It required a little more bravado and finesse to find herself actually standing in the general’s presence in the small French farmhouse in which he was currently headquartered. It was a comfortable place, gently domestic, once somebody’s home. He was immaculately smart: boots polished, face pale and shaved to a perfect smoothness.
“You say you have further information on the death of my son, Miss…Miss Reavley?” he said stiffly. “Are you in a position to testify to this at the court-martial? It will not be easy for you. The whole regiment is of a sullen and mutinous nature. Discipline has been allowed to fall into laxity. Your fellow V.A.D. volunteers may make it difficult for you. Are you prepared for that?”
She had already weighed her answers. She stood to attention. “I am prepared to tell the truth, sir, because it is the truth, whoever likes me or dislikes me for it.” Her gaze did not waver from his. She saw a tired and grieved man, the skin around his eyes paper thin, his shoulders held square by little more than pride.
She felt a wave of pity for him, for his arrogance and blindness, for the fragility that had stopped him seeing his son as he was, and his need to believe a lie and cling on to it even at the cost of other men’s lives. But if she did not break him, then he would break Cavan, and all the others. Worst of all, he would have broken all the men’s belief in justice and the bonds of loyalty here and now. And here and now those were almost the only things left that were good.
Northrup’s voice was hoarse with emotion when he spoke. “You are a fine woman, Miss Reavley. You have more courage and honor than your regiment’s chaplain. Is he related to you?”
“Captain Reavley is my older brother, sir.” His insulting Joseph made it easier. She was angry with him herself, but that was quite different. She would have defended him to the death against anyone else. With one sentence Northrup had taken away the impediment to striking the blow.
“What is it you know, Miss Reavley?” he asked.
She replied without hesitating.
“Well, sir, in order to prove beyond question why these twelve men in particular should do such a…dangerous and terrible thing, the court will have to show something very special. All the hardship and loss the men have faced over the last three years has never made them…mutiny. And I suppose that’s what it is?”
“That is what it is, Miss Reavley,” he agreed. “Make no mistake.”
It was time to tell him the truth, before someone interrupted them.
“Well, sir, in the case of Captain Morel, it was the order Major Northrup gave to move a field gun from one position to another across half a mile of plowed clay. The men argued that it would get stuck. They might lose the gun itself, and the wagons and the horses, possibly even some of the men, if it slipped.” She watched his face and saw the muscles tighten in his neck. He knew it was a stupid order, born of inexperience and too much pride to listen to lesser ranks.
“They argued, perhaps insolently,” she went on. “Major Northrup insisted. They obeyed and got stuck. They saved the horses, but two men were injured, one man’s leg was broken so badly Captain Cavan had to amputate it.” She hated continuing, but it was like a gangrenous limb: It must all come off or it was pointless having begun. “And Captain Morel was very upset about sending out a rescue party into no-man’s-land on a day when the German snipers could simply pick them off. Some refused to go, but others did. Several men were injured. Captain Eardslie was killed. He was one of my brother’s students in Cambridge, and he and Morel were great friends.”
Northrup’s face was ashen. She felt as if she were killing a man already wounded fatally. Still she drove it home. “I have details for all of them, sir, and men prepared to swear to every incident sufficiently to prove a motive for each one of the twelve, especially Captain Cavan. It took a great deal to break him, but I can—”
“Yes!” he interrupted her. “I see you have taken a great deal of care to have every point documented, Miss Reavley. It will not be necessary.” His voice was shaking and the muscles in his neck and jaw were so tight he could not control the tic in his cheek.
Her stomach was knotted until she felt nauseous. “Don’t you want to prove the guilt of all of them?” she asked quietly. “Not just the one who pulled the trigger? He may simply have panicked. Aren’t they all equally to blame? The whole twelve?”
His voice was barely audible. “What is it you want, Miss Reavley? You are not a fool! Are you trying to have my son’s name dishonored, to have revenge for your…your mutinous friends?”
She swallowed.
“No, sir. As I said in the beginning—and you praised me for it—I want the whole truth to be told, to be fair to everyone. Nobody is going to believe that good soldiers—especially exceptional ones like Captain Cavan—mutinied unless we can show what reason they had…or imagined they had.”
He stared at her, knowing he was being manipulated. He was certain in his own mind that it was Cavan she was trying to save, and yet he could see no way out, nothing with which he could accuse her. “They are already charged,” he pointed out. “Are you so bent on revenge?”
She hesitated. Was it necessary to strike the last blow? Yes it was. She dared not stop in case she was just short of victory. “Not revenge, sir, surely? Is it not justice?”
His voice dropped to a whisper.
“My son does not deserve to be buried with dishonor. Is it not enough for them that he is dead?”
“It is terrible that he is dead, sir. And Captain Eardslie, and all the others. Over half a million of them, I believe. Not counting the French, and of course the Austrians and Germans, and the Italians, and Russians. And I suppose we have to start counting the Americans, too, now.”
“I will speak with the prosecutor. Perhaps the charge can be lessened.”
She smiled very slightly, afraid to say anything in case she spoiled it. “Permission to return to my ambulance, sir?”
“Granted, Miss Reavley.”
Mason arrived back at Passchendaele to find it worse than before. It had rained almost without ceasing, the wettest August in human memory. Men lived and died in a hell past sanity to imagine. It went on day after day, night after night, with no victory and no end in sight except the possibility that there would be no life remaining— human, animal, or plant—and finally the mud would claim everything.
He thought of his beloved Yorkshire with its wild fells, shining tarns beneath wind-ragged skies, and steep villages with cobbled streets. But the memory was too all-consuming: It robbed him of words powerful enough to capture the passion and tenderness of a love so deep. Instead he began writing of England in general.
“It doesn’t seem possible.” He started a rough draft. “At home the trees tower green like clouds over the gold of the harvest fields. Horses bend to the plow and the fruit ripens in the orchards. Poppies burn scarlet grazing the corn with hot color. The men are gone. Women now get ready to reap and bind, laughing with each other, growing used to their new tasks.
“Here there are no trees, only a few shattered trunks and the scarlet is blood as men are crushed and trodden back to the all-consuming clay from which we are told we were fashioned by a deity who has grown tired of us and turned away. These few terrible miles hold so much human flesh you cannot set foot without standing on some man’s rotting body.”
Then he tore it up and wondered how to start again. Words needed to be simple for this, clear of all sentimentality. But what was there for anyone to say? For the first time in his life, words seemed pointless, his own too small, too shallow for the burden.
“We died in hell—they called it Passchendaele.” He could only quote others. “Oh, Jesus, make it stop!”
But it seemed no God was listening.
He heard the news of the arrests of Cavan, Morel, and the other ten before he reached the section where it had happened. He wanted to speak to Colonel Hook when he had the chance and to Joseph Reavley. He needed the whole story to write up, all the information he could find before the court-martial began. And of course he wanted to see Judith as well. That was at the forefront of his mind, as it had been lately, too often for his emotional comfort.
He found the ambulance parked outside a first aid station, just behind the supply trenches. It was covered with mud; he saw several scars and dents on it, and a few bullet holes. The air was soft and muggy, full of flies and the ever-present stench. The occasional fine rain did nothing to help.
He asked for Judith and was told that she and Wil Sloan were both inside the makeshift tent. There were several other men with them, all with apparently minor injuries, and they were clustered around Judith, looking at her and laughing. Most of them had mugs of tea, held up as if in a toast.
