At Some Disputed Barricade

To my brother, Jonathan, army surgeon

I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade.

—Alan Seeger

CHAPTER

ONE

The sun was sinking low over the waste of no-man’s-land when Barshey Gee staggered up the trench, his arms flying, his boots clattering on the duckboards. His face was ashen and streaked with mud and sweat.

“Chaplain! Snowy’s gone!” he cried, bumping into the earthen wall and stopping in front of Joseph. “Oi think he’s gone over the top!” His voice was hoarse with helplessness and despair.

That morning Snowy Nunn had seen his elder brother sawn in half by machine-gun fire in yet another pointless attack. It was now late July 1917, and this mid-Cambridgeshire regiment had been bogged down on this same stretch of ruined land between Ypres and Passchendaele since the beginning, those far-off days of courage and hope when they had imagined it would all be over by Christmas.

Now mutilation and death were everyday occurrences. The earth stank of three years’ worth of latrines, poison gas, and corpses. But it was still different to see the brother you had grown up with reduced to bleeding jelly in front of your eyes. At first Snowy had been too stunned to do anything, as if the sheer horror of it had paralyzed him.

“I think he’s gone over,” Barshey repeated. “He’s lost it. He’s gone to kill the whole German army himself. They’ll just wipe him out.” He gulped.

“We’ll get him back,” Joseph said with far more certainty than he felt. “He might have been taken back to the first aid post. Have you—”

“Oi looked,” Barshey interrupted him. “And in the cookhouse, and Oi looked in all the dugouts and the holes big enough for anyone to crawl in. He’s gone over the top, Captain Reavley.”

Joseph’s stomach clenched. It was pointless to cling to hope they both knew was futile. “You go north, I’ll go south,” he said briefly. “But be careful! Don’t get yourself killed for nothing!”

Barshey gave a bark of laughter so harsh it was almost a sob, and turned away. Joseph started in the opposite direction, south and west toward the place where a man could most easily go over the parapet and find the shelter of what was left of the trees—shell-torn, blackened, and mostly leafless, even now in full summer.

“’Evenin’, Chaplain,” the sentry said quietly from his position on the fire step, peering forward into the gathering gloom. The German guns were rumbling sullenly, starting the night’s barrage, flashes from their muzzles red. The British answered. There were Canadian and Australian regiments up in this section, too.

“Evening,” Joseph answered. “Seen Snowy Nunn?” He had too little time left to afford discretion. Grief had shattered all sense of self-preservation. Of course Snowy had seen men killed before: burned, drowned, gassed, frozen, or blown to pieces, some caught on the wire and riddled with bullets. But when it was your own brother, there was something that tore you in an inner way that nothing else could reach. Tucky had been his childhood friend and protector, the companion in his first adventures, the one who first told him daring jokes, the one who had stood up for him in the school playground. It was as if half his own life had been destroyed obscenely right in front of him.

Joseph had seen Snowy’s face, and known that when the first numbing shock wore off his emotion would turn to rage. He had just expected it to take longer.

“Have you seen him?” he asked the sentry again, this time more sharply.

“Don’t know, Captain Reavley,” the sentry answered. “Oi bin watching forward.”

“He hasn’t done anything,” Joseph said, clenching his teeth to keep control of the helplessness rising inside him. “I want to get to him before he does!” He knew what the man was protecting. Joseph was an officer and a priest, tied to the command by both rank and conviction. There were whispers that men in the French army had already mutinied, said they would hold their positions but would not launch any attack. They had demanded improved rations and whatever humanity of treatment was possible in this universal misery. Thousands had been charged, and over four hundred had been sentenced to death, but so far apparently very few had actually faced the firing squad.

In the British Army the losses had been equally appalling. Men were exhausted and morale was low, but as yet no mutiny. Now there was talk of another push forward against the German lines and there was no heart left for it. Everyone had seen too many friends dead or crippled to gain a few yards of clay, and nothing had changed, except the numbers of the dead. The sentry’s sympathies were with the men, and he was afraid.

“Please!” Joseph said urgently. “His brother was killed and he’s in a bad way. I need to find him.”

“And tell him what?” the sentry said raspingly, turning at last to face Joseph. “That there’s a God up there who loves us and it’ll turn out all right in the end?” His voice was raw with misery.

Joseph had not expressed that sentiment in a long time. Certainly such words were no help. Young men of nineteen or twenty who had been sent out to die, in a hell those at home could not even imagine, did not want to be told by a priest almost twice their age, who had at least had a chance at life, that God loved them in spite of every evidence to the contrary.

“I just want to prevent him from doing something stupid before he’s had time to think,” he said aloud. “I know his mother. I’d like to get one son back to her.”

The sentry did not answer. He turned back to face over the parapet again. The sky was fading into a soft, bright peach trailed across by a wisp of scarlet cloud, still burning in the sun. There were a few naked trees in Railway Wood to the west, silhouetted black against the hot color, more ahead over the German lines beyond Glencorse and Polygon Woods. That was the direction toward which they’d mount the attack.

“Oi don’t know,” the sentry said at last. “But you could troy Zoave Wood.” He jerked his hand to the right. “There’s one or two decent places over there you could sit boi yourself. If that was what you wanted.”

“Thank you.” Joseph moved on quickly. Ahead of him he heard rats’ feet scraping along the boards. The trenches were full of them, millions scavenging among the unburied dead. Men went out at night, Joseph often among them, and brought back the bodies, the living first, then what dead they could.

He passed the dugouts off to the side where stretchers and extra first aid supplies were kept, although each man was supposed to carry with him at least the basics to stanch a wound. It was getting dark and occasionally star shells burst above, briefly lighting the mud with a yellow-white glare, leaving men in momentary blindness afterward.

He still did not know what he was going to say to Snowy when he found him. Perhaps there was nothing more he could do than be there, sit with him in the long agonized silence. Snowy probably would not ask him the impossible questions. He had ceased to imagine there were any answers, and certainly none that Joseph knew. Snowy was over twenty, a veteran. Most of these boys coming out now had been taken from the schoolroom. When they were broken and dying, it was their mothers they called for, not God. Out here what was there to say to God? Joseph was not sure how many people believed in such a being anymore, or thought that if He was there, then He was just as helpless as everyone else.

The trench walls were deep here, the sides firmly riveted with wood.

He passed a couple of men squatting on their heels over a Dixie can of tea.

“Seen Snowy Nunn?” he asked, stopping beside them.

One lifted a pale face, smeared with mud, a long scar across his cheek. Joseph recognized him as Nobby. “Sorry, Cap’n, not lately, poor sod. Tucky were a good chap.” There was no horror in his voice and his eyes stared beyond Joseph into a distance no one else could see.

“Thanks, Nobby,” Joseph acknowledged, and moved on quickly. There were more sentries, a group of men telling tall stories to each other and laughing. Somebody was singing a music hall song with risqué alterations to the words.

Joseph passed an officers’ dugout, its entrance down steep steps. It was narrow as a tomb, but at least it was safe from sniper fire, and in the winter as warm as anyone could be in the frozen earth. He emerged from the confining walls of the trench into Zoave Wood. Most of the trees here were blasted or burned, but a few still had leaves. Beneath them the earth that normally was covered with undergrowth was trampled flat. The front line passed right through what was left of the wood.

He stood close to the trunk of the nearest tree and felt its rough bark against his back. If Snowy was here in these few acres behind the line it was just a matter of walking quietly, crisscrossing it like a gamekeeper looking for a poacher. Except that Snowy would probably be motionless in his grief, alone, growing cold even in this summer night because he was exhausted not in body but in heart. Perhaps he was consumed by that terrible, inexplicable guilt that survivors feel when for no reason at all they live on after those they loved have died.

Joseph started to walk, placing his feet softly on the bare ground. The wind stirred in the few remaining leaves, and shadows flickered, but he could hear nothing else above the noise of the guns. It was a warm night and the stench of the dead mixed with that of the latrines was thick in his throat, although these days he hardly noticed it. It was there all the time. You had to get right away from the lines, into one of the towns, perhaps in an estaminet, and smell cheese and wine and sweat before you lost it. Fortunately there was opportunity for this in places like Poperinghe or Armentières and the small villages within a few miles.

Something moved to his right. It must be a soldier. There were no animals left, and even birds would not come this close to the lines. He turned toward the figure and walked zigzag from tree to tree. It was a while before he saw the movement again. It was not Snowy. The man was too tall.

The sky was completely dark now, the only light emanating from gun flashes and star flares. They made the trees black and filled the spaces between with jagged shadows as the rising wind swayed them to and fro. The summer heat could not last. Soon there would be rain, maybe a thunderstorm. It would clear the air.

He almost stumbled on them: five men sitting in a slight hollow, facing each other and talking, all of them dragging on cigarettes, the brief glow marking their positions and momentarily showing a cheek or the outline of a nose and brow. At first he could not hear the words, but at least one of the low, emotion-charged voices was familiar: It was Edgar Morel, one of his own students from Cambridge days.

Joseph dropped down to his hands and knees to be less obvious, and crept forward soundlessly, keeping his movement steady so he didn’t catch anyone’s eye.

Morel drew on his cigarette again. The burning tobacco glowed red, showing his gaunt features and wide, dark eyes. He was speaking urgently and the anger in him was clear in the rigid lines of his shoulders and chest as he leaned forward. His captain’s insignia gleamed for a moment, then the darkness returned and the smoke he blew out was almost invisible. Joseph could smell it more than see it.

“They’re going to send us over the top again, toward Passchendaele,” Morel said harshly. “Thousands of us—not just us but Canadians, French, and Aussies, too. It’s all just as bloody hopeless as it’s always been. Jerry’ll pick us off by the hundreds. It’ll wipe us out. There’s almost nothing left of us already.”

“They’re all barking mad!” Geddes said bitterly. He was a lance corporal with a long, thin face. The hand holding his cigarette was shaking. It could have been nerves, or shell shock.

Somebody else lit another and passed it across. The man who took it thanked him and took a long drag, then coughed. Joseph stiffened, his stomach knotting. It was Snowy Nunn. He could not see the white blond hair under his helmet, but he recognized his voice.

“They’ve bin saying all summer that we’re going,” the fourth man said wearily. “Can’t make up their bloody minds. But when did they ever know their arse from their elbow anyhow?”

“The twenty-first of March, loike clockwork,” Snowy said quietly. “First day of spring, an’ over we go. They must think Jerry doesn’t have a calendar or something.” He took in a deep, rasping breath, his eyes filled with tears. “What for? What’s the point?” He stopped, his voice choking off.

The man next to him reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.

“The question is, what are we going to do about it?” Morel looked from one to the other of them, his expression unreadable in the darkness, except for his mouth, an angry line in the glow of his cigarette. “Are you willing to be driven over the top to get slaughtered for no bloody reason? The French aren’t, God help them.”

There was a bark of laughter. “You reckon it’s better to be tried and shot by your own? You’re just as dead, and your family’s got to live with the shame.”

“It’s show,” Morel argued. “The French aren’t going to shoot more than a dozen or two. But that isn’t the point.” He leaned forward, his body no more than a deeper shadow in the gloom. He spoke with intense earnestness. “Jerry’s a hell of a lot better prepared for us than we thought.”

“How d’you know that?” Geddes demanded. “What makes you God Almighty? Not that I’ve got any time for generals, or anybody else who thinks he’s better than his neighbor ’cos he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”

“Because I was questioning a prisoner a couple of days ago,” Morel answered sharply. “The Germans know we’re coming.”

“I forgot you speak bloody kraut,” Geddes said angrily. “Is that what you went to Cambridge for?”

A voice in the darkness told him to shut up.

“The point is, I do,” Morel answered.

“The point is, did you tell anyone?” one of the others asked. “Like Penhaligon, for example.”

“Of course I did!” Morel spat. “And he passed it on up. But they don’t want to know. Most of us are going to die anyway,” he went on urgently. “I’d rather go for a cause I believe in than be sent over the top because some damn fool general can’t think of anything except the same futile slaughter, year after year, no matter what the intelligence tells him. We’re no closer to winning than we were in 1914. I’m not sure that the Germans are our real enemies. Are you? You’ve fought opposite them for the last three years, captured some of them. I’m not the only one who’s talked to them. Our sappers have been in tunnels so close under their lines they can hear them talking at night. What about? Killing us? No, they aren’t! Ask any of the sappers, they’ll tell you they talk about their homes, their families, what they want to do after the war, if they live through it. They talk about friends, who’s been killed or wounded, how hungry they are, how cold, how damn wet! They make rotten jokes just like ours. And they sing, mostly sad songs.”

No one argued.

“I don’t hate them,” Morel went on. “If I had the choice, I’d let them all go back to the towns and villages where they belong. I hate the bastards that sent them. What if we copied the French, and told the generals to fight their own bloody war!”

There was a stunned silence.

“You can’t do that,” Snowy said at last. “It’s mutiny.”

“Afraid of being shot?” Geddes asked sarcastically. “Then you’re in the wrong place, son. An’ you know that as well as I do.”

Snowy did not answer. He sat without moving, his head bent.

“I’ll fight for what I believe in,” Morel went on. “It isn’t this senseless death. The land stinks of it! The best men of our generation are sacrificed for nothing! The generals commanding this farce haven’t any more idea of what they’re doing than their poor bloody horses have! Somebody’s got to stop it while there’s still anyone alive to care.”

Joseph was sick at heart, and his legs were cramped where he was crouching to the earth. He had felt the anger in the men for months, the growing helplessness since last summer, but still he had not expected anything so overt, not from a man like Morel. He had known him since 1913 when Joseph had first come back home to Cambridge after his wife’s death. The loss of Eleanor had left him too crippled in faith to lead a parish anymore. He had retreated into teaching. The theory in academic study of biblical languages was so much easier than trying to face the crises of love and faith, doubt, loss and disillusion that were part of the practice of religion.

He moved his leg, kneading the muscle to get rid of the pain. He should have realized that if anyone finally rebelled against the slaughter it would be Morel. Joseph’s job had been to try to teach eager, intelligent young men such as he to think for themselves! University was only partly about acquiring knowledge. Mostly it was about learning how to use the mind, refine the processes of thought.

He felt the steel against his cheek, cold as ice. He froze. Somehow the Germans had gotten a raiding party through the lines. Then he realized that if that were true, the men smoking a few yards from him would have been the first to be seen. He relaxed and tried to turn and see who it was, but the pressure increased.

Morel stood up and came toward him. He stopped about five feet away and struck a match. It flared for only a moment before the breeze blew it out, but long enough for him to recognize Joseph.

“What are you doing here, Captain Reavley?” he said coldly.

The rifle barrel moved away from his cheek, now that the man holding it knew who he was, and Joseph rose to his feet also, easing his aching muscles. It was strange how in the broken woods, earth bare even in high summer, they faced each other like strangers. All memory of being master and pupil had vanished.

There was no corresponding ease in Morel’s stance. His face was almost invisible. It raced through Joseph’s mind to behave as if he had heard nothing of their talk of mutiny, but he knew Morel would not believe him. Even were it true, he could not afford to take the risk.

“Captain Reavley?” Morel repeated, his voice harder.

“I was looking for Snowy Nunn,” Joseph replied. He outranked Morel and he was several years older, but he was a noncombatant, a chaplain rather than a fighting soldier. And perhaps out here in the woods, without a gun, that was irrelevant anyway. If Morel was really thinking about mutiny then all discipline and respect for rank were already gone. Would he shoot a chaplain, a man he had known for years?

Death was all around them, hundreds of men, sometimes even thousands every day. What did one more matter? Unless it was your brother—like Tucky Nunn? Then it ate inside you with a grief almost like madness, as if your own life were being torn apart. Friendship was the only sanity left.

“I know he came out this way,” Joseph went on.

“Come to say a prayer?” Morel asked sarcastically, his voice shaking a little now. “Don’t waste your time, Captain. God’s gone home; the Devil is master here. Don’t bother telling Snowy that. He knows.”

“Don’t decide for me what I am going to say, Morel,” Joseph responded curtly. “That is arrogant and offensive.”

A star shell went up and burst with a brief flare, showing the slight surprise on Morel’s face, and then the anger. “And you were just—” The rest of whatever Morel said was lost in the roar of gunfire less than fifty yards away. The light died and they were in darkness again.

Joseph made up his mind quickly. “Are you planning mutiny, Morel?”

“So you heard!” Morel said bitterly. “I think you’d have left me some doubt. That wasn’t very clever, Chaplain. I should have realized that when it came to it, you were just as stupid as the rest. I used to admire you so much.” There was a regret in him now, a loss so deep it was as if all the world he had loved had finally slipped from his grasp, the very last vestige gone in this ultimate disillusion.

“You called me chaplain,” Joseph reminded him. “Had you forgotten I am a priest? What you tell me in confidence I cannot repeat to anyone at all.” He breathed in and out quickly. “Let’s see how stupid you are, Morel.”

Snowy had stood up as well, but he did not move. He was facing toward them although it was impossible to tell how clearly he could see them.

“Not stupid enough to trust one chaplain with a loyal conscience and not enough brains to see that this is just a futile slaughter now.” Morel’s voice was sharp with emotion. “We won’t win, we’ll die for nothing. Well, I won’t! I care, Chaplain, whether you do or not! I won’t see these men sacrificed on the altar of some idiot general’s vanity. I don’t believe in God. If He existed, He would put a stop to this. It’s obscene!” He spat the word as if it were filth on his lips. “But I care about my men, not just the Cambridgeshires, but all of them. We’ve already lost Lanty and Bibby Nunn, Plugger Arnold, Doughy Ward, Chicken Hagger, Charlie Gee, Reg, and Arthur.” His voice dropped. “And Nigel. The only good I know of is to be sane, not to kill and not to be killed.”

“That would be best,” Joseph agreed, struggling to keep himself steady. Morel had named all the men from his own village deliberately. “But that’s not on offer right now,” he said. “Your choice is whether to trust me and let me walk away, or shoot me, and then shoot all the others who saw you do it. Is that what you want for them?”

“I won’t shoot them!” Morel said derisively. “They’re in it just as much as I am.”

“Oi in’t,” Snowy said from close to Morel’s back. “Not if you shoot Captain Reavley, Oi’m not. That’s murder.”

Joseph waited. There was a lull in the gunfire and he could hear the wind sighing in the branches. Then the crackle of machine guns burst out again and the deeper roar of the heavier shells from far behind the lines. One exploded five hundred yards away, sending the earth flying forty feet into the air.

“Some poor bastard’s got it,” Morel said quietly. “Aussies along that way. I like the Aussies. They don’t take damn stupid orders from anybody. Did you hear about them striking up their band every time the sergeant told our boys to drill in the sun, just to keep them busy? The Aussies couldn’t play ‘God Save the King’ to save themselves, but they made such a row banging and squealing on every instrument there is that the sergeant had to give up. I hope that’s true.”

“Yes, I heard,” Joseph answered. He smiled with a bitter grief in the darkness, but no one saw him.

“Is it true?” Morel asked.

“Yes.” He had no idea, but he wanted it to be, not only for himself but for all of them. He looked at Snowy, who had moved a step closer.

Morel was still hesitating. Should Joseph take the risk of moving to ease his limbs? One of the other men, indistinguishable in the dark, had his rifle in his hands, pointed loosely toward Joseph.

Snowy turned to him. “Goin’ to shoot me, too, are you? What for? Going over, or not going over? Or you just want to shoot someone, an’Oi’m an easy target what won’t shoot back? ’Cos I won’t. Not at me own mates.”

“Get out!” Morel said sharply. “Get out, Reavley, and take Nunn with you.”

Joseph grabbed Snowy by the arm and, almost pulling him off his feet, set out as fast as he could over the rough ground, snarled with tree roots, back toward the trench again and the cover of its walls.

“Thank you,” he said when they were finally safe below the parapet.

There was no life in Snowy’s voice. “Couldn’t let ’em shoot you,” he said flatly. “Moi fault you were out there.”

“Just came to see if you wanted company.”

“Oi know,” Snowy replied. “Oi seen you do it for hundreds of other men. There in’t nothing you can say. Tucky’s gone. Reckon we’ll all be gone in another month or two anyway. Good night, Chaplain.” And without waiting to see what Joseph might say, he turned and walked down the connecting trench toward the supply lines, keeping his balance on the duckboards with the ease of long practice.

It was a fairly quiet night, just the usual sporadic shelling and occasional machine-gun fire. Joseph never forgot the snipers and as the summer dawn came early, he kept his head well below the parapet in the forward trenches.

Fresh water and rations came up and the men stood to. There were all the usual drills, inspections, cleaning of kit, patching up of walls breached during the night. It was still hot and the lice were making men scratch their skins raw.

The mail came, and those with letters sat in the sun with their backs to the clay walls and read. For a few moments they were in another world. Fred Arnold, the blacksmith’s son from St. Giles, roared with laughter at a joke and turned to Barshey Gee next to him to pass it on. They were friends. Both had lost their brothers here, in this regiment.

There were other brothers as well, Cully and Whoopy Teversham. At home their family had a long and bitter feud with the Nunns over a piece of land. Out here it was all absurdly irrelevant.

Tiddly Wop Andrews, good looking but painfully shy, was reading a letter for the third time, blue eyes misty. It must be a love letter at last. Perhaps he could write what he could not say aloud. Joseph had tried many times to help him put his feelings into words, but of course he would not say so now. The men teased each other mercilessly, perhaps to break the tension of waiting for the next burst of violence.

Punch Fuller was sitting with his back to the clay wall and his face up to the sun. He would get his large nose burned if he was not careful. Joseph told him so.

“Yes, sir, Captain,” Punch said, and took no notice at all. He had long learned to ignore remarks about his most prominent feature. He closed his eyes and continued to make up even bawdier verses for “Mademoiselle from Armentières” than the classic ones, trying them out to himself in a surprisingly musical voice.

Joseph came to the end of the connecting trench and walked toward his dugout. Officers had a little privacy, cramped but comparatively safe under the ground. Gas was the worst threat because it was heavy and sank into any crater or hole. But it was unlikely to land this far back.

Just before he reached his dugout he met Major Penhaligon, his immediate commander. Penhaligon was about thirty, eight years younger than Joseph, but today he looked harassed and hollow-eyed. He had cut his cheek shaving and not had time to deal with it. A smear of dried blood marked his skin.

“Ah, Reavley,” he said, stepping in front of Joseph. “How’s Snowy Nunn? Did you see him? That was too bad. Tucky was one of the best.”

Tucky’s cheerful face was as clear in Joseph’s mind as it must have been in Snowy’s. They were alike, with blunt features and fair hair, but Tucky had had the confidence, the brash good humor, always ready to seize a chance for anything. He had been wiser than some men thought him, steadier in a crisis. He had helped Joseph more than once with a word of advice, a well-timed joke, an earthy sanity that reminded men of home, laughter, the things that were worth loving.

“Yes, sir,” Joseph replied. Death was death. It should not be harder for one than another, but it was. “Snowy’s taking it badly.”

Penhaligon had no idea what to say, and it showed in his eyes. He felt it his duty to try; both brothers were his men. He struggled through the weariness and the knowledge of the campaign ahead of them for something to say that would help.

It was Joseph’s job to break the news of loss to people, and think of a way to make it endurable when they would never really get over it, without unintentionally sounding as if he neither understood nor cared. It was his job to steady the panic, create courage out of terror, help men believe there was a purpose to all of this when none of them had any idea if there really was. He had no right to leave it to Penhaligon.

“I talked to him,” he said. “He’ll be all right. Give him a little while, but…keep him busy.” Should he say more, ask Penhaligon to give Snowy some duty that would guard him from Morel’s path?

“We’ll all be busy soon enough,” Penhaligon said with a twist of his mouth. “There’s going to be a pretty big push forward, starting in a day or so.”

“They’ve been saying that ever since the spring,” Joseph replied truthfully.

“Mean it this time,” Penhaligon told him, his eyes steady, trying to see if Joseph understood him beyond the mere words. “Afraid you’ll have a lot to do.”

The morning sun was hot already, but Joseph was chilled inside. He wanted to tell Penhaligon that the men were not ready, some of them not even willing anymore. He had no idea how many others there were like Morel.

Joseph became aware that Penhaligon was watching him, expecting him to speak. He wanted to warn him about Morel, but he had given his word that it ranked as a confession and was sacred. But Penhaligon was commanding a unit with an officer in it who was trying to subvert the entire campaign. Did what Joseph had overheard amount to mutiny? Or was it still only an exaggerated example of the kind of grumbling that was everywhere? The men were exhausted, emotionally and physically—and casualties were almost uncountable. What man of any spirit at all would not question the sanity of this, and think of rebelling against a useless death?

“Chaplain?” Penhaligon prompted him. “Is there something else?”

“No, sir,” Joseph said decisively. Morel had not spoken of any specific intent, simply complained of the violent senselessness of it all. Men had to be free to do that. Even if he thought of anything like refusing to obey an order, he was a Lancashire man born and bred, the Cambridgeshires would never follow him against other Englishmen. “Just thinking about what lies ahead, that’s all.”

Penhaligon smiled bleakly. “It’ll cost us a bit, but apparently it’ll be a real strategic advantage if we take Passchendaele. Damned if I know why. Just one more wretched hell, as far as I can see.”

Joseph did not answer.

The advance began the next morning, July 31. Judith Reavley stood with the men eating their last hot breakfast before the ration parties returned. Her stomach, like theirs, burned with hot tea and the fire of a tot of rum. At ten minutes to four, half an hour before the summer sunrise, the whistles blew and she watched in awe and misery as almost a million men moved forward over the plowed and torn-up fields, slick with mud after the occasional drizzle of the last few days. They threw up pontoons over the canals and poured across the water and up the other side. They moved on through the few still-standing copses of trees and small woods. The noise of guns was deafening and murderous fire mowed down whole platoons, tearing them apart, gouging up the earth.

By midmorning it began to rain in earnest, and a mist descended so that even four or five hundred yards away she could see that the outline of Kitchener’s Wood was no more than a smudge in the gloom.

Two hours later she was struggling to drive her ambulance over the sodden, rutted land to get it as close as she could to the makeshift first aid post to which the wounded were being carried. The road was bombed out and there was nothing but a track left. The shelling was very heavy and in the rain the mud was getting worse. The heavy clouds made it gray in spite of it being close to midday. She was afraid of being bogged down, or even tipping sideways into a crater and breaking an axle. It took all the strength she had to wrestle with the wheel and to peer through the murk to see where she was going.

Beside her was Wil Sloan, the young American who had volunteered at the beginning of the war, long before his country had joined only a matter of months ago. He had left his hometown in the Midwest and hitched a ride on the railroad to the East Coast. From there he had worked to earn his passage across the Atlantic. Once in England he had offered his time—his life, if need be—to help the troops in any way he could. He was not the only one. Judith had met several American drivers and medical orderlies like Wil, and nurses like Marie O’Day, doctors, even soldiers who had enlisted in the British Army, simply because they believed it was right.

Since January America itself had joined the Allies, but there were no American forces in this stretch of the line.

She knew there were shadows in Wil’s life. His blazing temper had run out of control more than once before, and had finally forced him to leave his home. He had never told her how serious the breach had been, but he had hinted at it. Perhaps because they were close enough friends that honesty compelled him, he could not pose to her as an unblemished hero.

Now he was sitting beside her, calling out warning and encouragement alternately as they bucked and slewed over the rough ground, trying to discern through the mist and rain where to stop for the wounded.

“There!” he shouted, pointing to what looked like a level spot slightly below a rise in the slope. There was a mound of some sort, and a man standing near it, waving his arms.

“Right!” she answered, but her voice was drowned by a shell exploding fifty yards away, sending mud and earth up like a gout of water. The debris fell on them, battering the roof and sides of the ambulance and flying in, striking both of them through the open part of the front above the windshield and the door.

She kept on with her hand on the accelerator. There was nothing to gain, or lose, by stopping before they reached the post. Finally she slithered to a halt, a few yards short of the level she had been aiming for. Almost immediately a soldier was beside her, shouting something she could barely hear, and gesticulating behind him.

Wil leaped out and splashed through the mud and rain to start helping the first wounded into the back. He would take only those too badly injured to walk. They could carry five, maybe six at the most. God only knew how many there were. He could do something to stanch bleeding—pack a wound, put on a tourniquet—but that was about all. If an artery was lacerated very often a man bled to death and there was little anyone could do about it. But if a limb was torn off completely, the artery constricted and the blood loss was far less. If they could prevent him dying of shock, there was a good chance of saving him.

Now Judith kept the engine running while Wil and several other men loaded in the wounded. As soon as they gave the signal, she could turn and begin the difficult journey back to the nearest clearing station. She had already made two trips, and she would go on as long as she could, all day and all night if necessary. She did not think that far ahead. One ambulance had been blown to pieces already today, killing everyone in it, and a crater had broken both axles of another.

Wil shouted and she felt the jolt as the door was slammed shut. She moved her hand and accelerated. The wheels spun, sending mud flying. She tried again, and again, then reversed before she could get them to grip.

The journey back was a nightmare. Twice, shells exploded close enough to them to batter them with debris. Once they got stuck, and Wil and the two injured who could stand had to get out to lighten the weight. By the time they reached the clearing station, one of the wounded men was dead. Wil had done everything he could, but it was not enough.

“Shock,” Wil said briefly, his face drawn under the smears of earth and blood. He shrugged. “Should be used to it,” he added, as if it were self-criticism, but his voice wavered.

She smiled at him, and said nothing. They knew each other well enough that he would understand, remember the words from the countless times they had done it all before.

They went back again and again all day, breaking only long enough to eat a little bread and a tin of Maconachie’s stew and hot tea out of a Dixie tin. It all tasted of oil and stale water, but they barely noticed.

By dusk, they were unloading wounded and helping to carry them into a makeshift operating theater in a tent somewhere in an open field. Everything was shrouded in rain. She could see a copse of trees about fifty yards away, but she had no idea which of the many woods it was. All that mattered was to get the men to some kind of help.

Inside the tent, medical orderlies were looking at the newcomers, trying to assess who to treat first, whose wounds could wait, and who was beyond saving anyway. The injured half-sat, half-lay, ashen faced, waiting with the terrible, hopeless patience of those who have looked at horror so often they can no longer struggle against it. They were trying to absorb the reality that their arms or legs were gone or their intestines spilling out into their blood-soaked hands.

Judith was half-carrying a man whose left leg was ripped open by shrapnel which they had bandaged as well as they could. His more important wound was his left arm, which was gone from the elbow down.

The surgeon came over to her. His coat was soaked with blood, his fair hair plastered back. His eyes were sunken and dark-ringed with exhaustion. She had worked with him countless times before.

“We’ve done what we can, Captain Cavan, but he was injured several hours ago,” she said. “He’s pretty cold and shaken up.” It was a magnificent understatement, but everyone dealt in understatement; it was a matter of honor. Ask any man how he was, and he would say, “Not too bad. Be all right in a while,” even if an hour later he was dead.

“Right.” Cavan acknowledged her with a brief smile, a momentary warmth to the eyes, then he moved to the other side of the man and supported him over to the corner inside the tent where he could lie until they could take him onto the table. “Come on, old son,” he said gently. The man was perhaps seventeen, his beard hardly grown. “We’ll have you sorted in a minute or two.”

“Don’t worry, sir,” the man responded hoarsely. “It’s not too bad. Actually I can’t feel it much. Leg hurts a bit.” He tried to smile. “Suppose I won’t be playing the violin now.”

Cavan’s face registered a sudden pity.

“Sorry, sir,” the man apologized. “I never played it anyway. Don’t like the piano much, either, but my mam made me practice.”

Cavan relaxed. “I expect she’ll let you off now,” he said drily. “Wait there and I’ll be with you in a minute.” He eased the man down gently, then turned back to Judith.

She read in his eyes the struggle to conquer the emotions that wrenched at him. There was no time, and they served no purpose. The only help was practical, always practical: clean, scrub, stitch, pack a wound, find something to take the edge off the pain, ease the fear, move to the next man. There was always a next man, and the one after, and a hundred after him.

Judith turned and went back to help Wil with the next casualty.

Ten minutes later a VAD nurse with a plain, sallow face handed her a mug of tea. It was sour and oily, but it was hot and someone had been thoughtful enough to lace it with about half a shot of rum. It loosened some of the knots inside her.

Another ambulance arrived and she helped them unload it. The men were badly wounded and the driver had caught a piece of shrapnel in the shoulder.

“You can’t go out there again,” he said, wincing as he tried to lift his arm. “Jerry’s putting up a hell of a barrage and we’re too close to the front here. They’ll probably have to evacuate this as it is. They’ll need us for that, after they’ve patched up the worst. It’s a bloody shambles. Thousands are dead, and God knows how many wounded.”

Judith walked back into the tent and over to the table where Cavan was stitching up a lacerated arm on a soldier with dark hair.

“Another lot, sir,” she said quietly. “Looks to be three bad ones, and the driver’s got a shrapnel tear in his right shoulder. He says it’s pretty grim out there, and Jerry’s coming this way, so we’ll probably get told to retreat. Do you want us to stay here and help if we have to go suddenly?”

“I’ve got men I can’t move,” he replied without looking up at her. His voice was very quiet. “We’d better see what we can do to defend ourselves. If it’s only the odd raiding party we’ll be all right.” He tied off the last knot. “Right, soldier. That’ll do. You’d better start making it back. That bandage’ll hold till you get to the hospital.”

The man eased himself off the table and Cavan put out his arm to steady him. “Go with MacFie over there. You can hold each other up. You’ll just about make a good man between the two of you.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” The man swayed, gritted his teeth and went gray-white. Then he steadied himself and, swaying a little again, made his way over to MacFie.

Cavan started with the next man. The one after that was beyond his help. Judith brought him a mug of tea. “If you survive it, it’ll make a new man of you,” she said wryly.

“Then you’d better get a river of it.” He took the mug out of her hands gently, his fingers over hers for an instant. “We’re going to need a whole new bloody army after this. God Almighty! Whose idea was this attack?”

“Haig’s, I imagine,” she replied.

“I’d like to get a scalpel to him sometime,” he responded, pulling his mouth into an expression of disgust as he swallowed the tea. “This really is vile! What the hell do they put in it? No, don’t tell me.”

“I could do it with a bayonet,” she replied bitterly.

“Make the tea?” he asked in surprise.

“No, sir, perform a little surgery on General Haig.”

He smiled and it softened his eyes. She could glimpse the man he would have been in peacetime, at home in the green fields and quiet hills of Hertfordshire. “Good with bayonets, are you, Miss Reavley?” he asked.

“I thought all you had to do was charge, shoulders down and your weight behind it,” she replied. “Isn’t it enthusiasm that counts rather than accuracy?”

This time he laughed and his fingers rested gently on her arm. It was just a brief contact, almost as if he had changed his mind before he completed the movement. Only his eyes betrayed the warmth within him. “Those guns sound closer. Perhaps you’d better start getting the wounded out of here and back to the first aid posts.”

“They’re no closer than before, sir,” she told him. She was as used to the sound of them as he was.

“That’s an order, Miss Reavley.”

She hesitated, wondering whether she dared defy him, or if she even wanted to. It had been the worst day’s casualties she had experienced so far, even worse than the first gassings two years ago, but leaving now would look so much like running away.

“Take those men back.” He still spoke sufficiently quietly that only she could hear. “Get them to the hospital now, while you can.”

“Yes, sir.” Reluctantly she turned, still feeling as if she were somehow deserting her duty, being less brave, less honorable than he was. She had gone only as far as the entrance flap of the tent when she heard the shots. This time there was no question that they were rifle fire and much closer than the German line. The next moment she saw them: a dozen German soldiers running toward her out of the gloom, rifles in front of them, bayonets fixed.

Wil Sloan dropped to the ground and she felt almost as if she had been hit herself. She stood frozen. A bullet tore into the canvas and she dived forward and ran to Wil, falling almost on top of him. It was idiotic to try to save him—they would all be dead in minutes—but still she grasped his shoulders to turn him over, needing to see where he was hit.

“Get off me, you fool!” he growled. “I need to get the gun up!”

She wanted to slap him out of sheer relief. “What gun?” she demanded furiously. “If you’ve got a gun, don’t bloody lie there, shoot someone!”

“I’m trying to! Let go of me!”

She obeyed immediately and he hunched up onto his elbows and knees. There was far more gunfire now. The other ambulance driver was firing back and there were more shots from the far side beyond the tent.

“Get the ambulance started,” Wil told her. “We’ll get everyone out that we can. It’ll be a hell of a crush, but we’ll get most of them, with two vehicles. Hurry. Don’t know how long we can hold them. This could be just the first of bloody thousands!”

She obeyed and, bending low, ran back to the tent. Half the wounded were gone already. All those who could stand had rifles. Cavan was at the operating table, still working. A man lay on it bleeding heavily, his belly ripped open. The anesthetist held the ether, but he was shaking so badly the mask seemed to jiggle in his hand.

“You’ve got to get out!” Judith shouted at them. “We’ve got two ambulances. We’ll get everyone in. Just hurry! There are at least a dozen Germans broken through and only five or six of us with guns. We can’t hold them off much longer.”

Cavan did not look up from his work of stitching. “We can’t go yet, Miss Reavley,” he said steadily. “If I leave this man, he’ll die. So will the others who have just been operated on. The journey under fire will tear their sutures open. Tell the men to stand fast. Then come back and help me. I’m afraid my orderly is dead.”

It was only then that Judith noticed the body on the floor. When she had turned to go outside five minutes ago he had been assisting Cavan. The bullets that had torn through the canvas had struck him in the chest.

“Be quick,” Cavan added. “I need you back here. I can’t keep on much longer without help.”

“Yes, sir.” She swiveled and went out, almost bumping into a lance corporal with a heavily bandaged leg. He was kneeling against a packing case firing round after round at the raiding party. One moment they were visible through the drifting rain only by the flicker of their rifle fire, then suddenly the wind gusted and they could see them clearly, more than a dozen of them pressing forward.

“Captain Cavan says to stand fast,” she said loudly. “Tell the ambulance drivers we’ve got to fight.”

He looked at her incredulously, his face slack with disbelief.

“You heard me, Corporal,” she replied. “We’ve got wounded men to defend.”

He swore under his breath, but he did not argue. “You’ll ’ave ter tell ’em yerself, miss. Oi can’t move. Oi don’t mean Oi won’t. Oi can’t!”

“Sorry,” she apologized, and bending low again she scrambled over to Wil and repeated Cavan’s order to him.

“Stand fast?” he repeated incredulously. “You English!” He aimed the rifle again. “Remember the Alamo!” he shouted, and fired. In the distance someone fell.

She gave him a pat on the shoulder and went back to the tent to help Cavan. She knew enough about field surgery to pass him the implements he asked for, even though she could not keep her hands steady. When she tried to thread the needle for him it was hopeless.

“Hold this,” he ordered, indicating the surgical clamp in his hand buried deep in the abdominal wound.

She took it and it slipped off the flesh, blood spurting up hot, catching her across the face. She had never been more ashamed of her inadequacy.

Cavan took the clamp from her and grasped the flesh again.

“Swab it,” he commanded.

She prayed under her breath and cursed herself. She tried to still her breathing, control her muscles. She must not be so stupid, so ineffectual. This was a man’s life she was holding. Her fingers steadied at last. She mopped up the blood, then threaded the needle and passed it to him.

He glanced upward and met her eyes. His look was warm for an instant, then he took the needle. She reached for the clamp.

The gunfire started again, louder and more rapid than before, volley after volley. It sounded as if it was just outside the tent flap. Cavan did not hesitate in his slow, steady work. “Keep swabbing,” he told her. “I need to see what I’m doing.”

A spray of bullets shredded the tent wall and the anesthetist collapsed silently, buckling to his knees, then sliding forward, his back scarlet. Through the ragged tear stepped a German soldier, rifle pointing at Cavan. Behind him were two more, their weapons pointing at Judith also.

“Stop!” the leader said clearly in almost unaccented English.

“If I do, he’ll bleed to death,” Cavan replied without looking up, his hands still working. “Swab, please, Miss Reavley.”

Imagining the bullets crashing into her, bringing instant white-hot death, Judith obeyed, soaking up the blood within the wound.

“Stop!” the German repeated, speaking to Cavan, not Judith.

“I have two more men to operate on,” Cavan replied. “Then we will withdraw.”

There was more rifle fire outside. Someone cried out. The German turned away.

Cavan went on stitching. He was almost finished. The bleeding was contained.

The German looked back. “Now you stop.”

The tent flap opened and one of the wounded men stood there. He was swaying slightly, blood streaming down his tunic where his left arm should be, a revolver in his right hand. He raised it and shot the first German soldier through the head. The other two fired at him at the same moment, hurling him back against the canvas. He was dead before he touched the tent wall, and slithered to the floor.

Cavan swung round and dived toward him, hands outstretched.

“It’s useless!” Judith shouted at him. One of the other soldiers raised his gun to aim at Cavan. She reached for the instrument tray, picked up a scalpel and drove it into the man’s neck. His bullet went through the ceiling.

Cavan was half on top of the dead soldier on the floor. He knew he could do nothing for him. It was his gun he was after. He rolled over, covered in blood, and shot the third soldier through the head.

The second one, gasping and spewing blood from his neck wound, staggered back through the tent the way he had come.

The gunfire outside never ceased.

“We have two more wounded we might save.” Cavan clambered to his feet, shaking, his face white.

“Only one now,” Judith corrected him. “Can…can we hold them off?”

“Of course we can,” he replied, his breath ragged, swaying a little. “But we’ve lost a scalpel.”

Joseph heard about it in the morning, standing in the wreckage of the forward trench, the parapet collapsed, mud up to their knees.

“It’s about the only good thing, Captain Reavley,” Barshey Gee said to him grimly as they stopped working on rebuilding the trench walls for a moment. “He’s some doc, eh, Cavan? There he was, cool as a cucumber, stitching away like there were nothing going on! An’ your sister with him. An’ that Yank ambulance driver, too.” Barshey was a tall man with thick hair. Before the war he had been slender; now he was gaunt and looked years older than twenty-four. “Got ’em out, they did. Didn’t leave a single live one behind.”

Joseph felt a wave of gratitude that Judith was still alive. It was so powerful he smiled fatuously in spite of his effort not to. He forced himself not to think about her most of the time. Everyone had friends, brothers, someone to lose. It would cripple one to think of it too much.

“I’m afraid Major Penhaligon’s dead, sir,” Barshey went on. “Pretty well half the brigade dead or wounded. The Canadians and the Aussies got it hard, too. Word is we could have lost around fifty thousand men….” His voice choked, words useless.

“This summer?” Joseph said. It was worse than he had thought.

“No, sir,” Barshey said hoarsely, the tears running down his cheeks. “Yesterday, sir.”

Joseph was numb. It could not be. He drew in his breath to say “Oh God,” but it died on his lips.

The battle of Passchendaele raged on and the rain continued, soaking the ground until it oozed mud and slime and the men staggered and sank in it.

On August 2, Major Howard Northrup arrived to replace Penhaligon. He was a slight man, stiffly upright with wide blue eyes and a precise manner.

“We’ve a hard job ahead of us, Captain Reavley,” he said when Joseph reported to him in his dugout. He did not invite Joseph to sit, even though he was obliged to bend because of the low ceiling.

“It’s your job to keep up morale,” Northrup went on. He appeared to be about twenty-five and wore his authority heavily. “Keep the men busy. Obedience must be absolute. Loyalty and obedience are the measure of a good soldier.”

“Our losses have been very heavy, sir,” Joseph pointed out. “Every man out there has lost friends….”

“That is what war is about, Captain,” Northrup cut across him. “This is a good brigade. Don’t let the standard down, Chaplain.”

Joseph’s temper flared. He had difficulty not shouting at the man. “I know it is a good brigade, sir,” he said between his teeth. “I’ve been with them since 1914.”

Northup flushed. “You are a chaplain, Captain Reavley, a noncombatant officer. Morale is your job, not tactics. I don’t wish to have to remind you of that again, or in front of the men, but I will do so if you make it necessary by questioning my orders. Thank you for your report. You are dismissed.”

Joseph saluted, then turned and went out, blind with fury.

CHAPTER

TWO

“Mr. Corracher, sir,” Woodrow said, opening the door to Matthew Reavley’s office and showing in a man in his early forties who was dressed formally in a dark suit. His hair was smooth and sleek, off his brow. Normally he would have been distinguished looking, but today his features were marred by anxiety.

Matthew stood up and offered his hand.

Corracher took it so briefly it was barely a touch.

“Thank you, Woodrow.” Matthew excused the clerk. “Sit down, Mr. Corracher. How can I help you?” That was a euphemism. Matthew was a major in the Secret Intelligence Service and Tom Corracher a junior cabinet minister of great promise. However, now he was sweating, in spite of the fact that the room was not overly warm. He had asked for an urgent appointment with someone in charge of counterespionage in London, and since America’s entry into the war in January Matthew’s duties were more general than previously, when America had been neutral, and German diplomacy across the Atlantic and sabotage of American munitions supplies a more immediate concern.

Did Corracher really have anything to say, or was he one of those who jumped at shadows? Many people were. The news was bad almost everywhere. Naval losses were mounting all the time and there was no end in sight. It seemed as if every day ships were going down somewhere. Britain was blockaded and in some places rations were so short the old, the weak, and the poorest actually died of hunger.

The news from the Western Front was devastating, and only moderately better in Italy, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Egypt. In Russia the tsar’s government had fallen and been taken over by the revolutionaries under Kerensky. Perhaps Corracher was merely reflecting the nation’s grief? He had a reputation for courage and a degree of candor. To Matthew it looked as if he might have been overrated in both.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Corracher?” he repeated.

Corracher drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. He had the air of a man about to be sent over the top to face enemy fire. Considering the real loss of life in Passchendaele, Matthew’s patience was fast dwindling.

Perhaps Corracher saw it. “I have been in Hungary recently,” he began. “I am not sure if you are aware of it, but the political situation there is very volatile. Losses in the Italian Front have been critical and it looks as if there may even be revolution there also—as well as in Russia, I mean.” He took a deep breath and steadied himself with an obvious effort. “I’m sorry. I am not making a great deal of sense.”

Matthew did not argue.

Corracher began again. “There is more unrest in Hungary than many people are aware of. A very strong element wishes to break away from the German- and Hungarian-dominated rule by Austria and become independent. If they did so, that would radically alter the balance of power in Southeastern Europe. The whole Balkan peninsula might be persuaded to ally with Italy and strengthen it against Austrian oppression.” Corracher smiled bleakly. “I see from your face that you appreciate at least some of what I am saying.”

“I do,” Matthew conceded. “Unfortunately that is not my area of expertise. I have been—”

“I know,” Corracher cut in. “America. But if my information is correct, you have also done some subtler and more dangerous, shall I say politically complicated, work here in England.” The nervousness had returned even more markedly. His body was rigid, his hands locked around each other, stiff fingered, and the sweat glistened on his face.

Matthew was aware of the silence in the room and the faint sound of footsteps beyond. Corracher was a cabinet minister, but he could still tell him nothing.

Corracher licked his lips. “There are men in this country, highly placed, who did not wish us to go to war against Germany, and do not now wish us to win. They do not wish us to lose, of course, but would rather we made an even-handed peace.” He was watching Matthew intently.

Matthew knew that far better than Corracher possibly could have. His own parents had been murdered in 1914 in order to regain a copy of the proposed treaty between King George and the Kaiser that his father had found and taken. It would have allied Britain with Germany in an empire that would have dominated the western world. But he had hidden it too well, and Matthew and Joseph had found it on the eve of the outbreak of war. But John Reavley had warned them that the conspiracy ran so high that they had not dared to trust anyone. Since then the man behind it—they referred to him among themselves as the Peacemaker—had maneuvered ruthlessly to end the war, even at the cost of Britain’s surrender. He had been willing to kill to achieve it, a lesser sacrifice for a greater cause. But Corracher could not know any of this.

“Indeed,” Matthew said as noncommittally as he could. It was hard to keep the emotion out of his voice. The memory could be pushed to the back of his mind, but the pain was always there: his parents crushed to death in a car wreck, then Cullingford murdered in the street; last year Blaine—and all the other men sacrificed to that terrible cause.

But Matthew had identified the Peacemaker, and the Peacemaker was dead now. It was a nightmare that came back to him waking or sleeping, heavy with the knowledge of betrayal and counterbetrayal. None of it had anything to do with Corracher.

“If you have come to tell me that, Mr. Corracher, it is unnecessary,” he said aloud. “We are aware of it. The most powerful man behind such a sentiment is dead. He was killed at sea, in the Battle of Jutland, last year.”

None of the fear left Corracher’s face; if anything, it increased. “Possibly.” His voice was flat.

“I was there. There can be no doubt.” Matthew remembered the German destroyer looming out of the darkness, the earsplitting sound as the huge twelve-inch naval guns on the deck of the Cormorant exploded, the searing fire belowdecks, magazines on fire, the stench of burning corticine, shattered glass, and smoke. Most of all he remembered Patrick Hannassey’s face as he stood with the prototype of the missile guidance system in his arms and hurled it down. He had turned to leap to the German ship that had rammed them and been carried away and back again by the sea, crashing into them over and over. Matthew had lunged after Hannassey. He could not afford to let him go with the knowledge he had of their scientific failure. He had locked with him, struggled, and won. He could still see Hannassey going over the side, whirling for an instant in the air, lit by the flames of the burning ship, arms and legs flailing. Then the German destroyer had heaved up on the wave and smashed into the Cormorant again, crushing Hannassey like a fly.

Corracher was staring at him, eyes wide. “Oh…” he gulped. “Then he…he can’t have been alone in the cause.”

Matthew’s emotions were too raw with the memory for him to argue. Hannassey was the only man he had ever killed with his own hands, but it was the knowledge of what happened to Detta that wounded him. She was the Peacemaker’s daughter. Of course long before he knew that, he had known she was an Irish Nationalist, just as she had known he was in British Intelligence. They had used each other. That did not stop him from loving her, or feeling the pain twist in his gut because he had beaten her at the game of betrayal. Her own people had crippled her in punishment for losing. Beautiful Detta—who had walked with such dark and subtle grace.

“Exactly what is it you want to tell me, Mr. Corracher?” Pain was jagged in his voice. “There have always been traitors and profiteers. Unless you come about someone of whose acts you have proof, there is nothing I can do. Perhaps it is a police matter rather than intelligence?”

Corracher appeared to come to some decision. The embarrassment in his face was acute, but this time he did not hesitate.

“I have worked hard and had some success in persuading the independent elements in Hungary to swing to the allied side. But they are my contacts, my mother’s family, and others they knew among the Hungarian aristocracy, who trust me. But I have been a voice within the cabinet against any kind of softening or appeasement,” he went on. “One of the few left.” He swallowed with difficulty, as if his throat was tight. “I am about to be charged with a crime I did not commit, but the evidence against me is overwhelming. Mr. Lloyd George will have no choice but to dismiss me from office, and leave the criminal prosecution to take what course it will.” His voice cracked. “It is unlikely that I will escape prison. But even with the best legal defense I can find, if I am cleared it will not remove the slur from my name, or the suspicion that I was guilty.”

Matthew felt the anger grow within him. If the man really was innocent, it was appalling. “I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. “How can Intelligence help you? Do you know who is behind it?”

Corracher’s eyes reflected an emotional exhaustion that was crippling. “If you mean names, I have no idea,” he replied. “I don’t believe there is anything you can do. I’m not seeking your help, Major Reavley, I am giving you information. I am not the only person to whom this has happened. Other men with views inconvenient to some have left office for one reason or another. Kemp was killed in a zeppelin raid last autumn. Newell resigned, no real reason given. And Wheatcroft is threatened with a scandal which will destroy his life.”

Suddenly Matthew’s attention was total. A coldness settled inside him. In the instance of Wheatcroft, he knew exactly what Corracher was referring to; word of it had crossed Matthew’s desk. Alan Wheatcroft had been accused of acts of gross indecency with another man much younger than himself. It had not been proved, and he had protested his innocence, but whether anyone believed him was almost irrelevant. When the accusation became widely disseminated, as inevitably it would, his career would be finished.

“What views did the other three have?” he asked. The belief that he knew was not sufficient.

Corracher smiled bitterly. “Kemp’s sister married a Belgian. All her family was killed in the first German advance. He wants crippling reparations. Newell was something of an expert in Russian affairs. Wheatcroft is different.” A flicker of puzzlement lit his eyes for a moment. “I’m not sure what interest he would be to anyone else. Maybe there’s something about him I don’t know.”

Matthew’s mind was racing. Had the Peacemaker been alive he would have seen a pattern in it, but Hannassey was dead. Matthew had seen his body crushed beyond recognition. Nothing could have survived that impact.

“Do you understand me, Major Reavley?” Corracher said quietly, leaning forward across the desk a little, his hands clenched white.

“Yes,” Matthew answered, drawing his attention back. “Yes, I do, Mr. Corracher. I can look into the other cases, but tell me about yours.” He was aware that it would be difficult for Corracher, and embarrassing, but he could not investigate without the facts.

Corracher was very pale and his hands were locked till the knuckles were white.

“It is extremely sordid,” he said huskily. “I am actually being charged with blackmail.”

Matthew was startled. “You mean someone is saying that you are a blackmailer? Not that you are being blackmailed…”

“That’s right.” Two spots of color stained Corracher’s cheeks.

“Who is saying this?”

Corracher bit his lip. “Mrs. Wheatcroft.”

“Mrs. Wheatcroft?” Matthew was incredulous. “Alan Wheatcroft’s wife? For God’s sake, why? Hasn’t she got more than enough trouble already?”

“That’s it.” Corracher all but swallowed his words. “She is saying that I blackmailed Alan after creating the situation with which he was charged. He claims it never existed in reality. I set it up in order to take money from him.” He stared at Matthew with desperation. “I can see how his wife would wish that that were true, but it is not. I knew nothing at all about it until the police accused me! I was as shocked as anyone.”

“Do you imagine that Wheatcroft told her that?” Matthew asked. His pity for Corracher was intense, but far greater than for any one man was the threat he implied to the integrity of government and the country in general. The only way to fight it was to find the truth.

Corracher frowned, struggling with his own emotions. “I could understand his wanting to find any way of escaping the charge. He must have been desperate. Anyone would be. But why say it was me? Why not one of his closer friends, somebody more likely?”

“For example?” Matthew pressed. He loathed doing this—it was personal in the most distasteful way—but to evade it now out of squeamishness would make it worse.

Corracher looked embarrassed. “Well there are people with…connections to that sort of thing. I mean…men…” He tailed off miserably, as if the air in the room oppressed him.

Matthew was less delicate. “Who prefer other men rather than women,” he finished for him. “But presumably are discreet about it. Yes, of course there are. You think one of them may have set up the scene, or possibly was himself blackmailed into it?”

“It seems probable,” Corracher conceded.

“Any idea who?”

“No. I…I could give you a list of names of those whose nature I am aware of, but it seems a despicable thing to do.” His face registered his disgust at the manipulation of a shared vulnerability in such a way.

“I’m only interested in finding who set up the Wheatcroft scandal and blamed you,” Matthew said vehemently. “If you are right, then someone is effectively ruining both of you. They are robbing the government of the men most likely to fight for a lasting peace. One that will prevent enemy alliance with future elements in Germany which would allow the same thing to happen again. God knows, we need a just peace, but not a weak one.”

“That is why I came to you, Captain Reavley,” Corracher said, his eyes meeting Matthew’s again. “I don’t believe it is coincidental. Whoever has created the evidence that makes me look guilty has been very clever. There’s no way I can fight against it without betraying other good men and raising doubts about other men’s personal lives.”

Matthew saw it very clearly. It was simple and supremely effective. Like a slip noose, every movement against it pulled it even tighter. “Tell me about Wheatcroft,” he asked. “Exactly what is he accused of doing? Where? Who else was involved, and what part are you supposed to have played? What evidence is there, written or witnessed? Is any of it true, even the bits that merely support or contribute?”

Corracher was deeply unhappy. He began slowly, hesitating as he searched for words, too embarrassed to look up. “Wheatcroft is accused of having solicited a sexual act with a young man in a public lavatory near Hampstead Heath. He lives not far from the heath and was walking his dog, which he does regularly. He had been seen talking to the same young man at least twice within two or three hundred yards of the place a week or two earlier. He says that this man simply asked him directions and he gave them.”

“Both times?” Matthew interrupted.

“Yes. It was quite late, at dusk, and he was apparently lost.”

“What does the young man say?”

Corracher’s face tightened. He looked up quickly, then away again. “That’s the thing. He’s a friend of mine, at least his father is. I’ve known him in a casual way most of his life. He’s a bit wild. He’s run up a degree of debt that he can’t pay, and it would be difficult for his father to come up with that much.”

“I take it he says Wheatcroft approached him?” Matthew concluded.

“Yes.”

“And it couldn’t be true?”

“He says I told him to say it!” Corracher’s face was scarlet now, but the anger in him was painfully real.

“Give me times, dates, and names,” Matthew said gently.

“There’s more.” Corracher’s voice was husky. “Wheatcroft says I asked him for money to keep it quiet, and he paid me a hundred pounds, but when I came back for more he told me to go to hell. And that was when I told Davy Pollock—the young man in question—to report it to the police. There is a hundred pounds in my bank that I can’t account for. Wheatcroft said he put it there the day after I demanded it, and he has the paying-in receipt.”

“How are you supposed to have asked for it?” Matthew asked.

“In a typewritten note.”

“Which I imagine he gave to the police?”

“Yes.”

“Write down everything you can think of, Mr. Corracher, including where I can reach you at any time, and I’ll do everything I can to expose the truth,” Matthew promised.

“Thank you.” Corracher seemed relieved that at last someone appeared to believe him. He rose to his feet a little unsteadily and offered his hand, then withdrew it and turned to the door. Was he afraid Matthew would decline to shake it? It was a mark of how deeply he already felt tainted by the charge.

After he had gone, Matthew read all the information, made the briefest of notes himself, then left his office to begin his inquiries.

Outside the air was close and heavy, as if waiting for thunder. The streets were quiet compared with peacetime. Petrol was scarce and expensive, and the army had first call on good horses. There was something heartbreakingly drab about the quiet women waiting in queues or patiently walking along the pavements. The omnibuses had women conductors. One passed Matthew as he waited on the curb to cross. The driver was a woman also, her hair drawn back off her face and tied behind her neck. The girls who worked in munitions factories had actually cut theirs short. It was too easy to get it caught in the machinery and literally have one’s scalp torn off.

No one seemed to wear red or pink anymore, as if it were somehow indecent in the face of so much loss.

Matthew crossed the street and reached the other side, stepping up onto the pavement past a group of white-faced women, silent, each lost in her own world. There were such groups in every town and village all over Europe, waiting for the casualty lists. In some places where a whole brigade had been wiped out, every house in street after street would have the blinds half drawn and stunned, white-faced women would sit in the August heat and wonder how they were going to face tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after that.

Too much had been paid to allow this ever to happen again, anywhere, for any reason. To appease now would be to make this terrible sacrifice meaningless. That thought was not bearable.

He walked past them to the top end, caught an omnibus to Hampstead Heath, and climbed the steps to the upper deck. He sat alone, his mind turned inward.

He barely glanced at the streets he passed through. They were gray and dusty, the city trees in full leaf between the occasional stretch of fire-scarred rubble where a zeppelin had bombed.

Was it possible that Hannassey had left some legacy behind him? Matthew had never imagined that the Peacemaker worked alone, but he had believed that the Peacemaker was not only the brain of the conspiracy, but the heart and the will of it also. Was he wrong? Was there still someone with the skill to concoct a plan like this and carry it through? Had the Peacemaker designed it and left the instructions before his death?

He dismounted at Hampstead Heath and walked to the police station. With his credentials, it was not difficult to find a senior officer willing to tell him about the alleged incident, the young man involved, and his debts.

“Miserable business,” Inspector Stevens said unhappily, sitting behind a desk piled with paperwork. He stirred a tin mug of tea to dissolve the sugar in it.

Matthew had declined the offer of tea.

“Could it have been a misunderstanding on Wheatcroft’s part?” he asked. “Unwise, perhaps, and young Pollock jumped the gun a bit?”

“Of course it could,” Stevens answered. “Pollock withdrew the complaint anyway. Said he was put up to it when he was drunk and only half knew what he was saying.” His bland face registered a weariness and unutterable contempt. “Young waster should be in the army, like everyone else!” He could not disguise the bitterness and the grief in his face. For a moment it was embarrassingly naked. Matthew did not need to ask where his own son was, or if he was still all right. The answer was stifling, like the hot air in the closed room.

“Why isn’t he in the army?” he asked, because he needed to know more about the boy.

Stevens shot him a look of disdain. “If someone propositioned him, it’d be the first time he bloody complained about it!” he said hoarsely.

“Obvious he was willing?” Matthew asked.

Stevens raised his eyebrows. “You mean should Wheatcroft have known what he was and kept clear? Not necessarily. He wasn’t refused by the army for that. Flat feet! That’s what it says on the forms. But that isn’t the point. Wheatcroft said the whole incident never happened, and Pollock changed his story. Said Corracher put him up to it.”

“Could that be true?”

“God knows!” Stevens replied. “I doubt it. Wheatcroft denied that Corracher tried to blackmail him at first, and then he refused to say anything at all. Seemed in a blue funk to me. Sweating like a pig and white as paper.” He ran his hand over his face, rubbing it hard. “He wanted to withdraw the whole thing, let it go, but his wife was furious, determined to charge Corracher, in case it ever came up again. Prove once and for all that he was a vicious liar.”

“Professional rivalry between the two men?” Matthew asked.

Stevens looked genuinely surprised. “Political? You mean for office? Never thought of that, but I don’t think so.”

“What do you think?”

Stevens rubbed his face again and moved his eyes to meet Matthew’s. “Honestly? Ever met Mrs. Wheatcroft? Formidable woman. Beautiful as cut glass, and about as comfortable. My guess would be that Wheatcroft behaved like a fool, refused to do the honorable thing and own up to it. Took the way out by blaming Corracher, until the alternative became facing his wife over it, and her public embarrassment if it became known. If he denied it to her—and maybe quite honestly—it might have been no more than an indiscretion. Then she insisted on taking the way out offered by blaming Corracher. Or at least he didn’t have the courage to deny that it was him. Poor devil!”

“Corracher?”

Stevens looked at him bleakly.

“Both of them. But it’s only my guess. Could be wrong. I don’t know Corracher, except by repute. And I’ve long ago learned that damn near anyone can surprise you—for better or worse.”

Matthew did not press him any further. He thanked him, asked him for David Pollock’s address, and went to see him. He was a handsome, rather effeminate young man. However on looking at him more closely, Matthew realized that that effect had been achieved more by allowing his hair to grow longer and wearing a loose shirt like an artist’s smock than by the basic cast of his features. At first he affected a slight lisp, but as soon as he became angry he forgot it.

“Of course I didn’t!” he said furiously. “It’s all lies! That damn politician put me up to it. Scared me silly. Thought I was going to be accused of…of being a…” He did not finish the sentence, as though the thought were too repellent for him to speak it. “The army refused me because I have flat feet! I couldn’t march if my life depended on it.”

Matthew did not bother to respond. He did not know the truth of his fitness, or his honesty. Nor did he care. It was not his job to chase cowards. It was Corracher who mattered, and the possibility of the Peacemaker’s plans still alive, still working their slow poison.

He did not believe Pollock, but neither could he prove him a liar. All he had achieved was to substantiate what Corracher had told him.

He left and walked back across Hampstead Heath in the late, thundery dusk. The leaves seemed to shiver in the heavy air and the breeze smelled of rain.

He turned it over in his mind. Was this plot a legacy of the Peacemaker? Or was it possible that Hannassey had been the tool, not the principal of the conspiracy? It was now a year since the Battle of Jutland, and Matthew had basked in a certain kind of peace. He had heard about the punishment of Detta and it had hollowed out a new place of pain inside him, but he had known it would come, even if not in so savage a form. He had found a degree of calm inside himself knowing that the man who had caused the death of John and Alys Reavley had finally met his own death. He was both horrified and satisfied that Hannassey’s end, too, had been violent, even that Matthew himself had caused it. He had had no moral alternative but to kill him, and when he had woken in the night, sick and sweating at the memory, that knowledge had enabled him to sleep again.

And there was the infinitely larger issue of the Anglo-German alliance, which the Peacemaker had so nearly brought about, with its monstrous dishonor. Now that, too, was laid to rest.

Except that perhaps it was not. The removal from office of four junior but highly effective members of the government was exactly the sort of thing the Peacemaker would do, and the skill and subtlety of the method suited his style. It was only by chance that the plot had come to Matthew’s notice. Now he realized with a chill that there may have been other plots during the year since Jutland, successful ones that he had not recognized because his assumption that the Peacemaker was dead had blinded him to even considering such a thing. He would have to rectify that fault urgently.

The next day he began inquiries about the death of Kemp in the zeppelin raid. No one had considered it suspicious at the time. There had been many deaths in such raids; his was simply more notable because of his position. Where he had lived was a matter of public record.

“Could it have been murder?” Matthew asked the fire warden who had been first on the scene.

“Murder?” the man looked startled, as if Matthew had said something in bad taste. “Call it that if you like, sir, but it’s better just to say it’s the war. Murder’s sort o’ personal. It’s this way for everybody at the moment.”

“What I mean, Mr. Barker, is could he have been killed by some other means and left with the casualties, to hide the fact that in his case it was murder?” Matthew explained.

Barker was taken aback. “Oo’d want ter do a thing like that?”

“Most people who have power also have enemies,” Matthew said evasively. “Is it possible?”

Barker still looked confused. “’Ow would I know, sir?”

“Where was he found? Inside the house? Under rubble? With other people or alone?” Matthew elaborated.

“Alone. In the street just outside the ’ouse,” Barker replied thoughtfully. “You sayin’ as ’e were put there, an’ we reckoned as it were the bombs wot killed ’im, but it weren’t? Yer never goin’ ter prove nothin’ now!”

“I daresay not. I’d just like to know.”

“Then ’e could a’ bin. Or not.”

“Thank you.”

About Newell he could learn nothing. Reasons of health were given for his resignation, but no one had any knowledge of what illness it might be. Newell himself refused to see or speak to Matthew, claiming that he was not well enough, and had nothing relevant to say.

Blackmail again? Possibly. Its particular nature did not matter. Matthew was now certain in his own mind that there was a concerted plan to get rid of ministers who were individually able to affect the course of war, through diplomatic skill or connections, whether it was the Peacemaker who was behind it or not. The nation was exhausted with the loss of men, with shortages of food, fuel, and luxuries of all sorts, with the drabness and ever-present fear of bombing. They dreaded even greater hunger, and ultimately invasion and conquest. Perhaps after that might come civil war, Briton against Briton as some surrendered, believing it the lesser evil, and others fought on until the slaughter and defeat were total.

But Matthew still found he was striding out even more rapidly, with his anger against the Peacemaker, alive or dead, so hard inside him it hurt his chest to breathe.

Now he had enough information to report his findings to Calder Shearing, the head of his branch of Intelligence.

“Morning, Reavley,” Shearing said as Matthew came into his office. “Anything on the sabotage in the factory in Bury St. Edmunds yet?” He looked up from his desk. He was a man of barely average height. His black hair was receding severely, but his face was so dominated by his dark eyes and powerful, expressive brows that one did not notice the expanse of his forehead. His nose was aquiline, his lips delicate and unusually sensitive.

“Yes, sir,” Matthew replied, still standing at attention. One did not relax until Shearing gave his permission to. “I have sufficient evidence for the police to deal with it now.”

“Then give it to them,” Shearing ordered. “There’s plenty more to be getting on with. There’s an unusually high number of accidents at the munitions factory in Derby—Johnson Heathman and Company. I—”

“I’ll give it to Bell,” Matthew interrupted him almost without realizing that he did so. “Tom Corracher came to see me two days ago with something far more urgent.”

Shearing’s brows rose and his eyes were bright and cold. “More urgent than sabotage of our munitions factories, and yet you left it for two days to come and tell me?”

Matthew remained at attention. He had worked with Shearing since before the war, and at times their tacit understanding of each other was like the best sort of friendship. They did not speak of emotions. Even last week when they had sat up all night together over merchant shipping losses, bruised at heart over the deaths of hundreds of men, no words had been necessary. To Matthew these losses were infinitely more vivid since his experiences during the Battle of Jutland. Now he knew the slow, crawling fear of night patrol when the enemy could be anywhere under the dark water and fire, explosion, and drowning came without any warning at all. He knew the head-splitting noise of the great guns, the smell of blood and fire.

And he knew what it was like to sink an enemy ship and watch it go down, with a thousand men just like yourself, to be buried in the darkness of the ocean forever.

What he did not know was anything of the nature or the passions, the background, the home or family of the man sitting behind the desk now, waiting for his explanation. He did not even know if Shearing had ever personally seen anyone die. Perhaps for him it was numbers, something all in the mind, like a chess game.

There was one picture in Shearing’s office, a painting of the London docks at twilight, and nothing else that betrayed his taste, his feelings, his own inner life. There were no books except those of a professional nature; no novels, no poetry. There were no photographs on the desk or the walls. He never mentioned his family, if he had any, or where he lived or had grown up, his school or university—nothing.

There had been many times when Matthew had wondered if Shearing himself could be the Peacemaker, before he knew it was Hannassey. It was a fear that had gripped him with an acute sadness. He had wanted to like Shearing. He found it easy to admire him. The suppleness of his mind, his occasional dry wit, the self-mastery and the dedication which kept him at his desk all day and half the night. It was the ability to trust him that had eluded Matthew, until Jutland had proved that the Peacemaker was Hannassey. Then suddenly relief, sweeter than he had expected, swept away suspicion. Now the trust was eroded again. Still he had no choice but to tell Shearing what he was doing; to attempt it secretly would betray his doubt, and he could not afford that.

“Reavley!” Shearing’s voice cut across Matthew’s thoughts impatiently.

“Yes, sir!” Matthew snapped his attention back. “It was a story I needed to investigate before I brought it to you. I couldn’t judge the importance of it without making some careful inquiries.”

“And you found it true.” That was a statement.

“It seems to be.”

“Then sit down, man, and tell me!” Shearing snapped. “Don’t stand there like a damn lamppost!”

“Yes, sir.” Matthew pulled up the chair and sat down. He recounted everything that Corracher had said, and how much of it he had been able to verify.

“And you believe that the removals of these four men are connected?” Shearing asked when Matthew finished. “Who do you consider responsible? Hannassey is dead.”

“Yes, sir,” Matthew responded, knowing the words were meaningless.

There was a wry amusement in Shearing’s eyes. “One of his disciples taken his mantle of power?”

“I don’t know, sir. That is first among the many things I would like to find out. But whoever it is, his purpose seems to be broadly the same, and his skill is obviously formidable. And I’d like to save Corracher, if possible.”

Shearing’s mouth pulled tight. “Not likely,” he said bitterly. “If the man behind this is as clever as you think, he’ll have made provision for Corracher fighting the charge. Wheatcroft’s wife has powerful family connections. They’ll all want to believe her, and take the blame off Wheatcroft, true or false. Think carefully before you act, Reavley—and keep me informed. You might end by making it even worse.”

It was a dismissal, but Matthew refused to stand up. “Are you telling me not to do anything, sir?” he said between his teeth.

“No, I’m telling you to use your brain, not your emotions!” Shearing said tartly. “Be as angry as you like. Go home and smash the china, swear at the neighbors, punch the furniture. Then grow up and do your job.”

Matthew sat motionless.

“Now!” Shearing shouted suddenly. “It’s a filthy thing to do! It’s deceit and betrayal and it soils everything it touches. Don’t sit there like a grave ornament! Do something!”

“Yes, sir.” Matthew stood up. Quite unreasonably, it made him feel better to see Shearing’s temper snap, too, and to know that under his tightly controlled surface he was just as furious and offended as Matthew himself.

That evening the man whom Matthew had referred to as the Peacemaker stood at the window of an upstairs room in his house on Marchmont Street, only a few miles away from Matthew’s flat. He was waiting for a visitor and uncertain when he would arrive. It was no longer possible to rely on steamers or trains. The German Grand Fleet had not left harbor since the Battle of Jutland, but U-boats still patrolled the seas, necessitating that British warships guard troop carriers bringing back the wounded from France and Flanders.

It grew darker. The soft colors of the sky were fading, light reflected on windows opposite. The fire watch would be out soon, looking for zeppelins, waiting for the explosion of bombs. The streetlamps would make the city an easy target from the air.

His hands clenched and unclenched, his nails digging into his palms when he saw a taxi slow as it passed his house, then speed up again. He had known it would not be Richard Mason; he would not be foolish enough to get out right at the door. However, he would be tired after the long, dangerous, and heartbreaking journey. He might be careless. He had been once before.

The Peacemaker drew the curtains closed and turned away from the window, impatient with himself and the emotion raging inside him, which locked the muscles of his arms and chest, making them ache. Mason, the man he was waiting for, was possibly the best of all the war correspondents. He had sent dispatches from all the places where the fighting was fiercest: France, Flanders, Northern Italy, Bulgaria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. He did not quote figures of men dead or wounded, or yards of mud-soaked land gained. He wrote with passion of individual experience, one act of heroism, one victory, one death. He described the weariness, the disgust, the hunger he himself felt, or the laughter, the letters from home, the silly jokes and terrible food. He hid nothing. Through the human suffering and tragedy of a few he painted the whole. In his words the destruction of Europe, now spreading across the Near East, North Africa, India, and America as well, was brought to life.

The Peacemaker had always known that the human cost of war was beyond measuring. As young men during the Boer War, he and Mason had both seen the concentration camps, the brutality, the degradation of the spirit. They had not known each other then, but the experience had given them a common goal. Both were consumed by an ideal that war should never be allowed to happen again, but the Peacemaker was willing to go to any lengths. One man, ten men, a hundred were a price not worth the counting if it could prevent the slaughter of ten million and the ruin of nations.

The Peacemaker had conceived a plan, and but for a collision of events no one could have prepared for, he would have succeeded. The treaty that would have bound Britain and Germany in an alliance unbeatable by any other axis of nations had been found by John Reavley, and seeing its potential with short-sighted patriotism rather than a world vision, he had stolen one of the copies to expose it. There was no time to write it out again, and have the kaiser sign it. The assassination in Sarajevo had altered everything. Even killing Reavley had not retrieved the document, and the buildup to war had become unstoppable.

Of course he had tried to find ways to bring about peace since then—he had never stopped trying. It had become a passion that devoured everything else in him, overtook his life and cost him every other wish or dream, every principle or ideal he had treasured, certainly all personal happiness. But what was that when balanced against the ruin of Europe and its centuries of beauty, its magnificence of thought, its philosophy and dreams, not to mention the loss of human life?

Every attempt had been foiled either by tides of circumstance or the intervention of an individual. In at least three instances that he knew of he had been frustrated by the sons of John Reavley, who were still bent on avenging his death, and still held his foolish idealism.

After the first poison gas attack in the trenches at Ypres in 1915, and the slaughter on the beaches of Gallipoli, Mason had written a brilliant article exposing the arrogance and extreme incompetence of the command in the second instance. Joseph Reavley had been briefly at Gallipoli also. He had pursued Mason back toward England and finally caught up with him in an open boat in the English Channel when they had survived the sinking of the ship they had been in.

What conceivable part of Reavley’s shortsighted philosophy could have changed Mason’s mind and persuaded him to abandon not only his article but also the entire cause? It had taken the Peacemaker more than a year to win him back and make him see the greater cause again.

It was Matthew Reavley who had caused the death of Patrick Hannassey, but this had not been unwelcome. Hannassey had been extremely useful, but by the summer of 1917 he was becoming a liability—greedy and unreliable. Corcoran had been one of the Peacemaker’s successes. Other plans were almost ripe as well.

So he paced the floor of his room trying to compose his mind as he waited for Richard Mason and the report he would bring from Russia, and even more important, from Germany itself. The Peacemaker had seen a year ago that the key might lie in the deluge that was about to break over the tsar’s government and bring it to an end. Now it had happened. Kerensky was in control now. He was a man of vision and humanity, a man of compromise. Lenin was there now, too, and Trotsky—but they were extremists. In time they would take Russia out of the war. There would be no more Eastern Front to bleed away German strength and crush its men with the deadly cold and hunger, and the useless marches and sieges that had ruined every army that had tried to conquer that vast country. Dear God, even Napoleon had learned that at crippling cost. Did the kaiser really delude himself he could do better?

God knew Germany tried hard enough to keep the United States out of the war, knowing how their strength would renew the almost beaten forces of Britain and France. Until January of this year, 1917, they had succeeded. But Zimmerman, the German foreign secretary, had sent that idiotic directive to Mexico to attack the United States. The telegram had somehow found its way to President Woodrow Wilson. America had had no choice but to declare war on Germany and join the Allies.

Tens of thousands more lives would be lost as the war dragged on for another year, and another. The blind, insensate stupidity of the leaders who sacrificed men for nothing but their own arrogance, their petty “little England” mentality, brought the hot rage to his mind. The sweat stood out on his body and he could feel his heart pounding. Britain and Germany were natural allies. Together they could have brought peace and safety to half the world, prosperity and civilized government, and the highest culture mankind had ever seen.

Instead Britain in its imperial conceit had loosed a storm of destruction that threatened to bring back the Dark Ages, and leave Europe all but uninhabited, except by the old, the crippled, and the lonely women whose men were buried in the blood-soaked earth.

He steadied himself with difficulty, breathing in slowly and out again, counting the seconds. There was still hope. He must be in total control when Mason arrived.

He heard another car go past and whirled around to stare at the door, then was furious with himself for giving in to such impulse.

And it was meaningless. Mason would not drive past this house. He would stop at least a hundred yards away.

Then there was the knock on the door.

“Come,” he said quietly.

The manservant came in. “Mr. Mason is here, sir,” he said respectfully. “Would you like tea, or perhaps a glass of whisky? There is Glenmorangie in the decanter, sir.”

“Bring tea and then leave us,” the Peacemaker replied. Mason would be tired and cold. There might be something to celebrate later, but not yet. It depended very much on what news he also brought from Germany.

“Yes, sir.”

Mason’s footsteps sounded on the stairs, and a moment later he came into the room. He was thinner than when the Peacemaker had last seen him, but he still moved with a certain grace in spite of the fact that he must have been exhausted. It was an energy of mind rather than of body that kept him going. It burned in his dark eyes now, and the power of his emotion was suggested in the lines of his face, the broad cheekbones and wide mouth.

“Have a seat, Mason,” the Peacemaker said calmly, as if it were only days since they had last seen each other, and not months. “I’ve sent for tea, but if you’d rather have whisky, it’s here.”

“Tea, thank you.” Mason sat down in the armchair opposite him, and only as he eased himself into it did his tiredness show. There was clearly a stiffness in his back, and the light of the lamp above the mantel accentuated for an instant the hollows around his eyes.

“Bad journey?” the Peacemaker asked, also sitting.

Mason did not hide his feelings; perhaps he couldn’t. “Trains are full of wounded,” he replied, his voice quiet and precise as always, but the pain in it undisguised. “Mostly from Passchendaele. Hundreds of them, gray-faced, staring into space. Some are straight from the schoolroom—fifteen, sixteen, slaughtered before they’ve tasted life.” He stopped abruptly, his breathing ragged as he tried to block the memory from his mind and think of the present: the Peacemaker and the quiet rooms where at least for a few hours he was comfortable and safe.

There seemed nothing to add, and trivialities would have been offensive to both of them. They waited a few moments with no sound but an occasional car in the street and the steady ticking of the clock on the mantel. It was now completely dark outside. The manservant brought tea and sandwiches, apologizing for the liberty.

“Fish paste, sir, and cucumber. I hope it is acceptable?”

Mason gave him a bleak smile. “After the rations I’ve had, it’s food for the gods. Thank you.”

“You’re most welcome, sir.” He inclined his head, then withdrew, closing the door.

The Peacemaker passed the tea and pushed the plate of sandwiches toward Mason. His stomach was tense and his mouth dry, but he sat calmly, as if there were all the time in the world. He would not ask for the article yet, with its encoded message from Berlin. He forced himself to wait until Mason had eaten, before he spoke again.

“What is the news from Russia?” he said when finally Mason put down his cup. “Has the revolution progressed since you were there before?” He made it sound as if he were no more than interested, not that the fate of the war might depend upon it.

Mason’s face was motionless, looking within himself, as he answered. “Yes, it has progressed, not as I had hoped. Kerensky is an intelligent man, a visionary, a moderate who wants to build the new without destroying the old.”

“The tsar will not give in,” the Peacemaker said with some distaste. He had little respect for Nicholas II, or for his tsarina Alexandra and her absurd dependence upon the filthy monk Rasputin. “What is Kerensky doing to hasten his complete control? He cannot wait forever!” His voice was sharper than he had meant it to be. With an effort he steadied it. “Russia is bleeding away in this senseless war, just as we are. And God knows their people deserve freedom from the centuries of oppression they have suffered. Don’t tell me about the hunger and the deaths on the Eastern Front, or the poverty across the land. Any dispatch can tell me that. What is the mood in St. Petersburg? Moscow? Or Kiev? What of Lenin, or Trotsky, or any of the men of real vision? When will they move to take over the leadership?

Mason was somber. He met the Peacemaker’s eyes at last. “I wish I didn’t have to say this,” he answered quietly, “but Kerensky is out of his depth. He is in many ways a man of both vision and morality, but history has overtaken him. He has neither the fire nor the obsession to match the mood of the people now, or their needs. It has passed beyond his kind of moderation.”

The Peacemaker sat still. Suddenly the restlessness was gone inside him, replaced by something like a solitary fire. If Mason was right about the mood in Russia, then his hope would be realized, perhaps soon. With the Eastern Front no longer a threat, Germany could turn all its men and forces toward the west. The German plan to ship Lenin into Russia in a sealed train had worked. They were on the brink of harvesting its fruits.

“I see,” he said aloud. He had never intended to tell Mason anything of the secret diplomacy that had brought some of this about. Mason hated war with a passion and a horror equal to anyone’s, but he was an Englishman, and the thought of England beaten would reach his emotions with unpredictable effect. It was prudent that he know only what was necessary. “You look tired,” the Peacemaker went on. “Have you an article for me?”

Since the American entry into the war in January he could no longer route his communications with Berlin through Washington. Now he relied on Mason to meet secretly with Manfred von Schenckendorff in any of the neutral territories Mason visited. He encoded his information within his articles, so nothing could ever be betrayed, and gave them to the Peacemaker on his return. The Peacemaker altered them slightly to remove the information and gave them back. It worked in reverse with copies of notes as if for an article yet to be written.

Mason pulled half a dozen slips of paper out of his pocket and passed them across.

“Thank you.” The Peacemaker accepted them. He had difficulty keeping his fingers from shaking, but he forced himself to leave the papers closed. He would read them later, alone.

“I wish I could say there is nothing urgent to discuss, and allow you to rest,” he said quietly. “But Passchendaele is a disaster.” He had no need to act to thicken his voice deliberately with pain; it was real enough, gouging into him, bringing back memory of Africa and a wave of nausea at sight of the dead, obscene and helpless. “It looks as if it is going to be worse even than the Somme,” he went on hoarsely.

Mason must have caught the sudden, ungoverned pain in him. “I know,” he answered softly.

The Peacemaker straightened a little in his chair, needing to mask the nakedness of his momentary lapse.

“Of course you do—at least from the figures, and the trainloads of wounded you’ll have seen. But that is not all. It is not widely known, at least to the public, but part of the French army mutinied….”

Mason jerked his head up, his eyes hot and angry. “The poor devils had just cause,” he said, as if the Peacemaker had leveled an accusation.

The Peacemaker nodded slowly. “I know that. They are brave and patriotic men, like ours, but their conditions are intolerable, and now they are being driven onto the enemy guns in pointless suicide. And it’s happening again all along the Flanders Front. We need an honest voice to tell us what is happening to our own men. This is no longer a war of the people, Mason, it’s become a senseless destruction the leaders are too blind or too incompetent to put a stop to. Get a good night’s sleep. See me in the morning and I will give you back your article. Then go to Ypres again. Forget the propaganda and the figures, and what the commanders say. Find the truth of what the men who are fighting and dying really think. We have to know!” Without realizing it he leaned forward. “We have the moral need to know, and they have the moral right that we should. If you won’t speak for them, who will?

Mason did not argue. “I’ll go tomorrow night, after I’ve reported to my paper,” he said simply. His face hardened as he smothered the weakness within himself, the momentary faltering, the longing to turn away. “There’s no reason to delay.”

“Good,” the Peacemaker said simply. He looked at the empty tea tray, sandwiches all eaten. “Would you like a Glenmorangie?”

“Yes,” Mason accepted. “Yes, I would.”

Richard Mason was not the last visitor to the house in Marchmont Street that evening. At close to midnight, after he had read the article and deleted Schenckendorff’s message the Peacemaker stood in the dark before the uncurtained window, his mind racing with new ideas. Hope had rekindled in him for an end to the madness of the battlefield. It might even be that the ordinary soldier himself at last could take control of his destiny. Most men who were actually commanded to kill the enemy, to fire the bullets, to let off the gas, who charged with the bayonets fixed, had no personal enmity toward the German soldiers in the lines opposite them. They knew they were just ordinary men like themselves. If the French could mutiny, then surely so could the British. Mason would bring him back the truth of morale in Flanders. Then perhaps there would be an end to it.

There was a knock on the door again, tentative at this late hour.

The Peacemaker swung around angrily. “What is it?” he demanded. He was inwardly exhausted by the unceasing emotional soar and plunge between despair and the blindness and the folly of those with whom he had to work. Time and time again he had been on the brink of success, the beginning of the end, only to have it dashed from his hand. “What is it?” he said again.

The manservant opened the door, looking apologetic. “It is a gentleman to see you, sir. He won’t give his name, but he says it is to do with a certain event on Hampstead Heath. Shall I ask him to leave, sir?”

“No. Tell him to come in,” the Peacemaker said quickly. “Do not disturb us. We shall require no refreshment. You may retire. I shall show him out.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll send the gentleman up.”

The man who arrived a moment later was thin, with a dark mustache and large, red-knuckled hands. He closed the door behind him. He met the Peacemaker’s eyes without flinching, as if they were equals. The Peacemaker did not like him. They were on the same side by force, not idealism. There was no passion for humanity in this man, only for himself and his own profit, but he was useful. “Yes?” he said curtly.

“Corracher’s been talking to someone in the Secret Intelligence Service,” the man told him. “He’s seen the pattern, and it looks as if he could make a fight of it.”

“Rubbish!” the Peacemaker snapped. “He’ll only dig himself in deeper. No one’s going to believe him.”

“This man did,” his visitor replied. “Started asking a lot of questions, getting police records—times and places. He was very thorough.”

The Peacemaker felt a tiny flash of anxiety, nothing more than a cold touch inside, there and then gone again. “Any idea who it is?”

“The man from Intelligence? His name is Matthew Reavley.” The man said it without expression, as if it meant nothing to him.

“Thank you.” The Peacemaker’s voice was little more than a whisper, and he stood perfectly still in the room. Reavley again. The name was like a curse. He cleared his throat. “I doubt he will do anything, but I will attend to it. I am obliged to you that you had the foresight to tell me. Good night.” He led the way down toward the front door, holding it open for the man to leave, then he locked and barred it behind him.

He returned to the upstairs room with an inexplicable sense of loss. It disturbed him. Of course Matthew Reavley would have to be killed. There was now no choice. Getting rid of ministers like Corracher was vital to the peace negotiations when they came. His Hungarian connection had proved far better than the Peacemaker had foreseen. He was striving for unity! A single state, led by Britain and Germany. A renegade Hungarian leadership waiting to break up the old Austro-Hungarian Empire was the last thing needed.

It was also vital that the right men guided the peace. After the defeat of the generals on both sides, the ordinary men might still ally and lay the foundations of an empire that would begin to rebuild with justice, bring order and finally prosperity again and beauty out of the present chaos.

Why should he grieve that it cost the life of Matthew Reavley? That was a sentimental weakness he must not allow himself. He was bone weary, but far deeper than that he was heartsick. What on earth was one life more? Passchendaele was costing thousands a day! Every day!

But London was still outwardly civilized, so it must be done with care. He would set the act in motion tomorrow, speak to the right man for the task. If he allowed personal regret of any kind to hold him back he was despicable, not fit to lead. The best men in the country had lost sons and brothers.

He sat down at his desk and encoded a short letter to Manfred for Mason to take tomorrow. Manfred von Schenckendorff had been the Peacemaker’s ally from the beginning, when it had still seemed possible that they might have won peace with honor, and avoided this whole misguided tragedy of war between two nations who should have been brothers—together. Manfred would understand the pervading sense of loss he felt that he had to destroy a good but stubborn man, as he had had to destroy Reavley’s father before him. He would so much rather have won him to the cause.

This new turn of events with Corracher had left him no choice. Manfred would appreciate that; they had always understood each other in the subtler ways of honor and logic and the wounds of unnecessary tragedy.

He walked over to the gramophone, wound it up, and placed a record on it: Beethoven, the last quartets, composed after he was deaf—complex, subtle, marvelously beautiful, and full of pain.

CHAPTER

THREE

Richard Mason walked along the rutted and cratered road in the steady rain. The sky was leaden and the rumble and crack of gunfire was mixed with occasional thunder. The few trees still left standing had branches torn from them, lying rotting on the ground. His clothes were sodden and sticking to him and his feet were covered in the thick Flanders mud. It seemed to be everywhere. The unhedged fields swam with it, the ditches were awash, and it lay thick and churned up across the way ahead.

He had passed more troops going forward, more wagonloads of ammunitions and supplies. And of course there were columns of the walking wounded, moving slowly, awkward with pain, their eyes unfocused in that strange, blank stare of those who have seen hell and carry it within them. Some had their eyes bandaged, and stumbled forward, arms outstretched and hands on the shoulder of the man in front of them. Mason turned away, choked with grief.

He was less than two miles from the trenches now. He could smell the familiar stench of death.

What could he write that would be new about any of this? Were there really rumors of mutiny, or just the usual complaining that was part of any life? Possibly it was little more than a good-natured sympathy for the French.

An ambulance passed him, loaded with wounded, and he glanced at the driver. Every time he saw the high, square outline of an ambulance he thought of Judith Reavley and finding her before on a stretch of road just like this. It was knotting his muscles and making his chest ache, as memory of her always did, quickening the blood and stirring him with a deep, unsettling hunger. Then, she had been slumped over the wheel of her ambulance, motionless at the side of the road.

At first he had been terrified she was actually dead. His relief when she opened her eyes and looked at him had been like warmth on freezing limbs. Then she had spoken and he realized the vibrancy was gone from her voice, the passion. Even the anger was snuffed out. Something beautiful was broken. He had never hated the war as savagely as he had at that moment. All the injured men and riddled corpses he had seen had not moved him any more deeply. She had symbolized all that was precious in living: the laughter, the courage, and the strength.

He had managed to see her twice since then, once in Paris, very briefly and almost by accident. The second time, in London, was a great deal more by design.

It seemed a long time ago now, and unconsciously he quickened his step, almost unaware of the soaking rain.

Half an hour later, he reached the dressing station behind the supply trenches. It was on the third line back from the forward trenches on the edge of no-man’s-land. The large tent was half supported by wooden walls at one side, and like everything else, was awash with mud. Through the gray air of late afternoon it was easy to imagine the dusk settling, although at this time of the year it would be hours yet before sunset.

Mason walked across the duckboards at the entrance and into the yellowish light of the lamps over the operating tables. He could smell blood and disinfectant. There were half a dozen men sitting on the floor, backs against packing cases. Two or three were drinking hot tea from tin mugs, their faces white. The others simply stared ahead of them into the distance as if they could see farther than the canvas wall or the darkening, rain-soaked air outside.

Another man lay on the table, the scarlet stump of his right leg making his injury hideously apparent. The surgeon working on him did not even look up as Mason came in. The anesthetist glanced at him, saw he was standing upright, and returned his attention to the patient.

A middle-aged medical orderly came over to him, his face lined with exhaustion. “Where are you hurt?” he said with little sympathy. His time was too precious to waste on the able-bodied.

“I’m not,” Mason replied, understanding his feelings. “Richard Mason, war correspondent.”

The orderly’s face softened. “Oh. Come to see Captain Cavan? Up for the V.C., he is.” There was pride in his voice and his head lifted, the weariness gone for a moment.

Mason changed his mind instantly about what he had been going to say, so that when he answered it had become the truth. “When he’s got time. Are those men waiting for the ambulance?” He realized with a sudden grip like iron in his stomach that he did not know for certain if Judith was still alive. Ambulances were shelled like everything else. Drivers could be killed or injured. Just because someone was unhurt a week ago did not mean they were safe now.

“Yes,” the orderly replied. “Shouldn’t be long.”

“Still got the American driver, Wil Sloan?” Mason pursued. It sounded as if he was looking for a story, even though his voice cracked a little. “Or did he go over to the American forces now they’re in it, too?”

“They’re not along this stretch,” the orderly told him, his lips thinning for a moment. “We’re all men who’ve been here from the beginning: English, Welsh, Canadians, French. Quite a few Aussies and New Zealanders, too. But Sloan’s still here. At least he was this morning.”

Mason did not ask what he meant. He had seen the casualty figures. His mouth was dry. “And Judith Reavley?” His heart pounded so he could hardly draw his breath as he waited the long seconds till the orderly answered. He realized how stupid the question was. Would the man even know one V.A.D. driver from another, or care, in this hell?

The orderly smiled, perhaps seeing Mason’s emotion raw in his face, unguarded until too late. “Must have been a demon on the roads in Cambridgeshire, that one! She certainly is here.”

Mason smiled back. He thought of saying something about his intention of writing an article on women in the battlefield, and then stopped himself in time. It would be absurd, and certainly wouldn’t fool the orderly. “Thanks,” he said simply. He accepted a hot cup of tea, which tasted of oil and dirt, and sat down to wait for a chance to speak to Cavan, and with the knowledge that in the next few hours Judith would come to this station.

The shelling grew heavier, but was still falling some distance from them. More wounded came in, but most of the injuries were superficial. Cavan acknowledged Mason briefly. He finished his operation on the man who had lost his leg, but could not leave him until the ambulance came. The rain never ceased its steady downpour, drumming on the canvas roof and adding to the already swimming craters outside. The wounded men’s hair was plastered to their heads, their faces shone wet, their uniforms stained dark. Some were covered in mud up to their armpits and must have been manually hauled out of the shell craters before they could drown.

It was nearly an hour before the ambulance arrived. They did not hear it in the noise of guns and the beat of rain. Mason noticed the movement at the entrance and looked up to see Wil Sloan. He looked tired, pale-skinned, and filthy, but had the same cheerful smile on his face that Mason remembered from a year ago. “Hi, Doc,” he said casually, looking across at Cavan. “Anyone for us?” His eyes went to the man on the table, who was still mercifully unconscious.

“Have you got a driver?” Cavan asked. “Someone’ll have to sit with him. He’s in a bad way.”

Sloan’s face tightened and he nodded. “Sure. If anyone can get us through this bloody bog, it’s Judith…Miss Reavley.”

Mason’s heart lurched.

The ghost of a smile touched Cavan’s face. “You’re picking up our bad language, Wil? You’ll shock them at home. I’ll help you carry him out.” He turned back to the table, his shoulders bent a little, a long smear of blood down his arm.

Mason stood up quickly. “I’ll give you a hand,” he offered. “I’m doing nothing. I’ll get the stretcher.”

Wil followed Cavan inside to help the other men who would take up the rest of the space in the ambulance. It would be only those who could not walk.

The minute Mason was outside the shelter of the tent the rain drenched him again. He could hardly discern the square outline of the ambulance through the gloom. His feet slipped in the mud and he found himself floundering. God knew what it must be like trying to struggle through it with ninety pounds of equipment and ammunition on your back and a rifle, knowing the bullets and shrapnel could tear into you any moment.

He saw Judith step out of the driver’s seat of the ambulance and come forward to help him, mistaking him for a wounded soldier. He straightened up, feeling foolish. He wanted to think of something engaging to say, but his mind was racing futilely.

“There’s an amputee coming out on a stretcher,” he said instead. “Still unconscious. We’re bringing him now. Wil Sloan’s going to have to ride in the back—” The rest was cut off by the roar and crash of a shell landing five hundred yards away. It sent a tower of earth and mud high into the air, which rained down on the roof of the tent behind them, and onto the ambulance with the dull thud of metal.

Judith took no notice at all. Her face showed surprise and an instant of pleasure as she recognized him, then she went straight around to the back of the ambulance and opened the doors. She pulled out the stretcher without waiting for his help. She was swift, efficient, even oddly graceful.

Next moment Wil Sloan was there as well and all their thoughts were overtaken by the need to load the unconscious man. They carried him as carefully as possible in the wind and rain, and then had to decide which of the others were most in need of riding along with him, bearing in mind that there had to be room for Wil also.

“How’s the road, Miss Reavley?” Cavan asked Judith when they were ready to go. The rain had eased a little but the heavy, overcast sky had brought darkness early and they were no more than outlines in the gloom.

“Bad,” she answered, her voice strained with anxiety. “But there’s no choice.” She knew the amputee had to reach a hospital soon if he was to live.

“Wil can’t leave him,” Cavan warned her. “I’m sorry.” They stood a yard away from each other and neither made a move or a gesture, but there was an intense gentleness in Cavan’s face in the headlights, and Judith’s eyes did not once waver from his. Mason saw it and was stung by a surge of jealousy so powerful it clenched his whole body. He was astonished at himself.

“Can I help?” he said immediately. “I can speak to you another time…sir.”

“Yes,” Cavan said. “Ride in the front with Miss Reavley. If there’s a wheel to be changed, or debris to move from the road, she’ll need another pair of hands.” He did not ask Judith; it was an order.

“Yes, sir.” Mason was pleased to obey. He splashed around to the other side and climbed in.

Cavan bent and cranked the engine, and it fired easily. Judith slipped in the clutch. There was a violent spurt of mud and they were jerked backward. Mason was startled, thinking she had forgotten which gear she was in.

She laughed. “On a slope,” she explained. “Going uphill the tank drains backward and we get no power. Drive in reverse and we’re fine. I’ll turn here.” She stopped and slewed around as she spoke, her hands strong on the wheel, muscles taut, then she drove forward along the dim, cratered road.

Every now and then star shells went up, lighting the landscape with its jagged tree stumps and erratic gouges out of the clay now filled with mud and water. There were wrecked vehicles by the side of the road and here and there carcasses of horses, even sometimes helmets to mark where men had died. Broken gun carriages and burned-out tanks showed up in the glare, and once the barrel of a great cannon projecting from a crater angled at the sky. Then the shell would fall and the darkness seemed more intense, in spite of the headlights, which showed little more than the slanting rain and the wilderness.

“How on earth do you know where you’re going?” he asked her incredulously.

“Habit,” she said frankly. “Believe me, I know this stretch of road better than I know my own village. Only trouble is we can’t get Jerry to put the craters in the same place each time. He’s a damn awful shot. All over the place like a drunken sailor.”

He forced himself to smile, although he knew she could not see him, and the lunacy of the whole thing almost choked him. Didn’t she see it, too? Was she deliberately blinding herself to it in order to survive? How could anyone tolerate being imprisoned in this, knowing the rest of the world was clean and sane? Somewhere beyond the endless violence, dirt, and incessant noise there were cities and villages where the sun shone, women wore pretty dresses, and people picked flowers, talked about crops and church fêtes, and gossiped. They ate around tables, washed in clean water, and slept in beds.

Another ambulance passed, lurching over the ruts, going toward the front line. For a moment its headlights lit Judith’s face as she raised her hand in salute. He saw her high cheekbones and beautiful, vulnerable mouth. She looked older, more finely honed by horror and exhaustion, but the spirit was back as he had first known her.

He was amazed. How did she do that? Did she simply refuse to think? Had she no idea what was going on everywhere else, the suffering and monumental loss, the crushing futility of it all?

They barged over a rut and came down hard. Mason felt the bones of his spine jar. What must it be like for the injured men in the back, especially the one he had seen operated on?

He could not see Judith’s face anymore as they lurched forward. He could just make out her shoulders as she clung on to the wheel, struggling to keep the vehicle on the road. The rain was harder again.

It was she who broke the silence.

“Did you come here to interview Captain Cavan?”

“Not particularly,” he replied. “It seemed like a good opportunity. Does he deserve the V.C.?”

“Oh, yes.” She could not keep the lift of excitement out of her voice as if there were new hope, and new life because of it. “His courage was extraordinary.”

He had known she would say that and it frightened him. It was so easy! One man’s heroism changed nothing, it was just a candle lit against the night. It would be quenched by the next gust of wind, and then the darkness would seem even worse. She was still just as naïve as ever. How many other men and women were there here just like her, believing the impossible, giving their lives pointlessly to defend a mirage?

“Did he really hold off a German attack practically single-handedly, and save his patients?”

“Not single-handedly,” she corrected him. “We all fought. But he commanded. He was the one who defied them and refused to leave.”

“We?” His voice was hoarse. “Are you speaking figuratively? You weren’t there?” he insisted. He did not want it to be true because of the danger to her, but as much as the knowledge of how close she had come to death, he did not want her to have been part of Cavan’s heroism.

“Yes, I was there,” she replied as if it still surprised her. “We were caught off guard. We didn’t expect the attack. It was well behind the lines.”

He was stunned. A shell exploded to their left, flinging mud up against the side of the ambulance and across the windshield. They lurched badly. Judith swore and wrenched the wheel over, trying to right them again. He leaned across and put his weight against it, his hands touching hers.

“Thank you,” she said matter-of-factly.

He did not reply, moving his hands away again and straightening himself in his seat. Suddenly he was acutely conscious of her, the mud and bloodstains on her gray dress, the curve of her cheek, the startling strength in her arms.

Ten minutes later they reached better roads which were still waterlogged, but without the shell holes, and they picked up speed. The rain eased until it was no more than a fine mist like a veil across the headlights, forever shifting and parting to show trees black against the sky. When they moved through villages, they found that a few buildings were burned out but most still stood, windows curtained against showing light. No one was in the streets.

“Have you been in France?” she asked him.

“Not lately,” he replied. “I was on the Eastern Front, up in Russia.”

“Is it as bad as they say?”

“Probably. Kerensky’s trying hard, but he’s changing too little. The time for moderation is gone. They want extreme now, someone more like Lenin or Trotsky. The hunger’s appalling.” He told her of individuals he had seen—the poverty, the hollow faces, the emaciated bodies. He said far more than he meant to, needing her to feel what he had, both the anger and the pity. He glanced sideways at her face, trying to read the emotions in it as she listened to him, seeing her expression fleetingly as they passed the lights of other vehicles. “Everybody’s sick of the war,” he finished.

“Only a madman wouldn’t be,” she replied, leaning forward to peer through the gloom. “But some things are necessary. Fighting is terrible. The only thing worse is not fighting.” There was no doubt in her voice, no wavering.

“Is it really better to fight?” he challenged her. “Always? Even at this cost?” His voice was harsher than he had meant it to be because his own certainties had been torn away, leaving him naked, and he hated it. “And do you really know enough about the French to judge?” The instant the words were out he regretted them. He wanted her as she had been the first time he had met her, ignorant and brave, luminous with her own belief, even if it was absurd, and wrong. It was what made her beautiful. “I’m sorry….” he started.

“Don’t apologize. Not to me. At least you have the courage to say what you believe.”

Should he answer her with the truth? He had seen the conditions in France, the unimaginable losses, the destruction, and it lacerated him with pity.

He did not want a division between them. He wanted her to care for him, to love him, but what use was that if he hated himself? What could he win with lies?

“It isn’t always the enemy you have to fight,” he said, weighing his words. “The French had reason for what they did. Enemies can be behind you as well as in front. The soldiers were mostly peasants, not revolutionaries at all. They objected to unfair rations and curtailed leave. New recruits were treated with favor while long-serving men were sent back to almost certain death, knowing their families at home were left to go hungry. Those who were excused from military service profiteered at their expense. Leave for agricultural purposes was based on political favoritism. They were willing to fight, and to die, but they wanted justice. I don’t see that as cowardice, or disloyalty.”

She remained silent, accelerating the ambulance over the smoother road. The rain had stopped and there were rents in the clouds. The moonlight showed the summer trees, heavy boughed and glistening as the headlights caught the wet leaves.

“I didn’t know that,” she said at last. “Poor devils. Do you think they’ll be executed?”

He heard the pity in her voice, but no anger that he had shattered her illusion. He reached out his hand to touch her, lay his fingers on her arm, then changed his mind and withdrew it. He did not want to risk being rebuffed. He knew how it would hurt.

“Only a few,” he answered her question. “Enough to make an example.”

She said nothing. A few minutes later they pulled in at the hospital. From then on everyone was busy helping to unload the wounded. The amputee was still alive, but very much weaker, and in great pain. The only thing that Judith or Mason could think about was getting him out of the ambulance and into a bed as easily as possible.

After the men were all unloaded, Judith was standing with Mason when Wil Sloan emerged from the side door of the hospital ward into the cobbled yard. He looked almost ghostly in the lamplight.

Judith went over to him and locked her arm in his, leading him across the yard to the ambulance. “Let’s see if there’s somewhere open for a glass of wine and a sandwich,” she said.

“It’s half past one in the morning,” he pointed out with a tiny smile.

She gave a shrug. “So we’ll find someone who’ll let us use their kitchen to make our own. We’ve got to sleep somewhere. Can’t go back to the trenches until I’ve cleaned the ambulance and got some more petrol anyway.” Mason had followed her. “Do you want to go back?” she asked him.

“Better than walking,” he replied. “Unless, of course, you’ll be shot for giving a civilian a ride?”

She gave him a quick smile. “We can always poke you with a bayonet, and put you in the back,” she offered. “Then you’ll be genuinely wounded!”

He was too tired to think of an answer.

Mason woke at five to find Wil Sloan’s hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently. It was already daylight and the ambulance was clean and refueled. There was time for bread and tea, and then they were in the yard beside the ambulance and ready to go again.

Judith looked tired. In the morning light, which was harder and colder than the dusk of yesterday, he saw the fine lines in her face and the shadows around her eyes. She was twenty-six, but she could have been ten years older. Her dress was plain gray and completely without adornment. The hem was still crusted with mud, but now he could see that the bloodstains were old and had already been washed many times. They were too soaked into the fiber ever to be removed.

She saw him watching her and gave him a tiny, self-conscious smile.

He remembered their first meeting with a catch in his throat that was as sharp as pain. It had been in 1915, in the Savoy Hotel. She had been dressed in a blue satin gown that had hugged her body and she had walked with a grace that had forced him to look at her. She had been angry, mistaken about almost everything, and utterly beautiful, enough to charm any man and stir forgotten hungers inside him.

Now the feeling was quite different. It was nothing to do with laughter or conquest, but a need within himself for something tender and clean, and immensely vulnerable, still capable of pain, and hope.

“Not quite the Savoy, is it?” she said drily, as if she had read his thoughts.

He felt the heat in his face. He wanted to look away from her, and could not. She would be gone too soon!

She was embarrassed also. “Come on!” she said quickly. “Get in!”

They spoke of general things. She asked him more about other battlefronts he had seen and he found it easy to tell her. He felt no more need to hide his feelings or his knowledge of casualties. He tried to describe the ravaged beauty of northern Italy with its exquisite skies over Venice and Trieste; the courage of partisan fighters in the mountains of Albania, particularly some of the women he had seen, struggling to get medical supplies to the wounded.

He even found himself explaining some of the moral dilemmas he faced as to how much or little he should tell the truth of certain events in his articles.

She listened with interest—and understood enough to offer no solutions.

It was a windy day with only a light rain. When they were two or three miles from the front, they saw a gun carriage on its side and a soldier standing beside it waving his arms in desperation. There were three others behind him near the gun and two horses harnessed to the gun carriage.

Judith pulled the ambulance to a halt as close as she could and the soldier was at her side immediately.

“Can you ’elp me, miss? Private ’Oskins is ’urt pretty bad. That bloody gun just pitched back into the mud and none of us could shift it, even with the ’orses. ’E’s gonna die if we don’t ’elp ’im. Both ’is legs is bust an’ ’is back’s gorn. I dunno ’ow ter move the thing wi’out makin’ it even worse. Please…”

Judith turned off the engine. “Yes, of course we will,” she said, climbing out without hesitation. “Come on.” She gestured to Mason, then hurried around to the back just as Wil Sloan opened the door and looked out. “We need help, Wil,” she told him. “Man trapped under a field gun. You’d better get tourniquets, and splints, and a stretcher.” She turned to Mason. “You come with me.” It was an order. Without seeing if he would obey, she picked up her skirts and waded through the ditch, in water up to her thighs. With a hand from the soldier she climbed out, then floundered across the thick, plowed clay to the crater. There, the other soldiers were trying to hold the gun from sliding even deeper, keeping the weary, patient horses leaning against the harness.

The injured man was almost submerged in the filthy water. Another man, who looked to be no more than sixteen or seventeen, held his head up, his eyes wide with terror. He was losing. He could feel the weight of the man slipping out of his grasp, slimy with mud and blood, and he was helpless to prevent it.

Mason dropped in beside him without even thinking about it, and grasped them both. They were freezing. The shock of it took his own breath away. A moment later Wil Sloan appeared with the stretcher. Judith was giving orders. “Hitch it tighter, move forward, slowly! Steady!”

There was a great squelch of mud and running water. Someone shouted, and the gun reared up. Mason put all his strength to pulling the wounded man, lost his footing, and fell back deeper into the crater himself. He thrashed around, suddenly terrified of drowning also. The clay held him. Water was in his eyes, in his mouth, over his head. It was vile, stinking of death. Someone caught hold of him and he was in the air again, gasping, filling his lungs. His hands still held the blouse of the wounded soldier. Wil Sloan was heaving on them both and one of the other soldiers as well.

They scrambled up onto the bank. Without even examining the wounds, Wil was binding tourniquets. Judith still held the horses.

“Hurry!” she shouted. “This gun’s going to slide backward any minute. I’ll have to cut the horses loose or they’ll go, too!”

“Stretcher!” Wil bellowed. Mason staggered to his feet and grasped it. Together they rolled the wounded man onto it, and then raised it up. They were a couple of yards clear when Judith cut the harness. The gun and carriage both fell back into the crater, sending up a wave of mud and water that drenched them, even at that distance.

“What the bloody hell are you doing?” a voice shouted furiously.

Mason looked at the captain who stood on the side of the road glaring at them. He was a slender man, his wide, dark eyes seeming overlarge in his haggard face.

“Whose damn fool idea was it to take a gun across a field full of mud?” he demanded.

The corporal snapped to attention as well as he could, standing in the gouged-up clay and over his knees in mud. “Orders of Major Northrup, Captain Morel. I told ’im we’d get stuck, but ’e wouldn’t listen.”

Morel turned to Judith. “Get that man to the nearest field station. Cavan’s only about a mile forward. Be quick.”

“Yes, sir.” Judith waved at Wil to go on, then climbed into the ambulance, her sodden skirts slapping mud everywhere, and took her place behind the wheel. “Will you have one of the men turn the crank for me?” she requested.

Wil slammed the door shut from inside with the wounded man. Morel himself turned the crank and the engine fired.

Judith looked quickly at Mason and he shook his head. There was a story here he had to find, and perhaps to tell. He hoped she understood. There was no chance to tell her.

She nodded briefly, then gave all her attention to driving.

Mason stood in the road and watched them go. He would speak to Cavan another time.

Captain Morel was tight with fury. His features were pinched and white except for two spots of color on his cheeks. His movements were jerky, his muscles locked hard.

“Leave it, Corporal!” he shouted at the man with the gun. “Save the horses and get them out of there.”

“But, sir, Major Northrup told us—”

“To hell with Major Northrup!” Morel snapped back, his voice shaking. “The man’s a bloody idiot! I’m telling you to get the horses out and rejoin your platoon.”

The corporal stood where he was, torn with indecision. Mason could see that he was terrified of what Northrup, who outranked Morel, would do to him for disobeying his order.

Morel saw it, too. He made an intense effort to control his fury. His face softened into pity so naked Mason felt almost indecent to have seen it. He wanted to look away, yet his own emotion held him. He was involved whether he wanted to be or not. Equally, he was helpless. This was one tiny instance of idiocy in a hundred thousand times as much.

“Corporal,” Morel said quietly, ignoring the rain running down his face. “I outrank you and I am giving you a direct order. You have no choice but to obey me, unless you want to be court-martialed. If Northrup questions you, tell him that. I’ll answer for it; you have my word.”

The corporal’s face flooded with relief. He was no more than eighteen or nineteen. “Thank you, sir.” He gulped.

Morel nodded. “Do it.” He turned away, then, realizing Mason was still there, he faced him. His eyes were hard and belligerent, ready to attack if Mason criticized him.

Mason looked at him more closely. Everything about him spoke of a terrible weariness. He was probably in his mid-twenties, a public school boy, and later, judging by his accent, a student at Cambridge. A wounded idealist, betrayed by circumstances and blind stupidity that no sane man could have conceived of.

Mason thought of all the Frenchmen, also betrayed and slaughtered. Would the man in front of him mutiny, too? There was a rage in him too fragile, too close to snapping.

“Who are you and what do you want?” Morel demanded.

“Richard Mason, war correspondent,” Mason replied. “Who is Northrup?”

Morel let out his breath slowly. “Major Penhaligon was killed on the first day of Passchendaele. Northrup’s his replacement.”

“I see.”

“I doubt it.” Morel glanced up the road the way the ambulance had gone. “You’ll have to walk. Follow the stench. You can’t get lost. Although it doesn’t matter a damn if you do. It’s all the same.”

“I know.”

Morel hesitated, then shrugged and turned away back to his own men and the staff car still parked on the edge of the road. After the driver cranked it up, Morel climbed in and they drove off.

Mason started to walk.

How should he write up this incident? Should he record it at all? It was a classic example of the idiocy of some of the officers now in command and, as always, it was the ordinary men who paid the price. Thanks to Judith’s intervention, this one would only have two smashed legs. He might even walk again, if it hadn’t caught his back as well. Others would be less fortunate.

He could see Judith in his mind’s eye, ordering the soldiers to lift, stand, hold. Her voice had been perfectly calm, but he had seen the tension in her. She knew what she was doing, and the risks. If one of the horses had slipped or she had lost control of it, the gun carriage would have rolled back into the crater and crushed the soldier to death.

She had not seemed to give reason even a passing thought. Morel’s fury had had no visible effect on her. She could have been a good nanny watching a small child throw a tantrum, simply waiting for it to pass before she told him to pull himself together and behave properly. It had not entered her head to rebel against the madness.

Why not? Did she lack the imagination? Was she conditioned to obedience, unquestioning loyalty no matter how idiotic the cause? Perhaps. John Reavley had stolen the treaty, and she was his daughter. Joseph Reavley was her brother. Maybe sticking to ideals regardless of pain or futility, in defiance of the evidence, was considered an evidence of faith, or some other virtue, in the family? She had been taught it when she was too young to question, and now to do so would feel like a betrayal of those she loved.

Mason’s feet hurt in the wet boots, and he was growing cold in spite of the exertion of walking. Two years ago Joseph Reavley had followed him from the shores of Turkey right to Gibraltar, then out into the English Channel. After the U-boat had sunk the steamer, they had ended in the same open boat in the rising storm, trying to make for England.

Would Joseph really have let them both drown rather than surrender his ideals to fight to the end? That one article, had Mason written it, might have ended the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of men, God knows how many of them dead in the two years since.

Yes, Judith was probably just like Joseph.

Mason remembered with surprise how he had believed Joseph then. For a brief time he too had understood the reasons for fighting. They seemed to embody the values that made all life sweet and infinitely precious. Indeed, was life worth anything at all, worth clinging to without them?

How many more had given their lives, blindly, heroically, since then? For what?

What would happen if he wrote that honestly, put quixotic sacrifice in its place? It was meaningless in the long run, no comfort to the hundreds of thousands left all over Europe, whose sons and husbands would never return, lonely women whose hearts were wounded beyond healing. Judith would think him a traitor—not to the cause, but to the dead, and to the bereaved who had paid so much.

He realized only now, in the wind and rain of this Flanders road where the stench of death was already knotting his stomach, that her disillusion in time would be a pain he would never afterward be free from. It would be one more light gone out forever and the darkness would be closer around him than he could bear.

Joseph came out of his dugout at the sound of Barshey Gee shouting almost incoherently. Gee swung around as he saw Joseph. His face was red, his thick hair sodden in the rain.

“Chaplain, you’ve got to do something! The major’s told us to go back out there and get the bodies, roight now!” He waved his arm toward the front parapet and no-man’s-land beyond. “We can’t, not in that mud! In the loight. Doesn’t he know we’d do it if we could?” His voice was hoarse and half choked with tears. “Jesus! Fred Arnold’s out there! Oi’ve known him all moi loife! Oi got stuck up a tree—scrumping apples in old Gabby Moyle’s orchard. It was Fred who got me down before Oi were caught.” He drew his breath in in a gasp. “Oi’d go if there were any chance at all, but that mud’s deep as the hoight of a man, an if yer get stuck in it you’ve no chance. Jerry’ll pick us off like bottles on a wall. Just lose more men for nothin’.”

“I know that, Barshey,” Joseph said grimly.

Barshey was shaking his head.

“Oi refused an order, Chaplain. We all did. He can have us court-martialed, but Oi won’t send men out there.” His voice was thick with tears.

“I’ll talk to him.” Joseph felt the same anger and grief hot inside him. He had known Fred Arnold, too, and his brother Plugger Arnold who had died of his wounds last year. “Wait here.” He turned and strode back toward the officers’ dugouts where he knew Northrup would be at this time of day.

All dugouts were pretty similar: narrow and earth-floored. There was room enough for a cot bed, a chair, and a makeshift desk. Most officers made them individual with odd bits of carpet, pictures of home or family, a few favorite books, perhaps a wind-up gramophone and several recordings.

Entrance was gained down steep steps and doorways were hung with sacking to keep out the rain.

“Yes, Chaplain?” Northrup said as Joseph answered the summons to come in. Northrup looked harassed and impatient. He was sitting in the hard-backed chair in front of the desk. There were half a dozen books on it, which were too worn for Joseph to read the titles. There was also a picture of a woman with a bland, pleasant face. Judging by the age of her and the resemblance about the set of eyes and the high brow, it was his mother.

Joseph disliked intensely having to speak, but he had no choice.

“Sir, I understand you ordered Corporal Gee to lead a rescue party to find the dead or wounded in no-man’s-land.”

“Of course I did, Captain Reavley.” His voice was faintly patronizing, even if he did not intend it. “We can’t leave them to die out there. Or fail to bring back the bodies of those who have. I regret that the corporal refused a direct order. I’ve given him half an hour to get his courage back, but if he doesn’t, I’ll have to put him on a charge. This is the British Army, and we obey orders. Do you understand me?”

Joseph wanted to tell him that the French command had driven its own men to mutiny, but he knew it would be disastrous to do that now. Northrup was thin-skinned enough to regard it as a personal insult and react accordingly.

He kept his temper under control with difficulty. “Sir, I’ve known Barshey Gee most of my life, and served beside him since 1914. He’s one of the bravest men in this regiment, and if he could have gone out there without sacrificing his men pointlessly, then he would have. One of his closest friends was lost last night….”

Northrup’s face was hard, his pale blue eyes hot with anger. “Then why doesn’t he get out there and look for him, Chaplain?”

Joseph had to struggle to keep his voice level. It was hard to breathe without gasping. “Because it’s been raining for a week, Major Northrup,” he said with elaborate patience that grated in spite of his effort to be civil. “The men are being sucked down into the mud and drowned! The craters are ten or twelve feet deep and no one can keep their footing for more than a few minutes. A soldier with full equipment hasn’t got a chance. He’d be stuck fast, a sitting target. He’s not willing to sacrifice more men pointlessly.”

“Recovering the wounded is not pointless, as you put it, Captain Reavley.” Northrup’s face was white, his hand on the desk pale-knuckled and trembling. “I would have thought that, as a chaplain, you of all people would have known that! Think of morale, man. That’s your job. I shouldn’t have to do it for you!”

“I am thinking of morale, sir.” Joseph’s words came between clenched teeth. “Court-martialing one of our best soldiers because he won’t lead his men on a suicidal mission is going to do infinitely more harm than the losses overnight.”

Northrup glared at him. His certainty had evaporated, and he was doubly angry because he knew Joseph could see it.

“Sir!” Joseph started again, unable to hide his emotion. “These men have been here for three years. They’ve endured hell. Every one of them has lost friends, many of them have lost brothers, cousins. Their villages have been decimated. You know nothing of what they’ve seen, and if you want their respect, then you must also show them the respect they deserve.”

Northrup remained silent for several minutes. Joseph could see the struggle in his face, the anger at being challenged and the fear of weakness. “Other men have gone out,” he said finally. “That puts paid to your argument, Reavley.”

“And have they come back?” Joseph asked. He sounded challenging and he had not intended to be. He sensed Northrup’s need to prove himself right and that he might dig himself in if he felt threatened, and yet he had gone too far to stop.

“Not yet,” Northrup said defiantly. “But Eardslie’s a good man, an officer. He didn’t refuse to go.”

Nigel Eardslie was another of Joseph’s students from St. John’s, before the war: a sensitive, intelligent young man, a good scholar, and a close friend of Morel’s. Suddenly the argument with Northrup was pointless. What did it matter who won it or who lost it? All he could think of was Eardslie and his men out in no-man’s-land in the mud.

“It’s not raining now,” Northrup added, as if that vindicated him.

“It’s not the rain that matters, it’s the mud!” Joseph snapped. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll see if I can help.” He did not bother to explain any further. Northrup was out of his depth and afraid to show it. Joseph saluted and left, pushing the sacking aside and climbing the steep steps up to the air again.

It took him nearly half an hour to make his way to the forward trench. The duckboards were awash, some floating knee-high in the filthy water. Others were almost waist-high, clogged with the bodies of dead rats, garbage, and old tins. The leg of a dead soldier stuck out from the gray clay of the wall. There were patches of blue sky overhead, but Joseph was cold because he was wet to the skin.

Going uphill slightly, he came to a relatively dry stretch and several groups of men cleaning equipment, telling bad jokes and laughing. One had his shirt off and had scratched his flesh raw where the lice had bitten him. Another had coaxed a flame inside a tin and was boiling water. Some were reading letters from home. Five of them could not have been over seventeen. Their bodies were slight, smooth-skinned, although their faces were hollow and there was a tight, brittle tension in their voices.

A hundred yards farther on he came to a connecting trench. Huddled along it, their backs to the walls, were a dozen men. He recognized Morel. He was standing a little apart from the others, bracing himself against the earth, his head back in a blind stare upward. The angles of his body were stiff, almost as if he were waiting to move, yet afraid to.

Joseph felt his chest tighten and his breath grew heavy in his lungs. He tried to go faster but the duckboards had rolled and were broken, and his feet could get little purchase in the mud.

No one took any notice of him when he stopped. He knew most of them. Bert Collins was there, caked in mud, his right arm blood-soaked. Cully Teversham and Snowy Nunn stood together with Alf Culshaw, who was smaller, narrow-chested, dapper when he had the chance. He always managed to scrounge whatever you wanted from rations—for a consideration, of course. He looked grim and tired, and there was a bandage wrapped tightly around his left arm. Stan Tidyman for once was not talking about his favorite food. He was shoulder to shoulder with George Atherton, who could mend anything if you gave him pliers, a bit of wire, and the time. The last one was Jim Bullen.

It was Cully who saw Joseph first, but there was no smile on his face. He did not even speak. No one saluted or came to attention.

Morel turned slowly but it was several seconds before his eyes focused and he recognized Joseph. His expression did not change. Snowy Nunn also stared unblinkingly.

They were covered in mud, wet to the waist, or—in the cases of Cully Teversham and Stan Tidyman—up to the armpits; all except Morel. In a blinding moment, Joseph understood: Barshey Gee had refused to take a party into no-man’s-land to look for survivors and bring back what dead they could find, but these were the men Nigel Eardslie had led.

“Eardslie?” Joseph’s voice was hoarse, almost unintelligible, except that they all knew what he was asking. He gulped air. “Wounded?”

“Dead,” Morel said huskily. “There wasn’t enough of him left to bring back. You want to bury one arm, a foot, Chaplain? Couldn’t even tell if it was left or right.” He could not control the tears running down his face.

Joseph was furious, raging against believing it, as if to refuse to acknowledge the fact could stop it being true.

“You went?” he said incredulously. “For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you?” He flung his arms out toward the sea of stinking, gas-soaked mud beyond the hastily thrown-up line. Then words choked him and failed.

“No, of course I bloody didn’t!” Morel shouted back at him, his voice so high-pitched it was almost a scream. His chest was heaving and he seemed hardly able to breathe. “That idiot Northrup ordered them and told them it was mutiny if they refused, and he’d charge them. And the stupid bastard would have, too!”

Joseph was overwhelmed. Grief and a terrible sense of helplessness stunned him. He had nothing left to say, no answers anymore. He stared at Morel and saw at the same time the young man he had first met at St. John’s: careless, hot-tempered, quick to laugh, and possessed of a hard, supple intelligence. The idealist in him was bruised to the bone, scorched with pain at the loss, and at the monstrous stupidity of it. Everything in Morel’s nature and his education told him it was his responsibility to stop it. He was bred to lead, to answer for actions and pay the price of them. It was naked in his face now, and he was teetering on the edge of mutiny. He would take Snowy with him—that was clear, too—and possibly several of the others.

How could Joseph tell them there was a God who cared? He felt his own belief slipping out of his grasp. He closed his eyes, his mind crying out, “Father, if You are there, if You still remember us, do something! We’re dying! Not just smashed and bleeding bodies, we’re dying inside. There’s no light left.”

“What do you say now, Reverend Reavley?” Morel’s voice cut across his mind like a knife edge.

Joseph opened his eyes and wiped a muddy hand across his face. “Barshey Gee refused to go,” he answered. “Northrup’ll have to back down. Did you find any wounded still alive?”

“Of course we bloody didn’t!” The tears streamed down Morel’s face. “Those that weren’t blown apart are drowned! And Northrup won’t back down. He’ll crucify the lot of us, if we don’t get to him first. There’s no point in waiting for God—Chaplain! How long does it take you to realize that there’s no God there? No God that gives a damn, anyway.” He turned and walked down the trench, blundering into the walls, bruising himself without knowing or caring.

Joseph had nothing to say. It even stole into his mind that perhaps Morel was right.

CHAPTER

FOUR

Four nights after Eardslie’s death, Northrup led a major assault. The rain had eased a little, but the water did not soak away through the thick clay of Passchendaele. It lay coating the paths and filling the craters and trenches.

Gradually they inched forward. The guns roared all night, and star shells lit up the sky. The landscape looked like the surface of the moon. It was hard to believe anything had ever lived on it, or would again.

They were long past midsummer and the days were shortening. The dawn was heavy and dull, a drifting mist and occasional rain obscuring most of the newly gained land. The woods ahead, beyond no-man’s-land, were not even a darkening of the gray. It was ideal for going out to search for wounded.

“Bloody Jerry won’t see anyone in this,” Barshey Gee said cheerfully, swinging his rifle over his shoulder. “Ready, lads?”

“Roight,” Cully Teversham agreed. Behind him Stan Tidyman, John Geddes, George Atherton, and Treffy Johnson nodded.

“Captain?” Barshey looked at Joseph.

“Of course.” Joseph led the way up the fire step, across the parapet and down onto the slimy mud on the other side. They had to be careful because the winding path through the craters and bogs changed with every bombardment. Bodies floated beside it, grotesquely swollen, and the stench of rotting flesh and effluent flooding over from the latrines was hanging in the almost motionless air.

They went in twos, one man to help the other if either lost his footing. They spread out to cover as much ground as possible. No one spoke. The misty rain would probably deaden sound, but it was not worth the risk.

Cully Teversham went with Joseph. He was a big man with ginger hair that even the army barber couldn’t tame and hands that dwarfed everything he held. He moved calmly, picking his way, testing the ground under his feet, always looking ahead and then to the sides.

A long spike of barbed wire caught around Cully’s leg and he stopped, bending slowly to cut himself free. Joseph helped, and they moved forward again.

Ahead and to the left they saw Geddes and George Atherton. They were no more than shapes in the gloom, identifiable only by Geddes’s stiff shoulders and the swing of his arms.

It was half an hour before they found the first wounded man. His side was torn open by shrapnel and one leg was broken, but he was definitely still alive. Awkwardly, slipping and floundering in the mud, they got him back across the parapet and to the dressing station behind. Then they went back to look for more. The mist was clearing, and in another hour their camouflage could be gone.

This time they were more certain of the path, and the urgency was greater. Joseph moved ahead, his feet sucking and squelching, tripping over occasional broken equipment, spent shells, and now and then part of a corpse. He was sweating. It was warmer and there were patches of blue sky above.

He saw the body before Cully did. It was lying on its side, looking as if it were asleep rather than dead. There was no apparent injury. Joseph quickened his step, slithered the last few feet, and bent over him. It was then he saw the crown on one shoulder. It was a major! He turned the man gently, trying to see who it was, and where he was wounded. It was Major Northrup.

Cully was at his shoulder. “In’t no good, Captain. Look.” There was no emotion in his voice. He was pointing at the man’s head.

Joseph saw. There was a small blue bullet hole in his skull, just above the bridge of his nose, exactly in the middle.

“Sniper,” Cully remarked. “Damn good shots, some o’ those Jerrys. Mind, I suppose he were pretty far forward. Clean way to go, if you’ve got to, eh?”

“Yes,” Joseph agreed. It was. Far better than being gassed, coughing your lungs up, drowning in your own body’s fluids, or being caught on the wire, riddled with bullets, and hanging there perhaps for days till you bled or froze to death. But that was not what was in his mind. Why had none of his own men brought Northrup back? Surely they had seen him fall? But no one had even reported him missing.

“Let’s get him back,” he said grimly.

“Yes, sir,” Cully said obediently.

It was an awkward journey and as the sky cleared and the heat burned through, the ground steamed gently. But the cover it offered was too little. Shots began to ring out, shells and sniper fire starting to miss them too narrowly.

They reached the forward lines, then the parapet, and rolled over into the shelter and filth of the front trench. Hands reached out to help them.

“He’s dead,” Cully said matter-of-factly. “Can’t do nothing for him, not now.”

“The major!” Stan Tidyman said in surprise. “Well Oi never!”

“Now we’ll have to get another one,” Tiddly Wop Andrews remarked. “Can’t be worse than this, though, can he?”

Barshey Gee fished a sixpence out of his pocket and slapped it on the fire step. “Sixpence says it can,” he said with a smile. “Oi’ll be happy to lose.”

The others laughed.

It was Joseph’s duty to report the death to Colonel Hook at the regimental command. Northrup would have to be replaced. Headquarters might send someone, or it might be a field promotion of someone already with them, but he had no time to think about it. Please heaven it would not be Morel. Joseph still did not know what to do about him, how to help or where his first obligation lay. Morel was angry at Northrup’s incompetence and his arrogance at refusing to be helped by a man from the ranks, even when he was right. But he was far from the only experienced man to feel that. And he was grieved at Eardslie’s death. They had been friends for years.

Geddes and Bill Harrison helped Joseph carry Northrup to the table in the first aid post. He would be buried close by, probably tonight. Precious transport had to be kept for the wounded.

He thanked them and Harrison remained behind. “Can I help you, sir? Tidy him up a bit?”

“Thank you,” Joseph said. It was a grim task, but he had done it so often it was almost mechanical now. Such decencies really were for those left alive who would know, a rather pointless exercise in humanity, as if it could make any difference. Northrup was beyond help, and no one else cared. It was a pretense that in the seas of blood each death was somehow important. The whole of the Western Front was strewn with broken bodies; many of them would never be found. He had presided at burials where there was little more to identify than a handful of dog tags.

Still he accepted the offer, and together they straightened his uniform, took off the worst of the mud and washed his face. Northrup looked frightened. There was no resolution or peace in his pinched features.

“Reckon as he saw it coming, don’t you, sir?” Harrison asked with a touch of pity. Perhaps now that Northrup could do no more harm he felt free to treat his weaknesses with humanity.

Joseph looked down at the corpse. He closed the staring eyes. “Yes,” he agreed. “It looks like it.”

“Poor devil,” Harrison said bleakly. “Is there anything else I can do, sir?”

Joseph found his throat dry, his hand trembling a little. “No, thank you. This is just routine. I’ll have to go and tell Colonel Hook, but I’ll make Northrup look a bit better first.”

“Yes, sir.” Harrison saluted and left.

When Joseph was certain he had gone he looked again at Northrup’s face. Even with his eyes closed, the fear was still there, ugly and painfully naked. How long would it be before Harrison realized that Northrup could not possibly have seen the sniper? Any German must have been at least five hundred yards away from where they had found Northrup’s body. Had Northrup simply panicked under fire? Please God that was it!

Please God? Did he think God was listening after all? Joseph had wanted Northrup removed before he killed any more men with his arrogant stupidity, but not this way!

He slid his hand under Northrup’s head and felt the exit wound. The bone was splintered, hair matted with blood and brain. There was no point in trying to wash it off. Simpler to bandage it briefly, decently. Make him look whole.

He took off the tin helmet and washed that clean. He stared at it. There was no scar, no mark on the metal where the bullet had exited. Where was the bullet? Fallen out onto the ground, or inside his clothes?

The answer was obvious but he still resisted it. There must be another explanation.

Deliberately, methodically, he examined the rest of the body. There were no other injuries on him, except for a chafing at the wrists. It was not much more than red marks and a little broken skin, as if he had been firmly tied, but not harshly.

Joseph knew it before he forced himself to accept it. Old memories flooded into his mind of finding another body and bringing it back, and then realizing it was not a casualty of war but murder. That time he had at first assumed a German soldier had held the dead man’s head below the water. This time he knew straightaway it was his own men who had killed Howard Northrup. But now, two years and thousands of deaths later, Joseph would be a great deal more careful what he did about it. The grief of that time, and the guilt of his own part in it, still haunted him. Before he reported this to anyone, he would learn more about Northrup’s incompetence, how serious it was, how many lives it had cost, or had appeared to cost, and whose. He would look further than an instant judgment of what seemed to be justice. He was wiser now, more aware of the complexity behind an apparently simple act. These men lived in circumstances unimaginable to those who had originally written the rules. How could any sane man have conceived of this horror, let alone framed laws to meet its needs?

He reached for a wet rag and was making sure the crowns on Northrup’s epaulettes were clean, when he saw Richard Mason standing in the doorway. His dark face which concealed so much emotion was set in lines of tense expectancy.

“Hello, Mason,” Joseph said with slight surprise. The last article of Mason’s he had read had been sent from Russia. “There’s nothing new here. You could copy what you put last time, just change the casualty figures.”

Mason’s mouth tightened in the barest of smiles. He came farther into the room. “Was he alive when you found him?” he asked.

“No.” Joseph knew in that moment that he would give Mason no information he did not have to. He needed time. He liked Mason personally; they had struggled through the nightmare of Gallipoli together, and then the storm in the English Channel, but Mason was a war correspondent. He would publish the truth of a situation, no matter how hideous, if he believed it served a greater good. Perhaps that was right, but Joseph had already learned how hard it was to judge where a path might lead, and that it was too late to be sorry afterward. Very little was simple.

Mason was looking at him, eyes unwavering. “Sniper?”

“Looks like it,” Joseph said. He knew it was a lie, but he needed to learn more before he committed himself. “Why? Are you going to write an obituary for him?”

Mason smiled this time, but there was no light in it, no humor. “Do you think I should, Reverend? What should I say? Killed in the line of duty, Passchendaele, the eighth of August, 1917. Not exactly individual, is it! I could write that for tens of thousands of men. They’re all unique to those who loved them, someone’s only son, only brother, husband, fiancé, friend.” His eyes widened and his voice became harsher. “What should I say about Northrup? That he was an arrogant fool and his men hated him? His death may save the lives of a few poor devils he’d have sent over the top uselessly?”

“If you set yourself up to judge one man, then you need to judge them all,” Joseph replied, this time facing him without flinching. “Do you feel you have the right or the ability to do that, Mason?”

Mason’s mouth turned down in a wry wince. He leaned against the upright of the tent flap and put his hands in his pockets.

“Of course I don’t. That wasn’t really my point. I notice that you question my right to say so, but not that it is true.”

“I question your right to come to that conclusion,” Joseph corrected him. “But I don’t really care what you think, only what you say.”

“And you don’t want me to say that Northrup was an incompetent officer and it’s a blessing for his men that he’s dead?” Mason raised his eyebrows. “His men are saying it themselves.”

“Possibly,” Joseph agreed. “To each other, but they wouldn’t write it down, or repeat it where his family will hear.”

“Perhaps that’s the problem?” Mason suggested. “We cover the errors, however disastrous, if it’s going to hurt someone’s feelings, especially if that someone is an officer.”

“We do it for the dead, whoever they are,” Joseph corrected him again.

“Ah.” Mason smiled. “That’s the point, isn’t it? Now he’s dead, his mistakes die with him. He’s no more danger, so why cause unnecessary pain?”

Joseph was beginning to feel cold in spite of the August sun burning outside and the close, overwarm air. “What is it you want, Mason? As you said, the man was arrogant and a fool, but he’s dead. Do you feel some moral obligation to soil his name and make his family’s grief the greater, just because it’s true? What about the families of the men who died because of his ignorance or bad judgment? Do you think knowing that will help their pain?”

“That’s what it’s about, isn’t it, Chaplain? Pain to other people?”

Joseph stared at him. The fierce intelligence in Mason’s eyes did not allow him to delude himself any longer. “Part of it, yes.”

“And is covering their sins the part you’ve taken on yourself?”

“Northrup’s sins are not my business, Mason,” Joseph told him. “Neither are they yours. He can’t do any more harm now.”

Mason straightened up. “It won’t work, Reavley. I’m not referring to Northrup’s sins, and you know that. I’m talking about how he died. I saw you look at the helmet. The bullet wasn’t there, was it?”

“Probably fell out.” Joseph still tried to evade the issue.

Mason walked over to the table and looked down at Northrup’s face. “He was shot by his own men, or at least by one of them. And the others are covering for him. You know that. Are you going to lie, by implication, so they escape with murder?” Now he was looking at Joseph, his eyes searching Joseph’s, probing for honesty. “Does war really change things so much, Chaplain?”

“I don’t know what happened yet,” Joseph answered him. “I want to find out before I jump to conclusions.”

“Liar,” Mason said quietly. “You want to find out if it was one of the men from your own village who killed him, so if it was, you can protect him.”

Perhaps a year ago Joseph would have lost his temper. Now he kept it tightly governed. “I want to find out what happened before I set in motion a chain of events I can’t stop or control,” he said gravely. “Perhaps moral issues are all black and white to you, although I doubt it. I know you’ve been prepared to sacrifice one goal to attain another.” He was referring to their argument in the Channel two years ago, and the implicit fact that Mason would allow some of his own countrymen to be killed in order to save the vast majority. Or was he naïve enough not to know decisions like that faced military commanders every week?

Mason smiled. The expression softened his face, changing him. “But we are not the same, Reavley. I’m a war correspondent. I can observe, tell stories, ask questions. You’re a chaplain, supposedly a man of God. People think you know the difference between right and wrong. They look to you to tell them, especially now when the world is falling apart. If you won’t stand, Reverend, who will?” There was mockery in his face, but a wry, self-conscious sort of hope as well. He wanted Joseph to have the certainty and the faith he did not. He might have denied it—Joseph believed he would have, because it was too precious to put to any test. Fragile as it was, ephemeral, he would be lost without it.

“I did more than that before,” Joseph answered him. “And I’m not sure whether I was right or not.”

“Northrup was murdered.” Mason bit his lip. “If he hadn’t been, you wouldn’t argue the issue now, you’d just deny it.”

“I’ve only just seen the helmet.” Joseph told the truth, but it was still a prevarication, and the moment he had said it he was sorry. He should have known what to do, if right and wrong were as clear to him as Mason seemed to imagine. And not only Mason. Many of the men thought he should not be confused, as they were. They wanted answers, and felt let down if he could not give them. Priests were God’s authority on earth. For a priest to say he did not know was about the same as admitting that God Himself did not know; that He had somehow become confused and lost control. Life and death themselves became meaningless.

Mason was waiting.

“You are not naïve,” Joseph told him. “Your faith doesn’t rest on me. Don’t blackmail me with it. I don’t know what happened to Northrup. Of course his own men might have killed him. It happens. I’d like to know more of the circumstances before I report it to Colonel Hook.”

Mason’s eyes were steady, unblinking.

“Why? In case the man who did it is someone you like, whose father and brothers you know? Or are you afraid the morale of the whole brigade will crumble if you tell the truth?”

“Aren’t you?” Joseph continued. “Or is that what you want? Truth at all cost? Whoever pays?”

“Who pays if the chaplain condones men murdering one of their officers because they don’t agree with his orders?” Mason asked.

“Is that how you see it?” Joseph said tensely. “If it’s as simple as that to you, maybe you should be the chaplain. You seem to have right and wrong very clearly labeled. You know far more about it than I do?”

Mason shrugged. “No. But I know what the men will say, and so do you. If you let Northrup’s death go, who’s next? I haven’t any faith that what we’re fighting for is worth the price. I think the whole bloody nightmare is madness. If I believed in the devil, I’d say he’s taken over.” He spread his strong, supple hands. “This has to be as close to hell as it gets. But you believe in something. You don’t have to be here. You could have stayed at home and looked after a nice quiet parish in the countryside, comforted the bereaved, and kept spirits up on the home front. But you’re here. Why? Just going down with the ship because you don’t know what else to do? Can’t find a way to admit you were wrong, or can’t face telling the men that?”

He had touched a nerve. How many nights had Joseph wrestled in prayer to find some sense, some light of hope in the endless loss? If God really had any power or cared for mankind at all, why did He do nothing?

Was Northrup’s murder just one more ugly and senseless tragedy for him, for his family, and most of all for the man who had pulled the trigger? Or would it be the catalyst for a general mutiny against the senseless daily slaughter?

Joseph could divert the attack against himself by attacking Mason in return, but it answered nothing, and Mason would know it, just as he knew it himself.

“You seem to think I should be the judge of what to do,” he said slowly. “And yet you have decided for me, before either of us knew what happened, or what result will come from pursuing it.”

“I know what result will come from not pursuing it,” Mason told him. “And so do you. Either you tell Hook, or I do.”

Joseph did not put him to the choice. If Hook had to be told, it would be his way.

“You’re quite sure, Captain Reavley?” Hook said unhappily. He was a lean man who had been spare to begin with and was now almost gaunt. He had been twice wounded, and the way he stood betrayed every so often that his shoulder still ached.

Joseph had said only what he had found, without drawing conclusions. “Yes, sir.”

“Any idea who is responsible?”

“No, sir. I’m afraid Major Northrup angered quite a few of the men.”

Hook gave him a dour glance. “He angered the whole bloody lot, Reavley. That isn’t what I asked.”

“I have no idea which of the men is responsible.”

Hook stared at him. His eyes were shadowed. He had seen too many of his men die, and he was helpless to do anything but go on ordering them forward in endless attack after attack. He wanted to avoid this one further pointless grief. He sighed. “See what you can find out when you have the chance.” He waited, trying to gauge if Joseph understood him.

“Yes, sir.” Joseph came to attention. “As soon as I have the opportunity.”

Hook relaxed a little. “I’ll write to his father. I should do it myself. Thank you, Reavley. You can go.”

Two days later, on the tenth of August, the rain burst like a monsoon over Ypres and Passchendaele, running in rivers down the slopes of the slight hills, filling the trenches till men were waist-deep in it. The fields became quagmires, latrines flooded, stores were ruined and swept away. In every direction one looked was water and more water.

Men made jokes about collecting animals.

“Anybody give me two cows for two rats?” Cully Teversham asked hopefully.

“Two cows for twenty rats?” George Atherton improved the offer, then laughed with the odd, jerky sound he always made.

“Oi’d give you all the sodding rats in Belgium for two cows,” Tiddly Wop Andrews retorted.

“I’ve already got all the sodding rats in Belgium!” Geddes said bitterly.

Into this morass came General Colin Northrup to mourn the loss of his son. He arrived in the middle of the afternoon, climbed out of his car, and stood in the torrential rain as if completely unaware of it, his back ramrod stiff, his face ashen.

It was Joseph’s task to meet him. Apart from his obvious grief, and his rank, the general was instantly recognizable because of his physical resemblance to his son. His coloring, the angle of nose and jaw, the steady blue eyes were all the same. Only his mouth was different. There was none of his son’s indecision in it, none of the hesitation or lack of fire.

Joseph saluted him and received a smart salute in return.

“If I can be of any service to you, General Northrup, I am at your command. May I extend the condolences of the whole brigade, sir. We all feel his loss.”

“I’m sure you do,” Northrup said quietly, his voice raw with hurt. “I understand he is the second commanding officer you have lost in a short space of time.”

“Yes, sir.” It seemed ridiculous to equate Northrup with Penhaligon, but only to Joseph who knew them both and had liked and admired Penhaligon. He struggled to find anything to say that would be even decent, let alone helpful. He understood grief. He had lost his wife, Eleanor, in childbirth in 1913, and his son as well, then both his parents had been murdered by the Peacemaker’s agent the year after. God knew how many of his friends had also died since then. There was not a man here who could not name a dozen they had lost. He knew no one could ease this man’s grief, but he could at least not insult him with dishonesty. “It always hits the men very hard. I’m sure you know that they often cover their feelings with jokes. It’s the only way to hold on to sanity.”

“Yes.” Northrup swallowed. “Yes, I know that, Chaplain. I don’t expect to see the loss I feel in anyone else, nor will I mistake levity for lack of respect. They did not have time to know him as I did, or what a fine man he was.”

“No, sir. We have a dugout for you, if you’d like to stay, but I daresay you would prefer to see his grave, and then decide for yourself what to do next. When you are ready, I’ll show you. It’s…it’s quite a decent place. We have very good men there.”

Northrup’s face was set so hard the muscles in his jaw quivered and a nerve ticked in his temple. “Show me my son’s grave, Captain Reavley.”

Joseph obeyed. It was over a mile’s walk through the drenching rain, but Northrup was too lost in his grief to be aware of physical discomfort. When they reached the place, which was filled with makeshift crosses, its earth newly turned, they stood in silence. Joseph already knew where Major Northrup’s grave was among the thousands. He took the general to it, then left him alone with his thoughts. Joseph, too, had agonizing memories that made him appreciate solitude. Half the men who had left England with him lay covered in this earth.

He waited until the general moved at last, stiffly, as if all his body ached and his joints pained him. Northrup could not have been more than in his early fifties, but he seemed an old man.

“Thank you, Captain,” he said courteously. “He was my only child.”

There was no answer to give that had any meaning. Joseph treated it with the dignity of silence.

The battle continued unabated. Joseph sat in his dugout, the endless rain beating unheard on the roof above him. It was difficult to keep the water from running down the steps and inside.

He had already written the day’s letters of condolence, five of them to the same small village half a dozen miles from St. Giles where he lived. He did it now almost as if in his sleep. He could no longer think of anything individual to say, even though he had known each of the men.

Now it was time to answer his own mail, the first chance he had had in several days. He picked Matthew’s letter off the top of the pile. It was general news, gossip about people they both knew, what was on in the theater or the cinema, a book he had wanted to read but could not find, an art exhibition everyone was talking about. It was not the facts that mattered but the pleasure of hearing from him, the familiarity of the phrases he used; as for everyone, it was the contact with home and people he loved.

He wrote back with all the harmless news he could think of, the bad jokes and the opinions, the rivalries and the generosity.

He replied similarly to his sister Hannah at home in St. Giles. She, of course, had written to him about the village and the people they both knew, but mostly of her children and the odd scraps of news about her husband, Archie, at sea in command of a destroyer.

She described the late summer trees, the gold of the fields, how untidy the garden was, and regretted that she could think of no way to send him raspberries, which were now ripe.

He smiled as he thanked her. Then he told her about Tucky Nunn, and asked her particularly to do what she could for his mother. Not that there was anything, but one had to try.

He wrote also to Hallam Kerr, the vicar in St. Giles who had been so utterly useless last year when Joseph had been home recuperating from injury. Then Kerr had sputtered platitudes, out of touch with any kind of real emotion. By the time Joseph left, Kerr had begun to grasp reality and find the courage to face it. Since then he had matured into a man who was usually adequate, and sometimes superb, but good or bad, he no longer ran away or hid in meaningless ritual answers.

He could not offer Kerr advice, nor did he need it; he simply reaffirmed friendship.

The most difficult letter to answer was the last he had received from Isobel Hughes. In 1915 her husband had been killed and Joseph had sent his condolences along with the official notice of bereavement. She had written back to thank him, and a warm and honest friendship had developed between them. Often he had found he could tell her of his feelings more openly than he could anyone else. Her answers, her faith in him and her easy, natural stories of her own life, hill-farming in Wales, had been a balm to him on many long and bitter nights.

Her last letter had woken in him almost a sense of betrayal. He was aware how ridiculous that was, and yet it was taking time for the smart to go away. He had never met her, and yet he had been taking some part of her affection for granted.

Now she had told him, perhaps a little awkwardly, maybe not soon enough, that she had met a young man, invalided out of the army, and was falling in love with him, and he with her.

Joseph sat in his rickety chair, holding the notepaper in his hands and reading her words again. What was he losing, exactly? More than a correspondent? He knew Isobel Hughes’s ideas, nothing more. That was not how love worked, not really. Did he want comfort, or did he also want the urgency, magic, the beating heart?

Could he fall in love again, after Eleanor?

Yes, if he was honest, he could. Was that a betrayal, too? Was that what he was afraid of? He wanted someone safe, so he would never risk that sort of pain again.

There it was, in the open. Fear. He was looking for safety.

He took out the pen again and wrote: Dear Isobel, and then quite easily the words came to wish her happiness, and rejoice with her.

Then he wrote to Lizzie Blaine, the widow of the young scientist who had been murdered in St. Giles last summer. It was she who had told him how Hallam Kerr had grown more than Hannah had, or anything Kerr himself had written. But then Lizzie was blazingly honest, even when she was the one most hurt by it. And she was brave. Her husband’s death had been appalling, but she had never flinched from seeking the facts, facing them wherever they led. It was not that she was not afraid, he had seen it in her eyes, her hands gripped on the steering wheel of her car as she had driven him on his quest both of pastoral care and of investigation, his injuries having prevented him from driving himself. She was deeply afraid. But she had a wry, self-mocking humor and a courage that forced her forward, whatever the price.

He could not remember that time with its horror and its burning disillusion without thinking of her also, and the companionship they had shared in such quiet adversity was a balm to the pain of it, a bright thread woven through the darkness, a loyalty amid the betrayal.

He wished he could tell her of Northrup’s death and the things he was afraid of now, but military censorship would only cut it out. He knew better than to try. Instead he told her how much he missed the richness of summer at home, the quiet lanes, the smell of growing things, the sight of horses leaning into the plow, men laughing over pints of ale after the work was done, faces burned by the sun.

He missed the silence. His ears ached for it. He missed dew on the grass, and the smell of clean earth. He told her all of that, more clearly than he ever had before, and setting the words down almost brought it within his grasp again.

There was a sharp rap on the wood by the sacking curtain, jerking him back to the present. The moment he answered, General Northrup came in. Joseph was startled, having assumed that he had left. Now his face was as pale as before, and his body as stiff, but his eyes were hot with anger. He did not attempt to conceal it, but stood swaying very slightly on the damp earth floor, his hands locked behind his back. He spoke before Joseph could rise to his feet.

“Captain Reavley, I have to tell you that I find morale among your men so low that they have descended to the grossest disloyalty toward their officers. There is a laxity that I cannot and will not tolerate.” He spoke very clearly, enunciating each word. “I have even heard oblique suggestions that my son was less than competent in his command. It is a slur on the name of a fine man who gave his life in the service of his country, and it is…obscene.” He took a deep breath. “In the name of decency it must cease. The men responsible for such traitorous talk must be identified and punished.” He drew his shoulders back even further. “I am disappointed in you, sir, that you did not take action sooner than this to stop such infamy.”

Joseph was standing now. He felt the heat burn up his cheeks, not for shame that he had not defended Major Northrup, but because he had allowed himself to hope that the general would leave without hearing it.

“Perhaps you believed that you were being loyal to Colonel Hook,” Northrup went on. “You are mistaken. The ultimate loyalty is to the truth. You do the army no service by keeping silent while slander and betrayal go on. As a man of God your duty is to the highest principles of honor. Your own convenience is nothing.” He sliced his hand in the air, then put it back stiffly to his side again. “You have let down your cloth, sir. I will not permit you, or any man, to dishonor my son. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.” Joseph’s mind raced. How could he respond to this man who was so deeply outraged by what was essentially the truth? If only right were as clear as General Northrup imagined. Did one place ideals of truth before compassion for men? This was a hell where just to survive took all a man could dredge up out of his soul. Hope and sanity were lights on a hill the other side of the abyss.

Northrup was waiting for an answer. His son was dead and his grief was insupportable. What good was forcing him to see the truth?

“Well?” Northrup’s temper broke. “Don’t just stand there, man! Account for yourself!”

How many explanations were there that would not wound irrevocably? They would sound to Northrup like lies and excuses anyway.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Joseph began. “Major Northrup replaced a man deeply respected. It was after that that we suffered a great many losses, both wounded and dead. Some of the men blamed Major Northrup for giving orders that cost many of those lives.”