Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [3]
The men in this segment were from the Cambridgeshire villages around Joseph’s home of Selborne St. Giles. Most of them knew each other by their local nicknames. Joseph was thirty-five, and for the years leading up to the war had been a lecturer in biblical languages at St. John’s College in Cambridge. Before that he had been in the ministry. He knew most of these men’s families. His own youngest sister, Judith, was twenty-four, older than many of these. He thought of her with a twisting confusion of emotions. He was intensely proud of her that she had volunteered to use her one distinctive skill, driving, to come here and work wherever she could help. She had been both a joy and a menace on the roads at home, but here she coped with the mud, the breakdowns, the long hours, and the horror of wounded and dying men with a courage he had not known she possessed.
The trench was climbing a bit, and drier. The slit of sky overhead was blue, with a thin drift of clouds, like mares’ tails.
Joseph was afraid for Judith in many ways. The obvious danger of injury or even death was only a part of it. There was also the vulnerability of the mind and heart to the destruction around her, the drowning in pain, the loss of so many young men, and the inability of the ambulances to do more than carry them from one place to another, very often too late. He knew the questions that tormented his own mind. No sane person could be wholehearted about war, not if they had seen it. It was one thing to stand in England in the early spring with the hedgerows beginning to bud, wild birds singing and daffodils in the gardens and along the banks under the trees, and speak of the nobility of war. It was an idea, at times even a noble one. Most people despised the thought of surrender.
Out here it was a reality. You froze most of the time. You were always cold and usually wet. All waking hours were occupied with monotonous routine: carrying, cleaning, digging, shoring up walls, trying to heat food and find drinkable water. You were always tired. And then there were the short interludes of horror: fear crawling in your stomach, shattering noise, and the blood and the pain, men dead, young men you had known and liked. Some would still be crippled long after the war passed into history; the nightmares would never be over for them.
Germany had invaded Belgium, and a matter of honor rested on it. Invasion was wrong; that was the one thing about which there was no question in anyone’s mind. But the few German soldiers he had seen were in every way but uniform indistinguishable from the young Englishman beside him. They were young, tired, dirty, and confused like everyone else.
When a successful raiding party captured someone and brought him back, Joseph had often been chosen to question him because before the war he had spent time in Germany and spoke the language not only fluently but with pleasure. Looking back on those times now was a wrenching, muddled sort of pain. He had been treated with such courtesy, laughed with them, shared their food. It was the land of Beethoven and Goethe, of science and philosophy, of vast myths and dreams. How could they now be doing this to each other?
Joseph turned the last corner and went up a couple of steps where he caught up with Charlie Gee and Corliss, but the trench was still too narrow for him to help. Two men could barely walk side by side, let alone three.
The main dressing station was in a tent a few yards away. At least it was dry, and no more of a target than any other structure. It was quite spacious inside. After a bad raid they had to deal with dozens of men, moving them in and out as rapidly as ambulances could take them back to proper hospitals. Just now there was a lull. There were only two men inside, gray-faced,