Shoulder the Sky (37 page)

These men would be at home with their families in the far corners of the earth.

But which was the greater madness, and which the sanity to fight and die by the tens of thousands for what you believe, not knowing if you could win, or to surrender before the bloodshed,

and save all the lives, the young and brave and so passionately innocent, to live out their days a conquered people, prisoners to someone else's will?

"I don't know anything else about Chetwin," Mynott said apologetically.

"No .. . no, I think that's probably enough," Joseph answered him. "We were wrong. It couldn't be what we thought."

"Does it matter a lot?"

"Yes. It matters a hell of a lot." Of course Matthew would have to check that it was true, but Joseph believed it. The Peacemaker had intended to succeed. Setting up a double bluff like this, at the expense of a young German noblewoman's life, was absurd, disgusting, and above all completely self-defeating. "Thank you. I'll see if I can get a lift on the next ship going home again."

"Well, there's nothing going out tonight. You might as well get a little sleep," Mynott observed. "Tomorrow look for a fellow called Richard Mason, war correspondent. He's down to go either tomorrow or the next day. If you can find him, you can probably thumb a lift with him."

"Thank you. I'll do that."

Joseph slept on the earth about fifty feet up. It was hard and cold, and only exhaustion gave him any rest at all. Perhaps a few nights on the ship had made him soft?

He woke quite a while after dawn and looked down on the beach full of activity. Men were moving about as if on the scene of some busy factory yard, digging, carrying, piling up boxes and crates. The smell of smoke drifted up from cooking.

Joseph thanked the Australians with whom he had camped for the night.

"Hooray, mate!" Blue answered cheerfully. "Holy Joe! I like that!" He laughed till the tears filled his eyes.

"G'day, sport," Flanagan called out. "Mind where you go!"

"You too." Joseph refused to think what their chances were. He would choose to believe they would be among the few who would survive. "Thank you," he said again.

He set off along the ridge and down on the grass towards the level, in roughly the direction he had been told he might find the correspondent, Richard Mason. Actually he was looking forward to meeting him he had seen his name on many of the best and most honest articles he had read. The man had an ability to catch the experience of a small group in all its passion and immediacy, and make it represent them all. There was something clean and unsentimental in his use of language, and yet the depth of his feeling was never in doubt.

It took Joseph nearly two hours, by which time his feet were sore and he was horribly aware of the flies everywhere.

"Over there, mate," a lanky Australian pointed. "That's the pommy writer feller."

"Thank you," Joseph said with profound relief. He could see only the man's back. He wore a plain khaki-coloured jacket and trousers and a wide-brimmed hat jammed on his head.

"Excuse me, are you Richard Mason?" Joseph asked when he reached him.

The man turned around slowly. He had an unusual face, with wide cheekbones and a broad, full-lipped mouth. It was a face of high intelligence, but far more striking was the brooding emotion in it, the sense of will. Joseph was certain he had found the right man; such features belonged to one who would write with blazing honesty.

"Yes," Mason answered. "Who are you? A chaplain!" He looked surprised and very slightly amused.

"Joseph Reavley," Joseph told him. "I had a mission out here which I have completed. I understand you are shortly leaving for England. I need to return as soon as possible, and if there is room in your transport I would be grateful."

Mason's eyes flickered for a moment of puzzlement, then he looked beyond them both at the milling men on the beach and up the slope at the dugouts, the shallow trenches, the makeshift shelters of stones and boxes. Finally he looked back at Joseph. "Your mission is finished, you said?" His implication was clear.

Joseph regarded him levelly and a little coldly. "Yes it is. I have only a few days more leave before I have to report back to my regiment at Ypres."

Mason coloured faintly. "I'm sorry' It was said frankly. His diction was perfect, a little sibilant, but there was a beauty in its exactness as if words were precious to him.

Joseph offered his hand.

Mason grasped it. "There's a ship going back towards Malta tomorrow. Probably about dawn. They'll find room for' you Won't be hard to get a troopship home from there." His eyes searched Joseph's face curiously. "Yours must be a rotten job a lot of the time. How the hell do you tell people they can make sense out of all this?" He gestured towards the rock escarpments almost six hundred feet above them where the Turkish guns commanded most of the bay. "Fever, dysentery, gunshot and shrapnel wounds, seasickness, overcrowding. One hospital ship out there has eight hundred and fifty wounded, and two doctors to look after them all. And one of those a bloody vet!" The anger was profound and so deep inside him it showed only in the lines of his face and the rigid tension of his shoulders; there was no surface fire any more. It had long since worn itself out.

"I don't try," Joseph answered. "I deal with people one at a time. I can only address the small things."

"In other words you can't make sense of it either," Mason concluded with a certainty that obviously gave him no pleasure. "You've given up on telling them this is some kind of divine destiny, and necessary furnace of affliction, and they should cling on to belief and just endure?"

"Actually I don't tell people much of what they should do at all," Joseph answered. "Most people are doing their best anyway. The big choices are taken away from us, it's only how we react that's left."

Mason turned away. The sunlight was harsh on his face, showing the lines of strain around his eyes. He looked about Joseph's own age thirty-six but the knowledge and the rage inside him were timeless. "It would have been nice if you could have given some great cosmic answer," he said drily. "But I wouldn't have believed you anyway. Have you had anything to eat today?"

"No. I wanted to be sure to find you."

Mason hesitated, as if to ask another question, then changed his mind. He turned and led the way through the wiry grass and the tumbled clay and rocks along towards a makeshift field kitchen. Half a dozen men were cooking and a group was already lining up for breakfast.

Joseph waited his turn, and was glad to walk away with a plate of stew, a couple of hard biscuits and a mug of tea. He sat next to Mason on the ground in the shelter of a rock to eat it, aware of the tensions around him, the constant glances up at the headlands where the Turkish guns were dug in and commanded almost all the advances up the slopes.

There was a lot of good-natured banter. The men were mostly Australians and New Zealanders, but there were just the same sort of robust and colourful complaints he would have heard at Ypres. Only the accents were different, and the individual terms of abuse. The subjects were the same: the food, the officers, the general impossibility of doing what was commanded. Men had sore feet, bellyache, only here they tried bathing in the sea to get rid of the ever-present lice. It didn't work any better than the matches in Flanders.

It was early afternoon, and Joseph was up the incline a dozen yards away from Mason, observing him writing notes, when the attack started. Men poured up the hill, charging the Turkish positions. Gunfire was incessant: the heavy artillery dug in behind the trenches and gullies; the machine guns' rapid, staccato fire; and the boom of ships' guns from the battleships in the bay.

Joseph followed Mason up to the lowest line of the dugouts and shallow trenches. The wounded came rapidly. A few were carried on stretchers, but most were floundering on their own feet, staggering and falling. Some were more seriously hit, and carried by their fellows. At times it was hard to tell which were the injured men; there was blood everywhere.

Once Joseph looked up from a rough piece of field first-aid he had been performing to find Blue on his knees in front of him. His tunic front was scarlet with blood, his hair matted, his face almost grey.

Joseph felt a lurch of horror so intense for an instant he was unable to move.

"Y'all right, sport?" Blue said hoarsely. "Look like you seen a ghost! Here." He half hauled a blood-soaked body forward. One arm was shattered, the hand gone altogether, and its left foot was blown away. "See what you can do for him, will you? He ... he was a good bloke." His eyes pleaded to be told something better than the truth he already knew.

"Of course," Joseph gulped, dizzy with a surge of relief that it was not Blue, although such a feeling was senseless. Blue was going straight back up into the fire, and it could be him next time, or the time after. Only a fool would imagine any of them had much of a chance of coming out of this without some fearful wound. Perhaps those who died quickly were among the fortunate. Their families would grieve, but that was secondary to the hell that was going on here, now.

Joseph took the dying man from Blue and told him to go back. There was no need for him to remain and watch.

Blue waved his hand and, ducking low, started back up again, rifle slung over his shoulder, feet scrabbling on the stones.

Joseph bent to the man on the ground. He was grey-faced, but still breathing. There was no way of knowing if he was conscious enough to feel the pain, or understand what had happened to him, but Joseph spoke to him as if he did.

"Hang on there," he said calmly. "You're in the first-aid station now. We'll patch you up; give you something for the pain, as soon as we get a bit further down."

The man's eyelids fluttered. It might have been because he heard, or just a response to the agony in his body.

Joseph took a wet rag and cleaned the man's face gently. It was a totally pointless gesture in every practical sense, but it showed someone cared. If he were even half conscious he would at least know he was not alone.

Ten minutes later he died, and Joseph moved to the next batch of wounded brought down. He helped medical orderlies, most of whom had little training. One was a veterinary surgeon from somewhere in New Zealand. He was skilled and worked with frantic dedication and an air of confidence. It was very reassuring to those who did not see his moments of panic as he reached for medicines and equipment he did not have, and fumbled now and then in human anatomy.

"Thanks, Padre," he said as Joseph handed him a bandage, then held the injured man's white-knuckled hand while the wound was bound up. "Where'd you come from?" he went on conversationally. "You speak like a pommy." He finished his bandaging and eased the man up.

Joseph leaned forward quickly to help, taking the man's weight. "That's right," he agreed. "Cambridgeshire."

"You mean where they have the boat race?" His face lit up. "I'd like to see that." He washed the bench down briefly with creosol.

"Actually they have it on the Thames, in London, but we row against Oxford, every year."

The vet grinned. "Don't always win, though, do you?"

"Not always," Joseph conceded. He held the next man while the vet straightened a dislocated limb, but there was no time to wait for the waves of agony to pass before moving the man and starting on the next.

"Train a lot of horses in Newmarket, don't you?" the vet asked, jerking his head to indicate that he needed Joseph's help lifting a dead man so he could reach the living. "Love horses. God, I hate to see them hurt!"

Later Joseph helped carry the injured down to the beach and on to tenders to take them out to the hospital ships. It was there that he met Mason again, who was also exhausted and covered with blood. He had lost his hat, and his black hair was falling on his face. There was a gentleness in his hands as he lifted the wounded and eased them into half-decent positions of comfort that momentarily masked the savage rage inside him.

It showed again later when, close to exhaustion, he stopped for an hour. He and Joseph sat together drinking scalding tea with rum in it, their backs against a pile of ammunition crates. Joseph was so tired every muscle in his body ached as if it had been wrenched and his bones had been bruised. Like Mason, he was caked in blood and his skin abraded by sand. It was an effort to hold the mug, but the rum in the tea was worth it.

"The bastard who thought of this bloody fiasco should be made to be here!" Mason said through clenched teeth. His eyes stared far away, as if he could see something out towards the horizon, and everything closer was a blur.

Joseph did not answer. Agreement was unnecessary. He sipped again and felt the fire slide down his throat and hit his stomach. This whole expedition was a nightmare from which he did not know how to waken. Perhaps life was the nightmare, and death was the awakening? Did the men who were slaughtered here open their eyes to some quiet place where they were whole again, with the people they loved around them, and no pain? Or was this all it was hope and then disaster and finally oblivion?

Mason climbed to his feet stiffly and looked at the water, then slowly he started to walk towards it, taking his boots off, then his clothes as he went.

Joseph did the same and followed after him, only half certain what he intended to do.