Shoulder the Sky (38 page)

Mason reached the edge, and without hesitation, waded in. when he was waist deep he bent and scooped it up in his hands and then poured it over his head. He did it again and again, as if to wash away more than the blood and dirt.

He turned to look at Joseph, a couple of yards away.

"Tell me, Chaplain, how much of this can be washed off? I could scrub down to the bone, but would all the seas of the earth take it out of my mind? I wonder if Churchill has read Macbeth. What do you think? Would his hands "the multitudinous seas incarnadine" with this bloody slaughter? There's no victory, no sense, just death and more death."

He walked back to the shore, dragging his feet against the tide, and put on his clothes again. Joseph did the same, the fabric sticking to his wet body.

"We'll be out of here in the morning," Mason said tersely. "In three days, if I'm not torpedoed by some bloody U-boat, I'll be back in London and I'll write a story that'll get this insane carnage stopped. Once the nation knows what the truth is they'll throw this government out."

"You can't tell them what it's like," Joseph replied flatly. "Even if you could write a piece that would describe this .. ." he was too stiff to point, he just glanced around, 'they wouldn't publish it. It's all censored. It has to be, or it would break the spirit at home. We'd get no more recruits."

"You want more men to come out and be slaughtered like this?" Mason asked, his eyes burning with accusation, but it sprang from his own raw, hurting anger, the inner wounds bleeding, not a desire to hurt Joseph.

"I'd rather not have war at all," Joseph replied. "But I didn't get to choose."

"None of us did!" Mason said bitterly, bending to tie his bootlaces. "If we were told the truth, then perhaps we would have! At least we'd have gone into it with our eyes open."

"You can't tell all the truth, only part of it," Joseph pointed out. "Anything you say is going to be your judgement, what you see and feel. Do you have the right to decide what other people must know, when they can't do anything to change it?"

"I have more than the right," Mason replied, straightening up. "I have the duty. We are a democracy, not a dictatorship. You can't choose if you don't know what the choices are." He half turned to face Joseph, wincing as a strained muscle in his shoulder shot through with pain and he moved gingerly to ease it. "Tell me that you believe any sane man or woman in England would choose this," he said the word with a savagery that tore the sound out of him, 'if they knew what it was. Is this glory? Are these Rupert Brooke's heroes, "swimmers into cleanness leaping" from this life to some mythical Valhalla? God in heaven, man! If you've any humanity at all, look at it! It's worse than barbarity, it's a hell only a civilized imagination could conceive! It's a refinement of madness beyond the merely bestial."

"And is telling people at home going to help anything?" Joseph asked with quiet pain.

Mason's eyes blazed. "Of course it will! Men won't volunteer for this if they know the truth. There's nothing glorious in it! There's nothing even useful! They're dying because of incompetence! We aren't going to take the Dardanelles, we aren't going to take Constantinople and we aren't going to liberate the Russian

Grand Fleet! The Eastern Fronts are going to be against the Italians, poor sods, and the Russians in the north if anyone's insane enough to try that. Napoleon failed. That should be a lesson to anyone."

Joseph smiled with a downward twist. "Now who's being naive?"

They reached the spot where they had sat before. Their mugs were still there. Mason picked up his and looked at the dregs. "You don't think the Kaiser will march against the Tsar? This whole abattoir is a glorified family feud! They're all bloody cousins!"

"I meant," Joseph corrected him, 'that I don't think anyone is instructed by the lessons of history."

Mason smiled at last, a curiously honest expression that suddenly shed years from his face. "Have another cup of tea? At least the rum's real. Then we'll go and see if we can get some of these poor devils out to the hospital ships. Not that they'll be that much better off there! They can exchange being shot at for being seasick. Personally I think I'd rather stay here and take my chances." Without waiting for Joseph to answer, he took both mugs over to the field kitchen.

Joseph relaxed a little. There was still time to try to make Mason see the terrible damage of what he intended. When they were at sea, away from this horror, he would be able to convince him that it would be wrong.

They spent the rest of the daylight helping the wounded men who could walk, carrying those who couldn't. It was back-breaking and heart-rending work. Another three times Joseph struggled up the hillside himself to help more men down. He stepped in blood, tripped over bodies, sometimes only limbs or torsos, riddles with bullets or blown apart by shells. In the shallow trenches British, Australians and Turks sometimes lay together, indistinguishable in the blood and earth. The smell of slaughter filled his mouth and throat and lungs. The wild thyme was gone; even the sharp sting of creosol couldn't penetrate through the sick sweetness of blood.

It was after midnight when he sank into a dazed exhaustion and the oblivion of sleep overtook him until dreams invaded it, full of torture and screaming.

He awoke with a jolt to daylight and someone throwing a bucket of seawater in his face. Its saltiness was exquisitely clean. He gasped and sat up, struggling for breath.

"There yare, cobber!" a voice said cheerfully "An' there's plenty more where that came from. But if yer ain't broke your legs, yer can fetch it for yerself

"Hey! It's Holy Joe!" another more familiar voice added. "Let's get the poor bleeder some breakfast. For a pommy he wasn't too bad last night."

Joseph clambered to his feet, pushing his hair off his face and wiping the water away. His body ached appallingly. "Thanks, but I need to find the journalist. He's shipping out today, and I'm getting a lift with him. Thanks all the same."

"No you aren't, sport! He left a couple of hours ago!"

Joseph froze. "What?"

"Guns got your ears? He left a couple of hours ago at least! He's long gone over the horizon on his way to Malta by now. You'll have to take the next ship whenever that is. Have a cup o' tea!"

Chapter Twelve

Another twenty-four hours of frantic effort followed before Joseph could find a ship going as far as Malta that would take him as a passenger. He had to use all the persuasion he had to gain his place, including his letters of authority from Matthew.

He paced the deck as the shores of Gallipoli faded behind him and became an indistinct blur, Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay no longer distinguishable. Even the sound of guns was finally lost in the wash of the sea. The island of Samothrace towered to the south, its corona of mist gilded by the setting sun. Today, as Joseph left this land steeped in history, the beauty of the past, the heroes, the love and hate of Troy, were simply a legacy of epic words with no healing left in them. The pain of the present drowned out all memory. The urgency of catching up with Richard Mason before he could hand his work to some irresponsible publisher made chaos of any other thoughts.

If Joseph could just have time to talk to him, explain rationally the damage it would do! If he could make him understand what Ypres was really like, repeated over and over again through hundreds of trenches right across the Western Front, the courage and the loyalty of the men, the idea of putting off even one man from taking up arms to support them would be abhorrent to him.

Men did not go into battle in cold blood but in the fever of the moment. The price was terrible, but the cost of failure was higher.

He paced back and forth, unable to sit down, too tense to eat, too filled with nervous energy to sleep, until at last exhaustion overtook him as he lay in a narrow cot in a crewman's quarters, while the man was on duty.

Malta was ancient, fascinating, full of colours, eclectic architecture and a cultural mixture that reflected every tide that had swept the Mediterranean in five hundred years, and yet was unique to itself. Explorers, merchants and crusaders had stopped here. Now the harbour of Valetta held British warships, and the liners, the yachts, the racing skiffs were silent and unseen.

Joseph barely saw any of it; he looked only for signs of where Mason could have gone. He asked the British seamen he met, the loaders and dockers, and eventually the harbour master himself.

"That would be the English gentleman from the newspapers," the harbour master replied. "Very fine writer. Read his stuff myself. Admire those chaps." He said it with profound feeling. "Never afraid to go where the danger is, if they can get the truth. He took the ship out to Gibraltar this morning. I arranged it for him myself."

"Gibraltar!" Joseph exploded with burning frustration. "How can I get there? It's urgent! I have dispatches for London. I have to get there in three days, at the outside!" If he did not catch him, Mason would deliver his work, with his damning descriptions of chaos and the pointless deaths of so many men who had volunteered, come willingly from the other side of the world, because they had felt it was the right thing to do. Their lives were squandered, uselessly and terribly.

At least that was what Mason would write. Whitehall would try to censor him, but he had seemed sure that he had a way to evade that. And once he had published, and his report was spread by pamphlet and word of mouth, could anyone prove him wrong?

He wasn't wrong!

Joseph could not explain that to anyone because he dared not use Mason's words; they were too easily repeated with all the irreparable damage they could do. He used Matthew's letter of authority again, arguing, pleading, hearing the panic inside him burn through.

Finally, as he stood once again on the deck of a steamer, this time bound for Gibraltar, watching the lights of Valetta fade into the soft Mediterranean night, emotional and physical exhaustion overcame him, and with it a feeling close to despair.

Now Joseph was racing across the Mediterranean trying to catch Mason, a brilliant journalist, a man of passion and his own kind of honour. Joseph had seen the searing tenderness in him as he had done what pitifully little he could for the wounded, body hunched with tension, rage almost choking him at the waste, the disorganization, the needless vulnerability of men exposed to shellfire on all sides.

And yet Mason's passion and horror were irrelevant to the harm he would do if he published what he had seen. Perhaps people would rise up and try to change the government, by ordinary civil means? There would be a vote of 'no confidence' in the House, forcing a general election. But that would leave Britain in turmoil, no one to make decisions, just as the Germans were lunging forward in Belgium, France, northern Italy and the Balkans. It would pile chaos upon chaos. And who else was there to elect?

It would shatter faith, the only strength left when defeat stared the armies in the face, and it offered nothing but anger and doubt in return. All those who had already died caught in the wires, drowned, frozen or blown to pieces, choked with gas and those shell-shocked, maimed and mutilated by war would have suffered for nothing, a surrender because no one else would come forward to take their places when they fell.

The thought choked him with a tearing grief for all those he had known, whose deaths he had watched, and for the countless others lost, and for those who loved them and whose lives would never be the same again. It seemed the ultimate blasphemy that their sacrifice should be thrown away. He could not bear it.

He ate, slept fitfully, and paced the deck, shoulders tight, hands clenched, as the ship made its way across the Mediterranean at what seemed to him a snail's pace.

He imagined what German occupation would be like for the Belgians and the French. The laws would be changed, there would be a curfew imposed so no one could go out after dark.

Travel would be restricted: you would have to have passes to go from one place to another, and explain your reasons. All newspapers would be censored. You would be told only what they wanted you to know. Food would be rationed, and all the best -the good cheese, the fresh fruit, the meat would go to the occupying forces.

But the physical inconveniences would be small compared with change in people. The brave would be hunted down and punished, interned in camps, perhaps like those in Africa during the Boer War women and children as well. The collaborators would be rewarded, the betrayers and profiteers, the vulnerable, the weak, the bribable, deceivable, the terrified would drift with sheep like obedience. Subconscience would become habit. Eventually memory would disappear, and then even hope.

What would Joseph tell the suffering Belgians to do, those quiet men and women he saw around Ypres and Poperinge and the sheltered villages and farms, refugees from their homes, leaving behind a broken land? Would he tell them they were beaten, and should now put up with defeat in peace, and that to attack the occupying forces or countries was actually murder? Turn the other cheek, or retaliation? Render unto the Kaiser what is the Kaiser's? If you attack your oppressor, does it have to be the individual soldier attacking you, or do you use intelligence, and strike at the head? Use the most effective weapon you can, when and where they are not expecting it, against whom it will do the most damage?

They were moral questions to which his instinct said one thing, and his doubts said another. He had little privacy in which to pray, but it was only convention that said you had to do it on your knees, or with your hands folded. A few minutes alone on the deck, a forced quietness of his racing mind, and he began to see more clearly, if nothing else, at least the need to stand for his own beliefs. It should be his wish to defend others, and it was certainly his duty. How could you argue with Christ, who was crucified, that it might hurt, or even cost you your life?