and he was dead weight. In fact, twice Joseph was anxious enough about him to stop and make sure he was still breathing. He was not certain how hard Morel had hit him.
They had to carry him another laborious half mile along the road before they came to a car that had been blown to bits. But no matter how they tried to imagine it, there seemed no way to take any of it apart. Reluctantly they abandoned it and again began the arduous task of carrying him.
They were still three or four miles from the nearest trenches when they were passed by a couple of soldiers who had apparently become separated from a relief column. It was a summer night, cloudless with a three-quarter moon, and light enough for Joseph to see how gaunt they were. He judged them to be veterans who had been wounded, and sent back too soon out of desperation. He had seen the same in the British ranks. In so many ways this was a mirror image of home. It tore at him with a familiarity, an acute understanding he would rather not have had.
The two men stopped. Neither looked strong enough to help carry Geddes, for which Joseph was grateful. Geddes was going home to face trial. He would never fight again, but still it would be one deceit too far.
“Looking for the nearest field station?” the taller one asked.
“Yes,” Joseph replied. “Not sure how bad he is.”
Geddes must have been conscious. He started to wriggle and become extremely awkward to hold. Had they been alone Joseph would have threatened to drop him, and done it. Geddes was trying to shout.
“He’s in a lot of pain,” Morel offered. “We’re looking for something to wheel him on, if we can find anything.”
“There’s bound to be something with wheels,” the shorter man said hopefully. “Even something broken might do. We could fix it to take the weight. He’s nothing like as heavy as field artillery.”
“Nothing like as useful, either,” Morel said under his breath.
They walked together, alternating Geddes’s body from one to another. The Germans insisted on taking their turn, and there was no way to refuse them without offense.
They had gone another half mile when they came to a pony cart at the side of the road. One wheel was blown to bits and what was left of the pony’s carcass was still between the shafts. They put Geddes down, Joseph adjusting the gag to make sure it was not working loose, and also retightening the binding around his body so it was less obviously a restraint and rather more like a bandage.
The other three undid the harness and lifted the broken trap off, then hauled it up onto the road. It sat sideways because of the missing wheel.
“Got to find another wheel for it,” Morel said thoughtfully. “Even one a different size would be better than nothing. Pity we have no tools. It won’t be so easy. Have to make do with lashing things together. Still, not far to go.”
The Germans had introduced themselves as Kretschmer and Wolff. Wolff and Morel now wandered off to see what they could find. Joseph and Kretschmer set about getting the three good wheels clean from the rubbish and making sure they could turn as freely as possible.
Wolff reappeared with a small wheel from a barrow of some sort, and Morel had a length of rope and a short piece of chain. Using everything, and considerable ingenuity, they lashed together a fourth leg for the cart, with the wheel on the end. It still did not make the height exactly, but it was a great help. Pleased with themselves, they laid Geddes on it as comfortably as possible, and set off on the road, taking turns, two at a time, carrying the shafts. The wheels squeaked appallingly.
“Here,” Kretschmer said cheerfully, digging into his pocket and bringing out a small bottle. “Have some schnapps.” He offered it to Joseph.
Joseph thanked him and took a mouthful. It felt as if a fire had exploded in his stomach. He was sure he could belch flame. Coughing hard, he thanked Kretschmer and passed it on to Morel, who took it rather more easily, then offered it to Wolff.
A mile later, after a couple more changes of shift as to who was pulling, they passed the schnapps around again. Joseph realized with a smile that they were marching in time to the squeaking of the wheels. The last shreds of cloud had gone and the moonlight shone pale on the cratered road, making black skeletons of the few shattered vehicles and broken trees. In the distance they could make out the standing walls of a burned house.
Wolff began to sing a drinking song. His voice was light and pleasant. Joseph remembered a little of the tune from his visits before the war, and he joined in.
An ambulance passed them going back, and a munitions supply convoy passed going forward to the lines.
They found a second song, and a third. There were still at least two miles farther to go. Joseph started to worry about how they were going to explain leaving these two men who in some absurd way had become friends. The last drop of schnapps was gone and none of them had any food. The squeaking of the wheels was incessant, and they were all unquestionably a little drunk.
Wolff began to sing again, this time in English, and they all joined in.
“There’s a long, long trail a-winding, into the land of my dreams,
“Where the nightingales are singing and a white moon beams…”
They went through all the verses, then began again. The three-quarter moon lit the road, but the only sound apart from their voices was the squeaking of the wheels, and the guns roaring a couple of miles ahead. The odors of bodily waste and putrefying flesh were already strong, and in the distance there was the flash of red and yellow mortar fire.
Joseph had no idea how they would get through the lines, other than the same way as they had come. Additionally, they would have to untie Geddes so he could run. But first they would have to find a way of parting from Kretschmer and Wolff, who with luck, would have a specific place to report.
But for this moment, his feet hurt, and his hands were blistered from holding the cart. His back and his legs ached and he was so hungry he could have eaten a raw turnip with pleasure, if he could have found one. But he was light-headed with schnapps, singing in the moonlight, and there was a kind of happiness in it that was desperately, passionately real.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
But all the way across the Channel, and then standing crowded in the troop train from Dover to London, jostled and jolted, kept upright largely by the press of other men’s bodies around him, he felt a deep and abiding misery that was almost paralyzing. There seemed no light in his inner landscape at all. Had he really imagined the court-martial would solve anything?
Rationally, perhaps the idiocy of it all, the casualty toll climbing toward a quarter million men for the gaining of one shattered town, would have been enough to make sane men call a halt to it, at whatever cost, on whatever terms. But was there any sanity left? No one looked at the whole monumental disaster. They all looked at their own little patch of it.
Perhaps it was too big for anyone to comprehend the ruin that stretched right from the Atlantic waves that swallowed men and ships off the battered shores of Britain right to the blood-soaked sands of Mesopotamia, to the snowbound graves of Russia. Europe was a charnel house. No one could count the millions of dead, let alone those maimed forever.
And yet Judith Reavley was prepared to risk her life to help eleven mutineers escape and flee to Switzerland, and Joseph was equally willing to risk his life to bring them back! In the scheme of things both actions were equally pointless, and just as likely to end in death.
Perhaps that was what hurt? Joseph had hardly any chance of succeeding, which—if he were a logical man —he would have known; but he wasn’t logical! He was an idealist, a dreamer, seeing the world he wanted more clearly than the real one.
Mason wished he did not like him so much. He had wit and imagination, courage to the point of stupidity—no,
