or it would break the spirit at home. We’d get no more recruits.”
“You want more men to come out and be slaughtered like this?” Mason asked, his eyes burning with accusation, but it sprang from his own raw, hurting anger, the inner wounds bleeding, not a desire to hurt Joseph.
“I’d rather not have war at all,” Joseph replied. “But I didn’t get to choose.”
“None of us did!” Mason said bitterly, bending to tie his bootlaces. “If we were told the truth, then perhaps we would have! At least we’d have gone into it with our eyes open.”
“You can’t tell all the truth, only part of it,” Joseph pointed out. “Anything you say is going to be your judgment, what you see and feel. Do you have the right to decide what other people must know, when they can’t do anything to change it?”
“I have more than the right,” Mason replied, straightening up. “I have the duty. We are a democracy, not a dictatorship. You can’t choose if you don’t know what the choices are.” He half turned to face Joseph, wincing as a strained muscle in his shoulder shot through with pain and he moved gingerly to ease it. “Tell me that you believe any sane man or woman in England would choose
“And is telling people at home going to help anything?” Joseph asked with quiet pain.
Mason’s eyes blazed.
“Of course it will! Men won’t volunteer for this if they know the truth. There’s nothing glorious in it! There’s nothing even useful! They’re dying because of incompetence! We aren’t going to take the Dardanelles, we aren’t going to take Constantinople, and we aren’t going to liberate the Russian Grand Fleet! The Eastern Fronts are going to be against the Italians, poor sods, and the Russians in the north—if anyone’s insane enough to try that. Napoleon failed. That should be a lesson to anyone.”
Joseph smiled with a downward twist. “Now who’s being naive?”
They reached the spot where they had sat before. Their mugs were still there. Mason picked up his and looked at the dregs. “You don’t think the kaiser will march against the tsar? This whole abattoir is a glorified family feud! They’re all bloody cousins!”
“I meant,” Joseph corrected him, “that I don’t think anyone is instructed by the lessons of history.”
Mason smiled at last, a curiously honest expression that suddenly shed years from his face. “Have another cup of tea? At least the rum’s real. Then we’ll go and see if we can get some of these poor devils out to the hospital ships. Not that they’ll be that much better off there! They can exchange being shot at for being seasick. Personally, I think I’d rather stay here and take my chances.” Without waiting for Joseph to answer, he took both mugs over to the field kitchen.
Joseph relaxed a little. There was still time to try to make Mason see the terrible damage of what he intended. When they were at sea, away from this horror, he would be able to convince him that it would be wrong.
They spent the rest of the daylight helping the wounded men who could walk, carrying those who couldn’t. It was backbreaking and heartrending work. Another three times Joseph struggled up the hillside himself to help more men down. He stepped in blood, tripped over bodies, sometimes only limbs or torsos, riddled with bullets or blown apart by shells. In the shallow trenches British, Australians, and Turks sometimes lay together, indistinguishable in the blood and earth. The smell of slaughter filled his mouth and throat and lungs. The wild thyme was gone; even the sharp sting of creosol couldn’t penetrate through the sick sweetness of blood.
It was after midnight when he sank into a dazed exhaustion and the oblivion of sleep overtook him until dreams invaded it, full of torture and screaming.
He awoke with a jolt to daylight and someone throwing a bucket of seawater in his face. Its saltiness was exquisitely clean. He gasped and sat up, struggling for breath.
“There y’are, cobber!” a voice said cheerfully. “An’ there’s plenty more where that came from. But if yer ain’t broke your legs, yer can fetch it for yerself.”
“Hey! It’s Holy Joe!” another more familiar voice added. “Let’s get the poor bleeder some breakfast. For a Pommie he wasn’t too bad last night.”
Joseph clambered to his feet, pushing his hair off his face and wiping the water away. His body ached appallingly. “Thanks, but I need to find the journalist. He’s shipping out today, and I’m getting a lift with him. Thanks all the same.”
“No you aren’t, sport! He left a couple of hours ago!”
Joseph froze. “What?”
“Guns got your ears? He left a couple of hours ago—at least! He’s long gone—over the horizon on his way to Malta by now. You’ll have to take the next ship—whenever that is. Have a cup o’ tea!”
CHAPTER
TWELVE
It was another twenty-four hours of frantic effort before Joseph could find a ship going as far as Malta that would take him as a passenger. He had to use all the persuasion he had to gain it, including his letters of authority from Matthew.
He paced the deck as the shores of Gallipoli faded behind him and became an indistinct blur, Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay no longer distinguishable. Even the sound of guns was finally lost in the wash of the sea. The island of Samothrace towered to the south, its corona of mist gilded by the setting sun. Today the beauty of the past, the heroes, the love and hate of Troy, which used to be a safe island of retreat, were simply a legacy of epic words, with no healing left in them. The pain of the present drowned out all memory. The urgency of catching up with Richard Mason before he could hand his work to some irresponsible publisher made chaos of any other thoughts.
If Joseph could just have time to talk to him, explain rationally the damage it would do! If he could make him understand what Ypres was really like, repeated over and over again through hundreds of trenches right across the Western Front, the courage and the loyalty of the men, the idea of putting off even one man from taking up arms to support them would be abhorrent to him.
Men did not go into battle in cold blood but in the fever of the moment. The price was terrible, but the cost of failure was higher.
He paced back and forth, unable to sit down, too tense to eat, too filled with nervous energy to sleep, until at last exhaustion overtook him lying in a narrow cot in a crewman’s quarters, while the man was on duty.
Malta was ancient, fascinating, full of colors, eclectic architecture, and a cultural mixture that reflected every tide that had swept the Mediterranean in five hundred years, and yet was unique to itself. Explorers, merchants, and Crusaders had stopped here. Now the harbor of Valetta held British warships and the liners, the yachts, the racing skiffs were silent and unseen.
Joseph barely saw any of it; he looked only for signs of where Mason could have gone. He asked the British seamen he met, the loaders and dockers, and eventually the harbormaster himself.
“That would be the English gentleman from the newspapers,” the harbormaster replied. “Very fine writer. Read his stuff myself. Admire those chaps.” He said it with profound feeling. “Never afraid to go where the danger is, if they can get the truth. He took the ship out to Gibraltar this morning. I arranged it for him myself.”
“Gibraltar!” Joseph exploded with burning frustration. “How can I get there? It’s urgent! I have dispatches for London. I have to get there in three days, at the outside!” If he did not catch him, Mason would deliver his work, with his damning descriptions of chaos and pointless death. Again so many of them were men who had volunteered, come willingly from the other side of the world, because they had felt it was the right thing to do. Their lives were squandered, uselessly and terribly.
At least that was what Mason would write. Whitehall would try to censor him, but he had seemed sure that he had a way to evade that. And once he had published it, and it was spread by pamphlet and word of mouth, could anyone prove him wrong?
He wasn’t wrong!
