“Sorry, Chaplain,” Tiddly Wop Andrews said bashfully, pushing his hair back, as if it were still long enough to get into his eyes. “Nobody loiked ’im. After what ’e done to that sapper, nobody gave ’im the toime o’ day. Couldn’t say where ’e went.”
“Oi saw ’im earlier on,” Bert Dazely said, shaking his head. They were standing with their backs to the trench wall. It was raining very lightly and the wind was cold. Joseph offered him a Woodbine and Bert took it. “Thank you, Captain.” He lit it and drew the smoke in thoughtfully. “ ’E were asking a lot o’ questions about how it felt to kill Germans. Oi said it felt bloody ’orrible! An’ so it does. You know Oi can hear them on a still day, or if the wind’s coming our direction?” He looked sideways at Joseph with a frown. “They call out to us, sometimes. Oi even got a couple o’ their sausages once. Left ’em out there, for us, an’ we left them a couple o’ packets o’ Woodbines and a tin o’ Maconochies.”
“Yes, quite a few men do that,” Joseph agreed, smiling. “I’ve even had the occasional German sausage myself. Better than a Maconochie, I think.”
Bert smiled back, but his face was serious again the moment after. His eyes were intense on Joseph’s. “If Oi swap food with them one day, an’ the next Oi’m goin’ over and killing ’em, what does that make me, Chaplain? What kind of a man am Oi going to be when I go ’ome—if Oi do? ’Ow am I goin’ to explain to moi children whoi Oi done that?”
The easy answer was on Joseph’s lips, the answer he had already given many times: that a soldier had no choice, the decisions were out of his hands, there was no blame attached. Suddenly it felt empty, an excuse not to answer, an escape from himself.
“I don’t know,” he said instead. “Would you rather have been a conscientious objector?”
The answer was instant. “No!”
“Then it makes you a man who will, reluctantly, fight for what he loves, and believes in,” Joseph told him. “Nobody said fighting was going to be either safe, or pleasant, or that there were not only risks of physical injury, but mental or spiritual, too.”
“Yeah, Oi reckon you’re right, Chaplain.” Bert nodded. “You got a way of cutting to what’s true, an’ making sense of it. A man who won’t foight for what he loves, don’t love it very much. In fact maybe he don’t love it enough to deserve keeping it, eh?”
“You could be right,” Joseph agreed.
“Oi s’pose it’s a matter o’ deciding what it is you love?” He lifted up his head and looked at the sky. In the distance there was a flight of birds, south, away from the guns. He knew all of them, every bird and its habits. He could imitate the calls of most of them. “Oi think Oi know what matters to me—England the way it ought to be,” he went on quietly. “People comin’ an’ goin’ ’ow they want, quarreling and making up, a pint of ale at the pub, seed time and harvest. Oi’d loike to be married an’ buried in the same church what Oi was christened in. Oi’d loike to see other places, but when it comes to it, Oi reckon Cambridgeshire’s big enough for me. But if we don’t stop Jerry here, doin’ this to the poor bloody Belgians, boi the toime he gets to us, if he wants to, it’ll be too late.”
“Yes, I think it will,” Joseph agreed, the thought twisting inside him with a pain that left him breathless. To think of the land he loved so fiercely, it was like part of his own being had been desecrated. It was unbearable.
“Thanks,” Bert said sincerely. “You koind o’ make things plain, right an’ wrong.”
Joseph drew in his breath to answer, then did not know what to say. It was his job here, to make sense of the chaotic, to justify the descent into hell, even to make intolerable suffering bearable because it had meaning, to insist that there was a God behind it who could make even this all right in the end.
Men like Bert Dazely would not condone murder in any situation at all. What was there left to believe in if Joseph knew Prentice had been killed by one of them, and did nothing about it? It would tear that delicate, life- preserving thread of trust, and plunge them into the abyss beneath.
If personal murder for vengeance, or to rid oneself of embarrassment or pain, were acceptable, what exactly was it they were fighting for? Bert had spoken of country things like the church and the pub, a village whose people you knew, the certainty of seasons, but what he meant was the goodness of it, the belief in a moral justice that endured.
To allow Prentice to be murdered, and do nothing, would be a betrayal of that, and he would not do it.
“Did you tell Prentice how you felt?” he asked.
Bert shook his head. “None o’ his damn business, beggin’ your pardon, Chaplain. Don’t talk to the loikes o’ him about things loike that. He weren’t one of us.”
Joseph already had a good idea exactly who had been in the area, or could have been so far as they were not known to have been somewhere else. Most men would be able to prove where they were on the front line, and most stretcher-bearers, medical orderlies, or other troops would have been no further forward than supply trenches, more probably in an advance first-aid post, or dugout.
And someone must have seen Prentice, possibly given him permission and assistance to go over the top. Which raised the question as to why he had been there at all! Had it been his own idea, or had someone suggested it to him, or even lured him there? Whatever Joseph asked, he must do it so discreetly no one suspected anything but an interest in informing Prentice’s family of what had happened, and of course General Cullingford in particular. He still had to do that, at least as a courtesy. Someone else might have given him the bare facts.
He must ask his questions quickly, or his reasons would no longer be valid. One did not pursue the fate of any one man for more than a few days, there were too many others. The whole regiment was his concern.
He asked Alf Griggs quite casually where Prentice had been the afternoon beforehand, almost as if it were of no interest to him.
“First-aid dugout, Plugstreet way,” Alf told him, lighting a Woodbine and shaking his head. He was a small, dapper man with the art of finding anything anybody wanted, at a price. “Bleedin’ nuisance ’e were,” he continued. “Followed the quartermaster around like a starvin’ dog for I dunno ’ow long, till ’e got told ter get out of it, or ’e’d be carved an’ served up fer dinner ’isself. Dunno w’ere ’e got ter after that.” He drew on his cigarette. “Wot does it matter, Chaplain? Poor sod’s gone west anyway.”
“Just to give his family some idea of how he happened to get killed.” Joseph was horrified how easily the lie came off his tongue. “Not so easy to understand when it’s a journalist rather than a soldier.”
“That one is not so easy ter understand ’ow ’e didn’t get trod on long before!” Alf said with a curl of his lip. “Nasty little sod! Beggin’ yer pardon, Reverend, but bein’ dead don’t make a man good, just means ’is badness don’t matter anymore.”
Joseph thanked him and went along the relatively straight route of the second-line trench to the stretch known as Plugstreet, after the nearby village of Ploegsteert. He found the first-aid dugout where a couple of stretcher-bearers were sitting having a smoke. A third was dozing, his feet sticking out in the weak sun, his boots unlaced. Near him the mud under the duckboards was nearly dry. The rain had stopped and the sky overhead was hazy blue, and just at this moment the guns were silent. There even seemed to be fewer rats than usual.
Lanty Nunn opened his eyes. “Allo, Chaplain. Lookin’ for someone?”
Joseph squeezed his way past and sat down, making himself comfortable. “Only trying to find out a bit more about how the journalist got killed,” he replied. “I expect the general will want to know—and his family. It’s not as if he had been a soldier.”
“It’s not as if ’e’d bin any damn use at all!” Lanty retorted.
Whoopy Teversham, who had been half asleep, sat up on his elbows. He had bright ginger hair and features like rubber, able to assume any expression. “Chaplain, you don’t want to tell the poor bastard’s mother ’e was a pain in the arse,” he said cheerfully. “Anyway, Oi expect she knew! Hell-bent on getting the story that’d make his name,” he went on. “Into everything, asking questions. Oi thought he was going to write it up like he’d saved the Western Front single-handed. He wanted all sorts of facts and figures; wounded, gassed, sent home to Bloighty, where and how the dead was buried. Guess he knows that now, eh?” He laughed abruptly, and ended up coughing.
“Don’t mind him, Chaplain,” Lanty said dourly. “He don’t know no better!”
Doughy Ward blinked, staring at Joseph with a frown. “Tell his family he went too far forward and got caught in cross fire. What does it matter? He’s dead.”
“He was drowned, actually,” Joseph told him.
“Yeah?” Doughy opened his eyes wide. “We don’t know what he was after up there, an’ to be honest, Chaplain, we don’t care. He were always poking his nose in, asking things what wasn’t none of his business.”
