A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [62]
She grasped the door firmly, ready to shut it, her face suddenly still as if she regretted offering opinions to a stranger. “Call again after dinner, if you want. I don’t expect he’ll come around before then, if he comes around at all.” Her voice was crisp again, businesslike. “It won’t do any good to try before that, mind!” She closed the door, leaving him standing there on the pavement.
Hamish, stirring again, said, “If he dies, and it’s proved you gave him the money that brought him to his grave, a man with your past, what do you suppose they’ll do to you?”
“It will be the end of my career. If not worse.”
Hamish chuckled, a cold, bitter sound. “But no firing squad. You remember those, now, don’t you? The Army’s way of doing things. A cold gray dawn before the sun rises, because no man wants to see a shameful death. That bleak hour of morning when the soul shrivels inside you and the heart has no courage and the body shrinks with terror. You remember those, don’t you! A pity. I’d thought to remind you….”
But Rutledge was striding toward the Inn, head down, nearly blundering into a bicycle, ignoring the woman who hastily moved out of his path and the voice of someone saying his name. The world had narrowed down to the agony that drove him and the memories that devoured him. Back in France, back to the final horror, the disintegration of all he had been and might be, in the face of blazing guns.
The machine gunner was still there, and the main assault was set for dawn. He had to be stopped before then. Rutledge sent his men across again, calling to them as he ran, and watched them fall, his sergeant the first to go down, watched the remnants turn and stagger back to their lines through the darkness, cursing savagely, eyes wild with pain and fury.
“It’s no’ the dying, it’s the waste!” Corporal MacLeod screamed at him, leaping back into the trench, faces turning his way. “If they want it taken out so badly, let them shell it!”
Rutledge, pistol in hand, shouted, “If we don’t silence it, hundreds of men will die—it’s our lot coming, we can’t let them walk into that!”
“I won’t go back—you can shoot me here, I won’t go back! I won’t take another man across that line, never again, as God’s my witness!”
“I tell you, there’s no choice!” He looked at the mutiny in the wild eyes surrounding him, looked at the desolation of spirit in weary, stooped shoulders, and forced himself to ruthless anger: “There’s never a choice!”
“Aye, man, there’s a choice.” The Corporal turned and pointed to the dead and dying, caught in a no-man’s-land between the gunner and the lines. “But that’s cold-blooded murder, and I’ll no’ be a part of it again. Never again!”
He was tall and thin and very young, burned out by the fighting, battered and torn by too many offenses and too many retreats, by blood and terror and fear, tormented by a strong Calvinistic sense of right and wrong that somehow survived through it all. It wasn’t courage he lacked; Rutledge knew him too well to think him a coward. He had quite simply broken—but others had seen it. There was nothing Rutledge could do for him now, too many lives were at stake to let one more stand in the way. Grief vied with anger, and neither won.
He’d had Hamish MacLeod arrested on the spot, and then he’d led the last charge out into the icy, slippery mud, challenging them to let him do it alone, and they’d followed in a straggle, and somehow the gun had been silenced, and there was nothing left afterward but to see to the firing party. Then he’d sat with Hamish throughout what was left of that long night, listening to the wind blowing snow against the huts they’d somehow rigged in the trenches. Listening to Hamish talk.
A hideously long night. It had left him drained beyond exhaustion, and at the end of it he’d said, “I’ll give you a second chance—go out there and tell them you were wrong!”
And Hamish had shaken his head, eyes dark with fear but steadfast. “No. I haven’t got any strength left. End it while I’m still a man. For God’s sake, end it now!