Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [37]
“Isaac, this is Captain Reavley,” Goldstone told him as another shell exploded twenty yards away, drenching them all in mud. Joseph slid a little further into the ice-cold water. “He’s a padre,” Goldstone went on. “Captain, this is Feldwebel Eisenmann, a keen Arsenal supporter, but apart from that, a good man. He used to visit our jeweler’s shop in Golders Green quite regularly before the war.”
“Guten abend, Feldwebel Eisenmann,” Joseph said, wiping the filth off his face with the back of his hand. “I did not expect to bump into you this way.”
The next flare showed a slight smile on Isaac’s face as he turned toward Joseph. “We Jews have a saying, ’Next year, in Jerusalem.’ One day, Father, we will have our own homeland. You will not see Jew fighting Jew like this then. We do not belong here. You Christians have ‘borrowed’ our religion and persecuted us for centuries, but soon, we hope we will be out of your way. As the prophet said, ’They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation.’ ”
“And in the book of Joel,” Joseph replied, quoting in classical Hebrew, “is it not written, ’Beat your plowshares into spears, and your pruning hooks into swords’? I used to teach Greek and Hebrew at Cambridge University. Lance Corporal Goldstone, I think we had better get back to our own lines.”
“So you speak our language, Father Yusuf!” Eisenmann said. “I hope we shall meet again. Shalom. Leheitra-ot.”
“Until we meet again, Smiling One,” Joseph replied, translating the meaning of Isaac’s name as he scrambled to the edge of the crater.
“One last thing, Father Yusuf?” Isaac added.
Joseph hesitated, clinging to the rim. “Yes?”
“Let me know how Arsenal are doing, please?”
Another flare made them flatten to the ground, but it showed them very clearly where they were, almost twenty feet from the German wire ahead of them. There were bodies distinguishable more by form than color. Some of them could still be alive, although nothing moved. But then it never did in the light.
The flare faded and it seemed even darker than before. It was overcast and drizzling slightly, an almost impenetrable gloom. It was a vague comfort to know they were roughly where they had thought they were. Men got lost sometimes, and end up blundering into the enemy’s trenches, instead of their own.
Eisenmann raised his hand in salute, then scrambled forward and in moments was lost in the darkness and drifting rain.
“I met him at Christmas,” Goldstone said softly, an edge of tragedy in his voice. He inched forward in the mud. “But it won’t happen again. There’ll be no truce next year. We are going forward into the night, Chaplain. Nothing for us to laugh at together.” He was referring to the bizarre incident of the German pastry chef who had been baking on Christmas Eve. Infuriated at the French troops still firing across the lines, he had seized a branch of Christmas tree and, still wearing his white baker’s hat, had rushed out into no-man’s-land to shout his outrage at such ignorance. And ignorance it had turned out to be. The troops in question were French Algerian, and therefore Muslim, and had no idea what was going on. Telephones had rung up and down the lines, and then the firing had ceased.
The chef, Alfred Kornitzke, had put the tree down, taken out matches, and solemnly lit all the candles. Then he had bellowed at them in the silent night, “Now you blockheads! Now you know what is going on! Merry Christmas!” And he returned unharmed to continue stirring his marzipan.
Joseph remembered Christmas with an exquisite pain still twisted inside him. Never had heaven and hell seemed closer than as he had stood on the ice-crusted fire-step and stared across the waste with its wreckage of human slaughter, and in the stillness under the blaze of stars, heard the voice of Victor Garnier of the Paris Opera singing “Minuit,