Shoulder the Sky

Shoulder the Sky By Anne Perry

Synopsis:

That was not the way for a chaplain to resolve anything. He moved forward... and grasped hold ofTucky, taking him off balance and knocking him against the uprights that held the trench wall. "The Germans are that way," he said tartly.

In April 1915 Joseph Reavley is serving as chaplain on the Front Line at Ypres. The war that should have been 'over by Christmas' has already decimated the British Expeditionary Force, and if Britain is to survive, a million new men must be recruited.

To Joseph's sector comes an ambitious and insensitive young war correspondent, determined to evade Government censorship and expose the horrors of trench life as he sees it. His great story will be the terrible deaths of soldiers in the first gas attack. But before he can dispatch his piece, he is found dead in no-man's-land and Joseph is forced to accept that it can only have been a British soldier who killed him. Still seeking the man behind his parents' murder, and to protect his sister Judith, also at the Front, from the pain of an impossible romance, Joseph must find the truth. His search takes him to London and the beaches of Gallipoli, and at last compels him to face a desperate moral judgement which challenges every belief he holds.

SHOULDER THE SKY is the second novel in Anne Perry's insightful and hard-hitting quintet charting the English experience of the First World War.

ANNE PERRY is a New York Times best selling author of historical fiction, whose novels have been richly and widely acclaimed:

"This dazzling story is one of sheer brilliance it's just so, so beautiful' North Wales Chronicle

"Brilliantly presented, ingeniously developed and packed with political implications that reverberate on every level of British society." New York Times

Also by Anne Perry and available from Headline

Tathea

Come Armageddon The One Thing More

World War 1 series No Graves as Yet

The Inspector Pitt series

Bedford Square

Half Moon Street

The Whitechapel Conspiracy

Southampton Row

Seven Dials

The William Monk series The Face of a Stranger A Dangerous Mourning

Defend and Betray

A Sudden Fearful Death

Sins of the Wolf

Cain His Brother

Weighed in the Balance

The Silent Cry

Whited Sepulchres

The Twisted Root

Slaves and Obsession

A Funeral in Blue

Death of a Stranger

The Shifting Tide

SHOULDER THE SKY

Anne Perry review

Copyright 2004 Anne Perry

The right of Anne Perry to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Review An imprint of

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All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 0 7553 0286 9 (hardback) ISBN 0 7553 0860 3 (trade paperback)

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To my stepfather:

Major W. A. B. "Bill' Perry,

one of the last officers to leave the beaches of Dunkirk, June 1940

If here today the cloud of thunder lours Tomorrow it will hie on far behests; The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust Are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

A. E. Housman

Chapter One

It was shortly after three in the afternoon. Joseph Reavley was half asleep in the April sun, his back to the pale clay wall of the trench, when he heard the angry voices.

"They be moi boots, Tucky Nunn, an' you know that well as Oi do! Yours be over there, wi' holes in 'em!" It was Plugger Arnold, a seasoned soldier of twenty, big-boned, a son of the village blacksmith. He had been in Flanders since the outbreak of war last August. Although he was angry, he kept his voice low. He knew it carried in the afternoon stillness when the men snatched the three or four hours of sleep they could. The German trenches were only seventy yards away across this stretch of the Ypres Salient. Anyone foolish enough to reach a hand up above the parapet would be likely to get it shot. The snipers seldom needed a second chance. Added to which, getting yourself injured on purpose was a court-martial offence.

Tucky Nunn, nineteen and new this far forward, was standing on the duckboards that floored the trench. They were there to keep the men's feet above the icy water that sloshed around, but this seldom worked. The water level was too high. Every time you thought the ground was drying out at last, it rained again.

"Yeah?" Tucky said, his eyebrows raised. "Fit me perfect, they do. Didn't see your name on 'em. Must 'ave wore off." He grinned, making no move to bend and unlace the offending boots and hand them back.

Plugger was sitting half sideways on the fire-step. A few yards away the sentry was standing with his back to them, staring through the periscope over the wire and mud of no man's land. He could not afford to lose concentration even for a moment, regardless of what went on behind him.

They's moi boots," Plugger said between his teeth. "Take 'em off yer soddin' feet an' give 'em back to me, or Oi'll take 'em off yer and give yer to the rats!"

Tucky bounced on the balls of his feet, hunching his shoulders a little. "You want to try?" he invited.

Doughy Ward crawled out of his dugout, fully dressed as they all were: webbing and rifle with bayonet attached. His fair-skinned face was crumpled with annoyance at being robbed of any part of his few hours of sleep. He glared at Joseph. "Thou shalt not steal." Isn't that right, Chaplain?"

It was a demand that even here in the mud and the cold, the boredom and sporadic violence, Joseph should do his job and stand for the values of justice that must remain, or all this would sink into a purposeless hell. Without right and wrong there was no sanity.

"Oi didn't steal them!" Tucky said angrily. "They were He did not finish the sentence because Plugger hit him, a rolling blow that caught the side of his jaw as he ducked and struck back.

There was no point in shouting at them, and the sound would carry. Added to which, Joseph did not want to let the whole trench know that there was a discipline problem. Both men could end up on charges, and that was not the way for a chaplain to resolve anything. He moved forward, careful to avoid being struck himself, and grasped hold of Tucky, taking him off balance and knocking him against the uprights that held the trench wall.

"The Germans are that way!" he said tartly, jerking his head back towards the parapet and no man's land beyond.

Plugger was up on his feet, slithering in the mud on the duckboards, his socks filthy and sodden wet. "Good oidea to send him over the top, Captain, where he belongs! But not in moi boots!" He was floundering towards them, arms flailing as if to carry on the fight.

Joseph stepped between them, risking being caught by both, which would make charges unavoidable. "Stop it!" he ordered briskly. "Take the boots off, Nunn!"

"Thank you, Chaplain," Plugger responded with a smile of satisfaction.

Tucky stood unmoving, his face set, ignoring the blood. "They ain't his boots oither!" he said sullenly, his eyes meeting Joseph's.

A man appeared around the dogleg corner. No stretch of the trench was more than ten or twelve yards long, to prevent shellfire taking out a whole platoon of men or in case a German raiding party made it through the wire. The trenches were steep-sided, shored up against mud slides, and barely wide enough for two men to pass each other. The man coming was tall and lean, with wide shoulders, and he walked with a certain elegance, even on the slopping duckboards. His face was dark, long-nosed, and there was a wry humour in it.

"Early for tea, aren't you?" he asked, his eyes going from one to another.

Tucky and Plugger reluctantly stood to attention. "Yes, Major Wetherall," they said almost in unison.

Sam Wetherall glanced down at Plugger's stocking feet, his eyebrows raised. "Thinking of creeping up on the cook, are you? Or making a quick recce over the top first?"

"Soon as Oi get moi boots back from that thievin' sod, Oi'll put 'em on again," Plugger replied, gesturing towards Tucky.

"I'd wash them first if I were you," Sam advised with a smile.

"Oi will," Plugger agreed. "Oi don't want to catch nothin'!"

"I meant your feet," Sam corrected him.

Tucky Nunn roared with laughter, in spite of the bruise darkening on his jaw where Plugger had caught him.

"Whose boots are they?" Joseph asked, smiling as well.

"Moine!" both men said together.

"Whose boots are they?" Joseph repeated.

There was a moment's silence.

"Oi saw 'em first," Plugger answered.

"You didn't take them," Tucky pointed out. "If you 'ad, you'd 'ave them now, wouldn't you?"

"Come on, Solomon." Sam looked at Joseph, his mouth pulled into an ironic twist.

"Right," Joseph said decisively. "Left boot, Nunn. Right boot, Arnold."

There was considerable grumbling, but Tucky took off the right boot and passed it over, reaching for one of the worn boots where Plugger had been sitting.

"Shouldn't have had them off now anyway," Sam said disapprovingly. "You know better than that. What if Fritz'd made a sudden attack?"

Plugger's eyebrows shot up, his blue eyes wide open. "At half-past three in the afternoon? It's tea-toime in a minute. They may be soddin' Germans, but they're not uncivilized. They still got to eat an' sleep, same as us."

"You stick your head up above the parapet, and you'll find he's nowhere near asleep, I promise you," Sam warned.

Tucky was about to reply when there was a shouting about twenty yards along the line, and a moment later a young soldier lurched around the corner, his face white. He stared at Sam.

"One of your sappers has taken half his hand off!" he said, his voice high-pitched and jerky.

"Where is he, Charlie?" Joseph said quickly. "We'll get him to the first-aid post."

Sam was rigid. "Who is it?" He started forward, pushing ahead of both of them, ignoring the rats scattering in both directions.

Charlie Gee swivelled and went on his heels; Joseph stopped to duck into the connecting trench leading back to the second line, the picked out a first-aid pack in case they needed more than the field dressing the wounded man should be carrying himself.

When he caught up with them Sam was bent over, one arm around a man sitting on the duckboards. The sapper was rocking back and forth, clutching the stump of his hand to his chest, scarlet blood streaming from it.

Joseph had lost count of how many wounded and dead he had seen, but each man's horror was new and real, and it looked as if in this case the man might have lost a good deal of his right hand.