front of him, staring with huge, baleful eyes. But his legs were free! He could feel them.

  The noise was still intense: machine-gun fire, shells exploding, and the deeper roar of the heavy artillery far behind the lines.

  Someone pulled on his arm and he had no choice but to scramble to his feet or have his arm dislocated at the socket.

  “Keep it on, you fool!” the pig in front of him shouted. “It’s a gas mask! And don’t just stand there! Take his feet!” It gestured to the blood-spattered man lying on the mud where the fire-step used to be.

  Joy surged through Joseph like an incoming tide. Inside the surreal pig-mask it was Sam. Gasping and laughing, he bent to obey. It took a few moments to get hold of the man properly, then he straightened up again, grasping his ankles firmly, and setting off backward, head and shoulders stooped to keep them below the line of the fractured parapet. Breathing was easier. His head still pounded and he had no peripheral vision because the goggle eyes showed a view that was only straight ahead, but step by step they moved through a world like something out of a medieval painter’s nightmare. Everywhere were mud and mangled bodies, some distorted into hideous forms by the agonies of suffocation. The greenish vapor still hung in drifts, sinking down the walls to sit in hollows, barely stirred by the wind.

  On every side the guns barked. Heavy shelling shook the ground to the west, more sporadic eastward as the artillery to the rear tried to take out the enemy’s biggest guns. Craters swam in mud and gas, foul-smelling as if hell beneath them had vomited up its bowels. Where the trench walls had
caved in he could see the waste stretching out in broken tree stumps, lengths of wire, and the torn limbs, skeletons, and bodies of men until flesh and mud were indistinguishable.

  They reached a supply trench and passed the man to stretcher-bearers, then went back for more. Neither of them spoke. What could there be to say? Somehow the world, in its political insanity, had descended another sharp step downward, dragging an innocent mankind in its wake. Young men Joseph had known all their lives were being destroyed in front of him, and he could do nothing even to explain it to himself, never mind to them. He was useless. All the study of his life evaporated here where hell was real. It swallowed everything.

  Physical action was all that was left. He tore gas masks off dead Germans, stomach heaving, hands trembling. He propped men up and gave them a little water, sat with them a moment until they died, carried one here or there, took anyone he could reach. There was no time to cover the dead, let alone bury them. That would come in the days ahead, if they held the ground and could find them. If they were forced to retreat, then perhaps the Germans would do it.

  Sometimes he lost Sam, but mostly they worked together, understanding each other without words, even without gesture, simply knowing. Two had more chance of lifting a wounded man than one, and with their gas helmets they could go where stretcher-bearers could not. Sam did not hesitate. He carried his rifle slung over his shoulder, bayonet fixed, and was ready to use it when they came around a corner suddenly and found themselves face-to-face with a German soldier. Sam lunged forward, spearing the man through the chest, and tearing off the soldier’s mask to use on the next live man of their own they found.