by Anne Perry
Mason put his hand up and pushed the heavy hair off his forehead. “You sound like the chaplain in the Cambridgeshires at Ypres, and an ambulance driver I know.”
“Woman driver?” Oldroyd asked him quietly.
“Yes.” Mason was surprised. Judith’s face was as clear in his mind as if they had parted only days ago rather than after the court-martial last year.
“Thought so.” Oldroyd nodded. “Women are as brave as any man. They die to save their own without a second thought. But then that’s love, isn’t it? Loyalty. Women never give up, not when it’s someone they love. Many a child wouldn’t be here if they did.” Oldroyd sipped his cider. “But a good woman’ll fight for anyone that’s hurt. It’s someone’s need that draws them, anything vulnerable.”
That was just what Joseph Reavley would have said. Mason knew it as he sat there in the crowded tavern with the voices and the laughter around him, the smell of ale, the sawdust, the light gleaming on pewter tankards hanging above the bar and horse brasses on the wall. That passion was what Judith looked for in a man because she had seen it and understood it in her brother. She had felt it herself and had carried its burden for years.
Then quite suddenly he realized that for all its weight, that passion was far less crushing than the doubt and sorrow he carried himself. He was looking at what he had lost, not at what he had won. It was not only Judith he had lost; it was something of the best in himself. No matter how difficult it was, or what comfort of surrender it cost him, he must change himself. He must become who he wanted to be: a man he could look at in the mirror with some sense of respect, at least for his aspirations, if not his accomplishments.
“Yes, you’re right,” he said aloud.
Oldroyd blinked again. “Of course I’m right, boy,” he said gently. “Except I was a bit above myself when I thought I could teach you, or anyone. You can tell people, that’s all. Life teaches, or it doesn’t. Be damn grateful you got the chance to try a bit harder. Where are you off to now?”
“Back to Ypres,” Mason replied without hesitation. “I have things to do there, before the end. Would you like another cider?”
Oldroyd pushed his glass across. “Seems like a good idea. Don’t mind if I do.”
Matthew Reavley crossed the English Channel on the night of October 13. He had told Shearing only that he was pursuing information about a British collaborator with the Germans, which was part of his job anyway. It would be time enough to speak of the Peacemaker if Schenckendorff really did provide proof of his identity.
The weather was overcast with a sharp wind and a choppy sea, but the physical discomfort was small compared with the constant danger of torpedo attack. Even at this late stage when surrender was only weeks away, the war at sea continued. Ships still went down. He stood on the deck staring toward the dark coast of Belgium ahead and willed himself not to think of it.
They disembarked at Dunkirk near dawn. He waited in a cold railway station until the first train eastward to Ypres. It stopped several miles short, where bombing had destroyed the tracks. He was tired and cold and very hungry, but rations were short and he was grateful for a tin mug of hot tea given him by an army cook at the railhead.
He was in uniform but had removed his insignia of the rank of lieutenant colonel, a recent promotion, and substituted that of major. It was less conspicuous. They had learned in the past that the Peacemaker had allies in the least expected places. Any rank was sufficient to ask for a lift toward the lines. “Intelligence service,” he said with a smile, to explain his absence of kit or weapons. “Trying to run down a traitor.”
“Before it’s too late, eh?” the young driver said with understanding. “Know where you want to be, sir? If I can help, I’ll be happy to. Nothing filthier than a man who turns against his own.”
“Gathering information—the man I need to see will be just behind the front lines.” Matthew cranked the engine for him, then climbed into the front seat. They pulled away onto the early-morning road, crowded mostly with wounded coming back toward the hospitals.
“Looking for anyone in particular?” The driver swerved expertly to avoid a loose dog running after small groups of wounded men on foot.
“I’ll start with the chaplain of the Cambridgeshires.” There was no point in being secretive about seeing Joseph. He would have to ask people for directions in order to find his brother. Evasion had become a habit with him. He didn’t like it—he found he was often evasive even when there was no need.
“Oh, Captain Reavley? You said your name was Reavley. He related to you, then?”
“My brother.” He was proud to say that, especially here, so close to the fighting.
The young man nodded and concentrated on the road ahead. It was muddy and potholed at best, at worst gouged out by mortar fire and littered with debris. In the ditch there were broken wheels and shafts from wagons, old boxes half decayed, and sometimes even the carcasses of animals, mostly horses. That was something that sickened Matthew more than he had expected it to. They looked so vulnerable, having loyally gone to the slaughter to service men’s rage and futility.
He could smell the front line long before they reached it. It was like nothing else he had ever known, thick and cloying. He gagged at the mixture of raw sewage and the sweet, stale odor of rotting flesh.
The driver glanced at him, then ahead again. “You’ll get used to it,” he said cheerfully. “I expect you’ll be sick the first few times you step on a corpse thrust up by the mud, especially if it’s been there for a year or two and you realize it’s one of our own. But you’ll get on with it.” He sniffed. “And if they’re right, it won’t be for much longer anyway. If you’re around in no-man’s-land, watch for craters. Some of them are pretty deep, and God knows what else is floating in them. Not much gas left now, but it’s heavy, sticks to the low bits, so stay higher an’ you’ll be all right. Don’t need to tell you about the barbed wire, you can work that out for yourself.”
Matthew studied him in the now-broad daylight. He was a lieutenant, and he looked by his build and the fine texture of his skin to be about eighteen or nineteen. But from the weariness in his eyes and the dry, painful humor of his voice he was an old man, long past his prime.
“Thank you,” Matthew replied. “I’ll probably just be speaking to people, prisoners coming through the lines. But I’ll remember your advice.”
“You’ll have to find the prisoners before you speak to them,” the driver pointed out. “Chaplain’s back at the Casualty Clearing Station now and then, but mostly he’s forward. I’ll take you as far as I can.”
Again Matthew thanked him.
They continued on in silence past columns of men walking slowly in the opposite direction. They moved as if half asleep, and their eyes seemed to see nothing. They put one foot before the other, shambling unevenly on the ruined road. Had they been lying down rather than standing, Matthew would have assumed them dead.
Suddenly he saw the human cost not in numbers of millions but individually, each an irretrievable loss. He was no longer aware of the stench, or the far distant noise of guns beyond the flat horizon as the armies moved inexorably forward, closing on the old battlegrounds and then at last moving toward Germany itself.
He had no wish to speak now, nor did he care if the young driver thought it was a squeamish stomach that held him silent. When they reached the field hospital, he thanked the driver, shook his hand, and jumped from the vehicle. Inside, he asked an orderly if he had any idea where Captain Reavley was. When that man could not help, he went to the next person, and the next. Finally a mild, good-natured American first-aid volunteer called Wil Sloan told him and offered, if he would work his passage by helping carry stretchers, to give him a lift farther forward to the station where Joseph was most likely to be.
“Known the chaplain since the Christmas of ’14,” Wil said with a smile as they started out. “I drive with his sister most of the time. I guess she must be your sister, too, eh?”
&
nbsp; Matthew swallowed hard. He could not think of Judith in this mud and rain, working day after day trying to do the impossible, seeing men die all around her. She had never spoken of it in the few times he had seen her at home on leave. Had she worked to forget? Or did she simply believe that he would never understand the reality, and that to allow anyone to believe less was a betrayal of the courage and the pain? If she had thought that, it would only have been the truth.
But then he never spoke of his work, either, because he was not allowed to. It was founded on lies and delusions: who could deceive the more efficiently and commit his own kind of betrayal.
Three times they got stuck in waterlogged craters, and Matthew had to climb out and help dig while Wil struggled with the steering wheel and the reluctant engine to get it started again. He was scratched, bruised, and splattered with mud by the time they finally reached the casualty dressing station where Joseph was. It was only a series of tents with some wooden duckboards to mark the walkways between. Even before locating his brother, however, he needed to fulfill his obligation to Wil and help load the stretchers into the ambulance.
He worked hard, slipping and staggering between the Evacuation tent and the parking area, trying desperately not to drop anyone. The loaded stretchers were not as heavy as he expected. Many of the wounded were only boys, light-boned, with no muscle on them yet. Their faces were hollow with shock. There seemed to be blood on everything.
He saw Joseph, knowing his outline from the angle of his shoulders and the way he stood, unconsciously favoring his right leg. Joseph gave no sign of having recognized him, but then he was not expecting to see Matthew here. He was absorbed in his work, seeming to know exactly where to be, what to say, and when he could help.
Matthew was awed by it. This was the older brother he had known all his life, and yet it was a stranger whose moral courage dwarfed his own. How could any man keep sane in this? There were broken bodies everywhere, ashen-faced, wounds hastily bound, the blood seeping through. He saw one soldier, not yet twenty, with a scarlet stump where his leg should have been.
Finally the rear door slammed shut and the ambulance jerked, stopped, then plunged forward, sending up sprays of mud. At last it picked up speed and disappeared into the rain. Matthew walked over to where Joseph was standing with the last of the walking wounded.
“Good afternoon, Chaplain,” he said quietly.
Joseph stood motionless, then slowly turned. He stared with momentary disbelief, then, as Matthew smiled at him, dawning joy.
“Matthew!” He clasped his hand and wrung it so hard, he crushed his fingers.
It was all Matthew could do not to cry out. At home he would have hugged him, but here in the midst of this absurd mixture of chaos and discipline, it seemed the wrong thing to do. “Hello, Joe,” he replied instead, grinning back.
“What are you doing here?” Joseph demanded. “The war’s not over, surely?” He looked momentarily bewildered. “They’re still fighting like hell ahead.” He gestured slightly eastward toward the old battlefield of the Ypres Salient, and beyond it Passchendaele, which was on the verge of being retaken. The German border was still miles away.
“Not yet,” Matthew answered. “Another three or four weeks at the most. That’s not why I came.” The excitement was sharp in his voice, and he could not control it.
Joseph looked at him, searching his eyes and finding no grief in them, no holding of darkness he needed to share. “The Peacemaker? You’ve found him?” His hand tightened again on Matthew’s.
“Almost,” Matthew answered. “In a day or two we’ll know. Get these men back to help of some kind, and I’ll tell you.”
Joseph was puzzled. “Why have you come instead of writing? He can’t be out here!”
“I’ll tell you,” Matthew replied. “Get your wounded to wherever they need to be.” He was still standing in the mud, and the rain was getting harder.
Reluctantly Joseph obeyed, knowing which had the greater urgency. It was gathering dusk before they sat together in Joseph’s bunker, shivering over a Dixie can of hot, muddy tea.
“Well?” Joseph demanded.
The rattle of guns was muted, far in the distance forward, but every now and then one of the big howitzers sent over a shell the weight of three grown men, which exploded close to them, shaking the ground and sending up massive gouts of earth.
“A messenger came to see me.” Matthew swallowed and tried to conceal his distaste at the oily residue in the tea. At least the warmth of it eased the clenched muscles inside him. “A Swiss priest, or that was how he was dressed. He said the Peacemaker’s ally in Germany, Manfred von Schenckendorff, is going to come through the lines at whatever point I would suggest. I said here, of course. He’ll give himself up, so we can take him to London to expose the Peacemaker to the government. To Lloyd George personally.”
“What?” Joseph stared at him, his face almost comical with disbelief in the yellow light of the lamp. “And you believed him? Matthew…”
Suddenly Matthew’s elation vanished. Was he so hungry for justice, before it was too late, that all sense of reality had left him? “Think about it!” he said huskily, feeling the heat burn up his face. “Half of Europe is ruined. America has lost more than three hundred thousand men killed, wounded, or missing, but we’ve lost over three million! Germany’s lost twice as many, and Austria-Hungary even more. The estimates we have altogether are beyond thirty-five million. God Almighty, Joe, what man with even a shred of sanity left could ever bear to imagine that happening again?”
Joseph closed his eyes, overwhelmed by the vision.
“The Peacemaker is planning to urge a settlement that will allow Germany to rise and begin it all over again,” Matthew went on. “He hasn’t forgotten his dream of dominion that would force peace on us all, but at the cost of strangling our spirits until we have no individuality left, only police to keep the law.”
“And does this Schenckendorff believe he’ll do that?” Joseph asked. “Why now? Why did he not see that years ago, or always?”
Matthew searched his mind and answered reluctantly. “Perhaps it was a dream with some nobility in the beginning. If I had ever seen war, real war like this, I might have done almost anything to prevent it happening again.”
“Sold out your countrymen, without asking them if it was what they wanted?” Joseph’s voice was quiet, his face bleak. “Or if they understood the price?”
“Nobody understands,” Matthew replied. “You can’t imagine…this!” He swung his arm around vaguely to indicate the battlefield beyond the clay walls of the dugout. “It’s a human abattoir. I don’t know if you believe in heaven anymore, but you must believe in hell!”
Joseph smiled faintly. “I believe in summer nights with the sky pale with stars, and in the poplars at sunset, and in spring the beech woods carpeted with bluebells so dense you can’t put your foot down between them. I believe in clean water and a quiet bed, in laughter and gentleness. I believe that some men have the courage and the honor to face anything at all, and die without self-pity or complaint. I believe in the possibility of friendship, the love that never betrays. That’s as close to heaven as I can grasp at the moment.”
Matthew sighed. “Schenckendorff is coming through the lines here. He knows your name, naturally. You should hear what he has to say. I expect your German is better than mine, colloquial anyway. Mine’s a little rusty. Don’t get enough practice. And I might need your help with the mechanics of getting to him, and making certain I can get him out of here and back to London.” He looked at Joseph gravely. “We’re so close to it, it would be easy to forget that the Peacemaker might still think he has a chance to win, and take the chance to kill him—and us.”
Joseph winced. “I suppose he could. Why should anyone think themselves safe here?”
Matthew started to laugh, then stopped.
“Nothing we can do except wait.” Joseph finished his tea as if it were fit to drink.
Joseph had
one of the better dugouts, and he made room for his brother in it. At least it was dry. But he slept badly that night, excited as always to have seen Matthew, wondering if he was sleeping or only pretending to. He was concerned for his welfare in the filth and danger he was unaccustomed to. Joseph lay in the dark of the familiar space, knowing where everything was, the rickety table, the one chair, the shelf with his books and the picture of Dante Alighieri, who had written so brilliantly about a different hell.
Joseph was the eldest of the four siblings. He was quite aware that worrying had become a habit with him, and had increased since his father’s death. He was not ready for the responsibility of caring for the other three, foreseeing dangers, comforting loss, finding a reason and an answer for pain. There was no answer, but you did not tell that to people you loved, and who had learned to rely on you. He was the wrong man to have chosen the church as a calling, but there was no way out now.
What if this Schenckendorff was one more trick of the Peacemaker’s? Matthew had looked so excited, so hopeful, all because some man had turned up on his doorstep in London and said he was a Swiss priest! Anyone could say that. Heaven help him, Joseph had said exactly that himself when he had been behind the German lines last year. He had been believed, too.
They wanted to find the Peacemaker so desperately, and time was running out. After the war was over, what chance would they have? Still, if he were honest, what chance had they ever had? Maybe their hunger for revenge was the Peacemaker’s final act of destruction of the Reavley family?
He drifted into half sleep and confused dreams. Then without any warning it was daylight. Cold and stiff, moving as quietly as he could, he got up, shaved, and began the long routine of paperwork, letters of condolence, and helping the wounded. He tried to comfort, advise, assist with practical things like eating or drinking with bandaged hands, or none at all, dressing with a shattered arm or leg, simple tasks that had suddenly become monumental.
