We Shall Not Sleep (31 page)

"Or at least his pattern of behavior," Matthew replied. "The violence toward women has to have begun very recently, or he'd have been caught before."

"I suppose so," Joseph said slowly. "The change could come slowly, as it has for everyone, and perhaps the thought of going home has made him realize how deep it is."

Matthew looked puzzled.

"Take Judith, for example," Joseph tried to explain. "She isn't the only one, but can you imagine how an average man would feel faced with a wife like her?"

"I know she's my sister, but I always thought she was beautiful," Matthew replied. "And rather fun. Awkward—but you get used to that. Underneath it she's pretty decent, if you're being serious. And you are, aren't you?"

"Yes. Very. She's also bright and articulate, and she's got more courage than most men I know. She's a better driver, and can mend an engine with almost anything that comes to hand. She's steady under fire, can give first aid to the wounded or the dying. She'd probably shoot a man if she had to, and I can't imagine her fainting or having a fit of the vapors like our aunts and grandmothers."

"I know. We've all changed," Matthew agreed.

"Do you know it, really?" Joseph pressed. "I think I'm only beginning to see how much. Are we going to be able to deal with it with some courage and grace?"

Far over their heads a reconnaissance plane circled slowly and banked hard, swinging off to the east, looking like a dragonfly over an endless marsh of zigzag ditches in the mud. "It isn't that sudden, Joe," Matthew pointed out.

"He may not have had much chance until recently," Joseph reasoned. "If he were at the front line, and not injured, he wouldn't see anyone except the occasional ambulance driver. Maybe not even that."

"You mean this was his first opportunity?" Matthew asked. "Could be. Before then his violence was very properly turned toward the enemy." He winced.

Joseph knew what he was thinking, but there was no time now to dwell on the effect of war on young men. Certainly there was nothing they could do about it. "We have to find out what happened to someone that made his rage or sense of helplessness explode." His memory reached back over the distress he had seen even in the last few years, the letters men had received from home about the loss of other members of their family or close friends. The grief was hard and deep-scouring. But it was deceit that tore men apart, wounding irreparably: the sweetheart who could not or would not wait, the children they barely knew, the babies born whom they might never see. Worst by far were the wives who betrayed.

Matthew watched his brother's eyes squint narrowly in a sudden burst of sun, dazzling where it caught the water in a series of craters, rippled by the east wind till the light danced. "Don't you know, Chaplain, if you really think about it?" he asked quickly. "Who's been cheated and left by a woman he loved, and should have been able to trust? Who's been belittled or laughed at? Everyone's been changed by what they've seen out here, even more by what they've done. Nobody is going to go home the same as they were before. Who has a wife that can't accept that?"

Joseph thought of them, one after the other, hearing again in his mind the tight, quiet voices of men for whom the gulf had become too great, whose friends were now strangers to whom they could no longer explain themselves, no longer share the laughter or the pain of the things that lay deepest. Perhaps it was the ultimate price of war, the change to the living more than the loss of the dead.

"It's Dante again," he said aloud. "Rewarded not for what we do, but by it—and by what we see, and what we see others do?"

Matthew said nothing.

"The
Inferno,"
Joseph explained unnecessarily, wondering if some of Dante's wasted landscape of hell might look a bit like this. Did the River Styx look like this slow-moving mud, filled with human remains from battles won and lost? That would symbolize despair very well. What about the forward lines now, all rage and noise, flame of gunfire and shattering destruction, the landscape of anger?

What about the uniquely human sins of corruption and betrayal? How would they look? Probably perfectly ordinary, like a smiling face, only the eyes would be empty.

"Everything we do changes us, becomes part of what we are," he said. "Do you think we'll ever get over this, Matthew? Will we recover and become human again, innocent enough to have hope, to value human life and believe in a God who loves us, one who has enough power to heal us, to affect anything that happens on earth? Or are we finally on the edge of the abyss, and falling?" The minute he had said it he wished he had not. It was selfish. Matthew was his younger brother, the one man above all others to whom he owed a better care than this, and some kind of protection from the darkness inside.

"Sorry," he said quickly. "I'll try to think who had bad news of some sort about a month ago. Whoever was closest to him will have noticed something. Trouble is, I'm the chaplain. If I know of it as a confidence, there's only a limited amount I can repeat." He pushed his hand over his forehead and back through his hair. "What a bloody mess."

****

Joseph sat in his bunker alone trying to remember every private and wounding grief he had heard some man stammer out to him, looking for any kind of comfort, any sense of justice in his pain. There were dozens of them. More often than not it wasn't the loss here—the friend crippled or killed—it was the betrayal of those at home, the wives or sweethearts who had grown tired of waiting. Would the women who had loved them accept what they had become, or would they be unable to cope with the memories? Would they even begin to understand the guilt of those who had survived when their friends had not?

Would the horror of killing an enemy soldier so much like a mirror image of yourself make any kind of sense? He was not there because he wanted to be, any more than you were. On a still night you could hear him talking with his friends, laughing, singing.

No wonder you could not sleep. It was easy to see the petty problems of home—a blocked drain, a disobedient child, a spilled jug of milk—as nothing at all. Life was what mattered. Friends, a whole body, someone to watch with you through the night.

Who had spoken of something bad enough to make him hate all women? He thought of the men betrayed or deserted and went through their names one by one, ticking off each as he remembered that they were dead, too badly injured, gone home already, or somewhere else far forward of here.

Turner was the first of those left who seemed possible. His wife had left him for Turner's own brother, who had escaped military service because of flat feet or something of the sort. Turner's rage had been almost uncontrollable. Joseph had thought it was against the war in general and the Germans in particular. But perhaps in time it had bent instead toward women.

And it seemed Culshaw was lying to protect him, again as one man did for his friend, perhaps not realizing there was anything more than a lapse of judgment and discipline.

"Of course he's bloody furious!" Culshaw had exploded. "His own brother! Flat feet or cross eyes or some damn thing! So he stays safe at home coining in the money on the black market while we're out here in the rats and the filth getting shot at. Sometimes I don't understand women at all. Have they got no honor, no sense of friendship, loyalty... anything?"

"Women are no more all alike than men are," Joseph had answered him. "Some men will sleep with anything that stays still long enough, and you know that as well as I do. Don't you think their wives feel just as used and betrayed?"

Culshaw had looked confused. "Are you saying it's the same, Chaplain?"

Joseph had sighed. "No," he said wearily. He was honest enough to admit that whatever reason or justice told him, it was not. His own reaction to Lizzie being raped forced him to acknowledge that reason had very little to do with the deepest passions, the intimacy of violation. "No, it's not the same, Culshaw. If a man is betrayed by a woman he loved, he doesn't forget it, and he doesn't heal easily. And if a woman is raped by a man, she doesn't forget that, either, or heal. Neither does any man who loved her. Have you considered that?"

Culshaw's face was very pale, the lines of exhaustion deep in his skin. "I never saw it like that."

"How did you see it?" Joseph had asked him.

Culshaw's eyes were wide. "He didn't do that!" he breathed out. "I swear! Jesus, do you think I'd have covered for him if he had? He skewered that German officer's foot, and he'd have beaten the hell out of any of the other prisoners, if we'd let him, but he never touched Sarah Price. You have to believe me!"

"I don't have to," Joseph told him, disgust filling his mind at the senseless violence toward men already beaten by violence and shame.

"But it's the truth!" Culshaw protested desperately.

"Yes," Joseph conceded. "I daresay it is."

Judith was thinking of the same things, but she at least faced the practical questions she had been wishing she could avoid. Material proof would have been so much easier, less viciously painful, but perhaps in the end it was always going to have come to this. She could not expect Joseph to do it, or Matthew, for that matter.

Now it could wait no longer. She told Wil she would be gone for a while but gave him no other explanation.

She found Lizzie helping Allie Robinson. They were preparing some of the more seriously wounded for evacuation. There was an almost euphoric sense of release now that the station was open again at least in part; and men could leave. It was as if a long paralysis were ended.

"Lizzie, I need to speak to you," she said quietly. "Sorry, but it's urgent."

Allie looked at her sharply. "When this is finished, Miss Reavley," she said with a certain coolness. There was a warning in her eyes and her manner. Judith was overstepping her authority.

"It's urgent," Judith repeated. "I'm sorry, but there's no time to wait.

Allie stiffened. "If you have wounded, Miss Reavley, then you need either an orderly to help you or a doctor. You do not need Mrs. Blaine, who is already occupied here."

Judith's emotions were raw with loathing of what she had to do. She felt guilty because of the pain she knew she was going to cause, and afraid Lizzie would hate her for it. Allie was a nuisance she had not foreseen, and the irritation of it scraped her raw, but if she lost her temper it would only make it all the more difficult, especially for Lizzie.

"I don't have wounded," she replied as civilly as she could, but her voice had an edge to it and she could hear it herself.

"I thought not." Allie smiled bleakly. "Then you will have to wait."

Judith took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "It can't wait, Allie. It's important."

Allies eyebrows rose. "To whom, Miss Reavley? To you?" The use of her name was a rebuke, and her face had no warmth in it, no possibility of yielding.

"It's not your concern, Miss Robinson, but if you force the issue, then it is important to Major Onslow of the military police. It is a matter of information that obviously I cannot discuss." It was no more than half a lie.

Anger flared in Allies eyes. "Then why did you not say so in the first place?" she asked angrily. "Just because you drive an ambulance around like a man does not give you the right to come in here giving orders. You forget yourself. You are going to find it extremely difficult after the war when you're not needed anymore. You would be wise to learn how to behave like a woman again. You're in danger of becoming a complete misfit, unwanted by men and an embarrassment to women."

Judith was stunned. The fury in Allies manner had taken her completely by surprise. Was it her own fear speaking? Surely not. There were going to be years of skilled nursing ahead; peace would not affect that.

"Well, if it's so urgent, get on with it!" Allie snapped. "Experience your authority. You won't have it much longer."

Judith bit back her retaliation and turned to Lizzie. They went out together, Lizzie looking anxious and unhappy.

As soon as they were beyond the Evacuation tent and in the open, the day bright and cold with frost in the wind, Lizzie spoke again.

"Does Major Onslow really want to see me?"

"No," Judith said quickly. "I do. But in a way it's half true. Not here, however; your bunker or mine."

"Mine's closer. What is it?"

"I'm sorry," Judith said fiercely. "I really am. I wouldn't do this if
there were any other way."

Lizzie walked in silence. It was a bad beginning. She was already afraid. They reached the bunker and went down the steps inside. It smelled of damp earth and enclosed space. The wooden slats on the floor were rotting but still better than the bare mud.

"What is it?" Lizzie demanded again. "Do they know something?" She did not sit down but remained standing, facing Judith in the gloom.

Judith could understand very easily how Lizzie might rather not know who had raped her, whose child she was carrying. Anonymity kept it one step further away. She wished with passion that she could leave it that way, or at least leave the choice to Lizzie.

"I'm sorry," she said again. "I am! They don't know, and all we can work out is that it had to be Cavan, Wil Sloan, or Benbow."

"How?" Lizzie's face was not clear in the faint light inside the bunker, but even in the shadows her disbelief was obvious. "It could have been anyone! I have no idea."

"It couldn't have been just anyone who killed Sarah. Everybody else is ruled out." It was brutal, but Lizzie had to know it was true. She had said so herself, to Onslow.

Lizzie sat down slowly on the bunk. Now she seemed unbearably tired, as if the strength inside her was used up. "I don't know," she said again. "I'd hate to think it was Cavan, or Wil Sloan, but I can't say it was Benbow because I don't know! It might not have been." She stared at Judith. "When it comes to it, even the people we like can have terrible secrets that we have no idea of. I'm not going to say it was Benbow just because Cavan and Wil are your friends. I'm sorry."

Judith was momentarily stunned. It was the last thing she had considered, at least consciously, but she could see how easily Lizzie must have thought of it.