We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [45]
German prisoners came through that night as well, some captured, several badly injured. More came willingly, with an air of desperate bewilderment. Most were passed on immediately without coming anywhere near the Casualty Clearing Station. They had been hastily bandaged, often lame or half blind, and then made to trudge on foot through the mud toward the railhead and the journey back into France. Only the wounded who could not be moved along without jeopardizing their lives were kept here.
It could not continue like this for many more days. Tension was mounting not only with overcrowding of men critically injured, and the growing expectation of peace, but above all with the endless questions by Jacobson stirring up suspicion and anger over all kinds of old loves and betrayals, fears of violation too deep to name or face. Beyond the question of who could have been guilty, the speculation of rape was more divisive than anyone had imagined.
Judith found that people she had known since the earliest years of the war, and beside whom she had fought illness, disaster, and grief, held views she could not accept. Even Cavan surprised her. She admired him intensely for his courage, both physical and moral. After the stand in the trenches for which he had been put up for the V.C., and then the murder of Major Northrup, she had risked the firing squad herself last year to help him escape. The other men involved in the crime had all gone, but Cavan had chosen to remain and face trial. That decision had infuriated her, yet he had refused to be swayed. She had known it was born of supreme honor to duty, and she never forgot it in him.
Now he stood at the operating table having just amputated a man’s shattered foot. He was exhausted; there was blood on his white coat and up both his sleeves. It was even splattered on the pale skin of his face, which was hollowed about the eyes by exhaustion.
“Thank you,” he told Bream, the orderly. He looked at Gwen Williams, the nurse who had assisted him. “Call me if he gets feverish, but I think that should be all right.”
Judith had remained to help after bringing the man in. Cavan had already complimented her for getting him there alive. “I’ll fetch you some water,” she said, turning to go outside.
“Yer can’t go alone!” Bream waved sharply as Judith reached the tent flap. “I’ll get it, after I’ve taken ’im to Resuscitation.” He gestured at the unconscious patient.
“It’s only fifty yards away,” Judith countered. “I’ll be perfectly safe.”
Bream opened his mouth to protest. He was about twenty. A London clerk before the war, he was too flat-footed to make the infantry.
“For goodness’ sake!” Gwen cut across him. “Nothing’s going to happen to her.”
“It can ’appen to anyone!” Bream replied, his eyes wide. “Well, any woman. We’ve got a madman ’round ’ere, and no one knows ’oo ’e is.”
“It won’t happen to anyone,” Gwen contradicted, shaking her head irritably. “Some women invite disaster of one sort or another. If you behave with sense, don’t lead people on and behave like a—I’m sorry, like a tart—then people won’t get the wrong idea.”
“The right idea being what?” Judith asked with brittle civility. She had thought she liked Gwen. Suddenly she didn’t. They were strangers in culture and belief, allies only by force of extraordinary circumstance.
Gwen stared as if she, too, was seeing the other woman clearly for the first time. “I’m surprised that the chaplain’s sister should need anyone to tell her the right way to behave,” she said coldly.
“We weren’t talking about my behavior, or Sarah’s,” Judith pointed out. “We were talking about whoever it was who killed her—which, as you put it so pithily, was the wrong idea.”
“Judith, let it be,” Cavan said wearily. “It’s over. It’s a tragedy that we can’t undo, like pretty well every other bloody useless death here. Some wretched man forgot that you are only allowed to kill the enemy who’s wearing a different uniform from you and carrying a gun at the time. An enemy who’s wearing a dress and