“Path of the bullet, sir. Straight through and out at the back, sir.”
“And the distance the man with the gun stood from Major Faulkner when he fired the shot?”
General Hardesty looked inquiringly at Joseph, but Joseph made no objection.
“The distance?” Faulkner repeated.
“Hard to say, sir,” Tredway answered.
“Touching him? Fifty feet? Half a mile?” Faulkner raised his eyebrows.
“Most like fifty feet, sir.”
“How do you know this, Corporal?”
“’Cos o’ the wound, sir. An’ how far the bullet went through.”
“And can you tell the kind of gun it was fired from? At least whether it was a handgun or a rifle? A British gun or a German one? Or French, perhaps?”
“We’ve got no French ’ere, sir,” Tredway said tartly. “They’re up farther to the east.” There was clear contempt in his voice for Faulkner’s ignorance. He was a man who shuffled papers, not one who fought.
“I was thinking of the gun itself, Corporal,” Faulkner corrected him. “Not the nationality of the man who fired it.”
There was a rustling in the room. Someone coughed.
Tredway flushed. “A rifle, sir.”
“British?”
“Couldn’t say, sir.” His jaw set hard.
“A rifle, possibly British, fired at apparently fifty feet,” Faulkner summarized. “Thank you, Corporal.” He gestured to invite Joseph to ask his questions.
Joseph stood up. Now that the moment had come he felt a sort of calm hopelessness. “Corporal Tredway, your knowledge is impressive, although I imagine after three years’ active service you have seen a great many wounds of all sorts? Rifle, revolver, pistol, shrapnel, shell splinters, even injuries caused by explosions, overturning gun carriages, panicking horses…”
Faulkner stared at him with mounting irritation.
Hardesty winced but did not interrupt. His expression suggested pity more than anger.
“Yes, Chaplain…I mean…Captain Reavley,” Tredway said, frowning.
“Any way to tell if they are caused by accident or by malice, Corporal?” Joseph asked.
“No, sir,” Tredway said, meeting Joseph’s eyes squarely. There was a flicker in them, as if he might have thought of smiling. “’Cept for horses panicking, like. That’s almost always accident. They don’t often do it maliciously. They’re better than people, that way.”
There was a slight ripple of laughter in the room.
Faulkner’s face tightened.
“And gun carriages,” Tredway added. “That’s more likely accident, down to stupidity…sir. They don’t have no malice neither.”
Joseph preempted Faulkner. “But gunshots would be most likely intended, I assume. Is there any way you can tell, from the injury itself?”
“No, sir. None at all, sir.”
“Thank you.”
Faulkner declined to pursue the issue. General Hardesty also did not take up his right to question the witness. He looked around slowly, gauging the emotion of the court, and perhaps judged correctly that almost to a man they were in sympathy with the accused. They would have to be forced or tricked into giving any evidence against them if it could be withheld, misinterpreted, or simply denied.
But Joseph knew it was a shallow victory. In the end it was the officers who would decide, not the men who crowded the benches or stood at the back waiting, their hands clenched, faces tense. There was no jury, no public opinion. Those who attended were either witnesses called or men who were off the front line due to injury.
The next witness took the stand. He recounted who he had seen—and where—on the day of Northrup’s death. He was neatly tricked by Faulkner into stating that most of the men charged, and Cavan in particular, had not been at their usual posts in the early evening. In fact, Cavan had not been in any of the places he usually was at that hour. The man’s testimony, intended to help, went to indicate that Cavan behaved out of character, and that no one knew where he was.
Joseph knew he would not improve the situation by questioning the man; more likely it would make it more obvious that he was lying in an attempt to save Cavan.
Hardesty looked as if he was aware that emotion was having a far larger effect than the facts, but he did not intervene.
Faulkner called more men and elicited similar responses, building a picture of curious and unexplained behavior that night. Each piece was minute, but placed carefully together, as Faulkner did, they were like the fractions of a mosaic, and the picture was chillingly clear. Twelve men were unable to find a single witness as to where they were. The conclusion was only implicit, but it sank with deeper and deeper weight on everyone in the hot and overcrowded room.
There was a brief recess. Joseph saw Judith come in. Actually what he saw was the crowded men move to make space for her, and then the light on the fair streaks of her hair, bleached from when the summer had been bright, before the battle at Passchendaele, and the rain. Their eyes met. She was frightened, but had he not known her so well he would not have seen it in her pale face.
The court resumed.
Faulkner began calling his other witnesses. This was the most difficult part for him, far worse than any defense Joseph might mount. He must prove some kind of motive for such a terrible and self-destructive act as mutiny, and by officers, in particular, who had until that time shown exemplary service. There cannot have been a man in the room, or beyond it in the regiment, who was not burningly aware that Cavan had been put up for the Victoria Cross. Compared with him Howard Northrup was both a moral coward and a military fool.
At the same time Faulkner must not allow anyone to suggest that Northrup had deserved his fate, or even that he was seriously incompetent. It must seem that every other man faced with the same situations might have given the same orders, with the same results. There must be motive, but no justification. It was a delicate balance, but he stood on the balls of his feet, weight slightly forward, voice confident.
Joseph looked over to where General Northrup sat, his face so pale the shadows under his eyes looked like old bruises. His lips were tight, his nose pinched as if he had long carried an inner pain which had finally come to a crisis.
Joseph turned away. To stare at a man in such distress was intrusive, the more so because Joseph would only add to it when circumstance allowed him. There was little room for compassion here, perhaps none at all. It was deeply against his instinct to strike at a man whose grief he had seen so openly, who had possibly even trusted him. But gentleness toward one now might yield the death of the others, and his loyalties could not be divided. Everyone else in the court might be evenhanded, but his duty could be only to the men whose champion he was.
Faulkner was careful in his questioning, almost to a fault. He called men as witnesses who had been on the edge of incidents, and were not caught up emotionally. By presenting such a bland view he showed that he was not ignoring the incidents. He conceded that they had occurred, robbing Joseph of the need to and if Joseph were to then call men who gave very different accounts, they would be seen as biased.
Their closeness would in itself color their views and they could easily be suspected of leaning too far in the opposite direction, of seeing fault in Northrup simply to justify the actions of their friends who now faced judgment. Joseph saw the trap, and yet he still feared overbalancing into it.
His hands clammy and his chest tight, he rose to cross-examine the third witness, a young soldier who had been at the front only a matter of three months. He came from the Derbyshire Peak District and had no ties with Cambridgeshire.
“Private Black,” Joseph began. “You have given us a clear account of this unfortunate accident with the gun carriage, which you say some of the men felt was Major Northrup’s fault. You saw nothing to suggest that it was?”
“No, sir,” Black replied. He looked uncomfortable and confused. He was very young, perhaps sixteen.
“But you say they were extremely angry?”
