Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [33]
The bombardment picked up in the evening and went on all night. It was one of the worst he could remember; there were so many men gone that in places, sentries on watch were alone, exhausted, and fighting against falling asleep. Apart from the fact that it was an offense for which a man could be court-martialed and face the firing squad, no one wanted to let down their friends or themselves.
There were no reinforcements yet. The Canadians had suffered the worst along this part of the line, and the French Algerians farther east. Now, far from a shortage of food, there were no men to eat it, and it was rotting.
By dawn there was some respite in the attack, possibly because with the slackening of the wind, pockets of gas still lingered over the craters and in the lower lying trenches. As full daylight spread over the vast wasteland with its shattered trees and gray water, its mud and corpses, Joseph made his way back to his own dugout. He washed in cold, sour water, shaved, and sat down at his makeshift table with pen, ink, and paper, and a preliminary list of casualties.
He hated it, but it was part of a chaplain’s job to write to the families of the dead and break the news. He tried not to say the same thing each time, as if one man’s death were interchangeable with any other. The widow or parents, whoever it was, deserved the effort of individual words. Nothing would make it better, but perhaps a little dignity, showing that someone else cared as well as themselves, would make a difference in time.
Here in his dugout he had a few possessions from home, things he had chosen because they mattered most to his inner life: the picture of Dante from his study in St. John’s, that marvelous tortured face that had seen its own hell and bequeathed the vision to the world; a couple of books of verse, Chesterton and Rupert Brooke; a photograph of his family, all of them together three Christmases ago; a coin his friend Harry Beecher had found when they had walked together along the old wall the Romans had built fifteen hundred years ago across Northumberland from the Channel to the Irish Sea. They were all memories of happiness, the treasures of life.
In the dugout the air was close and humid. Somewhere in the distance a windup gramophone was playing. The cheerful, tinny sound of dance music was at once absurd and incredibly sane. Maybe somewhere people still danced?
Outside he knew men were digging, shoring up trench walls, carrying in fresh timber and filling sandbags to rebuild the parapets. He could smell food, bacon frying, as well as smoke, the rot of bodies, latrines, and the faint lingering odor of the gas.
He had many letters to write, but the hardest was going to be of a captain he had held in his arms while he retched up his lungs and drowned in his own blood. It was one of the worst deaths. There was a horror and an obscenity to it that was not there in a shell blast, if it had been quick.
Of course many other deaths were appalling. He had seen men torn in pieces, their blood gushing onto the ground; or caught in the wire and then riddled with bullets, jerking as the metal tore them apart, then left to hang there, because nobody could get to them. They could be there for hours before death released them at last.
He wrote:
Dear Mrs. Hughes,
I am deeply sorry to have to tell you that your husband, Captain Garaint Hughes, was among the victims of last night’s attack. He was a brave soldier and a fine man. Nothing I say can touch your grief, but you can be proud of the sacrifice he made, and the fortitude and good humor with which he conducted himself.
I was with him to the end, and I grieve for the loss of a man who lived and died with honor.
Captain Joseph Reavley, Chaplain
He looked on it and read it again. It still seemed formal. Should it be? Perhaps that was the only way to keep the dignity—if there could be any dignity in mud and blood and pain, and coughing your lungs up.
Then he picked up the pen again and added,
We sat in the lamplight together and he spoke to me with great frankness.