“Then they won’t believe it. It sounds like an excuse. Were they really going to let him go again, after they’d put him on a mock trial?”
“I don’t know, Judith. That’s all I could get out of the man who told me.”
Another ambulance pulled up outside. They saw the lights and heard the squelching in the mud, and voices shouting. Joseph moved aside and she followed him.
“Was he there? Is he in prison now?” she urged. “Why should anyone believe him? And if he told you in confession, why did you report it? He betrayed all his fellows!”
“He wasn’t one of them,” Joseph corrected her. “He knows because I think lots of the men do. Consider, Judith—if there were twelve men as a jury, surely others kept watch for them and covered what they were doing. There are a lot more than twelve men involved.”
She saw a glimmer of hope, just a thread. “Then that’s better. Everyone agreed Major Northrup was a disaster! Can’t we take that to the general, and show him what it’ll do to his son’s reputation? Even to his own, for that matter?” Men started carrying stretchers into the dressing station. She stepped closer to Joseph. “Joe, in the general’s place wouldn’t you forgo revenge rather than have the name of someone you loved publicly vilified and all their mistakes proved?”
“Of course I would. Revenge is worth nothing anyway. But General Northrup doesn’t feel that way.”
“Then we’ll have to make him!”
He looked at her blankly, anxiety puckering his brow, but he did not argue. It was only then that she realized he had intended to do it anyway; he merely needed time to gather the evidence. Perhaps her pain had made her too quick to judge.
“Hurry!” she urged. “The general could leave, and then it’ll be too late. I’ll help. I know Wil Sloan will, too, and others.”
He drew in his breath to argue and—realizing the futility of it—let it out again without speaking.
Judith knew there was no time to wait for Joseph to speak to General Northrup. Northrup was somewhere far behind the lines. She and Wil knew who was involved and they had transport. It was not difficult to arrange to be the drivers who took several patients back to the hospital at Lille, and then divert on the way back and find Northrup’s headquarters. Certainly they would be away longer than they should be, and they would have to commandeer petrol for the extra miles, but no one would have to be asked to cover for them or tell the necessary lies. A score of men were only too eager, vying for the privilege.
It required a little more bravado and finesse to find herself actually standing in the general’s presence in the small French farmhouse in which he was currently headquartered. It was a comfortable place, gently domestic, once somebody’s home. He was immaculately smart: boots polished, face pale and shaved to a perfect smoothness.
“You say you have further information on the death of my son, Miss…Miss Reavley?” he said stiffly. “Are you in a position to testify to this at the court-martial? It will not be easy for you. The whole regiment is of a sullen and mutinous nature. Discipline has been allowed to fall into laxity. Your fellow V.A.D. volunteers may make it difficult for you. Are you prepared for that?”
She had already weighed her answers. She stood to attention. “I am prepared to tell the truth, sir, because it is the truth, whoever likes me or dislikes me for it.” Her gaze did not waver from his. She saw a tired and grieved man, the skin around his eyes paper thin, his shoulders held square by little more than pride.
She felt a wave of pity for him, for his arrogance and blindness, for the fragility that had stopped him seeing his son as he was, and his need to believe a lie and cling on to it even at the cost of other men’s lives. But if she did not break him, then he would break Cavan, and all the others. Worst of all, he would have broken all the men’s belief in justice and the bonds of loyalty here and now. And here and now those were almost the only things left that were good.
Northrup’s voice was hoarse with emotion when he spoke. “You are a fine woman, Miss Reavley. You have more courage and honor than your regiment’s chaplain. Is he related to you?”
“Captain Reavley is my older brother, sir.” His insulting Joseph made it easier. She was angry with him herself, but that was quite different. She would have defended him to the death against anyone else. With one sentence Northrup had taken away the impediment to striking the blow.
“What is it you know, Miss Reavley?” he asked.
She replied without hesitating.
“Well, sir, in order to prove beyond question why these twelve men in particular should do such a…dangerous and terrible thing, the court will have to show something very special. All the hardship and loss the men have faced over the last three years has never made them…mutiny. And I suppose that’s what it is?”
“That is what it is, Miss Reavley,” he agreed. “Make no mistake.”
It was time to tell him the truth, before someone interrupted them.
“Well, sir, in the case of Captain Morel, it was the order Major Northrup gave to move a field gun from one position to another across half a mile of plowed clay. The men argued that it would get stuck. They might lose the gun itself, and the wagons and the horses, possibly even some of the men, if it slipped.” She watched his face and saw the muscles tighten in his neck. He knew it was a stupid order, born of inexperience and too much pride to listen to lesser ranks.
“They argued, perhaps insolently,” she went on. “Major Northrup insisted. They obeyed and got stuck. They saved the horses, but two men were injured, one man’s leg was broken so badly Captain Cavan had to amputate it.” She hated continuing, but it was like a gangrenous limb: It must all come off or it was pointless having begun. “And Captain Morel was very upset about sending out a rescue party into no-man’s-land on a day when the German snipers could simply pick them off. Some refused to go, but others did. Several men were injured. Captain Eardslie was killed. He was one of my brother’s students in Cambridge, and he and Morel were great friends.”
Northrup’s face was ashen. She felt as if she were killing a man already wounded fatally. Still she drove it home. “I have details for all of them, sir, and men prepared to swear to every incident sufficiently to prove a motive for each one of the twelve, especially Captain Cavan. It took a great deal to break him, but I can—”
“Yes!” he interrupted her. “I see you have taken a great deal of care to have every point documented, Miss Reavley. It will not be necessary.” His voice was shaking and the muscles in his neck and jaw were so tight he could not control the tic in his cheek.
Her stomach was knotted until she felt nauseous. “Don’t you want to prove the guilt of all of them?” she asked quietly. “Not just the one who pulled the trigger? He may simply have panicked. Aren’t they all equally to blame? The whole twelve?”
His voice was barely audible. “What is it you want, Miss Reavley? You are not a fool! Are you trying to have my son’s name dishonored, to have revenge for your…your mutinous friends?”
She swallowed.
“No, sir. As I said in the beginning—and you praised me for it—I want the whole truth to be told, to be fair to everyone. Nobody is going to believe that good soldiers—especially exceptional ones like Captain Cavan—mutinied unless we can show what reason they had…or imagined they had.”
He stared at her, knowing he was being manipulated. He was certain in his own mind that it was Cavan she was trying to save, and yet he could see no way out, nothing with which he could accuse her. “They are already charged,” he pointed out. “Are you so bent on revenge?”
She hesitated. Was it necessary to strike the last blow? Yes it was. She dared not stop in case she was just short of victory. “Not revenge, sir, surely? Is it not justice?”
His voice dropped to a whisper.
“My son does not deserve to be buried with dishonor. Is it not enough for them that he is dead?”
“It is terrible that he is dead, sir. And Captain Eardslie, and all the others. Over half a million of them, I believe. Not counting the French, and of course the Austrians and Germans, and the Italians, and Russians. And I suppose we have to start counting the Americans, too, now.”
“I will speak with the prosecutor. Perhaps the charge can be lessened.”
She smiled very slightly, afraid to say anything in case she spoiled it. “Permission to return to my ambulance, sir?”
“Granted, Miss Reavley.”
Mason arrived back at Passchendaele to find it worse than before. It had rained almost without ceasing, the wettest August in human memory. Men lived and died in a hell past sanity to imagine. It went on day after day, night after night, with no victory and no end in sight except the possibility that there would be no life remaining—human, animal, or plant—and finally the mud would claim everything.
He thought of his beloved Yorkshire with its wild fells, shining tarns beneath wind-ragged skies, and steep villages with cobbled streets. But the memory was too all-consuming: It robbed him of words powerful enough to capture the passion and tenderness of a love so deep. Instead he began writing of England in general.
“It doesn’t seem possible.” He started a rough draft. “At home the trees tower green like clouds over the gold of the harvest fields. Horses bend to the plow and the fruit ripens in the orchards. Poppies burn scarlet grazing the corn with hot color. The men are gone. Women now get ready to reap and bind, laughing with each other, growing used to their new tasks.
“Here there are no trees, only a few shattered trunks and the scarlet is blood as men are crushed and trodden back to the all-consuming clay from which we are told we were fashioned by a deity who has grown tired of us and turned away. These few terrible miles hold so much human flesh you cannot set foot without standing on some man’s rotting body.”
Then he tore it up and wondered how to start again. Words needed to be simple for this, clear of all sentimentality. But what was there for anyone to say? For the first time in his life, words seemed pointless, his own too small, too shallow for the burden.
“We died in hell—they called it Passchendaele.” He could only quote others. “Oh, Jesus, make it stop!”
But it seemed no God was listening.
He heard the news of the arrests of Cavan, Morel, and the other ten before he reached the section where it had happened. He wanted to speak to Colonel Hook when he had the chance and to Joseph Reavley. He needed the whole story to write up, all the information he could find before the court-martial began. And of course he wanted to see Judith as well. That was at the forefront of his mind, as it had been lately, too often for his emotional comfort.
He found the ambulance parked outside a first aid station, just behind the supply trenches. It was covered with mud; he saw several scars and dents on it, and a few bullet holes. The air was soft and muggy, full of flies and the ever-present stench. The occasional fine rain did nothing to help.
He asked for Judith and was told that she and Wil Sloan were both inside the makeshift tent. There were several other men with them, all with apparently minor injuries, and they were clustered around Judith, looking at her and laughing. Most of them had mugs of tea, held up as if in a toast.
Mason’s shadow across the door made one then another turn, and they froze.
He walked in. He could not help looking first at Judith. She was very slender, as if under the gray V.A.D. uniform with its long skirt she were thin enough to be fragile. She had been at the front for three years. She must be so weary of dirt and pain, and never having time for laughter, never dressing in pretty clothes, being admired, playing games and falling in love. There was something fierce and uniquely beautiful about her, a waiting passion that war had robbed her of living yet.
She was flushed and her eyes were bright. The men had been looking at her as they raised their mugs. Why? Had something happened, and he knew nothing of it?
They recognized him. Wil Sloan came forward, still smiling a little, but guarded now. “Hello, Mr. Mason. You looking for someone?” he asked.
Mason made up his mind immediately. “I was going to do a piece on your surgeon, Captain Cavan. I meant to last time I was here, but he was too busy. If he still is, I thought I’d ask other people about him. You must all have stories you could tell. It would be especially good for morale.” He would have to keep up the lie to Judith, and hope she never knew he had heard about the arrests.
They stared at him, the laughter dying out of their faces. Wil turned to Judith, as if seeking her permission to answer.
“I think that’s an excellent idea,” she said vigorously, looking at Mason with a bright challenge. “Captain Cavan is one of the best men in the whole Army Medical Corps, and they’re all good. We should tell you in detail about his holding off the German attack, which is why he’s up for the V.C. But there are lots of other stories as well.” Her voice was warm, vibrant with enthusiasm, her eyes shining. There was even a faint flush in her cheeks.
Mason felt an acute sensation of dismay, and then of inexplicable anger. Damn it, even after he was arrested for mutiny and murder, there was a fire in her when she spoke of Cavan that was there for no one else. Judith Reavley, the idealist, the unquestioning patriot, was going against all her convictions for this man! What was the matter with her?
Cavan was in his early thirties, and a good-looking man, fair-haired, strong, with an intelligent face. He remembered seeing him working with Judith, easily, as if understanding were there without the need for words. Should he have seen it then?
He felt shut out, cold to the core of his belly. He had been thinking of her far too often, allowing her to matter. He realized how much of the hope, the peace inside, the warmth that was worth having, had rested in the thought of her.
They were waiting for him to answer. He must control himself—hide the awful vulnerability inside him. “Thank you,” he said. “That would work very well. Then a few words with him will be enough.” He was not going to let them dupe him entirely. Apart from pride, he could not afford to appear a complete fool, which he would do if he wrote a piece about Cavan, apparently not knowing he was charged with mutiny and murder. When the court-martial began, that would be the biggest story of the entire British Army on the Western Front. The only thing that could overwhelm that would be for the army to break through and advance considerably. And at the moment they were paying in blood for every yard.