“Damnable,” Holt agreed. “Can’t get a line on him, though. Keeps his own head well down.”
“Oh, yes,” Joseph nodded. “We’d never get him from here. It needs a man to go over in the dark and find him.”
“Not a good idea, Chaplain. He’d not come back. Not advocating suicide, are you?”
Joseph chose his words very carefully and kept his voice as unemotional as he could.
“I wouldn’t have put it like that,” he answered. “But he has cost us a lot of men. Mordaff today, you know?”
“Yes… I heard. Pity.”
“Except that wasn’t the sniper, of course. But the men think it was, so it comes to the same thing, as far as morale is concerned.”
“Don’t know what you mean, Chaplain.” There was a slight hesitation in Holt’s voice in the darkness.
“Wasn’t a rifle wound, it was a pistol,” Joseph replied. “You can tell the difference, if you’re actually looking for it.”
“Then he was a fool to be that close to German lines,” Holt said, facing forward over the parapet and the mud. “Lost his nerve, I’m afraid.”
“Like Ashton,”Joseph said. “Can understand that, up there in no-man’s-land, mud everywhere, wire catching hold of you, tearing at you, stopping you from moving. Terrible thing to be caught in the wire with the star shells lighting up the night. Makes you a sitting target. Takes an exceptional man not to panic, in those circumstances… a hero.”
Holt did not answer.
There was silence ahead of them, only the dull thump of feet and a squelch of duckboards in mud behind, and the trickle of water along the bottom of the trench.
“I expect you know what it feels like,” Joseph went on. “I notice you have some pretty bad tears in your trousers, even one in your blouse. Haven’t had time to mend them yet.”
“I daresay I got caught in a bit of wire out there last night,” Holt said stiffly. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“I’m sure you did,” Joseph agreed with him. “Ashton didn’t. His clothes were muddy, but no wire tears.”
There were several minutes of silence. A group of men passed by behind them, muttering words of greeting. When they were gone the darkness closed in again. Someone threw up a star shell and there was a crackle of machine-gun fire.
“I wouldn’t repeat that, if I were you, Chaplain,” Holt said at last. “You might make people think unpleasant things, doubts. And right at the moment morale is high. We need that. We’ve had a hard time recently. We’re going over the top in a trench raid soon. Morale is important… trust. I’m sure you know that, maybe even better than I do. That’s your job, isn’t it? Morale, spiritual welfare of the men?”
“Yes… spiritual welfare is a good way of putting it. Remember what it is we are fighting for, and that it is worth all that it costs… even this.” Joseph gestured in the dark to all that surrounded them.
More star shells went up, illuminating the night for a few garish moments, then a greater darkness closed in.
“We need our heroes,” Holt said very clearly. “You should know that. Any man who would tear them down would be very unpopular, even if he said he was doing it in the name of truth, or justice, or whatever it was he believed in. He would do a lot of harm, Chaplain. I expect you can see that…”
“Oh, yes,” Joseph agreed. “To have their hero shown to be a coward who laid the blame for his panic on another man, and let him be buried in shame, and then committed murder to hide that, would devastate men who are already wretched and exhausted by war.”
“You are perfectly right.” Holt sounded as if he were smiling. “A very wise man, Chaplain. Good of the regiment first. The right sort of loyalty.”
“I could prove it,” Joseph said very carefully.
“But you won’t. Think what it would do to the men.”
Joseph turned a little to face the parapet. He stood up onto the fire step and looked forward over the dark expanse of mud and wire.
“We should take that sniper out. That would be a very heroic thing to do. Good thing to try, even if you didn’t succeed. You’d deserve a mention in dispatches for that, possibly a medal.”
“It would be posthumous!” Holt said bitterly.
“Possibly. But you might succeed and come back. It would be so daring, Fritz would never expect it,” Joseph pointed out.
“Then you do it, Chaplain!” Holt said sarcastically.
“It wouldn’t help you, Captain. Even if I die, I have written a full account of what I have learned today, to be opened should anything happen to me. On the other hand, if you were to mount such a raid, whether you returned or not, I should destroy it.”
There was silence again, except for the distant crack of sniper fire a thousand yards away and the drip of mud.
“Do you understand me, Captain Holt?”
Holt turned slowly. A star shell lit his face for an instant. His voice was hoarse.
“You’re sending me to my death!”
“I’m letting you be the hero you’re pretending to be and Ashton really was,” Joseph answered. “The hero the men need. Thousands of us have died out here, no one knows how many more there will be. Others will be maimed or blinded. It isn’t whether you die or not, it’s how well.”
A shell exploded a dozen yards from them. Both men ducked, crouching automatically.
Silence again.
Slowly Joseph unbent.
Holt lifted his head. “You’re a hard man, Chaplain. I misjudged you.”
“Spiritual care, Captain,” Joseph said quietly. “You wanted the men to think you a hero, to admire you. Now you’re going to justify that and become one.”
Holt stood still, looking toward him in the gloom, then slowly he turned and began to walk away, his feet sliding on the wet duckboards. Then he climbed up the next fire step and up over the parapet.
Joseph stood still and prayed.
MOTHER’S MILK by Chris Simms
Just a glimpse across the graveyard at a hundred yards and he knew that milking her dry would pose no problem at all.
To an ordinary person she was a sad-looking woman in her forties, fat thighs bulging as she bent forward to replace the dying flowers before the gravestone with a fresh bouquet.
But to Daniel Norris she stank of need. The need for company. The need for human warmth. The need for someone to lavish kindness upon. So acute was his ability to sniff out and exploit vulnerability, she may as well have held a loudhailer to her lips and announced to the cemetery, “In sickness and in health, please, God, give me someone to care for.”
He slid into the shadow of a moss-furred crypt and waited for her to pass. As he stood there out of the weak October sun, a breeze whispered between the graves and a shiver ran through him. The ugly clacking of two crows squabbling in a nearby yew tree masked the sound of her approaching steps, but he soon heard the crunch of gravel as her stout legs took her back towards the gates, hair dull and brown, head held up in an attempt to bravely face the grey afternoon.
As soon as she was out of sight he hurried over to the grave she had just left. The headstone was new. He sneered at her tacky taste. Shiny black marble topped by two maudlin cherubs trumpeting a silent lament to an unhearing God. His eyes scanned quickly over the inscription, letters chiselled out then painted with a layer of fake gold. Something about her babies now being with the angels. His eyebrows raised in slight surprise: He had assumed it was a husband and not young ones she’d lost. Not that it mattered to him. He knew she was alone in the world.
He studied the large and expensive bouquet. If this was the weekly ritual he suspected, she had plenty of cash to spare. He rubbed his hands together in the chill autumnal air. Wealthy widows were particularly easy to fleece.
Several days dragged by as he eked out an existence between dimly lit boozers and dingy bookies, their floors littered with torn paper slips. A win on the dogs on Friday provided some much-needed cash for the weekend. He combed his grey-flecked hair and put his blazer on over his only decent shirt. Then he treated himself to twenty Bensons, leaving the dented tin of rolling tobacco in his hostel room before heading to the Tap and Spile.