rather longer view than you have! Few men set out on a battle they don’t believe they can win.”
“Few of them are stupid enough,” Mason agreed tersely.
“And are you going to tell them what will happen if they don’t fight?” Joseph had to raise his voice against the rising noise of the wind and the water in order to be heard. The light must have been broadening a little behind him to the northeast because he could see the stippling on the backs of the waves and the pale crests were creaming now and then. His feet were numb with cold.
“With no army we’ll be forced to surrender,” Mason answered him. “The slaughter will stop. It’s a war we should never have got into. England has no quarrel with Germany.”
“Whether we should have or not doesn’t matter now,” Joseph told him. “It’s past. Right or wrong, we can’t undo it. Germany has invaded Belgium, the land has been bombed and burned, the people driven out, thousands of them killed, their farms and villages destroyed. Are you going to tell them to surrender to the soldiers that have despoiled them, bury their dead, then carry on as before?”
“Of course I’m not going to tell them anything so damned stupid!” Mason said angrily. “Belgium will suffer, it already has, but isn’t that less evil than the whole of Europe plunged into chaos and death? We are on the brink of destroying the finest young men of an entire generation for what? Can you justify what’s happening?”
“I’m not trying to.” Joseph was staring at the two crewmen in the stern. Andy seemed to be asleep, although he stirred now and then, and once Joseph had seen him open his eyes. The other man was lying next to him, half cradled across his knees, Andy’s uninjured arm supporting his head, but he had not moved in over half an hour.
“Take the oar,” Joseph said abruptly. It was light enough now to see Mason’s face, the weariness and the strain in it, wet from spray. He understood what Joseph was thinking. He took the oar.
Joseph moved forward carefully. The boat was pitching and if he stood he might lose his balance, perhaps even go over the side. On his hands and knees he reached the wounded man.
Andy opened his eyes: wide and frightened, full of pain.
Joseph put the back of his hand to the other man’s neck. He could feel no pulse at all. His skin was waxy- white in the creeping daylight.
Andy’s good arm tightened around him. His face asked the question, but he did not speak.
“I think we could let him lie on the bottom,” Joseph said, having to speak loudly to be heard above the sea. “Be more comfortable for you. That weight would send your legs to sleep.”
“I don’t mind!” Andy protested.
“You might need your legs, when we reach land,” Joseph answered. “And it won’t help.”
Andy blinked, his face crumpling.
“I’m sorry.” Joseph touched him briefly. “Come on.”
Andy still hesitated, then slowly eased himself sideways and helped Joseph move the dead man’s body so it lay out of his way and where the oarsmen would not bump it. Then he inched back to where he had been before, careful to take exactly the same position, and pulled the piece of canvas over himself. “I’m sorry I can’t help,” he apologized.
Joseph broke off a piece of the chocolate and gave it to him. “There are only two oars anyway,” he replied.
He went back to his place again and he and Mason rowed in silence for a while. The white light spread across the horizon behind them, still without color. The wind was harder, and rising. It was getting more and more difficult to make any headway against it.
“Where do you come from?” Joseph asked Mason. He was anxious to know, and he needed to find some opening, some corner of emotion in Mason he could use to carry his argument. He must not give up, no matter what it cost. This was the ultimate test.
“Beverly,” Mason replied. “Near Hull, in Yorkshire. Where do you?”
“Selborne St. Giles, just outside Cambridge,” Joseph said. “Have you always been a journalist?”
“Nothing else I ever wanted to do.” Mason smiled bleakly. “Don’t tell me you always wanted to preach, I couldn’t bear it! Some time, even if it was in the cradle, you must have wanted to do something else!”
“My father wanted me to be a doctor. I tried, but I felt so useless in the face of the pain, and the fear.”
“So you chose the pain and fear of the spirit instead?” There was surprise in Mason’s face, but it was not without respect. “Was your father upset?”
“Yes. But he’s dead now.”
“So is mine. He died while I was in Africa . . . reporting on the Boer War.” He said the words with anger and a grief that clearly still hurt him. He was looking not at Joseph but at the sea rolling away behind them, now beginning to be touched with color, but a heavy gray, only undershot with blue.
“That’s where you learned to hate war,” Joseph observed. It was barely a question.
“It’s not a noble thing,” Mason said, his lips tight. “It’s vicious, stupid, and bestial! It brings out the worst in too many men who used to be decent. There is immense courage, pity, honor, and all the things that are finest in human nature in some, but at the price of losing too many. The sacrifice is immeasurable. And it’s a cost we have no right to ask of anyone—anyone at all!”
Joseph was quiet for a while. It was becoming difficult to hold the oars. The boat was bucking as the waves caught it from different angles and his strength was failing. He began to think of all the things he valued most, not what ought to matter, but what really did: his family, the people he loved who formed the frame of his life within which everything else took meaning. What was laughter or beauty or understanding if there was no one with whom to share it? What was achievement alone? So many things were made only in order to give them to someone else.
Friendship was at the root of it all, the honesty without judgment, the generosity of the spirit, the tenderness that never failed. In a way it was the end of fear, because if you were not alone, everything else was bearable.
He thought of Sam. If he and Mason didn’t make the shore, then at least he would never have to go and find Sam and tell him he knew he had killed Prentice. He was surprised how much of a relief that was.
His hand slipped on the oar, as if he had already half let it go. Mason jerked around, fear in his face for an instant, until he saw Joseph tighten his grip on it again.
What would Sam have said to try to persuade Mason not to write his article on Gallipoli? What arguments were there left? He had tried everything he could think of. None of it was enough. What if he failed? Finally he faced the thought he had been avoiding for the last two hours. There was only one way to be absolutely certain that Mason did not publish his piece, and that was to kill him. Could he wait until they were within sight of land, and he could manage the boat alone, then calmly take the oar and strike Mason with it, so hard it would kill him? He had no need to ask himself, he knew the answer. But was that humanity, even godliness? Or was it cowardice?
What if a ship were to see them before that, while he was still dithering, and pick them up? The decision would be taken out of his hands. No. That was dishonest. He would have left it too late, and missed his chance. Anyway, justification or excuses were pointless. If morale in England were destroyed, the reason Joseph Reavley failed to act would be utterly irrelevant.
“You would tell all of the men who might enlist and go,” he said aloud. “And then many of them would change their minds. Their families would be relieved—at least most of them would. How about the families of all those who are already there? Or who have died in France, or Gallipoli, or at sea? How do you suppose they would feel?”
“Probably angry enough to demand that the government answer for it,” Mason replied, struggling to keep hold of the oar. “Pull, damn it!”
“We can’t pull against this,” Joseph replied, jerking his head at the waves. “One misjudgment and we’ll be tipped over. We need to turn and go before it.”
“Where to, for God’s sake?” Mason demanded, his voice higher pitched, exhaustion and panic too close to the surface. “Out into the middle of the Atlantic?”
“Better there, and above the water, than the English Channel, and under it,” Joseph replied. “Even south of here we’ll still be in a shipping lane. We don’t have a choice.”
“Can you turn it without capsizing?” Mason demanded.
“I don’t know,” Joseph admitted. “But we can’t go on like this. We can’t hold it. We’ll have to be fast.”
“What about the wounded man? If he goes over we’ve lost him!”
“If the boat goes over we’re all lost!” Joseph shouted back. “Together! When there’s a lull. Wait for it! You lift
