by Anne Perry
Joseph had his answer planned. “He won’t leave until he gets an answer. I want to find one he’ll accept, and stop looking.”
“Loike wot, Chaplain? If it weren’t a Jerry, it had to be one of us.”
“True,” Joseph conceded. “With our casualty rate, probably someone who’s dead, too, by now.”
“Roight.” Punch nodded. “But still won’t be very good for his family, though, will it? An’ d’yer think the general’ll believe it? Sort of convenient, don’t you think? An’ apart from that, Chaplain, who’s going to tell him a loi? You aren’t!”
Joseph was both pleased and frustrated by Punch’s faith in him. The next part of his plan was very carefully judged. “I realize you don’t know exactly what really happened, Punch,” he began. “But let’s create a sort of working model, for something that’s close enough people would believe it. The major was a liability. He didn’t know what he was doing, and he wouldn’t be told. It cost several good men’s lives, plus a smashed leg here and there, the odd amputation.”
“That’s roight,” Punch agreed guardedly. “We all know that.”
“So far General Northrup doesn’t,” Joseph corrected him. “He’s still denying all such accusations.”
“So whoi does he think we shot him, then?” Punch said reasonably.
“That’s a good point,” Joseph said vehemently. “I can find chapter and verse of that easily enough. And when I do, the people who suffered most, or those whose friends did, are going to be suspect. That’s the reason I haven’t made a point of looking very hard so far. I hoped he’d realize it’s going to be ugly. Do as much damage to his son’s reputation as anyone’s. But he isn’t listening.”
“Don’t necessarily follow!” Punch protested. “You can’t say as it was this man or that just because of who got killed!”
“I know that.”
“Could’ve been lots of people!” Punch emphasized.
An idea was crystallizing in Joseph’s mind. “Do you mean lots of people together, Punch, or just any one of lots of people?”
Punch was thinking hard.
Joseph waited.
“How would it be…” Punch said very slowly, “if you was to tell him that it was lots of men, dozen or more. Not one man gone mad who wanted to murder him, but a dozen who’d all had enough, and could see that more an’ more men were going to get killed if the major didn’t stop and listen to someone with experience? And it was only meant to scare some sense into him.”
“How was shooting him going to scare sense into him?” Joseph said dubiously.
“Not shoot him, Chaplain. Set up a trial, loike. Make him sit an’ listen to what a fool he was, evidence. Foind him guilty of incompetence, causing other men’s deaths, an’ pretend to shoot him. Scare the hell out of him.” He studied Joseph’s face earnestly, searching for understanding.
It was beginning to be very clear. “You mean a kangaroo court-martial?” Joseph said very softly.
“I’m only suggesting it!” Punch protested. “D’you think the general moight believe that?”
“Private soldiers court-martialing an officer?”
“Not just privates, nor corporals neither.”
“Officers?” Joseph was not really surprised. “Captain Morel?”
“An’ Captain Cavan. He were the one who had to amputate poor Matheson’s leg, just ’cos that idiot sent him to cart a bloody great field gun through the mud. Everyone told him it was dangerous!” He stared at Joseph, challenging him to argue.
Joseph sat numbly, no longer even aware of his surroundings. It was worse than he had thought. They were speaking theoretically, but both knew that what Punch was really saying was the truth. If Cavan had been involved and Northrup ever found out, it would be a court-martial that would tear apart more than just the regiment. Cavan was one of the best surgeons on the Ypres Salient, and one of the bravest men. His recommendation for the V.C. had heartened every man who knew him. If he were now court-martialed for Northrup’s murder, it might be the final grief and absurdity that would break the spirit of some, and ignite others to the mutiny that had lain just beneath the surface in men like Morel. There wouldn’t be a serving soldier on the front who wouldn’t think Cavan was worth ten of Northrup, whatever the law said.
“Captain Reavley?” Punch said anxiously.
“Yes. Yes, I see. It was designed to frighten Major Northrup. What went wrong?”
“Oi don’t know, sir. Oi swear.”
“Thank you.”
“You aren’t going to go an’ tell Colonel Hook what Oi said, are you? Oi’ll deny it, sir.” His eyes were angry and frightened.
“No, I’m not,” Joseph said sharply. “I told you I wasn’t. But I can’t find a story the general will believe if I don’t know what the truth is. This way none of the facts anyone can discover will prove it false.”
“Roight. Yes, I see. Thank you, Chaplain.”
It was dusk as Joseph left in a staff car returning to the front. The air was motionless, wet and close to the skin. The sky leached the last tones of warmth out of the waterlogged land. Thin vapors of mist provided a curious softness but hid none of the desolation: the broken trees; the bare, scorched wreckage of houses and farms; the litter of broken guns and vehicles on the roads.
The car was on a cratered road now, and he smelled the familiar stench long before they reached even the outpost farthest back. The first star shells were bursting, and gradually the sound of the heavy guns blurred one raid into another. A stray eighteen-pound shell exploded fifty yards away, jarring the earth and sending eruptions of heavy Flanders clay high and dark into the air. Most of it was far in front of the car, over the woods toward Passchendaele itself.
As he alighted, he thanked the driver who had given him a lift, glad of a few hundred yards to walk. He felt battered by the noise, as if it were a physical assault, but he needed the time for a last arrangement of thoughts in his mind.
He found Hook in his dugout. He was looking at maps, although he must have known the whole of the Ypres Salient better than he knew his own garden. The photograph of his wife had been moved to the top of the gramophone, as if both had to be forgotten for the moment.
“Ah, come in, Reavley,” he said, looking up as if relieved to forget the advances and retreats for a while. “Did you learn anything?”
“Yes, sir,” Joseph replied, letting the sacking fall closed over the doorway and standing to attention as well as he could. It was raining again outside and his boots were heavy with mud, his legs soaked almost up to the knee. “I found Punch Fuller, and he told me a good deal of what happened.”
There was no light in Hook’s face. “As a confession?” Clearly he hoped it was; then Joseph could not tell him.
“No, sir—more or less theoretically, the sort of thing that could have happened,” Joseph answered unhappily. He stood to attention, refusing to sit. “I really think, sir, that General Northrup would prefer not to know this,” he said very clearly. “And it would serve no purpose at all to tell him. The major was an arrogant and inexperienced officer who inadvertently caused the deaths of several good men, and the serious injuries of others. It provoked intense ill feeling among almost all the men, not just an odd one here or there. Any action you take is going to have to involve at least a dozen men, sir. And I have reason to think that his actual death was not intended but was an accident.”
Hook looked weary. He gestured to Joseph to be seated on an upturned ammunition box.
“You can’t have it all ways, Reavley,” he said. “Either a dozen men were involved because he had angered them beyond their control, or his death was an accident. Which was it? And if you’re going to say it was an accident, then you are going to have to produce the man who fired the shot, and prove its accidental nature. What the hell was he doing pointing a loaded weapon at an officer anyway?”
“I don’t know who did it, sir,” Joseph said honestly. It was the one part of the story he had no need to blur.
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“Don’t play games with me, Reavley!” Hook snapped. His uniform was crumpled and bloodstained. His face was haggard with exhaustion. “I’ve got men dying out there by the hundreds every day!” His hands were trembling. “I need to get Northrup off my back and out of the way! Either you know what happened or you don’t! What did Fuller tell you? You said a dozen men. Do you mean a kangaroo court-martial?”
There was no point in denying it. Hook obviously knew. Joseph felt the net of circumstance tightening around him, but he was determined to give Hook a way out. “Yes, sir, but only with the intention of frightening him into taking advice in the future. Not to kill him.”
Hook’s face was pale, his mouth pulled down with grief. “Who was involved, Reavley?” His voice dropped. “I have to know.”
Joseph looked straight back at him. He would not make the same mistake this time. He was prepared to lie, evade, whatever was necessary, and live with his conscience. “I don’t know, sir. Fuller told me what happened, not who was concerned. And I promised him I’d not betray him. I think the men may know, sir, but no one will say. You can’t blame them if their loyalty to each other is greater than to some military principle of obedience to an incompetent officer who, out of sheer stupidity, is going to cost the lives of their friends.” He chose his words deliberately. “We owe them more than that.”
Hook passed his hand across his face. Joseph could hear the faint rasping of dry skin over the stubble of his beard. “I don’t have the luxury of choosing my own morality, Reavley. I can tell Northrup this, but he won’t believe me. He can’t afford to, because it makes his son a disgrace to him. And it would set a precedent that would be impossible to live with. Truth or lie, the army can’t afford to grant that it is just.”
“Then tell him it was an accident,” Joseph demanded. “Let Major Northrup be buried with some semblance of honor. That would serve everyone.”
Hook gave a sharp bark, supposed to be laughter. “I’ll try!”
Joseph spent the night working with Cavan at the dressing station as casualties poured in. He snatched a few hours of sleep, then went to sit with the wounded or dying and do what he could for them. Mostly it was simply not leaving them to die alone.
At ten o’clock, Barshey Gee came and told him the colonel wanted to see him, and ten minutes later Joseph was back in Hook’s dugout facing General Northrup, white-faced and standing so ramrod-stiff it seemed as if his back was arched.
“Are you saying, Captain Reavley, that my son was murdered by the common consent of a dozen or more of his own men?” His voice rasped in his throat as if he could not gulp the air into his lungs. “What in God’s name has this army come to? Are we a crowd of barbarians, beyond the law? I will not surrender humanity and decency, sir, to a bunch of hooligans so demoralized by drink and terror that they turn on their own officers! Is there no morality left? How dare you stand there in the uniform of a man of God, and condone such…such evil!” His body trembled and he was obviously having difficulty controlling his voice.
“Sir, I did not say he was murdered,” Joseph replied as calmly as he could.
“What do you call it, then?” Northrup demanded passionately. “A dozen men with guns against one unarmed officer? Pray, what does that pass for in your terminology?”
“You obviously know more about it than I do, sir,” Joseph said stiffly. “What I heard was that the men pleaded with Major Northrup to listen to the evidence of more experienced soldiers, even though they were junior in rank. When he would not do so, and it was costing lives unnecessarily, they used force to make him listen, to save their own lives and those of their comrades. He was killed by accident, not intentionally. I don’t know how that happened, or who was involved.”
“The records of killed and injured should make that plain enough,” Northrup replied. “These men all come from the same villages, played in the same football teams or brass bands, or whatever. Even a half-wit could find out who conspired together for this, if they wanted to. Whatever it began as, it ended as murder! And I shall see justice.”
“Sir…” Hook began, but it was obvious in his face that he had already tried remonstrating with every argument he knew and had failed.
“It ended as tragedy,” Joseph corrected him. “Most things do out here, sir. I believe profoundly that it would be better for everyone if we allow it to remain an honorable tragedy. Major Northrup was an officer respected by his men, who mourn their loss. Does it serve anyone to say that he was so incompetent that his men feared for their lives, and shot him in what they believed to be self-defense?”
Northrup winced as if Joseph had struck him, but he did not retreat. “I daresay that is what you would prefer, sir, but it is not the truth,” he said hoarsely. “He was murdered by men who panicked and lost their discipline. I will find out who they are! If you will not assist me, I shall do it alone! And Headquarters will know that you endeavored to cover it up, to your eternal disgrace.”
He gulped.
“I am forced to believe it is because the surgeon, Captain Cavan, was involved, and you are jealous of your regiment’s chance of gaining a V.C. Captain Morel, who is a renegade if ever a man was, used to be your student in Cambridge, and you are deliberately shielding him. It will not be difficult to find the others, and when I do, you will have no choice but to arrest them! Sir!” He snapped to attention, saluted Hook, then pushed past Joseph and went up the steps and out into the mud.
Hook sat down and buried his head in his hands.
Joseph said nothing. He knew Cavan and Morel at least would be arrested by morning, probably all the others within another twenty-four hours. He had done everything he knew—and he had failed.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
J udith jolted abruptly into wakefulness. She was lying on an ambulance blanket on the floor of the tent where she had fallen asleep. She had no idea how long ago that was. Day and night had blurred into one long cacophony of guns and engines, rain-soaked darkness split by star shells and the flash of explosions.
Now it seemed to be murky daylight, and comparatively quiet, just a distant rumble. She shivered because her clothes were wet and her bones ached from the hard floor.
“Is it time?” she said automatically, blinking and trying to clear her head.
Wil Sloan was bending over her, his grip still hard on her shoulder. His face was pale and slicked with rain, his hair dripping. There were bruises of exhaustion around his eyes.
“Something terrible’s happened,” he said huskily.
Fear boiled up in her like a wave of nausea. Was he going to tell her that Joseph had been killed? It was the thing she dreaded most of all. She found her throat was closed and the words wouldn’t escape her lips.
“They’ve arrested twelve men for killing Major Northrup,” Wil said. “Harrison came and told me.”
“Twelve!” She was both relieved and appalled. “Twelve?” She propped herself on one elbow. “That’s ridiculous. How could twelve…all of them?”
“Kangaroo court-martial,” he replied, just as she realized it herself.
“And shot him?” she whispered.
“That’s what they’re saying. But the thing is…Cavan was one of them.”
Now she understood his horror. “Cavan?” It was too awful to grasp. “But they can’t take our doctor away! What about the wounded? That’s…monstrous! They…they can’t!”
“They have,” he said. “And Captain Morel.”
She sat up straight, pain shooting through her muscles. “Why? How do they know it was them?”
His face was bleak. “I’m sorry, Judith. The chaplain went to Paris and found one of the men who knew, and got it out of him somehow.”
“I don’t believe it!” She refused to. Joseph would not do that. “You must be wrong,” she insisted. “Anyway, if the man confessed to a priest, you can’t use it! Joseph would never repeat a confession. He couldn’t!”
“He didn’t say who it was.” Wil shoo
k his head. “Just that it was twelve. Northrup worked out who was angriest with the major and took it from there.”
Judith struggled to her feet. “We’ve got to do something about it. This is terrible.”
Wil stood also. “Right now we’re on duty. And we’ll have to take the wounded all the way back to the field hospital because there’ll be no one able to do much in the dressing station.”
“What a bloody nightmare.” She sighed. “We’ll have to do something about it! We can’t let this go on, Wil. The men’ll mutiny! To lock up our best surgeon over some idiot like Northrup! Are we trying to lose this war?”
“Keep your shirt on, Judith,” he said anxiously. “Don’t do anything rash. We can’t afford to get ourselves locked up, too. That won’t help. I’ll get a cup of tea. It’s going to be another bad night.”
It was. Judith drove in a daze, fighting to keep the ambulance on the shell-pocked road and not get mired in the mud on either side or break an axle in one of the craters. It took all her strength to hold the wheel, and twice she had to get out and crank the engine to life again after a particularly violent stop.
All the time her mind was wrestling with the thought of Cavan in military prison awaiting trial. She could picture him as clearly as if she were looking at him. She could hear his voice in her mind. If they found them guilty of having mutinied and shot Northrup, they would all face a firing squad. There was no possible alternative. The worst thing was that she knew that he could have done it. He cared for the wounded above all things; he would put them before anything else. He had the anger and the courage.
How could Joseph have let it happen? He must have known General Northrup was rabid for revenge. Why had he not simply said he couldn’t find out who was responsible? Even General Northrup couldn’t arrest the entire regiment.
She peered through the windshield, trying to discern what the dark shapes ahead were. The shellfire was getting heavier. The last one had landed only fifty yards away, and the debris had fallen heavily on the roof.