At Some Disputed Barricade wwi-4 Read online

  Northrup’s face was hard, his pale blue eyes hot with anger. “Then why doesn’t he get out there and look for him, Chaplain?”

  Joseph had to struggle to keep his voice level. It was hard to breathe without gasping. “Because it’s been raining for a week, Major Northrup,” he said with elaborate patience that grated in spite of his effort to be civil. “The men are being sucked down into the mud and drowned! The craters are ten or twelve feet deep and no one can keep their footing for more than a few minutes. A soldier with full equipment hasn’t got a chance. He’d be stuck fast, a sitting target. He’s not willing to sacrifice more men pointlessly.”

  “Recovering the wounded is not pointless, as you put it, Captain Reavley.” Northrup’s face was white, his hand on the desk pale-knuckled and trembling. “I would have thought that, as a chaplain, you of all people would have known that! Think of morale, man. That’s your job. I shouldn’t have to do it for you!”

  “I am thinking of morale, sir.” Joseph’s words came between clenched teeth. “Court-martialing one of our best soldiers because he won’t lead his men on a suicidal mission is going to do infinitely more harm than the losses overnight.”

  Northrup glared at him. His certainty had evaporated, and he was doubly angry because he knew Joseph could see it.

  “Sir!” Joseph started again, unable to hide his emotion. “These men have been here for three years. They’ve endured hell. Every one of them has lost friends, many of them have lost brothers, cousins. Their villages have been decimated. You know nothing of what they’ve seen, and if you want their respect, then you must also show them the respect they deserve.”

  Northrup remained silent for several minutes. Joseph could see the struggle in his face, the anger at being challenged and the fear of weakness. “Other men have gone out,” he said finally. “That puts paid to your argument, Reavley.”

  “And have they come back?” Joseph asked. He sounded challenging and he had not intended to be. He sensed Northrup’s need to prove himself right and that he might dig himself in if he felt threatened, and yet he had gone too far to stop.

  “Not yet,” Northrup said defiantly. “But Eardslie’s a good man, an officer. He didn’t refuse to go.”

  Nigel Eardslie was another of Joseph’s students from St. John’s, before the war: a sensitive, intelligent young man, a good scholar, and a close friend of Morel’s. Suddenly the argument with Northrup was pointless. What did it matter who won it or who lost it? All he could think of was Eardslie and his men out in no-man’s-land in the mud.

  “It’s not raining now,” Northrup added, as if that vindicated him.

  “It’s not the rain that matters, it’s the mud!” Joseph snapped. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll see if I can help.” He did not bother to explain any further. Northrup was out of his depth and afraid to show it. Joseph saluted and left, pushing the sacking aside and climbing the steep steps up to the air again.

  It took him nearly half an hour to make his way to the forward trench. The duckboards were awash, some floating knee-high in the filthy water. Others were almost waist-high, clogged with the bodies of dead rats, garbage, and old tins. The leg of a dead soldier stuck out from the gray clay of the wall. There were patches of blue sky overhead, but Joseph was cold because he was wet to the skin.

  Going uphill slightly, he came to a relatively dry stretch and several groups of men cleaning equipment, telling bad jokes and laughing. One had his shirt off and had scratched his flesh raw where the lice had bitten him. Another had coaxed a flame inside a tin and was boiling water. Some were reading letters from home. Five of them could not have been over seventeen. Their bodies were slight, smooth-skinned, although their faces were hollow and there was a tight, brittle tension in their voices.

  A hundred yards farther on he came to a connecting trench. Huddled along it, their backs to the walls, were a dozen men. He recognized Morel. He was standing a little apart from the others, bracing himself against the earth, his head back in a blind stare upward. The angles of his body were stiff, almost as if he were waiting to move, yet afraid to.

  Joseph felt his chest tighten and his breath grew heavy in his lungs. He tried to go faster but the duckboards had rolled and were broken, and his feet could get little purchase in the mud.

  No one took any notice of him when he stopped. He knew most of them. Bert Collins was there, caked in mud, his right arm blood-soaked. Cully Teversham and Snowy Nunn stood together with Alf Culshaw, who was smaller, narrow-chested, dapper when he had the chance. He always managed to scrounge whatever you wanted from rations—for a consideration, of course. He looked grim and tired, and there was a bandage wrapped tightly around his left arm. Stan Tidyman for once was not talking about his favorite food. He was shoulder to shoulder with George Atherton, who could mend anything if you gave him pliers, a bit of wire, and the time. The last one was Jim Bullen.

  It was Cully who saw Joseph first, but there was no smile on his face. He did not even speak. No one saluted or came to attention.

  Morel turned slowly but it was several seconds before his eyes focused and he recognized Joseph. His expression did not change. Snowy Nunn also stared unblinkingly.

  They were covered in mud, wet to the waist, or—in the cases of Cully Teversham and Stan Tidyman—up to the armpits; all except Morel. In a blinding moment, Joseph understood: Barshey Gee had refused to take a party into no-man’s-land to look for survivors and bring back what dead they could find, but these were the men Nigel Eardslie had led.

  “Eardslie?” Joseph’s voice was hoarse, almost unintelligible, except that they all knew what he was asking. He gulped air. “Wounded?”

  “Dead,” Morel said huskily. “There wasn’t enough of him left to bring back. You want to bury one arm, a foot, Chaplain? Couldn’t even tell if it was left or right.” He could not control the tears running down his face.

  Joseph was furious, raging against believing it, as if to refuse to acknowledge the fact could stop it being true.

  “You went?” he said incredulously. “For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you?” He flung his arms out toward the sea of stinking, gas-soaked mud beyond the hastily thrown-up line. Then words choked him and failed.

  “No, of course I bloody didn’t!” Morel shouted back at him, his voice so high-pitched it was almost a scream. His chest was heaving and he seemed hardly able to breathe. “That idiot Northrup ordered them and told them it was mutiny if they refused, and he’d charge them. And the stupid bastard would have, too!”

  Joseph was overwhelmed. Grief and a terrible sense of helplessness stunned him. He had nothing left to say, no answers anymore. He stared at Morel and saw at the same time the young man he had first met at St. John’s: careless, hot-tempered, quick to laugh, and possessed of a hard, supple intelligence. The idealist in him was bruised to the bone, scorched with pain at the loss, and at the monstrous stupidity of it. Everything in Morel’s nature and his education told him it was his responsibility to stop it. He was bred to lead, to answer for actions and pay the price of them. It was naked in his face now, and he was teetering on the edge of mutiny. He would take Snowy with him—that was clear, too—and possibly several of the others.

  How could Joseph tell them there was a God who cared? He felt his own belief slipping out of his grasp. He closed his eyes, his mind crying out, “Father, if You are there, if You still remember us, do something! We’re dying! Not just smashed and bleeding bodies, we’re dying inside. There’s no light left.”

  “What do you say now, Reverend Reavley?” Morel’s voice cut across his mind like a knife edge.

  Joseph opened his eyes and wiped a muddy hand across his face. “Barshey Gee refused to go,” he answered. “Northrup’ll have to back down. Did you find any wounded still alive?”

  “Of course we bloody didn’t!” The tears streamed down Morel’s face. “Those that weren’t blown apart are drowned! And Northrup won’t back down. He’ll crucify the lot of us, if we don’
t get to him first. There’s no point in waiting for God—Chaplain! How long does it take you to realize that there’s no God there? No God that gives a damn, anyway.” He turned and walked down the trench, blundering into the walls, bruising himself without knowing or caring.

  Joseph had nothing to say. It even stole into his mind that perhaps Morel was right.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  F our nights after Eardslie’s death, Northrup led a major assault. The rain had eased a little, but the water did not soak away through the thick clay of Passchendaele. It lay coating the paths and filling the craters and trenches.

  Gradually they inched forward. The guns roared all night, and star shells lit up the sky. The landscape looked like the surface of the moon. It was hard to believe anything had ever lived on it, or would again.

  They were long past midsummer and the days were shortening. The dawn was heavy and dull, a drifting mist and occasional rain obscuring most of the newly gained land. The woods ahead, beyond no-man’s-land, were not even a darkening of the gray. It was ideal for going out to search for wounded.

  “Bloody Jerry won’t see anyone in this,” Barshey Gee said cheerfully, swinging his rifle over his shoulder. “Ready, lads?”

  “Roight,” Cully Teversham agreed. Behind him Stan Tidyman, John Geddes, George Atherton, and Treffy Johnson nodded.

  “Captain?” Barshey looked at Joseph.

  “Of course.” Joseph led the way up the fire step, across the parapet and down onto the slimy mud on the other side. They had to be careful because the winding path through the craters and bogs changed with every bombardment. Bodies floated beside it, grotesquely swollen, and the stench of rotting flesh and effluent flooding over from the latrines was hanging in the almost motionless air.

  They went in twos, one man to help the other if either lost his footing. They spread out to cover as much ground as possible. No one spoke. The misty rain would probably deaden sound, but it was not worth the risk.

  Cully Teversham went with Joseph. He was a big man with ginger hair that even the army barber couldn’t tame and hands that dwarfed everything he held. He moved calmly, picking his way, testing the ground under his feet, always looking ahead and then to the sides.

  A long spike of barbed wire caught around Cully’s leg and he stopped, bending slowly to cut himself free. Joseph helped, and they moved forward again.

  Ahead and to the left they saw Geddes and George Atherton. They were no more than shapes in the gloom, identifiable only by Geddes’s stiff shoulders and the swing of his arms.

  It was half an hour before they found the first wounded man. His side was torn open by shrapnel and one leg was broken, but he was definitely still alive. Awkwardly, slipping and floundering in the mud, they got him back across the parapet and to the dressing station behind. Then they went back to look for more. The mist was clearing, and in another hour their camouflage could be gone.

  This time they were more certain of the path, and the urgency was greater. Joseph moved ahead, his feet sucking and squelching, tripping over occasional broken equipment, spent shells, and now and then part of a corpse. He was sweating. It was warmer and there were patches of blue sky above.

  He saw the body before Cully did. It was lying on its side, looking as if it were asleep rather than dead. There was no apparent injury. Joseph quickened his step, slithered the last few feet, and bent over him. It was then he saw the crown on one shoulder. It was a major! He turned the man gently, trying to see who it was, and where he was wounded. It was Major Northrup.

  Cully was at his shoulder. “In’t no good, Captain. Look.” There was no emotion in his voice. He was pointing at the man’s head.

  Joseph saw. There was a small blue bullet hole in his skull, just above the bridge of his nose, exactly in the middle.

  “Sniper,” Cully remarked. “Damn good shots, some o’ those Jerrys. Mind, I suppose he were pretty far forward. Clean way to go, if you’ve got to, eh?”

  “Yes,” Joseph agreed. It was. Far better than being gassed, coughing your lungs up, drowning in your own body’s fluids, or being caught on the wire, riddled with bullets, and hanging there perhaps for days till you bled or froze to death. But that was not what was in his mind. Why had none of his own men brought Northrup back? Surely they had seen him fall? But no one had even reported him missing.

  “Let’s get him back,” he said grimly.

  “Yes, sir,” Cully said obediently.

  It was an awkward journey and as the sky cleared and the heat burned through, the ground steamed gently. But the cover it offered was too little. Shots began to ring out, shells and sniper fire starting to miss them too narrowly.

  They reached the forward lines, then the parapet, and rolled over into the shelter and filth of the front trench. Hands reached out to help them.

  “He’s dead,” Cully said matter-of-factly. “Can’t do nothing for him, not now.”

  “The major!” Stan Tidyman said in surprise. “Well Oi never!”

  “Now we’ll have to get another one,” Tiddly Wop Andrews remarked. “Can’t be worse than this, though, can he?”

  Barshey Gee fished a sixpence out of his pocket and slapped it on the fire step. “Sixpence says it can,” he said with a smile. “Oi’ll be happy to lose.”

  The others laughed.

  It was Joseph’s duty to report the death to Colonel Hook at the regimental command. Northrup would have to be replaced. Headquarters might send someone, or it might be a field promotion of someone already with them, but he had no time to think about it. Please heaven it would not be Morel. Joseph still did not know what to do about him, how to help or where his first obligation lay. Morel was angry at Northrup’s incompetence and his arrogance at refusing to be helped by a man from the ranks, even when he was right. But he was far from the only experienced man to feel that. And he was grieved at Eardslie’s death. They had been friends for years.

  Geddes and Bill Harrison helped Joseph carry Northrup to the table in the first aid post. He would be buried close by, probably tonight. Precious transport had to be kept for the wounded.

  He thanked them and Harrison remained behind. “Can I help you, sir? Tidy him up a bit?”

  “Thank you,” Joseph said. It was a grim task, but he had done it so often it was almost mechanical now. Such decencies really were for those left alive who would know, a rather pointless exercise in humanity, as if it could make any difference. Northrup was beyond help, and no one else cared. It was a pretense that in the seas of blood each death was somehow important. The whole of the Western Front was strewn with broken bodies; many of them would never be found. He had presided at burials where there was little more to identify than a handful of dog tags.

  Still he accepted the offer, and together they straightened his uniform, took off the worst of the mud and washed his face. Northrup looked frightened. There was no resolution or peace in his pinched features.

  “Reckon as he saw it coming, don’t you, sir?” Harrison asked with a touch of pity. Perhaps now that Northrup could do no more harm he felt free to treat his weaknesses with humanity.

  Joseph looked down at the corpse. He closed the staring eyes. “Yes,” he agreed. “It looks like it.”

  “Poor devil,” Harrison said bleakly. “Is there anything else I can do, sir?”

  Joseph found his throat dry, his hand trembling a little. “No, thank you. This is just routine. I’ll have to go and tell Colonel Hook, but I’ll make Northrup look a bit better first.”

  “Yes, sir.” Harrison saluted and left.

  When Joseph was certain he had gone he looked again at Northrup’s face. Even with his eyes closed, the fear was still there, ugly and painfully naked. How long would it be before Harrison realized that Northrup could not possibly have seen the sniper? Any German must have been at least five hundred yards away from where they had found Northrup’s body. Had Northrup simply panicked under fire? Please God that was it!

  Please God? Did h
e think God was listening after all? Joseph had wanted Northrup removed before he killed any more men with his arrogant stupidity, but not this way!

  He slid his hand under Northrup’s head and felt the exit wound. The bone was splintered, hair matted with blood and brain. There was no point in trying to wash it off. Simpler to bandage it briefly, decently. Make him look whole.

  He took off the tin helmet and washed that clean. He stared at it. There was no scar, no mark on the metal where the bullet had exited. Where was the bullet? Fallen out onto the ground, or inside his clothes?

  The answer was obvious but he still resisted it. There must be another explanation.

  Deliberately, methodically, he examined the rest of the body. There were no other injuries on him, except for a chafing at the wrists. It was not much more than red marks and a little broken skin, as if he had been firmly tied, but not harshly.

  Joseph knew it before he forced himself to accept it. Old memories flooded into his mind of finding another body and bringing it back, and then realizing it was not a casualty of war but murder. That time he had at first assumed a German soldier had held the dead man’s head below the water. This time he knew straightaway it was his own men who had killed Howard Northrup. But now, two years and thousands of deaths later, Joseph would be a great deal more careful what he did about it. The grief of that time, and the guilt of his own part in it, still haunted him. Before he reported this to anyone, he would learn more about Northrup’s incompetence, how serious it was, how many lives it had cost, or had appeared to cost, and whose. He would look further than an instant judgment of what seemed to be justice. He was wiser now, more aware of the complexity behind an apparently simple act. These men lived in circumstances unimaginable to those who had originally written the rules. How could any sane man have conceived of this horror, let alone framed laws to meet its needs?