Shoulder the Sky (10 page)

No one moved. Not a duckboard tilted or a foot squelched.

Then he heard it not a fusillade of fire, but gasping, a cry strangled in the throat, gagging.

Sam swivelled round, his face ashen. "God Almighty!" he said, his voice choking. "It's gas! Run!"

Joseph froze. He did not understand. How could any soldier, let alone Sam, give the order to run?

Then Sam's shoulder hit him hard in the chest and almost knocked him off his feet. He bent to a crouch, more by instinct than thought.

"Get up!" Sam shouted at him. There were other noises now, yells of rage, terror, half-words cut off in the middle, the terrible sounds of men retching and choking, and beyond them the rising barrage of gunfire.

"Get up!" Sam shouted again. "The gas sinks! It's on the ground."

"We've got to help!" Joseph protested, swivelling round and pushing against Sam's weight. "We can't leave them!"

"We can't help anyone if we're dead." Sam yanked him along by one arm. "In the supply trenches we'll have a moment."

Joseph did not understand him, but at least Sam seemed to have some idea what to do. Gas? Poison in the air? He stumbled to the next corner, and the next, bumping into the uprights, lurching left and right. He could already taste something acrid in the air. His eyes were watering. Men were stumbling everywhere. The shelling was getting louder. It must be closer. Any minute German soldiers would appear towering over the parapet, shooting them like trapped animals.

He reached the supply trench and ran along it, his feet slipping on the wet boards, splashing mud, until Sam hit him from behind and sent him flying. He found himself on his hands and knees, rats scattering ahead of him.

"Take your scarf or handkerchief anything, and piss on it!" Sam ordered. "Then tie it over your nose and mouth."

Joseph could not believe it.

"Do it!" Sam's voice exploded, high-pitched, close to panic. "For God's sake, Joe! Do you want to be a dead priest, or a live man, and some damn use? It absorbs the gas, or at least the worst of it!" He suited the action to the word himself, tying the wet cloth around his face like a mask. "There's no time to look for stretchers, and there'll never be enough anyway."

Joseph obeyed, feeling sick, frightened and absurd, but he was too accustomed to the smells, the physical indignity of trench life to be revolted. He followed blindly after Sam as they turned and made their way forward again, and down the slight incline. At the first opening they fell over the body of a soldier lying on his back, dead hands clawing at his throat, his face twisted in agony. There was froth and bloody vomit on his lips. It was Roby Sutter, one of Tucky's cousins. He had been nineteen. Joseph had bought cheese from his father's farm.

Ahead of him Sam was still moving, bent forward, head just below the parapet. The gunfire was heavier, and there were more shells. Earth and clay exploded up in huge gouts, shooting sideways, fan-shaped. The gas was drifting. He could see its dirty, green-white swathes in the air. If there was a raiding party coming over it would be any moment now. Sam turned, raising his arms, swinging them round to indicate forward.

They found two more men still alive, one wounded in the shoulder, propped up against the trench wall. Blood was streaming down his chest and arm, but he was breathing quite well. The other was unconscious, his face already grey. Joseph bent to the wounded man just as there was another burst of shellfire, this time closer to them. The dirt rained down within a few yards.

"I'm going to get you back," Joseph said firmly. "But I'll have to carry you. I'm sorry if I hurt you." He had no idea if the man heard him or not. As carefully as he could, he eased him over his shoulder and very slowly straightened his back, not upright in case he offered a target where the forward side of the trench had collapsed inwards but bent, as if heaving coal.

He heard Sam go onwards, leaving the gassed man where he was.

About a hundred yards later, just as Joseph felt as though his spine was breaking, he met more troops coming in. Their faces were pale, frightened, eyes wide. Immediately behind them were the stretcher-bearers.

He gave the stretcher-bearers his man still bleeding, but alive -then turned and went back the way he had come. It was worse. More gas was drifting across the mud and craters between the lines. It was patchy, like a real fog, here and there in whorls torn rugged by the wind, leaving the dead trees poking up like gravestones above a drowned world. It lay like a pall, following the low ground until trenches, which had been shelters, became graves, bodies piled grotesquely, suffocated in their own blood and fluids.

The shelling went on, the noise deafening, shrapnel everywhere. Joseph found more men alive, struggling and wounded. He helped where he could, keeping the urine-soaked scarf over his nose and mouth, tying it so it would not fall off while he used his hands. He lost count of the men he lifted, struggling to keep his balance in the mud, and carried or dragged back to medical aid, and some sort of cleaner air. His muscles screamed with the effort of their weight. Often he slipped and fell over. His own lungs were bursting, but he could not stop: there were always more men down. Some he thought might live; some died even before he could get them help.

He did not know how long it was before he saw Sam again through the smoke and the gas. He lurched towards him, calling out. A shell exploded near them, knocking him off his feet. Part of the parapet caved in, filling the space between them with a cascade of earth and half-buried corpses, some weeks old. Now there was no shelter any more.

"Help me dig him out!" Sam shouted through the gunfire, and Joseph realized there was a live man under the rubble as well.

If he were wounded the shock of that would have killed him. If he were gassed there was no hope anyway, not under that slide of clay. He started to say so.

"Shut up and dig!" Sam yelled at him. "The poor sod was all right before that!"

Joseph's head was throbbing and his vision was blurred. The trench floor seemed to undulate, but the firing wasn't heavy enough to move the ground like that. The gas had a smell different from latrines or decaying bodies. He obeyed, digging clumsily with his hands, afraid that even if he could find a shovel, he might strike living flesh with it.

He was digging frantically, heaving great clods of wet clay and flinging them anywhere he could, aware of Sam a couple of yards away on the other side, doing the same. Then he felt the ground lurch and the inner side of the trench erupt in a flying wall of dirt that knocked him flat on his back. More weight landed on his legs, and staring upwards he saw what looked like a row of giants with human bodies and the heads of pigs. It wavered as if he were seeing it all under water. The noise was deafening, and one of the pigs fell on top of him.

When he opened his eyes his face was covered. There was something not only over his nose and mouth, but around his head and he could see only dimly. Panic seared through him. He put up his hands to tear it off, and received a sharp blow to his forearm, stinging with pain. One of the giant pigs was in front of him, staring with huge, baleful eyes. But his legs were free! He could feel them.

The noise was still intense: machine-gun fire, shells exploding, and the deeper roar of the heavy artillery far behind the lines.

Someone pulled on his arm and he had no choice but to scramble to his feet or have his arm dislocated at the socket.

"Keep it on, you fool!" the pig in front of him shouted. "It's a gas mask! And don't just stand there! Take his feet!" It gestured to the blood-spattered man lying on the mud where the fire-step used to be.

Joy surged through Joseph like an incoming tide. Inside the surreal pig-mask it was Sam. Gasping and laughing, he bent to obey. It took a few moments to get hold of the man properly, then he straightened up again, grasping his ankles firmly, and setting off backwards, head and shoulders stooped to keep them below the line of the fractured parapet. Breathing was easier. His head still pounded and he had no peripheral vision because the goggle eyes showed a view that was only straight ahead, but step by step they moved through a world like something out of a medieval painter's nightmare. Everywhere were mud and mangled bodies, some distorted into hideous parodies of form in the agonies of suffocation from within. The greenish vapour still hung in drifts, sinking down the walls to sit in hollows, barely stirred by the wind.

On every side the guns barked. Heavy shelling shook the ground to the west, more sporadic eastwards as the artillery to the rear tried to take out the enemy's biggest guns. Craters swam in mud and gas, foul-smelling as if hell beneath them had vomited up its bowels. Where the trench walls had caved in Joseph could see the wasteland stretching out in broken tree stumps, lengths of wire and the torn limbs, skeletons and bodies of men until flesh and mud were indistinguishable.

They reached a supply trench and passed the man to stretcher-bearers, then went back for more. Neither of them spoke. What could there be to say? Somehow the world, in its political insanity, had descended another sharp step downwards, dragging an innocent mankind in its wake. Young men Joseph had known all their lives were being destroyed in front of him, and he could do nothing even to explain it to himself, never mind to them. He was useless. All the study of his life evaporated here where hell was real. It swallowed everything.

Physical action was all that was left. He tore gas masks off dead Germans, stomach heaving, hands trembling. He propped men up and gave them a little water, sat with them a moment until they died, carried one here or there, took anyone he could reach. There was no time to cover the dead, let alone bury them. That would come in the days ahead, if they held the ground and could find them. If they were forced to retreat, then perhaps the Germans would do it.

Sometimes he lost Sam, but mostly they worked together, understanding each other without words, even without gesture, simply knowing. Two had more chance of lifting a wounded man than one, and with their gas helmets they could go where stretcher-bearers could not. Sam did not hesitate. He carried his rifle slung over his shoulder, bayonet fixed, and was ready to use it when they came around a corner suddenly and found themselves face to face with a German soldier. Sam lunged forward, spearing the man through the chest, and tearing off his mask to use on the next live man of their own they found.

There was no question of advancing. The relief poured in with terrible casualties, men falling forward as they were shot, faces in the mud, or floundering as the gas filled their lungs and they drowned from the inside, screaming and gurgling.

But at last the Germans fell back and the line held. By dark the guns and flares showed a landscape of torn wires, trenches barely recognizable in the cratered mud and the still-lingering pockets of gas.

Joseph was at the dressing station, his head pounding, body so exhausted he could barely feel the pain of burning muscles, bruised flesh and torn skin. He looked at the blood soaking his tunic and trousers with surprise, not even sure if any of it was his own.

Opposite him, sitting on another upturned box, Sam was stripped to the waist while a young VAD stitched the long gash across his chest and placed a bandage on it.

Sam's dark face was smeared with blood and smoke, his eyes

Anne Perrybloodshot. "What a hell of a mess," he said with a slight smile. "Good thing it won't show. I'll tell you for nothing, I wouldn't let you touch my jacket with a needle."

"Sorry, sir," the VAD apologized. He looked about twenty, grey-faced with horror and exhaustion, and Joseph recognized his accent as Canadian, although he could not place it more closely than that.

Sam winced as the thread was cut, pulling the skin a little. "Don't worry. By the end of the war you'll be good enough to stitch shirts, I dare say," he said with a gasp. "If that's your idea of a straight seam, they'll fit Quasimodo."

The VAD looked puzzled. "Quasimodo, sir?"

' Notre-Dame de Paris," Sam replied, moving his arm tentatively, then catching his breath with pain. "French classic'

"Oh. Can I get you a shot of rum, sir? You look all in."

"You can. And one for the chaplain there. He frequents all the same pubs I do."

Joseph had only a couple of deep scratches; a little cleaning and bandaging were all that was needed. He drank the rum and tried to rise to his feet, but the tent swayed around him and he fell forward on his knees.

"No more rum for the chaplain," Sam observed. "He'll need to stay sober for weeks to bury this many dead." He watched as the young Canadian carefully helped Joseph to sit again. "On the other hand," Sam added, 'perhaps he'll need to stay drunk to bear it! You'd better get him another, but get him something to eat at the same time." He turned to Joseph, his face suddenly tender. "Sleep it off, Joe. These poor devils deserve a priest who knows what he's saying, whether anyone believes him or not." He stood up himself, his face went ashen, and he toppled over just as the VAD caught him and eased him to the ground. "Stretcher!" he shouted, his voice rising sharply.

Joseph rolled over and lay down on the earth. If he tried to stand again he would only cause more work. Let them put him in a corner somewhere until he came back out of the black hole of oblivion. Please God, it was a black hole, full of darkness without shape or sound no agony, no awareness at all. He hoped they would leave Sam somewhere near him.