Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [121]
Mason colored faintly. “I’m sorry.” It was said frankly. His diction was perfect, a little sibilant, but there was a beauty in its exactness as if words were precious to him.
Joseph offered his hand.
Mason grasped it. “There’s a ship going back toward Malta tomorrow. Probably about dawn. They’ll find room for you. Won’t be hard to get a troopship home from there.” His eyes searched Joseph’s face curiously. “Yours must be a rotten job a lot of the time. How the hell do you tell people they can make sense out of all this?” He gestured toward the rock escarpments almost six hundred feet above them where the Turkish guns commanded most of the bay. “Fever, dysentery, gunshot and shrapnel wounds, seasickness, overcrowding. One hospital ship out there has eight hundred and fifty wounded, and two doctors to look after them all. And one of those a bloody vet!” The anger was profound and so deep inside him it showed only in the lines of his face and the rigid tension of his shoulders, there was no surface fire anymore. It had long since worn itself out.
“I don’t try,” Joseph answered. “I deal with people one at a time. I can only address the small things.”
“In other words you can’t make sense of it either,” Mason concluded with a certainty that obviously gave him no pleasure. “You’ve given up on telling them this is some kind of divine destiny, and necessary furnace of affliction, and they should cling onto belief, and just endure?”
“Actually I don’t tell people much of what they should do at all,” Joseph answered. “Most people are doing their best anyway. The big choices are taken away from us, it’s only how we react that’s left.”
Mason turned away. The sunlight was harsh on his face, showing the lines of strain around his eyes. He looked about Joseph’s own age, but the knowledge and the rage inside him were timeless. “It would have been nice if you could have given some great cosmic answer,” he said drily. “But I wouldn’t have believed you anyway. Have you had anything to eat today?”
“No. I wanted to be sure to find you.”
Mason hesitated, as if to ask another question, then changed his mind. He turned and led the way through the wiry grass and the tumbled clay and rocks along toward a makeshift field kitchen. Half a dozen men were cooking and a group was already lining up for breakfast.
Joseph waited his turn, and was glad to walk away with a plate of stew, a couple of hard biscuits, and a mug of tea. He sat next to Mason on the ground in the shelter of a rock to eat, aware of the tensions around him, the constant glances up at the headlands where the Turkish guns were dug in and commanded almost all the advances up the slopes.
There was a lot of good-natured banter. The men were mostly Australians and New Zealanders, but there were just the same sort of robust and colorful complaints he would have heard at Ypres. Only the accents were different, and the individual terms of abuse. The subjects were the same: the food, the officers, the general impossibility of doing what was commanded. Men had sore feet, bellyache, only here they tried bathing in the sea to get rid of the ever-present lice. It didn’t work any better than the matches in Flanders.
It was early afternoon and Joseph was up the incline a dozen yards away from Mason, observing him writing notes, when the attack started. Men poured up the hill, charging the Turkish positions. Gunfire was incessant: The heavy artillery dug in behind the trenches and gullies; the machine guns’ rapid, staccato fire; and the boom of ships’ guns from the battleships in the bay.
Joseph followed Mason up to the lowest line of the dugouts and shallow trenches. The wounded came rapidly. A few were carried on stretchers, but most were floundering on their own feet, staggering and falling. Some were more seriously hit, and carried by their fellows. At times it was hard to tell which were the injured men; there was blood everywhere.
Once Joseph looked up from a rough piece of field first aid he had been performing to find Blue on his knees in front of him. His tunic front was scarlet