taste of the real war he could write something about that would grab everybody’s attention. He wanted to add going over in a raid to what he already had! Maybe kill some Germans himself, then he could write as an actual soldier and tell people what it was really like, the feel of it, the smell of bodies, the rats, everything as it is, so they’d know.” Her face pinched. “Maybe it’s wicked of me, Captain Reavley, and you being a godly man, but I’m glad he didn’t live to do that.”
He was startled. He had not thought of correspondents writing so graphically. “Yes, I’m glad, too, Mrs. O’ Day. Perhaps I’m not as godly as you think. Thank you for your help.” He left her taking the mugs back inside, a tall, sad figure in a gray dress soiled with blood, busy with the small duties of habit and comfort.
He spoke later to Lucy Crowther, assistant to Marie O’Day. She was rolling bandages on the table in the first-aid station. Her dark hair was tied back severely and her knuckles were clenched and she avoided his eyes. “Yes. He was boasting that he was going over with the men,” she answered his question.
“For the second time,” he said.
She looked up at him. “No. He’d never been over before.”
“He told Mrs. O’Day that he’s been right up to the German wire!”
“Oh, that!” she said dismissively. “Any fool can do that, once the sappers have dug the tunnel!”
“You mean underground!” Again his belief was stretched to snapping.
Her face was twisted with contempt. “Yes, of course. You didn’t think he went on top, did you?”
“He was back here from eastward somewhere,” he asked, trying to piece it together in his mind.
“That’s right. The sappers were working along at Hill Sixty. Major Wetherall and his men. Prentice went that way with them.”
“Prentice went with Major Wetherall?”
“Yes.” She finished the last bandage. “I don’t know how Major Wetherall could stand him, but he can’t have minded or he’d have got rid of him,” she said. “Sappers don’t have to put up with anybody they don’t want to. It’s pretty dangerous, with explosions, cave-ins, water, and all that.” There was admiration in her now, an utterly different tone in her voice, a softness.
Joseph found himself smiling. He knew that what Sam did was dangerous, and vital. If a shell landed anywhere along the tunnel, they could be buried alive, crushed by falling earth, or perhaps worse, imprisoned and left to suffocate. And there was the moral hell of getting so close to the German trenches that you could hear the men talking to each other, the laughter and jokes, the occasional singing, all the daily sounds of life far from home and in intense danger. You could sense the comradeship, the grief for loss, the pain, the loneliness, the whisper of fear or guilt, the hundreds of small details that showed they were men exactly like yourselves, and most of them nineteen or twenty years old as well.
They listened to overhear information. Sometimes they planted explosives to blow up the trench itself. More than once they accidentally broke in on an enemy sap and found themselves face-to-face with Germans doing exactly the same job, with the same fears and the same guilts. Joseph had sat listening to them, because listening was all he could do to help, and his admiration for them was intense. But there was still a sweetness seeing it in someone else. “Thank you,” he said aloud. “Who would know what Prentice actually did do, and what was said, who he finally went with?”
“You could try Corporal Gee. Barshey Gee,” she added, knowing how many Gees there were in the regiment.
He thanked her and went in the darkening air, now louder with gunfire, to look for Barshey Gee.
The gunfire increased, heavy artillery going on both sides. He moved from one stretch of trench to another, past men crouched over machine guns, others waiting, rifle in hand, in case there was a German raiding party coming. Eyes scanned the alternate glare and darkness of no-man’s-land. It was easy to mistake the haggard outline of a tree stump for that of a man.
Then there was a bad hit at Hill 62, and he forgot Barshey Gee, Prentice, or anything else while he helped wounded men, mostly carrying them on his back. No one could carry a six-foot stretcher around the corners without tipping it over.
By midnight it eased off for a while, then there was another flurry, and the expected raiding party came. Star shells lit the sky and the running figures were momentarily silhouetted black. Against the glare bullets ricocheted everywhere. Several men fell, but the attack was beaten off. Two prisoners were taken, white-faced, stiff-lipped, only slightly injured. They looked to be about twenty, fair-haired and fair-skinned. Joseph was sent to talk to them, because of his fluent German, but he learned nothing except their names and regiment. It was all he expected. He would have both despised and pitied a man who gave him more.
It was close to the spring dawn when he finally caught up with Barshey, who was sitting on an empty ammunition crate smoking a Woodbine, oblivious of the blood crusting on his cheek and down his left arm.
“Hello, Reverend,” he said cheerfully. “We won that one, Oi think.”
“Raids are always rough on whoever crosses no-man’s-land,” Joseph agreed, squatting on his heels opposite him.
“Want one?” Barshey offered him a Woodbine.
“No thanks,” Joseph declined. “Do you remember the raid the night Prentice was killed?”
“Who’s Prentice?”
“The war correspondent.”
“Oh, him!” Barshey shrugged. “Rotten little sod. Yes, of course Oi remember it. He didn’t come back. They say he got drowned. Shouldn’t ever have gone, stupid bastard.” He drew in deeply. “Oi told him that, but he was hell-bent on it. He’s been up the saps with Major Wetherall’s men and thought he was a soldier.” His lip curled in contempt. “Full of what he was going to write about it. Tell ’em all at home everything they don’t want to know. Oi moight’ve pushed him in a crater meself, if Oi’d ’a thought of it.”
“I don’t suppose you know who did?” Joseph said casually.
“No oidea.”
Barshey stubbed out his Woodbine and lit another, cupping his hand around the match from habit, even though they were well behind the lines now. “Didn’t you and Major Wetherall go out and look for some o’ them as moight be still alive? You brought Captain Hughes back, didn’t you? He didn’t make it.” He shook his head and his voice dropped. “Pity. He was a good man, even though he was Welsh.”
“Yes. We found Prentice’s body, too.” Joseph said nothing about Hughes, even to defend the Welsh. That was Isobel’s husband, and losing him still hurt.
Barshey shrugged. “Don’t know whoi you bothered risking your neck for that one. He was dead anyway. No point, really.”
“I’d have fetched him if he’d been anyone else,” Joseph said.
Barshey grinned suddenly. “Oi reckon you’re a fool, Cap’n, but it’s a sort o’ comfort. Oi’d loike to think you’d come for me, whether Oi were any good or not. Because sometimes Oi think Oi’m foine, but other days Oi wake up with dead Jerries in moi ’ead, and Oi think of their woives and mothers, and that maybe they’re the ones Oi can hear singing sometimes? Or the ones that left the sausages out there for us, or that yell out asking for the football scores, an’ Oi can’t stand it. Oi need to think there’s someone that’d come for me, no matter what.” He was still smiling, but his eyes were brilliant, hurting with the intensity of his need.
“Don’t think it,” Joseph said softly. “You can be sure I would.”
Barshey nodded, blinking a little. He looked down and squinted into the empty Woodbine packet to hide his feelings, not because he wanted another cigarette. “You know if you want to find out what happened to the stupid bastard, you should ask Major Wetherall. He was with him up the saps ’cos Prentice was bragging about it. Reckoned Wetherall thought he was some kind of soldier. Load of rubbish, if you ask me. Wetherall despoised him. But he came from the saps over to us during the raid, roight across no-man’s-land. More guts than any other man Oi know. He might’ve seen the stupid sod fall in a crater.”
Joseph was cold in the pit of his stomach. “Major Wetherall came across no-man’s-land during the raid?”
Barshey smiled. “Loike Oi said, he’s one on his own.”
It was the one answer Joseph had not thought of: any of the other sappers, Corliss’s friends—but not Sam!
“You all roight, Cap’n?” Barshey said gently. “You look pretty bad. You didn’t get hit, did you?”
“Hit?” Joseph said stupidly.
