At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [142]
No, it wasn’t! The fact that in one man’s opinion something was true, or part of a truth, did not rob him of judgment whether to speak it or not. The responsibility was still his. It was the ultimate hypocrisy to shelter behind morality instead of standing before it.
He reached the lines, ate a brief meal of stew and hard bread already beginning to mold, then walked through the mud to his dugout. He read for a little while, and finally fell asleep after three in the morning, with the words crying out in his mind “Father, help me!” but no idea of what that help could be.
The next day began with Faulkner once again calling witnesses from among the men who had been at the front only a short time and had no personal loyalty to Morel or to Cavan, and no friendship with the other men of the Cambridgeshire regiments.
Within the first half hour, his questions turned in the direction Joseph had dreaded from the beginning. “Why,” Faulkner asked, “if the accused men were not guilty as charged, did they escape custody and flee the battlefield, and try to reach neutral Switzerland? And what is more interesting—how did that escape occur?”
Joseph was cold to the pit of his stomach. Had he underestimated Faulkner in thinking he did not know that Judith and Wil Sloan had helped them? Was he looking for someone to betray that? Was he trying to apply pressure on Joseph that would force him to lie to protect them both, and thus expose himself as a passionately interested party doing everything he could to conceal a crime out of personal motives?
Was that why they had chosen Joseph to defend the men? Because he had the ultimate weakness and they had known it all along? How blindly, arrogantly stupid he had been! Yet again he had walked, open-eyed, into total betrayal! And not only Cavan, Morel, and the other men, but Judith and Wil Sloan would pay for it with their lives.
Now he was angry, deeply and passionately angry. He was sweating. The room seemed to roar in his ears as if he were underwater. Surely the Germans had not advanced far enough to make the room ring and tremble like this?
Faulkner was questioning one of the guards who had kept the prisoners in the farmhouse rooms. The man stared back stolidly, answering exactly as required.
“Yes, sir, Captain Morel refused to give his word, sir, so we had no choice but to lock him up.”
“But separately, not with the other ranks?” Faulkner clarified.
“That’s right, sir.”
“And he escaped?”
“Looks that way, sir.”
Faulkner’s eyebrows shot up. “You have some doubt, Corporal Teague?”
“Only know he was there in the evening, an’ gone the next morning, sir,” Teague replied blankly. “Don’t seem likely he was abducted.”
There was a snigger of laughter around the room.
Faulkner flushed. “You find this amusing, Corporal?” he said icily. “We are investigating a man’s death!”
“Holy God!” Teague exploded, his face suddenly white. He swung his arm out in a generally northeast direction. “We got a thousand men out there dying every single bloody day!” he shouted. “One idiot officer gets a clean bullet in his brain, or what passes for one in his case, and you become righteously indignant, as if it never happened before? I got no bloody idea what happened to him, and I don’t sodding care!”
His voice was growing more strident. “Good men got crippled or killed because he was too stiff-necked to let anyone tell him what he didn’t know. And God ’elp ’em if they tried! If someone bust them out, I don’t know who it was. They give me a clip on the back of the head, an’ I don’t blame them one bit, but I never saw their faces.” He flung his arm out to point at the accused men, but still stared defiantly at Faulkner. “Haven’t you got something better to do than stand here arguing the toss over those poor sods? We’re going to lose the war ’cos you lot shot us from behind!”
Faulkner’s face was burning with rage, but General Hardesty stepped