“He admitted to murder. That is different.”
“Not one of your village men, Chaplain?”
“No.” Joseph knew what was coming next. But at least they had left the subject of the escape, for a moment.
“Could that be why he is guilty?”
“If you are suggesting all Gloucestershire men are murderers, that is ridiculous,” Joseph retorted.
“I am suggesting, sir, that your loyalty to your own men supersedes all honor or balance or judgment on your part. Fighting together in these appalling circumstances, and your fearful losses, have warped your judgment and upset the balance of your thinking. We have no one’s word for it but yours and Captain Morel’s that any of these events in Major Northrup’s home village ever took place.”
“Are those your last questions to me?” Joseph found his voice was trembling and there were pins and needles tingling in his fingers. The last chance, the one he had been hoping to avoid since the beginning, was now facing him.
“They are,” Faulkner replied with a gleam of satisfaction.
Joseph turned to Hardesty. “Sir, I need to call one last witness who can substantiate the greater part of what I have said.”
“Who is it, Captain Reavley?”
“General Northrup, sir.”
Hardesty stared at him, eyes wide, questioning.
Joseph stared back. The fact that he had made the decision did not lessen his revulsion at it.
“Very well,” Hardesty agreed. “General Northrup, sir. Will you take the stand.” It was an order, not a request. There was no choice for either of them.
Slowly, as if his whole body ached, Northrup rose to his feet and walked forward, back straight, shoulders angular and rigid. He was sworn in and turned to face Joseph. There was nothing gentle in his face, no silent plea for mercy. He looked like a man facing his execution. It seemed Faulkner had convinced him that Joseph was utterly partisan, a man without justice, only blind loyalty to his own, regardless of innocence or guilt.
Joseph wavered. He longed to be able to prove him wrong. He had mercy, honor, a sense of justice being for all, as it was for none. But his calling here was to fight for his own men, and that did not allow him space to cover Major Howard Northrup’s weaknesses with mercy. He wanted General Northrup to know that, to understand. He realized in the same moment that to do the right thing was necessary, to need to be seen to do it was a luxury, even a self-indulgence, and completely irrelevant.
“General Northrup,” he began, his voice firmer than he had expected. “Would you confirm for the court that you live at Wood End Manor in Gloucestershire, and that your son Major Howard Northrup grew up there, and lived there until the outbreak of war in 1914?”
“That is correct,” Northrup replied coldly.
“Did Corporal Geddes’s family live in the same village at that time?”
“Yes.”
“Did Corporal John Geddes’s father become involved in a business venture with Major Northrup?”
General Northrup stiffened, his face pink. “I did not concern myself in my son’s financial affairs,” he replied quietly.
Joseph loathed doing it, but his voice was perfectly steady. “Every man in this court would understand your desire to protect your son’s name, sir, but you are under oath, and other men’s lives depend upon your honesty— good men, soldiers like yourself. Are you swearing on your word as an officer that you at no time involved yourself, financially or otherwise, in your son’s business affairs?”
Northrup’s face burned scarlet. “I…I lent him money when it was…necessary. Once or twice. Not…not as a habit, sir.”
“Would it be truthful to say that you indulged many of his desires, and that when he overspent, you paid his debts?” Joseph pressed. “Or did you never do that?”
“I did it…. It was a matter of honor,” Northrup said savagely. Hiseyes blazed in sockets so shadowed as to seem hollows in the bones of his head. He had aged bitterly in the weeks since his son’s body had been found.
“Did the Geddes family lose their home?”
Northrup’s hand jerked up. He drew his breath in as if to deny it, then remained silent.
“Is the Geddes family still in the home in which Corporal Geddes grew up?” Joseph insisted. “If necessary we can find out, but it will delay proceedings, surely pointlessly. The answer will be the same. Is it something you wish to hide?”
Faulkner rose to his feet, and Hardesty waved him sharply down again.
“No, sir,” Northrup said very quietly. “I believe they were evicted.”
Joseph chose his question very carefully. “Did your son’s business succeed or fail?”
“It failed.”
Joseph was aware of Faulkner tense in his seat, ready to spring to his feet any moment. He would need only a shred of a chance.
“Might it be possible that Corporal Geddes could believe that was Major Northrup’s fault, whether it was or not?”
“It…” Northrup swallowed, a flash of gratitude in his eyes, there and then gone again instantly. “He might have believed it, yes.”
“Thank you, General Northrup. That is all I have to ask you, sir.”
Faulkner shot to his feet, stared at Northrup’s ashen face, then very slowly sat down again. “I have nothing to add to this…this fiasco,” he said angrily.
Hardesty looked at Northrup. “Thank you, sir,” he said quietly. “The court has nothing further to say, either.”
In a room electric with hostility, Faulkner made a closing speech demanding justice against one man who had committed murder, and eleven others whose act of mutiny had condoned it and made them accessories both before and after the fact. He requested that the court sentence them all to death, for the sake of law, justice, and the values the army and the country stood for. He demanded that they not allow sentimentality or fear of the enemy to dissuade them from doing their duty.
He sat down again, still with the court in utter silence.
Joseph stood up.
“The circumstances of this war are unlike anything we have ever known before,” he began. “A man who has not floundered in the mud of no-man’s-land, faced every fire, and seen his friends and his brothers torn apart by shellfire, riddled with bullets, or gassed to death, cannot even imagine what courage it takes to face it not just day after day, but year after year. Many of us will never leave here. We know that, and we accept it. Almost all of us came here because we wished to, we came to fight for the land and the people we love, our own people.”
He took a deep breath. He realized with surprise how passionately he believed what he was saying. “But in order to walk into hell, we need the loyalty of our brothers, whether of blood and kin, or of common cause. We have to trust them without question, trust that they will share with us their last piece of bread, the warmth of their bodies in the ice of winter, and that they will never sacrifice our lives uselessly, on the altars of their own pride, or expect us to pay the price of their ignorance. If you will follow a man into the darkness and the mouth of the guns, then you have to know beyond question that he will do the same for you, that he will give all he has to be the leader you believe him to be.”
He was speaking to Hardesty and the two men beside him, in whose hands judgment rested, but he faced the body of the court.
“Captain Morel and Captain Cavan, and nine of the other ten men here, took the action of trying to curb Major Northrup in order to fulfill the duty of trust they know their men placed in them.
“They were guilty of gross insubordination. It was the price they were willing to pay to save the lives of their fellows. They will accept judgment for that at the hands of their peers, of men who know what it is to be a soldier at Passchendaele, and they will serve whatever punishment those men decide is just, because they have walked the same path.”
He sat down again, the sweat prickling on his skin, his heart pounding. “Thank you, Captain,” Hardesty said quietly. He looked at the men on either side of him. “Gentlemen, we shall return to the farmhouse kitchen in case
