We Shall Not Sleep (8 page)

"He is here," Joseph told him. "I'll bring him as soon as I can. But as you will be aware, we dare not tell anyone else who you are, or why you are so important."

Schenckendorff did not answer.

"You must tell no one," Joseph said urgently, lowering his voice even further. "Be as invisible as you can be, just like any other prisoner. We have no idea where the Peacemaker..." He hesitated. "Where your counterpart may have allies," he amended. It was brutal, but he could not afford to be unclear. "He may have guessed that you have come to us, and he will see it as a betrayal, one he cannot afford."

"I know," Schenckendorff said in no more than a whisper. "He will kill me. Perhaps he will do that eventually anyway. With him the cause was always first." He spoke with difficulty. "Perhaps that is the germ of his moral decay—he cannot see that some weapons destroy the men who wield them in a subtler and deeper way than the enemy they kill with their use. I will be extremely careful, Reverend Reavley." The shadow of a smile touched his lips. "I have to survive in order to tell your prime minister what my ... ally ... has done. He will not believe it from anyone else. Even I may have some difficulty. It will be necessary for you to be there, and to swear to the existence of the original treaty your father took. Do you still have it?"

Joseph smiled very slightly. "Who is the Peacemaker?" he asked.

Schenckendorff smiled back. It was a thin, painful gesture but not without both humor and comprehension. "The treaty would help," he said, evading the question. His voice was growing weaker, as if the pain of his broken foot, the shock to the bones, the extensive loss of blood, and no doubt several days of bitter deliberation before the struggle to get through the lines had exhausted his physical and mental strength. He had risked being shot as a deserter.

Joseph debated within himself whether to tell the doctor in charge here that Schenckendorff was of special importance and to take care that he did not die of neglect to his wound. That was possible in the vast crowd of German prisoners pouring through the lines now in their tens of thousands. Not all of them would be fed, treated, and cared for. And Allied soldiers must come first, always. But he could give no reason. The doctors were harried to exhaustion. Burdening them with secrets was foolish, especially one they would not understand. The risk was higher than any advantage. He decided against it.

"I'll have my brother here by this evening," he said instead. "Get as much rest as you can. Sleep if possible."

There was a flash of appreciation in Schenckendorff s eyes that he had not indulged in platitudes. "Good night, Chaplain."

Joseph managed to find Matthew and get the message through to him. He arrived back at the Casualty Clearing Station by sundown, but when he saw Schenckendorff, the German was feverish and in intense pain. The wound in his foot was messy, as if
a bayonet rather than a bullet had caused it. He had lost a great deal of blood, and there was a fear of septicemia.

"You'd better start praying," Matthew said grimly when he found Joseph in the storage tent. He was sorting through supplies and trying to tidy them up after the night's casualties. "That foot looks pretty bad. Hope to hell they don't have to amputate it. It would make him hard to move. We won't convince anyone if we can't get him to London."

"Did he tell you who the Peacemaker is?" Joseph asked, turning from the table where bandages, linen, disinfectant, and suture thread were laid out.

Matthew looked back at him steadily. "No. Did he ask you if you still had the treaty Father took from the Peacemaker?"

"Yes. But I didn't answer him."

Matthew chewed his lip. "Joe, do you think that's what he really wants? Is he still on the Peacemaker's side and they need to get that treaty back before the armistice, just in case we expose it then?"

The thought had crossed Joseph's mind with a bitter disappointment, but he could not dismiss it. "Maybe," he said unhappily. "Perhaps we'd better not tell Judith anything until we know more. Damn it." He swallowed hard. "Damn it! I'd begun to hope we had him."

Matthew gripped Joseph s shoulder hard. "Maybe we have."

Joseph looked at him. "Have you thought what it would cost a man in Schenckendorff's position to turn against his own like that? I can hardly imagine the courage and the moral strength to face the fact that you had dedicated your life to a cause that was fatally flawed, then give yourself to the enemy to undo your own efforts and accept whatever they choose to do to you."

"Nor can I," Matthew agreed. "Which is part of why I dare not believe it yet. He's either a true hero or a very clever double dealer. Either way, he's a brave man." He sighed. "And he could die of that damn foot. What did it, Joseph?"

"Bayonet, by the look of it."

"God in heaven!For what? What's the point of that now?"

Joseph did not answer. For a man who had seen half the men he knew killed, the rage to commit such an act was easy to understand, and impossible to explain.

CHAPTER THREE

It was another long night of casualties. More German prisoners coming through the lines voluntarily, or taken in desperate, failed battles. Joseph worked between the first-aid post and the Casualty Clearing Station. He finally got a break at almost half past three in the morning and lay down in his dugout. He was exhausted and filthy, but here it was at least dry. Matthew was curled up, sound asleep, and he took care not to disturb him.

He woke with a jolt to find Tiddly Wop Andrews bending over him. There was a thread of daylight coming down the steps. He could see that Tiddly Wop's handsome face was gaunt with weariness, and now also creased with new anxiety. "Chaplain!" Tiddly Wop said urgently. "Wake up! The colonel wants you roight away."

Joseph struggled to the surface of comprehension, his head pounding. "Why? What is it now?" His first fear was that Schenckendorff had died. Then he realized that Hook had no idea how much that would matter. He struggled to sit up. Every bone and muscle in his body hurt. "What's happened, Tiddly?"

Before the war Tiddly Wop's hair had been long, and when he was worried he brushed at his brow as if it still were. He did it now, un-aware of the movement. "Oi
don't know, Chaplain, but it's bad. Looks loike
hell, he does. Something at the clearing station, that's all Oi know. You'd better go now. That's whoi Oi
didn't even get you a mug of
 
tea. No toime."

Joseph was suddenly ice-cold. "Have you seen Miss Reavley?" he demanded, his mouth dry. That was always his first thought.

"Yes, an' she's foine, sir. But you'd better go," Tiddly Wop urged.

Warmth flooded back into Joseph as if the blood had started pumping again. That was absurd. Judith had been here for four years, and usually he managed not to think about what she faced, or he would cease to function at all. It was the only way anyone could survive. Most men had family here, or at the very least lifelong friends. They all came from the same few villages. It was what bound them together, made the sharing and the loyalty complete, and the loss devastating.

He struggled to his feet and followed Tiddly Wop out into the pale, misty daylight. The rain had stopped; a watery sun was gleaming on the mud. Here and there it shone on a flat surface of a crater, making it look like polished steel.

It was a fifteen-minute hard walk to the colonel's command bunker. Joseph went down the concrete steps and parted the sacking over the entrance. He asked for permission to enter. When it was given he went in and stood to attention. This was farther forward than the Casualty Clearing Station. It was an old German bunker, and deeper than the British equivalent. The floor was dry, the walls lined with pretty decent wood.

"Sit down," Hook ordered, gesturing to an ammunition box turned on end. They must have taken the chairs when they retreated. Tiddly Wop was right: Hook looked dreadful. "I'm afraid there's been a death at the clearing station," he said grimly. "I've no choice but to call in the military police, but I want you to be there. You know how to keep your head and deal with these things."

Joseph was confused. There were deaths every day, in the trenches, in no-man's-land, in the ambulances, in the first-aid posts, in the clearing stations, in the fields, and on the sides of the roads, violent, desperate deaths all the time. A hospital was the best place to die, not the worst.

"One of the nurses," Hook added. "Sarah Price."

"I'm sorry," Joseph said automatically. "I'll write to her family. What happened?"

"For God's sake, Reavley!" Hook snapped, his voice near the edge of control. "I wouldn't have woken you up to tell you if
it were an accident! The poor girl was hacked to death with a damn bayonet!"

For the second time since waking up, Joseph was stunned into complete immobility. He struggled to grasp what Hook had said, and yet the words were clear enough. A nurse had been brutally murdered. Of course the military police had been sent for; there was no other possible action. "Yes, sir," he said slowly.

"Be there, please," Hook asked. "The men are going to take it very badly. I don't want..." He looked for the right word. "I don't want revenge. I suppose it was one of the German prisoners, but we can't have them all massacred. Do what you can, Reavley."

"Yes, sir." Joseph stood up sharply. His mind was racing now to Schenckendorff. How would they get him out? He could not tell Hook that the man needed to leave. Perhaps they would find out what had happened quickly and it would all be settled in a day or two, then Schenckendorff s fever would have broken and he could travel. He would be in pain, but so were tens of thousands of men. War was about pain of one sort or another.

Hook drew in his breath as if to add something further, then let it go again in silence. Joseph excused himself and went to find Matthew before going to the station.

Matthew was standing with a group of other men around a small fire with a Dixie can of boiling water. He was about to make tea. Joseph greeted him. He turned around, regarding Joseph with some concern. He did not ask what was the matter, but it was clear that Schenckendorff was just as much on his mind.

"You'd better come," Joseph added simply.

Matthew thanked the men for the tea, leaving it behind as he fell into step with his brother single-file between the old craters. Only when they could move side by side did Joseph tell him what Hook had said.

"I suppose he's sure?" Matthew asked, hunching his coat collar up. "That's going to make it harder to get Schenckendorff out, isn't it? They'll be pretty unhappy about German prisoners, even injured ones.

And I was worrying about him dying!" He pulled his mouth down in a hard line. "I suppose the only good thing is that he was too ill to be suspected. Filthy irony of it."

"He wasn't too ill to stand," Joseph replied. "Not early in the evening, anyway. You'd be amazed what a man can do, injured almost to death."

"Murdering a nurse?" Matthew's voice rose in disbelief. "What the devil for? He's on his way to London to give up his ally, and pretty certainly to be hanged!"

"No one in the Casualty Clearing Station knows that," Joseph pointed out. "At least, please God, no one does. Let's hope this Swiss priest of yours was careful."

Matthew hastened his stride toward the clearing station. All the men were moving forward in file toward the ever-shifting front line: the wagons of ammunition boxes, two tanks mired in mud and making heavy weather of churning it up on their huge tracks, and mule teams pulling guns forward on carriages.

Judith Reavley pulled her ambulance into the mud as close to the Casualty Clearing Station as she could and climbed out. She was tired and stiff from driving most of the night, and more than anything she wanted a hot drink to ease the chill inside her. First she must help unload the wounded, however, then when they were safe check her engine, which was misfiring. It was early daylight now. Mist hung over the craters, softening the harsh lines of the old supply trenches and for the moment making them look more like cart tracks than the gashes in the land that they were.

She stood, turning slowly, looking for someone to help. It was a two-man job to carry a stretcher. Someone must have seen her coming. A doctor hurried by fifty yards away, increasing his step to a run, but he took no notice of her. She started toward the Admissions tent. She was halfway there when another doctor came out whom she recognized immediately. It was Cavan, one of the best surgeons in the army, a man with whom she had worked through some of the worst nights during the battles of Ypres and Passchendaele, and in the long, desperate days since. His courage had merited him a Victoria Cross, and his rash loyalty had caused him to lose it.

He saw her and went back to the opening, shouting something inside. Two more men appeared and ran toward the ambulance. Cavan came to her, his face grave, his eyes smudged with shadows of exhaustion. She assumed he had lost many wounded through the night. There was no point in saying anything comforting to him. They had both seen this happen so many times, the understanding needed no words, and nothing helped anyway. Even if the task had been hopeless and the men too mutilated ever to survive, death was still death.

"Judith!" he said the moment they were out of the hearing of the wounded. "Something pretty awful has happened. Sarah Price has been killed." He took her arm and held it, closing his hand to grip her as if afraid she might sway and overbalance.

"I'm sorry," she said sincerely. Death was still death, but it was somehow worse that Sarah had made it this far ... only to be killed in what had to be the final weeks of the war. By this time next month it could all be over. "What happened? There's not much falling this far back now."

"Not shelling," he said. "She was murdered." He was frowning, his face furrowed with distress. "It was brutal. She was cut about with a bayonet, in the pit of the stomach, and then left out where the hospital waste is put."

"You mean ..." She stopped. She tried to picture Sarah Price lying in the mud behind the Operating tent where they disposed of blood-soaked bandages, old swabs, litter that could not possibly be reused, sodden clothes, and the mangled, amputated limbs of the worst injured. "Who did it?" She felt her stomach churn with horror, then a hot wave of fury. She had not particularly liked Sarah. She was trivial, made fun of things that were important, laughed too loudly, flirted in a silly way, showing off. But she was also kind, and generous, always willing to share any food she had, or pretend she had not heard a joke before and find it funny all over again. "Who did it?" Her voice rose sharply, and she pulled her arm away from his.