Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [23]
Did that prove anything? According to Mary Allard, Sebastian had gone out, and been troubled when he returned. To see whom? All Matthew knew now was that it had not been Aidan Thyer.
He drove back to London knowing only that the master of St. John’s was in a position of extraordinary power to do exactly what the Peacemaker planned, and that Sebastian had been seeing a third woman, perhaps a fourth, in a deceit that startled him. It was like a fog—choking, blinding, and impossible to grip.
CHAPTER
THREE
General Owen Cullingford stood in the center of the room he had turned into his corps headquarters in the small château a couple of miles from Poperinge, to the west of Ypres. The military situation was desperate. He was losing an average of twenty men every day, killed or wounded. In places there was only one man to each stretch of the trench and they were worked to exhaustion simply to keep sentry duty and give the alarm if there was a German attack. In the worst raids whole platoons of fifty men were wiped out in one night, leaving vast gaps in manning the line.
Ammunition was so short it had to be rationed. Every shot had to find a target; sometimes there was no second chance. Ironically, if a brigade did well, there was the difficulty of getting sufficient food up over the crowded and shell-cratered roads to reach them, and if they were decimated, the food was surplus, and wasted. Clean, drinkable water was even more difficult to find.
The other major challenge was evacuating the wounded. Those who could, simply had to walk. Kitchener had promised a million new men, but they were raised by voluntary recruitment, and were still too few, and too raw to fill the yawning gap.
The challenge he feared most was keeping up morale. An army that did not believe it could win was already beaten. Every day he saw more men wounded, more bodies of the dead, more white crosses over hasty graves. He could not afford to show emotion. The men needed to believe that he knew more than they did, that he had some certainty of victory that kept him from the fear that touched them all, or the personal horror or grief at uncontrollable pain. It was his duty to present the same calm face, squared shoulders, and steady voice whatever he felt, and to live the lie with dignity. Sometimes that was all he could do. He must never look away from wounds, or piles of the dead, never let a terrified man see that he was just as frightened, or a dying man think even for a moment that his life had been given for nothing.
Now the chaplain had come from the Second Brigade to complain about the war correspondent who had been crass and intrusive in the Casualty Clearing Station, and ended up in a fight. If it had been any other correspondent he would have told the chaplain to have the man arrested and sent back to Armentières, or wherever it was he had come from. But it was Eldon Prentice, his own sister’s son, and characteristically, he had told everyone of their relationship, so they were reluctant to be heavy-handed.
Reavley was a decent man, considerably older than most of the soldiers, well into his middle thirties. Cullingford knew more about him than Reavley was aware of, because his sister, Judith, had been Cullingford’s translator and part-time driver for several months. His previous driver had been severely injured and Judith had taken over at short notice because her language skills were excellent. Days had turned into a couple of weeks, and other considerations had taken over. She was an extremely good driver and, more than that, she knew the mechanics of a car better than many of the men.
Not that that was the reason he had made no effort to replace her with a regular army driver. Even as he stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, staring out the window at the overgrown garden, her face came to his mind, strong, vulnerable, full of emotion, the sort of face that haunts the mind, not so much for its beauty as for the dreams it awakens.
At first she had been full of anger. He smiled as he looked back