At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [37]
“Eardslie?” Joseph’s voice was hoarse, almost unintelligible, except that they all knew what he was asking. He gulped air. “Wounded?”
“Dead,” Morel said huskily. “There wasn’t enough of him left to bring back. You want to bury one arm, a foot, Chaplain? Couldn’t even tell if it was left or right.” He could not control the tears running down his face.
Joseph was furious, raging against believing it, as if to refuse to acknowledge the fact could stop it being true.
“You went?” he said incredulously. “For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you?” He flung his arms out toward the sea of stinking, gas-soaked mud beyond the hastily thrown-up line. Then words choked him and failed.
“No, of course I bloody didn’t!” Morel shouted back at him, his voice so high-pitched it was almost a scream. His chest was heaving and he seemed hardly able to breathe. “That idiot Northrup ordered them and told them it was mutiny if they refused, and he’d charge them. And the stupid bastard would have, too!”
Joseph was overwhelmed. Grief and a terrible sense of helplessness stunned him. He had nothing left to say, no answers anymore. He stared at Morel and saw at the same time the young man he had first met at St. John’s: careless, hot-tempered, quick to laugh, and possessed of a hard, supple intelligence. The idealist in him was bruised to the bone, scorched with pain at the loss, and at the monstrous stupidity of it. Everything in Morel’s nature and his education told him it was his responsibility to stop it. He was bred to lead, to answer for actions and pay the price of them. It was naked in his face now, and he was teetering on the edge of mutiny. He would take Snowy with him—that was clear, too—and possibly several of the others.
How could Joseph tell them there was a God who cared? He felt his own belief slipping out of his grasp. He closed his eyes, his mind crying out, “Father, if You are there, if You still remember us, do something! We’re dying! Not just smashed and bleeding bodies, we’re dying inside. There’s no light left.”
“What do you say now, Reverend Reavley?” Morel’s voice cut across his mind like a knife edge.
Joseph opened his eyes and wiped a muddy hand across his face. “Barshey Gee refused to go,” he answered. “Northrup’ll have to back down. Did you find any wounded still alive?”
“Of course we bloody didn’t!” The tears streamed down Morel’s face. “Those that weren’t blown apart are drowned! And Northrup won’t back down. He’ll crucify the lot of us, if we don’t get to him first. There’s no point in waiting for God—Chaplain! How long does it take you to realize that there’s no God there? No God that gives a damn, anyway.” He turned and walked down the trench, blundering into the walls, bruising himself without knowing or caring.
Joseph had nothing to say. It even stole into his mind that perhaps Morel was right.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Four nights after Eardslie’s death, Northrup led a major assault. The rain had eased a little, but the water did not soak away through the thick clay of Passchendaele. It lay coating the paths and filling the craters and trenches.
Gradually they inched forward. The guns roared all night, and star shells lit up the sky. The landscape looked like the surface of the moon. It was hard to believe anything had ever lived on it, or would again.
They were long past midsummer and the days were shortening. The dawn was heavy and dull, a drifting mist and occasional rain obscuring most of the newly gained land. The woods ahead, beyond no-man’s-land, were not even a darkening of the gray. It was ideal for going out to search for wounded.
“Bloody Jerry won’t see anyone in this,” Barshey Gee said cheerfully, swinging his rifle over his shoulder. “Ready, lads?”
“Roight,” Cully Teversham agreed.