was Barshey Gee, Charlie Gee’s brother. He looked tired, dark rings around his eyes as if he were bruised, no color 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 him, 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 from 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 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 he 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. Some-one 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 onto 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 held ’im 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 onto 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, letter 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.
In the trenches they sat huddled together for warmth, told ridiculous jokes, shared one another’s dreams, and pains. They risked their lives to save one of their own, and a death was personal and very deep, like that of a brother.
He sat in the trench in the sun with Cully Teversham, who was busy running a lighted match over the seams of his tunic to kill the lice. He did it with intense care, his big hands holding the fabric gently, keeping the flame exactly the right distance away not to burn the threads.
Joseph was listening, as he did so often, but now, more than in the past, he was afraid that he would not have any answers. If he said there was meaning to it all, a God of love behind the slaughter and the pain, would anybody believe him? Or would they merely think he was parroting the words expected of him, the things he was sent here to say, by people who had not the beginnings of an idea what the reality was like? What kind of a man looked on living hell like this, and mouthed comfortable, simple phrases he did not even believe himself?
A dishonest man, a coward.
Cully let the match go and lit another. “Is Charlie Gee going to make it?” he asked. “It ain’t roight. Oi just got to loike ’im. We never knowed the Gees till we come ’ere, Whoopy an’ me. Tevershams and Gees never spoke. All over a piece o’ land, years back, it was. Don’t even know roightly what ’appened. Something to do wi’ pigs on it. Dug up everything worth ’aving. But that’s pigs for yer. Everyone knows that.”
Joseph said nothing, just listening.
“But they’re alroight, Charlie an’ Barshey are,” Cully went on, keeping his head bent, the sun bright on his ginger hair. “An’ that newspaper man ought never to ’ave bin in that Casualty place, let alone go sayin’ what ’e did. Whoi don’t they do something about that, instead o’ nailing that poor bastard what got ’is hand tore to bits, eh?” He looked up at last, awaiting an answer from Joseph.
What was there to say? The truth was no use, and lies were worse. He could not tell them that he knew no sense in it, he was just as afraid as they were, perhaps not of maiming or of death, but that all his life he had striven to have faith in something that was beyond his understanding, and at the very worst, was a creation of his own need? What did he worship, except hope, and a desperate, soul-starving need for there to be a God?
He worshipped goodness; courage, compassion, honor, the purity of mind that knows no lies, even to oneself; the gentleness to forgive with a whole heart; the ability to have power and never even for a moment misuse it. The
