was used to. It should have wrapped him round in peace, but it didn’t.
He went out again, asking first at the half dozen or so small hotels he knew the men used when in Paris. He kept his chaplain’s collar showing to allay suspicion that his search had any ill intent, but it didn’t help. He spoke of Punch Fuller by name, and described him fairly closely: his long nose and sharp chin, his slightly rolling walk, his ready wit. They all stared at him with blank faces, many openly hostile.
Then he tried the cafes, bars, and other drinking places—all without success. By near midnight again he was nursing a glass of rough red wine in a nightclub in the cellar of one of the older hotels. There were several other British soldiers there. They seemed determined to stay awake for every precious hour of leave, savor it to the last breath of smoky, wine-filled atmosphere, hear every aching note of the music from the three-piece band. A middle- aged woman with a thin body sang in a languorous voice filled with heartbreak.
Suddenly Joseph could no longer keep from his mind the awareness of how everything had changed since he was last here on leave himself, too short a time to go home. It was only three months ago, but now it was all just a little shabbier; a few more chairs were broken and not mended, and the tables more deeply scarred. Windows were cracked, lamps missing pieces of colored glass. It was this room he could see as he sat, but in his mind it was everywhere. Coffee was thin and bitter. Women’s faces were bleak, numbed with loss. Clothes were patched and repaired, the few shreds of style left a little more desperate. Outside there was uncollected rubbish blowing in the gutters, and windows were boarded up where there was no glass to mend them.
The comradeship was still there, the anger and the pain, and a shred of the old ironic wit. But the shell was thin, and too near to breaking.
Joseph sipped his wine again and watched the group of Tommies at the bar. None of them looked more than twenty, several far younger, maybe sixteen or seventeen. They were laughing too loudly. They thought they were pretending to be brave, knowing that tomorrow or the next day they were going back to be killed. Joseph knew the courage was real—but behind the stupid jokes, white faces were slicked with the sweat of uncertainty and fear. Finally, Joseph realized, each man was desperately alone.
The three-piece band started a Cole Porter song. Porter himself was somewhere here in Paris, so Joseph had heard, but he would be in a better place than this, more sophisticated.
He should start looking for Punch Fuller again. He had to tell General Northrup that he had tried. Stupid man. The truth would hurt everyone, himself most of all.
And yet Joseph knew that some Englishman had shot Major Northrup on purpose, to save him from bringing on them even more destruction, and more of his friends sacrificed for nothing. Did duty require you to die pointlessly? If Punch were to ask him that, what would he say?
He had no idea. Too many of the old certainties were gone. Once he would have known exactly what to say to Morel about honor and leadership. Now he understood Morel’s belief that his duty was toward the men whose lives were in his charge, to save them from incompetents who would take their loyalty and sacrifice it hideously and for nothing, unaware even of what they were asking.
He had tried again to argue with Morel. He could hear the words in his mind—“You can’t lead them to mutiny! Think what it means. They’ll be shot.”
“How terrible,” Morel had said sarcastically. “Good men shot.”
Joseph had floundered, seeking something to say, a core of belief within himself to cling to and give him fire and conviction. He had found nothing sure enough, and Morel knew it as much as he did. He had failed.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see a man smiling at him. He was tall and dark with a long nose and a mercurial, ironic laughter in his eyes. Just now there was a strange gentleness in him, an instant of naked emotion.
“Sam?” Joseph’s voice was hoarse. Amazement and joy welled up inside him. It was Sam, wasn’t it? Sam Wetherall, whose grave he had wept over, even though he knew it was not his friend’s body in it, but someone else’s wearing his tags. They had arranged it. It had been the only answer to Prentice’s death and the knowledge afterward.
Sam grinned. “You look like hell, Joe. But it’s still good to see you. Don’t make a fuss.”
Joseph’s heart raced with fear, hope, intense, pounding relief. There was no question anymore. Sam was alive. “What are you doing here?” He managed the words although his lips were dry and his throat tight. Sam was not in uniform. “Are you on leave?” Surely he could not have left the army, even in his new identity, not deserted? It wasn’t possible, not the Sam he knew. He realized he was shaking with fear. His belief in Sam was one of the few certainties he relied on. He did not want it tested.
Sam eased himself into the stool beside him. “Took a leaf out of your brother’s book,” he said very quietly.
Joseph stared at him, struggling to understand. Intelligence? But Sam was a sapper, one of those who dug under the enemy lines, listened, set mines, blew up defenses. Perhaps the tight spaces and the claustrophobia had gotten to him at last. It got to most men, sooner or later. Too many were buried alive in collapses, drowned in the mud and debris, crushed by falls.
He found himself smiling simply because Sam was alive. Memories poured back of conversations they had had on the line in 1915, when it had all been so new. They had thought then that the war wouldn’t last a year. It had been talk of glory, of heroism and sacrifice. Now it was just death, endlessly and pointlessly ever more death. The soldiers were even younger.
“Here in Paris?” he asked aloud, his voice almost level.
“Mostly.” Sam’s eyes were far away for a moment. “How’s the regiment?” He did not ask for anyone by name, but Joseph thought of the men Sam had known who were dead now. There was no need to tell him.
Sam interrupted his efforts to concoct a good answer. “You were never a good liar, Joe. Who’s gone? Everyone?”
“No!” Joseph denied too quickly, thinking of those whose comradeship had been so precious. “Only a few: Tucky Nunn, Eardslie, Chicken Hagger, Lanty and Bibby Nunn both, Doughy Ward, both the Arnold brothers.”
Sam’s hand tightened on his arm. He said nothing. He had never wasted words.
The barman poured him some absinthe and he ignored it.
“I’m looking for Punch Fuller,” Joseph said quietly.
“Deserted?” Sam said with slight surprise. “Poor sod. Is that really the best use they can find for you, to send you to Paris after the poor devils that reached the end of the line?” He frowned. “If he’s really cut and run, Joe, there’s no point in finding him. He’s a casualty of war. You can’t save him.”
“No, he’s not a deserter,” Joseph said slowly. Perhaps he should not tell Sam about it, but he knew he was going to. He had no idea what Sam had done in the dreadful years since they had parted, just before Sam went over the top that day in spring of 1915. But he was the same man with whom he had shared the chocolate biscuits, sitting in the dugout, and told stories of the laughter and the memories that mattered, of the England they loved and the past that was slipping a little further away each day.
Sam was waiting, watching him. His face was leaner than before, more deeply lined. Joseph could barely even guess at the pain losing his identity must have caused him, hollowing out places of loneliness, character, and grief he could not imagine. He could never return to England, the familiar hills and fields, the villages, the rhythm and music of speech, the common history that framed even the simplest things.
Had Joseph been wrong to offer that way out? He had so desperately wanted Sam to live, and the decision had seemed right at the time, the only thing possible.
“We had an incompetent officer shot,” he said aloud, looking at Sam again. “It might have passed off without any fuss, considering the overall losses, but another damn war correspondent saw it and left me no way out. The man’s father is a general, and he’s determined to see justice done and his son’s good name reinstated, and of course whoever murdered him tried for it, and face the firing squad.”
“What has Punch Fuller got to do with it? Don’t say you’re playing detective again, Joe!”
“Not willingly,” Joseph answered, more memories almost drowning him. If he had been wiser last time, Sam would still be in the British Army, under his own name, and if he survived the war, free to go home to his brother.
Sam saw it in his eyes. He smiled. “Don’t blame yourself for being who you are, Joe. I don’t. I never wanted you to betray yourself, and that’s what it would have been.”
“I don’t want to know who killed Northrup,” Joseph retorted. “And I already know why. The man was a fool, and dangerous.”
