Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [45]
“Yes, quite a few men do that,” Joseph agreed, smiling. “I’ve even had the occasional German sausage myself. Better than a Maconochie, I think.”
Bert smiled back, but his face was serious again the moment after. His eyes were intense on Joseph’s. “If Oi swap food with them one day, an’ the next Oi’m goin’ over and killing ’em, what does that make me, Chaplain? What kind of a man am Oi going to be when I go ’ome—if Oi do? ’Ow am I goin’ to explain to moi children whoi Oi done that?”
The easy answer was on Joseph’s lips, the answer he had already given many times: that a soldier had no choice, the decisions were out of his hands, there was no blame attached. Suddenly it felt empty, an excuse not to answer, an escape from himself.
“I don’t know,” he said instead. “Would you rather have been a conscientious objector?”
The answer was instant. “No!”
“Then it makes you a man who will, reluctantly, fight for what he loves, and believes in,” Joseph told him. “Nobody said fighting was going to be either safe, or pleasant, or that there were not only risks of physical injury, but mental or spiritual, too.”
“Yeah, Oi reckon you’re right, Chaplain.” Bert nodded. “You got a way of cutting to what’s true, an’ making sense of it. A man who won’t foight for what he loves, don’t love it very much. In fact maybe he don’t love it enough to deserve keeping it, eh?”
“You could be right,” Joseph agreed.
“Oi s’pose it’s a matter o’ deciding what it is you love?” He lifted up his head and looked at the sky. In the distance there was a flight of birds, south, away from the guns. He knew all of them, every bird and its habits. He could imitate the calls of most of them. “Oi think Oi know what matters to me—England the way it ought to be,” he went on quietly. “People comin’ an’ goin’ ’ow they want, quarreling and making up, a pint of ale at the pub, seed time and harvest. Oi’d loike to be married an’ buried in the same church what Oi was christened in. Oi’d loike to see other places, but when it comes to it, Oi reckon Cambridgeshire’s big enough for me. But if we don’t stop Jerry here, doin’ this to the poor bloody Belgians, boi the toime he gets to us, if he wants to, it’ll be too late.”
“Yes, I think it will,” Joseph agreed, the thought twisting inside him with a pain that left him breathless. To think of the land he loved so fiercely, it was like part of his own being had been desecrated. It was unbearable.
“Thanks,” Bert said sincerely. “You koind o’ make things plain, right an’ wrong.”
Joseph drew in his breath to answer, then did not know what to say. It was his job here, to make sense of the chaotic, to justify the descent into hell, even to make intolerable suffering bearable because it had meaning, to insist that there was a God behind it who could make even this all right in the end.
Men like Bert Dazely would not condone murder in any situation at all. What was there left to believe in if Joseph knew Prentice had been killed by one of them, and did nothing about it? It would tear that delicate, life-preserving thread of trust, and plunge them into the abyss beneath.
If personal murder for vengeance, or to rid oneself of embarrassment or pain, were acceptable, what exactly was it they were fighting for? Bert had spoken of country things like the church and the pub, a village whose people you knew, the certainty of seasons, but what he meant was the goodness of it, the belief in a moral justice that endured.
To allow Prentice to be murdered,