Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [115]
Joseph leaned forward, head in his hands. “All right. I’ll go in the morning,” he whispered.
“I’m sorry,” Matthew said with sudden gentleness. “I know you haven’t had leave in months, and God knows, you deserve it. But I can’t trust anyone else.”
“I know,” Joseph agreed. “I’ll be all right. Tell me about Mynott, and what I need to do.”
The sea journey was, as Matthew had said, roughly three days, steaming at full speed south through the Straits of Gibraltar, then east across the Mediterranean. The weather was perfect, blazing sunshine and warm, blue seas.
At first Joseph was glad simply to sleep as much as cramped and shared accommodation allowed him to. The ship was full of men going out to fight on the beaches and landings at Gallipoli, and they must have heard of the storm of casualties there already. Many of them would not come home, and most of them who did would have sustained injury and loss.
Joseph made himself available to offer what support and encouragement he could, but they were raw recruits, and he had already seen nearly a year of war in the trenches of the Western Front. It was better he tell them nothing. There were truths too overwhelming, too shattering to the mind and the hope, to be faced all at once. A step at a time was all the mind could bear. He thought it was not cowardice that kept him silent when he heard their laughter and their talk of heroism in battle, of honor and sacrifice and the glory of courage.
The Dardanelles were among the great legendary places of the world, a crossroad for the nations of history: Persia, Judea, Greece, Rome, Islam, and the vast empires of the East beyond. Alexander the Great had left Greece to conquer the ancient realms of India and Egypt. Xerxes had crossed the Dardanelles in his attempt to crush the rising Athens. Leander had swum the Hellespont to be with Hero, and died for love. And in the mists of time Homer’s Greeks had come that way bound for the siege of Troy: Helen, Menelaus, Achilles, and Odysseus on his long return to Ithaca.
In even older dreams, Jason and the Argonauts had pursued the Golden Fleece through these same straits up into the Black Sea.
Now he heard young Englishmen talking of it as if this were another great heroic saga, and they would return with the honor of war. He stared across the dancing blue water, and felt his eyes sting with tears. He, too, had grown up with the poetry of the wine-dark seas of Homer flowing through his dreams. He had wanted to walk the ruins of Troy in the magic light of the Mediterranean, hear in the silence of the wind in the grass the echoes of the wars between men and gods that laid the dreams of Western man and built the cities and laws, the philosophies and poems, upon which Europe had nourished its heart for two thousand years.
And he would see it, but now it would be amid the slaughter of today, and perhaps out of it he would find the truth of a betrayal he had to know, however much he did not want to.
The ship dropped anchor in the Aegean Sea, north of the Dardanelles, opposite the landing beaches of Anzac Cove. All the men crowded to the side to stare at the shore and the pale, steep hills behind, jagged right down to the shore. The bay was dotted with ships, but far out, beyond the firing range of the Turkish artillery from the fortresses and placements on the crown of the ridge above. Men crowded the beaches, hundreds of them, wounded and sick waiting to be escorted out to hospital ships. Medical orderlies were trying to help, fighting units huddled under the brief stretch of rocks and outcrops, making a slow and bloody way upward, surrounded by fire on all sides except the sea.
Joseph had told the commander that he was on Secret Intelligence Service work, backed up by the documents Matthew had given him. He was quite open that he was here to find a particular officer who might have information, but he did not give any name, until he was on the tender, making its way through the pale Aegean. The water should have been a limpid blue, but here it was turgid