At Some Disputed Barricade (21 page)

Judith began to organize it immediately. She directed one man to recount his memory of helping Cavan carry wounded men to shelter and set broken limbs right there in the forward trench with mortar fire all around them. Another she told to repeat his tales of good humor through long hours operating in the field hospital, patience teaching new men now to assist. And for good measure a good few long and rambling jokes were added.

Mason sat through them, making notes, watching thin, strained faces and hearing the laughter and the pain in their voices. He hated being an onlooker. There was something vaguely indecent about drawing such memories from men whose passion and nakedness of heart could be extinguished by blood and shellfire in the next week or two, while he went safely home.

And yet those who read his work were the families of those men, and countless more like them. They deserved to know.

He was very aware of their enthusiasm to keep him there, and he knew the reason. Judith might be directing the situation, but the men understood and were more than willing. The murder of Major Northrup was already known. Did they really imagine they could keep the arrest of twelve men secret? Why even attempt it? It must be only a matter of days until the court-martial. Since it was a capital charge, and twelve men accused, including two officers, the army would send a militarily appointed prosecutor from London. Even so, like every other sentence of death, it would still be referred right up to Field Marshal Haig himself before it was carried out. That rule applied to the newest private, let alone to an officer nominated for the V.C.

What a bloody horrible, senseless tragedy! Why on earth had they done such a thing? Had they really imagined for a moment that they would get away with it? Or were they driven by a power far beyond the capacity for thought?

He refused to decide at the moment exactly what story he would write, but possibilities crowded his mind. The one he knew the Peacemaker would want was to make Cavan the hero, betrayed by an incompetent and cowardly command. A bad officer had been put in charge, and a surgeon had had to get rid of him in order to stop even more pointless slaughter of his men. All the stories about Cavan that he was now hearing would help with that: the laughter and comradeship, the heroism in the face of madness.

He took it all down carefully, noting the name and rank of those who told him. Judith went outside and did some work on her ambulance, then returned an hour later. There was still the same suppressed excitement about her, and he began to realize that she was following a very definite plan of some sort. For a wild moment the thought flashed to him that it was the same as his and the Peacemaker’s. She had finally seen too much slaughter and was prepared to take a small step toward ending it. She was watching him now as he finished the last notes from the men. She came over toward him. She walked with grace, the weariness under such rigid control was completely hidden. He wondered when she had last slept properly in any kind of bed, or eaten a meal that wasn’t cooked in a Dixie can. She must be so tired of dirt, endless chores, and desperate jokes one hardly dared laugh at. And yet laughter and that all-consuming comradeship of those who share life and death were the only shreds of human sanity left.

“Did you get some good stories?” she asked Mason, sitting down at the other side of the small table.

“Yes, thank you. But I’d still like to hear about his stand against the German raiding party for which they’ve put him up for the V.C. You were there, weren’t you?”

She looked at him wryly.

“You know I was. Would you like me to tell you now? I’m not back on duty for an hour.” She pushed a strand of hair off her brow. “I can do it.”

“What about a chance to sleep?”

“Are you telling me I look tired?”

He studied her face. He was surprised at the strength in her, and the defensive challenge in her eyes in that question. How different she was from the girl who had worn the blue satin gown at the Savoy with such infinite femininity. She must know that, too, with a different kind of regret from his.

“Actually you look beautiful.” He said it deliberately, and yet it was totally sincere. “But reason says that, like everybody else, you must need to sleep.”

There was a moment’s confusion in her eyes, uncertainty whether to believe him or not. Then she flushed very slightly and he knew in that instant how much it mattered to her. It was a belief that if there were ever peace again she could still be the woman she was inside, before the war.

“I’ll sleep next break,” she answered. “You might have gone by then, and you need to get the story.” Without waiting for him to reply, she told him in vivid and dramatic detail exactly what the raid had been like and how Cavan’s remarkable courage had saved all their lives. He could simply take it down and rewrite it using her words, there was such a force of life in them. Never once did she hesitate or repeat herself.

As he wrote it, he began to understand at last what it was she was doing. She was re-creating in the readers’ minds the situation that had brought about Major Northrup’s death, and showing Cavan as a man who had had no moral choice but to act as he had. She was paralleling his courage and decision in the trenches with his decision to frighten Northrup into acting with some sense.

Did she really believe that all they had meant to do was frighten him? Or did she not care?

When she had finished, he asked the question that had waited at the back of his mind since the beginning. “Can you arrange for me to see Cavan himself, even if only for a few moments? I have to have a quote from him.” He watched her, wondering what she would do.

“You can’t.” She looked back quizzically, trying to judge whether he was testing her, or if he really did not know.

“Can’t I?” he said aloud.

“No one can,” she replied, her eyes unwavering. “General Northrup found the twelve men with the best cause to kill his son, and had them all arrested, including Captain Cavan. No one confessed, and no one denied it. We don’t know whether they’re guilty or not. General Northrup said he would try and get the charge reduced from mutiny and murder down to insolence, disobeying an order, and accident. But it hasn’t happened yet. It’s bloody chaos. He was our best surgeon, and men are dying he could have saved.” The misery in her voice was savage. He flinched at the sound of it.

“Why would General Northrup try to get the charge reduced?” he asked, puzzled.

She looked at him with a twist of defiance, even pride. “Because in order to prove deliberate murder he’ll have to show motive, of course! Why on earth would twelve loyal soldiers without a blemish on their records get together and murder an officer?”

“Because he’s a dangerously arrogant and incompetent idiot!” he responded.

“Exactly. Which I can prove. But General Northrup is not so keen to have that demonstrated. When he realized just how—”

“Yes, I see,” he said quickly. “Was it you who pointed out to him how unfortunate that would be?” He knew the answer. That was the source of the fire in her eyes, and why the men were toasting her in Dixie cans of tea. No doubt it was also why she was keen that Mason should write a piece just now extolling Cavan. Was it because she cared for Cavan with more than friendship, or simply that she was brave and driven by the same passionate loyalty to her friends that bound all the fighting men together? She had charged in blindly to the rescue, without thinking of the cost or the chances of success. That is who she was, like Joseph: all pointless idealism, and dreams that were fragile and idiotic, and desperately beautiful.

The lock of hair had fallen forward again across her brow. Without thinking, he reached across and pushed it into place, only afterward realizing how intimate the gesture was.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized, feeling self-conscious.

She colored as well, suddenly aware of his physical nearness.

“You’re still going to write about him!” she said urgently. “Nothing that Northrup says changes that. And Cavan might have had nothing to do with it. They’ve just arrested the most likely twelve.”

Mason reflected that, in a different age, she would have been married to some nice local doctor or landowner by now, probably with a couple of children. Her days would have been spent in a little socially admirable work, probably connected with the church, and the occasional society party, or hunts ball. Instead she was watching the carnage of a generation. It was not happiness but a kind of sublime lunacy that kept her going. It was all pointless, and it would break her in the end, and that was something he dreaded. It would be like the very last lights going out as the darkness consumed everything.

He loved her for it with a kind of hunger he dared not face. It was precious beyond his reach and like the reflection of a distant fire, a warmth he could not touch or hold. It was an illusion, what she believed in was not real, and yet the beauty of it haunted him too fiercely to let it go.

“I’ll write the best I can,” he promised. “But it won’t change anything, Judith. I wish I could say it would. I expect it’s out of Northrup’s hands by now.”

Her mouth tightened; she bit her lower lip. “Are you warning me to give up?” she said a little huskily.

“Never,” he whispered. “Just be prepared to be beaten, at least this time.” He put his hand over hers where it lay on the tabletop. Her hands were very slender, stiff now in resistance. “Cavan won’t escape, unless he can prove he wasn’t part of it.”

“And leave the others?” she said indignantly. “He’d never do that.”

Of course not. Cavan was just like her! Quixotic…absurd.

“Oh, Judith! Can’t you…” He stopped. He would be asking her to deny her very nature. “No, of course you can’t.” He rose to his feet and leaned across the table, kissing her softly on the mouth. For a long moment of infinite warmth, as if a new fire melted every aching shard of ice inside him, he clung on to her. Then slowly he pulled away, leaving her behind, but never the memory. He turned and walked out into the incessant, clinging, suffocating rain.

Judith was right, of course; he had no opportunity to speak to Captain Cavan, or any of the other imprisoned men. He did not tip his hand to the authorities by asking for it when he knew it was an impossibility. Instead he went forward to the front line and gathered all the factual information he could. He saw how they were struggling to manage without Cavan, as Judith had told him—and for that matter, without Morel, who had been a good officer.

He asked men about Morel, and gained perhaps a slightly biased picture. But even accounting for that, he emerged as a brave and widely experienced man, which was unusual in these times of sweeping casualties. A front-line officer with three years’ service was rare. He was joked about because it was the easiest way of defusing the emotion, although the men knew he was burning with anger and emotionally unreliable. However, neither his courage nor his judgment of a military situation were ever doubted. They felt his loss keenly.

Still Mason could not stand by and simply make notes of it all, like some recording demon—angels were beyond the power of his imagination. Useless or not, he went out with the stretcher parties as he had done in Gallipoli, or the Italian Front facing Austria where men also died in the tens of thousands, and on the bitter Russian Front in the east, and the sands of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The weather was different, and the terrain; death was the same.

He saw Joseph on the third day. They had both returned from no-man’s-land, up to the armpits in mud from digging men out of the craters and attempting to carry them back. Off balance with the weight of the unconscious wounded, they had floundered and fallen. They had helped each other up again awkwardly, picked up their burdens again and finally reached the front-line trench. It was filled with water like a stagnant canal, with broken pieces of duckboard, and corpses of rats and men.

Still helping each other, they made it at last to a drier stretch and passed the wounded over to an ambulance crew. Then they sat shivering with exhaustion in one of the dressing station tents. Someone put blankets around them and passed the Dixie cans of hot tea laced with rum.

Joseph looked at Mason and smiled.

“Still think all this is a good idea, Chaplain?” Mason asked, waving his hand to indicate everything around them.

Joseph could see in Mason’s face a darkness that would not now be won over by any word or act as it had been in the small boat back in 1915. “I think it’s hell,” he answered the question.

Mason looked at him curiously, an urgency behind his probing.

“I was talking to Judith,” he began; his eyes flickered away, self-consciously, then back again. “She still believes there’s some point to all this, some moral purpose that makes it worthwhile. Do you?”

Joseph hesitated a moment, not only as to the truth of any answer, but even to how honest he should be to Mason. “There can’t be a heaven if there’s no hell. But I admit, I hadn’t envisioned having to spend so much time in hell.”

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?”