Anne Perry_World War One 05 Read online

  “I know,” he said at last. “We’re all afraid of the future, because we don’t know what it will be. But we can’t let men kick a German prisoner to death, whatever they feel. If we are no better than that, in God’s name, what have ten million men died for?”

  “I’ll talk to them,” Harrison promised. He pinched out his cigarette, then threw the dregs of his tea away. “It won’t happen again.”

  The following day, October 12, Joseph was back in the Casualty Clearing Station as prisoners continued to come through the lines. Most were marched back into camps, where they would be held as the Allied army moved eastward over the old battlefields toward the borders of Germany. The few who were seriously wounded were kept in the clearing stations until they could be moved on without risking their lives.

  There was sometimes information to be gained from them, but it was of little use now. The terrain had been fought over back and forth and was known intimately, every dugout, every trench. Only the craters changed as the guns fired ceaselessly, churning up old clay, old corpses, the wreckage of armor. The movement of regiments varied too often for yesterday’s prisoners to tell what tomorrow’s deployment would be.

  Joseph spent much of his time translating between the prisoners and doctors. His German had been fluent even before the war. He had spent time there studying, and he cared for both the land and its people. Like any other Englishman, he’d found the idea of fighting Germany troubling and unnatural. He knew that the soldiers on the other side of the lines were too much like the men from his own village whom he talked with every day. It was the governments, the tide of history, that made one country different from the other.

  He had been behind the lines last year and seen the suffering of the ordinary people, the hunger and fear. He remembered the German soldiers who had helped him. They had shared Schnapps and sung songs together. Hunger, fear, and wounds were the same in any language—and weariness, and the love of home.

  Now he was standing in the Resuscitation tent, trying to reassure a prisoner with an amputated leg. Rain beat intermittently on the canvas. The man was not much more than twenty, his eyes sunken with pain and the shock of being suddenly mutilated, his country beaten, and himself among strangers. Nationality seemed an irrelevance.

  Joseph knew that he should attend to the wounded of his own regiment, even though none of them were seriously ill, but the terror in this man’s eyes haunted him. He looked like Hannah’s oldest son, the color of his eyes and the way his hair grew off his brow. Busy with small jobs—fetching and carrying, running errands—Joseph kept returning to the man lying motionless in the sheets, the stump of his leg still oozing blood.

  “When will your armies be in Germany?” the young man asked him shortly after midnight.

  “I don’t know,” Joseph said frankly. “There’s still a lot of hard fighting. The war may be over before we actually cross the border.”

  “But you will get there, tens of thousands of you—” He left the sentence hanging as if he did not know how to finish it. His face was sweating despite the cold, and his teeth were clamped together so the muscles of his jaw were tight, bulging under the gray-white skin.

  Suddenly, with a sense of shame, Joseph knew that the man’s fear was not for himself. The desperation of his fighting had come not from hate or the hunger for a German victory, but simply from the driving fear of what would happen to his family when enemy soldiers poured into the homeland of those who had killed their comrades, their friends and brothers, and revenge for it all lay open before them. Perhaps he knew what had happened to Belgium in 1914, and had been repeated over and over in every town and village. It might have appalled him as much as it did British soldiers to see the beaten and bereaved people, the burned-out farms, and the eyes of the women who had been raped.

  If the tide had gone the other way—and there had been years when it had seemed inevitable that it would—then German troops would be marching through the little villages of Cambridgeshire: St. Giles, Haslingfield, Cherry Hinton, and all the others. The enemy would walk the cobbles of the familiar streets where Joseph had grown up. German soldiers would be sleeping under the thatched roofs, tearing up the gardens, perhaps killing the beasts to provide food, shooting those people who resisted. Women he had known all his life would be confused and humiliated, ashamed to smile or be seen to offer a kindness.

  He saw the fear in the German’s eyes now, and the bitter knowledge that he had failed to protect his women, perhaps his children. He would rather have died in battle. And yet what use was he to them dead? What use was he to anyone, a prisoner, and with only one leg?

  Could Joseph tell him with any honesty that his women would not be violated, or his house burned? After four years of horror, inconceivable to those who had not endured it, and slaughter that numbed the mind, could he say the victors would not take payment for it in blood and pain? Some men retained their humanity even in the face of hell. He had seen it. He could name scores of them—living and dead. But not all the men had done so, not by a long way.

  Should he comfort this young soldier lying ashen and broken-bodied in front of him by telling him lies? Or did he deserve the truth? A dubious honor.

  What would he want himself? Would he want to think Hannah was safe, even if it were not true? And her children—the boys and Jenny? What about Lizzie Blaine, who had been such a friend to him when he was home wounded in 1916? The thought of her frightened and shamed by a German soldier was so hideous his stomach churned, and for a moment he was nearly sick.

  He had not heard from her lately. He had tried not to count how long it was, but he knew: six weeks and two days. He had not expected it to hurt so much, but every mail call without a letter from her was like a blow to a place already aching.

  The German was still watching him, uncertain now if he was going to answer at all.

  “Where is your family?” Joseph asked him.

  “Dortmund,” the man answered.

  Joseph smiled. “It’ll be a long time before they get that far.” He tried to sound confident. “The worst will have worn off by then. There’ll be some discipline. They’ll be regular troops. Most of the volunteers will have gone home. We’re all tired of war. Vengeance has little flavor once the blood has cooled a bit.”

  The man blinked hard, the tears running down his cheeks. He was too weak to raise his hands to check them. “Thank you for not lying to me,” he said quietly. “If you had said British soldiers don’t do such things, I would not have believed you.”

  “Most of us don’t,” Joseph told him.

  “I know. Most of us don’t, either.” There was defiance in his voice, and his eyes were hot with anger.

  “We’ve all changed,” Joseph said sadly. “Not much is as it used to be.”

  The German closed his eyes and retreated into some grief or pain too deep within himself for anyone else to guess at.

  Joseph waited a moment longer, in case there was anything further the man wanted to say, then turned and walked away. It was raining harder; the canvas rumbled with it. He kept in the shelter of the walkway between the tents. The ground was wet, the light shining on pools of water.

  His thoughts turned to Lizzie again. He could not think of going home without her filling his mind. He remembered how she had been his driver all the time he was there two years ago, too badly injured to handle a car himself. Despite her husband’s murder, she had found the strength and the courage to help him look for the man who had so fearfully betrayed them all, and to confront him when at last they could no longer avoid the truth.

  Joseph had begun by liking her, finding her company easy because she understood loss and never evaded it with trite words. She knew when to talk, and when to stay silent and allow the pain to take hold, then slowly absorb it and carry on.

  And she could be fun. Her humor was quick and dry. She had an easy laugh; the light of it reached her eyes, which were very blue despite her dark hair. If ever she felt sorry for herself she fought it alone, without blaming others. And yet she was imperfect enough to be vulnerable, to make mistakes. She needed help now and then.

  Why had she not written?

  Did she sense the growing affection in him and know that she could not love again—at least not love a man who had seen four years in the trenches and was so immersed in the horror of it, he was changed forever? Weren’t all men changed? Could any of them be whole enough again to make a woman happy? No woman wanted to grieve forever. Women created life, affirmed it, loved no matter what else happened. They needed to nurture, to begin again.

  Perhaps only women like his sister Judith, who was here at the front, could understand and speak to soldiers as equals, could endure the nightmares and the ridiculous jokes, the miseries that seared the heart and would not be let go. To forget the dead would be to betray them, and was unforgivable. It would be to deny honor, to deny friendship, to make all the injury and the loss not real anymore.

  Judith understood. She had been here since the beginning of the war, driving her ambulance with the wounded and the dead, fighting the hunger and cold, the disease, the horrific injuries, the despair and the hope, like the rest of them. It was ironic that he could talk to Judith…yet at the same time he didn’t need to, because she knew it all just as he did.

  The rain was soft and cold in his face as he crossed the mud back to the Admissions tent to see if there was anyone newly arrived who needed help.

  Would he be able to offer anything of tenderness or honesty to any woman who had no experience of war? Or would the gulf between them be made uncrossable by the ghosts of too many friends lying dead in his arms, too many journeys across no-man’s-land with terror and grief tearing him apart, too many long nights being deafened by the guns?

  Lizzie
, why don’t you write? Don’t you know what to say anymore? What horror could there be in the future as terrible as that we have already endured?

  He stopped, his feet covered in mud. He was not ready to go into the tent yet. He needed a short break before finding the next man to talk to, to try to comfort, or if not that, then at least to help him to a drink of water or turn him onto his other side for a little ease.

  He had not faced it until this moment that Lizzie meant so much to him, far more than friendship, more than laughter or comfort or someone to trust. The thought that she might not write again was a loneliness he was not equipped to endure. It was pointless to evade it, even if it were possible. He loved her.

  Joseph’s brother, Matthew Reavley, was sitting in a bare, impersonal London office opposite Calder Shearing, his superior in the Secret Intelligence Service.

  “A month,” Shearing said, pulling his mouth into a tight line. “Possibly a week or two longer, if the Germans hold out around Ypres, but not much more. Prisoners are pouring third repetition across the lines, sometimes ten thousand a day. There’s still hard fighting in Menin, Courtrai—and Verdun, of course. Casualty figures are bad on both sides.” He did not need to look at the names on the map. As Matthew was well aware, he knew them all better than the furniture of his own house or the neglected garden behind it.

  “Talks by early November?” Matthew asked. “Cease-fire?”

  “Probably,” Shearing replied. “But we’re not ready. We’re still arguing with Wilson and the French.”

  His voice was raw with emotion and barely suppressed anger. This had been the most devastating war in history. It had spread to almost every corner of the world. Thirty-five million people were missing, dead, or injured; a continent spread with ruin. The balance of power was altered forever, the old rule swept away. The kaiser was toppled, the Austro-Hungarian Empire crumbling. In Russia a revolution had occurred, even more terrible than that which had swept the Bourbon monarchy from France. America had emerged as a new world power.

  “Wilson’s Fourteen Points,” Matthew said grimly.

  It was a vexed subject. President Woodrow Wilson of the United States was in effect the chief arbiter between the opposing forces, and as far back as January he had laid out his principles upon which peace should be negotiated.

  Shearing’s strong hand clenched on the desk between the two men. “Don’t argue it, Reavley. Not now.”

  “He has no grasp of history,” Matthew said yet again. “If we force his terms on Germany, it will lay the foundation for another war just as bloody as this!”

  “I know!” Shearing snapped, the muscles of his face tightening. “We all know it, but the man doesn’t listen to us. He has the mind of a country schoolmaster and the soul of an army mule. But what matters is that he has the power of a nation that didn’t join the war until close to the end, when the rest of us were already on our knees. He rescued us, and, very politely, he doesn’t intend to let us forget it.”

  “If it was a European country schoolmaster it wouldn’t matter,” Matthew said drily, leaning back in his chair. He had grown comfortable in Shearing’s room only lately, now that he understood why there was nothing personal in it. “He would at least grasp the reasons for our ancient quarrels, and know that we can’t be forced to get over them by common sense, especially an outsider’s idea of what is sensible.”

  “I know!” Shearing repeated sharply. “Dermot Sandwell has tried pointing out that if we destroy Germany’s heavy industry with punitive restrictions, we will cripple the economy of the whole continent. Germany in violent recession could create a vacuum, which would suck in all of us, in time. Five or six years from now we could have an economic depression unlike anything we’ve seen before.”

  “Is Sandwell right?” Matthew asked with a sudden chill.

  “God knows,” Shearing replied. “Probably. And yet if we don’t prevent them from rearming we’ll be back where we started, and deserve to be.” He smiled. It was very brief, but there was warmth in it, even a momentary revelation of something very close to friendship. “I suppose you still don’t know who your ‘Peacemaker’ is?”

  Matthew took a deep breath, startled by the sense of defeat in himself. The failure hurt more deeply than he had expected. “No,” he admitted.

  “I’m sorry,” Shearing said quietly. “I suppose if I could help, you would have said so?”

  Shearing was an intense man who never spoke of himself. Matthew had learned from someone else of the tragic and heroic history of Shearing’s family. Only then had he finally trusted Shearing and understood his fierce loyalty to his adopted country. Not a trace of his original accent remained. His English was not only correct—it was completely colloquial. Nothing except the darkness of his eyes and an occasional sadness in his smile gave him away. Many times before that, Matthew had feared Shearing himself was the Peacemaker. There was a gleam of humor in the man’s eyes as he looked back at Matthew now. Perhaps he knew it, too, or guessed it.

  “Yes. And if I think of anything, I still will,” Matthew answered.

  Shearing tidied the handwritten notes in front of him and locked them in his desk. It was an unnecessary measure since the room would be locked also, but it was his habit to be careful, even though the notes would not be decipherable to anyone else were they found. “Bring me more as soon as you have it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Matthew stood up. “Good night, sir.”

  “Good night, Reavley.”

  Matthew returned to his office, locked away his own papers, and collected his mackintosh. Outside in the dark street, he turned left along the pavement and began to walk briskly. Getting home to his flat would take him about half an hour, by which time in the fine, cold drizzle he would be pretty wet. Still, it was better than looking for any kind of transport. Buses were crowded and irregular. Taxis were rare. Everyone was competing for the little petrol there was, and he could easily walk the distance. In fact, after sitting most of the day at a desk sifting information, he was glad of the strange sense of freedom the dark streets brought to him. They were crowded with other people also hurrying, their heads down, their collars high. The occasional gleam of car headlights shone on the wet surfaces: smooth tarmac or rough cobbles, the sharp edge of a curb.

  He would have known the way blindfolded. He passed the tobacconist on the corner. The man’s son had been killed at Gallipoli, and a younger son had lost an arm at Verdun. His daughter’s husband had been blinded at Messines. The greengrocer’s son was in the Royal Flying Corps. He was still fine, but his mother had been killed in a zeppelin raid here at home. And so it went. Everyone had lost someone, even if it was a lifelong friend rather than a relative.

  He crossed the street, facing into the wind. The rain was heavier. The Peacemaker that Shearing had referred to was the code name Matthew and Joseph had given to the man who had conceived a wild plan to prevent the war entirely, back in the summer of 1914.

  Matthew could remember walking across the sunlit cricket pitch that afternoon in Cambridge as if it were yesterday, and yet in a way it seemed like another lifetime. He could still see the cloudless sky and the white gleam of flannels and shirts. The women wore long, pale muslin dresses. Wide hats shaded their faces, and their long hair was elaborately dressed. It had been a golden afternoon that seemed as if it would go on forever.

  And Matthew had shattered it, at least for his own family. He had come to tell Joseph that their parents, John and Alys Reavley, had been killed in a car crash on the Hauxton Road. That evening as they sat in the silent, strangely empty family home, the village constable had come to express his sympathy, mentioning quite casually the news that in Sarajevo the archduke and duchess of Austria had been assassinated by some Serbian madman.

  John and Alys Reavley’s deaths had proved to be murder also. John Reavley had found one of the two drafts of a proposed treaty between Kaiser Wilhelm and King Edward. It would allow Germany to invade England, France, and Belgium and absorb them into an expanding German Empire, and then in time take the rest of Europe as well. The kaiser’s price was German help to regain the former British colony of the United States, and of course to keep the rest of the British Empire of India, Burma, Africa, Australasia, and various islands around the earth. It would in effect be an Anglo-German Empire greater than any the world had seen before. It might bring global peace, but at the cost of national honor and individual freedom.