Shoulder the Sky wwi-2 Read online

  Sam stood up. He looked so ill Joseph was afraid he was going to pass out himself. He half rose as if to help him, then realized the futility of it and sank back. Sam was almost as alone as Corliss.

  “Yes, sir,” Sam struggled to find his voice. “I have been Private Corliss’s commanding officer for seven months and have seen him face conditions worse than those faced by the men in the trenches under fire. The saps are unique. It takes a very special kind of man to dig into any earth, and go into the tunnels he makes, but especially this. It’s wet, it’s cold, it’s suffocating, and pretty often we come across dead bodies—sometimes Germans, sometimes our own men, men we’ve known, talked to, shared tea with or a joke. If such a man reaches the end of his concentration, sir, and makes a mistake that takes his hand off, I think he’s more to be pitied than blamed! Especially by a civilian newspaperman, sir, who’s never faced anything more dangerous than his editors’ blue pencil!”

  “Thank you, Major Wetherall,” Swaby said quietly. “I shall take your plea for mercy into consideration when I pass our verdict on up the command. It will have to go right to General Haig, of course. All capital cases do. In the meantime, Private Corliss will be kept under arrest, and taken to military prison to await his sentence. This court is dismissed.”

  “Jesus wept!” Sam said between his teeth, his voice trembling.

  “Actually, He’s probably the one person who would understand.” Joseph had not intended irony; he was sick, stomach clenched with misery as much for Sam as for Corliss, but it came to his lips unbidden.

  Sam’s mouth twisted with a terrible, bitter humor. “I suppose He would! He couldn’t get Himself out of it either!” he said with despair, his eyes shadowed and hollow with pain. “I’ll see Prentice in hell!”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  “This way, Padre!” Goldstone said urgently.

  Joseph had stopped bothering to tell Goldstone—or anyone—that he was Church of England, not Roman Catholic. It did not matter much, and he was happy to answer to anything well meant. “I’m coming,” he replied, slithering in the mud. It was thick and clinging, wet on the surface after the day’s fine rain. The raiding party that Colonel Fyfe had sent over the top earlier in the evening had been expected by the Germans and met with stiff opposition. There had been casualties, and Joseph and Lance Corporal Goldstone were among those who had volunteered to see if they could find anyone wounded and still alive.

  “Not much in the way of snipers now,” Goldstone went on, picking his way over a narrow neck of land between craters swimming in water. The occasional star shell showed the nightmare landscape in blacks and grays, quagmires of thick, gluelike clay, pools of water and slime, dead trees, dead men and now and then horses, dismembered limbs floating, or arms sticking up like branches out of the flat surfaces of ditches and holes. It was impossible to tell where it was safe to put one’s weight. Any step could suck you in, hold you and drag you down, as if it were a vast, filthy mouth pulling you toward some primeval belly to be swallowed into the earth and become part of it.

  The wind whined a little, shrill where it whistled through the wires. There was a cold edge to it. It was difficult to remember that it was spring, though now and again one heard skylarks, even here, and behind the lines, in the burned and ruined villages, there were still wildflowers.

  “This is the way they should have come, and we’re getting close to the German lines,” Goldstone continued huskily, his black, slightly awkward figure alternating between stark silhouette and invisibility ahead of Joseph. “Can’t go a lot further. God, this stuff stinks!” He pulled his boot out of the filth with a loud squelch. “Everything tastes of mud and death. I dream about getting it in my mouth. There’s quite a big crater over there. Can you see? Could be one of our boys in it. We’d better go look.”

  Reluctantly Joseph obeyed, his feet sliding as he missed his balance and almost fell forward onto Goldstone, who put up his hand to save him. Just as they reached the rim of the crater another flare lit up the sky. The standard advice was to freeze, because movement attracted attention, but instinct was to fling yourself forward onto the ground. Goldstone had already dived in and Joseph followed without thought.

  He landed in the soft, stinking mud and visions raced through his mind of falling helplessly into the toxic fluid, every desperate lashing out at it only sucking him in deeper until it filled his mouth and nose and then closed over his head. It was a wretched way to die. He would rather be shot.

  A wave of relief swept over him as he came to an abrupt stop, against a body crouched in the mud.

  “Shalom, Shlomo ben-Yakov. Baruch he-Shem,” the body said. “Have you any news about the Arsenal for me?”

  “Shalom, Isaac,” Goldstone’s distinctive voice replied from the darkness. “Impregnable defense, in my opinion. I don’t see any attack getting past.”

  A sickening shudder went through Joseph as he realized that Goldstone must know this German well and was giving away military information.

  “Mind you, if Manchester United are on form, they could give them a spot of bother,” Goldstone went on. “But Chelsea are a joke at the moment—defense like a sieve. Arsenal knocked four past them last Saturday, without reply. Do you follow football, Padre?”

  Joseph burst out laughing with crazy, hysterical relief, the sound of it echoing over the squelching mud and the wind in the wires. He was in no-man’s-land discussing football scores with two Jewish soldiers. “Not really,” he gasped, choking on his words.

  “Some of your men were through here earlier this evening, but they neglected to give me the latest football scores,” Isaac continued. “Some were killed, but we captured three.”

  “Isaac, this is Captain Reavley,” Goldstone told him as another shell exploded twenty yards away, drenching them all in mud. Joseph slid a little further into the ice-cold water. “He’s a padre,” Goldstone went on. “Captain, this is Feldwebel Eisenmann, a keen Arsenal supporter, but apart from that, a good man. He used to visit our jeweler’s shop in Golders Green quite regularly before the war.”

  “Guten abend, Feldwebel Eisenmann,” Joseph said, wiping the filth off his face with the back of his hand. “I did not expect to bump into you this way.”

  The next flare showed a slight smile on Isaac’s face as he turned toward Joseph. “We Jews have a saying, ’Next year, in Jerusalem.’ One day, Father, we will have our own homeland. You will not see Jew fighting Jew like this then. We do not belong here. You Christians have ‘borrowed’ our religion and persecuted us for centuries, but soon, we hope we will be out of your way. As the prophet said, ’They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation.’ ”

  “And in the book of Joel,” Joseph replied, quoting in classical Hebrew, “is it not written, ’Beat your plowshares into spears, and your pruning hooks into swords’? I used to teach Greek and Hebrew at Cambridge University. Lance Corporal Goldstone, I think we had better get back to our own lines.”

  “So you speak our language, Father Yusuf!” Eisenmann said. “I hope we shall meet again. Shalom. Leheitra-ot.”

  “Until we meet again, Smiling One,” Joseph replied, translating the meaning of Isaac’s name as he scrambled to the edge of the crater.

  “One last thing, Father Yusuf?” Isaac added.

  Joseph hesitated, clinging to the rim. “Yes?”

  “Let me know how Arsenal are doing, please?”

  Another flare made them flatten to the ground, but it showed them very clearly where they were, almost twenty feet from the German wire ahead of them. There were bodies distinguishable more by form than color. Some of them could still be alive, although nothing moved. But then it never did in the light.

  The flare faded and it seemed even darker than before. It was overcast and drizzling slightly, an almost impenetrable gloom. It was a vague comfort to know they were roughly where they had thought they were. Men got lost sometimes
, and end up blundering into the enemy’s trenches, instead of their own.

  Eisenmann raised his hand in salute, then scrambled forward and in moments was lost in the darkness and drifting rain.

  “I met him at Christmas,” Goldstone said softly, an edge of tragedy in his voice. He inched forward in the mud. “But it won’t happen again. There’ll be no truce next year. We are going forward into the night, Chaplain. Nothing for us to laugh at together.” He was referring to the bizarre incident of the German pastry chef who had been baking on Christmas Eve. Infuriated at the French troops still firing across the lines, he had seized a branch of Christmas tree and, still wearing his white baker’s hat, had rushed out into no-man’s-land to shout his outrage at such ignorance. And ignorance it had turned out to be. The troops in question were French Algerian, and therefore Muslim, and had no idea what was going on. Telephones had rung up and down the lines, and then the firing had ceased.

  The chef, Alfred Kornitzke, had put the tree down, taken out matches, and solemnly lit all the candles. Then he had bellowed at them in the silent night, “Now you blockheads! Now you know what is going on! Merry Christmas!” And he returned unharmed to continue stirring his marzipan.

  Joseph remembered Christmas with an exquisite pain still twisted inside him. Never had heaven and hell seemed closer than as he had stood on the ice-crusted fire-step and stared across the waste with its wreckage of human slaughter, and in the stillness under the blaze of stars, heard the voice of Victor Garnier of the Paris Opera singing “Minuit, Chrétiens, c’est l’heure solenelle.”

  Utter silence had fallen on every trench within earshot. Along the whole length of the line, whatever his nature or his faith, not a man had broken the glory of the moment.

  But that was gone now.

  Joseph and Goldstone moved on toward the wire, slowly in the dark, crawling on their bellies, slipping where the clay was wet, fumbling in the mud and water to gain a foothold. Whenever a flare went up they flattened themselves to the ground and for a moment the pockmarked land was lit, tangles of wire shown up black against the dun colors of the earth, bodies caught in them like giant flies in a web.

  They found several men dead, and one still alive. It took them nearly half an hour, working between flares, to pull him out of the mud without tearing off his injured leg and making the bleeding fatal. Then between them they carried him across the cratered land with its crooked paths and stumps of trees, its pockets of ice-cold water still carrying the faint, ghastly odor of gas, until they reached the parapet of the front trenches. They answered the sentry’s challenge, and slithered over and down, only to find that the man was dead.

  Joseph was momentarily overwhelmed with defeat. The two men in the trench and Goldstone were all looking at him, expecting him to say something to make sense of it. There was nothing, no sense—human or divine. It was not fair to expect him to have an answer, just because he represented the church. No concept within man was big enough to find sanity or hope in this. It was just day after day of blind destruction.

  “Chaplain?” It was Peter Rattray, whom he had taught in Cambridge. Thin and dark, he’d had so much imagination and poetry in the translation of ancient languages. They had walked along the grass under the trees together, looking at students punting on the river, and discussed poetry. Now his face was smeared with blood, his hair was cut short under his cap, and he was asking Joseph to find reason for him in this chaos of death, to untangle from it a meaning, as they once had with difficult pieces of translation.

  “We had to try,” Joseph said, knowing the words were not enough. “He might have made it.”

  “Of course.” Rattray rubbed the heel of his hand against his chin. “If it were me out there, I’d need to think you’d come for me—whatever.” He grinned, a desperate gesture, white teeth in the flare of a star shell. “Are there any more?”

  Joseph nodded, and he and Goldstone turned back to go over the parapet again as soon as there was another spell of darkness.

  The next one they brought back alive, and handed him over to the stretcher party.

  “Thanks, Chaplain,” he said weakly, his voice barely a whisper. They carried him away, bumping elbows against the crooked walls of the trench, slithering on the wet duckboards and keeping balance with difficulty.

  It was toward dawn when Joseph saw the body lying facedown at the edge of the shell crater and knew even before he reached it that the man had to be dead. His head was half submerged, as if he had been shot cleanly, and simply pitched forward.

  There was still time before daylight to get him back. Better he be buried somewhere behind the lines, if possible, than lie here and rot. At least his family could be told, instead of enduring the agony of missing in action and never knowing for sure, seesawing up and down between hope and despair. He refused to imagine a woman standing alone every morning, facing another day of uncertainty, trying to believe and afraid to think.

  He knelt down beside the man and turned him over, pulling him back a little. He was well built. Carrying him would not be easy. But since he was dead, he would not suffer if he were dragged.

  There was a smudge of gray in the sky to the east, but it was still not possible to see much until the flares went up. Then it was clear enough: the bright hair and—even through the mud—Eldon Prentice’s face.

  Joseph froze, a wave of unreality washing over him. What in God’s name had Prentice been doing out here? He had no business even in the front trenches, let alone in no-man’s-land. Now he’d been killed! Joseph should get him back before daylight made it impossible. He was so tired every muscle in his body ached, his legs would barely obey him. Goldstone was over somewhere to his left, searching another crater, and there was no way he could carry a body back by himself. He would have to stand even to get him in a fireman’s lift over his shoulder, and it was already too light to risk that.

  Why was he bothering to take Prentice, of all people? He wasn’t even a soldier. He had been responsible for Corliss’s court-martial. Without Prentice’s intrusion, Watkins would have let it go. And his gross insensitivity into Charlie Gee’s mutilation still made Joseph cringe in the gut with misery and rage.

  But if Joseph’s faith, even his morality, were about anything at all, it must be about humanity. Like or dislike had nothing to do with it. To care for those you liked was nature; it only rose above that into morality when your instincts cried out against it. He looked down at the body. Prentice was barely thirty. Now he was just like any other man. Death reduced the differences to irrelevance.

  The pale smear of light was broadening across the dun-colored sky.

  He started to pull him, on his back, not to drag his face through the mud if he should have to drop him when there was a flare.

  It seemed to take him ages to get across the open space. There were tree stumps in the way, and the body of a dead horse. Twice he slipped, in spite of the broadening light, and the weight of Prentice’s body pulled him into shallow craters full of dirty water. The stench of dead rats and the decaying flesh of men too shattered to reclaim seemed to soak through his clothes onto his skin. But he was determined to get Prentice back so he could be buried decently. The fact that he had disliked him, that he was heavy and awkward in death just as he had been in life, made Joseph doubly determined. He would not let Prentice beat him!

  “I will get you back!” he said between his teeth as Prentice’s body once again slid out of his hands and stuck fast. Where the devil was Goldstone? “I will not leave you be out here, no matter how bloody awkward you are!” he snarled, yanking him over half-sideways. Prentice’s foot squelched out of the clay and Joseph fell over backward at the sudden ease of it. He swore, repeating with satisfaction several lurid words he had learned from Sam.

  He covered ten yards before the next flare made him scramble for the slight cover of a shell hole. Only another ten yards to go. Any moment now and the sniper fire would start. The Germans would be able to see movement in this light.


  His shoulders ached with the dead weight, sucked down as if the earth were determined Prentice would be buried here, in this stretch of ruined land that belonged to no one. Joseph wondered in a fleeting thought if anything would ever grow here again. How absurd it was to kill and die over something already so vilely destroyed! There were other places, only a thousand yards away, where flowers bloomed.

  Then suddenly Goldstone was there, heaving at Prentice’s shoulders. They covered the last few yards and rolled him over the parapet and landed hard on the fire-step just as a machine gun stuttered and the bullets made a soft, thudding sound in the clay a few yards away.

  “He’s dead, Padre,” Goldstone said quietly, his face in the dawn light filled with concern, not for the body but for Joseph, the second time in one night struggling so fiercely to save someone, too late.

  “I know,” Joseph answered, wanting to reassure him. “It’s the war correspondent. I thought he should have a decent burial.”

  Two hours later Joseph was sitting on an empty ammunition box in Sam’s dugout, considerably cleaner and almost dry. The rations had been given out by the quartermaster and brought up to the front line, so they had both eaten a good breakfast of bread, apple and plum jam, a couple of slices of greasy bacon, and a cup of hot, very strong tea.

  Sam was sitting opposite Joseph, squinting at him through the haze of cigarette smoke, but it was better than the smell of death, or the latrines, and completely different from the gas three days before.

  “Good,” Sam said bluntly. “We’ve lost better men than Prentice, and we’ll lose a lot more before we’re through. I suppose your Christian duty requires that you affect to be sorry. Mine doesn’t.” He smiled bleakly, there was knowledge in it, fear, and a wry understanding of their differences, none of which had ever blunted their friendship. He required honor, laughter, courage, but never a oneness of view. “You can say a prayer over him,” he added. “Personally I’ll go and dance on his grave. He was always a rotten little sod.”