Shoulder the Sky

To my stepfather,

Major W. A. B. “Bill” Perry,

one of the last officers to leave the beaches of Dunkirk,

June 1940

If here today the cloud of thunder lours

Tomorrow it will hie on far behests;

The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours

Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust

Are from eternity, and shall not fail.

Bear them we can, and if we can we must.

Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

—A. E. Housman

CHAPTER

ONE

It was shortly after three in the afternoon. Joseph Reavley was half asleep in the April sun, his back to the pale clay wall of the trench, when he heard the angry voices.

“They be moi boots, Tucky Nunn, an’ you know that well as Oi do! Yours be over there wi’ holes in ’em!” It was Plugger Arnold, a seasoned soldier of twenty, big-boned, a son of the village blacksmith. He had been in Flanders since the outbreak of war in August. Although he was angry, he kept his voice low. He knew it carried in the afternoon stillness when the men snatched the three or four hours of sleep they could.

The German trenches were only seventy yards away across this stretch of the Ypres Salient. Anyone foolish enough to reach a hand up above the parapet would be likely to get it shot. The snipers seldom needed a second chance. Added to which, getting yourself injured on purpose was a court-martial offense.

Tucky Nunn, nineteen and new this far forward, was standing on the duckboards that floored the trench. They were there to keep the men’s feet above the icy water that sloshed around, but they seldom worked. The water level was too high. Every time you thought it was drying out at last, it rained again.

“Yeah?” Tucky said, his eyebrows raised. “Fit me perfect, they do. Didn’t see your name on ’em. Must ’ave wore off.” He grinned, making no move to bend and unlace the offending boots and hand them back.

Plugger was sitting half sideways on the fire-step. A few yards away the sentry was standing with his back to them, staring through the periscope over the wire and mud of no-man’s-land. He could not afford to lose concentration even for a moment, regardless of what went on behind him.

“They’s moi boots,” Plugger said between his teeth. “Take ’em off yer soddin’ feet an’ give ’em back to me, or Oi’ll take ’em off yer and give yer to the rats!”

Tucky bounced on the balls of his feet, hunching his shoulders a little. “You want to try?” he invited.

Doughy Ward crawled out of his dugout, fully dressed, as they all were: webbing and rifle with bayonet attached. His fair-skinned face was crumpled with annoyance at being robbed of any part of his few hours of sleep. He glared at Joseph. “ ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Isn’t that right, Chaplain?”

It was a demand that even here in the mud and the cold, amid boredom and sporadic violence, Joseph should do his job and stand for the values of justice that must remain, or all this would sink into a purposeless hell. Without right and wrong there was no sanity.

“Oi didn’t steal them!” Tucky said angrily. “They were . . .” He did not finish the sentence because Plugger hit him, a rolling blow that caught the side of his jaw as he ducked and struck back.

There was no point in shouting at them, and the sound would carry. Added to which Joseph did not want to let the whole trench know that there was a discipline problem. Both men could end up on a charge, and that was not the way for a chaplain to resolve anything. He moved forward, careful to avoid being struck himself, and grasped hold of Tucky, taking him off balance and knocking him against the uprights that held the trench wall.

“The Germans are that way!” he said tartly, jerking his head back toward the parapet and no-man’s-land beyond.

Plugger was up on his feet, slithering in the mud on the duckboards, his socks filthy and sodden. “Good oidea to send him over the top, Captain, where he belongs! But not in moi boots!” He was floundering toward them, arms flailing as if to carry on the fight.

Joseph stepped between them, risking being caught by both, the worst part of which would be that then a charge would be unavoidable. “Stop it!” he ordered briskly. “Take the boots off, Nunn!”

“Thank you, Chaplain,” Plugger responded with a smile of satisfaction.

Tucky stood unmoving, his face set, ignoring the blood. “They ain’t his boots oither!” he said sullenly, his eyes meeting Joseph’s.

A man appeared around the dogleg corner. No stretch of the trench was more than ten or twelve yards long, to prevent shellfire taking out a whole platoon of men—or a German raiding party making it through the wire. They were steep-sided, shored up against mud slides, and barely wide enough for two men to pass each other. The man coming was tall and lean with wide shoulders, and he walked with a certain elegance, even on the sloping duckboards. His face was dark, long-nosed, and there was a wry humor in it.

“Early for tea, aren’t you?” he asked, his eyes going from one to another.

Tucky and Plugger reluctantly stood to attention. “Yes, Major Wetherall,” they said almost in unison.

Sam Wetherall glanced down at Plugger’s stockinged feet, his eyebrows raised. “Thinking of creeping up on the cook, are you? Or making a quick recce over the top first?”

“Soon as Oi get moi boots back from that thievin’ sod, Oi’ll put ’em on again,” Plugger replied, gesturing toward Tucky.

“I’d wash them first if I were you,” Sam advised with a smile.

“Oi will,” Plugger agreed. “Oi don’t want to catch nothin’!”

“I meant your feet,” Sam corrected him.

Tucky Nunn roared with laughter, in spite of the bruise darkening on his jaw where Plugger had caught him.

“Whose boots are they?” Joseph asked, smiling as well.

“Moine!” both men said together.

“Whose boots are they?” Joseph repeated.

There was a moment’s silence.

“Oi saw ’em first,” Plugger answered.

“You didn’t take them,” Tucky pointed out. “If you ’ad, you’d ’ave them now, wouldn’t you!”

“Come on, Solomon.” Sam looked at Joseph, his mouth pulled into an ironic twist.

“Right,” Joseph said decisively. “Left boot, Nunn. Right boot, Arnold.”

There was considerable grumbling, but Tucky took off the right boot and passed it over, reaching for one of the worn boots where Plugger had been sitting.

“Shouldn’t have had them off now anyway,” Sam said disapprovingly. “You know better than that. What if Fritz’d made a sudden attack?”

Plugger’s eyebrows shot up, his blue eyes wide open. “At half past three in the afternoon? It’s teatoime in a minute. They may be soddin’ Germans, but they’re not uncivilized. They still got to eat an’ sleep, same as us.”

“You stick your head up above the parapet, and you’ll find he’s nowhere near asleep, I promise you,” Sam warned.

Tucky was about to reply when there was a shouting about twenty yards along the line, and a moment later a young soldier lurched around the corner, his face white. He stared at Sam.

“One of your sappers has taken half his hand off!” he said, his voice high-pitched and jerky.

“Where is he, Charlie?” Joseph said quickly. “We’ll get him to the first-aid post.”

Sam was rigid. “Who is it?” He started forward, pushing ahead of both of them, ignoring the rats scattering in both directions.

Charlie Gee swiveled and went on his heels. Joseph stopped to duck into the connecting trench leading back to the second line, and pick out a first-aid pack in case they needed more than the field dressing the wounded man should be carrying himself.

When he caught up with them Sam was bent over, one arm around a man sitting on the duckboards. The sapper was rocking back and forth, clutching the stump of his hand to his chest, scarlet blood streaming from it.

Joseph had lost count of how many wounded and dead he had seen, but each man’s horror was new, and real, and it looked as if in this case the man might have lost a good deal of his right hand.

Sam was ashen, his jaw clenched so tight the muscles stood out like cords. “We have to see it, Corliss!” His voice shook in spite of everything he could do to steady it. “We have to stop the bleeding!” He looked at Joseph, his eyes desperate.

Joseph tore open the dressing and, speaking gently to the injured man, took his hand and without examining it, pressed the bandage and the lint over the streaming wound, then bound it as well as he could. He had very little idea how many fingers were left.

“Come on, ol’ feller,” Charlie said, trying to help Corliss to his feet. “Oi’ll get you back to the doc’s and they’ll do it for you proper.”

Sam climbed to his feet and pulled Joseph aside as Charlie and Corliss stumbled past.

“Joe, can you go with them?” Sam said urgently. He swallowed, gulping. “Corliss is in a hell of a state. He’s been on the edge of funking it for days. I’ve got to find out what happened, put in a report, but the medics’ll ask him what caused it. . . . Answer for him, will you?” He stopped, but it was painfully apparent he wanted to say more.

Suddenly Joseph understood. Sam was terrified the man had injured himself deliberately. Some men panicked, worn down by fear, cold, and horror, and put their hands up above the parapet precisely so a sniper would get them. A hand maimed was “a Blighty one,” and they got sent home. But if it was self-inflicted, it was considered cowardice in the face of the enemy. It warranted a court-martial, and possibly even the death sentence. Corliss’s nerves may have snapped. It happened to men sometimes. Anything could trigger a reaction: the incessant noise of bombardment, the dirt, body lice. For some it was waking in the night with rats crawling over your body—or worse, your face. The horror of talking one moment to a man you had grown up with, the next seeing him blown to bits, perhaps armless and legless but still alive, taking minutes of screaming in agony to die. It was more than some could take. For others it was the guilt of knowing that your bullet, or your bayonet, was doing the same to a German you had never met, but who was your own age, and essentially just like you. Sometimes they crept over no-man’s-land at night and swapped food. Occasionally you could even hear them singing. Different things broke different men. Corliss was a sapper. It could have been the claustrophobia of crawling inside the tunnels under the earth, the terror of being buried alive.

“Help him,” Sam begged. “I can’t go . . . and they won’t believe me anyway.”

“Of course.” Joseph did not hesitate. He grasped Sam’s arm for an instant, then turned and made his way back over the duckboards to the opening of the communication trench. Charlie Gee and Corliss were far enough ahead of him to be out of sight around one of the numerous dogleg bends. He hurried, his feet slithering on the wet boards. In some places chicken wire had been tacked over them to give a grip, but no one had bothered here. He must catch up with them before they reached the supply trench and someone else started asking questions.

Morale was Joseph’s job, to keep up courage and belief, to help the injured, too often the dying. He wrote letters home for those who could not, either through injury, or inability to put to words emotions that overwhelmed them, and for which there was no common understanding. He tried to offer some meaning to pain almost beyond bearing. They were already in the ninth month of the bitterest and most all-consuming war the world had even seen.

To begin with they had believed it would be over by Christmas, but that had been December of 1914. Now, four months later, the British Expeditionary Force of almost one hundred thousand men was wiped out, either dead or injured, and it was critical that new recruits be found. Kitchener had called for a million men, and they would be fresh, healthy, not having endured a winter in the open in the unceasing cold and rain. They would not have lice, swollen and peeling feet, or a dozen other miseries to debilitate them.

Joseph crossed the reserve trench and saw men moving. A soldier was singing to himself, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” as he poured water out of a petrol can, wrinkling his nose at the smell. He balanced the Dixie tin over a precarious arrangement of candles to heat it. He raised a hand to Joseph and smiled without distracting his attention from his task.

The men in this segment were from the Cambridgeshire villages around Joseph’s home of Selborne St. Giles. Most of them knew each other by their local nicknames. Joseph was thirty-five, and for the years leading up to the war had been a lecturer in biblical languages at St. John’s College in Cambridge. Before that he had been in the ministry. He knew most of these men’s families. His own youngest sister, Judith, was twenty-four, older than many of these. He thought of her with a twisting confusion of emotions. He was intensely proud of her that she had volunteered to use her one distinctive skill, driving, to come here and work wherever she could help. She had been both a joy and a menace on the roads at home, but here she coped with the mud, the breakdowns, the long hours, and the horror of wounded and dying men with a courage he had not known she possessed.

The trench was climbing a bit, and drier. The slit of sky overhead was blue, with a thin drift of clouds, like mares’ tails.

Joseph was afraid for Judith in many ways. The obvious danger of injury or even death was only a part of it. There was also the vulnerability of the mind and heart to the destruction around her, the drowning in pain, the loss of so many young men, and the inability of the ambulances to do more than carry them from one place to another, very often too late. He knew the questions that tormented his own mind. No sane person could be wholehearted about war, not if they had seen it. It was one thing to stand in England in the early spring with the hedgerows beginning to bud, wild birds singing and daffodils in the gardens and along the banks under the trees, and speak of the nobility of war. It was an idea, at times even a noble one. Most people despised the thought of surrender.

Out here it was a reality. You froze most of the time. You were always cold and usually wet. All waking hours were occupied with monotonous routine: carrying, cleaning, digging, shoring up walls, trying to heat food and find drinkable water. You were always tired. And then there were the short interludes of horror: fear crawling in your stomach, shattering noise, and the blood and the pain, men dead, young men you had known and liked. Some would still be crippled long after the war passed into history; the nightmares would never be over for them.

Germany had invaded Belgium, and a matter of honor rested on it. Invasion was wrong; that was the one thing about which there was no question in anyone’s mind. But the few German soldiers he had seen were in every way but uniform indistinguishable from the young Englishman beside him. They were young, tired, dirty, and confused like everyone else.

When a successful raiding party captured someone and brought him back, Joseph had often been chosen to question him because before the war he had spent time in Germany and spoke the language not only fluently but with pleasure. Looking back on those times now was a wrenching, muddled sort of pain. He had been treated with such courtesy, laughed with them, shared their food. It was the land of Beethoven and Goethe, of science and philosophy, of vast myths and dreams. How could they now be doing this to each other?

Joseph turned the last corner and went up a couple of steps where he caught up with Charlie Gee and Corliss, but the trench was still too narrow for him to help. Two men could barely walk side by side, let alone three.

The main dressing station was in a tent a few yards away. At least it was dry, and no more of a target than any other structure. It was quite spacious inside. After a bad raid they had to deal with dozens of men, moving them in and out as rapidly as ambulances could take them back to proper hospitals. Just now there was a lull. There were only two men inside, gray-faced, their uniforms bloodstained, waiting to be moved.

Charlie Gee gave a shout and a young doctor appeared, saw Corliss and immediately went to him. “Come on, we’ll get that fixed up,” he said calmly. His eyes flickered to Joseph and then back again. It was easy enough to see in his haggard face, hollow-eyed, the fear that a hand wound was self-inflicted.

Joseph moved forward quickly. “We did what we could to help the bleeding, Doctor, but I don’t know exactly what happened. He’s a sapper, so I imagine something collapsed underground. Maybe one of the props gave way.”

The doctor’s face eased a little. “Right.” He turned back to Corliss and took him inside.

Joseph thanked Charlie Gee and watched him amble back up the connecting trench toward the front line again.

An ambulance pulled up, a square-bodied Ford model T, a bit like a delivery van. It was open at the front, with a closed part at the back that could carry up to five men, laid out in stretchers, more if they were sitting up. The driver jumped out. He was a broad-shouldered young man with short hair that sat up on the crown of his head. He saluted Joseph then looked at the more seriously injured of the two men waiting, whose right leg was heavily splinted.

“Don’t need ter carry yer,” he said cheerfully. “Reckon an arm round yer and yer’ll be fine. ’Ave yer in ’ospital in an hour, or mebbe less, if Jerry don’t make too much of a mess o’ them roads. Cut ’em up terrible around Wipers, they ’ave. An’ ’Ellfire Corner’s a right shootin’ gallery. Still, we’ll cut up a few o’ them, an’ all. Looks broke all right.” He regarded the splinted leg cheerfully. “Reckon that’s a Blighty one, at least for a while, eh?”

“Oi’ll be back!” the soldier said quietly. “Oi’ve seen a lot worse than broken legs.”

“So’ve I, mate, so’ve I.” The ambulance driver pursed his lips. “But this’ll do for now. Now let’s be ’avin’ yer.”

Joseph moved forward. “Can I help?” he offered.

“Blimey! ’E don’ need the last rites yet, Padre. It’s only ’is leg! The rest of ’im’s right as rain,” the ambulance driver said with a grin. “Still—I s’pose yer could take the other side of ’im, stop ’im fallin’ that way, like?”

Quarter of an hour later Joseph was refreshed by really quite drinkable tea. Unlike in the front trenches, there was plenty of it, almost too hot to drink, and strong enough to disguise the other tastes in the water.

He had almost finished it when a car drove up. It was a long, low-slung Aston Martin, and out of it stepped a slim, upright young man with fair hair and a fresh complexion. He wore a uniform, but with no rank. He ignored Joseph and went straight into the tent, leaving the flap open. He spoke to the surgeon, who was now tidying up his instruments. He stopped in front of him, almost at attention. “Eldon Prentice, war correspondent,” he announced.

Joseph followed him in. “Bit dangerous up here, Mr. Prentice,” he said, carefully not looking toward Corliss, who was lying on one of the palliasses, his bandaged hand already stained with blood again. “I’d go a bit further back, if I were you,” he added.

Prentice stared at him, his chin lifted a little, his blunt face smooth and perfectly certain of himself. “And who are you, sir?”

“Captain Reavley, chaplain,” Joseph replied.

“Good. You can probably give me some accurate firsthand information,” Prentice said. “Or at least secondhand.”

Joseph heard the challenge in his voice. “It’s cold, wet, and dirty,” he replied, looking at Prentice’s clean trousers and only faintly dusty boots. “And of course you’ll have to walk! And carry your rations. You do have rations, don’t you?”

Prentice looked at him curiously. “A chaplain is just the sort of man I’d like to talk to. You’d be able to give me a unique view of how the men feel, what their thoughts and their fears are.”

Joseph instinctively disliked the man. There was an arrogance in his manner that offended him. “Perhaps you haven’t heard, Mr. Prentice, but priests don’t repeat what people tell them, if it’s of any importance.”

Prentice smiled. “Yes, I imagine you have heard a great many stories of pain, fear, and horror, Captain. Some of them must be heartrending, and leave you feeling utterly helpless. After all, what can you do?” It was a rhetorical question, and yet he seemed to be waiting for an answer.

He had described Joseph’s dilemma exactly, and the emotions that most troubled him, awakening a feeling of inadequacy, even failure. There was so little he could do to help, but he was damned if he would admit it to this correspondent. It was too deep a hurt to speak of even to himself.

“Nothing that is really your concern, Mr. Prentice,” he said aloud. “A man’s troubles, whatever they are, are private to him. That is one of the few decencies we can grant.”

Prentice stood still for a moment, and then he turned slowly and looked at Corliss. “What happened to him?” he asked curiously. “Bad ammunition exploded and took off his fingers?”

“He was down the saps,” Joseph said tartly.

Prentice looked blank.

“Tunnels,” Joseph explained. “The intention is that the Germans won’t know where the tunnels are. They get within a yard or two of their trenches, then lay mines. If a mine had exploded there’d be nothing left of any of them.”

“He’s a sapper? I hear that men reaching their hands above the parapet level sometimes get hit by snipers.” Prentice was watching Joseph intently.

Joseph drew in breath to reply, and then changed his mind. Prentice was a war correspondent, like any other. They all pooled their information anyway—he knew that. He had seen them meeting together in the cafés when he had been behind the lines in one of the towns at brigade headquarters, or even further back at divisional headquarters. Nobody could see everything; the differences in their stories depended upon interpretation—what they selected and how they wrote it up.

There was movement at the entrance, and a sergeant came in. He saluted Joseph, ignored Prentice and spoke to the doctor, then went to Corliss. “What happened, soldier?”

Corliss stared up at him. “Not sure, sir. Bit of the wall fell in. Something landed on my hand.”

“What? A pick?”

“Could be, I suppose.”

“Hurts?”

“Yes, sir, but not too much. I expect I’ll be all right.”

“Sapper without ’is fingers is not much use. Looks like a Blighty one.” The sergeant pushed out his lip dubiously, but his voice was not unkind.

Joseph took a deep breath and let it out, feeling his muscles ease a little. If Corliss had been as close to the edge as Sam feared, he might have been careless, might even have been partly responsible for the accident, but that was still not a crime. If someone else had been injured he should be put on a charge, but he was the one in pain, the one who would spend the rest of his life with half a hand.

“Nasty injury,” Prentice remarked, taking a couple of steps over toward the sergeant. “Eldon Prentice. I’m press.” He looked down at Corliss where he was lying. “Looks like you’ll see home before the rest of your mates.”

Corliss gulped and the fraction of color that was in his face vanished. His teeth were chattering and he was beginning to shake. Perhaps Sam had been right and his nerves were shot.

There was a long silence. Suddenly Joseph was aware of the tent being cold. The air smelled of blood, the sweat of pain, and disinfectant. There was noise outside, someone shouting, the faint patter of rain on canvas. The light was fading.

Should he say anything, or might he only make it worse? The doctor was unhappy, it was wretchedly clear in his tired face. He was a young man himself. He had seen too many bodies broken, too much hideous injury he could not help. He was trying to dam rivers of blood with little more than his hands. The shadows under his eyes looked even more pronounced.

Joseph knew the sergeant vaguely. His name was Watkins. He was regular army. He had probably seen most of his friends killed or injured already. He believed in discipline; he knew the cost of cowardice, even one man breaking the line. He also knew what it was like to face fire, to go over the top into a hail of bullets. He had heard the screams of men caught on the wire.

Joseph turned to Prentice. “It’s a pity you won’t get to go along the saps some time,” he said, his voice drier and more brittle than he had meant it to be. “You could write a good piece about what it feels like to crawl on your hands and knees through a hole in the ground under no-man’s-land, hear the water dripping and the bits of earth falling. A bit close to the rats down there, but it can’t be helped. They’re everywhere, as I expect you’ve noticed. Thousands of the things, big as cats, some of them. They feed on the dead, especially the eyes. You want to cover your face when you’re asleep.” He felt an acute satisfaction as he saw Prentice shiver. “But then you won’t be able to go that far forward, will you? War correspondents don’t. They’d get in the way. You only have to watch what other men do, and then go off somewhere safe and talk about it.”

“And what do you do? Pray about it, Chaplain?” Prentice snapped. “God Almighty! You’re a joke!” His voice was shrill with contempt. “You’re no more use here than a maiden aunt in a whorehouse. If your God gives a damn about us, where is He?” He jabbed his hand viciously in the direction of the front line, and no-man’s-land beyond. “Ask him,” he pointed at Corliss, “if he believes in God when he’s down one of his saps!”

“If you had ever been out there at night, when they’re shooting, you would know there’s nothing else to believe in except God,” Joseph answered him with bitter certainty. “If there’s any real, physical place to convince you there is a hell, try no-man’s-land in winter. To sit in a nice warm pub with a glass of beer and write stories for the breakfast tables in England sounds like heaven in comparison.”

“Look . . .” Prentice began.

He was cut off by the sergeant. “I think you’d better go back to your pub and your beer, Mr. Prentice,” he said in a hard, level voice. “What the captain says is right. And you may believe in nothing at all, but you’ve got no place coming out here and making mock of other men’s faith. When it gets bad, it may be all you’ve got. But you wouldn’t know that, seeing as you aren’t a soldier.” He was a big man, heavier than Prentice, though not as tall, and he was seven or eight years older, probably nearer forty.

“Any officer can have you arrested at any time,” he went on. “King’s regulations. So it might be a good idea to be polite to the captain, don’t you think?”

Prentice stood facing him, measuring his resolve.

Joseph waited without moving.

Prentice retreated, his face tight with anger.

The sergeant smiled. “Ambulance’ll be here soon,” he said to Corliss. “Take you back to a proper hospital, then Blighty in time.” His voice was strong, comfortable, but Joseph knew from his face that he had no inner certainty that it was not a self-inflicted wound. He would not report it as such because Prentice had angered him. He was an outsider who had come in and tried to tell him his job. It was soldiers closing ranks against civilians.

Outside there was a splash and crunch as an ambulance drew up, and a moment later a loose-limbed young man came in. He was soaked and his dark hair dripped down his face. As soon as he spoke, it was obvious that he was American.

“Hi, you got anyone for me, Doc?” He saw Joseph. “Hi, Padre, how’s it going?”

“Fine thank you, Wil,” Joseph replied. “Yes, there’s one for you there.”

Wil walked over to Corliss. “Looks like it hurts,” he said sympathetically.

Corliss tried to smile. “Yes, but not too much,” he answered, his voice rasping between dry lips.

Prentice grunted, and smiled sarcastically.

“That’s what everyone says!” Joseph told him, not bothering to suppress his anger. “If they’re dying, they still say that!”

“But he’s not dying, is he, Chaplain?” Prentice responded. “And he won’t! In a week or two he’ll be home in England, warm and safe!”

“So will you!” Joseph told him. “Only you’ll have all your fingers.” And he turned to help Wil Sloan get Corliss to his feet and out to the ambulance in the rain.

Matthew Reavley drove along the open road in the April sunshine. He was heading south from London toward the outskirts of Brighton and he had a sense of exhilaration to be out of the city and at last, after nine months of frustration and failure, to be on the brink of a real step forward.

The events of the previous summer, even before the outbreak of war, had altered his life irrevocably. At the end of June, on the same day as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Matthew’s parents had been killed in a car crash, which at first had seemed simply an accident. On the previous evening John Reavley had telephoned Matthew to relate his discovery of a document that outlined a plan which, if carried out, would ruin England’s honor and change the history of the world. It was in motoring from his home in St. Giles to Matthew in London that the accident had happened.

But when Matthew and Joseph had examined their father’s possessions, taken from the wreck, there was no document. Nor was it in the shattered car. They had searched the house and found nothing even resembling such a thing.

The car crash had proved to be a careful and deliberate murder, although the police had never known that. John Reavley had also warned Matthew, in their last brief conversation, that the conspiracy touched even as high as the royal family, and he could trust no one.

Matthew and Joseph, seven years Matthew’s senior, had uncovered the painful and ultimately tragic truth of what had happened. They had found the document where John Reavley had hidden it, and it was far worse than he had painted it. Even as Matthew sped between the hedgerows with their new leaves translucent green, a soft veil of rain misting the copse of woodland in the distance, he remembered the numbing horror with which he and Joseph had read the paper. It was beyond anything they had imagined: a treaty between Kaiser Wilhelm II and King George V agreeing that England should abandon France and Belgium to the German conquering army, in return for which England and Germany together would form an empire to divide the world between them. Most of Europe would fall to Germany, who would then help Britain to keep its present empire and add to it the old colonies of the Americas, including the entire United States. It was a betrayal almost inconceivable.

And yet it would have avoided the slaughter that was now staining the battlefields of Europe. The British Expeditionary Force of less than a hundred thousand men was already all but destroyed by death and injury. If England were to survive, it must raise a million more men to go voluntarily into that hell of pain and destruction.

They knew who had killed John and Alys Reavley, and why. The killer himself was now dead, as was his brother, but the instigator of it all, almost certainly the man who had believed he could convince King George to sign the treaty, was still unknown, and free to continue in whatever way he could to further the creation of his empire of subjugation and dishonorable peace.

Joseph was serving in Flanders and had no opportunity to pursue the Peacemaker, as they had called him. Hannah had moved back to the family home in St. Giles, with her three children. Her husband, Archie, was in the Royal Navy and at sea most of the time. She had been the closest to their mother, and in many ways was trying to take her place in the village, close to the familiar lanes and fields of her childhood, the families she knew, the routines of domestic care and the small duties and kindnesses that were the fabric of life.

Matthew himself had naturally continued in his career in the Secret Intelligence Service which his father had so deplored. It surprised him how much it still hurt that the one time John Reavley would have turned to him for professional help it had been too late, and he still, nearly a year later, could not complete the task.

Judith, five years younger than Matthew, was using the only real skill she had and harnessing her aimless impetuosity somewhere in the Ypres area, as a VAD—Voluntary Aid Dispenser—driving ambulances, staff cars, whatever she was asked. Her letters sounded as if finally she had found a sense of consuming purpose, and even a fellowship, which gave her a kind of happiness in spite of the frequent danger and the almost perpetual physical hardship.

That meant it was only Matthew who was able to pursue the little knowledge they had in order to find the Peacemaker, not for personal vengeance or even some abstract of justice, but to stop him in whatever alternative way he was pursuing his goal. And none of them had ever imagined he would abandon it.

He drew up at the crossroads. A team of horses—heavy and patient creatures—were drawing a harrow over the field to his left and he could smell the turned earth, a rich, clinging fragrance. The rain had passed and the sunlight glittered on the dripping leaves in the hedge.

He accelerated and moved forward. He could trust no one outside the family, not even his own superior in the SIS, in fact possibly him least of all. He could only rehearse the facts that were indisputable and deduce from them what else had to be true.

John Reavley had finished his university education in mathematics in Germany, and had many German friends. One of them had been Reisenburg, the man whose calligraphic skills had been used to draft both copies of the treaty. Reisenburg had been appalled by what he saw, and stolen them, bringing them to England to the one man he trusted, and believed might be able to stop the conspiracy.

Reisenburg had passed the documents to John Reavley, who had within hours telephoned Matthew in London, saying he would bring them the following day. But he had got no farther than a few miles when he had been sabotaged on the road by Sebastian Allard, Joseph’s favorite student at St. Giles. Sebastian was passionate, idealistic, and terrified of the destruction not only to life but to the very spirit of civilization that war would bring. He had believed the Peacemaker’s plan to be the lesser evil. Then after he had committed double murder in its cause, and seen with horror the reality of violent death, he had found he could not live with it.

That had been followed by the murder of Harry Beecher, Joseph’s oldest and dearest friend. Reisenburg, too, had been killed, but they had no idea by whom.

And on August 4th Britain had been plunged into war.

Who was the Peacemaker? A man with allies who had access to the German royal court, almost certainly to the kaiser himself, and who also had private and personal access to King George V. No one would conceive of such a plan, let alone put it into action, without knowing both men. He was also quite obviously politically astute, had a soaring and utterly ruthless imagination, and yet in his own way a passionate morality.

He and his disciples had desperately wanted the treaty document back because there was neither time nor opportunity to redraft it and get the kaiser to sign it again before offering it to the king, but also it was imperative it did not fall into the hands of anyone who would make it public.

When they had discovered it was gone, they must have known it was Reisenburg who had taken it, but not in time to follow him. If they had, they would have taken it from him and killed him then. Similarly they could not have seen him pass it to John Reavley, or again they would have acted at the time.

And yet they had instructed Sebastian to kill John Reavley the very next day; therefore they had to have known that he had it, and that he would be driving down that particular stretch of road that morning.

The Peacemaker could only be someone who knew John Reavley personally, and also knew that his second son worked in London in the Intelligence Services, and would be the obvious person to whom to take the document.

Who had contacted Sebastian Allard with information and instructions, in the few hours of the afternoon or evening after Reisenburg had given John Reavley the document, and knew that he had set out the next day to London?

Sebastian was dead, as was his brother, Elwyn. Their father, Gerald, was drowned even deeper in the brandy bottle, and their mother, Mary, was broken by the fury and shame of the scandal. She had changed her name and left Cambridgeshire with its unbearable past behind her. She had not adopted any family name, either on her parents’ side, or Gerald’s, but something totally unconnected. It had taken Matthew this long to find her where she worked as a voluntary aide in a military hospital outside Brighton.

It was early afternoon when he parked in the gravel space outside the entrance and climbed out, grateful to stretch his legs after the two-hour drive. He went up the steps and in the hallway inquired if he could speak with Mrs. Allan, and was directed to one of the wards. He passed a young man, looking no more than twenty, sitting in a wheelchair. The way the rug fell over his lap made it apparent he had only one leg.

Matthew did not want to look at it. He was twisted with pity, guilty for being able to stride out easily himself, and he was in a hurry. He was acutely aware that Joseph would have felt the same, and would have stopped. It often surprised him how much he missed Joseph. Since he had lived in London and Joseph in Cambridge, he had not expected to.

“Good afternoon,” he said with a smile. “Am I heading the right way for Ward Three?”

“Yes, sir,” the man assured him with a sudden light in his face. He looked at Matthew’s uniform but saw no regimental insignia on it. “Straight ahead.”

“Thanks,” Matthew acknowledged, and went the rest of the way and through the door. He saw Mary as soon as he was inside. She was wearing a gray skirt and blouse with a white apron over it, rather than the fashionable unrelieved black silk of mourning that he had last seen her in, but she was still gaunt-faced, her body almost fleshless, shoulders high and thin, backbone like a ramrod. She took no notice of him, concentrating on her task of rolling bandages. She was probably used to people coming and going in the ward.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Allan,” he said quietly, using her new name in order not to embarrass her. “Can you spare me a few minutes of your time?”

She stopped, her hands motionless, the bandage in the air. Very slowly she turned, but he knew that she had already recognized his voice. Her angular features were pinched with fear and her dark eyes shadowed. She stared at him without speaking.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Allan,” he repeated her new name to let her know he had no intention of ripping away the mask she had so carefully constructed. There was such tragedy between them, wounds for which healing could not be imagined. Both his parents were dead at her son’s hands, both her sons were guilty of murder and suicide, and the scandal had destroyed everything she cared about, and it was his brother who had exposed it. She had no dreams left, and the emptiness was there as she looked at him.

“I assume you have some reason, Captain Reavley,” she replied without expression in her voice.

“Maybe we could walk outside?” he suggested, glancing toward the door which opened onto a terrace and then the lawn where he could see at least half a dozen young men in chairs of one sort or another.

“If it is necessary,” she answered. She did not betray any interest in what he wanted, nor did she ask how any of his family were, although she must have known Joseph and Judith were both in Flanders, because it had been general knowledge in the area before she had left it.

He led the way, their footsteps hard on the wooden floor of the ward. He was aware of at least two men lying silently in beds watching them as they went.

Outside the air was mild and still, sheltered by the high walls covered with roses and honeysuckle, not yet in full leaf. The sky above was milky blue.

“What is it you wish?” she asked, stopping well short of any of the other occupants of the garden.

He had given a great deal of thought to what he would say to her, but nothing had ever been free from the desperate pain of the past. There was no clean or kind way of phrasing it. Perhaps simple was the best.

He had decided to tell her as much of the truth as he dared. She was owed that much, she had lost more than any of them, and he saw no added danger in it.

“Sebastian did not act alone,” he began. “Someone taught him ideas and beliefs, then told him what to do. He obeyed, thinking it would avert war. That person, apart from individual guilt for death in your family and mine, is also still free to commit treason and sabotage of England, and to help Germany in any way he can. Their motives don’t matter, they must still be prevented. I cannot ask official help in this because I don’t know whom I can trust.”

The faintest, most bitter humor touched her face for an instant, then vanished, her black eyebrows rising so slightly it could have been only a trick of the light. “And you imagine you can trust me?”

“I’ve told you little you don’t already know,” he replied. “Added to which, I’m at a dead end. I cannot believe that you have any kinder feelings toward this man than I do.”

The emotion was nowhere in her face except her eyes, suddenly sprung to smoldering life. “I would kill him if I could,” she replied. “I would like to do it with my own hands, and watch him go. I would like to see the knowledge in him, and the pain. I would make sure that he went slowly, and that he knew who I was.”

The implacable hate in her frightened him, but he did not doubt her words. He found his mouth dry. Could he ever hate like that? He had lost his parents, and the grief might never completely leave him, but their deaths had been swift and honorable. Both her sons, the passion and the hope of her life, had been turned into murderers, and died by suicide. And yet neither of them had been evil, he knew that as clearly as he saw the sunlight on the grass. They had been deceived and destroyed by others, and in the end, crucified by shame.

“Unfortunately I haven’t yet found him,” he said to her with a gentleness he was amazed that he could feel for her. She looked like some mythical fury rather than an ordinary twentieth-century woman standing on the lawn of a Brighton hospital. But then surely myth survived because it was a distillation of human truth? “You can help me,” he added.

“How?” she asked, looking at the wheelchair-bound soldiers, not at him.

“Who contacted Sebastian the afternoon before the crash in which my parents died? In any way, telephone, letter, personally, anything at all.”

“How excruciatingly delicate of you, Captain Reavley.” There was a hint of mockery in her voice. “You mean the day before Sebastian killed your mother and father!”

“Yes. The morning would have been too early, anything from lunchtime onward.”

She considered for a moment or two before answering. “He had two or three letters in the early afternoon delivery. One telephone call, I remember. No one visited, but he did go out. I have no idea whom he could have met then.”

“Did the letters come through the post?”

“Of course they came through the post! What were you imagining? Letters by pigeon? Or a liveried footman dropping something off in a carriage?”

“A message by hand,” he replied. “It is simple enough to put something in a letter box, but it wouldn’t have a franked stamp on it.”

She let out her breath in a sigh. “Do you really think this is going to help you find him? Or that it will bring any kind of justice if you do? You won’t be able to prove anything. You will look ridiculous, and he will walk away. You’ll be fortunate if he doesn’t ruin you for slander.”

“You underestimate me, Mrs. Allan. I didn’t have anything so straightforward in mind.”

She stared at him. It was not hope in her eyes, making them so alive, but it was a flicker of something better than the dead anger before. “There was a telephone call, from Aidan Thyer, and then half an hour after that, he went out.”

Aidan Thyer. He was master of St. John’s College in Cambridge, a position of extraordinary, almost unique influence. Many young men’s dreams and ambitions had been molded by whoever had been master of their college in their first formative years as adults, away from home, beginning to taste the wild new freedoms of intellectual adventure. He could remember his own master, the brilliance of his mind, the dreams he had started, worlds he had opened for his students. Who better to teach Sebastian to be an idealist who would kill for peace?

If it were Thyer, it would hit Joseph profoundly. But pain had nothing to do with truth.

“Nothing between?” he asked aloud. “No one to the door, even at the back? No deliveries, no tradesmen?”

“No,” she answered.

Was she being careful, or trying to avoid an answer that would hurt so deeply? But it had to be someone John Reavley had known, and presumably trusted. It had to be someone close enough and with the intellectual and moral power to have influenced Sebastian to kill two people he had known for years, the parents of the man who had tutored and helped him even before going up to university and even more afterward.

“Did he say anything about where he was going?”

“No. Do you think it was Aidan Thyer?” Her voice was crowded with disbelief. After Sebastian’s death she had stayed in Thyer’s house! He had witnessed her grief, and appeared to do all he could to help.

“I don’t know,” he replied truthfully. “There are lots of possible explanations. But it is at least somewhere to begin. Someone told him what to do, and where my father would be.”

“Why could it not have been at any time?” she asked, frowning slightly. “Why only in the afternoon of the day before? Why did he do it? Your brother was Sebastian’s closest friend.”

“I know. It had nothing to do with Joseph. It was political.” That was as close to the truth as he would come.

“That’s absurd!” she retorted. “Your father used to be a member of Parliament, I know, but he didn’t stand for any convictions Sebastian was against. He didn’t stand for anything out of the ordinary. There were scores of men like him, maybe even hundreds.” It was possibly not intended to be rude, but her tone was dismissive and she made no effort to hide it.

Matthew pictured his father’s mild, ascetic face with its incisive intelligence, and the honesty that was so clear it was sometimes almost childlike. Yes, there were many men who believed as he had, but he himself was unique! No one could fill the emptiness his death had created. Suddenly it was almost impossible not to snap back at Mary’s callous remark. It required all his self-control to answer civilly.

“And had any of those hundreds been the ones to learn the information he had, and had the courage to act on it,” he said carefully, “then they would have been the ones killed.” He deliberately avoided using the word “murdered.”

Her face pulled tight and she turned away. “What information?”

“Political. I can’t tell you more than that.”

“Then go and talk to Aidan Thyer,” she told him. “There’s nothing I can do to help you.” And without waiting for him to say anything more, or to wish him good-bye, she turned and walked back toward the door leading inside, a stiff-backed figure, every other passion consumed in grief, oddly dignified, and yet completely without grace.

Matthew remained outside, and went back to the car along the grass and around the footpath.

CHAPTER

TWO

“I don’t know,” Sam said wearily, pushing his hair back and unintentionally smearing mud over his brow. “It’s such a bloody mess it’s impossible to tell for sure. Looks like one of the props came loose and some of the wall collapsed. But what made it happen could be any of a dozen things. How much of his hand has he lost?”

They were in Sam’s dugout, off the support trench. It was three steps down from the trench itself, a deep hole in the ground, duckboards on the floor, a sacking curtain over the door. It was typical of many officers’ quarters: a narrow cot, a wooden chair, and two tables, both made out of boxes. On a makeshift shelf beside the bed there were several books—a little poetry, some Greek legend, a couple of novels. There was a gramophone on one of the boxes, and inside the box about twenty records, mostly classical piano music, Liszt and Chopin, a little Beethoven, and some opera. Joseph knew them all by heart. There was also a photograph of Sam’s brother, younger, his face pinched with ill health.

“Two middle fingers, I think,” Joseph replied. “If it doesn’t get infected he might keep the rest.”

Sam had brewed tea in his Dixie can, which was carefully propped over a lighted candle. He had a packet of chocolate biscuits that had come out of a parcel from home. He poured the tea, half for Joseph, and divided the biscuits.

“Thanks.” Joseph took it and bit into one of the biscuits. It was crisp and sweet. It almost made up for the taste of the tea made with brackish water and cooked in an all-purpose can. At least it was hot. “There was a new war correspondent there,” he went on. “Arrogant man. Scrubbed and ironed. Hasn’t the faintest idea what it’s like in a sap.” He had only been in one once himself, but he would never forget how he had felt. It had been all he could do to control himself from crying out as the walls seemed to close in on him, and from the sound of the dripping, the scurry of rodent feet. Every shell he heard could be the one that caved in the entrance and buried them under the earth to suffocate. He was used to the tap-tap sounds of Germans doing the same. One could hear them in dugouts, even like this. In ways the silence was worse; it could mean they were priming their fuses. The mines could blow any moment.

Sam was watching him, his eyes questioning.

There was no avoiding the truth. “He thought it might have been self-inflicted,” he admitted. “Somebody’s been telling him stories, and he was full of it.”

Sam did not answer. His curious, ironic face reflected the thoughts he refused to speak; pity for men pushed beyond their limits and the knowledge that this could have been exactly such a thing, fear of punishment for the man, and that he would not be able to protect him; and weariness of the dirt, the exhaustion and the pain of it all. He smiled very slightly, a surprisingly sweet expression. “Thanks for trying.”

Joseph took a second chocolate biscuit and finished his tea. “It’s not enough,” he said, standing up. “Watkins wasn’t going to charge him, but I’ll make absolutely sure. Corliss looked a bit shaky to me. I’ll go back to the field hospital and make sure he’s all right.”

Sam nodded, gratitude in his eyes.

Joseph smiled. “Maybe I’ll get a decent cup of tea,” he said lightly. “I’ve nothing better to do.”

He walked as far as the first-aid post, passing Bert Dazely with the mail delivery for the men in the front trenches. He had a whole sheaf of letters in his hand and was grinning broadly, showing the gap in his front teeth.

“Afternoon, Chaplain,” he said cheerfully. “Seen Charlie Gee up there? Oi got two for ’im. Oi reckon as that girl of ’is must wroite ’im every day.”

“I think she does,” Joseph agreed with a momentary twinge of envy. Eleanor had died in childbirth two years ago, and in one terrible night he had lost his wife and his son. In an act of will, he forced it out of his mind. There were things to do today, things to keep the mind and the emotions busy. “I’ve been with Major Wetherall. I don’t know where Charlie is.”

“Oi’ll find ’im,” Bert said happily, knowing he carried the most precious thing on the whole battlefield.

Joseph had only a quarter of an hour to wait before an ambulance showed up, and since the driver had only two injured to carry, he was able to beg a lift back to the Casualty Clearing Station, which was in effect a small mobile hospital. They had just recently come into full use.

He asked the first nurse he saw. She was a tall, striking-looking woman, but it was not until she spoke that he realized she was American.

“Can I help you, Captain?”

“Yes, please, nurse . . .” He hesitated.

“Marie O’Day,” she told him.

“Irish?” he said with surprise. He must have mistaken the accent.

She smiled, and it lit her face. “No, my husband’s people were, way back. He drives one of the ambulances. Who are you looking for?”

“Private Corliss, the sapper brought in with his hand crushed, yesterday.”

The light in her vanished. “Oh. It’s pretty bad. I think three of his fingers are gone. He’s not doing so well, Chaplain. He’s very low. I’m glad you’ve come to see him.” She hesitated, as if to say more, but uncertain how to phrase it.

The fear tightened inside Joseph, knotting his stomach. This was exactly what he was supposed to be able to help, the shock, the despair, the inward wounds the surgeons could not reach. “What is it, Mrs. O’Day? I need to know!”

“I don’t know how it happened, and I don’t care,” she answered, meeting his eyes with a fierce honesty. “I don’t understand how any of these boys have the courage to go over the top, knowing what could happen to them, or along the tunnels under the ground. They’re terrified sick, and yet they do it, and they make jokes.” Without warning her eyes filled with tears and she turned half away from him. “Sometimes I hear them saying . . .”

He reached out his hand to touch her arm, then changed his mind. It was too familiar. “What is it you want to tell me, Mrs. O’Day?”

She blinked several times. “There’s a young war correspondent hanging around asking questions. I know they have to. It’s their job, and people at home have a right to know what’s going on. But he’s heard something about self-inflicted wounds, particularly to hands, and he’s pushing it.” The indecision was still in her face, the need to say more, or perhaps it was the will that he should understand without her doing so.

He remembered Sam’s fear, and his own. He had seen men paralyzed with terror, their bodies unable to move, or keep control of their functions. The underground tunnels were more than some men could take; the horror of being buried alive was worse than being shot for cowardice. He did not even know what Prentice was asking, or what he intended to write, and yet he came close to hating him already.

“I’ll find him,” he promised. “War correspondents don’t have any rights to be this far forward. They’re civilians; any officer can order them out, and I will, if he’s being a nuisance.”

She drew in her breath quickly to explain.

“I know,” he assured her. “We don’t know how Corliss lost his fingers, and I’m not certain that we want to.”

She relaxed. It was what she needed. “Thank you, Captain. I’ll take you to him.” She turned and led the way out of the door, along a path of wooden boards and into another hut with cots along either side. Joseph knew from the past that it was immediately next to the operating theater. He saw Corliss on one of the beds, lying on his side, his face turned away. The fair-haired figure of Prentice was easily recognizable in the middle of the floor, by his clean uniform if nothing else. He was talking to a soldier with his arm in a sling. He looked around as they came in and his face lit with anticipation.

“Ah! The chaplain again,” he said eagerly, dismissing the soldier and moving toward Joseph. “Have you learned any more about how the sapper came to lose half his hand?”

“He did not lose half his hand!” Marie O’Day snapped. “And will you please keep your voice down! In fact, you’d better get out of here altogether. This is a hospital ward, not a café for you to stand around in the way, chatting to people.” She was within an inch of his height and she was defending her territory and the men she cared about with a savage admiration and pity.

Prentice recognized that he was beaten, at least for the moment, and retreated.

Joseph gave her a beaming smile, then went over to Corliss’s bed and looked down at him. He was lying with his eyes open, staring blindly into the distance, his face without expression.

It was situations like this that Joseph knew he should have some answer for, words that would ease the pain, take away some of the fear that twisted the gut and turned the bowels to water, something to make sense of the unbearable. Only the divine could serve; there was nothing human big enough to touch it.

But what could he say? Looking at Corliss now, he knew at least that he was aware of being suspected, and that he could not prove his innocence. He had lost his hand, and it might even become infected and he could lose his whole arm. If he was found guilty of causing it himself, he would be blindfolded and shot to death in dishonor. Could anything worse happen to a man?

The words died on his tongue. He simply sat on the bed and put his hand on Corliss’s shoulder. “If you want to talk, I’m here,” he said quietly. “If you don’t, that’s all right.”

For a long time Corliss did not move. When at last he spoke it was hoarsely, as if his throat were dry. “What did Major Wetherall say? It hurts like a knife in my belly to let him down.”

Joseph saw the tears on Corliss’s face. “He sent me to keep the journalist out of your way,” he answered.

“ ’Cos he’s after me,” Corliss said. “He thinks I did it myself, on purpose. I heard him say so.”

“He doesn’t know a thing,” Joseph replied. “I might see if I can take him down a sap, that’ll give him a good idea of what it’s like. If he wants a story, that would be a great one. Make a hero out of him.”

Corliss smiled only slightly, and gulped.

“And Major Wetherall knows what it’s like down there,” Joseph went on.

Corliss blinked.

Joseph allowed the silence to settle.

“Thanks, Chaplain,” Corliss said at last.

Half an hour later Joseph had spoken to each of the other men in the room, then went outside to find Prentice again. He needed to appeal to the man’s better nature. If he understood what the losses had been, how many wounded and dead there were in every battalion, and no reserves to take their places, then he would not attack the morale of the men left who were trying desperately to stay awake day and night, sometimes to watch an entire length of trench from one dogleg to the next. They had been wet most of the winter, and frozen half of it. They lived on stale food, dirty water—and little enough of that. They slept in the open. Every one of them had lost friends they had grown up with, men they knew like brothers.

Many of them did not want to kill Germans. Some had blood-drenched nightmares from which they woke screaming, soaked in sweat, afraid to tell anyone—thoughts that might be seen as disloyalty, cowardice, even treason.

Prentice was talking to Sergeant Watkins. He looked relaxed, standing a little sideways next to a table with splints and bandages on it. His weight was more on one foot than the other, as if he had infinite time to spare. Opposite him was Sergeant Watkins, almost to attention, his jaw tight, his heavy face flushed.

“So morale is pretty low,” Prentice was saying with assurance. “In fact about as low as it can be. I’ve heard that some men don’t even want to fight the Germans. Is that so?”

“No sane man wants to kill another, if ’e don’t ’ave to,” Watkins replied in a low, angry voice. “But if Jerry fires at us, b’lieve me, mister, our boys’ll fire back. You go up the front line some time, instead of ’anging around ’ere, an’ you’ll soon see. What d’yer think all that noise is, thunder? God Almighty moving ’is furniture? It’s guns, boy, enough guns to kill every bloody thing in Flanders. Not that there is much left livin’ around ’ere!”

“And you’re short of ammunition, too, so I hear?” Prentice continued, not put off in the least. “Having to ration the men, even ask them to give back what they haven’t used.”

“None to waste,” Watkins answered, glaring back. “Everybody knows that, just don’t say so. If Jerry don’t know, don’t tell ’im.”

“With the odds so heavy against us, and morale so low, it must be hard to make the men get out there and fight?” Prentice raised his eyebrows, his blue eyes very wide.

“You’re talking rubbish!” Watkins said angrily, his face flushed dark red. “I got better things to do than stand ’ere listening to you rabbiting on. You get out an’ see what it’s really like, an’ leave the sick ’ere to themselves.” He turned half away.

“I thought you might have come to find out if the sapper’s wound was self-inflicted,” Prentice said very clearly.

Watkins froze, then turned back very slowly. “You what?”

Prentice repeated what he had said, his eyes challenging, his expression innocent.

Joseph’s throat tightened, his stomach churning. This was exactly what he had come to prevent. He must say something now, before it was too late.

“Mr. Prentice, you know very little about it,” he interrupted. “And military justice is not your affair. Sergeant Watkins is thoroughly familiar with his job. He’s regular army. He doesn’t need you to direct him.”

Prentice turned to Joseph and smiled, a cold, satisfied curve of the lips. “I’m sure he doesn’t,” he agreed. “He’ll do the right thing, for the good of the army as a whole, toward winning the war, whether he enjoys doing it, or it’s personally difficult for him. He mustn’t let like or dislike for a man stand in his way, or anybody else’s civilian beliefs. Nor mine.” He smiled even more widely. “Or yours, Chaplain. He’ll find the truth. But then I imagine as a man of God, you’re for the truth, too.”

Joseph knew he had lost the argument as he felt it slip out of his hands, and he saw it in Watkins’s face.

“What happens to a man who has deliberately injured himself?” Prentice went on. “You owe it to the rest of his unit to deal with it, don’t you? The one thing I’ve noticed out here, even in a few days, is the loyalty, the extraordinary depth of friendship between men, the willingness to share, to risk and even to sacrifice.” There was a note of envy in his voice, he hurried his words with an underlying edge of anger. “They are owed honor, and the loyalty of those who have the power to protect them, and the duty to lead.”

Watkins looked at him in silent misery.

Joseph searched desperately for something to say, but what was there? Marie O’Day knew that Corliss’s wound could have been self-inflicted, even Sam feared it. He had said Corliss was close to losing his nerve.

“It’s a . . .” he started to say, looking for a medical excuse.

Prentice ignored him, keeping his eyes on Watkins. “Matter of military duty to collect the evidence,” he finished the sentence. “Find the truth. There must be someone who saw it. The only reason not to speak to them is that you fear what they will say.” He smiled for an instant, then it disappeared. “I’m sure that isn’t the case . . . is it?”

“ ’Course it isn’t!” Watkins said tightly, his lips drawn into a thin line. “I’ll look into it. If there’s evidence, there’ll be a court-martial. But it’s none o’ your business, mister! You get the hell out of here. Go do your job, an’ leave us to do ours!” He swiveled on his heel and strode out past Joseph, too angry to speak, and perhaps ashamed that he had allowed himself to be trapped.

Joseph had failed. Far from protecting Corliss, he had been instrumental in allowing Prentice to force Watkins into investigating the incident, and Joseph already felt the sick fear that Corliss was guilty. People had different breaking points. A good commander could tell when it was coming. Sam had seen it and tried to protect him. It was himself Corliss had hurt, no one else. He had not left his post, or fallen asleep, or allowed anyone else to take the blame. It was one of those cases where turning a blind eye would possibly have saved him, given him time to recover at least his self-esteem, the control to build something out of what was left. Prentice had no idea what any of the men faced, let alone sappers. Joseph should have found a way to prevent this.

He went back and talked with Marie O’Day. She was furious with Prentice, but she could not help.

They could all hear the bombardment. The heavy artillery seemed to have a very good range tonight. The walls shivered and the lights swayed, casting wavering shadows on the walls. About ten o’clock the first casualties came in: some with broken arms and legs, a man with a deep shrapnel wound in the chest, another with a foot blown off. The surgeons operated in desperate haste. The smell of blood filled the air. Everybody seemed to be splashed and stained with red.

The night stretched on. The noise of the artillery stopped and started, stopped and started. Prentice was somewhere around. Joseph saw him half a dozen times; once he was carrying tea, more often he was helping a wounded man or lifting a stretcher. His clothes were now as creased and bloodstained as anyone else’s, his fair skin pale from fatigue and perhaps horror as well, his voice rasping with emotion.

Then at about four in the morning Wil Sloan came in gray-faced, carrying one end of a stretcher on which Charlie Gee lay. His skin was almost blue, eyes sunken in their sockets, and there was a great scarlet streaming wound in the pit of his belly where his genitals should have been. Wil had tried to pad it with all the bandages he could find, but everything was soaked through.

“Help him!” he cried out, his voice close to a scream. “Help him! Sweet Jesus, do something!”

The surgeon dropped the needle he was stitching with, and an orderly picked it up and carried on. Marie O’Day let out a moan of anguish and lurched forward to help the other bearer ease the stretcher onto the table.

“All right, soldier,” the surgeon said gently. “We’ll look after you. We’ll stop the worst of the pain, and stitch you up.” He barely looked at the young VAD nurse who had come down from the other operating table. “Get water, plenty of pads, instruments,” he told her.

She stepped closer and saw the wound, and in a hideous moment of realization understood it. Her face went paper-white and she staggered backward and crumpled to the floor.

Joseph saw the movement but he was too slow to save her.

Marie O’Day picked the girl up and dragged her to the corner, then went about collecting the things the surgeon had asked for.

Joseph knew Charlie had understood at least some part of the meaning of his blinding pain, and the wrenching panicky horror in other people’s faces. He tried to look at Joseph. His lips moved but he had not the strength to make any sound.

Joseph thought of the girl who wrote to him every day, and felt so sick he was afraid he might faint, just as the nurse had done. But Wil Sloan was standing almost beside him, his eyes bright with tears, gulping to find enough air to sustain him, desperate, pleading without words, praying.

What God would let this happen to a young man? He would be better dead. He will probably die anyway, from shock and loss of blood, or from infection, but couldn’t it have been without knowing what had happened to him?

Joseph put out his hand and grasped Charlie’s, holding on to it, feeling the fingers move a tiny fraction. “Hang on, Charlie,” he said hoarsely. “We’re with you.”

The surgeon was beginning to work already. The anesthetic mask was not there yet. Charlie was still conscious.

The wound was ghastly, still pumping blood, even though the first-aid station had done all they could.

Then Prentice was there, staring. “What’s happened to him?” he asked. “God in heaven! His genitals have gone! There’s nothing left!”

Charlie’s eyes filled with tears and there was a gurgle in his throat. Joseph felt his fingers curl, and then loose again as the surgeon at last put the anesthetic mask mercifully on his face.

Wil turned around and looked at Prentice. His skin was gray, his eyes wild and he gasped and gagged for breath. He teetered for a moment, as if trying to keep his balance, then he lunged forward, swinging his fists, and caught Prentice on the side of the jaw.

Prentice went staggering backward, but Wil followed him, lashing out again and again, left fist, then right, then left. Prentice crashed into the far wall, sending a tray of instruments flying off the small table. He put up his arms to shield his face, but it was useless. Wil was in a red rage and he went on striking him on any part of his body he could reach, head, shoulder, chest, stomach.

The surgeon swore. “For God’s sake, stop him! Somebody get hold of the bloody lunatic!”

Prentice fell over and slid down against the wall, half on top of the girl who had fainted. Wil grabbed his arms and yanked him up again, punching at him at the same time. Prentice gave a high-pitched scream as his shoulder dislocated with the twist of his own weight against the grip. Wil hit him again and he crumpled.

The orderly stood frozen. Marie looked around for something to hit Wil with, before he actually killed Prentice.

Joseph stepped forward, forcing the picture of Charlie Gee out of his mind. He stepped behind Wil and put his arms around his neck, throwing his weight backward so Wil was forced to let go of Prentice to save himself. But he struggled, trying to swing around and rid himself of the restraint.

“Stop it!” Joseph said fiercely. “You’ll kill him, you fool! That isn’t going to help anyone.”

Wil jerked against him, almost pulling Joseph off his feet, then recoiled as his neck met the lock of Joseph’s arm.

Prentice was clambering to his feet, his face streaming blood, his uniform torn and his left arm hanging limply, oddly angled at the shoulder. His mouth was a snarl of pain and fury, but he was equally clearly terrified.

Joseph kept his grip on Wil, but he met Prentice’s eyes. “Back off.” He waved. “Or I’ll let him go.”

Prentice was gasping, blood from a broken tooth running down his lip. “I’ll have him court-martialed!” he choked out the words. “He’ll spend the next five years in the glass house!”

“You can’t have him court-martialed,” Joseph replied coldly. “He’s a volunteer. You can sue him in civil court, if you can get an extradition order. He’s an American over here to help us in the war.”

“General Cullingford is my uncle!” Prentice wiped his hand over his mouth and winced with a cry as it jagged his broken tooth. The gesture did nothing to stop the blood. “I’ll see he’s kept here!”

“For what?” Joseph asked, eyes wide. “Nobody here is going to have seen a thing! Are you?” he demanded, glancing sideways at Marie, working beside the surgeon, up to her elbows in blood, and the orderly passing instruments, swabs, needles threaded with fresh silk.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” the surgeon said without looking up. “Get that bloody idiot out of here.”

“You should take him out under arrest!” Prentice gasped, spitting more blood.

“Not him, you!” the surgeon snapped.

“I’m injured! He’s broken my damn teeth!” Prentice said furiously.

“I don’t do teeth.” The surgeon was still working on Charlie, head down. “See the regimental dentist, if you can find him.”

“You’d better tell him you got too near an explosion, and fell on one of the props.” Joseph eased his hold on Wil Sloan, who straightened up, coughing now that he could get his breath back.

Prentice glared at him. “You think I’m going to lie to protect you? There’s military discipline for this sort of thing. You can’t attack somebody and get away with it. He’s a raving madman!”

“Really?” Joseph said, an exaggerated lift in his voice. “I saw nothing in particular. I was too busy thinking about a man shot half to pieces to worry about what was happening to a stupid journalist who didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut in an operating theater.”

“I saw nothing,” the orderly added, his face twisted with anger and pity. “Did you, Mrs. O’Day?”

“Not a thing,” she replied. “Nor did Janet.” She gestured to the girl now climbing up slowly from where she had been slumped against the wall. The whole episode had taken only minutes. Janet stared at the scene in front of her, at Wil and Joseph, at the operating table, and then at Prentice. Her face was filled with shame, but it was only Marie O’Day’s opinion she cared about, what had happened between the men barely touched her consciousness.

“Take them away.” Marie O’Day gestured to the blood-soaked swabs in one of the dishes. “Bring me some more—quickly.”

The girl moved to obey, grateful for a second chance, but still keeping her eyes averted from the operating table, in case her nerve betrayed her again.

“Out!” Joseph ordered Prentice. He pushed Wil in front of him also, and a moment later they were in the entrance, and then outside on the wooden walk. “You’d better get out of here,” he said to Wil. “You’re a volunteer, you can go wherever you like. If you’ve any sense, you’ll go at least as far as divisional headquarters for a while. They’ll find you something to do.”

“What about Charlie? I can’t leave him!” Wil demanded.

“You can’t help,” Joseph said gently. “You getting thrown out won’t make it any better for him. Just lose yourself for a while. Go to Armentières, or somewhere like that.”

Wil’s eyes were still sunken with shock, and now, after the exertion, his rage having cooled off and the horror returning, he started to shake, but, stumbling and slipping on the boards, he made his way reluctantly along the line of the huts, and around the corner.

“Don’t think I’ll forget this!” Prentice snarled, blowing bubbles of blood through his bruised and rapidly swelling lips. One eye was already darkening with a huge bruise and the other cheek was blotched. His arm hung uselessly and obviously with pain.

“You can remember what you like,” Joseph replied. “But you’d be wise to say and do nothing. If anyone hears about what you said in front of Charlie Gee, you’ll get no cooperation from any of the men. And you may find you have other ‘accidents’ on dark nights. As you pointed out to Sergeant Watkins, friendship is about all we have here, that and loyalty to your unit and a belief that we’re fighting for something that matters; honor, a way of life, people we love.”

He looked at Prentice’s face. The man was not used to physical pain, and he was obviously hurting pretty badly. “You’d better go up to one of the forward first-aid stations,” he advised. “You’re hardly a hospital case, but you could do with a little attention, a stitch or two, perhaps, and someone to put your shoulder back. It’s quite a simple thing to do, but it’ll hurt like hell.” He said that with pleasure. “Wait your turn, and tell them anything you want. A shrapnel burst near you would probably be best. It looks as if you fell. There’ll be lots hurt worse than you are, so you’ll make a fool of yourself if you raise a fuss. People are hard on cowards.” He gave a very small, tight smile. “And do it smartly, before I arrest you.”

Prentice was furious. “That lunatic attacked me! I didn’t even hit him back! Or are you going to lie about that, too?”

“For getting in the way of treating the wounded, and wasting medical officers’ time,” Joseph replied without hesitation. “You didn’t hit him back because he didn’t give you a chance. Be grateful I haven’t arrested you already.”

Prentice stared at him just long enough to realize he meant it, then turned on his heel and went off, shambling unevenly, feet slithering on the boards, physical and emotional shock making him dizzy.

Joseph went back inside the hospital hut to check on Charlie Gee’s condition. It was too much, he thought. He remembered how alone and inadequate to the burden he had felt when his parents were killed, and suddenly he was the head of the family, expected to know the answers, and have the strength and the inner certainty to help.

That had been nothing compared with what he needed to do now. No teaching, no ministry prepared you to have answers for this. What kind of a God hurled you into this hell without teaching you what you were supposed to do, to say, even to think in order to keep your own faith?

There was no answer, only numberless men, young, broken, and in desperate need. He went up the step and in through the door.

It was several days after Matthew had returned from seeing Mary Allard in Brighton before he could take the time to go up to Cambridge and find an opportunity to speak with Aidan Thyer. It was a bright spring morning with a sharp wind and sunlight glittering off the wet cobbles of the streets. The porter let him into St. John’s College. Apparently he had been told to expect him, because he walked with him across the outer quadrangle, under the arch and into the smaller, quieter inside quad where the master’s lodgings were situated on the farther side.

“There you are, sir,” he said respectfully. All men in uniform were regarded with a special dignity, whether he knew them or not, and he remembered Joseph with affection, and a peculiar awe for his part in the previous summer’s tragedy. He did not want to be intrusive, and the indecision was in his face, but he had to ask.

“How is the Reverend Reavley, sir? We think of him often.”

“He’s well, thank you,” Matthew replied.

“He’s in Flanders, isn’t he?” It was a statement, and there was pride in it.

“Yes, near Ypres.” Matthew was surprised how much pride he felt in it himself. He realized how little he knew Joseph. He had half expected him to stay at home, or to find a post in administration, perhaps in one of the command headquarters far behind the lines. His language skills might possibly have been useful. He could very easily have avoided the worst of the violence and the pain, and no one would have blamed him.

The porter nodded. He was a quiet man, stolid, fond of a quiet beer in the evenings, and a walk beside the river. “We’ve got a few of our young men there. Many in France, too, o’ course. An’ Gallipoli. It isn’t like it used to be. Don’t hear young people laughing around the place like it was, playin’ the fool, an’ gettin’ up to tricks.” He sighed, his blunt face full of loss. “Daft, half the time. No harm in ’em, mind, just high spirits. Dead now, some of ’em. Young Mowbray, what was studyin’ history, lost both his feet. Frostbite, they said it was, then gangrene. Don’t think of that in war, do you! Think of shots, and things like that.” He took a deep breath. “That’s the master’s house, sir. He’s expecting you.”

Matthew thanked him and walked across the short space to the door. It opened the moment he knocked on it. A maid of about sixteen led him into the dining room where French doors opened onto the master’s garden. It was presently filled with pruned rosebushes, bare-sticked, waiting for the spring, and gaudy splashes of late daffodils in bloom. Here and there were dense clumps of violets in the damp, shaded earth.

Aidan Thyer was sitting in his armchair, a pile of papers on the table beside him, presumably essays, theses on one thing and another. He stood up as Matthew came in. He was a little taller than average, but the striking thing about him was his flaxen hair, so fair it seemed to catch the light whichever way he moved. His face was long, his cast of expression a strange mixture of melancholy and humor, but both infused by a keen intelligence.

“Come in, Captain Reavley,” he invited, waving to the chair opposite his own. “Can I offer you anything? Tea, or a glass of sherry?”

“Sherry would be excellent, thank you. It’s good of you to make time for me.”

“Not at all. You said it was important. How can I help?” As he was speaking, Thyer went to the cabinet, opened it, and poured two glasses of light, dry sherry. He carried one back to Matthew, and sat down with the other. “Have you heard from Joseph lately?” he asked with interest. “He writes occasionally, but I can’t help wondering if he is putting a brave face on it.”

“I’m sure he is,” Matthew answered. “Sometimes it is the only way to deal with it.”

Thyer smiled bleakly. He was waiting for Matthew to explain his visit.

Matthew hesitated also. It would take great care; he could not be as forthright as he had been with Mary Allard. Thyer was less emotional and a far better judge of other men’s characters. Sitting in this quiet drawing room surrounded by the dust and stones, the wooden stairs hollowed by the feet of centuries of students, the strange mixture of wisdom and enthusiasm. He was acutely conscious that he might be facing a man who had deliberately plotted to betray and break it all on the wheel of idealistic militarism and bloodless surrender.

“I’ve been thinking about the deaths of my parents,” he began, and saw the twist of pity in Thyer’s face. “We know probably as much of the facts as we ever will,” he continued. “And perhaps now they don’t matter. But I still find myself needing to understand. It seems unarguable that Sebastian Allard deliberately caused the accident, and the evidence is strong as to how.” He was aware of sitting unnaturally still. The silence in the room seemed like a tangible thing. “I still have no idea why, and I find that I need to know.” He waited for Thyer’s response, trying to read his face.

Thyer looked startled.

“My dear Matthew, if I knew why, I should have told you at the time. Or at least, to be more accurate, I should probably have told Joseph.”

Matthew leaned back a little, steepling his fingers and gazing at Thyer over the top of them. “Would you? If it had been a painful reason, either to Joseph or to the Allards, for example? Or if maybe you had only guessed at something, perhaps later, in light of other events.”

“I don’t know,” Thyer said, frowning. “The question is completely hypothetical. I know nothing about your family that could explain Sebastian’s act, and I admit I have given it some thought myself and come to no conclusion at all. The little we know makes no sense.”

“It wasn’t personal and it could not have been financial,” Matthew went on. He had weighed what to say on the drive from London. If he said too much he would betray to Thyer that he suspected him, yet if Thyer were the Peacemaker he would know exactly why Matthew was here and everything else that he knew about the document, and the murder of Reisenburg as well. The risk of learning nothing was too great to afford such caution.

“What are you suggesting?” Thyer prompted. His voice was level, his diction perfect. He had sat here, questioned by some of the most brilliant minds of more than a generation, men who would go on to hold many of the highest positions in the land, in industry, science, finance, and government. He molded them, not they him.

“Perhaps political?” Matthew suggested carefully.

Thyer considered for a moment. “I know Sebastian had some very strong beliefs, but so do most young men. Heaven preserve us from those who have none.” He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, I forgot for a moment what he did. I apologize. But knowing your family I find it extremely difficult to believe that your father held any conviction at all that would enrage anyone or make them feel threatened to the point of murder.”

Was that a bait to provoke Matthew into proving himself correct? It was like a complicated game of chess, move and countermove, think three places ahead. He had already considered that. “I wondered if it had anything to do with my father’s German friends.” He watched Thyer’s face. His expression barely changed, only a flicker of the eyes.

“You mean some German connection with the war?” Thyer asked a trifle skeptically. “I can’t imagine what, unless it was built on a misconception. Your father was not for war, was he? I know Sebastian hated the thought. But then so did many young men. Since they are the ones who have always had to fight our wars, and give their lives and their friends to the slaughter, they can barely be blamed for that.”

Matthew felt a faint prickling on his skin in the quiet room, so essentially English with its mahogany Pembroke table at the far side, its prints on the wall. He recognized one of Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire, ruins towering up like an unfinished sketch, more dream than stone. There were daffodils in the china vase, Connie Thyer’s embroidery in a basket, the April sunlight on the flower garden beyond the French doors, centuries-old walls.

Beyond the quad in the other direction there would be students in cap and gown, exactly as they had been for hundreds of years, carrying piles of books, hurrying to class. Others would be crossing the Bridge of Sighs over the river, perhaps glancing through the stone fretwork at the punts drifting by, or the smooth, shaved green of the grass under the giant trees.

“Father was not for war,” Matthew replied. “But he was not for surrender either. He would choose to fight, if pushed far enough.” He kept his voice light, as if the words were quite casual.

“So would we all,” Thyer said with a tight smile. “I really can’t help you, Matthew. I wish I could. It makes no sense to me. Sebastian went to Germany that summer, I believe. Perhaps he became infected with strange ideas there. International socialism has become a religion for some, and can carry all the irrationality and crusading zeal of a religion, even the martyr’s crown for those in need of a cause to follow.”

“You speak as if you have experience of it?” Matthew observed. It seemed a world away from Cambridge, but ideas traveled as far as words could be carried.

Thyer smiled. “I’m master of St. John’s; it is my job to know what young men dream of, what they talk about, whom they listen to, and what they read, both prescribed and otherwise. The best of them always want to change the world. Didn’t you?” His face was gentle, at a glance no more than politely interested, but his clear, light blue eyes penetrated unwaveringly.

Was he a man who wanted to change the world—into an Anglo-German hegemony?

“It isn’t the change that matters,” Matthew answered, feeling his heart beat high in his throat. He must not give himself away. A clumsy word now would be enough. “It’s the means they propose to use to bring it about,” he finished.

“Sebastian was persistently against war,” Thyer said with certainty. “He admired German science and culture, particularly music. But that does not make him unusual. Find me a civilized man anywhere who doesn’t.”

They were moving around and around each other like a medieval dance, never touching. Matthew was learning nothing, except the extraordinary power over minds that the master of a college could exert, which he knew already. Thyer was simply reminding him. Intentionally? Did it amuse him to play?

“You spoke to Sebastian the day before he killed my parents,” he said aloud.

Thyer was jolted at last. It showed only in the flicker of his eyes. “How did you know that?” he asked quietly.

“You took no trouble to conceal it,” Matthew replied. “Was it meant to be secret?”

Thyer relaxed deliberately, the faintest touch of humor at the corners of his mouth. “No. Not at all.” His face was almost without expression. “I called to remind him of his promise to give me a few quotes for a dinner with some friends. He could be forgetful. They were Greek scholars who could appreciate his translations of heroic verse.”

It was another world, a year ago, and a different lifetime. “And had he forgotten?” Matthew asked. Heroic verse! And the next day he had murdered John and Alys Reavley.

“No,” Thyer replied. “He had prepared for it and was quite willing. As it happened, I canceled the dinner. It no longer seemed appropriate. Joseph would have been one of the guests, and in the circumstances none of us felt like proceeding.” Thyer bit his lip and leaned forward very slightly. “I am quite aware of what you are seeking, Matthew. I find it almost impossible to believe that Sebastian was planning murder then,” he said earnestly. “He sounded exactly like the young man we all knew: intense, charming, exasperating, brilliant, at times sublimely funny. And of course fickle.”

Matthew was surprised. “Fickle?”

Thyer’s face softened unexpectedly with a deep sadness. “He was very handsome. He had all life before him. He had a keen appetite for its pleasures, and he wanted to taste them all. I was unaware of his fiancée until she came here after his death, but I knew perfectly well of his dalliance with the girl in the pub along by the millpond, and others as well. He was fairly discreet about seeing her, but Cambridge is not such a big place, and he was easy to recognize also.”

“I didn’t know about others.” Matthew was surprised, and disconcerted. “Who were they?”

“I have no idea,” Thyer confessed. “I imagine he did not wish any of his—girls—to know about the rest.”

“But you knew!” Matthew pointed out.

Thyer smiled very slightly. “A great deal is told to me that does not become general knowledge. As long as his behavior is within certain bounds, a student’s love affairs are not my concern. I may not approve, but I do not interfere.”

It still left a faintly disturbing taste. Sebastian had taken some trouble to deceive at least three women. It could not have been easy, it required planning, evasion, sometimes lies. Deeper than that, it required a degree of lying to himself. To his fiancée he had proposed marriage, or at the least, allowed it to be understood. To Flora in the pub along the river he had offered a deep and possibly intimate friendship, and now it seemed he had given time and at least a degree of affection also to other women. He had committed something of himself to each of them, and yet all of them would have supposed themselves to be unique.

Was that kind of emotional deceit in a man the beginning of the duplicity that could betray his friends and eventually his country as well? Where does omission of the truth begin to be a lie?

The telephone rang on the wall beside Thyer. “Excuse me,” he said, picking it up. Unconsciously he straightened a little as he listened, nodding his head and smiling. “Yes, of course,” he said quietly. “I know your beliefs in the matter, but I think a compromise is necessary.” He waited a few moments while the person on the other end spoke. He nodded again, giving occasional murmurs of agreement. He had not spoken the other person’s name, and yet a certain respect in his manner made Matthew suppose that it was someone of considerable importance, and his mind was sharp to the power of a man in Thyer’s position. What more perfect place for the Peacemaker? He would know men in government, the army, the royal household, the diplomatic service, he would know their dreams and their weaknesses, and above all, they would trust him.

He was still talking, giving gentle advice, the subtlest of pressure.

What had he really said in his conversation to Sebastian on that last afternoon before the murder? It need not have been anything more than an arrangement to meet. The knowledge of the document, the need for such horrific violence could not have been delivered that way, it had to have been face-to-face. He could hardly imagine the emotion there must have been, Sebastian’s horror, recoiling from the savagery of it, the irredeemable commitment to a single act that was the violation of all he professed to believe. And the Peacemaker would have argued the greater good, the self-sacrifice to save humanity, the urgency to prevent the chaos of war—no time to delay, prevaricate. He might even have called him a coward, a dreamer with no passion or courage.

It had to have been face-to-face. Thyer had seen him that afternoon, or early evening. It was grotesque to sit here in the drawing room making polite conversation, playing games around each other, as if it were chess, not lives. There was a dreamlike insanity, the madder because it was real.

Thyer hung up the phone. He was standing near the instrument where it hung on the wall. Outside the morning sunlight was silent on the roses. In the far distance someone laughed.

“I don’t suppose you saw him?” Matthew said aloud, his voice sounding unnatural in his ears. “Sebastian, I mean.”

“No. I just spoke to him on the telephone,” Thyer answered. “There was no need to say anything else.” A very slight shadow touched his face. “Whatever prompted him to commit such a crime the following day, I believe it must have happened after that, but I have no idea what it was. I think you may have to resign yourself to the fact that you may never discover. I truly am sorry.”

Was he a supreme actor? Or only what he seemed—a quiet, scholarly man, now watching half his students sent to the battlefields of Europe to waste their dreams and their learning in blood?

“What time was it you spoke to him?” Matthew asked.

“Almost quarter past three, I think,” Thyer answered. “But I was with Dr. Etheridge from the philosophy department at the time. I daresay he would remember, if you think it matters?”

“Thank you,” Matthew said with a strange mixture of honesty and confusion. He took his leave still uncertain if he had learned anything, or nothing. It would seem to be so easy to check all Thyer had told him, and yet if it were true, what had he learned? Who had spoken to Sebastian—where? How had he been contacted and given his orders to commit the crime that had destroyed his victims, and also himself, when there had been no other call, no letter and no message?

He left the master’s lodgings and, after considerable inquiry, found Dr. Etheridge, who confirmed exactly what Thyer had said. Without difficulty Matthew also confirmed Thyer’s whereabouts for the rest of the evening until after midnight. He had gone from dinner in the hall to a long conversation in the senior common room and finally back to his lodgings. He had never been alone.

Did that prove anything? According to Mary Allard, Sebastian had gone out, and been troubled when he returned. To see whom? All Matthew knew now was that it had not been Aidan Thyer.

He drove back to London knowing only that the master of St. John’s was in a position of extraordinary power to do exactly what the Peacemaker planned, and that Sebastian had been seeing a third woman, perhaps a fourth, in a deceit that startled him. It was like a fog—choking, blinding, and impossible to grip.

CHAPTER

THREE

General Owen Cullingford stood in the center of the room he had turned into his corps headquarters in the small château a couple of miles from Poperinge, to the west of Ypres. The military situation was desperate. He was losing an average of twenty men every day, killed or wounded. In places there was only one man to each stretch of the trench and they were worked to exhaustion simply to keep sentry duty and give the alarm if there was a German attack. In the worst raids whole platoons of fifty men were wiped out in one night, leaving vast gaps in manning the line.

Ammunition was so short it had to be rationed. Every shot had to find a target; sometimes there was no second chance. Ironically, if a brigade did well, there was the difficulty of getting sufficient food up over the crowded and shell-cratered roads to reach them, and if they were decimated, the food was surplus, and wasted. Clean, drinkable water was even more difficult to find.

The other major challenge was evacuating the wounded. Those who could, simply had to walk. Kitchener had promised a million new men, but they were raised by voluntary recruitment, and were still too few, and too raw to fill the yawning gap.

The challenge he feared most was keeping up morale. An army that did not believe it could win was already beaten. Every day he saw more men wounded, more bodies of the dead, more white crosses over hasty graves. He could not afford to show emotion. The men needed to believe that he knew more than they did, that he had some certainty of victory that kept him from the fear that touched them all, or the personal horror or grief at uncontrollable pain. It was his duty to present the same calm face, squared shoulders, and steady voice whatever he felt, and to live the lie with dignity. Sometimes that was all he could do. He must never look away from wounds, or piles of the dead, never let a terrified man see that he was just as frightened, or a dying man think even for a moment that his life had been given for nothing.

Now the chaplain had come from the Second Brigade to complain about the war correspondent who had been crass and intrusive in the Casualty Clearing Station, and ended up in a fight. If it had been any other correspondent he would have told the chaplain to have the man arrested and sent back to Armentières, or wherever it was he had come from. But it was Eldon Prentice, his own sister’s son, and characteristically, he had told everyone of their relationship, so they were reluctant to be heavy-handed.

Reavley was a decent man, considerably older than most of the soldiers, well into his middle thirties. Cullingford knew more about him than Reavley was aware of, because his sister, Judith, had been Cullingford’s translator and part-time driver for several months. His previous driver had been severely injured and Judith had taken over at short notice because her language skills were excellent. Days had turned into a couple of weeks, and other considerations had taken over. She was an extremely good driver and, more than that, she knew the mechanics of a car better than many of the men.

Not that that was the reason he had made no effort to replace her with a regular army driver. Even as he stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, staring out the window at the overgrown garden, her face came to his mind, strong, vulnerable, full of emotion, the sort of face that haunts the mind, not so much for its beauty as for the dreams it awakens.

At first she had been full of anger. He smiled as he looked back on it now. She had been driving an ambulance and seen so many wounded men. She blamed the higher command, the officers who stayed behind and gave the orders, torn between cowardice and incompetence, sending younger and better men out to die. It had been a gradual thing, as she had driven him from one point to another, seeing the larger picture, slowly realizing how grave the situation was; understanding had come to her that he had no choice. One could not save a platoon, or a battalion, and in so doing lose a brigade. If they survived at all, it would be discipline and intelligence that saved them, not emotion, no matter how real or how easy to understand.

He found he could talk to her. With a male driver there was always the difference of rank between them. The man would be regular army, and regardless of conscience or loyalty, he would never lose sight of the difference in their station. An NCO could never argue with an officer, let alone a general, never even allow a difference of view to be seen. Judith had no such qualms. She was a volunteer, and could leave any time she chose. Strictly speaking, he had very little jurisdiction over her. He could dismiss her, but that was all. He could have no effect in her career because she had none. It gave her a kind of freedom, and he was amused to see her use it.

She was brave, generous, funny, and capable of the wildest misjudgments. But her innate honesty compelled her to admit it when she was wrong. It was on one of those occasions, weeks ago now, when he should have disciplined her, at least verbally, and he had found it painfully difficult to do, that he realized how dangerously his own feelings had overtaken him.

He had married later in life, only seven years ago, when he had been already forty-one. Nerys had been married before and it had ended in terrible tragedy. He had found her gentle, charming, and so utterly feminine that before he realized it she had become part of his life. Suddenly he had a home, a place of belonging where domestic order never failed him, where he was loved and comfortable. That he was not understood was something he had appreciated only recently.

He told her nothing of war; she had already suffered enough with her first husband’s death. Even now she had occasional nightmares. He knew it when he saw her face white in the mornings, and her eyes full of fear. She did not speak of it, there were always vast areas of pain that neither of them touched—his of the war now, the men broken and lost, hers of the scandal and the suicide.

Judith was different. She saw as much of the present horror as he did, when she had been driving the ambulance perhaps even more. She might be angry, tender, exhausted, or wrenched with pity, but she confronted it. Her parents had been killed shortly before the war, and her own grief was still raw. Every now and then it spilled over and she reached out to other people who were shaken with loss of one sort or another, with a tenderness that woke new and profound emotions in him, hungers that were frightening, and too honest to deny, much as he tried.

So speaking to Joseph Reavley about Eldon Prentice had been difficult. Nevertheless, Reavley was right, and Prentice must be curbed in his diligence. No, that was the wrong word; Eldon was ambitious and crassly insensitive. He was Abby’s only son, but Cullingford still found him impossible to like. He had tried, but there was an indelicacy in Eldon’s perception of other people that offended Cullingford every time he observed it. It was as if he had an extra layer of skin, so he was unaware of levels of subtler pain in others, embarrassment or humiliation that a finer man would have felt, and avoided.

His words within Charlie Gee’s hearing were unforgivable. His mere wounds were too hideous even to think of, mutilations worse than death. A decent man would not have looked. Reavley had said very little of what the American ambulance driver had actually done, knowing Cullingford would prefer not to know; all he wanted was to protect him.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” he replied automatically.

It was his ADC, Major Hadrian, who entered. He was a small, slender man, intense, efficient, and fiercely loyal. It had taken Cullingford a while to feel comfortable with him, but now habit had won and he accepted Hadrian’s supreme efficiency as a matter of form. “Yes?” he asked.

Hadrian’s face was tight, expression closed in and unhappy.

“A Mr. Prentice is here, sir. He’s a war correspondent, and he insists on speaking with you.” He did not add that the man was Cullingford’s nephew, and that was a startling omission. Prentice would certainly have told him.

“He appears to have met with a slight accident, sir,” Hadrian added.

“Did he tell you that?” Cullingford asked curiously. He dreaded having to listen to Prentice’s complaints about Reavley, and principally about the American VAD driver who had attacked him.

“No, sir,” Hadrian replied.

“Did he tell you he was my nephew?” Cullingford asked. Surely Hadrian would have dealt with the matter himself otherwise.

“No, sir. I already knew. Prentice and I were at school together, Wellington College. He was three years behind me, but I know him.” He added nothing more, and his face was deliberately blank. Cullingford could not imagine that they had been friends, for reasons other than the difference in their ages.

“You’d better send him in,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” There was a flicker of understanding in Hadrian’s eyes, then he turned on his heel and left.

A moment later Prentice came in, closing the door behind him. In spite of the fact that Reavley had warned him, Cullingford was startled at how bad Prentice looked. His fair skin had taken the bruising heavily, he was considerably swollen and the flesh around his eye and jaw was bruised dark purple. His lip was distorted out of shape and when he spoke it was with difficulty because one of his front teeth was chipped. His left arm was in a sling to keep it comfortable after the dislocated shoulder had been put back into place, a quick but intensely painful procedure.

“Good morning, Uncle Owen,” he said almost challengingly. “As you can observe, I have been assaulted. You don’t seem to have much discipline over your troops.”

Cullingford had intended not to be annoyed by him, and already he had lost. He could feel his temper tighten. “I see men injured far more seriously, every day, Eldon. If you don’t know the casualty figures, wounded and dead, then you are not doing your job. If you need medical attention, then go and get it. If you are looking for sympathy, mine is already taken up by soldiers who have had their arms and legs blown off, or their bellies torn open. It seems as if your worst injury is a chipped tooth.”

“I assume your soldiers were wounded by enemy fire,” Prentice said stiffly. “I was assaulted by an ambulance driver! An American, for heaven’s sake!”

“Yes, we have a few American volunteers,” Cullingford agreed. “They are here at their own expense, living in pretty rough conditions, they eat army rations and sleep when and where they can. They work like dogs. Some even get killed helping others. I think it is one of the highest forms of nobility I have seen. They give everything, and ask little in return.”

Prentice hesitated, uncertain for a moment how to answer. It had taken the impetus out of his fury. “I suppose you have no power to exert any kind of discipline over them,” he said finally.

“Never needed to,” Cullingford replied straightaway, a tiny smile on his lips.

“Well, you need to now!” Prentice said in sudden fury. “The man has an ungovernable temper. He went berserk. Lost any kind of control.”

“Who else did he attack?” Cullingford inquired.

The blood rushed up Prentice’s uninjured cheek. “No one, but there was hardly anyone else there! It was only the chaplain who prevented him from killing me, and he wasn’t in any hurry. Not much of a chaplain, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you,” Cullingford snapped. “You’re not a child anymore, Eldon, to come running to your parents if someone picks a quarrel with you. Deal with your own problems. No one admires a sneak. I thought seven years at Wellington would have taught you that. And in Flanders I am not your uncle, I am the general in charge of this corps. I have one hundred and thirty thousand men, many dead or wounded, replacements to find, food and munitions to transport, and, please God, some way to hold the line against the enemy. I haven’t time to attend to your squabbles with an ambulance driver. Don’t come to me with it again.”

Prentice was livid, but he forced himself to relax his body, shifting his weight to stand more elegantly, as if he were perfectly at ease. “Actually what I came for, Uncle Owen, was to ask you to give me a letter of authority to go forward to the front lines, or anywhere else I need to, to get the best story. I know correspondents are a bit limited, and pretty well any officer can arrest them, even the damned chaplain, who probably doesn’t know a gun from a golf club. This one actually threatened me!”

“No,” Cullingford said without needing even to consider it. “You have exactly the same privileges and limitations as all other correspondents.” He was not going to be twisted by family loyalties into giving Prentice an advantage. Abigail should not expect it. The boy had lost his father a few years ago, but he was thirty-three, and indulgence would not help him.

“I imagine you know Captain Reavley,” Prentice said without making any move to go.

“You’re mistaken,” Cullingford replied. “I’ve met him a couple of times. Two divisions is over a hundred and thirty thousand men. I know very few of them personally, and those I do are the fighting officers and the senior staff officers concerned with transport and replacements.”

There was a slight smile on Prentice’s face, no more than a sheen of satisfaction. “I was thinking of a more personal basis,” he answered. “He must be related to your VAD driver, isn’t he? Reavley’s not such a common name, and I thought I detected a faint resemblance.”

Cullingford felt a sudden wave of heat wash over him. There was really very little likeness that he could see between Judith and Joseph Reavley. He was dark and she was fair, her face was so much softer than his, so feminine. Perhaps there was something similar in the directness of the eyes, an angle to the head, and a way of smiling, rather than the structure of bones.

Prentice was watching him. He must answer. He was conscious of guilt, and being desperately vulnerable. He was not used to having emotions he could not control, or defend.

“They are brother and sister,” he answered, keeping his voice level, not so casual as to seem forced. “If you think that means he is around here any more than his duties require, you have very little grasp of the army, or the nature of war.”

“She’s beautiful,” Prentice observed. “In a kind of way. Very much a woman. If she were my sister, driving a middle-aged man around, I’d be over here pretty often—out of concern for her.” He shifted his weight to his other foot, and smiled a fraction more. “In fact, since she’s a volunteer, and could do or not do whatever she wanted, I’d make sure she didn’t get into that sort of position.”

Cullingford felt the heat rise up his face, and was furious with himself for not being able to hide it. He knew it was burningly visible because Prentice recognized it immediately. The triumph was brilliant in his eyes.

“But then perhaps the good chaplain doesn’t know that you’re married,” he said quietly. “And I don’t suppose for a moment that he’d connect Aunt Nerys’s previous tragedy with you. After all, her name was Mallory then, and it was more her husband’s name and poor young Sarah Whitstable whose names were spread all over the newspapers. They can be very cruel: Middle-aged man runs off with sixteen-year-old daughter of Tory peer; double suicide leap off cliffs at Beachy Head, or wherever it was. Bodies dashed to pieces on the rocks below. Poor Aunt Nerys! If she knew you were being driven around by a beautiful, hotheaded twenty-three-year-old, she’d start the nightmares all over again. But I’m sure Captain Reavley doesn’t know that!”

Cullingford felt the room swim around him, as if it had been rocked by heavy artillery fire. It was a physical blurring, even though it was created by an emotional shock. It was real, Prentice was blackmailing him! There was no smile on his face, no wavering in his bold, clear blue eyes. He meant it!

There was also no defense. Cullingford had never said or done anything even remotely improper with Judith. He had never touched her, not even called her by her Christian name. It was all in his imagination, in the momentary meeting of eyes, things that had not needed words: a great sweep of sky across the west, gilded by the fading sun, cloud-racks of searing beauty that hurt and healed with the same touch; understanding of laughter and pain; the knowledge when to be silent.

His guilt was deeper than acts, it was a betrayal of the heart. And yet the loneliness had been slowly killing him. He had protected Nerys at a cost to himself greater than he had realized before. Perhaps it was his fault, too, for allowing her to live in a world cocooned from reality, but he had left it too late to change it now. Nerys was at home, in another life. Judith was here, she was the one who had seen the grotesque ruin of no-man’s-land, the mud, the ice-rimmed craters with the limbs of dead men poking up as if in some last, desperate hold on life. He did not need to reach after impossible explanations for her, or speak with words that were too raw still to bear it.

“I only want a letter,” Prentice was talking again, unable to wait. “Just something to stop them hedging me in. I’m doing my job! And of course I’ll share anything I get with the other correspondents.” He put his good hand in his pocket, in a possibly unconscious imitation of Cullingford’s stance when he was at ease, moments he might have remembered before the war. “Thanks. It’ll help a lot.”

Cullingford would like to have thrown him out, possibly even physically, but he could not afford to. There was steel inside Prentice. He wanted to succeed. If he were prevented in a way he imagined unfair, he would bring down anyone he felt to blame. He would not care who else it hurt, but that it included Cullingford would please him. Cullingford had never liked him. He had tried, and failed. Perhaps he had not tried very hard; he was not a man to whom relationships were easy. Only Judith had crashed through his self-protection guard. She had put no artificial limits to her own feelings, no bounds at all to what she was prepared to know or to see. And then when she was hurt by it, her very hold on endurance, the courage to hope and purpose threatened, it was his strength she needed.

“I’ll give you a letter of authority,” he conceded, hating himself for such surrender. “But you can still be arrested if you get in anyone’s way.”

“I daresay that’ll do,” Prentice replied with the sharp relish of victory in his voice, making it high and a little abrupt. “At least for now. Thank you . . . Uncle Owen.”

Cullingford did not look at him. It was only when the letter was written and Prentice had put it rather awkwardly in his pocket with his one hand, and then gone out, that Cullingford realized that his muscles were clenched with the effort of self-control and the anger inside him was making him hold his breath.

Hadrian was standing in the doorway waiting for instructions. His face was watchful, his eyes unhappy. How well did he really know Prentice? Well enough to have believed blackmail of him?

“If Mr. Prentice comes again,” Cullingford told him, “I don’t want to see him. In fact, so help me God, if I never see him again it will suit me very well!”

Hadrian stared at him, his face dark with emotion. “Yes, sir,” he said quietly. “I’ll see to it.”

Cullingford turned away, suddenly embarrassed. He had not meant to reveal so much. “Will you tell Miss Reavley to get the car ready. I need to go to Zillebeke in half an hour.”

“Yes, sir,” Hadrian said.

Sam Wetherall sat on the fire-step in the sun, a packet of Woodbines in his hand. It was nearly five o’clock. He was smiling, but the sharp, warm light picked out the crusted mud along the line of his jaw, and the deep weariness around his eyes.

“There was Barshey Gee sitting there cleaning his rifle,” he said wryly, “and holding this long philosophical discussion with the German captain, all very reasonable and patient, explaining to him how he was wrong. Apparently he’d been doing it for days. The German was lying with his head and shoulders sticking out of the ground about a foot below the top of the parapet.”

“Days?” Joseph stared at him in horror.

Sam shrugged, grinning. “Oh, he was dead! No one had dared to climb over the top to dislodge him.” He raised his eyebrows. “Which brings to mind, Jerry’s awfully quiet this afternoon. Wonder what he’s up to?” He cocked his head a little sideways, listening.

“It’s been quiet for a while.” Joseph realized he had heard no sniper fire for more than an hour. That was not unusual when there was a Saxon or South German regiment opposite them. They, like some of the English regiments, were inclined to live and let live. However there were others who were far more belligerent, and there had recently been a change on the German side, so this was unexpected.

Sam stood up, bending his head to keep it low, and moving over to Whoopy Teversham, standing on sentry duty. “What can you see?” he asked.

Whoopy was concentrating on the periscope in his hands and did not look away. “Not much, sir. Word is this lot’s pretty tough. Oi ’aven’t seen a thing. Could be all asleep, from anything Oi can tell.”

Sam took the periscope from him and stared through it, his shoulders hunched and tense. Slowly he swiveled it around to look right along their own lines, then across no-man’s-land again. He gave it back to Whoopy and stepped down onto the duckboards. “Wind’s changed,” he said with a shrug. “Blowing our way.”

“I know that,” Joseph answered ruefully. “Smells different.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “You can tell one lot of dead men from another?”

“Of course I can,” Joseph replied. “You don’t have to carry a rifle to have a nose. And the latrines are behind us, not in front.”

“The subtlety of it,” Sam expressed mock admiration.

“Oi can’t see the trenches!” Whoopy interrupted sharply, his voice touched with alarm. “There’s a sort of cloud! Only it’s on the ground, and Oi think it’s coming this way. Bit to the north of us, up Poelkapelle.”

“What do you mean?” Sam demanded, his voice edgy. “What sort of cloud?”

“Greenish-white,” Whoopy replied. “It’s koind of drifting over no-man’s-land. Maybe it’s camouflage, hoiding a raiding party?” Now there was alarm in his voice as well, high-pitched and urgent. He swung around the butt of his rifle to clang on an empty shell case, and at the same minute gongs sounded along the trench to the north and west.

Men scrambled to their feet, seizing weapons, preparing for a wave of enemy troops over the top. Joseph saw Plugger Arnold with his odd boots, and Tucky Nunn. Then there was silence, a long breathless waiting.

Joseph stood as well, crouching a little, back to the wall. An afternoon raid was unusual, but he knew what to expect. There would be a shout of warning, shots, shellfire, wounded men, some dead. He would be there to help carry those they might save. Trying to maneuver a stretcher in the short, narrow lengths of duckboard, around the jagged corners was ghastly. But they had been built precisely so an enemy could not get a long range of fire and decimate a score of men in one raking barrage. It was worth the sacrifice. Most of them they would carry on their backs.

No one moved. Not a duckboard tilted or a foot squelched.

Then he heard it—not a fusillade, but gasping, a cry strangled in the throat, gagging.

Sam swiveled round, his face ashen. “God Almighty!” he said, his voice choking. “It’s gas! Run!”

Joseph froze. He did not understand. How could any soldier, let alone Sam, give the order to run?

Then Sam’s shoulder hit him hard in the chest and almost knocked him off his feet. He bent to a crouch, more by instinct than thought.

“Get up!” Sam shouted at him. There were other noises now, yells of rage, terror, half words cut off in the middle, the terrible sounds of men retching and choking, and beyond them the rising barrage of gunfire.

“Get up!” Sam shouted again. “The gas sinks! It’s on the ground.”

“We’ve got to help!” Joseph protested, swiveling around and pushing against Sam’s weight. “We can’t leave them!”

“We can’t help anyone if we’re dead.” Sam yanked him along by one arm. “In the supply trenches we’ll have a moment.”

Joseph did not understand him, but at least Sam seemed to have some idea what to do. Gas? Poison in the air? He stumbled to the next corner, and the next, bumping into the uprights, lurching left and right. He could already taste something acrid in the air. His eyes were watering. Men were stumbling everywhere. The shelling was getting louder. It must be closer. Any minute German soldiers would appear—towering over the parapet, shooting them like trapped animals.

He reached the supply trench and ran along it, his feet slipping on the wet boards, splashing mud, until Sam hit him from behind and sent him flying. He found himself on his hands and knees, rats scattering ahead of him.

“Take your scarf or handkerchief—anything, and piss on it!” Sam ordered. “Then tie it over your nose and mouth.”

Joseph could not believe it.

“Do it!” Sam’s voice exploded, high-pitched, close to panic. “For God’s sake, Joe! Do it! It absorbs the gas, or at least the worst of it!” He suited the action to the word himself, tying the wet cloth around his face like a mask. “There’s no time to look for stretchers, and there’ll never be enough anyway.”

Joseph obeyed, feeling sick, frightened, and absurd, but he was too accustomed to the smells, the physical indignity of trench life to be revolted. He followed blindly after Sam as they turned and made their way forward again, and down the slight incline. At the first opening they fell over the body of a soldier lying on his back, dead hands clawing at his throat, his face twisted in agony. There was froth and bloody vomit on his lips. It was Roby Sutter, one of Tucky’s cousins. He had been nineteen. Joseph had bought cheese from his father’s farm.

Ahead of him Sam was still moving, bent forward, head just below the parapet. The gunfire was heavier, and there were more shells. Earth and clay exploded up in huge gouts, shooting sideways, fan-shaped. The gas was drifting. He could see its dirty, green-white swathes in the air. If there was a raiding party coming over it would be any moment now. Sam turned raising his arms, swinging them round to indicate forward.

They found two more men still alive, one wounded in the shoulder, propped up against the trench wall. Blood was streaming down his chest and arm, but he was breathing quite well. The other was unconscious, his face already gray. Joseph bent to the wounded man just as there was another burst of shell fire, this time closer to them. The dirt rained down within a few yards.

“I’m going to get you back,” Joseph said firmly. “But I’ll have to carry you. I’m sorry if I hurt you.” He had no idea if the man heard him or not. As carefully as he could, he eased him over his shoulder and straightened his back, not upright—in case he offered a target where the forward side of the trench had collapsed inward—but bent, as if heaving coal.

He heard Sam go onward, leaving the gassed man where he was.

About a hundred yards later, just as Joseph felt as though his spine was breaking, he met more troops coming in. Their faces were pale, frightened, their eyes wide. Immediately behind them were the stretcher-bearers.

He gave the stretcher-bearers his man—still bleeding, but alive—then turned and went back the way he had come. It was worse. More gas was drifting across the mud and craters between the lines. It was patchy, like a real fog, here and there in whorls torn rugged by the wind, leaving the dead trees poking up like gravestones above a drowned world. It lay like a pall, following the low ground until trenches that had been shelters became graves, bodies piled grotesquely, suffocated in their own blood and fluids.

The shelling went on, the noise deafening, shrapnel everywhere. Joseph found more men alive, struggling and wounded. He helped where he could, keeping the urinated scarf over his nose and mouth, tying it so it would not fall off while he used his hands. He lost count of the men he lifted, struggling to keep his balance in the mud, and carried or dragged back to medical aid, and some sort of cleaner air. His muscles screamed with the effort of their weight. Often he slipped and fell over. His own lungs were bursting, but he could not stop, there were always more men down. Some he thought might live, some died even before he could get them help.

He did not know how long it was before he saw Sam again through the smoke and the gas. He lurched toward him, calling out. A shell exploded near them, knocking him off his feet. Part of the parapet caved in, filling the space between them with a cascade of earth and half-buried corpses, some weeks old. Now there was no shelter anymore.

“Help me dig him out!” Sam shouted through the gunfire, and Joseph realized there was a live man under the rubble as well.

If he was wounded, the shock of that would have killed him. If he was gassed there was no hope anyway, not under that slide of clay. He started to say so.

“Shut up and dig!” Sam yelled at him. “The poor sod was all right before that!”

Joseph’s head was throbbing and his vision was blurred. The trench floor seemed to undulate, but the firing wasn’t heavy enough to move the ground like that. The gas had a smell different from latrines or decaying bodies. He obeyed, digging clumsily with his hands, afraid that even if he could find a shovel, he might strike living flesh with it.

He was digging frantically, heaving great clods of wet clay and flinging them anywhere he could, aware of Sam a couple of yards away on the other side, doing the same. Then he felt the ground lurch and the inner side of the trench erupt in a flying wall of dirt that knocked him flat on his back. More weight landed on his legs, and staring upward he saw what looked like a row of giants with human bodies and the heads of pigs. It wavered as if he were seeing it all under water. The noise was deafening, and one of the pigs fell on top of him.

When he opened his eyes, his face was covered. There was something not only over his nose and mouth, but around his head and he could see only dimly. Panic seared through him. He put up his hands to tear it off, and received a sharp blow to his forearm, stinging with pain. One of the giant pigs was in front of him, staring with huge, baleful eyes. But his legs were free! He could feel them.

The noise was still intense: machine-gun fire, shells exploding, and the deeper roar of the heavy artillery far behind the lines.

Someone pulled on his arm and he had no choice but to scramble to his feet or have his arm dislocated at the socket.

“Keep it on, you fool!” the pig in front of him shouted. “It’s a gas mask! And don’t just stand there! Take his feet!” It gestured to the blood-spattered man lying on the mud where the fire-step used to be.

Joy surged through Joseph like an incoming tide. Inside the surreal pig-mask it was Sam. Gasping and laughing, he bent to obey. It took a few moments to get hold of the man properly, then he straightened up again, grasping his ankles firmly, and setting off backward, head and shoulders stooped to keep them below the line of the fractured parapet. Breathing was easier. His head still pounded and he had no peripheral vision because the goggle eyes showed a view that was only straight ahead, but step by step they moved through a world like something out of a medieval painter’s nightmare. Everywhere were mud and mangled bodies, some distorted into hideous forms by the agonies of suffocation. The greenish vapor still hung in drifts, sinking down the walls to sit in hollows, barely stirred by the wind.

On every side the guns barked. Heavy shelling shook the ground to the west, more sporadic eastward as the artillery to the rear tried to take out the enemy’s biggest guns. Craters swam in mud and gas, foul-smelling as if hell beneath them had vomited up its bowels. Where the trench walls had caved in he could see the waste stretching out in broken tree stumps, lengths of wire, and the torn limbs, skeletons, and bodies of men until flesh and mud were indistinguishable.

They reached a supply trench and passed the man to stretcher-bearers, then went back for more. Neither of them spoke. What could there be to say? Somehow the world, in its political insanity, had descended another sharp step downward, dragging an innocent mankind in its wake. Young men Joseph had known all their lives were being destroyed in front of him, and he could do nothing even to explain it to himself, never mind to them. He was useless. All the study of his life evaporated here where hell was real. It swallowed everything.

Physical action was all that was left. He tore gas masks off dead Germans, stomach heaving, hands trembling. He propped men up and gave them a little water, sat with them a moment until they died, carried one here or there, took anyone he could reach. There was no time to cover the dead, let alone bury them. That would come in the days ahead, if they held the ground and could find them. If they were forced to retreat, then perhaps the Germans would do it.

Sometimes he lost Sam, but mostly they worked together, understanding each other without words, even without gesture, simply knowing. Two had more chance of lifting a wounded man than one, and with their gas helmets they could go where stretcher-bearers could not. Sam did not hesitate. He carried his rifle slung over his shoulder, bayonet fixed, and was ready to use it when they came around a corner suddenly and found themselves face-to-face with a German soldier. Sam lunged forward, spearing the man through the chest, and tearing off the soldier’s mask to use on the next live man of their own they found.

There was no question of advancing. The relief poured in with terrible casualties, men falling forward as they were shot, faces in the mud, or floundering as the gas filled their lungs and they drowned from the inside, screaming and gurgling.

But at last the Germans fell back and the line held. By dark the guns and flares showed a landscape of torn wires, trenches barely recognizable in the cratered mud, and the still-lingering pockets of gas.

Joseph was at the dressing station, his head pounding, body so exhausted he could barely feel the pain of burning muscles, bruised flesh, and torn skin. He looked at the blood soaking his tunic and trousers with surprise, not even sure if any of it was his own.

Opposite him, sitting on another upturned box, Sam was stripped to the waist while a young VAD stitched the long gash across his chest and placed a bandage on it.

Sam’s dark face was smeared with blood and smoke, his eyes bloodshot. “What a hell of a mess,” he said with a slight smile. “Good thing it won’t show. I’ll tell you for nothing, I wouldn’t let you touch my jacket with a needle.”

“Sorry, sir,” the VAD apologized. He looked about twenty, gray-faced with horror and exhaustion, and Joseph recognized his accent as Canadian, although he could not place it more closely than that.

Sam winced as the thread was cut, pulling the skin a little. “Don’t worry. By the end of the war you’ll be good enough to stitch shirts, I daresay,” he said with a gasp. “If that’s your idea of a straight seam, they’ll fit Quasimodo.”

The VAD looked puzzled. “Quasimodo, sir?”

“Hunchback of Notre Dame,” Sam replied, moving his arm tentatively, then catching his breath with pain. “Bit before your time. French classic.”

“Oh. Can I get you a shot of rum, sir? You look all in.”

“You can. And one for the chaplain there. He frequents all the same pubs I do.”

Joseph had only a couple of deep scratches; a little cleaning and bandaging were all that was needed. He drank the rum and tried to rise to his feet, but the tent swayed around him and he fell forward on his knees.

“No more rum for the chaplain,” Sam observed. “He’ll need to stay sober for weeks to bury this many dead.” He watched as the young Canadian carefully helped Joseph to sit again. “On the other hand,” Sam added, “perhaps he’ll need to stay drunk to bear it! You’d better get him another, but get him something to eat at the same time.” He turned to Joseph, his face suddenly tender. “Sleep it off, Joe. These poor devils deserve a priest who knows what he’s saying, whether anyone believes him or not.” He stood up himself, his face went ashen, and he toppled over just as the VAD caught him and eased him to the ground. “Stretcher!” he shouted, his voice rising sharply.

Joseph rolled over and lay down on the earth. If he tried to stand again he would only cause more work. Let them put him in a corner somewhere until he came back out of the black hole of oblivion. Please God it was a black hole, full of darkness without shape or sound, no agony, no awareness at all. He hoped they would leave Sam somewhere near him.

When Joseph opened his eyes again it was morning. He saw the sky above him delicate blue with the light pouring through it, still touched with the cool silver of dawn. Then he moved. Every muscle in his body hurt. He felt as if he had been beaten. He was lying on the ground outside the first-aid post. He must have been injured.

Then he remembered the gas.

He rolled over and sat up, his head pounding, his stomach knotted. Someone came to him with a cup of water, but he brushed it aside. Where was Sam? He stared around. The earth was littered with bodies, some bandaged, some splinted, some motionless. He saw Sam’s dark head. He looked to be asleep. There was a bandage around his chest, under his tunic.

Now he remembered it all, the choking, the pall of death over everything, the struggle to save, the overwhelming failure. It came back with a taste of despair so intense he sank back to the ground, breathing hard, unable to force strength into his limbs. He was barely aware of it as somebody held the water to his lips. He drank only because it was less trouble than arguing.

He lay there for a while. He must have drifted off into sleep again, because the next thing he was aware of was someone easing him up into a sitting position and offering him food, and hot tea with a stiff lacing of rum.

Sam was sitting cross-legged opposite him, pulling a face of disgust at the taste of the drink in his hands.

“I wonder what else was in the crater they got this out of!” he said sourly. “A dead horse, I should think!” He took a deep breath, coughed, and then finished the rest of it. He grinned across at Joseph. There was nothing to say, no hope or sanity, nothing wise or clever. The only thing that made it endurable was the knowledge that he was not done.

Half an hour later Joseph was still sore, his body aching and skin torn raw where he had scratched it because of the fleas and body lice that afflicted everyone, officers and men alike. There had been no time or opportunity to try to get rid of them.

It was now nearly midday. There was an air of anxiety even more profound than usual, and Joseph became aware of it as he saw how many men there were still on the ground. Ambulances pulled up, were loaded, and drove away again, always five men or more in each. There was very little laughter; people were too stunned to joke.

Joseph stood up slowly, realized he could keep his balance, and set off to find the surgeon and see if he needed any help. But what could he say to a dying man, or one in appalling pain? That there was a purpose to all this? What? A God who loved them? Where was he? Deaf? Occupied somewhere else? Or as helpless as Joseph himself in the face of endless, senseless, unbearable pain?

There was nothing to say as he sat beside young, dying men. He repeated the Lord’s Prayer, because it was familiar, and it was a way of letting a man already sinking into the blindness of death know that he was there. For some it was the sound of a voice, for others it was touch, a hand on a limb that they could still feel. Some wanted a cigarette. Though Joseph himself did not smoke, he had learned the trick early to carry a packet or two of Woodbines.

The bombardment picked up in the evening and went on all night. It was one of the worst he could remember; there were so many men gone that in places, sentries on watch were alone, exhausted, and fighting against falling asleep. Apart from the fact that it was an offense for which a man could be court-martialed and face the firing squad, no one wanted to let down their friends or themselves.

There were no reinforcements yet. The Canadians had suffered the worst along this part of the line, and the French Algerians farther east. Now, far from a shortage of food, there were no men to eat it, and it was rotting.

By dawn there was some respite in the attack, possibly because with the slackening of the wind, pockets of gas still lingered over the craters and in the lower lying trenches. As full daylight spread over the vast wasteland with its shattered trees and gray water, its mud and corpses, Joseph made his way back to his own dugout. He washed in cold, sour water, shaved, and sat down at his makeshift table with pen, ink, and paper, and a preliminary list of casualties.

He hated it, but it was part of a chaplain’s job to write to the families of the dead and break the news. He tried not to say the same thing each time, as if one man’s death were interchangeable with any other. The widow or parents, whoever it was, deserved the effort of individual words. Nothing would make it better, but perhaps a little dignity, showing that someone else cared as well as themselves, would make a difference in time.

Here in his dugout he had a few possessions from home, things he had chosen because they mattered most to his inner life: the picture of Dante from his study in St. John’s, that marvelous tortured face that had seen its own hell and bequeathed the vision to the world; a couple of books of verse, Chesterton and Rupert Brooke; a photograph of his family, all of them together three Christmases ago; a coin his friend Harry Beecher had found when they had walked together along the old wall the Romans had built fifteen hundred years ago across Northumberland from the Channel to the Irish Sea. They were all memories of happiness, the treasures of life.

In the dugout the air was close and humid. Somewhere in the distance a windup gramophone was playing. The cheerful, tinny sound of dance music was at once absurd and incredibly sane. Maybe somewhere people still danced?

Outside he knew men were digging, shoring up trench walls, carrying in fresh timber and filling sandbags to rebuild the parapets. He could smell food, bacon frying, as well as smoke, the rot of bodies, latrines, and the faint lingering odor of the gas.

He had many letters to write, but the hardest was going to be of a captain he had held in his arms while he retched up his lungs and drowned in his own blood. It was one of the worst deaths. There was a horror and an obscenity to it that was not there in a shell blast, if it had been quick.

Of course many other deaths were appalling. He had seen men torn in pieces, their blood gushing onto the ground; or caught in the wire and then riddled with bullets, jerking as the metal tore them apart, then left to hang there, because nobody could get to them. They could be there for hours before death released them at last.

He wrote:

Dear Mrs. Hughes,I am deeply sorry to have to tell you that your husband, Captain Garaint Hughes, was among the victims of last night’s attack. He was a brave soldier and a fine man. Nothing I say can touch your grief, but you can be proud of the sacrifice he made, and the fortitude and good humor with which he conducted himself.I was with him to the end, and I grieve for the loss of a man who lived and died with honor.

Captain Joseph Reavley, Chaplain

He looked on it and read it again. It still seemed formal. Should it be? Perhaps that was the only way to keep the dignity—if there could be any dignity in mud and blood and pain, and coughing your lungs up.

Then he picked up the pen again and added,

We sat in the lamplight together and he spoke to me with great frankness. He had the courage to call my bluff, and ask me what I really believed. I think in trying to answer him honestly, which he deserved, I answered a few of my own questions also. I owe him a gratitude for that, and I shall not forget him.

Joseph Reavley

Before he could think better of it, or feel self-conscious, he folded it and put it in one of the envelopes. Perhaps the fact that it was personal would one day make her feel closer to the man she had loved.

That afternoon Joseph went with Sam to perform the duty he hated most of all, worse even than writing to families of the dead. The court-martial of Private Edwin Corliss had been unavoidable. Since it was a capital charge, it was presided over by Major Swaby, from another division, with two junior officers, Lieutenants Bennett and MacNeil, neither of whom looked to be over twenty-three. They were all pale-faced, stiff, and profoundly unhappy.

They were all behind the lines. Such proceedings were not conducted under fire. One room of a café had been temporarily commandeered and it had an oddly comfortable look, as if a waiter might appear with a bottle of wine any moment.

Swaby came over to where Joseph and Sam were waiting. He spoke to them briefly. “Your man, Major Wetherall?”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said stiffly, his face pale and tight with anxiety. “He’s a good man.” He did not add any details of his service. This was not the time. Swaby understood.

“Don’t worry,” Swaby said calmly. “Straightforward case. We’ll hear it and debate for a few minutes, then send the poor devil home. Wouldn’t have brought it at all if the sergeant hadn’t been pushed into a bit of a corner. Can’t be seen to overlook these things.”

“No, sir.” Sam relaxed only a fraction.

Swaby went up to the front and sat down at the table. The proceedings begun.

Sergeant Watkins gave evidence, looking acutely unhappy, but he told the truth exactly as he saw it, standing to attention and facing forward.

Every accused man was entitled to ask an officer, usually of his own unit, to defend him, and Corliss had chosen Sam. Now Sam stood to question Watkins. He was courteous, even respectful. He knew enough to take great care neither to embarrass the man, nor seem to be condescending to him. Watkins was a career soldier. He would rather be abused than patronized.

Sam did not argue with the facts, he simply allowed Watkins to tell as little as possible, and choose his own words. It was apparent that if he had been allowed to, he would have let the matter go.

“Then why didn’t you, Sergeant Watkins?” Sam said tartly. His face was pale, his eyes glittering with anger, his body stiff. He leaned forward a little and winced, probably as the bandage tightened over the gash on his chest.

“Civilian present, sir!” Watkins said bitterly. “Newspaperman. Couldn’t let them write up that we ’ave no discipline. And ’e’d take it ’igher, sir!”

“I see. Thank you.”

The surgeon looked so tired Joseph was afraid he was going to pass out before he was finished giving his evidence. Even Major Swaby seemed concerned for him.

“Are you all right, Captain Harrison?” he asked gravely.

“Yes, sir,” the surgeon answered, blinking. “I really can’t help you. I know Corliss lost two fingers in the accident, and we had to take a third off later, but I have no idea how it happened. Don’t have time to think about such things, if it doesn’t matter to the treatment. I certainly didn’t ask him, and I’ve no idea if he said anything. People behave differently when they’re in shock, and a lot of pain. There was an accident. That’s all I know.”

The prosecuting officer did his duty reluctantly. He had several of the men from Sam’s command who had been present just before the accident, and those who were there immediately after. He may not have wished to question them, but he clearly had been given no choice.

Joseph sat in wretched unhappiness, aware of Corliss’s misery and his strong sense of guilt, although whether it was because he had unintentionally injured himself, or because he felt he had let his unit down, it was impossible to tell.

The verdict was given within minutes. Surely they would understand that the case was only brought because of Prentice? They could find Corliss not guilty, say it was an accident, whether it was or not.

It was customary that the most junior officer on the panel should give his opinion on sentence first, so he might not be influenced by his seniors.

Everyone waited.

“Lieutenant Bennett?” Swaby asked.

Bennett looked everywhere but at Corliss or Sam. Joseph had seen him fumbling through the handbook, his fingers trembling.

“Lieutenant Bennett?” Swaby repeated.

“I can’t say anything else, sir,” Bennett mumbled. “It’s a capital charge, sir.”

“I know what the charge is, Lieutenant. What is your recommendation for sentence?”

Bennett gulped. “Death, sir.”

Corliss was already sitting. He was considered medically unfit to have to stand. His hand was very heavily bandaged and in a sling. Sam gripped hold of him, supporting him upright.

Swaby let out his breath, then gulped. “Lieutenant MacNeil?” he asked.

MacNeil looked as if he might be sick. “I . . . I have to agree, sir. I . . . I’m not sure that . . . I mean, is there . . .” He tailed off in profound distress.

“Would you prefer to suggest something else, Lieutenant?” Swaby asked.

MacNeil was clearly floundering. “No, sir,” he said hoarsely. “The law . . . the law seems quite clear,” he said, his hand on a well-thumbed red book, The Manual of Military Law.

Swaby was ashen. It was not what he had expected, but they had left him no way out. He was too inexperienced in such things himself to know what latitude he had in reversing what his juniors had said, and there was no one to help him. The officers who usually conducted such courts-martial before were either dead or too badly injured to be here.

He gulped again, gagging on his own breath. “M-morale must be maintained. Any man who deliberately inflicts a ‘Blighty one’ on himself in order to return home and escape his responsibilities to his country and his fellow soldiers must be made an example of.”

The room was breathless.

Sam was gray-faced.

Swaby looked like a man in a nightmare from which he could not escape. “Private Edwin Corliss,” he said miserably. “It is the judgment of this court-martial tribunal that you have committed a serious act of cowardice in the field, and for this you should be sentenced to death. Major . . . Wetherall . . .” He gulped again. “Have you anything you wish to say in mitigation of the accused?”

Sam stood up. He looked so ill Joseph was afraid he was going to pass out himself. He half rose as if to help him, then realized the futility of it and sank back. Sam was almost as alone as Corliss.

“Yes, sir,” Sam struggled to find his voice. “I have been Private Corliss’s commanding officer for seven months and have seen him face conditions worse than those faced by the men in the trenches under fire. The saps are unique. It takes a very special kind of man to dig into any earth, and go into the tunnels he makes, but especially this. It’s wet, it’s cold, it’s suffocating, and pretty often we come across dead bodies—sometimes Germans, sometimes our own men, men we’ve known, talked to, shared tea with or a joke. If such a man reaches the end of his concentration, sir, and makes a mistake that takes his hand off, I think he’s more to be pitied than blamed! Especially by a civilian newspaperman, sir, who’s never faced anything more dangerous than his editors’ blue pencil!”

“Thank you, Major Wetherall,” Swaby said quietly. “I shall take your plea for mercy into consideration when I pass our verdict on up the command. It will have to go right to General Haig, of course. All capital cases do. In the meantime, Private Corliss will be kept under arrest, and taken to military prison to await his sentence. This court is dismissed.”

“Jesus wept!” Sam said between his teeth, his voice trembling.

“Actually, He’s probably the one person who would understand.” Joseph had not intended irony; he was sick, stomach clenched with misery as much for Sam as for Corliss, but it came to his lips unbidden.

Sam’s mouth twisted with a terrible, bitter humor. “I suppose He would! He couldn’t get Himself out of it either!” he said with despair, his eyes shadowed and hollow with pain. “I’ll see Prentice in hell!”

CHAPTER

FOUR

“This way, Padre!” Goldstone said urgently.

Joseph had stopped bothering to tell Goldstone—or anyone—that he was Church of England, not Roman Catholic. It did not matter much, and he was happy to answer to anything well meant. “I’m coming,” he replied, slithering in the mud. It was thick and clinging, wet on the surface after the day’s fine rain. The raiding party that Colonel Fyfe had sent over the top earlier in the evening had been expected by the Germans and met with stiff opposition. There had been casualties, and Joseph and Lance Corporal Goldstone were among those who had volunteered to see if they could find anyone wounded and still alive.

“Not much in the way of snipers now,” Goldstone went on, picking his way over a narrow neck of land between craters swimming in water. The occasional star shell showed the nightmare landscape in blacks and grays, quagmires of thick, gluelike clay, pools of water and slime, dead trees, dead men and now and then horses, dismembered limbs floating, or arms sticking up like branches out of the flat surfaces of ditches and holes. It was impossible to tell where it was safe to put one’s weight. Any step could suck you in, hold you and drag you down, as if it were a vast, filthy mouth pulling you toward some primeval belly to be swallowed into the earth and become part of it.

The wind whined a little, shrill where it whistled through the wires. There was a cold edge to it. It was difficult to remember that it was spring, though now and again one heard skylarks, even here, and behind the lines, in the burned and ruined villages, there were still wildflowers.

“This is the way they should have come, and we’re getting close to the German lines,” Goldstone continued huskily, his black, slightly awkward figure alternating between stark silhouette and invisibility ahead of Joseph. “Can’t go a lot further. God, this stuff stinks!” He pulled his boot out of the filth with a loud squelch. “Everything tastes of mud and death. I dream about getting it in my mouth. There’s quite a big crater over there. Can you see? Could be one of our boys in it. We’d better go look.”

Reluctantly Joseph obeyed, his feet sliding as he missed his balance and almost fell forward onto Goldstone, who put up his hand to save him. Just as they reached the rim of the crater another flare lit up the sky. The standard advice was to freeze, because movement attracted attention, but instinct was to fling yourself forward onto the ground. Goldstone had already dived in and Joseph followed without thought.

He landed in the soft, stinking mud and visions raced through his mind of falling helplessly into the toxic fluid, every desperate lashing out at it only sucking him in deeper until it filled his mouth and nose and then closed over his head. It was a wretched way to die. He would rather be shot.

A wave of relief swept over him as he came to an abrupt stop, against a body crouched in the mud.

“Shalom, Shlomo ben-Yakov. Baruch he-Shem,” the body said. “Have you any news about the Arsenal for me?”

“Shalom, Isaac,” Goldstone’s distinctive voice replied from the darkness. “Impregnable defense, in my opinion. I don’t see any attack getting past.”

A sickening shudder went through Joseph as he realized that Goldstone must know this German well and was giving away military information.

“Mind you, if Manchester United are on form, they could give them a spot of bother,” Goldstone went on. “But Chelsea are a joke at the moment—defense like a sieve. Arsenal knocked four past them last Saturday, without reply. Do you follow football, Padre?”

Joseph burst out laughing with crazy, hysterical relief, the sound of it echoing over the squelching mud and the wind in the wires. He was in no-man’s-land discussing football scores with two Jewish soldiers. “Not really,” he gasped, choking on his words.

“Some of your men were through here earlier this evening, but they neglected to give me the latest football scores,” Isaac continued. “Some were killed, but we captured three.”

“Isaac, this is Captain Reavley,” Goldstone told him as another shell exploded twenty yards away, drenching them all in mud. Joseph slid a little further into the ice-cold water. “He’s a padre,” Goldstone went on. “Captain, this is Feldwebel Eisenmann, a keen Arsenal supporter, but apart from that, a good man. He used to visit our jeweler’s shop in Golders Green quite regularly before the war.”

“Guten abend, Feldwebel Eisenmann,” Joseph said, wiping the filth off his face with the back of his hand. “I did not expect to bump into you this way.”

The next flare showed a slight smile on Isaac’s face as he turned toward Joseph. “We Jews have a saying, ’Next year, in Jerusalem.’ One day, Father, we will have our own homeland. You will not see Jew fighting Jew like this then. We do not belong here. You Christians have ‘borrowed’ our religion and persecuted us for centuries, but soon, we hope we will be out of your way. As the prophet said, ’They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation.’ ”

“And in the book of Joel,” Joseph replied, quoting in classical Hebrew, “is it not written, ’Beat your plowshares into spears, and your pruning hooks into swords’? I used to teach Greek and Hebrew at Cambridge University. Lance Corporal Goldstone, I think we had better get back to our own lines.”

“So you speak our language, Father Yusuf!” Eisenmann said. “I hope we shall meet again. Shalom. Leheitra-ot.”

“Until we meet again, Smiling One,” Joseph replied, translating the meaning of Isaac’s name as he scrambled to the edge of the crater.

“One last thing, Father Yusuf?” Isaac added.

Joseph hesitated, clinging to the rim. “Yes?”

“Let me know how Arsenal are doing, please?”

Another flare made them flatten to the ground, but it showed them very clearly where they were, almost twenty feet from the German wire ahead of them. There were bodies distinguishable more by form than color. Some of them could still be alive, although nothing moved. But then it never did in the light.

The flare faded and it seemed even darker than before. It was overcast and drizzling slightly, an almost impenetrable gloom. It was a vague comfort to know they were roughly where they had thought they were. Men got lost sometimes, and end up blundering into the enemy’s trenches, instead of their own.

Eisenmann raised his hand in salute, then scrambled forward and in moments was lost in the darkness and drifting rain.

“I met him at Christmas,” Goldstone said softly, an edge of tragedy in his voice. He inched forward in the mud. “But it won’t happen again. There’ll be no truce next year. We are going forward into the night, Chaplain. Nothing for us to laugh at together.” He was referring to the bizarre incident of the German pastry chef who had been baking on Christmas Eve. Infuriated at the French troops still firing across the lines, he had seized a branch of Christmas tree and, still wearing his white baker’s hat, had rushed out into no-man’s-land to shout his outrage at such ignorance. And ignorance it had turned out to be. The troops in question were French Algerian, and therefore Muslim, and had no idea what was going on. Telephones had rung up and down the lines, and then the firing had ceased.

The chef, Alfred Kornitzke, had put the tree down, taken out matches, and solemnly lit all the candles. Then he had bellowed at them in the silent night, “Now you blockheads! Now you know what is going on! Merry Christmas!” And he returned unharmed to continue stirring his marzipan.

Joseph remembered Christmas with an exquisite pain still twisted inside him. Never had heaven and hell seemed closer than as he had stood on the ice-crusted fire-step and stared across the waste with its wreckage of human slaughter, and in the stillness under the blaze of stars, heard the voice of Victor Garnier of the Paris Opera singing “Minuit, Chrétiens, c’est l’heure solenelle.”

Utter silence had fallen on every trench within earshot. Along the whole length of the line, whatever his nature or his faith, not a man had broken the glory of the moment.

But that was gone now.

Joseph and Goldstone moved on toward the wire, slowly in the dark, crawling on their bellies, slipping where the clay was wet, fumbling in the mud and water to gain a foothold. Whenever a flare went up they flattened themselves to the ground and for a moment the pockmarked land was lit, tangles of wire shown up black against the dun colors of the earth, bodies caught in them like giant flies in a web.

They found several men dead, and one still alive. It took them nearly half an hour, working between flares, to pull him out of the mud without tearing off his injured leg and making the bleeding fatal. Then between them they carried him across the cratered land with its crooked paths and stumps of trees, its pockets of ice-cold water still carrying the faint, ghastly odor of gas, until they reached the parapet of the front trenches. They answered the sentry’s challenge, and slithered over and down, only to find that the man was dead.

Joseph was momentarily overwhelmed with defeat. The two men in the trench and Goldstone were all looking at him, expecting him to say something to make sense of it. There was nothing, no sense—human or divine. It was not fair to expect him to have an answer, just because he represented the church. No concept within man was big enough to find sanity or hope in this. It was just day after day of blind destruction.

“Chaplain?” It was Peter Rattray, whom he had taught in Cambridge. Thin and dark, he’d had so much imagination and poetry in the translation of ancient languages. They had walked along the grass under the trees together, looking at students punting on the river, and discussed poetry. Now his face was smeared with blood, his hair was cut short under his cap, and he was asking Joseph to find reason for him in this chaos of death, to untangle from it a meaning, as they once had with difficult pieces of translation.

“We had to try,” Joseph said, knowing the words were not enough. “He might have made it.”

“Of course.” Rattray rubbed the heel of his hand against his chin. “If it were me out there, I’d need to think you’d come for me—whatever.” He grinned, a desperate gesture, white teeth in the flare of a star shell. “Are there any more?”

Joseph nodded, and he and Goldstone turned back to go over the parapet again as soon as there was another spell of darkness.

The next one they brought back alive, and handed him over to the stretcher party.

“Thanks, Chaplain,” he said weakly, his voice barely a whisper. They carried him away, bumping elbows against the crooked walls of the trench, slithering on the wet duckboards and keeping balance with difficulty.

It was toward dawn when Joseph saw the body lying facedown at the edge of the shell crater and knew even before he reached it that the man had to be dead. His head was half submerged, as if he had been shot cleanly, and simply pitched forward.

There was still time before daylight to get him back. Better he be buried somewhere behind the lines, if possible, than lie here and rot. At least his family could be told, instead of enduring the agony of missing in action and never knowing for sure, seesawing up and down between hope and despair. He refused to imagine a woman standing alone every morning, facing another day of uncertainty, trying to believe and afraid to think.

He knelt down beside the man and turned him over, pulling him back a little. He was well built. Carrying him would not be easy. But since he was dead, he would not suffer if he were dragged.

There was a smudge of gray in the sky to the east, but it was still not possible to see much until the flares went up. Then it was clear enough: the bright hair and—even through the mud—Eldon Prentice’s face.

Joseph froze, a wave of unreality washing over him. What in God’s name had Prentice been doing out here? He had no business even in the front trenches, let alone in no-man’s-land. Now he’d been killed! Joseph should get him back before daylight made it impossible. He was so tired every muscle in his body ached, his legs would barely obey him. Goldstone was over somewhere to his left, searching another crater, and there was no way he could carry a body back by himself. He would have to stand even to get him in a fireman’s lift over his shoulder, and it was already too light to risk that.

Why was he bothering to take Prentice, of all people? He wasn’t even a soldier. He had been responsible for Corliss’s court-martial. Without Prentice’s intrusion, Watkins would have let it go. And his gross insensitivity into Charlie Gee’s mutilation still made Joseph cringe in the gut with misery and rage.

But if Joseph’s faith, even his morality, were about anything at all, it must be about humanity. Like or dislike had nothing to do with it. To care for those you liked was nature; it only rose above that into morality when your instincts cried out against it. He looked down at the body. Prentice was barely thirty. Now he was just like any other man. Death reduced the differences to irrelevance.

The pale smear of light was broadening across the dun-colored sky.

He started to pull him, on his back, not to drag his face through the mud if he should have to drop him when there was a flare.

It seemed to take him ages to get across the open space. There were tree stumps in the way, and the body of a dead horse. Twice he slipped, in spite of the broadening light, and the weight of Prentice’s body pulled him into shallow craters full of dirty water. The stench of dead rats and the decaying flesh of men too shattered to reclaim seemed to soak through his clothes onto his skin. But he was determined to get Prentice back so he could be buried decently. The fact that he had disliked him, that he was heavy and awkward in death just as he had been in life, made Joseph doubly determined. He would not let Prentice beat him!

“I will get you back!” he said between his teeth as Prentice’s body once again slid out of his hands and stuck fast. Where the devil was Goldstone? “I will not leave you be out here, no matter how bloody awkward you are!” he snarled, yanking him over half-sideways. Prentice’s foot squelched out of the clay and Joseph fell over backward at the sudden ease of it. He swore, repeating with satisfaction several lurid words he had learned from Sam.

He covered ten yards before the next flare made him scramble for the slight cover of a shell hole. Only another ten yards to go. Any moment now and the sniper fire would start. The Germans would be able to see movement in this light.

His shoulders ached with the dead weight, sucked down as if the earth were determined Prentice would be buried here, in this stretch of ruined land that belonged to no one. Joseph wondered in a fleeting thought if anything would ever grow here again. How absurd it was to kill and die over something already so vilely destroyed! There were other places, only a thousand yards away, where flowers bloomed.

Then suddenly Goldstone was there, heaving at Prentice’s shoulders. They covered the last few yards and rolled him over the parapet and landed hard on the fire-step just as a machine gun stuttered and the bullets made a soft, thudding sound in the clay a few yards away.

“He’s dead, Padre,” Goldstone said quietly, his face in the dawn light filled with concern, not for the body but for Joseph, the second time in one night struggling so fiercely to save someone, too late.

“I know,” Joseph answered, wanting to reassure him. “It’s the war correspondent. I thought he should have a decent burial.”

Two hours later Joseph was sitting on an empty ammunition box in Sam’s dugout, considerably cleaner and almost dry. The rations had been given out by the quartermaster and brought up to the front line, so they had both eaten a good breakfast of bread, apple and plum jam, a couple of slices of greasy bacon, and a cup of hot, very strong tea.

Sam was sitting opposite Joseph, squinting at him through the haze of cigarette smoke, but it was better than the smell of death, or the latrines, and completely different from the gas three days before.

“Good,” Sam said bluntly. “We’ve lost better men than Prentice, and we’ll lose a lot more before we’re through. I suppose your Christian duty requires that you affect to be sorry. Mine doesn’t.” He smiled bleakly, there was knowledge in it, fear, and a wry understanding of their differences, none of which had ever blunted their friendship. He required honor, laughter, courage, but never a oneness of view. “You can say a prayer over him,” he added. “Personally I’ll go and dance on his grave. He was always a rotten little sod.”

“Always?” Joseph said quickly.

Sam squinted through the smoke. “I was at school with him. He was three years behind me, but he was a crawling little weasel even then. Always watching and listening to other people, and keeping notes.” The shadows around his eyes were accentuated by the lantern light inside the dugout. It was too deep for daylight to brighten anything beyond the first step inside the door, and the high walls of the trench blocked most of that. “I’ve got enough grief for the men I care about,” he added, his voice suddenly husky. He brushed his hand across his cheek. “God knows how many there’ll be of them.”

Joseph did not answer. Sam knew he agreed, a glance affirmed it without words.

There was a sound outside, a child’s voice asking in French if anybody wanted a newspaper: “Times, Daily Mail, only yesterday’s.”

Joseph stood up. “I’ll get you one,” he offered. “Then I’d better go and see to the bodies.” It was his duty to prepare men for burial, and after a bad night there was often no time for anything but the briefest of decencies. Identification was checked, tags removed, and any personal belongings, then the bodies, or what was left of them, were buried well behind the lines. That was the least one could do for a man, and sometimes it was also the most.

He stood up, Sam watching him as he went, smiling. Outside he bought a paper from the boy who looked about twelve, and told him to take it to Sam, then walked back along the supply trench to the Casualty Clearing Station where the bodies had been taken. It was a soft, bright morning now, mist burned off except for the wettest stretches where the craters were still deep. He could hear the occasional crack of a sniper’s shot, but mostly it was only the sounds of men working, someone singing “Good-bye Dolly Grey,” and now and then a burst of laughter.

He reached the Clearing Station and found three men busy. The casualties had not been heavy last night, and there were only five dead. Joseph went to help the burial party because he felt obliged to pay some respect to Prentice, for his own sake. It was a kind of finishing. He was the one who had found him, he had brought him back. To walk away now, and then return to say the appropriate words over the grave, seemed an evasion.

There were two orderlies in the makeshift room—Treffy Runham, small, nondescript, always tidy; the other was Barshey Gee, Charlie Gee’s brother. He looked tired, dark rings around his eyes as if he were bruised, no color at all in his skin. They worked quickly, cracking bad jokes to cover the emotion as they made the dead as decent as possible and retrieved the few personal belongings to send back to those who had loved them. They looked up as Joseph came in.

“Mornin’, Chaplain,” Treffy said with a slight smile. “Could ’ave bin worse.”

“Good morning, Treffy,” Joseph replied. “Morning, Barshey.” He moved straight over to help them. He had done it often enough there was no need to ask what was needed.

Barshey looked at him, eyes haunted, full of questions he dared not ask. Joseph knew what they were: Should he wish Charlie dead, out of his agony of mind as well as body, or was life sacred, any life at all? What did God require of you, if there was a God?

Joseph had no answer. He was as lost as anyone else. The difference was that he was not supposed to be. He didn’t fight, he wasn’t a sapper like Sam, or a doctor, an ambulance driver or anything else. All he was here for was to give answers.

He looked at the bodies. One was Chicken Hagger. There were tears in his tunic and his flesh, as much of it as he could see, and several bullet holes. He must have been caught on the wire. It was a horrible death, usually slow.

Barshey was watching him, but he did not say anything.

Joseph walked over to Prentice’s body. They had left him until last, possibly because the others were men they had known and cared about, almost family. Prentice was a stranger. This was nothing like a usual civilian death, shocking and unexpected. Nor was anybody looking for someone to blame, as with Sebastian Allard, and Harry Beecher in Cambridge last summer. Here it hardly even mattered how death had happened; there was nothing to learn from it, no questions to ask.

Even so, Prentice’s body was unusual in that there were no marks of violence on him at all. He had not been shot, or blown apart by explosive or shrapnel, he had simply drowned in the filthy water of a shell hole. There were no tears in his clothes, except from when Joseph had dragged him over stony ground. There was no blood at all.

Not that that made him unique. Other men had drowned. In the winter some had frozen to death.

All Joseph could do was lay him straight, clean the mud off his face, and tidy his hair. The fact that he had drowned had distorted his features, and the bruises from the beating Wil Sloan had given him were still dark and swollen, his lip cracked. But then no one was going to see him, unless it was decided to ship him home. That was a possibility, since he was not a soldier. Perhaps he had better wash him properly, even his hair. Today there was time for such gestures.

He fetched a bowl of water and rinsed out the mud and the rank smell from the shell crater. Barshey Gee helped him, holding another basin underneath so they did not slop the floor.

“What’s that?” he asked as Joseph put a towel around Prentice’s head and started to rub him dry.

“What?” Joseph saw nothing.

“You left mud on his neck,” Barshey replied, his voice was cold. Someone must have told him about the incident in the Casualty Clearing Station. They shouldn’t have done. It was a pain Barshey could have done without.

Joseph unwrapped the towel and looked. There were dark smudges at the back of Prentice’s neck, just below the fair gold hair. But he needed only a glance to see it was bruised skin, not mud. Another look showed him very similar marks on the right as well. They were roundish shapes, two on either side. He heard Barshey draw in his breath quickly, and looked up to meet his eyes. He did not need to say anything to know that the same thought was in his mind. Some-one had held Prentice down, keeping his face in the mud until it had filled his lungs.

“Could someone do that?” he asked, hoping for denial. “Wouldn’t he struggle? Throw them off?”

“Not if you had your weight on ’im,” Barshey answered, huskily, his eyes not moving from Joseph’s. “Knee in the middle of his back.”

Joseph rolled the body over, standing beside him to prevent him from falling onto the floor. He lifted the jacket and shirt and looked at the dead flesh of his lower back. The marks were there, just small, no more than abrasions, and little pinpricks of bleeding as if he had tried to free himself, and chafed the skin on fabric pressed hard against him.

Barshey swore quietly. “Here, Treffy. Come and look at this! Somebody held ’im down with ’is face in the mud, on purpose, till ’e drowned. Whoi the ’ell would anyone do that? Whoi not just shoot ’im?”

“Don’t know,” Treffy admitted, biting his thin lips. “Maybe ’e loikes to be personal. Or he was close to our lines, and wanted to be quiet?”

“What’s wrong with a bayonet?” Barshey demanded, his eyes angry and frightened. “That’s what they’re for.”

“Maybe ’e’d just lost a friend, or something?” Treffy suggested. “Just needed to do it with ’is ’ands. Best not tell anyone, don’t you think, Chaplain?”

“Yes,” Joseph agreed quickly, pulling Prentice’s tunic down and rolling him over again onto his back and smoothing his hair into place. He had not liked the man, he understood Barshey’s feelings only too well, and Wil Sloan’s too. Even better did he understand Sam’s. The trial of Edwin Corliss had been a nightmare, and without Prentice it need never have happened. Sam at least would not grieve, he would probably bless whatever German had done this.

“Yes,” he said again. “Better not tell people. There’s no need.”

Joseph left the Clearing Station to go to speak with the other casualties of the night, the wounded and the bereaved, men who had lost friends. Almost everyone belonged to a household, groups of half a dozen or so men who worked, ate, slept, and fought side by side. They shared rations, parcels from home, letter and news, a sense of family. They wrote to each other’s parents and girlfriends; often they knew them anyway. Sometimes they had grown up together and knew and loved the same places, had played truant from school on the same summer days, and scrumped apples from the same farmer’s trees.

In the trenches they sat huddled together for warmth, told ridiculous jokes, shared one another’s dreams, and pains. They risked their lives to save one of their own, and a death was personal and very deep, like that of a brother.

He sat in the trench in the sun with Cully Teversham, who was busy running a lighted match over the seams of his tunic to kill the lice. He did it with intense care, his big hands holding the fabric gently, keeping the flame exactly the right distance away not to burn the threads.

Joseph was listening, as he did so often, but now, more than in the past, he was afraid that he would not have any answers. If he said there was meaning to it all, a God of love behind the slaughter and the pain, would anybody believe him? Or would they merely think he was parroting the words expected of him, the things he was sent here to say, by people who had not the beginnings of an idea what the reality was like? What kind of a man looked on living hell like this, and mouthed comfortable, simple phrases he did not even believe himself?

A dishonest man, a coward.

Cully let the match go and lit another. “Is Charlie Gee going to make it?” he asked. “It ain’t roight. Oi just got to loike ’im. We never knowed the Gees till we come ’ere, Whoopy an’ me. Tevershams and Gees never spoke. All over a piece o’ land, years back, it was. Don’t even know roightly what ’appened. Something to do wi’ pigs on it. Dug up everything worth ’aving. But that’s pigs for yer. Everyone knows that.”

Joseph said nothing, just listening.

“But they’re alroight, Charlie an’ Barshey are,” Cully went on, keeping his head bent, the sun bright on his ginger hair. “An’ that newspaper man ought never to ’ave bin in that Casualty place, let alone go sayin’ what ’e did. Whoi don’t they do something about that, instead o’ nailing that poor bastard what got ’is hand tore to bits, eh?” He looked up at last, awaiting an answer from Joseph.

What was there to say? The truth was no use, and lies were worse. He could not tell them that he knew no sense in it, he was just as afraid as they were, perhaps not of maiming or of death, but that all his life he had striven to have faith in something that was beyond his understanding, and at the very worst, was a creation of his own need? What did he worship, except hope, and a desperate, soul-starving need for there to be a God?

He worshipped goodness; courage, compassion, honor, the purity of mind that knows no lies, even to oneself; the gentleness to forgive with a whole heart; the ability to have power and never even for a moment misuse it. The grace and the strength to endure, the fortitude to hope, even when it made no sense at all. To be found dead at one’s post, if need be, but still facing forward. That was the answer he gave himself, and pieces of it he gave to others.

“I don’t think they have the answers any more than we do,” Joseph told him. “Major Wetherall will do everything he can for Corliss, and it doesn’t matter about Prentice anymore.” He looked up at the narrow strip of sky above the trench walls, the wind whipping mares’ tails of cloud across it. Sometimes it was all the beauty they could see, a reminder of the rest of the world and the glory and purpose they fought to hold.

“I’m glad that bastard’s dead,” Cully said, dropping the spent match in the mud and regarding his tunic skeptically. Apparently it satisfied him, because he put it back on again. “Is that wicked?” he asked anxiously.

Joseph smiled. “I hope not!”

Cully relaxed. “He was pretty damn unlucky! He must’ve run bang into the only Jerry around there, ’cos we were to the east of where ’e was and Harper’s lot were to the west. Don’t know how any Jerry got through.”

Joseph was puzzled, but he thought little more of it until later in the evening when he was helping Punch Fuller light a candle to heat tea. He overheard a conversation that made it clear there had been a patrol between the German line and where he had found Prentice.

“What time?” he asked.

“Well, I dunno, Chaplain,” Punch said, his eyes wide. “Line held, that’s all I know. We lost Bailey, and Williams got hit in the shoulder, but no one got past us. I’d stake my life on that!”

It was Prentice’s life Joseph was thinking about. “But there must have been one German got through,” he argued. There had to be. Maybe that is why Prentice was drowned rather than shot? It began to make sense. A German had been caught, probably out on a reconnaissance of the British lines, and he was alone so he couldn’t afford to make any noise at all, or he’d attract the attention of the patrol.

“Why’s that, Chaplain?” Punch asked.

“I found one of our men dead,” Joseph answered. “About twenty yards out directly in front of Paradise Alley.” He named the length of trench as it was known locally.

“Then you must have found the Jerry, too,” Punch said with certainty. “No one got back past us.”

“He must have waited till you went, and then gone.”

“We didn’t come back till dawn,” Punch assured him. “That’s how we lost Bailey. Too damn slow. If a Jerry’d got up out of the mud and gone back, he’d ’ave passed right through us. Believe me, that didn’t ’appen. We’d all ’ave seen him, us, our sentries, and theirs.” He turned to Stan Meadows beyond him. “Isn’t that right?”

Stan nodded vigorously.

“I must be mistaken,” Joseph told him, and bent his attention to the candle in the tin, and the mug of tea. He was not mistaken, but he did not want anyone else to start thinking what was now racing through his mind. It was ugly, bringing back hard, painful memories of Sebastian’s death, the surprise and suspicion, the broken trust and the knowledge he had not wanted. Death was grief enough; murder was a destruction of so many other things as well. It stripped away the protection of small, necessary privacies, and exposed weaknesses that at other times could have been guessed at, and then left to be forgotten.

Was this murder again? In the general carnage of war, had someone taken the opportunity to kill Prentice, in the belief his death would be taken for granted as just another casualty?

Who? That was something he did not even want to think about.

What would happen now if he told Colonel Fyfe what he had found? Everyone would know. The trust between men would be destroyed, the friendships that made life bearable; the bad jokes, the teasing, the willingness to listen, even to silly things, anxieties that were foolish, dreams that would never happen, simply in the act of sharing. The certainty that one man would risk his life for another was what bound them into a fighting force.

Suspicion of murder, and the questions that went with it, would poison that, and the cost here would be even greater than it had been in Cambridge. If he told Fyfe, an investigation would begin, justice might be found, or it might not, but at what price? Wil Sloan? Even Barshey Gee? Or one of the sappers who had been Corliss’s friends? And if it were not found, if they never knew, then what shadow would be over them all, perhaps endlessly?

But surely among all the things he could not help, could not even ease, this was one small certainty he could. Prentice had been killed deliberately, by one of their own. The morality of that could not be changed by the fact that Prentice had been arrogant, insensitive, even brutal. To say that it could was to set himself up as an arbiter of who could or could not be murdered with impunity!

The fact that justice was impartial was one absolute in a world descending into chaos. Truth was one certainty worth pursuing, finding, and clinging on to. Whatever the work or the pain involved, he had a purpose.

He did not speak to Colonel Fyfe. When he knew the cause and could prove it, that would be the time to act.

There were many things he needed to know. The very first was the one he dreaded most, and perhaps in his heart was the reason he had to find the truth. He could not forget Sam’s rage at the court-martial of Corliss. The whole thing had been merciless, and it would never have happened had Prentice not pushed the issue. Perhaps Corliss had lost his nerve. He would not be the first man to have been pushed beyond his limit, and for an instant cracked. Men covered for each other. The moment of terror was kept secret. There were few men who did not understand.

Corliss was Sam’s man, his to punish or to protect. That was what loyalty was about, and Corliss had trusted him, as his other men did.

How could he ask Sam? How could he now protect him? Only by proving that he could not be involved, before he began any inquiry.

Sam looked up from cleaning his rifle. “Was he?” he said without emotion.

“Yes.” Joseph sat down beside him, ignoring the mud. “I have to find out who did it.”

“Why?” Sam lit a cigarette.

“You can’t go around murdering people, just because you think they deserve it,” Joseph replied.

Sam smiled, his black eyes bright. “Better reason than because they’re German.”

Joseph did not smile back.

Sam’s face darkened. “Leave it alone, Joe,” he said quietly. “Lots of people had pretty good reasons for hating Prentice. This isn’t peacetime England. Better men than Prentice are being killed every day. We have to learn to live with it, and face the fact that tomorrow it could be our turn, or that of someone we love, someone we’d give our own lives to protect. Have you seen Barshey Gee lately? He knows what happened to Charlie. He’s his brother, for God’s sake!”

“Are you saying Barshey Gee killed Prentice?” Joseph’s mouth was dry.

“No, I’m not!” Sam snapped. “I’m saying he’ll be suspected. So will Wil Sloan, or any of my men. Or me!” He stared at Joseph unblinkingly. “I’d see him in hell, with pleasure.”

“I know.” Joseph’s voice was little more than a whisper. “That’s why I’m here. I want to prove you couldn’t have, before I begin. Where were you when Prentice went over the top?”

“Down a tunnel under the German lines,” Sam replied. “But I can’t prove it. Huddleston saw me go down, but he didn’t come with me.”

Relief washed over Joseph like a blast of warmth. He even found himself smiling. “I had to ask,” he said aloud.

“Leave it alone, Joe,” Sam repeated. “You don’t want to know!”

Joseph stood up. “Maybe I don’t want to, but I have to. It’s my job. It’s about the only certain thing I can do.”

Sam’s face was puckered.

“Hannah sent me some Dundee cake,” Joseph offered. “Come and have some after stand-to.”

Sam raised his hand in half salute, and acceptance, then went back to cleaning his rifle.

Joseph knew it would not be easy. No one else wished to know what had happened to Prentice. He had been either tolerated or positively disliked by all the men. They answered Joseph’s questions out of deference to him, but unwillingly.

“Dunno, Captain,” Tucky Nunn said bluntly. “Don’t see much out there, ’ceptin’ what Oi’m doing meself.”

“Sorry, Chaplain,” Tiddly Wop Andrews said bashfully, pushing his hair back, as if it were still long enough to get into his eyes. “Nobody loiked ’im. After what ’e done to that sapper, nobody gave ’im the toime o’ day. Couldn’t say where ’e went.”

“Oi saw ’im earlier on,” Bert Dazely said, shaking his head. They were standing with their backs to the trench wall. It was raining very lightly and the wind was cold. Joseph offered him a Woodbine and Bert took it. “Thank you, Captain.” He lit it and drew the smoke in thoughtfully. “ ’E were asking a lot o’ questions about how it felt to kill Germans. Oi said it felt bloody ’orrible! An’ so it does. You know Oi can hear them on a still day, or if the wind’s coming our direction?” He looked sideways at Joseph with a frown. “They call out to us, sometimes. Oi even got a couple o’ their sausages once. Left ’em out there, for us, an’ we left them a couple o’ packets o’ Woodbines and a tin o’ Maconochies.”

“Yes, quite a few men do that,” Joseph agreed, smiling. “I’ve even had the occasional German sausage myself. Better than a Maconochie, I think.”

Bert smiled back, but his face was serious again the moment after. His eyes were intense on Joseph’s. “If Oi swap food with them one day, an’ the next Oi’m goin’ over and killing ’em, what does that make me, Chaplain? What kind of a man am Oi going to be when I go ’ome—if Oi do? ’Ow am I goin’ to explain to moi children whoi Oi done that?”

The easy answer was on Joseph’s lips, the answer he had already given many times: that a soldier had no choice, the decisions were out of his hands, there was no blame attached. Suddenly it felt empty, an excuse not to answer, an escape from himself.

“I don’t know,” he said instead. “Would you rather have been a conscientious objector?”

The answer was instant. “No!”

“Then it makes you a man who will, reluctantly, fight for what he loves, and believes in,” Joseph told him. “Nobody said fighting was going to be either safe, or pleasant, or that there were not only risks of physical injury, but mental or spiritual, too.”

“Yeah, Oi reckon you’re right, Chaplain.” Bert nodded. “You got a way of cutting to what’s true, an’ making sense of it. A man who won’t foight for what he loves, don’t love it very much. In fact maybe he don’t love it enough to deserve keeping it, eh?”

“You could be right,” Joseph agreed.

“Oi s’pose it’s a matter o’ deciding what it is you love?” He lifted up his head and looked at the sky. In the distance there was a flight of birds, south, away from the guns. He knew all of them, every bird and its habits. He could imitate the calls of most of them. “Oi think Oi know what matters to me—England the way it ought to be,” he went on quietly. “People comin’ an’ goin’ ’ow they want, quarreling and making up, a pint of ale at the pub, seed time and harvest. Oi’d loike to be married an’ buried in the same church what Oi was christened in. Oi’d loike to see other places, but when it comes to it, Oi reckon Cambridgeshire’s big enough for me. But if we don’t stop Jerry here, doin’ this to the poor bloody Belgians, boi the toime he gets to us, if he wants to, it’ll be too late.”

“Yes, I think it will,” Joseph agreed, the thought twisting inside him with a pain that left him breathless. To think of the land he loved so fiercely, it was like part of his own being had been desecrated. It was unbearable.

“Thanks,” Bert said sincerely. “You koind o’ make things plain, right an’ wrong.”

Joseph drew in his breath to answer, then did not know what to say. It was his job here, to make sense of the chaotic, to justify the descent into hell, even to make intolerable suffering bearable because it had meaning, to insist that there was a God behind it who could make even this all right in the end.

Men like Bert Dazely would not condone murder in any situation at all. What was there left to believe in if Joseph knew Prentice had been killed by one of them, and did nothing about it? It would tear that delicate, life-preserving thread of trust, and plunge them into the abyss beneath.

If personal murder for vengeance, or to rid oneself of embarrassment or pain, were acceptable, what exactly was it they were fighting for? Bert had spoken of country things like the church and the pub, a village whose people you knew, the certainty of seasons, but what he meant was the goodness of it, the belief in a moral justice that endured.