by Anne Perry
Maybe if she found out every stupid and dangerous thing Major Northrup had done she could widen the field of men likely to want him dead so far that they couldn’t possibly arrest all of them. There couldn’t be exactly twelve who had lost someone. How did they know they had the right twelve? Wasn’t there some legal principle about it being better to let ten guilty men go free than punish one innocent one?
Surely the general would not want his son’s name to go down in history as an officer so incompetent his men had had to kill him to save their own lives? He was refusing to believe that now, but if there was proof, he would have to. Or at least he would know that others would believe it, and that was what mattered.
They were near the front line. She slewed to a stop as a couple of soldiers ran toward her, their Red Cross armbands catching the headlights. Wil leaped out and threw the ambulance doors open. Someone was scrambling through the mud, sliding and floundering, waving his arms at stretcher bearers. Someone else was staggering across the lights, bandaged around the head and eyes, blood on his hands.
She tried to keep the engine running as she felt the weight go into the back and the balance alter. A shell exploded so close that the metal of flying shrapnel clanged on the ambulance sides. A gout of mud slapped against the window and spurted into her face.
More figures drifted across the headlights, blurred by mud and rain, and the weight jolted again.
Then Wil appeared at the door. “We’re full! You’ll have to back out, there’s water everywhere! Don’t lose the engine, you might never get it going again in this. I’ll get in when you’ve turned.” He disappeared.
It took her ten minutes, with considerable help, before she was back on the road facing in the opposite direction. She heard the door slam, and opened the throttle to push the engine as hard as she could. They lurched forward, splashing up sprays of water, hesitated a moment, then caught a purchase on the mud and gravel and moved forward.
She drove as hard as she could, knowing that because Cavan was locked up in some French farmhouse far behind the lines, they would have miles more to go before they could find help.
It was dark except for the occasional flares, and the rain became worse. They hit a deep crater in the mud, which was masked by water until it was too late. She was fortunate not to break the axle. There was no help for it but to turn off the engine and get out.
Wil came around from the back. He could see at a glance what was wrong, even if the violent lurch had not told him.
“It’s too deep,” she said desperately, wiping the rain out of her eyes. “You’ll have to get at least some of them out. We’ll have to lift it. I’ll see if there’s a piece of wood or something we can use as a lever, get it up, if someone else pushes.” She looked around to see if there was any other light or sign of movement.
Wil pushed his hand through his sodden hair and left a smear of blood on his face. “Alf Culshaw’s blinded, but he’s still got both legs and arms. If we point his hands in the right place he can lift. The others are too far gone. One poor devil will be lucky if we get him there alive.” His voice caught. “Jesus wept! This is so bloody senseless!” He turned and plowed back through the mud to the back of the ambulance and pulled the door open.
Judith started after him. It would take both of them to help the injured men out to lighten it enough to lift. They were heavy, awkward, and in desperate pain. Her hands slipped on the wet stretcher handles and her back ached unbearably as she tried to keep her balance and carry the heavy bodies to the side of the road.
“I’m sorry,” she said to them over and over. “Got to lighten it so we can lift it out.”
The first man was peacefully unconscious, blood soaking through his bandages in the rain.
“It’s not too bad,” the second said, trying to smile. “Don’t worry, miss.”
She felt the hot tears on her face as she bent to touch his hand. “Won’t be long. Just got to lift a little, then we’ll get you back.”
Together with Wil she lifted two more out, leaving only the worst injured behind. Alf Culshaw she led slowly, warning of the puddles and ruts, until he and Wil were on either side of the stuck wheel. She placed Culshaw’s hands under the edge of the frame. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked him. “I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t have to.”
“I know,” he said quietly. “Just don’t ask me to guide you where we are going.” He gave a dry, hacking laugh.
“You lift. I’ll drive,” she replied. “Better that way. I can’t lift for toffee! Thanks.” She had the wood ready—broken pieces from a dead tree and a couple of lengths of old sacking.
“Go on then,” Wil directed. “One, two, three!”
The ambulance rocked and heaved level. Judith threw the wood and sacking in and it settled down again. She ran to the driver’s seat and scrambled in. Wil moved Culshaw out of the way, then cranked the handle and they moved forward at last.
“Right!” Wil yelled, jumping backward. “Let’s get them in again!”
She left the engine on, brake tight, and scrambled back to lift the stretchers in again to a cheer, and then to help Culshaw back into the seat.
She drove without incident the rest of the way. It seemed to take hours—but it was probably not more than forty-five minutes longer. A strange doctor, white-faced and obviously harassed, took the wounded in. The last man was already dead. Judith and Wil got back into the ambulance and started for the front again, this time with Wil in the front.
“We’ll get Cavan back,” he said when they were half a mile from the dressing station. “We’ll find a way. He can’t have been the one who shot Northrup. He must be covering for someone. It’ll come out.”
“Do you think so?” she asked, glancing sideways at him, although she could see nothing more than his outline in the dark.
“We’ve got to make it!” he said grimly. “If General Northrup could find out who the twelve most likely are, then we have to be able to find out why, as well. They’d never have done it without a hell of a good reason. We’ve got to find the people who’ll swear to it.”
“And take it to Northrup?” she asked. Her stomach knotted up with fear at the thought of it.
“You game?” Wil said, touching her arm for a moment.
She swallowed and felt her heart beating in her throat. “Of course.”
On the final trip of the night she found Joseph at the field dressing station. He helped her with the last stretcher. The man was already dead from his wounds. Defeat overwhelmed her, and a sense that everything was slipping out of the last trace of control that she had.
“If we could have taken him to Cavan’s dressing station he’d have been alive!” she said furiously, tears choking her. “But those men are bleeding to death because he’s locked up in some damn farmhouse waiting to go on trial and be shot over that idiot Northrup!” She stared at him defiantly. “Why couldn’t you leave your stupid conscience out of it and just keep your mouth shut? You didn’t have to tell Colonel Hook it was a kangaroo trial! You could just have said you didn’t know! Why can’t you ever leave well enough alone?”
Joseph looked so tired his skin was gray in the early daylight, the stubble dark on his chin. There was no light in his eyes at all.
“I had to tell him something close to the truth, or he could too easily find out I was lying,” he answered her.
“Don’t tell him anything at all!” she shouted back. “Why didn’t you just say you didn’t know? He can’t force you!”
Joseph looked down at the muddy boards they were standing on. “I thought if General Northrup knew it was at least a dozen men, a court-martial, not a private murder, he’d be so ashamed he’d let it drop rather than leave his son so disgraced. It would have been better for everyone. Otherwise he could just have found the worst enmity, the man he thought unjust, and blamed him. He isn’t going to let it go.”
“He isn’t now!” she retorted. “He’s charged Cavan, and we’ve got to take wounded men
twice as far to get them treated—and they’re dying, Joseph! They’re dying, when they don’t have to!”
“I know….”
She felt guilty for attacking him when he was so obviously blaming himself anyway, but she was too angry and too frightened to stop. “We’ve got to save Cavan. What are we going to do?” She tried to moderate her voice a little, hearing the shrill edge to it. “Does Northrup really want it to come out that his son caused all those people’s deaths? If we can prove it, find all the evidence of what a fool he was, who’s dead because of him, and why there were twelve men willing to risk their own lives in order to get rid of him, wouldn’t he want that silenced?”
They could both hear the sounds of movement inside, voices giving orders, stifled murmurs of pain.
“He wasn’t meant to be killed, only frightened,” Joseph explained.
“So who shot him?” she demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“Then they won’t believe it. It sounds like an excuse. Were they really going to let him go again, after they’d put him on a mock trial?”
“I don’t know, Judith. That’s all I could get out of the man who told me.”
Another ambulance pulled up outside. They saw the lights and heard the squelching in the mud, and voices shouting. Joseph moved aside and she followed him.
“Was he there? Is he in prison now?” she urged. “Why should anyone believe him? And if he told you in confession, why did you report it? He betrayed all his fellows!”
“He wasn’t one of them,” Joseph corrected her. “He knows because I think lots of the men do. Consider, Judith—if there were twelve men as a jury, surely others kept watch for them and covered what they were doing. There are a lot more than twelve men involved.”
She saw a glimmer of hope, just a thread. “Then that’s better. Everyone agreed Major Northrup was a disaster! Can’t we take that to the general, and show him what it’ll do to his son’s reputation? Even to his own, for that matter?” Men started carrying stretchers into the dressing station. She stepped closer to Joseph. “Joe, in the general’s place wouldn’t you forgo revenge rather than have the name of someone you loved publicly vilified and all their mistakes proved?”
“Of course I would. Revenge is worth nothing anyway. But General Northrup doesn’t feel that way.”
“Then we’ll have to make him!”
He looked at her blankly, anxiety puckering his brow, but he did not argue. It was only then that she realized he had intended to do it anyway; he merely needed time to gather the evidence. Perhaps her pain had made her too quick to judge.
“Hurry!” she urged. “The general could leave, and then it’ll be too late. I’ll help. I know Wil Sloan will, too, and others.”
He drew in his breath to argue and—realizing the futility of it—let it out again without speaking.
Judith knew there was no time to wait for Joseph to speak to General Northrup. Northrup was somewhere far behind the lines. She and Wil knew who was involved and they had transport. It was not difficult to arrange to be the drivers who took several patients back to the hospital at Lille, and then divert on the way back and find Northrup’s headquarters. Certainly they would be away longer than they should be, and they would have to commandeer petrol for the extra miles, but no one would have to be asked to cover for them or tell the necessary lies. A score of men were only too eager, vying for the privilege.
It required a little more bravado and finesse to find herself actually standing in the general’s presence in the small French farmhouse in which he was currently headquartered. It was a comfortable place, gently domestic, once somebody’s home. He was immaculately smart: boots polished, face pale and shaved to a perfect smoothness.
“You say you have further information on the death of my son, Miss…Miss Reavley?” he said stiffly. “Are you in a position to testify to this at the court-martial? It will not be easy for you. The whole regiment is of a sullen and mutinous nature. Discipline has been allowed to fall into laxity. Your fellow V.A.D. volunteers may make it difficult for you. Are you prepared for that?”
She had already weighed her answers. She stood to attention. “I am prepared to tell the truth, sir, because it is the truth, whoever likes me or dislikes me for it.” Her gaze did not waver from his. She saw a tired and grieved man, the skin around his eyes paper thin, his shoulders held square by little more than pride.
She felt a wave of pity for him, for his arrogance and blindness, for the fragility that had stopped him seeing his son as he was, and his need to believe a lie and cling on to it even at the cost of other men’s lives. But if she did not break him, then he would break Cavan, and all the others. Worst of all, he would have broken all the men’s belief in justice and the bonds of loyalty here and now. And here and now those were almost the only things left that were good.
Northrup’s voice was hoarse with emotion when he spoke. “You are a fine woman, Miss Reavley. You have more courage and honor than your regiment’s chaplain. Is he related to you?”
“Captain Reavley is my older brother, sir.” His insulting Joseph made it easier. She was angry with him herself, but that was quite different. She would have defended him to the death against anyone else. With one sentence Northrup had taken away the impediment to striking the blow.
“What is it you know, Miss Reavley?” he asked.
She replied without hesitating.
“Well, sir, in order to prove beyond question why these twelve men in particular should do such a…dangerous and terrible thing, the court will have to show something very special. All the hardship and loss the men have faced over the last three years has never made them…mutiny. And I suppose that’s what it is?”
“That is what it is, Miss Reavley,” he agreed. “Make no mistake.”
It was time to tell him the truth, before someone interrupted them.
“Well, sir, in the case of Captain Morel, it was the order Major Northrup gave to move a field gun from one position to another across half a mile of plowed clay. The men argued that it would get stuck. They might lose the gun itself, and the wagons and the horses, possibly even some of the men, if it slipped.” She watched his face and saw the muscles tighten in his neck. He knew it was a stupid order, born of inexperience and too much pride to listen to lesser ranks.
“They argued, perhaps insolently,” she went on. “Major Northrup insisted. They obeyed and got stuck. They saved the horses, but two men were injured, one man’s leg was broken so badly Captain Cavan had to amputate it.” She hated continuing, but it was like a gangrenous limb: It must all come off or it was pointless having begun. “And Captain Morel was very upset about sending out a rescue party into no-man’s-land on a day when the German snipers could simply pick them off. Some refused to go, but others did. Several men were injured. Captain Eardslie was killed. He was one of my brother’s students in Cambridge, and he and Morel were great friends.”
Northrup’s face was ashen. She felt as if she were killing a man already wounded fatally. Still she drove it home. “I have details for all of them, sir, and men prepared to swear to every incident sufficiently to prove a motive for each one of the twelve, especially Captain Cavan. It took a great deal to break him, but I can—”
“Yes!” he interrupted her. “I see you have taken a great deal of care to have every point documented, Miss Reavley. It will not be necessary.” His voice was shaking and the muscles in his neck and jaw were so tight he could not control the tic in his cheek.
Her stomach was knotted until she felt nauseous. “Don’t you want to prove the guilt of all of them?” she asked quietly. “Not just the one who pulled the trigger? He may simply have panicked. Aren’t they all equally to blame? The whole twelve?”
His voice was barely audible. “What is it you want, Miss Reavley? You are not a fool! Are you trying to have my son’s name dishonored, to have revenge for your…your mutinous friends?”
She swallowed.
“No, sir. As
I said in the beginning—and you praised me for it—I want the whole truth to be told, to be fair to everyone. Nobody is going to believe that good soldiers—especially exceptional ones like Captain Cavan—mutinied unless we can show what reason they had…or imagined they had.”
He stared at her, knowing he was being manipulated. He was certain in his own mind that it was Cavan she was trying to save, and yet he could see no way out, nothing with which he could accuse her. “They are already charged,” he pointed out. “Are you so bent on revenge?”
She hesitated. Was it necessary to strike the last blow? Yes it was. She dared not stop in case she was just short of victory. “Not revenge, sir, surely? Is it not justice?”
His voice dropped to a whisper.
“My son does not deserve to be buried with dishonor. Is it not enough for them that he is dead?”
“It is terrible that he is dead, sir. And Captain Eardslie, and all the others. Over half a million of them, I believe. Not counting the French, and of course the Austrians and Germans, and the Italians, and Russians. And I suppose we have to start counting the Americans, too, now.”
“I will speak with the prosecutor. Perhaps the charge can be lessened.”
She smiled very slightly, afraid to say anything in case she spoiled it. “Permission to return to my ambulance, sir?”
“Granted, Miss Reavley.”
Mason arrived back at Passchendaele to find it worse than before. It had rained almost without ceasing, the wettest August in human memory. Men lived and died in a hell past sanity to imagine. It went on day after day, night after night, with no victory and no end in sight except the possibility that there would be no life remaining—human, animal, or plant—and finally the mud would claim everything.
He thought of his beloved Yorkshire with its wild fells, shining tarns beneath wind-ragged skies, and steep villages with cobbled streets. But the memory was too all-consuming: It robbed him of words powerful enough to capture the passion and tenderness of a love so deep. Instead he began writing of England in general.