Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

Joseph forced himself to answer. “I should think so.” The words were stiff.

“Well, if he isn’t, the men’ll want to know why!” Willis said fiercely. “Bloody hero, he is.”

Joseph thanked him and went to find Seagrove and Noakes. They told him pretty much the same story.

“You going to have him recommended?” Noakes asked. “He earned it this time. Mordaff came and we said just the same to him. Reckon he wanted the Captain given a medal. He made us say it over and over again, exactly what happened.”

“That’s right,” Seagrove nodded, leaning on a sandbag.

“You told him the same?” Joseph asked. “About the wire, and Ashton getting caught in it?”

“Yes, of course. If he hadn’t got caught by the legs he’d have gone straight on and landed up in Fritz’s lap, poor devil.”

“Thank you.”

“Welcome, Chaplain. You going to write up Captain Holt?”

Joseph did not answer, but turned away, sick at heart.

He did not need to look again, but he trudged all the way back to the field hospital anyway. It would be his job to say the services for both Ashton and Mordaff. The graves would be already dug.

He looked at Ashton’s body again, looked carefully at his trousers. They were stained with mud, but there were no tears in them, no marks of wire. The fabric was perfect.

He straightened up.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly to the dead man. “Rest in peace.” And he turned and walked away.

He went back to where he had left Mordaff’s body, but it had been removed. Half an hour more took him to where it also was laid out. He touched the cold hand and looked at the brow. He would ask. He would be sure. But in his mind he already was. He needed time to know what he must do about it. The men would be going over the top on another trench raid soon. Today morale was high. They had a hero in their number, a man who would risk his own life to bring back a soldier who had lost his nerve and panicked. Led by someone like that, they were equal to Fritz any day. Was one pistol bullet, one family’s shame, worth all that?

What were they fighting for anyway? The issues were so very big, and at the same time so very small and immediate. of the firing line, are you? You’ve been up here a couple of weeks; you should be in turn for a step back any day. Me too, thank God.”

Joseph faced forward, peering through the gloom toward no-man’s-land and the German lines beyond. He was shaking. He must control himself. This must be done in the silence, before the shooting started up again. Then he might not get away with it.

“Pity about that sniper over there,” he remarked. “He’s taken out a lot of our men.”

“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.”