Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [39]
Why was he bothering to take Prentice, of all people? He wasn’t even a soldier. He had been responsible for Corliss’s court-martial. Without Prentice’s intrusion, Watkins would have let it go. And his gross insensitivity into Charlie Gee’s mutilation still made Joseph cringe in the gut with misery and rage.
But if Joseph’s faith, even his morality, were about anything at all, it must be about humanity. Like or dislike had nothing to do with it. To care for those you liked was nature; it only rose above that into morality when your instincts cried out against it. He looked down at the body. Prentice was barely thirty. Now he was just like any other man. Death reduced the differences to irrelevance.
The pale smear of light was broadening across the dun-colored sky.
He started to pull him, on his back, not to drag his face through the mud if he should have to drop him when there was a flare.
It seemed to take him ages to get across the open space. There were tree stumps in the way, and the body of a dead horse. Twice he slipped, in spite of the broadening light, and the weight of Prentice’s body pulled him into shallow craters full of dirty water. The stench of dead rats and the decaying flesh of men too shattered to reclaim seemed to soak through his clothes onto his skin. But he was determined to get Prentice back so he could be buried decently. The fact that he had disliked him, that he was heavy and awkward in death just as he had been in life, made Joseph doubly determined. He would not let Prentice beat him!
“I will get you back!” he said between his teeth as Prentice’s body once again slid out of his hands and stuck fast. Where the devil was Goldstone? “I will not leave you be out here, no matter how bloody awkward you are!” he snarled, yanking him over half-sideways. Prentice’s foot squelched out of the clay and Joseph fell over backward at the sudden ease of it. He swore, repeating with satisfaction several lurid words he had learned from Sam.
He covered ten yards before the next flare made him scramble for the slight cover of a shell hole. Only another ten yards to go. Any moment now and the sniper fire would start. The Germans would be able to see movement in this light.
His shoulders ached with the dead weight, sucked down as if the earth were determined Prentice would be buried here, in this stretch of ruined land that belonged to no one. Joseph wondered in a fleeting thought if anything would ever grow here again. How absurd it was to kill and die over something already so vilely destroyed! There were other places, only a thousand yards away, where flowers bloomed.
Then suddenly Goldstone was there, heaving at Prentice’s shoulders. They covered the last few yards and rolled him over the parapet and landed hard on the fire-step just as a machine gun stuttered and the bullets made a soft, thudding sound in the clay a few yards away.
“He’s dead, Padre,” Goldstone said quietly, his face in the dawn light filled with concern, not for the body but for Joseph, the second time in one night struggling so fiercely to save someone, too late.
“I know,” Joseph answered, wanting to reassure him. “It’s the war correspondent. I thought he should have a decent burial.”
Two hours later Joseph was sitting on an empty ammunition box in Sam’s dugout, considerably cleaner and almost dry. The rations had been given out by the quartermaster and brought up to the front line, so they had both eaten a good breakfast of bread, apple and plum jam, a couple of slices of greasy bacon, and a cup of hot, very strong tea.
Sam was sitting opposite Joseph, squinting at him through the haze of cigarette