We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [20]
“Known the chaplain since the Christmas of ’14,” Wil said with a smile as they started out. “I drive with his sister most of the time. I guess she must be your sister, too, eh?”
Matthew swallowed hard. He could not think of Judith in this mud and rain, working day after day trying to do the impossible, seeing men die all around her. She had never spoken of it in the few times he had seen her at home on leave. Had she worked to forget? Or did she simply believe that he would never understand the reality, and that to allow anyone to believe less was a betrayal of the courage and the pain? If she had thought that, it would only have been the truth.
But then he never spoke of his work, either, because he was not allowed to. It was founded on lies and delusions: who could deceive the more efficiently and commit his own kind of betrayal.
Three times they got stuck in waterlogged craters, and Matthew had to climb out and help dig while Wil struggled with the steering wheel and the reluctant engine to get it started again. He was scratched, bruised, and splattered with mud by the time they finally reached the casualty dressing station where Joseph was. It was only a series of tents with some wooden duckboards to mark the walkways between. Even before locating his brother, however, he needed to fulfill his obligation to Wil and help load the stretchers into the ambulance.
He worked hard, slipping and staggering between the Evacuation tent and the parking area, trying desperately not to drop anyone. The loaded stretchers were not as heavy as he expected. Many of the wounded were only boys, light-boned, with no muscle on them yet. Their faces were hollow with shock. There seemed to be blood on everything.
He saw Joseph, knowing his outline from the angle of his shoulders and the way he stood, unconsciously favoring his right leg. Joseph gave no sign of having recognized him, but then he was not expecting to see Matthew here. He was absorbed in his work, seeming to know exactly where to be, what to say, and when he could help.
Matthew was awed by it. This was the older brother he had known all his life, and yet it was a stranger whose moral courage dwarfed his own. How could any man keep sane in this? There were broken bodies everywhere, ashen-faced, wounds hastily bound, the blood seeping through. He saw one soldier, not yet twenty, with a scarlet stump where his leg should have been.
Finally the rear door slammed shut and the ambulance jerked, stopped, then plunged forward, sending up sprays of mud. At last it picked up speed and disappeared into the rain. Matthew walked over to where Joseph was standing with the last of the walking wounded.
“Good afternoon, Chaplain,” he said quietly.
Joseph stood motionless, then slowly turned. He stared with momentary disbelief, then, as Matthew smiled at him, dawning joy.
“Matthew!” He clasped his hand and wrung it so hard, he crushed his fingers.
It was all Matthew could do not to cry out. At home he would have hugged him, but here in the midst of this absurd mixture of chaos and discipline, it seemed the wrong thing to do. “Hello, Joe,” he replied instead, grinning back.
“What are you doing here?” Joseph demanded. “The war’s not over, surely?” He looked momentarily bewildered. “They’re still fighting like hell ahead.” He gestured slightly eastward toward the old battlefield of the Ypres Salient, and beyond it Passchendaele, which was on the verge of being retaken. The German border