Shoulder the Sky (13 page)

He kneeled down beside the man and turned him over, pulling him back a little. He was well-built. Carrying him would not be easy. But since he was dead, he would not suffer if he were dragged.

There was a smudge of grey in the sky to the east, but it was still not possible to see much until the flares went up. Then it was clear enough: the bright hair, and even through the mud -Eldon Prentice's face.

Joseph froze, a wave of unreality washing over him. What in God's name had Prentice been doing out here? He had no business even in the front trenches, let alone in no man's land. Now he'd been killed! Joseph should get him back before daylight made it impossible. He was so tired every muscle in his body ached, and his legs would barely obey him. Goldstone was over somewhere to his left, searching another crater, and there was no way he could carry a body back by himself. He would have to stand even to get him in a fireman's lift over his shoulder, and it was already too light to risk that.

Why was he bothering to take Prentice, of all people? He wasn't even a soldier. He had been responsible for Corliss's court martial. Without Prentice's intrusion, Watkins would have let it go. And his gross insensitivity into Charlie Gee's mutilation still made Joseph cringe with misery and rage.

But if Joseph's faith, even his morality, were about anything at all, it must be about humanity. Like or dislike had nothing to do with it. To care for those you liked was nature; it only rose above that into morality when your instincts cried out against it. He looked down at the body. Whatever dislike Joseph had felt for him no longer mattered. Now, in death, he was just like any other man. Death reduced the differences to irrelevance.

The pale smear of light was broadening across the dun-coloured sky.

Joseph started to pull him, on his back, so as not to drag his face through the mud if he should have to drop him when there was a flare.

It seemed to take him ages to get across the open space. There were tree stumps in the way, and the body of a dead horse. Twice he slipped, in spite of the broadening light, and the weight of Prentice's body pulled him into shallow craters full of dirty water. The stench of dead rats and the decaying flesh of men's bodies too shattered to be reclaimed seemed to soak through his clothes on to his skin. But he was determined to get Prentice back so he could be buried decently. The fact that he had disliked him, that he was heavy and awkward in death, just as he had been in life, made Joseph doubly determined. He would not let Prentice beat him!

"I will get you back!" he said between his teeth as Prentice's body once again slid out of his hands and stuck fast. Where the devil was Goldstone? "I will not leave you be out here, no matter how bloody awkward you are!" he snarled, yanking him over half sideways. Prentice's foot squelched out of the clay and Joseph fell over backwards at the sudden ease of it. He swore, repeating with satisfaction several lurid words he had learned from Sam.

He covered ten yards before the next flare made him scramble for the slight cover of a shell hole. Only another ten yards to go. Any moment now and the sniper fire would start. The Germans would be able to see movement in this light.

His shoulders ached with the dead weight, sucked down as if the earth were determined Prentice would be buried here, in this stretch of ruined land that belonged to no one. Joseph wondered, in a fleeting thought, if anything would ever grow here again. How absurd it was to kill and die over something already so vilely destroyed! There were other places, only a thousand yards away, where flowers bloomed.

Then suddenly Goldstone was there, heaving at Prentice's shoulders. They covered the last few yards and rolled him over the parapet and landed hard on the fire-step just as a machine gun stuttered and the bullets made a soft, thudding sound in the clay a few yards away.

"He's dead, Padre," Goldstone said quietly, his face in the dawn light filled with concern, not for the body but for Joseph, the second time in one night struggling so fiercely to save someone, too late.

"I know," Joseph answered, wanting to reassure him. "It's the war correspondent. I thought he should have a decent burial."

Two hours later Joseph was sitting on an empty ammunition box in Sam's dugout, considerably cleaner and almost dry. The rations had been given out by the quartermaster and brought up to the front line, so they had both eaten a good breakfast of bread, apple and plum jam, a couple of slices of greasy bacon and a cup of hot, very strong tea.

Sam was sitting opposite Joseph, squinting at him through the haze of cigarette smoke, but the smell of it was better than the stink of death or the latrines, and completely different from the gas of three days before.

"Good," Sam said bluntly. "We've lost better men than Prentice, and we'll lose a lot more before we're through. I suppose your Christian duty requires that you affect to be sorry. Mine doesn't." He smiled bleakly; there was knowledge in it, fear, and a wry understanding of their differences, none of which had ever blunted their friendship. He required honour, laughter, courage, but never a oneness of view. "You can say a prayer over him," he added. "Personally I'll go and dance on his grave. He was always a rotten little sod."

"Always?" Joseph said quickly.

Sam squinted through the smoke. "I was at school with him. He was three years behind me, but he was a crawling little weasel even then. Always watching and listening to other people, and keeping notes." The shadows around his eyes were accentuated by the lantern light inside the dugout. The hole was too deep for daylight to brighten anything beyond the first step inside the door, and the high walls of the trench blocked most of that. "I've got enough grief for the men I care about," he added, his voice suddenly husky. He brushed his hand across his cheek. "God knows how many there'll be of them."

Joseph did not answer. Sam knew he agreed; a glance affirmed it.

There was a sound outside, a child's voice asking in French if anybody wanted a newspaper: "Times, Daily Mail, only yesterday's."

Joseph stood up. "I'll get you one," he offered. "Then I'd better go and see to the bodies." It was his duty to prepare men for burial, and after a bad night there was often no time for anything but the briefest of decencies. Identification was checked, tags removed, and any personal belongings, then the bodies, or what was left of them, were buried well behind the lines. That was the least one could do for a man, and sometimes it was also the most.

He stood up, Sam watching him as he went, smiling. Outside Joseph bought a paper from the boy, who looked about twelve, and told him to take it to Sam, then walked back along the supply trench to the casualty clearing station where the bodies had been taken. It was a soft, bright morning now, mist burned off except for the wettest stretches where the craters were still deep. He could hear the occasional crack of a sniper's shot, but mostly it was only the sounds of men working, someone singing "Goodbye Dolly Gray', and now and then a burst of laughter.

He reached the clearing station and found three men busy. The casualties had not been heavy last night, and there were only five dead. Joseph went to help the burial party because he felt obliged to pay some respect to Prentice, for his own sake. It was a kind of finishing. He was the one who had found him, he had brought him back. To walk away now, and then return to say the appropriate words over the grave, seemed an evasion.

There were two other orderlies in the makeshift room Treffy Runham, small, nondescript, always tidy, the other was Barshey Gee, Charlie Gee's brother. He looked tired, dark rings around his eyes as if he were bruised, no colour at all in his skin. They worked quickly, cracking bad jokes to cover the emotion as they made the dead as decent as possible and retrieved the few personal belongings to send back to those who had loved them. They looked up as Joseph came in.

"Mornin', Chaplain," Treffy said with a slight smile. "Could 'ave bin worse."

"Good morning, Treffy," Joseph replied. "Morning, Barshey." He moved straight over to help them. He had done it often enough there was no need to ask what was needed.

Barshey looked at him, eyes haunted, full of questions he dared not ask. Joseph knew what they were: should he wish Charlie dead, out of his agony of mind as well as body, or was life sacred, any life at all? What did God require of you, if there was a God?

Joseph had no answer. He was as lost as anyone else. The difference was that he was not supposed to be. He didn't fight, he wasn't a sapper like Sam, or a doctor, an ambulance driver or anything else. All he was here for was to give answers.

He looked at the bodies. One was Chicken Hagger. There were tears in his tunic and his flesh, as much of it as he could see, and several bullet holes. He must have been caught on the wire. It was a horrible death, usually slow.

Barshey was watching Joseph, but he did not say anything.

Joseph walked over to Prentice's body. They had left him until last, possibly because the others were men they had known and cared about, almost family. Prentice was a stranger. This was nothing like a usual civilian death, shocking and unexpected. Nor was anybody looking for someone to blame, as with Sebastian Allard, and Harry Beecher in Cambridge last summer. Here it hardly even mattered how death had happened; there was nothing to learn from it, no questions to ask.

Even so, Prentice's body was unusual in that there were no marks of violence on him at all. He had not been shot, or blown apart by explosive or shrapnel; he had simply drowned in the filthy water of a shell hole. There were no tears in his clothes, except when Joseph had dragged him over stony ground. There was no blood at all.

Not that that made him unique. Other men had drowned. In the winter some had frozen to death.

All Joseph could do was lay him straight, clean the mud off his face and tidy his hair. The fact that he had drowned had distorted his features, and the bruises from the beating Wil Sloan had given him were still dark and swollen, his lip cracked. But then no one was going to see him, unless it was decided to ship him home. That was a possibility, since he was not a soldier. Perhaps, Joseph thought, he had better wash him properly, even his hair. Today there was time for such gestures.

He fetched a bowl of water and rinsed out the mud and the rank smell from the shell crater. Barshey Gee helped him, holding another basin underneath so they did not slop the floor.

"What's that?" he asked as Joseph put a towel around Prentice's head and started to rub him dry.

"What?" Joseph saw nothing.

"You left mud on his neck," Barshey replied. His voice was cold. Someone must have told him about the incident in the casualty clearing station. They shouldn't have done. It was a pain Barshey could have done without.

Joseph unwrapped the towel and looked. There were dark smudges at the back of Prentice's neck, just below the fair gold hair. But Joseph needed only a glance to see it was bruised skin,

not mud. Another look showed him very similar marks on the right as well. They were roundish shapes, two on either side. He heard Barshey draw in his breath quickly, and looked up to meet his eyes. He did not need to say anything to know that the same thought was in his mind. Someone had held Prentice down, keeping his face in the mud until it had filled his lungs.

"Could someone do that?" he asked, hoping for denial. "Wouldn't he struggle? Throw them off?"

"Not if you had your weight on 'im," Barshey answered, huskily, his eyes not moving from Joseph's. "Knee in the middle of his back."

Joseph rolled the body over, standing beside him to prevent him from falling on to the floor. He lifted the jacket and shirt and looked at the dead flesh of his lower back. The marks were there, just small, no more than abrasions, and little pinpricks of bleeding as if he had tried to free himself, and chafed the skin on fabric pressed hard against him.

Barshey swore quietly. "Here, Treffy. Come and look at this! Somebody heldim down with 'is face in the mud, on purpose, till 'e drowned. Whoi the 'ell would anyone do that? Whoi not just shoot 'im?"

"Don't know," Treffy admitted, biting his thin lips. "Maybe 'e loikes to be personal. Or he was close to our lines, and wanted to be quiet?"

"What's wrong with a bayonet?" Barshey demanded, his eyes angry and frightened. "That's what they're for."

"Maybe 'e'd just lost a friend, or something?" Treffy suggested. "Just needed to do it with 'is 'ands. Best not tell anyone, don't you think, Chaplain?"

"Yes," Joseph agreed quickly, pulling Prentice's tunic down and rolling him over again on to his back and smoothing his hair into place. He had not liked the man he understood Barshey's feelings only too well, and Wil Sloan's too. Even better did he understand Sam's. The trial of Edwin Corliss had been a nightmare, and without Prentice it need never have happened. Sam at least would not grieve; he would probably bless whatever German had done this.

"Yes," he said again. "Better not tell people. There's no need."

Joseph left the clearing station to go to speak with the other casualties of the night the wounded and the bereaved, men who had lost friends. Almost everyone belonged to a 'household', groups of half a dozen or so men who worked, ate, slept and fought side by side. They shared rations, parcels from home, letters and news, a sense of family. They wrote to each other's parents and girlfriends often they knew them anyway. Sometimes they had grown up together, and knew and loved the same places, had played truant from school on the same summer days and scrumped apples from the same farmer's trees.