Shoulder the Sky (12 page)

Sam was grey-faced.

Swaby looked like a man in a nightmare from which he could not escape. "Private Edwin Corliss," he said miserably, 'it is the judgement of this court martial tribunal that you have committed a serious act of cowardice in the field, and for this you should be sentenced to death. Major .. . Wetherall .. ." he gulped again, 'have you anything you wish to say in mitigation of the accused?"

Sam stood up. He looked so ill Joseph was afraid he was going to pass out himself. He half rose as if to help him, then realized the futility of it and sank back. Sam was almost as alone as Corliss.

"Yes, sir," Sam struggled to find his voice. "I have been Private

Corliss's commanding officer for seven months and have seen him face conditions worse than those faced by the men in the trenches under fire. The saps are unique. It takes a very special kind of man to dig into any earth, and go into the tunnels he makes, but especially this. It's wet, it's cold, it's suffocating, and pretty often we come across dead bodies sometimes Germans, sometimes our own men, men we've known, talked to, shared tea with or a joke. If such a man reaches the end of his concentration, sir, and makes a mistake which takes his hand off, I think he's more to be pitied than blamed! Especially by a civilian newspaperman, sir, who's never faced anything more dangerous than his editor's blue pencil!"

"Thank you, Major Wetherall," Swaby said quietly. "I shall take your plea for mercy into consideration when I pass our verdict on up the command. It will have to go right to General Haig, of course. All capital cases do. In the meantime, Private Corliss will be kept under arrest, and taken to military prison to await his sentence. This court is dismissed."

"Jesus wept!" Sam said between his teeth, his voice trembling.

"Actually, he's probably the one person who would understand." Joseph had not intended irony. He was sick, his stomach clenched with misery as much for Sam as for Corliss, and the words came to his lips unbidden.

Sam's mouth twisted with a terrible, bitter humour. "I suppose He would! He couldn't get Himself out of it either!" he added with despair, his eyes shadowed and hollow with pain. "I'll see Prentice in hell!"

Chapter Four

"This way, Padre!" Goldstone said urgently.

Joseph had stopped bothering to tell him that he was Church of England, not Roman Catholic. It did not matter much, and he was happy to answer to anything well meant.

"I'm coming," he replied, slithering in the mud, which was thick and clinging, wet on the surface after the day's fine rain. The raiding party that Colonel Fyfe had sent over the top earlier in the evening had been expected by the Germans and met with stiff opposition. There had been casualties, and Joseph and Lance -Corporal Goldstone were among those who had volunteered to see if they could find anyone wounded and still alive.

"Not much in the way of snipers now," Goldstone went on, picking his way over a narrow neck of land between craters swimming in water. The occasional star shell showed the nightmare landscape in blacks and greys, quagmires of thick, glue-like clay, pools of water and slime, dead trees, dead men and, now and then, horses, dismembered limbs floating, or arms sticking up like branches out of the flat surfaces of ditches and holes. It was impossible to tell where it was safe to put one's weight. Any step could suck you in, hold you and drag you down, as if the crater were a vast, filthy mouth, pulling you towards some primeval belly to be swallowed into the earth and become part of it.

The wind whined a little, shrill where it whistled through the wires. There was a cold edge to it. It was difficult to remember that it was spring, though now and again one heard skylarks, even here, and behind the lines, in the burned and ruined villages, there were still wild flowers.

"This is the way they should have come, and we're getting close to the German lines," Goldstone continued huskily, his black, slightly awkward figure alternating between stark silhouette and invisibility ahead of Joseph. "Can't go a lot further. God, this stuff stinks!" He pulled his boot out of the filth with a loud squelch. "Everything tastes of mud and death. I dream about getting it in my mouth. There's quite a big crater over there. Can you see? Could be one of our boys in it. We'd better go look."

Reluctantly Joseph obeyed, his feet sliding as he missed his balance and almost fell forward on to Goldstone, who put up his hand to save him. Just as they reached the rim of the crater another flare lit up the sky. The standard advice was to freeze, because movement attracted attention, but instinct was to fling yourself forward on to the ground. Goldstone had already dived in and Joseph followed without thought.

He landed in the soft, stinking mud, and visions raced through his mind of falling helplessly into the toxic fluid, every desperate lashing out at it only sucking him in deeper until it filled his mouth and nose and then closed over his head. It was a wretched way to die. He would rather be shot.

A wave of relief swept over him as he came to an abrupt stop, against a body crouched in the mud.

"Shalom, Shlomo ben-Yakov. Baruch be-Shem," the body said. "Have you any news about the Arsenal for me?"

"Shalom, Isaac," Goldstone's distinctive voice replied from the darkness. "Impregnable defence, in my opinion. I don't see any attack getting past."

A shudder went through Joseph as he realized that Goldstone must know this German well and was giving away military information.

"Mind you, if Manchester United are on form, they could give them a spot of bother," Goldstone went on. "But Chelsea are a joke at the moment defence like a sieve. Arsenal knocked four past them last Saturday, without reply. Do you follow football, Padre?"

Joseph burst out laughing with relief, the sound of it echoing over the squelching mud and the wind in the wires. He was in no man's land, discussing football scores with two Jewish soldiers. "Not really," he gasped, choking on his words.

"Some of your men were through here earlier this evening, but they neglected to give me the latest football scores," Isaac continued. "Some were killed, but we captured three."

"Isaac, this is Captain Reavley," Goldstone told him as another shell exploded twenty yards away, drenching them all in mud. Joseph slid a little further into the ice-cold water. "He's a padre," Goldstone went on. "Captain, this is Feldwebel Eisenmann, a keen Arsenal supporter, but apart from that, a good man. He used to visit our jeweller's shop in Golders Green quite regularly before the war."

lGuten Abend, Feldwebel Eisenmann," Joseph said, wiping the filth off his face with the back of his hand. "I did not expect to bump into you this way."

The next flare showed a slight smile on Isaac's face as he turned towards Joseph. "We Jews have a saying, "Next year, in Jerusalem." One day, Father, we will have our own homeland. You will not see Jew fighting Jew like this then. We do not belong here. You Christians have "borrowed" our religion and persecuted us for centuries, but soon, we hope we will be out of your way. As the prophet said, "They shall beat their swords into plough shares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation." '

"And in the book of Joel," Joseph replied, quoting in classical Hebrew, "Is it not written, "Beat your plough shares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears"? I used to teach Greek and Hebrew at Cambridge University. Lance-Corporal Goldstone, I think we had better get back to our own lines."

"So you speak our language, Father Yusuf!" Eisenmann said. "I hope we shall meet again. Shalom. Leheitra-of.J

"Until we meet again, Smiling One," Joseph replied, translating the meaning of Isaac's name as he scrambled to the edge of the crater.

"One last thing, Father Yusuf?" Isaac added.

Joseph hesitated, clinging to the rim. "Yes?"

"Let me know how Arsenal are doing, please?"

Another flare made them flatten to the ground, but it showed them very clearly where they were, almost twenty feet from the German wire ahead of them. There were bodies distinguishable more by form than colour. Some of them could still be alive, although nothing moved. But then it never did in the light.

The flare faded and it seemed even darker than before. The sky was overcast and drizzling slightly, an almost impenetrable gloom. It was a vague comfort to know they were roughly where they had thought they were. Men got lost sometimes, and end up blundering into the enemy's trenches, instead of their own.

Eisenmann raised his hand in salute, then scrambled forward and in moments was lost in the darkness and drifting rain.

"I met him at Christmas," Goldstone said softly, an edge of tragedy in his voice. He inched forward further in the mud. "But it won't happen again. There'll be no truce next year. We are going forward into the night, Padre. Nothing for us to laugh at together." He was referring to the bizarre incident of the German pastry chef who had been baking on Christmas Eve and, infuriated at the French troops still firing across the lines, had seized a branch of Christmas tree, and still wearing his white baker's hat, had rushed out into no man's land to shout his outrage at such ignorance. And ignorance it had turned out to be. The troops in question were French Algerian, and therefore Muslim, and had no idea what was going on. Telephones had rung up and down the lines, and then the firing had ceased.

The chef, Alfred Kornitzke, had put the tree down, taken out matches, and solemnly lit all the candles. Then he had bellowed at them in the silent night, "Now you blockheads! Now you know what is going on! Merry Christmas!" And he returned unharmed to continue kneading his marzipan.

Joseph remembered Christmas with a pain that still twisted inside him. Never had heaven and hell seemed closer than as he had stood on the ice-crusted fire-step and stared across the waste,

with its wreckage of human slaughter, and in the stillness under the blaze of stars, heard the voice of Victor Gamier of the Paris Opera singing "Minuit Chretiens, c'est Vheure solennelW'.

Utter silence had fallen on every trench within earshot. Along the whole length of the line, whatever his nature or his faith, not a man had broken the glory of the moment.

But that was gone now.

Joseph and Goldstone moved on towards the wire, slowly in the dark, crawling on their bellies, slipping where the clay was wet, fumbling in the mud and water to gain a foothold. Whenever a flare went up they flattened themselves to the ground and for a moment the pock-marked land was lit, tangles of wire shown up black against the dun colours of the earth, bodies caught in them like giant flies in a web.

They found several men dead, and one still alive. It took them nearly half an hour, working between flares, to pull him out of the mud without tearing off his injured leg and making the bleeding fatal. Then between them they carried him across the cratered land with its crooked paths and stumps of trees, its pockets of ice-cold water still carrying the faint, ghastly odour of gas, until they reached the parapet of the front trenches. They answered the sentry's challenge, and slithered over and down, only to find that the man was dead.

Joseph was momentarily overwhelmed with defeat. The two men in the trench and Goldstone were looking at him, expecting him to say something to make sense of it. There was nothing, no sense human or divine. It was not fair to expect him to have an answer, just because he represented the Church. No concept within man was big enough to find sanity or hope in this. It was just day after day of blind destruction.

"Chaplain?" It was Peter Rattray whom he had taught in Cambridge. Thin and dark, he'd had so much imagination and poetry in the translation of ancient languages. They had walked along the grass under the trees together, looking at students punting on the river, and discussed poetry. Now his face was smeared with blood, his hair was cut short under his cap, and he was asking Joseph to find reason for him in this chaos of death, to untangle from it a meaning, as they once had with difficult pieces of translation.

"We had to try," Joseph said, knowing the words were not enough. "He might have made it."

"Of course." Rattray rubbed the heel of his hand against his chin. "If it were me out there, I'd need to think you'd come for me whatever." He grinned, a desperate gesture, white teeth in the flare of a star shell. "Are there any more?"

Joseph nodded, and he and Goldstone turned back to go over the parapet again as soon as there was another spell of darkness.

The next one they brought back alive, and handed him over to the stretcher party.

"Thanks, Chaplain," he said weakly, his voice barely a whisper. They carried him away, bumping elbows against the crooked walls of the trench, slithering on the wet duckboards and keeping balance with difficulty.

It was towards dawn when Joseph saw the body lying face down at the edge of the shell crater and knew even before he reached it that the man had to be dead. His head was half submerged, as if he had been shot cleanly, and simply pitched forward.

There was still time before daylight to get him back. Better he be buried somewhere behind the lines, if possible, than lie here and rot. At least his family could be told, instead of enduring the agony of' missing in action' and never knowing for sure, seesawing up and down between hope and despair. He refused to imagine a woman standing alone every morning, facing another day of uncertainty, trying to believe and afraid to think.