At Some Disputed Barricade wwi-4

by Anne Perry

  Despite Joseph’s sympathy for General Northrup, it was the sight of Morel that bit most deeply into his emotions. He could remember the youthful Morel arriving at Cambridge his first year. The man he was now—honed hard by mental and physical suffering, the isolation of leadership, the rigor of living with his own decisions—was not even foreshadowed in him then. That had been only five years ago, but when the world was still young.

  Morel should have been graduating this year, and wondering what to do with his life! Instead he was standing in a farmhouse near Ypres expecting to face a firing squad of his own countrymen, because he had rebelled against what he believed passionately to be wrong. Was there any way on earth Joseph could make that argument in his defense?

  Morel stood straight now, at attention as the charges were repeated.

  The farmhouse room was full of men, and a few women from among the nurses and V.A.D. corps. The three officers were seated behind the wooden table. Joseph and Faulkner were at separate tables immediately in front.

  Joseph still had only the barest idea what he was going to say. He was reluctant to think of departing from the truth on moral grounds, and in practical terms that course was far too dangerous. To be caught in even an evasion would destroy the only advantage he had, which was the hope of understanding. If they had any defense at all, then it was that their act had been driven by a moral necessity.

  The preliminary formalities were over. Faulkner rose to his feet, but did not move from behind his table. He had a curious quality of stiffness that was apparent from the very beginning. He made no gestures with his hands nor did he even seem to alter the weight of his body from one foot to the other.

  He called his first witness: the medical orderly who had initially examined Howard Northrup’s body. The man was manifestly unhappy, but the facts were not contestable. Northrup had died as the result of a rifle bullet to the head. It had struck him through the brow. He had to have been facing forward at the time.

  “Let me understand you clearly, Corporal Tredway,” Faulkner said heavily. “Whoever fired the shot was standing in front of Major Northrup, looking straight at him?”

  “Yes, sir.” Tredway gulped. He had no room for evasion, although he would clearly like to have had.

  “Head up?” Faulkner persisted. “Head down? Turning, ducking?”

  “No, sir,” Tredway said wretchedly.

  “And you know this how?”

  “Path of the bullet, sir. Straight through and out at the back, sir.”

  “And the distance the man with the gun stood from Major Faulkner when he fired the shot?”

  General Hardesty looked inquiringly at Joseph, but Joseph made no objection.

  “The distance?” Faulkner repeated.

  “Hard to say, sir,” Tredway answered.

  “Touching him? Fifty feet? Half a mile?” Faulkner raised his eyebrows.

  “Most like fifty feet, sir.”

  “How do you know this, Corporal?”

  “’Cos o’ the wound, sir. An’ how far the bullet went through.”

  “And can you tell the kind of gun it was fired from? At least whether it was a handgun or a rifle? A British gun or a German one? Or French, perhaps?”

  “We’ve got no French ’ere, sir,” Tredway said tartly. “They’re up farther to the east.” There was clear contempt in his voice for Faulkner’s ignorance. He was a man who shuffled papers, not one who fought.

  “I was thinking of the gun itself, Corporal,” Faulkner corrected him. “Not the nationality of the man who fired it.”

  There was a rustling in the room. Someone coughed.

  Tredway flushed. “A rifle, sir.”

  “British?”

  “Couldn’t say, sir.” His jaw set hard.

  “A rifle, possibly British, fired at apparently fifty feet,” Faulkner summarized. “Thank you, Corporal.” He gestured to invite Joseph to ask his questions.

  Joseph stood up. Now that the moment had come he felt a sort of calm hopelessness. “Corporal Tredway, your knowledge is impressive, although I imagine after three years’ active service you have seen a great many wounds of all sorts? Rifle, revolver, pistol, shrapnel, shell splinters, even injuries caused by explosions, overturning gun carriages, panicking horses…”

  Faulkner stared at him with mounting irritation.

  Hardesty winced but did not interrupt. His expression suggested pity more than anger.

  “Yes, Chaplain…I mean…Captain Reavley,” Tredway said, frowning.

  “Any way to tell if they are caused by accident or by malice, Corporal?” Joseph asked.

  “No, sir,” Tredway said, meeting Joseph’s eyes squarely. There was a flicker in them, as if he might have thought of smiling. “’Cept for horses panicking, like. That’s almost always accident. They don’t often do it maliciously. They’re better than people, that way.”

  There was a slight ripple of laughter in the room.

  Faulkner’s face tightened.

  “And gun carriages,” Tredway added. “That’s more likely accident, down to stupidity…sir. They don’t have no malice neither.”

  Joseph preempted Faulkner. “But gunshots would be most likely intended, I assume. Is there any way you can tell, from the injury itself?”

  “No, sir. None at all, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  Faulkner declined to pursue the issue. General Hardesty also did not take up his right to question the witness. He looked around slowly, gauging the emotion of the court, and perhaps judged correctly that almost to a man they were in sympathy with the accused. They would have to be forced or tricked into giving any evidence against them if it could be withheld, misinterpreted, or simply denied.

  But Joseph knew it was a shallow victory. In the end it was the officers who would decide, not the men who crowded the benches or stood at the back waiting, their hands clenched, faces tense. There was no jury, no public opinion. Those who attended were either witnesses called or men who were off the front line due to injury.

  The next witness took the stand. He recounted who he had seen—and where—on the day of Northrup’s death. He was neatly tricked by Faulkner into stating that most of the men charged, and Cavan in particular, had not been at their usual posts in the early evening. In fact, Cavan had not been in any of the places he usually was at that hour. The man’s testimony, intended to help, went to indicate that Cavan behaved out of character, and that no one knew where he was.

  Joseph knew he would not improve the situation by questioning the man; more likely it would make it more obvious that he was lying in an attempt to save Cavan.

  Hardesty looked as if he was aware that emotion was having a far larger effect than the facts, but he did not intervene.

  Faulkner called more men and elicited similar responses, building a picture of curious and unexplained behavior that night. Each piece was minute, but placed carefully together, as Faulkner did, they were like the fractions of a mosaic, and the picture was chillingly clear. Twelve men were unable to find a single witness as to where they were. The conclusion was only implicit, but it sank with deeper and deeper weight on everyone in the hot and overcrowded room.

  There was a brief recess. Joseph saw Judith come in. Actually what he saw was the crowded men move to make space for her, and then the light on the fair streaks of her hair, bleached from when the summer had been bright, before the battle at Passchendaele, and the rain. Their eyes met. She was frightened, but had he not known her so well he would not have seen it in her pale face.

  The court resumed.

  Faulkner began calling his other witnesses. This was the most difficult part for him, far worse than any defense Joseph might mount. He must prove some kind of motive for such a terrible and self-destructive act as mutiny, and by officers, in particular, who had until that time shown exemplary service. There cannot have been a man in the room, or beyond it in the regiment, who was not burningly aware that Cavan had been put up for the Victoria Cross. Compared wi
th him Howard Northrup was both a moral coward and a military fool.

  At the same time Faulkner must not allow anyone to suggest that Northrup had deserved his fate, or even that he was seriously incompetent. It must seem that every other man faced with the same situations might have given the same orders, with the same results. There must be motive, but no justification. It was a delicate balance, but he stood on the balls of his feet, weight slightly forward, voice confident.

  Joseph looked over to where General Northrup sat, his face so pale the shadows under his eyes looked like old bruises. His lips were tight, his nose pinched as if he had long carried an inner pain which had finally come to a crisis.

  Joseph turned away. To stare at a man in such distress was intrusive, the more so because Joseph would only add to it when circumstance allowed him. There was little room for compassion here, perhaps none at all. It was deeply against his instinct to strike at a man whose grief he had seen so openly, who had possibly even trusted him. But gentleness toward one now might yield the death of the others, and his loyalties could not be divided. Everyone else in the court might be evenhanded, but his duty could be only to the men whose champion he was.

  Faulkner was careful in his questioning, almost to a fault. He called men as witnesses who had been on the edge of incidents, and were not caught up emotionally. By presenting such a bland view he showed that he was not ignoring the incidents. He conceded that they had occurred, robbing Joseph of the need to and if Joseph were to then call men who gave very different accounts, they would be seen as biased.

  Their closeness would in itself color their views and they could easily be suspected of leaning too far in the opposite direction, of seeing fault in Northrup simply to justify the actions of their friends who now faced judgment. Joseph saw the trap, and yet he still feared overbalancing into it.

  His hands clammy and his chest tight, he rose to cross-examine the third witness, a young soldier who had been at the front only a matter of three months. He came from the Derbyshire Peak District and had no ties with Cambridgeshire.

  “Private Black,” Joseph began. “You have given us a clear account of this unfortunate accident with the gun carriage, which you say some of the men felt was Major Northrup’s fault. You saw nothing to suggest that it was?”

  “No, sir,” Black replied. He looked uncomfortable and confused. He was very young, perhaps sixteen.

  “But you say they were extremely angry?”

  “Yes, sir. At least, they were cussing a lot, and swore he was…well…not up to much as a soldier.”

  “Did anyone suggest that he should take advice in the matter from some of the more experienced men?”

  “I dunno, sir.”

  “Are you quite sure about that, Private Black?”

  Black glanced at Faulkner, then back at Joseph. It seemed to occur to him for the first time that he was out of his depth, and that whatever Faulkner promised him, it was the men of his own regiment whom he would have to live with, and very possibly die with. He stood fidgeting slightly, clenching and unclenching his hands.

  Joseph could not afford to be sorry for him. Everyone in the room—and especially the officers who would have to make the judgment—must surely have seen that look.

  “Do you know why you in particular were asked to give evidence today?” Joseph pressed his advantage.

  “No, sir.”

  “You did not have a particularly good view of the accident?”

  “No, sir.” Black was now visibly unhappy.

  “Nor much knowledge of field guns, horses, mud, bad weather?”

  Black was sweating. “No, sir. I only just got here, sir.”

  “Did you volunteer to testify?”

  “No, sir!” That was from the heart.

  “I see. Perhaps you simply represent a certain point of view, a very impartial one?” Joseph suggested.

  “I think impartiality is what we are seeking, is it not?” Faulkner interrupted coldly. “It is the indulgence of emotion and personal opinion over obedience, discipline, and loyalty which has brought us to this place.”

  “Impartiality perhaps,” Joseph said, knowing his voice was rough-edged with the power of his own feelings. “But not apathy, indifference, or, above all, total ignorance.” He stopped himself from continuing only with an intense effort. In spite of himself, of seeing it open in front of him and knowing its exact nature, he was still overbalancing into the trap.

  Faulkner smiled. “I have nothing further to ask Private Black,” he said.

  Hardesty turned to Black.

  “Did you hear talk of mutiny, Private?”

  “No, sir!”

  “Simply distress at an accident?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  He was excused, and Faulkner proceeded with perhaps a little less assuredness. He called more witnesses of military misjudgment, lack of knowledge or foresight, but always making it seem like no more than the misfortunes of combat that happened all the time, and to other men as well as Northrup. He built up a careful picture of resentful men who were desperate to escape the battle line, to blame someone else for their pain and fear, and their helplessness to alter the terrible fate ahead of them.

  The case closed for the day.

  Joseph left the farmhouse and walked alone back toward his dugout. It was more than four miles, but he wanted the time alone to think. If there was to be justice then eleven of the twelve men would be found guilty of no more than insubordination, and that even with understanding; but Howard Northrup would not be exposed to the whole army as an arrogant and incompetent man, a failure. He had been placed by circumstances into a position he was not suited to fill. Possibly an ambitious father who saw what he wished to was additionally responsible. But was there any justice served by forcing him, publicly, to see every bitter moment of his own mistakes, and what they had cost?

  Joseph would like to have saved them all.

  He trudged through the mud in the dying sun, refusing to accept that it was impossible. Was he capable of virtually crucifying General Northrup?

  If he did not, then his evasion, his cowardice, would condemn Cavan and Morel and the others. And it could also betray the rest of the regiment who trusted him to fight for them all. And they did see the fate of them all in whatever happened to the twelve, he had seen that in their eyes, the tension in their movements, the questions they did not ask. They believed they knew him.

  Perhaps that was the decision made. He could strip the defenses for Howard Northrup, and those from his father, as far as he had to. He would be careful to say nothing but the truth. That was bitter!

  No, it wasn’t! The fact that in one man’s opinion something was true, or part of a truth, did not rob him of judgment whether to speak it or not. The responsibility was still his. It was the ultimate hypocrisy to shelter behind morality instead of standing before it.

  He reached the lines, ate a brief meal of stew and hard bread already beginning to mold, then walked through the mud to his dugout. He read for a little while, and finally fell asleep after three in the morning, with the words crying out in his mind “Father, help me!” but no idea of what that help could be.

  The next day began with Faulkner once again calling witnesses from among the men who had been at the front only a short time and had no personal loyalty to Morel or to Cavan, and no friendship with the other men of the Cambridgeshire regiments.

  Within the first half hour, his questions turned in the direction Joseph had dreaded from the beginning. “Why,” Faulkner asked, “if the accused men were not guilty as charged, did they escape custody and flee the battlefield, and try to reach neutral Switzerland? And what is more interesting—how did that escape occur?”

  Joseph was cold to the pit of his stomach. Had he underestimated Faulkner in thinking he did not know that Judith and Wil Sloan had helped them? Was he looking for someone to betray that? Was he trying to apply pressure on Joseph that would force him to lie to protect them both, and thus expose himse
lf as a passionately interested party doing everything he could to conceal a crime out of personal motives?

  Was that why they had chosen Joseph to defend the men? Because he had the ultimate weakness and they had known it all along? How blindly, arrogantly stupid he had been! Yet again he had walked, open-eyed, into total betrayal! And not only Cavan, Morel, and the other men, but Judith and Wil Sloan would pay for it with their lives.

  Now he was angry, deeply and passionately angry. He was sweating. The room seemed to roar in his ears as if he were underwater. Surely the Germans had not advanced far enough to make the room ring and tremble like this?

  Faulkner was questioning one of the guards who had kept the prisoners in the farmhouse rooms. The man stared back stolidly, answering exactly as required.

  “Yes, sir, Captain Morel refused to give his word, sir, so we had no choice but to lock him up.”

  “But separately, not with the other ranks?” Faulkner clarified.

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “And he escaped?”

  “Looks that way, sir.”

  Faulkner’s eyebrows shot up. “You have some doubt, Corporal Teague?”

  “Only know he was there in the evening, an’ gone the next morning, sir,” Teague replied blankly. “Don’t seem likely he was abducted.”

  There was a snigger of laughter around the room.

  Faulkner flushed. “You find this amusing, Corporal?” he said icily. “We are investigating a man’s death!”

  “Holy God!” Teague exploded, his face suddenly white. He swung his arm out in a generally northeast direction. “We got a thousand men out there dying every single bloody day!” he shouted. “One idiot officer gets a clean bullet in his brain, or what passes for one in his case, and you become righteously indignant, as if it never happened before? I got no bloody idea what happened to him, and I don’t sodding care!”

  His voice was growing more strident. “Good men got crippled or killed because he was too stiff-necked to let anyone tell him what he didn’t know. And God ’elp ’em if they tried! If someone bust them out, I don’t know who it was. They give me a clip on the back of the head, an’ I don’t blame them one bit, but I never saw their faces.” He flung his arm out to point at the accused men, but still stared defiantly at Faulkner. “Haven’t you got something better to do than stand here arguing the toss over those poor sods? We’re going to lose the war ’cos you lot shot us from behind!”