At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [117]
Since Joseph was pretending to be Swiss, they did not think he had any serious interest in the issue, so they were prepared to talk about it to him, and he did not disabuse them. He set out again with quickened hope and moved more rapidly than before, believing the escaped men were not far ahead of him.
Directly to the east was the German border. He was past the field of Verdun, where 350,000 Frenchmen had been killed or wounded the previous year, and still the battle raged on. Joseph had no idea how many Austrians and Germans had been killed there, but he knew it must be at least as many. The Russian Front he had only heard about, and the Italian, and the Turkish fronts, and the arenas of war in Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. He refused to think about them. All he could do was this one tiny contribution: give Morel and the other fugitives a chance to come back. Even that might be beyond him, but trying had become almost as important for his own sanity as for their survival. It would mean that in this endless destruction there was something within his control.
In the end, he found them in the ruins of a bombed village, so little of which was left that even its name was obliterated. He had followed a rumor: a joke about someone’s French being notoriously bad. Some young men, worn out and with several days’ beard, had asked for directions to a farm where he and his friends could sleep. Only he had mispronounced it as une femme—a woman. He had met with much bawdy laughter, and remarks about all ten of them.
The joke was told with pity for their desperation but then everyone was desperate. It was not that they were unwilling to share what they had, but they too had nothing. They were gaunt-faced, exhausted young men with eyes that stared beyond the mark, seeing a hell they would never forget. The images lay inside the eyelids, waking or sleeping, and coiled into the brain, pounding in the blood. The sound of guns never stopped; even in the rare silences it was still there in the head.
The escapees saw Joseph at the same moment he saw them. He knew Morel instantly, even in silhouette against the sunlight on a stretch of wall still standing. He was thin, and his uniform was filthy—perhaps on purpose to disguise its markings. But the way he stood was characteristic. Even now the grace had not left him, the natural elegance he had always had. Trotter and Snowy Nunn were sitting on piles of rubble. Snowy was drinking from a tin can. The others were out of sight, perhaps asleep somewhere.
Morel saw Joseph and froze, his hand on his revolver.
Joseph stood motionless. He did not have a weapon, but even if he had he would not have used it. He took a step forward experimentally.
Morel raised the revolver.
“That would change everything,” Joseph said quietly.
Morel stiffened, recognizing him now, even though Joseph was wearing borrowed French civilian clothes, and Morel was facing the sun.
“Would it?” he asked. “Who would know?”
Joseph stood still. “You would,” he answered. “You might forget shooting me, although I doubt it. In hot blood now, it might be all right, but peace will come eventually, of one sort or another….”
“I can’t count the number of men I’ve killed,” Morel told him wearily. “Most of them were perfectly decent Germans doing no more than I’m doing, fighting for their country. What choice do they have, any more than I?”
“None,” Joseph said honestly. “I expect it hurts them just as it does most of us. But you know me. I’m part of your peacetime as well as your war. But even if you can live with it, can Snowy? Can he ever go back to St. Giles, to his family and his land, if you kill me?”
Morel gave a sharp burst of laughter. “What the hell is so special about you? You’re ridiculous!” There was deep, wounding pain in his face. “A million