Shoulder the Sky (2 page)

Sam was ashen, his jaw clenched so tight the muscles stood out like cords. "We have to see it, Corliss!" His voice shook in spite of everything he could do to steady it. "We have to stop the bleeding!" He looked at Joseph, his eyes desperate.

Joseph tore open the dressing and, speaking gently to the injured man, took his hand and, without examining it, pressed the bandage and the lint over the streaming wound, then bound it as well as he could. He had very little idea how many fingers were left.

"Come on, oP feller," Charlie said, trying to help Corliss to his feet. "Oi'll get you back to the doc's and they'll do it for you proper."

Sam climbed to his feet and pulled Joseph aside as Charlie and Corliss stumbled past.

"Joe, can you go with them?" Sam said urgently. He swallowed, gulping. "Corliss is in a hell of a state. He's been on the edge of fun king it for days. I've got to find out what happened, put in a report, but the medics'll ask him what caused it... Answer for him, will you?" He stopped, but it was painfully apparent he wanted to say more.

Suddenly Joseph understood. Sam was terrified the man had injured himself deliberately. Some men panicked, worn down by fear, cold and horror, and put their hands up above the parapet precisely so a sniper would get them. A hand maimed was 'a Blighty one', and they got sent home. But if it was self-inflicted, it was considered cowardice in the face of the enemy. It warranted a court martial, and possibly even the death sentence. Corliss's nerves may have snapped. It happened to men sometimes. Anything could trigger it off: the incessant noise of bombardment, the dirt, body lice; for some it was waking in the night with rats crawling over your body or worse, your face. The horror of talking one moment to a man you had grown up with, the next seeing him blown to bits, perhaps armless and legless but still alive, taking minutes of screaming in agony to die it was more than some could take. For others it was the guilt of knowing that your bullets or your bayonet were doing the same to a German you had never met, but who was your own age, and essentially just like you warm, breathing, laughing, eating. Sometimes they crept over no man's land at night and swapped food. Occasionally you could even hear them singing. Different things broke different men. Corliss was a sapper. His nerve could have gone at the claustrophobia of crawling inside the tunnels under the earth, the terror of being buried alive.

"Help him," Sam begged. "I can't go ... and they won't believe me anyway."

"Of course." Joseph did not hesitate. He grasped Sam's arm for an instant, then turned and made his way back over the duck-boards to the opening of the communication trench. Charlie Gee and Corliss were far enough ahead of him to be out of sight round one of the numerous dogleg bends. He hurried, his feet slithering on the wet boards. In some places chicken wire had been tacked over them to give a grip, but no one had bothered here. He must catch up with them before they reached the supply trench and someone else started asking questions.

Morale was Joseph's job to keep up courage and belief, to help the injured, too often the dying. He wrote letters home for those who could not, either through injury or inability to put into words emotions that overwhelmed them, and for which there was no common understanding. He tried to offer some meaning to pain almost beyond bearing. They were already in the ninth month of the bitterest and most all-consuming war the world had even seen.

To begin with they had believed it would be over by Christmas, but that had been December 1914. Now it was April 1915, the British Expeditionary Force of almost one hundred thousand men was wiped out, either dead or injured, and it was desperate that new recruits were found. Kitchener had called for a million men, and they would be fresh, healthy, not having endured a winter in the open in the unceasing cold and rain. They would not have lice, swollen and peeling feet, or a dozen other miseries to debilitate them.

Joseph crossed the reserve trench and saw men moving. A soldier was singing to himself "It's a Long Way to Tipperary' as he poured water out of a petrol can, wrinkling his nose at the smell. He balanced the dixie tin over a precarious arrangement of candles to heat it. He raised a hand to Joseph and smiled without distracting his attention from his task.

The men in this segment were from the Cambridgeshire villages around Joseph's home of Selbourne St. Giles. Most of them knew each other by their local nicknames. Joseph was thirty-six, and for the years leading up to the war had been a lecturer in Biblical languages at St. John's College in Cambridge. Before that he had been in the ministry. He knew most of these men's families. His own youngest sister, Judith, was twenty-four, older than many of these.

He thought of her with a twisting confusion of emotions. He was intensely proud that she had volunteered to use her one distinctive skill, driving, to come here and work wherever she could help. She had been both a joy and a menace on the roads at home, but here she coped with the mud, the breakdowns, the long hours and the horror of wounded and dying men with a courage he had not known she possessed.

The trench was climbing a bit, and drier. The slit of sky overhead was blue, with a thin drift of clouds, like mares' tails.

Joseph was afraid for Judith in many ways. The obvious danger of injury or even death was only a part of it. There was also the vulnerability of the mind and heart to the destruction around her: the drowning in pain, the loss of so many young men, and the inability of the ambulances to do more than carry them from one place to another, very often too late. He knew the questions that tormented his own mind. No sane person could be wholehearted about war, not if they had seen it. It was one thing to stand in England in the early spring with the hedgerows beginning to bud, wild birds singing and daffodils in the gardens and along the banks under the trees, and speak of the nobility of war. It was an idea, even at times a noble one. Most people despised the thought of surrender.

Out here it was a reality. You were always cold frozen at times and usually wet. All waking hours were occupied with monotonous routine: carrying, cleaning, digging, shoring up walls, trying to heat food and find drinkable water. You were always tired. And then there were the short interludes of horror: fear crawling in your stomach, shattering noise, and the blood and the pain, men dead young men you had known and liked. Some would still be crippled long after the war passed into history; the nightmares would never be over for them.

And maybe Germany had invaded 'poor little' Belgium, and a matter of honour rested on it. Invasion was wrong; that was the one thing about which there was no question in anyone's mind. But the few German soldiers Joseph had seen were in every way but uniform indistinguishable from the Englishmen beside him. They were young, tired, dirty, and confused like everyone else.

When a successful raiding party captured someone and brought him back, Joseph had often been chosen to question the prisoner because before the war he had spent time in Germany and spoke the language not only fluently but with pleasure. Looking back on those times now was a wrenching, muddled sort of pain. He had been treated with such courtesy, laughed with them, shared their food. It was the land of Beethoven and Goethe, of science and philosophy and vast myths and dreams. How could they now be doing this to each other?

Joseph turned the last corner, and up a couple of steps he caught up with Charlie Gee and Corliss, but the trench was still too narrow for him to help. Two men could barely walk side by side, let alone three abreast.

The main dressing station was in a tent a few yards away. At least it was dry, and no more of a target than any other structure. It was quite spacious inside. After a bad raid they had to deal with dozens of men, moving them in and out as rapidly as ambulances could take them back to proper hospitals. Just now there was a lull. Only two men were inside, grey-faced, their uniforms bloodstained, waiting to be moved.

Charlie Gee gave a shout, and a young doctor appeared, saw Corliss and immediately went to him.

"Come on, we'll get that fixed up," he said calmly. His eyes flickered to Joseph and then back again. It was easy enough to see in his haggard, hollow-eyed face the fear that a hand wound was self-inflicted.

Joseph moved forward quickly. "We did what we could to stem the bleeding, Doctor, but I don't know exactly what happened. He's a sapper; I imagine something collapsed underground. Maybe one of the props gave way."

The doctor's face eased a little. "Right." He turned back to Corliss and took him inside.

Joseph thanked Charlie Gee and watched him amble back up the connecting trench towards the front line again.

An ambulance pulled up, a square-bodied Ford Model T, a bit like a delivery van. It was open at the front, and with a closed part at the back, which could carry up to five men laid out in stretchers, more if they were sitting up. The driver jumped out. He was a broad-shouldered young man with short hair that sat up on the crown of his head. He saluted Joseph, then looked at the more seriously injured of the two men waiting, whose right leg was heavily splinted.

"Don't need ter carry yer," he said cheerfully. "Reckon an arm round yer and yer'll be fine. "Ave yer in 'ospital in an hour, or mebbe less, if Jerry don't make too much of a mess o' them roads. Cut 'em up terrible around Wipers, they 'ave. An' "Ellfire Corner's a right shootin' gallery. Still, we'll cut up a few o' them, An' all. Looks broke all right." He regarded the splinted leg cheerfully. "Reckon that's a Blighty one, at least for a while, eh?"

"Oi'll be back!" the soldier said quietly. "Oi've seen a lot worse than broken legs."

"So've I, mate, so've I." The ambulance driver pursed his lips. "But this'll do for now. Now let's be 'avin' yer."

Joseph moved forward. "Can I help?" he offered.

"Blimey! "E don' need the last rites yet, Padre. It's only 'is leg! The rest of 'im's right as rain," the ambulance driver said with a grin. "Still I s'pose yer could take the other side of'im, stop 'im fallin' that way, like?"

A quarter of an hour later Joseph was refreshed by really quite drinkable tea. Unlike in the front trenches, there was plenty of it, almost too hot to drink, and strong enough to disguise the other tastes in the water.

He had almost finished it when a car drove up. It was a long,

low-slung Aston Martin, and out of it stepped a slim, upright young man with very fair hair and a fresh complexion. He wore uniform, but with no rank. He ignored Joseph and went straight into the tent, leaving the flap open. He stopped in front of the surgeon, who was now tidying up his instruments, almost at attention.

"Eldon Prentice, war correspondent," he announced.

Joseph followed him in. "Bit dangerous up here, Mr. Prentice," he said, carefully not looking towards Corliss, who was lying on one of the palliasses, his bandaged hand already stained with blood again. "I'd go a bit further back, if I were you," he added.

Prentice stared at him, his chin lifted a little, his blunt face smooth, perfectly certain of himself. "And who are you, sir?"

"Captain Reavley, chaplain," Joseph replied.

"Good. You can probably give me some accurate first-hand information," Prentice said. "Or at least second-hand."

Joseph heard the challenge in his voice. "It's cold, wet and dirty," he replied, looking at Prentice's clean trousers and only faintly dusty boots. "And, of course, you'll have to walk! And carry your rations. You do have rations, don't you?"

Prentice looked at him curiously. "A chaplain is just the sort of man I'd like to talk to. You'd be able to give me a unique view of how the men feel, what their thoughts and fears are."

Joseph instinctively disliked the man. There was an arrogance in his manner that offended him. "Perhaps you haven't heard, Mr. Prentice, but priests don't repeat what people tell them, if it's of any importance."

Prentice smiled. "Yes, I imagine you have heard a great many stories of pain, fear and horror, Captain. Some of them must be heart-rending, and leave you feeling utterly helpless. After all, what can you do?" It was a rhetorical question, and yet he seemed to be waiting for an answer.

He had described exactly Joseph's dilemma, and the emotions that most troubled him, awakening a feeling of inadequacy, even failure. There was so little he could do to help, and even then it was trivial, but he was damned if he would admit it to this correspondent. The feeling of inadequacy caused too deep a hurt to speak of, even to himself.

"Nothing that is really your concern, Mr. Prentice," he said aloud. "A man's troubles, whatever they are, are private to him. That is one of the few decencies we can grant."

Prentice stood still for a moment, and then he turned very slowly and looked at Corliss. "What happened to him?" he asked curiously. "Bad ammunition exploded and took off his fingers?"

"He was down the saps," Joseph said tartly.

Prentice looked blank.

"Tunnels," Joseph explained. "The intention is that the Germans won't know where the tunnels are. They get within a yard or two of their trenches, then lay mines. If a mine had exploded there'd be nothing left of any of them."

"He's a sapper? I hear that men reaching their hands above the parapet level sometimes get hit by snipers." Prentice was watching Joseph intently.

Joseph drew in breath to reply, and then changed his mind. Prentice was a war correspondent, like any other. They all pooled their information anyway he knew that. He had seen them meeting together in the cafes when he had been behind the lines in one of the towns at Brigade Headquarters, or even further back at Divisional Headquarters. Nobody could see everything; the differences in their stories depended upon interpretation, what they selected and how they wrote it up.