He stepped and banged into a piece of broken riveting where the earth wall had collapsed.
It was Mason again. This was playing straight into the Peacemaker’s hands. Was he behind it? Or was Joseph just indulging his delusions? The last letter from Matthew had said he was chasing down the old enemy at last. There was no other way to interpret that. Now it looked as if thanks to a catalogue of stupid mistakes, the Peacemaker was going to win after all. Britain would be in mutiny and defeat, with the best part of a million men dead, countless more wounded in body and crushed in mind and spirit. It was a defeat he could not even have imagined when they first left for France three years ago, thinking they would be home for Christmas. It had been all heroism and honor then, dreams of glory. Now there was only despair.
It would have been better to have turned a blind eye to Northrup’s murder, better even to have shot the man himself, than have it come to this. What was the point at which he had made the wrong judgment? Perhaps that was the secret of life, knowing when was the precise moment at which you decide to do something irrevocable, rather than being a coward, a man always thinking, poised on the edge of decision, and never making it.
Joseph went to bed in his own dugout a little after midnight and slept more deeply than he had expected. However, just before dawn he woke with a jolt, his heart pounding, the sweat pouring off his body. Everything was familiar—the books, the picture of Dante, his chair and desk—but there was rifle fire close at hand and men’s voices, high-pitched, shouting.
He rolled off the bunk and stood up, his body shaking. There were more shouts, and bursts of fire rather than controlled aiming.
There was a noise immediately outside on the steps, then the sacking curtain was yanked aside and a figure blocked out the shred of light.
Joseph half expected to see the spike-crested helmet of a German officer. He made a supreme effort to calm himself and look, and realized it was a British Tommy, but bareheaded.
“Capt’n Reavley! You there, sir?”
“Yes, I am.” Joseph swallowed. “What is it, Tiddly Wop?”
“They’re gone, Captain. All of ’em, ’cepting Captain Cavan. Gawd knows how it happened, but they’re gone!” Andrews replied.
Joseph struggled to grasp what the words meant. It could not possibly be true. “Gone?” he repeated foolishly. “You mean they’ve been taken somewhere else? They’re going to have the court-martial at another regiment?”
“Oi don’t mean been took, sir. Oi mean gone themselves! Nobody knows where they are. They escaped. Could ’ave gone anywhere.”
Now Joseph was cold, as if his hands and feet hardly belonged to him. “They couldn’t have got out of the farmhouse. What happened to the guard? How could they get out?”
“Guards are all tied up like turkeys for dinner, but not a hair of their head broke.”
“You said Captain Cavan is still there?” Joseph was bitterly disappointed. For a moment he had believed the impossible, and now reality plunged him back even deeper. “That doesn’t make sense, Tiddly Wop.”
“Since when did anything in this bleeding war make sense, Chaplain? If it does to you then, whoi in’t you telling anyone else?”
“The other eleven have gone? How did they get out?”
“No idea,” Tiddly Wop said with a shadow of anger. “An’ if Oi did, Oi wouldn’t be telling. Oi just thought you’d loike to know.”
“I do! I…I just wish Captain Cavan had gone, too.”
A faint glimmer of light caught Tiddly Wop’s teeth gleaming as he grinned. “Sorry. Oi shouldn’t have said that, Chaplain. Course you do.”
There was more shouting outside but the rifle fire had stopped. Tiddly Wop turned around and made his way out, Joseph on his heels. It was relatively quiet, the heavy guns only sporadic. Joseph stared around at the figures sprinting across the open ground, and others standing almost idly. There was a military car parked on the driest piece of ground. A man in officer’s uniform stood beside it, waving his arms, apparently giving directions to the others.
“Got to look loike we want to find them,” Tiddly Wop said sententiously.
“How long ago did they go?” Joseph asked.
Tiddly Wop shrugged. “How do Oi know? They could be on their way to Paris by now. Only more likely they’ll go to Switzerland. Oi would.”
“The Swiss border’s hundreds of miles away,” Joseph retorted.
“Then Oi hope they get a lift. Not that they would, of course!” he added hastily, taking a nervous glance at Joseph.
“They might have gone the other way altogether.” Joseph entered the conspiracy without hesitation. “Maybe making for the sea.”
“Back to Blighty?”
“No, more likely Sweden.” Joseph found himself smiling. He knew it was stupid to be amused. They would be found and brought back. Cavan was probably showing more sense in staying. And it might buy more time. It could take several days to catch them all, if they ever did. Some might get killed, in the ordinary course of the war. “I wonder if we can help,” he added aloud.
“Roight!” Tiddly Wop agreed. “Oi’ll go an’ see if Lieutenant Moore wants a hand. He don’t know north from south, that one. If someone don’t give him a hand he’ll end up in Switzerland himself!”
Joseph offered to look for the escapees, and he spent the next hour pretending to search. Like the rest of the men, he generally made sure that all signs of which way they might have gone were thoroughly obliterated.
He shared a Dixie can of tea with Colonel Hook, sitting in the back of the supply trench on a couple of sandbags.
“Find any trace?” Hook asked, eyebrows raised.
“None at all,” Joseph said immediately. He met Hook’s eyes with complete candor.
“No,” Hook replied. “Didn’t think you would.”
By midday it was a very different matter. General Northrup had returned, and word had come up the line that Lieutenant Colonel Faulkner would arrive before sunset. Northrup was furious.
“How can you be so totally incompetent?” he shouted at Hook. His face was pinched and two blotches of color stained his cheeks. “Don’t you mount some kind of guard? For God’s sake, your command is falling to pieces around you! Pull yourself together, man!”
They were in the small command post. It was little more than a room in a farm outbuilding, furnished with a table and half a dozen chairs. Northrup was pacing the floor, his boots scratching on the wooden boards. He swung his arms and jabbed the air.
The accusation was grossly unjust, and both tragic and absurd. Joseph intervened, although both of them outranked him.
“The men are exhausted, sir,” he said to Northrup. “No one is getting more than a few hours’ sleep any night. The wounded are pouring back from the battlefront and we are finding it more than we can do to get them to hospital, keep any sort of supplies coming forward of either food or ammunition. The only men we’ve got to spare for guarding prisoners are those who are wounded already. We don’t know what happened, and blaming them is premature and deeply unfair. In any other circumstances they’d be invalided out and taken care of in a decent hospital.”
“I know the conditions are hard, Captain Reavley,” Northrup said with a tight little grimace. “This is not the only part of the line battered almost to breaking—although I grant you it is the worst. But it’s all the more important we keep up our standards, for the sake of morale.”
“If somebody is found to be culpable, it will be attended to.” Hook broke his long silence, rising to his feet and picking up a pile of dispatches. “Now, sir, if you will excuse me, I must go and see to some of these things.”
As soon as he had left, Northrup stared at Joseph. “This is a preposterous situation, Captain. I realize that your sympathies are with your men, and perhaps that is how you see your calling, but this cannot be ignored as if it were not a capital offense.” He stared at Joseph accusingly. “You must realize that? Now, of all times, we must stand fast to those principles we believe in, when there is the greatest temptation to give in, or to cut and run. Officers must set an example. It is what we are here for.”
Joseph drew in breath to argue, to tell him forcefully how absurd and cruel and utterly pointless he was, that
