We Shall Not Sleep (2 page)

Harrison stared at the ruined tree stump ahead of them, with the carcass of a horse beneath it. Joseph knew he loved horses. He even liked the stubborn, awkward regimental mules. "Hard to stop it," Harrison said after a while. "It just goes on and on, one death after another. Men get angry because they feel so helpless. There's nothing to hit out at. Culshaw's father was in the navy, and his elder brother."

"Was?" Joseph asked, although he knew what Harrison was going to say.

"Both went down last year," Harrison answered. "His sister lost her husband, too. No idea what he's going home to ... if he makes it."

"Nobody does," Joseph said quietly. He thought of his own home, instinctively moving his hand toward his pocket, and then away again. He knew the letter was there. Hannah's husband, Archie, commanded a destroyer. Would he survive the last few weeks or months of war? Would any of them? Joseph was still unhurt, except for the dull ache in his bones that cold brought, reminding him of his smashed arm and the deep shrapnel wound in his leg that had invalided him home in the summer of 1916. He had been tempted to stay in Britain. At his age he could have. Not that he would have been happy. It would have been a betrayal of his men still out here, and of the women at home who loved them and trusted him to sit with the injured, not leave them to die alone.

"It can't ever be the same," he agreed aloud. "The England we fought for is gone anyway. We all know that."

"You used to teach theology in Cambridge, didn't you?" Harrison asked. "Will you go back to that?" His face was curious, surprisingly gentle.

Joseph smiled at the innocence of the question. He had gone to teach at the university as a form of escape. His wife, Eleanor, had died in childbirth, and their son with her. His bereavement had been insupportable, his faith too shallow to sustain him. The thought of ministering to the human needs of a congregation had overwhelmed him, so he ran and hid in the purely cerebral teaching of biblical languages.

"No," he said in answer to Harrison's question. "It's a little divorced from the reality of living." What a weight of intellectual dismissal that carried. When you cradled a man in your arms as he bled to death in the freezing mud, theory was nothing, however beautiful to the brain. Only being there counted, staying with him no matter what else happened, no matter if you were freezing and terrified also, and just as alone as he. That promise—"I will not leave you"—was the only one worth keeping.

Harrison looked sideways at him. The light was broader now, cold and white, and they could see each other's faces. He lit a cigarette, cupping the brief flame in his hands. "Everything's changed at home. Women do half the jobs we used to have. Couldn't help it, the men were away or dead. Or crippled, of course! But it's still different." He stared at the dregs of his tea. "God, that tastes foul! But how long will clean water and no more guns be enough for us, Chaplain? We'll be strangers, most of us. We're heroes at the moment, because we're still fighting, but what about in six months, or a year? One day we'll have to deal with the ordinary things. We'll get used to each other, stop being polite and careful. When I'm home on leave now people can't do enough for me. I'm given the best in the house."

Joseph said nothing. He knew exactly what Harrison meant, the intended kindness, the meaningless conversations, the silences they couldn't fill.

"I still have nightmares on leave," Harrison said softly, blowing out smoke. "I can hear the guns even when they aren't there. I think of the men who won't come back, and I see that terrible stare in the faces of too many who look as if they're whole, until you see their eyes. We're frightened we'll be killed in the last few weeks, and we're frightened of going home and being strangers and alone, because we don't fit in anymore."

He waited several minutes before answering. Everything Harrison said was true. Joseph tried not to think about the emptiness of going back. He was needed here, desperately needed, so much that the burden of it was sometimes crushing.

"I know," he said at last. "We're all afraid of the future, because we don't know what it will be. But we can't let men kick a German prisoner to death, whatever they feel. If we are no better than that, in God's name, what have ten million men died for?"

"I'll talk to them," Harrison promised. He pinched out his cigarette, then threw the dregs of his tea away. "It won't happen again."

The following day, October 12, Joseph was back in the Casualty Clearing Station as prisoners continued
to
come through the lines. Most were marched back into camps, where they would be held as the Allied army moved eastward over the old battlefields toward the borders of Germany. The few who were seriously wounded were kept in the clearing stations until they could be moved on without risking their lives.

There was sometimes information to be gained from them, but it was of little use now. The terrain had been fought over back and forth and was known intimately, every dugout, every trench. Only the craters changed as the guns fired ceaselessly, churning up old clay, old corpses, the wreckage of armor. The movement of regiments varied too often for yesterday's prisoners to tell what tomorrow's deployment would be.

Joseph spent much of his time translating between the prisoners and doctors. His German had been fluent even before the war. He had spent time there studying, and he cared for both the land and its people. Like any other Englishman, he'd found the idea of fighting Germany troubling and unnatural. He knew that the soldiers on the other side of the lines were too much like the men from his own village whom he talked with every day. It was the governments, the tide of history, that made one country different from the other.

He had been behind the lines last year and seen the suffering of the ordinary people, the hunger and fear. He remembered the German soldiers who had helped him. They had shared Schnapps and sung songs together. Hunger, fear, and wounds were the same in any language— and weariness, and the love of home.

Now he was standing in the Resuscitation tent, trying to reassure a prisoner with an amputated leg. Rain beat intermittently on the canvas. The man was not much more than twenty, his eyes sunken with pain and the shock of being suddenly mutilated, his country beaten, and himself among strangers. Nationality seemed an irrelevance.

Joseph knew that he should attend to the wounded of his own regiment, even though none of them were seriously ill, but the terror in this man's eyes haunted him. He looked like Hannah's oldest son, the color of his eyes and the way his hair grew off his brow. Busy with small jobs—fetching and carrying, running errands—Joseph kept returning to the man lying motionless in the sheets, the stump of his leg still oozing blood.

"When will your armies be in Germany?" the young man asked him shortly after midnight.

"I don't know," Joseph said frankly. "There's still a lot of hard fighting. The war may be over before we actually cross the border."

"But you will get there, tens of thousands of you—" He left the sentence hanging as if he did not know how to finish it. His face was sweating despite the cold, and his teeth were clamped together so the muscles of his jaw were tight, bulging under the gray-white skin.

Suddenly, with a sense of shame, Joseph knew that the man's fear was not for himself. The desperation of his fighting had come not from hate or the hunger for a German victory, but simply from the driving fear of what would happen to his family when enemy soldiers poured into the homeland of those who had killed their comrades, their friends and brothers, and revenge for it all lay open before them. Perhaps he knew what had happened to Belgium in 1914, and had been repeated over and over in every town and village. It might have appalled him as much as it did British soldiers to see the beaten and bereaved people, the burned-out farms, and the eyes of the women who had been raped.

If the tide had gone the other way—and there had been years when it had seemed inevitable that it would—then German troops would be marching through the little villages of Cambridgeshire: St. Giles, Haslingfield, Cherry Hinton, and all the others. The enemy would walk the cobbles of the familiar streets where Joseph had grown up. German soldiers would be sleeping under the thatched roofs, tearing up the gardens, perhaps killing the beasts to provide food, shooting those people who resisted. Women he had known all his life would be confused and humiliated, ashamed to smile or be seen to offer a kindness.

He saw the fear in the Germans eyes now, and the bitter knowledge that he had failed to protect his women, perhaps his children. He would rather have died in battle. And yet what use was he to them dead? What use was he to anyone, a prisoner, and with only one leg?

Could Joseph tell him with any honesty that his women would not be violated, or his house burned? After four years of horror, inconceivable to those who had not endured it, and slaughter that numbed the mind, could he say the victors would not take payment for it in blood and pain? Some men retained their humanity even in the face of hell. He had seen it. He could name scores of them—living and dead. But not all the men had done so, not by a long way.

Should he comfort this young soldier lying ashen and broken-bodied in front of him by telling him lies? Or did he deserve the truth? A dubious honor.

What would he want himself? Would he want to think Hannah was safe, even if it were not true? And her children—the boys and Jenny? What about Lizzie Blaine, who had been such a friend to him when he was home wounded in 1916? The thought of her frightened and shamed by a German soldier was so hideous his stomach churned, and for a moment he was nearly sick.

He had not heard from her lately. He had tried not to count how long it was, but he knew: six weeks and two days. He had not expected it to hurt so much, but every mail call without a letter from her was like a blow to a place already aching.

The German was still watching him, uncertain now if he was going to answer at all.

"Where is your family?" Joseph asked him.

"Dortmund," the man answered.

Joseph smiled. "It'll be a long time before they get that far." He tried to sound confident. "The worst will have worn off by then. There'll be some discipline. They'll be regular troops. Most of the volunteers will have gone home. We're all tired of war. Vengeance has little flavor once the blood has cooled a bit."

The man blinked hard, the tears running down his cheeks. He was too weak to raise his hands to check them. "Thank you for not lying to me," he said quietly. "If you had said British soldiers don't do such things, I would not have believed you."

"Most of us don't," Joseph told him.

"I know. Most of us don't, either." There was defiance in his voice, and his eyes were hot with anger.

"We've all changed," Joseph said sadly. "Not much is as it used to be."

The German closed his eyes and retreated into some grief or pain too deep within himself for anyone else to guess at.

Joseph waited a moment longer, in case there was anything further the man wanted to say, then turned and walked away. It was raining harder; the canvas rumbled with it. He kept in the shelter of the walkway between the tents. The ground was wet, the light shining on pools of water.

His thoughts turned to Lizzie again. He could not think of going home without her filling his mind. He remembered how she had been his driver all the time he was there two years ago, too badly injured to handle a car himself. Despite her husbands murder, she had found the strength and the courage to help him look for the man who had so fearfully betrayed them all, and to confront him when at last they could no longer avoid the truth.

Joseph had begun by liking her, finding her company easy because she understood loss and never evaded it with trite words. She knew when to talk, and when to stay silent and allow the pain to take hold, then slowly absorb it and carry on.

And she could be fun. Her humor was quick and dry. She had an easy laugh; the light of it reached her eyes, which were very blue despite her dark hair. If ever she felt sorry for herself she fought it alone, without blaming others. And yet she was imperfect enough to be vulnerable, to make mistakes. She needed help now and then.

Why had she not written?

Did she sense the growing affection in him and know that she could not love again—at least not love a man who had seen four years in the trenches and was so immersed in the horror of it, he was changed forever? Weren't all men changed? Could any of them be whole enough again to make a woman happy? No woman wanted to grieve forever. Women created life, affirmed it, loved no matter what else happened. They needed to nurture, to begin again.

Perhaps only women like his sister Judith, who was here at the front, could understand and speak to soldiers as equals, could endure the nightmares and the ridiculous jokes, the miseries that seared the heart and would not be let go. To forget the dead would be to betray them, and was unforgivable. It would be to deny honor, to deny friendship, to make all the injury and the loss not real anymore.

Judith understood. She had been here since the beginning of the war, driving her ambulance with the wounded and the dead, fighting the hunger and cold, the disease, the horrific injuries, the despair and the hope, like the rest of them. It was ironic that he could talk to Judith ... yet at the same time he didn't need to, because she knew it all just as he did.

The rain was soft and cold in his face as he crossed the mud back to the Admissions tent to see if there was anyone newly arrived who needed help.

Would he be able to offer anything of tenderness or honesty to any woman who had no experience of war? Or would the gulf between them be made uncrossable by the ghosts of too many friends lying dead in his arms, too many journeys across no-man's-land with terror and grief tearing him apart, too many long nights being deafened by the guns?

Lizzie, why don't you write? Don't you know what to say anymore? What horror could there be in the future as terrible as that we have already endured?