We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [3]
“’Morning, Chaplain?” he said questioningly as Joseph crouched beside him. “What are you doing this far forward?” He searched Joseph’s face, knowing there must be some kind of trouble to bring him this close to the firing. “We lost Henderson. I’d like to write to his family and tell them myself,” he added, a note of apology in his voice.
Joseph had known he would. It was the sort of thing Harrison would not leave to others. Such news should always be broken by someone who had at least known the dead man. However good the regimental chaplain was, a letter from him was still in a sense impersonal.
“It’s about Culshaw and Turner,” Joseph told him.
Harrison frowned but waited for Joseph to continue.
“Caught a German prisoner trying to escape,” Joseph said, making it as brief as possible. “Boy of around sixteen, thin as a scarecrow. Beat him almost to death. Whoopy Teversham caught them and stopped it.”
Harrison stared at the ruined tree stump ahead of them, with the carcass of a horse beneath it. Joseph knew he loved horses. He even liked the stubborn, awkward regimental mules. “Hard to stop it,” Harrison said after a while. “It just goes on and on, one death after another. Men get angry because they feel so helpless. There’s nothing to hit out at. Culshaw’s father was in the navy, and his elder brother.”
“Was?” Joseph asked, although he knew what Harrison was going to say.
“Both went down last year,” Harrison answered. “His sister lost her husband, too. No idea what he’s going home to…if he makes it.”
“Nobody does,” Joseph said quietly. He thought of his own home, instinctively moving his hand toward his pocket, and then away again. He knew the letter was there. Hannah’s husband, Archie, commanded a destroyer. Would he survive the last few weeks or months of war? Would any of them? Joseph was still unhurt, except for the dull ache in his bones that cold brought, reminding him of his smashed arm and the deep shrapnel wound in his leg that had invalided him home in the summer of 1916. He had been tempted to stay in Britain. At his age he could have. Not that he would have been happy. It would have been a betrayal of his men still out here, and of the women at home who loved them and trusted him to sit with the injured, not leave them to die alone.
“It can’t ever be the same,” he agreed aloud. “The England we fought for is gone anyway. We all know that.”
“You used to teach theology in Cambridge, didn’t you?” Harrison asked. “Will you go back to that?” His face was curious, surprisingly gentle.
Joseph smiled at the innocence of the question. He had gone to teach at the university as a form of escape. His wife, Eleanor, had died in childbirth, and their son with her. His bereavement had been insupportable, his faith too shallow to sustain him. The thought of ministering to the human needs of a congregation had overwhelmed him, so he ran and hid in the purely cerebral teaching of biblical languages.
“No,” he said in answer to Harrison’s question. “It’s a little divorced from the reality of living.” What a weight of intellectual dismissal that carried. When you cradled a man in your arms as he bled to death in the freezing mud, theory was nothing, however beautiful to the brain. Only being there counted, staying with him no matter what else happened, no matter if you were freezing and terrified also, and just as alone as he. That