Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [36]
Sam’s mouth twisted with a terrible, bitter humor. “I suppose He would! He couldn’t get Himself out of it either!” he said with despair, his eyes shadowed and hollow with pain. “I’ll see Prentice in hell!”
CHAPTER
FOUR
“This way, Padre!” Goldstone said urgently.
Joseph had stopped bothering to tell Goldstone—or anyone—that he was Church of England, not Roman Catholic. It did not matter much, and he was happy to answer to anything well meant. “I’m coming,” he replied, slithering in the mud. It was thick and clinging, wet on the surface after the day’s fine rain. The raiding party that Colonel Fyfe had sent over the top earlier in the evening had been expected by the Germans and met with stiff opposition. There had been casualties, and Joseph and Lance Corporal Goldstone were among those who had volunteered to see if they could find anyone wounded and still alive.
“Not much in the way of snipers now,” Goldstone went on, picking his way over a narrow neck of land between craters swimming in water. The occasional star shell showed the nightmare landscape in blacks and grays, quagmires of thick, gluelike clay, pools of water and slime, dead trees, dead men and now and then horses, dismembered limbs floating, or arms sticking up like branches out of the flat surfaces of ditches and holes. It was impossible to tell where it was safe to put one’s weight. Any step could suck you in, hold you and drag you down, as if it were a vast, filthy mouth pulling you toward some primeval belly to be swallowed into the earth and become part of it.
The wind whined a little, shrill where it whistled through the wires. There was a cold edge to it. It was difficult to remember that it was spring, though now and again one heard skylarks, even here, and behind the lines, in the burned and ruined villages, there were still wildflowers.
“This is the way they should have come, and we’re getting close to the German lines,” Goldstone continued huskily, his black, slightly awkward figure alternating between stark silhouette and invisibility ahead of Joseph. “Can’t go a lot further. God, this stuff stinks!” He pulled his boot out of the filth with a loud squelch. “Everything tastes of mud and death. I dream about getting it in my mouth. There’s quite a big crater over there. Can you see? Could be one of our boys in it. We’d better go look.”
Reluctantly Joseph obeyed, his feet sliding as he missed his balance and almost fell forward onto Goldstone, who put up his hand to save him. Just as they reached the rim of the crater another flare lit up the sky. The standard advice was to freeze, because movement attracted attention, but instinct was to fling yourself forward onto the ground. Goldstone had already dived in and Joseph followed without thought.
He landed in the soft, stinking mud and visions raced through his mind of falling helplessly into the toxic fluid, every desperate lashing out at it only sucking him in deeper until it filled his mouth and nose and then closed over his head. It was a wretched way to die. He would rather be shot.
A wave of relief swept over him as he came to an abrupt stop, against a body crouched in the mud.
“Shalom, Shlomo ben-Yakov. Baruch he-Shem,” the body said. “Have you any news about the Arsenal for me?”
“Shalom, Isaac,” Goldstone’s distinctive voice replied from the darkness. “Impregnable defense, in my opinion. I don’t see any attack getting past.”
A sickening shudder went through Joseph as he realized that Goldstone must know this German well and was giving away military information.
“Mind you, if Manchester United are on form, they could give them a spot of bother,” Goldstone went on. “But Chelsea are a joke at the moment—defense like a sieve. Arsenal knocked four past them last Saturday, without reply. Do you follow football, Padre?”
Joseph burst out laughing with crazy, hysterical relief, the sound of it echoing over the squelching mud and the wind in the wires. He was in no-man’s-land discussing football scores with two Jewish soldiers. “Not really,” he gasped, choking on his words.
“Some of