Shoulder the Sky wwi-2

by Anne Perry

  “Yes,” Mason answered. “Who are you? A chaplain!” He looked surprised and very slightly amused.

  “Joseph Reavley,” Joseph told him. “I had a mission out here, which I have completed. I understand you are shortly leaving for England. I need to return as soon as possible, and if there is room in your transport I would be grateful.”

  Mason’s eyes flickered for a moment of puzzlement, then he looked beyond them both at the milling men on the beach and up the slope at the dugouts, the shallow trenches, the makeshift shelters of stones and boxes. Finally he looked back at Joseph. “Your mission is finished, you said?” His implication was clear.

  Joseph regarded him levelly and a little coldly. “Yes, it is. I have only a few days more leave before I have to report back to my regiment at Ypres.”

  Mason colored faintly. “I’m sorry.” It was said frankly. His diction was perfect, a little sibilant, but there was a beauty in its exactness as if words were precious to him.

  Joseph offered his hand.

  Mason grasped it. “There’s a ship going back toward Malta tomorrow. Probably about dawn. They’ll find room for you. Won’t be hard to get a troopship home from there.” His eyes searched Joseph’s face curiously. “Yours must be a rotten job a lot of the time. How the hell do you tell people they can make sense out of all this?” He gestured toward the rock escarpments almost six hundred feet above them where the Turkish guns commanded most of the bay. “Fever, dysentery, gunshot and shrapnel wounds, seasickness, overcrowding. One hospital ship out there has eight hundred and fifty wounded, and two doctors to look after them all. And one of those a bloody vet!” The anger was profound and so deep inside him it showed only in the lines of his face and the rigid tension of his shoulders, there was no surface fire anymore. It had long since worn itself out.

  “I don’t try,” Joseph answered. “I deal with people one at a time. I can only address the small things.”

  “In other words you can’t make sense of it either,” Mason concluded with a certainty that obviously gave him no pleasure. “You’ve given up on telling them this is some kind of divine destiny, and necessary furnace of affliction, and they should cling onto belief, and just endure?”

  “Actually I don’t tell people much of what they should do at all,” Joseph answered. “Most people are doing their best anyway. The big choices are taken away from us, it’s only how we react that’s left.”

  Mason turned away. The sunlight was harsh on his face, showing the lines of strain around his eyes. He looked about Joseph’s own age, but the knowledge and the rage inside him were timeless. “It would have been nice if you could have given some great cosmic answer,” he said drily. “But I wouldn’t have believed you anyway. Have you had anything to eat today?”

  “No. I wanted to be sure to find you.”

  Mason hesitated, as if to ask another question, then changed his mind. He turned and led the way through the wiry grass and the tumbled clay and rocks along toward a makeshift field kitchen. Half a dozen men were cooking and a group was already lining up for breakfast.

  Joseph waited his turn, and was glad to walk away with a plate of stew, a couple of hard biscuits, and a mug of tea. He sat next to Mason on the ground in the shelter of a rock to eat, aware of the tensions around him, the constant glances up at the headlands where the Turkish guns were dug in and commanded almost all the advances up the slopes.

  There was a lot of good-natured banter. The men were mostly Australians and New Zealanders, but there were just the same sort of robust and colorful complaints he would have heard at Ypres. Only the accents were different, and the individual terms of abuse. The subjects were the same: the food, the officers, the general impossibility of doing what was commanded. Men had sore feet, bellyache, only here they tried bathing in the sea to get rid of the ever-present lice. It didn’t work any better than the matches in Flanders.

  It was early afternoon and Joseph was up the incline a dozen yards away from Mason, observing him writing notes, when the attack started. Men poured up the hill, charging the Turkish positions. Gunfire was incessant: The heavy artillery dug in behind the trenches and gullies; the machine guns’ rapid, staccato fire; and the boom of ships’ guns from the battleships in the bay.

  Joseph followed Mason up to the lowest line of the dugouts and shallow trenches. The wounded came rapidly. A few were carried on stretchers, but most were floundering on their own feet, staggering and falling. Some were more seriously hit, and carried by their fellows. At times it was hard to tell which were the injured men; there was blood everywhere.

  Once Joseph looked up from a rough piece of field first aid he had been performing to find Blue on his knees in front of him. His tunic front was scarlet with blood, his hair matted, his face almost gray.

  Joseph felt a lurch of horror so intense for an instant he was unable to move.

  “Y’all right, sport?” Blue said hoarsely. “Look like you seen a ghost! Here.” He half hauled a blood-soaked body forward. One arm was shattered, the hand gone altogether, and its left foot was blown away. “See what you can do for him, will you? He . . . he was a good bloke.” His eyes pleaded to be told something better than the truth he already knew.

  “Of course,” Joseph gulped, dizzy with a surge of relief that it was not Blue, although it was senseless. Blue was going straight back up into the fire, and it could be him next time, or the time after. Only a fool would imagine any of them had much of a chance of coming out of this without some fearful wound. Perhaps those who died quickly were among the fortunate. Their families would grieve, but that was secondary to the hell that was going on here, now.

  He took the dying man from Blue and told him to go back. There was no need for him to remain and watch.

  Blue waved his hand and, ducking low, started back up again, rifle slung over his shoulder, feet scrabbling on the stones.

  Joseph bent to the man on the ground. He was gray-faced, but still breathing. There was no way of knowing if he was conscious enough to feel the pain, or understand what had happened to him, but Joseph spoke to him as if he did.

  “Hang on there,” he said calmly. “You’re in the first-aid station now. We’ll patch you up. Give you something for the pain, as soon as we get a bit further down.”

  The man’s eyelids fluttered. It might have been because he heard, or just a response to the agony in his body.

  Joseph took a wet rag and cleaned the man’s face gently. It was a totally pointless gesture in every practical sense, but it showed someone cared. If he was even half conscious he would at least know he was not alone.

  Ten minutes later he died, and Joseph moved to the next batch of wounded brought down. He helped medical orderlies, most of whom had little training. One was a veterinary surgeon from somewhere in New Zealand. He was skilled and worked with frantic dedication and an air of confidence. It was very reassuring to those who did not see his moments of panic as he reached for medicines and equipment he did not have, and fumbled now and then in human anatomy.

  “Thanks, Padre,” he said as Joseph handed him a bandage, then held the injured man’s white-knuckled hand while the wound was bound up. “Where’d you come from?” he went on conversationally. “You speak like a Pommie.” He finished his bandaging and eased the man up.

  Joseph leaned forward quickly to help, taking the man’s weight. “That’s right,” he agreed. “Cambridgeshire.”

  “You mean where they have the boat race?” His face lit up. “I’d like to see that.” He washed the bench down with creosol.

  “Actually they have it on the Thames, near London, but we row against Oxford, every year.”

  The vet grinned. “Don’t always win, though, do you!”

  “Not always,” Joseph conceded. He held the next man while the vet straightened a dislocated limb, but there was no time to wait for the waves of agony to pass before moving the man and starting on the next.

  “Train a lot of horses in Newmarket, don’t you?” the vet a
sked, jerking his head to indicate that he needed Joseph’s help lifting a dead man so he could reach the living. “Love horses. God, I hate to see them hurt!”

  Later Joseph helped carry the injured down to the beach and onto tenders to take them out to the hospital ships. It was there that he met Mason again, who was also exhausted and covered with blood. He had lost his hat, and his black hair was falling over his face. There was a gentleness in his hands as he lifted the wounded and eased them into half-decent positions of comfort that momentarily masked the savage rage inside him.

  It showed again later when close to exhaustion he stopped for an hour. He and Joseph sat together drinking scalding tea with rum in it, their backs against a pile of ammunition crates. Joseph was so tired every muscle in his body ached as if it had been wrenched and his bones had been bruised. Like Mason, he was caked in blood and his skin abraded by sand. It was an effort to hold the mug, but the rum in the tea was worth it.

  “The bastard who thought of this bloody fiasco should be made to be here!” Mason said through clenched teeth. His eyes stared far away, as if he could see something out toward the horizon, and everything closer was a blur.

  Joseph did not answer. Agreement was unnecessary. He sipped again and felt the fire slide down his throat and hit his stomach. This whole expedition was a nightmare from which he did not know how to waken. Perhaps life was the nightmare, and death was the awakening? Did the men who were slaughtered here open their eyes to some quiet place where they were whole again, with the people they loved around them, and no pain? Or was this all it was—hope and then disaster—and finally oblivion?

  Mason climbed to his feet stiffly and looked at the water, then slowly he started to walk toward it, taking his boots off, then his clothes as he went.

  Joseph did the same and followed after him, only half certain what he intended to do.

  Mason reached the edge, and without hesitation, waded in. When he was waist deep he bent and scooped it up in his hands and then poured it over his head. He did it again and again, as if to wash away more than the blood and dirt.

  He turned to look at Joseph, a couple of yards away.

  “Tell me, Chaplain, how much of this can be washed off? I could scrub down to the bone, but would all the seas of the earth take it out of my mind? I wonder if Churchill has read Macbeth? What do you think? Would his hands ‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’ with this bloody slaughter? There’s no victory, no sense, just death and more death.”

  He walked back to the shore, dragging his feet against the tide, and put on his clothes again. Joseph did the same, the fabric sticking to his wet body.

  “We’ll be out of here in the morning,” Mason said, his words terse. “In three days, if I’m not torpedoed by some bloody U-boat, I’ll be back in London and I’ll write a story that’ll get this insane carnage stopped. Once the nation knows what the truth is they’ll throw this government out.”

  “You can’t tell them what it’s like,” Joseph replied flatly. “Even if you could write a piece that would describe this . . .” He was too stiff to point, he just glanced around. “They wouldn’t publish it. It’s all censored. It has to be, or it would break the spirit at home. We’d get no more recruits.”

  “You want more men to come out and be slaughtered like this?” Mason asked, his eyes burning with accusation, but it sprang from his own raw, hurting anger, the inner wounds bleeding, not a desire to hurt Joseph.

  “I’d rather not have war at all,” Joseph replied. “But I didn’t get to choose.”

  “None of us did!” Mason said bitterly, bending to tie his bootlaces. “If we were told the truth, then perhaps we would have! At least we’d have gone into it with our eyes open.”

  “You can’t tell all the truth, only part of it,” Joseph pointed out. “Anything you say is going to be your judgment, what you see and feel. Do you have the right to decide what other people must know, when they can’t do anything to change it?”

  “I have more than the right,” Mason replied, straightening up. “I have the duty. We are a democracy, not a dictatorship. You can’t choose if you don’t know what the choices are.” He half turned to face Joseph, wincing as a strained muscle in his shoulder shot through with pain and he moved gingerly to ease it. “Tell me that you believe any sane man or woman in England would choose this,” he said the word with a savagery that tore the sound out of him, “if they knew what it was. Is this glory? Are these Rupert Brooke’s heroes, ’swimmers into cleanness leaping’ from this life to some mythical Valhalla? God in heaven, man! If you’ve any humanity at all, look at it! It’s worse than barbarity, it’s a hell only a civilized imagination could conceive! It’s a refinement of madness beyond the merely bestial.”

  “And is telling people at home going to help anything?” Joseph asked with quiet pain.

  Mason’s eyes blazed.

  “Of course it will! Men won’t volunteer for this if they know the truth. There’s nothing glorious in it! There’s nothing even useful! They’re dying because of incompetence! We aren’t going to take the Dardanelles, we aren’t going to take Constantinople, and we aren’t going to liberate the Russian Grand Fleet! The Eastern Fronts are going to be against the Italians, poor sods, and the Russians in the north—if anyone’s insane enough to try that. Napoleon failed. That should be a lesson to anyone.”

  Joseph smiled with a downward twist. “Now who’s being naive?”

  They reached the spot where they had sat before. Their mugs were still there. Mason picked up his and looked at the dregs. “You don’t think the kaiser will march against the tsar? This whole abattoir is a glorified family feud! They’re all bloody cousins!”

  “I meant,” Joseph corrected him, “that I don’t think anyone is instructed by the lessons of history.”

  Mason smiled at last, a curiously honest expression that suddenly shed years from his face. “Have another cup of tea? At least the rum’s real. Then we’ll go and see if we can get some of these poor devils out to the hospital ships. Not that they’ll be that much better off there! They can exchange being shot at for being seasick. Personally, I think I’d rather stay here and take my chances.” Without waiting for Joseph to answer, he took both mugs over to the field kitchen.

  Joseph relaxed a little. There was still time to try to make Mason see the terrible damage of what he intended. When they were at sea, away from this horror, he would be able to convince him that it would be wrong.

  They spent the rest of the daylight helping the wounded men who could walk, carrying those who couldn’t. It was backbreaking and heartrending work. Another three times Joseph struggled up the hillside himself to help more men down. He stepped in blood, tripped over bodies, sometimes only limbs or torsos, riddled with bullets or blown apart by shells. In the shallow trenches British, Australians, and Turks sometimes lay together, indistinguishable in the blood and earth. The smell of slaughter filled his mouth and throat and lungs. The wild thyme was gone; even the sharp sting of creosol couldn’t penetrate through the sick sweetness of blood.

  It was after midnight when he sank into a dazed exhaustion and the oblivion of sleep overtook him until dreams invaded it, full of torture and screaming.

  He awoke with a jolt to daylight and someone throwing a bucket of seawater in his face. Its saltiness was exquisitely clean. He gasped and sat up, struggling for breath.

  “There y’are, cobber!” a voice said cheerfully. “An’ there’s plenty more where that came from. But if yer ain’t broke your legs, yer can fetch it for yerself.”

  “Hey! It’s Holy Joe!” another more familiar voice added. “Let’s get the poor bleeder some breakfast. For a Pommie he wasn’t too bad last night.”

  Joseph clambered to his feet, pushing his hair off his face and wiping the water away. His body ached appallingly. “Thanks, but I need to find the journalist. He’s shipping out today, and I’m getting a lift with him. Thanks all the same.”

  “No you aren’t, sport! He left a
couple of hours ago!”

  Joseph froze. “What?”

  “Guns got your ears? He left a couple of hours ago—at least! He’s long gone—over the horizon on his way to Malta by now. You’ll have to take the next ship—whenever that is. Have a cup o’ tea!”

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  It was another twenty-four hours of frantic effort before Joseph could find a ship going as far as Malta that would take him as a passenger. He had to use all the persuasion he had to gain it, including his letters of authority from Matthew.

  He paced the deck as the shores of Gallipoli faded behind him and became an indistinct blur, Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay no longer distinguishable. Even the sound of guns was finally lost in the wash of the sea. The island of Samothrace towered to the south, its corona of mist gilded by the setting sun. Today the beauty of the past, the heroes, the love and hate of Troy, which used to be a safe island of retreat, were simply a legacy of epic words, with no healing left in them. The pain of the present drowned out all memory. The urgency of catching up with Richard Mason before he could hand his work to some irresponsible publisher made chaos of any other thoughts.

  If Joseph could just have time to talk to him, explain rationally the damage it would do! If he could make him understand what Ypres was really like, repeated over and over again through hundreds of trenches right across the Western Front, the courage and the loyalty of the men, the idea of putting off even one man from taking up arms to support them would be abhorrent to him.

  Men did not go into battle in cold blood but in the fever of the moment. The price was terrible, but the cost of failure was higher.

  He paced back and forth, unable to sit down, too tense to eat, too filled with nervous energy to sleep, until at last exhaustion overtook him lying in a narrow cot in a crewman’s quarters, while the man was on duty.