“I’m sorry,” Holt said quietly. “I did what I could. I can’t have got to him in time. He panicked.”
Mordaff jerked his head up. “He never would!” The cry was desperate, a shout of denial against a shame too great to be borne. “Not Will!”
Holt stiffened. “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely. “It happens.”
“Not with Will Ashton, it don’t!” Mordaff retorted, his eyes blazing, pupils circled with white in the candlelight, his face gray. He had been in the front line two weeks now, a long stretch without a break from the ceaseless tension, filth, cold, and intermittent silence and noise. He was nineteen.
“You’d better go and get that arm dressed, and your side,” Joseph said to Holt. He made his voice firm, as to a child.
Holt glanced again at the body of Ashton, then up at Joseph.
“Don’t stand there bleeding,” Joseph ordered. “You did all you could. There’s nothing else. I’ll look after Mordaff.”
“I tried!” Holt repeated. “There’s nothing but mud and darkness and wire, and bullets coming in all directions.” There was a sharp thread of terror under his shell-thin veneer of control. He had seen too many men die. “It’s enough to make anyone lose his nerve. You want to be a hero-you mean to be-and then it overwhelms you-”
“Not Will!” Mordaff said again, his voice choking off in a sob.
Holt looked at Joseph again, then staggered out.
Joseph turned to Mordaff. He had done this before, too many times, tried to comfort men who had just seen childhood friends blown to pieces, or killed by a sniper’s bullet, looking as if they should still be alive, perfect except for the small, blue hole through the brain. There was little to say. Most men found talk of God meaningless at that moment. They were shocked, fighting against belief and yet seeing all the terrible waste and loss of the truth in front of them. Usually it was best just to stay with them, let them speak about the past, what the friend had been like, times they had shared, just as if he were only wounded and would be back, at the end of the war, in some world one could only imagine, in England, perhaps on a summer day with sunlight on the grass, birds singing, a quiet riverbank somewhere, the sound of laughter, and women’s voices.
Mordaff refused to be comforted. He accepted Ashton’s death; the physical reality of that was too clear to deny, and he had seen too many other men he knew killed in the year and a half he had been in Belgium. But he could not, would not accept that Ashton had panicked. He knew what panic out there cost, how many other lives it jeopardized. It was the ultimate failure.
“How am I going to tell his mam?” he begged Joseph. “It’ll be all I can do to tell her he’s dead! His pa’ll never get over it. That proud of him, they were. He’s the only boy. Three sisters he had, Mary, Lizzie, and Alice. Thought he was the greatest lad in the world. I can’t tell ‘em he panicked! He couldn’t have, Chaplain! He just wouldn’t!”
Joseph did not know what to say. How could people at home in England even begin to imagine what it was like in the mud and noise out here? But he knew how deep shame burned. A lifetime could be consumed by it.
“Maybe he just lost sense of direction,” he said gently. “He wouldn’t be the first.” War changed men. People did panic. Mordaff knew that, and half his horror was because it could be true. But Joseph did not say so. “I’ll write to his family,” he went on. “There’s a lot of good to say about him. I could send pages. I’ll not need to tell them much about tonight.”
“Will you?” Mordaff was eager. “Thanks… thanks, Chaplain. Can I stay with him… until they come for him?”
“Yes, of course,” Joseph agreed. “I’m going forward anyway. Get yourself a hot cup of tea. See you in an hour or so.”
He left Mordaff squatting on the earth floor beside Ashton’s body and fumbled his way back over the slimy duckboards toward the travel line, then forward again to the front and the crack of gunfire and the occasional high flare of a star shell.
He did not see Mordaff again, but he thought nothing of it. He could have passed twenty men he knew and not recognized them, muffled in greatcoats, heads bent as they moved, rattling along the duckboards, or standing on the fire steps, rifles to shoulder, trying to see in the gloom for something to aim at.
Now and again he heard a cough, or the scamper of rats’ feet and the splash of rain and mud. He spent a little time with two men swapping jokes, joining in their laughter. It was black humor, self-mocking, but he did not miss the courage in it, or the fellowship, the need to release emotion in some sane and human way.
About midnight the rain stopped.
A little after five the night patrol came scrambling through the wire, whispered passwords to the sentries, then came tumbling over the parapet of sandbags down into the trench, shivering with cold and relief. One of them had caught a shot in the arm.
Joseph went back with them to the support line. In one of the dugouts a gramophone was playing a music-hall song. A couple of men sang along with it; one of them had a beautiful voice, a soft, lyric tenor. It was a silly song, trivial, but it sounded almost like a hymn out here, a praise of life.
A couple of hours and the day would begin: endless, methodical duties of housekeeping, mindless routine, but it was better than doing nothing.
There was still a sporadic crackle of machine-gun fire and the whine of sniper bullets.
An hour till dawn.
Joseph was sitting on an upturned ration case when Sergeant Renshaw came into the bunker, pulling the gas curtain aside to peer in. “Chaplain?”
Joseph looked up. He could see bad news in the man’s face. “I’m afraid Mordaff got it tonight,” he said, coming in and letting the curtain fall again. “Sorry. Don’t really know what happened. Ashton’s death seems to have… well, he lost his nerve. More or less went over the top all by himself. Suppose he was determined to go and give Fritz a bloody nose, on Ashton’s account. Stupid bastard! Sorry, Chaplain.”
He did not need to explain himself, or to apologize. Joseph knew exactly the fury and the grief he felt at such a futile waste. To this was added a sense of guilt that he had not stopped it. He should have realized Mordaff was so close to breaking. He should have seen it. That was his job.
He stood up slowly. “Thanks for telling me, Sergeant. Where is he?” “He’s gone, Chaplain.” Renshaw remained near the doorway. “You can’t help ‘im now.”
“I know that. I just want to… I don’t know… apologize to him. I let him down. I didn’t understand he was… so…”
“You can’t be everybody’s keeper,” Renshaw said gently. “Too many of us. It’s not been a bad night otherwise. Got a trench raid coming off soon. Just wish we could get that damn sniper across the way there.” He scraped a match and lit his cigarette. “But morale’s good. That was a brave thing Captain Holt did out there. He wanted the chance to do something to hearten the men. He saw it and took it. Pity about Ashton, but that doesn’t alter Holt’s courage. Could see him, you know, by the star shells. Right out there beyond the last wire, bent double, carrying Ashton on his back. Poor devil went crazy. Running around like a fool. Have got the whole patrol killed if Holt hadn’t gone after him. Hell of a job getting him back. Fell a couple of times. Reckon that’s worth a mention in dispatches, at least. Heartens the men, knowing our officers have got that kind of spirit.”
“Yes… I’m sure,” Joseph agreed. He could only think of Ashton’s white face, and Mordaff’s desperate denial, and how Ashton’s mother would feel, and the rest of his family. “I think I’ll go and see Mordaff just the same.” “Right you are,” Renshaw conceded reluctantly, standing aside for Joseph to pass.
Mordaff lay in the support trench just outside the bunker two hundred yards to the west. He looked even younger than he had in life, as if he were asleep. His face was oddly calm, even though it was smeared with mud. Someone had tried to clean most of it off in a kind of dignity, so that at least he was recognizable. There was a large wound in the left side of his forehead. It was bigger than most sniper wounds. He must have been a lot closer.