At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [116]
“So you are going east after the eleven men?” the Frenchman asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me give you a good dinner and a night’s rest first,” he offered. “Then if you wish to proceed, may I suggest that you change your attire? You appear to speak French at least adequately.” He pulled a slight face. “Not enough to pass for French, unless you claim to come from some other region—Marseille, perhaps?” His tone suggested that to him Marseille was barbaric, barely French at all. “Have you any other language? German, perhaps?”
“Yes. And rather better,” Joseph admitted. “But I don’t think passing for German would be very clever.”
The Frenchman gave a particularly Gallic shrug.
“Of course not. I was thinking German-speaking Swiss,” he said. “That would account for your accent. A Protestant priest, Swiss, and therefore neutral.”
The idea was very appealing, except that if he were captured out of uniform he could be shot as a spy rather than held as a prisoner of war. He pointed that out.
“Indeed,” the Frenchman conceded. “I was considering your chances of success in traveling unnoticed, and finding your eleven men. We can get you some suitable clothes. Stay as far back as the supply trenches, or even farther, and you are unlikely to be taken by Germans. Do what you think best.”
When Joseph set out in the French staff car the following morning he was well fed, by trench catering standards, and well rested.
It was not raining and the late summer air was soft and bright. He was so accustomed to the smells of overcrowding, open latrines, and too many dead to bury that he barely noticed them. He thought instead of the sun on his face and—at least to the south—a land that held some echo of its prewar glory. Farms were ruined, villages bombed and burned as everywhere else, but on the horizon there were trees and the hills rolled away green in the distance. He could even see cattle grazing here and there when he veered farther away from the trenches and the incessant sound of guns.
Just as in his own lines on the Ypres Salient, there were men returning to battle after brief leave, often because of injury. There were columns of wounded making their painful way back to field dressing stations, and there were supply trucks, munitions, and ambulances on the crowded roads.
The car took him another thirty miles. After that he had to walk.
He stopped only to ask directions or seek information of anyone who might have seen a group of men together who were going along the lines rather than back or forward to fight. He was appalled how easily it came to him to invent lies to explain his errand. The only part that did not vary was his physical descriptions of the most noticeable of the men, particularly Morel, the one he was sure could speak French fluently and would be the natural leader.
He slept where he could. Men were unfailingly willing to share the meager rations they had. Any thanks he offered were inadequate, but gratitude was all he had.
When he finally found someone who seemed to have seen them the day before, he was dubious. The description he received in return could have been almost any soldier.
That evening the sighting was much more positive. Crouching in one of the rear support trenches, Joseph listened to a group of French soldiers describe someone lost and badly frightened. Apparently the man had admitted considering mutiny, which they sympathized with wholeheartedly. The man had divulged that he had an idiot for an officer, that he had rebelled against his orders. As