At Some Disputed Barricade wwi-4

by Anne Perry

  Mason’s mouth twisted a little but his eyes remained steady. “I wasn’t looking for a metaphysical answer, Reavley—something a little more from the heart and the belly. Not what you want to believe, or what you think you ought to believe! What is there inside you, really?”

  “When? Now? Just bewilderment and exhaustion,” Joseph replied. “Tomorrow morning, or next time I see someone I love, or an act of total unselfishness, or courage more than I could manage myself? Then yes, I believe there’s something wiser and better than I am, and infinitely greater. Do I know where I’m going? No. Do you?”

  “I’m not sure if anywhere I wish to go exists,” Mason replied.

  “Then build it,” Joseph replied. “If you survive, of course,” he added with a smile.

  “Is that what you tell your men when they’re dying?” Mason would not give up.

  “If it’s what’s needed. Usually it isn’t. Just being there, talking about anything, so they’re not alone.”

  “Saying what they need to hear.” Mason turned the words over, still looking at Joseph steadily. “Because you’ve nothing else to say? Charging the guns, obediently, like the Light Brigade at Balaclava, because you don’t know what else to do? Following orders, Chaplain? Aren’t you supposed to be leading?”

  Joseph saw the rage and pain in him, the knowledge of darkness closing in, not just at Passchendaele, but everywhere.

  “I think the most I can do is keep going,” Joseph told him.

  Mason was silent for a long time. “Thank you at least for honesty,” he said at last. “I don’t know how you can survive on that—it isn’t enough.”

  “As long as there’s somebody you can touch in the darkness, it has to be enough,” Joseph told him.

  Mason did not answer. Slowly he drank the rest of his tea.

  Joseph finished his also. He meant what he had said. The fact that he too needed more, just a glimmer of hope that one day there would be an answer he could understand, was none of Mason’s business.

  “Yes?” the Peacemaker said urgently as Mason sat in the chair opposite him in the upstairs room in Marchmont Street. “I know all about the losses. It’s the epitome of all we sought so desperately to prevent. I would have given everything I’ve ever had, my own life if it would have helped, to prevent this. Even you don’t have words to describe the horror or the futility of it. What about this trial for mutiny and murder? They have twelve men arrested, you say?”

  “Yes.” Mason looked up. He was haggard. His heavy black hair made his skin look even more pallid, almost bloodless, and there was a consuming grief in his eyes as if no passion would ever burn them alive again. The Peacemaker was concerned for him. Could a war correspondent suffer battle fatigue?

  “The twelve men with the best motives, apparently, for wanting Major Northrup dead,” Mason answered. “Or—I should say more accurately—removed from command. And since those above him either didn’t know how incompetent he was, or didn’t care, death seems to have been the only way. I imagine, since he was a general’s son, it was beyond the power of Colonel Hook to remove him. The thing is, Captain Cavan, the surgeon up for the V.C., is one of them.”

  “Perfect.” The Peacemaker breathed the word like a sigh. “It is so absolutely farcical we couldn’t have created anything more likely to make even the sanest and most blindly loyal of men rebel against this suicidal injustice.” He felt he was on the brink of something that could be used to turn the tide at last.

  “There’s word that General Northrup will try to get the charge lessened to one of insubordination, and that Northrup’s death was more of an accident than intentional murder,” Mason warned.

  “Really!” The Peacemaker felt a sudden chill. “Why?”

  Mason sighed. “Because to prove intent they must prove motive. Doing that will automatically expose Major Northrup’s disastrous incompetence. His father does not want that. And believe me, the men are all loyal to the mutineers. If the charge is kept at murder, they’ll make damned certain Major Northrup is exposed.”

  “And does the general know this?” The Peacemaker was fascinated. It opened up possibilities of further mutiny he had hardly dared hope for.

  “Yes, of course he does,” Mason replied.

  “This is very good,” the Peacemaker said decisively. “I shall make certain that the prosecutor appointed is a hard-liner. I have just the man in mind. He will make certain the full charge is retained, and prosecuted to the full. We need have no doubt of a capital sentence. Captain Cavan, V.C., will be put before the firing squad. It will be the spark that finally sets the tinder afire.”

  He smiled slightly, an unexpected regret tugging at him. “The British troops will never stand for an injustice of such obscenity. And I think the country may even be behind them, if we handle it the right way. There comes a point when people will no longer be herded to slaughter like sheep. Believe me, Mason, the Russians are very close to that point now. If the tsar does not make peace with Germany, withdraw her troops from the battle front altogether, and institute radical social reform, the Russian people will rise up in a way we have not seen since the High Terror in Paris in 1793 when the gutters ran red with blood.”

  “The tsar won’t change—not that much!” Mason looked stunned, almost buried by the enormity of the idea.

  “I doubt it,” the Peacemaker agreed. “I think by next month, or the month after, we will see riot in the streets of St. Petersburg, and blood.” He felt the exultation surge up inside him, catching his breath and his throat. “We are at the beginning of the end, Mason! There will be peace by Christmas! Peace! Dear God, peace!”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  “S ir?” Joseph stood in Colonel Hook’s dugout, assuming from the message that had summoned him that the news was dire.

  Hook looked up from the paper he had been reading. His skin was gray and an uneven stubble shadowed his jaw.

  “Ah, Reavley. I’ve just been informed that London is sending a prosecutor for the court-martial. I was hoping we could have someone from one of the regiments near here. At least they’d understand the…the pressures. But they’re sending a man called Faulkner. I’ve heard of him.” He looked up at Joseph, frowning. “He has something of a reputation, very rigid, believes in the ultimate deterrent. I don’t think the bastard’s ever seen action.” He rubbed his hand over his head. “Sorry. I shouldn’t speak of him like that. I suppose he might be able to…” His voice tailed off. He sounded utterly without hope.

  Joseph sat down without being asked. He cleared his throat. “What are the chances of General Northrup getting the charges reduced?”

  Hook was surprised. “From Faulkner? None at all. He’ll make an example of Cavan and Morel. Reavley, I’m afraid of what the men will do when they hear. We’ve got just over three days; then it’ll be too late.”

  Joseph did not need to ask him what he meant. Once the twelve men were charged with mutiny and murder—unless they were found not guilty, which was virtually impossible—there could be no other sentence but death. The chances were high that there really could be mutiny. With the resultant loss of morale, the lines would be smashed and the forces that survived would be driven back behind the last defenses. The Germans would simply carry on straight through to Paris, and France would fall.

  After that there was nothing between the German Army and the beaches of England except twenty miles of flat summer sea. Defeat would be only weeks away.

  Joseph looked up at Hook and saw understanding of exactly the same thing in his eyes.

  “Is it worth telling Faulkner what it would be likely to do to the men?” he asked.

  “It would if he believed it,” Hook replied. “Men like that usually have an excellent escape from situations they don’t want to be responsible for: They simply refuse to believe it. He would say the British Army never mutinies and never surrenders. It is only the occasional soldier who does, and that sort of man has to be weeded out…severely. He would consider this
an excellent opportunity to make an example.”

  “It won’t make an example of anything except ignorance and brutality,” Joseph said, hearing his own voice crack with emotion and something close to despair. “No matter how good men are, or how brave, there’s a point beyond which they break. There’s no point afterward in excusing yourself by saying you were too damned stupid to see it!”

  “I know.” Hook looked down at the paper again. “I’ll try appealing to London, but I don’t know what good it’ll do.”

  It was dismissal. Joseph stood, excused himself from the claustrophobic safety of the mud and earth, and the few familiar objects of Hook’s personal life, and went out into the faint, misty sunlight. He felt acutely guilty. At some point there must have been a time when he could have acted differently, hidden something, even lied outright so it would never have reached this stage.

  He walked slowly along the track, his boots squelching in the thick mud. At this slightly higher level it was shallower, the water puddling rather than running along. Out in the craters of no-man’s-land either it would be steaming a little in the August heat, or there would be low-lying mustard gas again. It wasn’t always easy to tell.

  If Mason had not seen Northrup’s body and known he had been shot by a British gun, there would have been no need for anyone to be aware that it wasn’t just another casualty. God knew there were enough of them!

  He stepped and banged into a piece of broken riveting where the earth wall had collapsed.

  It was Mason again. This was playing straight into the Peacemaker’s hands. Was he behind it? Or was Joseph just indulging his delusions? The last letter from Matthew had said he was chasing down the old enemy at last. There was no other way to interpret that. Now it looked as if thanks to a catalogue of stupid mistakes, the Peacemaker was going to win after all. Britain would be in mutiny and defeat, with the best part of a million men dead, countless more wounded in body and crushed in mind and spirit. It was a defeat he could not even have imagined when they first left for France three years ago, thinking they would be home for Christmas. It had been all heroism and honor then, dreams of glory. Now there was only despair.

  It would have been better to have turned a blind eye to Northrup’s murder, better even to have shot the man himself, than have it come to this. What was the point at which he had made the wrong judgment? Perhaps that was the secret of life, knowing when was the precise moment at which you decide to do something irrevocable, rather than being a coward, a man always thinking, poised on the edge of decision, and never making it.

  Joseph went to bed in his own dugout a little after midnight and slept more deeply than he had expected. However, just before dawn he woke with a jolt, his heart pounding, the sweat pouring off his body. Everything was familiar—the books, the picture of Dante, his chair and desk—but there was rifle fire close at hand and men’s voices, high-pitched, shouting.

  He rolled off the bunk and stood up, his body shaking. There were more shouts, and bursts of fire rather than controlled aiming.

  There was a noise immediately outside on the steps, then the sacking curtain was yanked aside and a figure blocked out the shred of light.

  Joseph half expected to see the spike-crested helmet of a German officer. He made a supreme effort to calm himself and look, and realized it was a British Tommy, but bareheaded.

  “Capt’n Reavley! You there, sir?”

  “Yes, I am.” Joseph swallowed. “What is it, Tiddly Wop?”

  “They’re gone, Captain. All of ’em, ’cepting Captain Cavan. Gawd knows how it happened, but they’re gone!” Andrews replied.

  Joseph struggled to grasp what the words meant. It could not possibly be true. “Gone?” he repeated foolishly. “You mean they’ve been taken somewhere else? They’re going to have the court-martial at another regiment?”

  “Oi don’t mean been took, sir. Oi mean gone themselves! Nobody knows where they are. They escaped. Could ’ave gone anywhere.”

  Now Joseph was cold, as if his hands and feet hardly belonged to him. “They couldn’t have got out of the farmhouse. What happened to the guard? How could they get out?”

  “Guards are all tied up like turkeys for dinner, but not a hair of their head broke.”

  “You said Captain Cavan is still there?” Joseph was bitterly disappointed. For a moment he had believed the impossible, and now reality plunged him back even deeper. “That doesn’t make sense, Tiddly Wop.”

  “Since when did anything in this bleeding war make sense, Chaplain? If it does to you then, whoi in’t you telling anyone else?”

  “The other eleven have gone? How did they get out?”

  “No idea,” Tiddly Wop said with a shadow of anger. “An’ if Oi did, Oi wouldn’t be telling. Oi just thought you’d loike to know.”

  “I do! I…I just wish Captain Cavan had gone, too.”

  A faint glimmer of light caught Tiddly Wop’s teeth gleaming as he grinned. “Sorry. Oi shouldn’t have said that, Chaplain. Course you do.”

  There was more shouting outside but the rifle fire had stopped. Tiddly Wop turned around and made his way out, Joseph on his heels. It was relatively quiet, the heavy guns only sporadic. Joseph stared around at the figures sprinting across the open ground, and others standing almost idly. There was a military car parked on the driest piece of ground. A man in officer’s uniform stood beside it, waving his arms, apparently giving directions to the others.

  “Got to look loike we want to find them,” Tiddly Wop said sententiously.

  “How long ago did they go?” Joseph asked.

  Tiddly Wop shrugged. “How do Oi know? They could be on their way to Paris by now. Only more likely they’ll go to Switzerland. Oi would.”

  “The Swiss border’s hundreds of miles away,” Joseph retorted.

  “Then Oi hope they get a lift. Not that they would, of course!” he added hastily, taking a nervous glance at Joseph.

  “They might have gone the other way altogether.” Joseph entered the conspiracy without hesitation. “Maybe making for the sea.”

  “Back to Blighty?”

  “No, more likely Sweden.” Joseph found himself smiling. He knew it was stupid to be amused. They would be found and brought back. Cavan was probably showing more sense in staying. And it might buy more time. It could take several days to catch them all, if they ever did. Some might get killed, in the ordinary course of the war. “I wonder if we can help,” he added aloud.

  “Roight!” Tiddly Wop agreed. “Oi’ll go an’ see if Lieutenant Moore wants a hand. He don’t know north from south, that one. If someone don’t give him a hand he’ll end up in Switzerland himself!”

  Joseph offered to look for the escapees, and he spent the next hour pretending to search. Like the rest of the men, he generally made sure that all signs of which way they might have gone were thoroughly obliterated.

  He shared a Dixie can of tea with Colonel Hook, sitting in the back of the supply trench on a couple of sandbags.

  “Find any trace?” Hook asked, eyebrows raised.

  “None at all,” Joseph said immediately. He met Hook’s eyes with complete candor.

  “No,” Hook replied. “Didn’t think you would.”

  By midday it was a very different matter. General Northrup had returned, and word had come up the line that Lieutenant Colonel Faulkner would arrive before sunset. Northrup was furious.

  “How can you be so totally incompetent?” he shouted at Hook. His face was pinched and two blotches of color stained his cheeks. “Don’t you mount some kind of guard? For God’s sake, your command is falling to pieces around you! Pull yourself together, man!”

  They were in the small command post. It was little more than a room in a farm outbuilding, furnished with a table and half a dozen chairs. Northrup was pacing the floor, his boots scratching on the wooden boards. He swung his arms and jabbed the air.

  The accusation was grossly unjust, and both tragic and absurd. Joseph intervened, although both of them
outranked him.

  “The men are exhausted, sir,” he said to Northrup. “No one is getting more than a few hours’ sleep any night. The wounded are pouring back from the battlefront and we are finding it more than we can do to get them to hospital, keep any sort of supplies coming forward of either food or ammunition. The only men we’ve got to spare for guarding prisoners are those who are wounded already. We don’t know what happened, and blaming them is premature and deeply unfair. In any other circumstances they’d be invalided out and taken care of in a decent hospital.”

  “I know the conditions are hard, Captain Reavley,” Northrup said with a tight little grimace. “This is not the only part of the line battered almost to breaking—although I grant you it is the worst. But it’s all the more important we keep up our standards, for the sake of morale.”

  “If somebody is found to be culpable, it will be attended to.” Hook broke his long silence, rising to his feet and picking up a pile of dispatches. “Now, sir, if you will excuse me, I must go and see to some of these things.”

  As soon as he had left, Northrup stared at Joseph. “This is a preposterous situation, Captain. I realize that your sympathies are with your men, and perhaps that is how you see your calling, but this cannot be ignored as if it were not a capital offense.” He stared at Joseph accusingly. “You must realize that? Now, of all times, we must stand fast to those principles we believe in, when there is the greatest temptation to give in, or to cut and run. Officers must set an example. It is what we are here for.”

  Joseph drew in breath to argue, to tell him forcefully how absurd and cruel and utterly pointless he was, that he had lost all touch with reality.

  Any day now they would lose the battle of Passchendaele, and the whole Western Front could buckle and break apart. The last thing on earth the army needed was an idiotic prosecution of one of its few heroes still alive.