Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [123]
“The bastard who thought of this bloody fiasco should be made to be here!” Mason said through clenched teeth. His eyes stared far away, as if he could see something out toward the horizon, and everything closer was a blur.
Joseph did not answer. Agreement was unnecessary. He sipped again and felt the fire slide down his throat and hit his stomach. This whole expedition was a nightmare from which he did not know how to waken. Perhaps life was the nightmare, and death was the awakening? Did the men who were slaughtered here open their eyes to some quiet place where they were whole again, with the people they loved around them, and no pain? Or was this all it was—hope and then disaster—and finally oblivion?
Mason climbed to his feet stiffly and looked at the water, then slowly he started to walk toward it, taking his boots off, then his clothes as he went.
Joseph did the same and followed after him, only half certain what he intended to do.
Mason reached the edge, and without hesitation, waded in. When he was waist deep he bent and scooped it up in his hands and then poured it over his head. He did it again and again, as if to wash away more than the blood and dirt.
He turned to look at Joseph, a couple of yards away.
“Tell me, Chaplain, how much of this can be washed off? I could scrub down to the bone, but would all the seas of the earth take it out of my mind? I wonder if Churchill has read Macbeth? What do you think? Would his hands ‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’ with this bloody slaughter? There’s no victory, no sense, just death and more death.”
He walked back to the shore, dragging his feet against the tide, and put on his clothes again. Joseph did the same, the fabric sticking to his wet body.
“We’ll be out of here in the morning,” Mason said, his words terse. “In three days, if I’m not torpedoed by some bloody U-boat, I’ll be back in London and I’ll write a story that’ll get this insane carnage stopped. Once the nation knows what the truth is they’ll throw this government out.”
“You can’t tell them what it’s like,” Joseph replied flatly. “Even if you could write a piece that would describe this . . .” He was too stiff to point, he just glanced around. “They wouldn’t publish it. It’s all censored. It has to be, or it would break the spirit at home. We’d get no more recruits.”
“You want more men to come out and be slaughtered like this?” Mason asked, his eyes burning with accusation, but it sprang from his own raw, hurting anger, the inner wounds bleeding, not a desire to hurt Joseph.
“I’d rather not have war at all,” Joseph replied. “But I didn’t get to choose.”
“None of us did!” Mason said bitterly, bending to tie his bootlaces. “If we were told the truth, then perhaps we would have! At least we’d have gone into it with our eyes open.”
“You can’t tell all the truth, only part of it,” Joseph pointed out. “Anything you say is going to be your judgment, what you see and feel. Do you have the right to decide what other people must know, when they can’t do anything to change it?”
“I have more than the right,” Mason replied, straightening up. “I have the duty. We are a democracy, not a dictatorship. You can’t choose if you don’t know what the choices are.” He half turned to face Joseph, wincing as a strained muscle in his shoulder shot through with pain and he moved gingerly to ease it. “Tell me that you believe any sane man or woman in England would choose this,” he said the word with a savagery that tore the sound out of him, “if they knew what it was. Is this glory? Are these Rupert Brooke’s heroes, ’swimmers into cleanness leaping’ from this life to some mythical Valhalla? God in heaven, man! If you’ve any humanity at all, look at it! It’s worse than barbarity, it’s a hell only a civilized imagination could conceive! It’s a refinement of madness beyond the merely bestial.”
“And is telling people at home going