Best British Crime 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Hello, Chaplain,” one of them said cheerfully. “How’s God these days?”

  “Gone home on sick leave,” the other answered quickly, before Joseph could reply. There was disgust in his voice, but no intended irreverence. Death was too close here for men to mock faith.

  “Have a seat,” the first offered, waving toward a third chair. “Morris got it today. Killed outright. That bloody sniper again”

  “He’s somewhere out there, just about opposite us,” the second said grimly. “One of those blighters the other day claimed he’d got forty-three for sure.”

  “I can believe it,” Joseph answered, accepting the seat. He knew better than most what the casualties were. It was his job to comfort the terrified, the dying, to carry stretchers, often to write letters to the bereaved. Sometimes he thought it was harder than actually fighting, but he refused to stay back in the comparative safety of the field hospitals and depots. This was where he was most needed.

  “Thought about setting up a trench raid,” the major said slowly, weighing his words and looking at Joseph. “Good for morale. Make it seem as if we were actually doing something. But our chances of getting the blighter are pretty small. Only lose a lot of men for nothing. Feel even worse afterward.”

  The captain did not add anything. They all knew morale was sinking. Losses were high, the news bad. Word of terrible slaughter seeped through from the Somrne and Verdun and all along the line right to the sea. Physical hardship took its toll, the dirt, the cold, and the alternation between boredom and terror. The winter of 1916 lay ahead.

  “Cigarette?” the major held out his pack to Joseph.

  “No thanks,” Joseph declined with a smile. “Got any tea going?”

  They poured him a mugful, strong and bitter, but hot. He drank it, and half an hour later made his way forward to the open air again and the travel trench. A star shell exploded high and bright. Automatically he ducked, keeping his head below the rim. They were about four feet deep, and in order not to provide a target, a man had to move in a half crouch. There was a rattle of machine-gun fire out ahead and, closer to, a thud as a rat was dislodged and fell into the mud beside the duckboards.

  Other men were moving about close to him. The normal order of things was reversed here. Nothing much happened during the day. Trench repair work was done, munitions shifted, weapons cleaned, a little rest taken. Most of the activity was at night, most of the death.

  “ ‘Lo, Chaplain,” a voice whispered in the dark. “Say a prayer we get that bloody sniper, will you?”

  “Maybe God’s a Jerry?” someone suggested in the dark.

  “Don’t be stupid!” a third retorted derisively. “Everyone knows God’s an Englishman! Didn’t they teach you nothing at school?”

  There was a burst of laughter. Joseph joined in. He promised to offer up the appropriate prayers and moved on forward. He had known many of the men all his life. They came from the same Northumbrian town as he did, or the surrounding villages. They had gone to school together, nicked apples from the same trees, fished in the same rivers, and walked the same lanes.

  It was a little after six when he reached the firing trench beyond whose sandbag parapet lay no-man’s-land with its four or five hundred yards of mud, barbed wire, and shell holes. Half a dozen burnt tree stumps looked in the sudden flares like men. Those gray wraiths could be fog, or gas.

  Funny that in summer this blood-and-horror-soaked soil could still bloom with honeysuckle, forget-me-nots, and wild larkspur, and most of all with poppies. You would think nothing would ever grow there again.

  More star shells went up, lighting the ground, the jagged scars of the trenches black, the men on the fire steps with rifles on their shoulders illuminated for a few, blinding moments. Sniper shots rang out.

  Joseph stood still. He knew the terror of the night watch out beyond the parapet, crawling around in the mud. Some of them would be at the head of saps out from the trench, most would be in shell holes, surrounded by heavy barricades of wire. Their purpose was to check enemy patrols for unusual movement, any signs of increased activity, as if there might be an attack planned.

  More star shells lit the sky. It was beginning to rain. A crackle of machine-gun fire, and heavier artillery somewhere over to the left. Then the sharp whine of sniper fire, again and again.

  Joseph shuddered. He thought of the men out there, beyond his vision, and prayed for strength to endure with them in their pain, not to try to deaden himself to it.

  There were shouts somewhere ahead, heavy shells now, shrapnel bursting. There was a flurry of movement, flares, and a man came sliding over the parapet, shouting for help.

  Joseph plunged forward, sliding in the mud, grabbing for the wooden props to hold himself up. Another flare of light. He saw quite clearly Captain Holt lurching toward him, another man over his shoulder, deadweight.

  “He’s hurt!” Holt gasped. “Pretty badly. One of the night patrol. Panicked. Just about got us all killed.” He eased the man down into Joseph’s arms and let his rifle slide forward, bayonet covered in an old sock to hide its gleam. His face was grotesque in the lantern light, smeared with mud and a wide streak of blood over the burnt cork that blackened it, as all night patrol had.

  Others were coming to help. There was still a terrible noise of fire going on and the occasional flare.

  The man in Joseph’s arms did not stir. His body was limp and it was difficult to support him. Joseph felt the wetness and the smell of blood. Wordlessly others materialized out of the gloom and took the weight.

  “Is he alive?” Holt said urgently. “There was a hell of a lot of shot up there.” His voice was shaking, almost on the edge of control.

  “Don’t know,” Joseph answered. “We’ll get him back to the bunker and see. You’ve done all you can.” He knew how desperate men felt when they risked their lives to save another man and did not succeed. A kind of despair set in, a sense of very personal failure, almost a guilt for having survived themselves. “Are you hurt?”

  “Not much,” Holt answered. “Couple of grazes.”

  “Better have them dressed, before they get poisoned,” Joseph advised, his feet slipping on the wet boards and banging his shoulder against a jutting post. The whole trench wall was crooked, giving way under the weight of mud. The founds had eroded.

  The man helping him swore.

  Awkwardly carrying the wounded man, they staggered back through the travel line to the support trench and into the light and shelter of a bunker.

  Holt looked dreadful. Beneath the cork and blood his face was ashen. He was soaked with rain and mud and there were dark patches of blood across his back and shoulders.

  Someone gave him a cigarette. Back here it was safe to strike a match. He drew in smoke deeply. “Thanks,” he murmured, still staring at the wounded man.

  Joseph looked down at him now, and it was only too plain where the blood had come from. It was young Ashton. He knew him quite well. He had been at school with his older brother.

  The soldier who had helped carry him in let out a cry of dismay, strangled in his throat. It was Mordaff, Ashton’s closest friend, and he could see what Joseph now could also. Ashton was dead, his chest torn open, the blood no longer pumping, and a bullet hole through his head.

  “I’m sorry,” Holt said quietly. “I did what I could. I can’t have got to him in time. He panicked.”

  Mordaff jerked his head up. “He never would!” The cry was desperate, a shout of denial against a shame too great to be borne. “Not Will!”

  Holt stiffened. “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely. “It happens.”

  “Not with Will Ashton, it don’t!” Mordaff retorted, his eyes blazing, pupils circled with white in the candlelight, his face gray. He had been in the front line two weeks now, a long stretch without a break from the ceaseless tension, filth, cold, and intermittent silence and noise. He was nineteen.

  “You’d better go and get that arm dressed, and your side,” Joseph said to
Holt. He made his voice firm, as to a child.

  Holt glanced again at the body of Ashton, then up at Joseph.

  “Don’t stand there bleeding,” Joseph ordered. “You did all you could. There’s nothing else. I’ll look after Mordaff.”

  “I tried!” Holt repeated. “There’s nothing but mud and darkness and wire, and bullets coming in all directions.” There was a sharp thread of terror under his shell-thin veneer of control. He had seen too many men die. “It’s enough to make anyone lose his nerve. You want to be a hero—you mean to be—and then it overwhelms you—”

  “Not Will!” Mordaff said again, his voice choking off in a sob.

  Holt looked at Joseph again, then staggered out.

  Joseph turned to Mordaff. He had done this before, too many times, tried to comfort men who had just seen childhood friends blown to pieces, or killed by a sniper’s bullet, looking as if they should still be alive, perfect except for the small, blue hole through the brain. There was little to say. Most men found talk of God meaningless at that moment. They were shocked, fighting against belief and yet seeing all the terrible waste and loss of the truth in front of them. Usually it was best just to stay with them, let them speak about the past, what the friend had been like, times they had shared, just as if he were only wounded and would be back, at the end of the war, in some world one could only imagine, in England, perhaps on a summer day with sunlight on the grass, birds singing, a quiet riverbank somewhere, the sound of laughter, and women’s voices.

  Mordaff refused to be comforted. He accepted Ashton’s death; the physical reality of that was too clear to deny, and he had seen too many other men he knew killed in the year and a half he had been in Belgium. But he could not, would not accept that Ashton had panicked. He knew what panic out there cost, how many other lives it jeopardized. It was the ultimate failure.

  “How am I going to tell his mam?” he begged Joseph. “It’ll be all I can do to tell her he’s dead! His pa’ll never get over it. That proud of him, they were. He’s the only boy. Three sisters he had, Mary, Lizzie, and Alice. Thought he was the greatest lad in the world. I can’t tell ‘em he panicked! He couldn’t have, Chaplain! He just wouldn’t!”

  Joseph did not know what to say. How could people at home in England even begin to imagine what it was like in the mud and noise out here? But he knew how deep shame burned. A lifetime could be consumed by it.

  “Maybe he just lost sense of direction,” he said gently. “He wouldn’t be the first.” War changed men. People did panic. Mordaff knew that, and half his horror was because it could be true. But Joseph did not say so. “I’ll write to his family,” he went on. “There’s a lot of good to say about him. I could send pages. I’ll not need to tell them much about tonight.”

  “Will you?” Mordaff was eager. “Thanks . . . thanks, Chaplain. Can I stay with him . . . until they come for him?”

  “Yes, of course,” Joseph agreed. “I’m going forward anyway. Get yourself a hot cup of tea. See you in an hour or so.”

  He left Mordaff squatting on the earth floor beside Ashton’s body and fumbled his way back over the slimy duckboards toward the travel line, then forward again to the front and the crack of gunfire and the occasional high flare of a star shell.

  He did not see Mordaff again, but he thought nothing of it. He could have passed twenty men he knew and not recognized them, muffled in greatcoats, heads bent as they moved, rattling along the duckboards, or standing on the fire steps, rifles to shoulder, trying to see in the gloom for something to aim at.

  Now and again he heard a cough, or the scamper of rats’ feet and the splash of rain and mud. He spent a little time with two men swapping jokes, joining in their laughter. It was black humor, self-mocking, but he did not miss the courage in it, or the fellowship, the need to release emotion in some sane and human way.

  About midnight the rain stopped.

  A little after five the night patrol came scrambling through the wire, whispered passwords to the sentries, then came tumbling over the parapet of sandbags down into the trench, shivering with cold and relief. One of them had caught a shot in the arm.

  Joseph went back with them to the support line. In one of the dugouts a gramophone was playing a music-hall song. A couple of men sang along with it; one of them had a beautiful voice, a soft, lyric tenor. It was a silly song, trivial, but it sounded almost like a hymn out here, a praise of life.

  A couple of hours and the day would begin: endless, methodical duties of housekeeping, mindless routine, but it was better than doing nothing.

  There was still a sporadic crackle of machine-gun fire and the whine of sniper bullets.

  An hour till dawn.

  Joseph was sitting on an upturned ration case when Sergeant Renshaw came into the bunker, pulling the gas curtain aside to peer in. “Chaplain?”

  Joseph looked up. He could see bad news in the man’s face. “I’m afraid Mordaff got it tonight,” he said, coming in and letting the curtain fall again. “Sorry. Don’t really know what happened. Ashton’s death seems to have . . . well, he lost his nerve. More or less went over the top all by himself. Suppose he was determined to go and give Fritz a bloody nose, on Ashton’s account. Stupid bastard! Sorry, Chaplain.”

  He did not need to explain himself, or to apologize. Joseph knew exactly the fury and the grief he felt at such a futile waste. To this was added a sense of guilt that he had not stopped it. He should have realized Mordaff was so close to breaking. He should have seen it. That was his job.

  He stood up slowly. “Thanks for telling me, Sergeant. Where is he?” “He’s gone, Chaplain.” Renshaw remained near the doorway. “You can’t help ‘im now.”

  “I know that. I just want to ... I don’t know . . . apologize to him. I let him down. I didn’t understand he was ... so ...”

  “You can’t be everybody’s keeper,” Renshaw said gently. “Too many of us. It’s not been a bad night otherwise. Got a trench raid coming off soon. Just wish we could get that damn sniper across the way there.” He scraped a match and lit his cigarette. “But morale’s good. That was a brave thing Captain Holt did out there. He wanted the chance to do something to hearten the men. He saw it and took it. Pity about Ashton, but that doesn’t alter Holt’s courage. Could see him, you know, by the star shells. Right out there beyond the last wire, bent double, carrying Ashton on his back. Poor devil went crazy. Running around like a fool. Have got the whole patrol killed if Holt hadn’t gone after him. Hell of a job getting him back. Fell a couple of times. Reckon that’s worth a mention in dispatches, at least. Heartens the men, knowing our officers have got that kind of spirit.”

  “Yes . . . I’m sure,” Joseph agreed. He could only think of Ashton’swhite face, and Mordaff’s desperate denial, and how Ashton’s mother would feel, and the rest of his family. “I think I’ll go and see Mordaff just the same.” “Right you are,” Renshaw conceded reluctantly, standing aside for Joseph to pass.

  Mordaff lay in the support trench just outside the bunker two hundred yards to the west. He looked even younger than he had in life, as if he were asleep. His face was oddly calm, even though it was smeared with mud. Someone had tried to clean most of it off in a kind of dignity, so that at least he was recognizable. There was a large wound in the left side of his forehead. It was bigger than most sniper wounds. He must have been a lot closer.

  Joseph stood in the first paling of the darkness and looked at him by candlelight from the open bunker curtain. He had been so alive only a few hours ago, so full of anger and loyalty and dismay. What had made him throw his life away in a useless gesture? Joseph racked his mind for some sign that should have warned him Mordaff was so close to breaking, but he could not see it even now.

  There was a cough a few feet away, and the tramp of boots on duck-boards. The men were stood down, just one sentry per platoon left. They had returned for breakfast. If he thought about it he could smell cooking.

  Now would be the time to ask around and find out
what had happened to Mordaff.

  He made his way to the field kitchen. It was packed with men, some standing to be close to the stoves and catch a bit of their warmth, others choosing to sit, albeit further away. They had survived the night. They were laughing and telling stories, most of them unfit for delicate ears, but Joseph was too used to it to take any offense. Now and then someone new would apologize for such language in front of a chaplain, but most knew he understood too well.

  “Yeah,” one answered his question through a mouthful of bread and jam. “He came and asked me if I saw what happened to Ashton. Very cut up, he was.”