At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [130]
Mason returned to London with a heavy sense of oppression. His mind should have been crowded with thoughts of the slaughter at Passchendaele and the impending farce of the court-martial of Cavan, the only one of the twelve men who was actually in custody.
But all the way across the Channel, and then standing crowded in the troop train from Dover to London, jostled and jolted, kept upright largely by the press of other men’s bodies around him, he felt a deep and abiding misery that was almost paralyzing. There seemed no light in his inner landscape at all. Had he really imagined the court-martial would solve anything?
Rationally, perhaps the idiocy of it all, the casualty toll climbing toward a quarter million men for the gaining of one shattered town, would have been enough to make sane men call a halt to it, at whatever cost, on whatever terms. But was there any sanity left? No one looked at the whole monumental disaster. They all looked at their own little patch of it.
Perhaps it was too big for anyone to comprehend the ruin that stretched right from the Atlantic waves that swallowed men and ships off the battered shores of Britain right to the blood-soaked sands of Mesopotamia, to the snowbound graves of Russia. Europe was a charnel house. No one could count the millions of dead, let alone those maimed forever.
And yet Judith Reavley was prepared to risk her life to help eleven mutineers escape and flee to Switzerland, and Joseph was equally willing to risk his life to bring them back! In the scheme of things both actions were equally pointless, and just as likely to end in death.
Perhaps that was what hurt? Joseph had hardly any chance of succeeding, which—if he were a logical man—he would have known; but he wasn’t logical! He was an idealist, a dreamer, seeing the world he wanted more clearly than the real one.
Mason wished he did not like him so much. He had wit and imagination, courage to the point of stupidity—no, actually beyond it. And compassion, again beyond sense. You could not argue about honor with him because he did not listen. He followed his own star, even though it was an illusion; beautiful, better than the truth, but a mirage. And when he reached the place where he thought it was, he was going to discover that there was nothing there. That was what Mason hated: the disillusion he knew had to come. No one would be able to help them. What does a man do when he climbs the vast heights, struggles his way upward to heaven, and when bleeding and exhausted he gets there and finds it empty?
He was furious with Joseph for being so vulnerable, and leaving people like Mason to be wounded by his pain.
The train jolted and threw him against the man beside him, knocking him off balance. He apologized. They stopped somewhere in a siding, crowded together, hot and exhausted, legs aching.
The minutes dragged by. He was impatient, although it made little difference when he reached London. He was going to see the Peacemaker, and he would be admitted whatever time he got there. He was going to report on the court-martial and the mood of the men. The Peacemaker would not be pleased. The court-martial was not only going to be absurd, it was going to appear so. Might someone step in and prevent it even now? Was there anyone who could? If so, it would be obvious they had, and that would be absurd also.
The train started to move, lurching with a clang of couplings, then stopped again. Someone swore under his breath. There was another lurch and bang, and another. Then slowly they picked up speed.
Mason was lying to himself: It was not really the thought of Joseph that weighed him down, it was Judith. He could remember the touch of her lips, and her eyes as she looked at him when he drew away at last. He wanted to hold that forever, and he knew he was losing it already. Even if no one ever betrayed the fact that it was she and the American volunteer driver who had rescued the mutineers, she had been willing to do it. That was the division between them that was uncrossable. She was impulsive, quixotic, rushing in like