At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [84]
“Never,” he whispered. “Just be prepared to be beaten, at least this time.” He put his hand over hers where it lay on the tabletop. Her hands were very slender, stiff now in resistance. “Cavan won’t escape, unless he can prove he wasn’t part of it.”
“And leave the others?” she said indignantly. “He’d never do that.”
Of course not. Cavan was just like her! Quixotic…absurd.
“Oh, Judith! Can’t you…” He stopped. He would be asking her to deny her very nature. “No, of course you can’t.” He rose to his feet and leaned across the table, kissing her softly on the mouth. For a long moment of infinite warmth, as if a new fire melted every aching shard of ice inside him, he clung on to her. Then slowly he pulled away, leaving her behind, but never the memory. He turned and walked out into the incessant, clinging, suffocating rain.
Judith was right, of course; he had no opportunity to speak to Captain Cavan, or any of the other imprisoned men. He did not tip his hand to the authorities by asking for it when he knew it was an impossibility. Instead he went forward to the front line and gathered all the factual information he could. He saw how they were struggling to manage without Cavan, as Judith had told him—and for that matter, without Morel, who had been a good officer.
He asked men about Morel, and gained perhaps a slightly biased picture. But even accounting for that, he emerged as a brave and widely experienced man, which was unusual in these times of sweeping casualties. A front-line officer with three years’ service was rare. He was joked about because it was the easiest way of defusing the emotion, although the men knew he was burning with anger and emotionally unreliable. However, neither his courage nor his judgment of a military situation were ever doubted. They felt his loss keenly.
Still Mason could not stand by and simply make notes of it all, like some recording demon—angels were beyond the power of his imagination. Useless or not, he went out with the stretcher parties as he had done in Gallipoli, or the Italian Front facing Austria where men also died in the tens of thousands, and on the bitter Russian Front in the east, and the sands of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The weather was different, and the terrain; death was the same.
He saw Joseph on the third day. They had both returned from no-man’s-land, up to the armpits in mud from digging men out of the craters and attempting to carry them back. Off balance with the weight of the unconscious wounded, they had floundered and fallen. They had helped each other up again awkwardly, picked up their burdens again and finally reached the front-line trench. It was filled with water like a stagnant canal, with broken pieces of duckboard, and corpses of rats and men.
Still helping each other, they made it at last to a drier stretch and passed the wounded over to an ambulance crew. Then they sat shivering with exhaustion in one of the dressing station tents. Someone put blankets around them and passed the Dixie cans of hot tea laced with rum.
Joseph looked at Mason and smiled.
“Still think all this is a good idea, Chaplain?” Mason asked, waving his hand to indicate everything around them.
Joseph could see in Mason’s face a darkness that would not now be won over by any word or act as it had been in the small boat back in 1915. “I think it’s hell,” he answered the question.
Mason looked at him curiously, an urgency behind his probing.
“I was talking to Judith,” he began; his eyes flickered away, self-consciously, then back again. “She still believes there’s some point to all this, some moral purpose that makes it worthwhile. Do you?”
Joseph hesitated a moment, not only as to the truth of any answer, but even to how honest he should be to Mason. “There can’t be a heaven if there’s no hell. But I admit, I hadn’t envisioned having to spend so much time in hell.”
Mason’s mouth twisted a little but his eyes remained steady. “I wasn’t looking for a metaphysical answer, Reavley—something a little