We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [107]
“Everything we do changes us, becomes part of what we are,” he said. “Do you think we’ll ever get over this, Matthew? Will we recover and become human again, innocent enough to have hope, to value human life and believe in a God who loves us, one who has enough power to heal us, to affect anything that happens on earth? Or are we finally on the edge of the abyss, and falling?” The minute he had said it he wished he had not. It was selfish. Matthew was his younger brother, the one man above all others to whom he owed a better care than this, and some kind of protection from the darkness inside.
“Sorry,” he said quickly. “I’ll try to think who had bad news of some sort about a month ago. Whoever was closest to him will have noticed something. Trouble is, I’m the chaplain. If I know of it as a confidence, there’s only a limited amount I can repeat.” He pushed his hand over his forehead and back through his hair. “What a bloody mess.”
Joseph sat in his bunker alone trying to remember every private and wounding grief he had heard some man stammer out to him, looking for any kind of comfort, any sense of justice in his pain. There were dozens of them. More often than not it wasn’t the loss here—the friend crippled or killed—it was the betrayal of those at home, the wives or sweethearts who had grown tired of waiting. Would the women who had loved them accept what they had become, or would they be unable to cope with the memories? Would they even begin to understand the guilt of those who had survived when their friends had not?
Would the horror of killing an enemy soldier so much like a mirror image of yourself make any kind of sense? He was not there because he wanted to be, any more than you were. On a still night you could hear him talking with his friends, laughing, singing.
No wonder you could not sleep. It was easy to see the petty problems of home—a blocked drain, a disobedient child, a spilled jug of milk—as nothing at all. Life was what mattered. Friends, a whole body, someone to watch with you through the night.
Who had spoken of something bad enough to make him hate all women? He thought of the men betrayed or deserted and went through their names one by one, ticking off each as he remembered that they were dead, too badly injured, gone home already, or somewhere else far forward of here.
Turner was the first of those left who seemed possible. His wife had left him for Turner’s own brother, who had escaped military service because of flat feet or something of the sort. Turner’s rage had been almost uncontrollable. Joseph had thought it was against the war in general and the Germans in particular. But perhaps in time it had bent instead toward women.
And it seemed Culshaw was lying to protect him, again as one man did for his friend, perhaps not realizing there was anything more than a lapse of judgment and discipline.
“Of course he’s bloody furious!” Culshaw had exploded. “His own brother! Flat feet or cross eyes or some damn thing! So he stays safe at home coining in the money on the black market while we’re out here in the rats and the filth getting shot at. Sometimes I don’t understand women at all. Have they got no honor, no sense of friendship, loyalty…anything?”
“Women are no more all alike than men are,” Joseph had answered him. “Some men will sleep with anything that stays still long enough, and you know that as well as I do. Don’t you think their wives feel just as used and betrayed?”
Culshaw had looked confused. “Are you saying it’s the same, Chaplain?”
Joseph had sighed. “No,” he said wearily. He was honest enough to admit that whatever reason or justice told him, it was not. His own reaction to Lizzie being raped forced him to acknowledge that reason had very little to do with the deepest passions, the intimacy of violation. “No, it’s not the same, Culshaw. If a man is betrayed by a woman he loved, he doesn’t forget it, and he doesn’t heal easily. And if a woman is raped by a man, she doesn’t forget