We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [119]
She studied the slow way he ate, the courtesy in his manners, and the distance between the few words he said, brief communications only when necessary.
They finished as quickly as they could and thanked the woman, hurrying out with no time for extra words, all afraid in case something gave them away.
They pressed on westward, moving slowly because the roads were so badly cratered that they dare not go more than twenty or twenty-five miles an hour. It rained again, washing mud everywhere, soaking Judith and whoever sat beside her.
It grew dark about five o’clock. Heavier clouds rolled in from the north like gray smears across the sky, wind-drawn curtains of rain hiding the trees. Mason had gone back into the body of the ambulance; Joseph was beside his sister.
“How’s Schenckendorff?” she asked him.
“His foot hurts, but I don’t think it’s any worse,” he replied, hunching himself up a little and pulling his overcoat closer around him. “He’s not feverish, but he looks miserable. It must hurt. Wounds to the feet do.”
“Do you think that’s why he looks so unhappy?” She swerved to avoid a pothole filled with water that she had noticed only just in time. “Sorry,” she said automatically.
“Do you think he’s dreading getting to London?” he asked. “He’s bound to. In a way he’s riding to his own execution, even if it is his own choice.” His voice was low, muted with a kind of awe.
“I hadn’t even gotten that far,” she replied. “Although I suppose he has to be. Will they execute him, Joseph? He’s done no more than fight for his country, as we all have. You shoot a man for that during the war, while he’s armed, but you don’t execute him for it afterward. There’s no crime in it.” She refused to think about Mason’s situation. As the hours went by, that was becoming more and more difficult. It was not only that she loved him: his passion and subtlety; his energy of mind; the honesty that had driven him to act where so many others merely dreamed and bemoaned their own helplessness. As she at last faced the situation with a cool head, and the will to consider and believe other ideas, she realized that the moral issues were not so easy to sweep entirely to one side or the other.
She would still have fought, been blown to bits in Flanders, rather than live a life of guilt and regret under the domination of anyone else. But driving through the ruins of Belgium, passing graveyards filled with endless white crosses all the same, she could see that it was mistaken, but not monstrous, to have considered a different path.
Perhaps Joseph was also thinking about Mason, because he said nothing.
“I was wondering about guilt,” she said aloud. “Did you watch his face as he ate the bread today? He looked at her farm, and it almost choked him. Don’t you think he would have thought that it would still be standing if we hadn’t found the treaty, and there’d been no war?”
“There would still have been a war,” Joseph said quickly, staring ahead at the rain now beating on the windscreen in front of them. It was swishing around and blowing inside, bitterly cold. The headlamps shone yellow in the gathering gloom, shining on puddles on the rutted road, broken trees, and fallen debris at the sides. “It might have been months later, or even years, but it would have come.”
“Do you think so?”
“The balance of power was too precarious to last.” He spoke thoughtfully, feeling his way. “There were too many promises that could never have been kept, too many alliances weighing one against another. Germany might have conquered most of Europe in a military sense, but there would always be a resistance. Possibly it would gather strength in time. There’d be sabotage to anything vulnerable, such as railways, bridges, fuel supplies. They