At Some Disputed Barricade (32 page)

“It’s mutilation, not death yet,” Joseph said softly, willing himself to believe it.

“Isn’t it?” There was little hope in Morel’s face.

Joseph started forward. “Let’s see if anyone’s encountered Geddes.”

They walked in silence for more than a mile. They passed only one person: an ancient man leading a plow horse, a dog at his heels.

Then Joseph picked up the conversation. “What are we going to say? I should be able to make them believe I’m a priest. And that I’m nearly forty. They’ll believe I’m that old.”

Morel gave him a wry look. He was in his mid-twenties, but he looked gaunt and there were deep lines in his face. “Or more,” he said drily. “But so are plenty of fighting men. I’d better think of something, and before we reach that farm.” He gestured toward a group of buildings perhaps half a mile away. One side was black from fire.

“The simplest is best,” Joseph answered, having already given the matter some consideration. “You are a priest also.”

“What happened to my collar?” Morel asked the obvious. “German priests wear them, too.”

“Swiss,” Joseph corrected him. “Your accent isn’t good enough for a native. You were helping someone and got blood all over it. You could wash yourself, but your collar and tunic were ruined. Don’t forget the tunic, nobody gets blood only on their collar. They’ll know you’re lying. Another tunic is no problem from a dead man, but he wouldn’t have a priest’s collar. You know enough from your prewar studies of biblical languages to pass as long as you don’t try to conduct a service.”

Morel smiled. “You lie better than I expected.”

“Thank you!” Joseph said sarcastically. “Geddes won’t get away with that. So what would you do in his place?”

The farm was only a hundred yards away now. It was dilapidated, mended with old boards and clearly whatever had come to hand. There obviously had been no glass to replace the shattered windows, and perhaps no putty either. It must take either courage or desperation for the inhabitants to have remained here.

“He doesn’t have more than a few words of German,” Morel said dubiously. “But he’s a fly bastard. He’ll have thought of something.”

“If you don’t understand, best to pretend you can’t hear,” Joseph observed. “Maybe he’ll pretend to be shell-shocked and deaf.”

Morel looked at him with a flash of respect, but he said nothing. They were at the entrance to the farmyard. An elderly woman was putting out kitchen scraps for a few scrawny chickens. She was rawboned and thin, her face seamed with grief. She looked up at them with alarm.

Joseph smiled at her. “Bless you, mother,” he said quietly in German. “Can you spare us a little clean water to drink?”

She saw his collar, and the fear melted out of her eyes. Joseph was ashamed at the ease of the deception. “Of course,” she answered him, only glancing at Morel. “And food? Are you hungry?” That was a gracious formality. Of course they were hungry. Everyone was hungry.

Joseph hesitated. Which was worse—to take her food or to insult her by implying that she had too little to give away?

“Come,” she directed, and led them into the farmhouse kitchen. It was stone-floored, with heavy wooden rafters across the ceiling from which in better times there would have been a flitch of bacon and strings of onions, as well as the few dried herbs there were now. Being late August there was no need to heat the room, and she had allowed all but the embers to go out in the big black range. She had probably been going to eat whatever she had cold. Now she opened up the door of the range and prepared to put a small piece of wood inside.

“It is hot walking,” Joseph said quickly. “Pastor Morel and I would both be grateful for cold water, if that is possible? My name is Josef…”—he picked the first name that came into his head—“…Bauer.”

She introduced herself shyly and then turned her attention to cutting dark rye bread into slices and finding a small portion of cheese and half an onion. She served it carefully on polished plates, and with glasses of cold water, presumably from the well. They were far enough back from the battle line for the water to be unpolluted.

Joseph began the conversation by explaining their presence. He said they were looking for a young man, a parishioner in peacetime, who was badly shell-shocked and who had run away, terrified. They were afraid if they did not find him he might be shot as a deserter, but since the incident he had been deaf and would not understand. Had she seen such a young man pass this way?

She said she had not seen him herself, but her neighbor three miles to the south had mentioned just such a man to her only yesterday. They thanked her profusely and took their leave. She had given them directions to the nearest village, and then to the small town beyond. She felt certain that anyone in the young man’s position would head in that direction, hoping to hide and find shelter and possibly food before making his way home.

They thanked her and left.

They passed munitions and supply columns going toward the front, men on foot going back from leave and brief recovery after minor injuries, and raw recruits going to join the front. Most of these last were painfully young and their faces soft with the last remnants of childhood. Now they were struggling to mask fear and honor their commitment, and their families’ faith in them. Many would already have lost fathers and older brothers.

“Jesus wept!” Morel said under his breath. “That blind boy on the right looked just like Snowy Nunn! What the hell are we doing here, Chaplain? What are we doing anywhere except at home?”

Joseph did not bother answering. Platitudes were no use anyway, and there was nothing else to offer but words that had all been said before.

They found shelter for the night in someone’s byre. Even though it was dry, clean, and perfectly comfortable, the owner apologized, quite unnecessarily. The next morning they were offered a kind of gruel for breakfast. They ate it gratefully and without asking what was in it. Everyone they saw was hungry, frightened, trying hard to hang on to some dignity and a shred of hope.

Morel knew nothing of the Peacemaker, and for a few moments Joseph was overcome with the longing to talk to Matthew, to try to explain why looking at this land, these people, he could understand the dreams and the pain that had driven a man to want peace at any price. The world in which right and wrong had seemed so obvious was gone like a bubble grasped at by a hand, disappeared in an instant.

But he could not say as much to Morel. Morel needed him to be certain of at least something—therefore he must seem so.

Finally it was Morel who broke the silence. “Will you go back to St. John’s?” he asked, staring straight ahead, avoiding Joseph’s eyes.

Joseph was appalled. Is that what Morel thought of him, that he would go back to the same old escape, exactly as if nothing had happened? Build himself another cocoon!

“I don’t imagine there’ll be much to go back to,” he said a little sharply. “I can’t see many people wanting to learn biblical languages in the aftermath of this, can you?”

“They have their uses,” Morel said with a frown. “Perhaps if we’d studied the past a little more diligently we’d have seen further into the future.”

“That’s a leisure pursuit,” Joseph said. “I don’t think we’ll have much leisure in the years after the war. It isn’t going to be the same.”

“
Nothing’s
going to be the same,” Morel agreed with intense earnestness. “Women are doing half the jobs men used to. A woman’s life isn’t defined by who she marries anymore. It won’t go back to that, not now. Think of your sister.”

Joseph knew he meant Judith, but even Hannah was changed. All over Europe there were women who had learned to manage alone, to find courage and learn skills that had not been imagined before the war.

“You can’t turn time backward,” he said aloud.

“Good God, no!” Morel was suddenly savage. “Not in anything! I’ve fought beside men who used to wait on me at table or clean my boots. We can’t and mustn’t go back to that.”

“We won’t.” Perhaps because Joseph had been home on leave so little, and then only to St. Giles, where social barriers were as old as the land and who owned and worked it, most of the change had made little impression on him. He had always known men like Barshey Gee, Snowy Nunn, and the others. He had played with men like them in the village school, knowing they would go on to work with their hands, and he would go up to university.

“There’ll be a new government,” Morel said thoughtfully. “If they don’t care for the sick and disabled, then we’ll force them to. There’ll be legislation so it’s every man’s right to work, or if there’s no work, then to be cared for, to have medicine, food, a roof over his head regardless, and over his children’s. And the right to be taught because he has the brains to learn.”

He was walking with his shoulders hunched, muscles tight. “Not out of charity, but because it’s every man’s right. We’re quick enough to call him up to fight in the blood and filth of the trenches and to die for his country. And he came in the millions, without a question or a complaint. We owe, Chaplain! And by God, if I live through this, I’m going to do what I can. Not just for them, but for ourselves. What are we worth if we don’t?”

It was a challenge. Joseph knew he meant it. It was for the men he led that he had been willing to mutiny against Northrup, and that was blazingly clear now. It was not one isolated anger or a personal rebellion. It was his nature, and he would be as true to it in civilian life as he was now. Joseph could imagine him in the future, a firebrand politician fighting for social justice, with a decency man to man that owed nothing to charity. The loyalty in the face of horror would not fade just because the guns were silent.

Nor would the suffering. Only a fool could imagine that. The dead would never return, nor would most of the crippled or blinded ever be whole again.

Was Morel waiting for him to say what he would do? The silence within his own head demanded it. There was only one decent answer: to go back into an active ministry, if there was one that would have him. What faith would there be after this? Millions would be desperate for help, comfort, and hope in the future, a belief that there was meaning to the ruin of so much. But would they look to God for it? Or would the Church seem as much an anachronism swallowed in the past as the golden afternoons of cricket and tea on the lawn in that last gilded summer of 1914?

And could he do it alone, without a wife to encourage him, explain the village gossip, the relationships he did not even see, to pick up his mistakes and oversights, simply to believe in him?

Joseph had no answer for himself, never mind for Morel. “In any event I’ll not go back to St. John’s.”

“Didn’t think you would.” Morel smiled.

It was the second night, after a gaudy sunset painted across the southwestern sky, that they arrived at the bombed-out part of a small town where they hoped to find Geddes. They were moving carefully, aware that he was a fugitive and although he would not expect them, he would be wary. He spoke little German and knew he was in enemy territory, and a hunted man.

For their own safety they had long ago discarded their French rifles, and even Morel’s British Army revolver. As priests they had no justification for carrying them, much less for using them. Geddes, on the other hand, would certainly have armed himself with a German pistol to go with his masquerade as a German soldier.

There was little light in the sky and it was several moments before Morel was even certain that the man they had spotted was Geddes. He waited, watching as the man looked one way then the other, preparing to settle himself for a brief rest. His face was haggard, stubble growth on his cheeks. He could easily have been what he pretended: shell-shocked, exhausted, terrified because he could not hear.

Deliberately Morel tapped his boot on the stone lintel of what was left of the house. The man spun around, facing the last of the light from the fading west. He saw only Morel’s outline in the archless doorway. There was a second when he was uncertain what to do. His movement had betrayed that he could hear. That ruse was lost to him. He could not recognize Morel, who was deliberately standing with his back to the light, and one hand near his hip where a gun would have been—had he still had one.

Joseph was at the far side, closer to Geddes. When he saw Morel nod, he moved to stand close enough to Geddes that he could push a small piece of wood into his side, like the barrel of a gun. “Don’t move, Geddes,” he said quietly. “I’d rather deal with you alive, but if need be, dead will serve.”

Geddes froze. He might not have known Joseph’s voice, but the fact that he had spoken to him in English was sufficient.

Morel strode forward and took the piece of wood. “Thank you,” he said easily. “Now I think we should all start off home while it’s still dark. It’s a long hike. But as long as we make the lines before dawn, we have as good a chance as we’ll get.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Geddes said flatly. “Shoot me if you want to.”

Morel was not in the least perturbed. “Actually I do rather want to,” he said quite lightly. “If you hadn’t shot and killed Northrup, we wouldn’t all have this present spot of bother. What the hell did you do that for? We could have made our point without hurting him.”

“Maybe you could,” Geddes said sullenly. “What about the poor bloody soldiers he was going to order into the next stupid piece of action? Wouldn’t be you, would it, Major! Your skin’s safe.”

“Not now, it isn’t,” Morel answered. “But a little testimony from you would help.”

Geddes sat down deliberately. “Too bad.” His sneer was visible in the half-light. “Because I’m staying here. Shoot me, if that’s what you want. It won’t get you anything—no testimony, no defense. Please yourself.”

“I wasn’t thinking of shooting you to death,” Morel told him. “Something rather more painful, but not fatal—at least not yet.”

Geddes was motionless. When he spoke, his voice wobbled a little. “You wouldn’t…”

“The Chaplain might not,” Morel admitted. “But I would. The way I see it, Geddes, it’s your life or mine. And not only mine, but Cavan’s and all the others’. Put like that, and you bloody bet I would!”