No Man's Land

by Reginald Hill

  ‘These Aussies are the living end,’ drawled a cavalry captain. ‘That mutiny down at Étaples last September was almost entirely due to them, I gather.’

  A neighbour kicked his elegantly booted leg under the table as the senior officers at the head of the table paused in their conversation and turned frostily disapproving stares in his direction. As Denial had foreseen, the riots at Étaples had been officially described as small outbursts of unruly behaviour, limited in their effects and trivial in their causes. To use the word mutiny in this connection was a gross indiscretion.

  ‘There were Anzac troops involved, yes,’ agreed Denial.

  ‘But not your chaps?’

  ‘No,’ said Denial. ‘Not my chaps.’

  ‘No? Well, good hunting, old sport,’ said his interlocuter. ‘I say, this claret’s not a patch on last night’s. I reckon someone’s been switching labels again!’

  Custom made it impossible for Denial to leave the mess before the senior officer retired and that night old battles were being re-fought and new ones which would bring the war to an end in a month if only Haig would listen, were being fantasized. The junior officers were infected by the game and a heated discussion began at Denial’s end of the table. He sat in silence, his thoughts drifting to what waited for him at the war’s end. And what might have waited.

  At last, long after midnight, it was possible to get to bed. He took a look out of the window of the attic room he had been allotted. A heavy mist was draping itself over trees and buildings and as he watched the last star went out. He climbed into his restricting cot and fell asleep.

  Outside and less than a hundred yards away the masking mist swirled around three shivering men. Two of them, Viney and Hepworth, were merely reacting to the dark chill which struck through every layer of clothing to the marrow. But the third, Arnold Tomkins, returning to the scene of his clerical triumphs, was shaking with pure terror. He hadn’t stopped shaking since he left the farm several hours earlier. It was only the fact that of all the world’s terrors, that inspired by Viney’s wrath was the greatest, which kept him on his feet.

  Hepworth’s motives for being present were more obscure. He had greeted the appearance of Viney, Tomkins and Lothar on Wednesday night with watchful indifference. Madeleine on the other hand had made no attempt to conceal her irritation.

  Viney had brought the German along for two reasons. Firstly to interpret and secondly because he did not care to leave him unsupervised in the Warren. With Coleport no longer reliable, there was no one even among his closest supporters whom he cared to trust to apply the ultimate sanction on Lothar.

  But the promise of a return home with proper papers to guarantee a fair measure of protection had at least turned most of the opposition neutral.

  As for Madeleine Gilbert and her family, Viney had urged Lothar to underline that it meant the Lost Battalion would be out of their lives forever. All that he wanted was to use the farm as a jumping-off point for this last raid.

  ‘Are we asking or telling them?’ enquired Lothar, knowing the answer.

  Viney frowned.

  ‘Don’t get clever, Fritz,’ he warned. ‘You know that Taff and the raiding party will be turning up here on Friday night. We’ll do the raid on Saturday. And we’ll be off back to the Warren the next night and after that, it’s every man for himself.’

  Lothar regarded the Australian in bewilderment. For once he could not understand the man’s motives. He was determined to show who was the leader, certainly. But success this time would mean the dissolution of Viney’s Volunteers. And even if his grandiose scheme of providing every man in the group with genuine papers worked, it would benefit himself least of all. England was not home to Viney. And if he really wanted to get there, Lothar was certain he could contrive it without this dangerous and foolhardy raid.

  Now he asked the question direct.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Viney? Is it to get Josh home?’

  Viney shrugged and said, ‘Mebbe. If he wants to go. Or you might say I’m doing it for Patsy Delaney. In memoriam, Fritz. In memoriam. Now tell the good lady here what’s going to happen. Tell her, not ask.’

  Lothar told. Madeleine exchanged a glance with Hepworth but otherwise her response was the emotionless indifference he had come to expect.

  ‘Where is Nicole?’ enquired Lothar. ‘I have not seen her?’

  Madeleine shrugged and said, ‘Busy.’

  It didn’t take any great powers of observation to see that Hepworth and Madeleine were now sleeping together. Old Alpert, Madeleine’s father, had died shortly after Christmas, and as the sole male remaining, Heppy had become very much the master of the house, as far as anyone could be said to be master with a will as strong as Madeleine’s to contend with.

  Lothar spoke with him alone on Friday afternoon while Viney was sleeping in preparation for that night’s recce.

  ‘How are things with you, Heppy?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You will stay here after the war?’

  Hepworth shrugged, an untypically Gallic movement.

  ‘Madeleine will not, I think, leave here easily,’ prodded Lothar.

  ‘Then mebbe I’ll stay here,’ growled the Yorkshireman.

  ‘But you are not a farmer. It needs expertise to work on a farm.’

  The watchful eyes turned on him.

  ‘Listen, Fritz, whatever a man can do, I can turn my hands to.’

  Then suddenly the tone became more conciliatory.

  ‘Not that you’re not right, Fritz. I reckon in the long run, I can do it. But it really needs a lot more knowledge than I’ve got. Aye, and mebbe a bit more energy too.’

  Lothar thought about this.

  ‘It’s Josh you mean, isn’t it?’ he said.

  Hepworth nodded.

  ‘Viney has promised they may all go home to England,’ said Lothar.

  ‘Home! That’s pie in the sky, Fritz, and you know it,’ said Hepworth. ‘Any road, Josh has never seemed interested to me in getting home, not like them other bastards. You know that better than me, Fritz. How are things between you two, anyway?’

  ‘Not good,’ said Lothar. ‘He hates me still.’

  ‘And Nicole, how’s he feel about her?’

  Now it was Lothar’s turn to shrug.

  ‘Does she talk of him, Heppy?’ he asked.

  ‘Times, she does.’

  Yes, thought Lothar. He could understand her pouring out her heart to this man. He knew well how much Nicole needed masculine strength to lean on and with Hepworth’s developing relationship with Madeleine, he would make the perfect surrogate father and perhaps even confessor.

  ‘And she would like Josh to come back here? To stay?’ he asked.

  He had still not spoken to Nicole, though from time to time he had glimpsed her, looking pale and preoccupied. Each time she had become aware of him, she had turned and hurried away.

  Hepworth said, ‘She needs someone, Fritz. If not Josh, you.’

  Lothar smiled in surprise. He had plans and a mission far beyond a French farm once this war was over. Win or lose, Germany would be in a turmoil with a huge groundswell of anti-militarism fed by bereavement and waste and hunger. Hence would come the energies for the new socialist future which was the only thing that could make any sense of these years of carnage.

  ‘Me?’ he said. ‘Why should I stay? How can Nicole need me?’

  Hepworth stood up and said harshly, ‘She’s pregnant, Fritz. That’s why.’

  When the time came for the recce to begin, Lothar reiterated the refusal to go on it that he had made from the start. Viney came as near to pleading with him as he had ever done. Arnold Tomkins had already caused him considerable alarm by disappearing an hour earlier. They had found him shivering in the byre, his terror of the expedition having overcome his terror of the big gentle cow against whom he pressed himself for warmth and concealment. Now he was kitted up and apparently resigned to going, but Viney reckoned it
was going to take at least two men to keep him in order once they got on their way.

  It was Hepworth who ended the argument.

  ‘I’ll go,’ he said.

  Viney looked surprised but didn’t argue.

  ‘Hurry up and get ready,’ he growled. ‘We’re late already.’

  Under the pretext of helping Hepworth black his face, Lothar was able to ask him, ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve seen how Viney takes care of the wounded,’ said the Yorkshireman. ‘But if Viney gets wounded, who takes care of him? There’s no one here he’d be much bothered about protecting, is there?’

  Lothar was in no doubt that ‘take care’ was a euphemism.

  He gave it its proper inflection when he said, ‘You take care of yourself, Heppy.’

  ‘I’ll do that. But if I didn’t get back, you’d take care of this, wouldn’t you, Fritz? Promise?’

  His gesture included the farm and all in it.

  ‘You love her?’ said Lothar; then, embarrassed at this intrusion into the man’s private life, he said, ‘I promise.’

  Madeleine approached at this point, in her hand a fresh baked loaf.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You will be hungry.’

  ‘Aye. All of us,’ Hepworth said.

  He tore the loaf into three and tossed a chunk each to Viney and Tomkins. Then with sudden violence he grasped Madeleine and drew her to him in a fierce embrace which she returned with passion.

  Five minutes later, the ill-assorted trio had slipped away into the night if Tomkins’s reluctant stumble could be called slipping.

  Lothar closed the door and said to Madeleine in a quiet voice which brooked no denial, ‘Tell Nicole I wish to speak to her.’

  Terror or time had blunted Arnold Tomkins’s memory. All that he seemed to be capable of identifying through the night-glasses which Viney had brought along was the stable block in which he used to sleep. And as the mist blossomed and the château became a vague grey hulk he grew uncertain even of this.

  Viney grew more and more impatient. He had made Tomkins draw a plan of the château and its environs in the Warren, but the clerk’s uncertainties had convinced him that a recce was essential. And now with the actual building within a stone’s throw, the little shit seemed even less certain of the layout.

  ‘We’ll go in closer,’ he whispered.

  ‘No, please, Viney,’ begged Tomkins. ‘There’s guards!’

  ‘Of course there’s fucking guards!’ exploded Viney. ‘But where? If you could tell me that, we’d know something worth knowing!’

  He pulled down his woollen mitt and glanced at the wristwatch with the luminous dial he had ‘won’ from an officer in the Gallipoli campaign. A novelty still at that time, the officer had boasted in Viney’s presence its convenience and its security from theft. But he had lost first his watch and not long after his life.

  It was four-thirty, much, much later than Viney had planned. They should have been half way back to the farm now, but Tomkins’ slowness of movement in getting here and uncertainty of identification on arrival had cost them a good two hours. It would be long after dawn by the time they made it back, so they might have cause to bless the fog after all.

  He made up his mind.

  ‘We’ll risk the guards,’ he whispered. ‘Just a quick look, Arnie, old chum, just so’s you can get your bearings, then it’s home to a hot breakfast and a twelve hours’ kip. All right, mate?’

  His friendly approach did the trick. Tomkins nodded and the three men began to edge cautiously forward. Soon they had moved out of the concealment of the shrubbery and were making their way across a formal garden. It was sadly neglected, but the long, lank grass gave little protection. Fortunately it was criss-crossed with a pattern of slightly sunken paths flanked by miniature ornamental hedges and when they hit one of these they were able to move at a crouch with some small degree of concealment. Eventually they arrived at a central junction of paths marked by a small marble fountain choked with weed and debris. To Viney’s delight, this seemed to trigger off a positive response in Tomkins’s memory.

  ‘Here, listen, I know where I am now,’ he said. ‘Right ahead there, there’s a bit of terrace, see?’

  Straining his eyes through the mist, Viney could just about make it out.

  ‘Right in the middle there’s the main door, now that’s useless as there’s always a sentry in the box outside …’

  ‘Well, for Christ’s sake keep your voice down!’ ordered Viney.

  ‘Sorry. There’s three big windows either side, then if you go round the corner, another four big windows down the side of the house. The third of them down the left- hand side, that’s the room you want. Leastways it was when I was here.’

  This, if accurate, was just the kind of information Viney wanted.

  ,‘The window fastenings,’ he said. ‘What about them?’

  ‘It’s a simple catch, I recall. Easy to prise open with a knife. But at night they usually close the shutters and I doubt you’d get through them without using an axe. But if you go round the back of the house, there’s no shutters there any more. Got used for firewood, I think. And you could easily …’

  He choked as Hepworth’s hand closed sharply on his mouth.

  A moment later they heard footsteps on a path. The mist made distance and direction difficult till there was the soft scratching of a match and the glow of a cigarette being lit in cupped hands about twenty-five yards to their left.

  Voices spoke low. It sounded like two men. Tomkins stirred in fear, but Hepworth’s hand remained on his mouth and Viney had his left arm in a grip like a vice.

  The men came strolling towards them. After a few paces their shapes became clearly visible through the mist. Helmets and slung rifles. They were patrolling sentries, but fortunately, as Viney had guessed, rendered complacent by too much time in a cushy billet.

  It seemed that they were going to walk straight towards the crouching trio but within a dozen feet of the fountain they suddenly veered off right, towards the house, obviously following the line of an intersecting path. A moment later and their shapes were almost invisible.

  Slowly Viney let his breath out and, releasing Tomkins, took another quick glance at his watch.

  It was four-forty.

  He tapped Hepworth and jerked his thumb towards the east to indicate it was time to move out. The result was devastating. As though his gesture had stabbed a detonating button wired to a line of charges fifty miles long, the whole horizon exploded with a brilliance that lit up the fog and a couple of seconds later a dreadful pulsating but unremittant thunder came rolling over the trembling land.

  Tomkins’s teeth closed on Hepworth’s fingers and the Yorkshireman jerked his hand away with a cry of pain. But his cry was drowned in the little corporal’s shriek of sheer terror. He leapt to his feet and stared in horror for a second at the livid east, then, still shrieking, he turned his back on it and ran for the familiar safety of his former workplace.

  The two sentries had spun round to look in wild amazement at the tremendous firework display which was ripping the night sky to shreds. Out of the mist, rushing at them, screaming like a man, or indeed a platoon of men, on bayonet practice at Étaples, came a demented figure.

  One of the sentries tried to stutter a challenge but the other had. a greater sense of his own worth. The rifle came off his shoulder with a speed that would have delighted his old training sergeant and the first bullet hit Tomkins when he was still several yards away.

  The next half-dozen bullets took him in the back. They all came from Viney’s Luger. His spine shattered by one of them, he went down with that unmistakable looseflapping slump which proclaims a dead man.

  Viney and Hepworth paused no longer. Turning and still crouched low, they sprinted away in the mist towards the distant crescent of flame.

  The corridors of the château were rapidly filled with men in various stages of undress.

  ‘It’s the big one,’ chortled the cavalry ca
ptain. ‘I almost hope they manage a little breakthrough. Then we’ll see what the gees can do!’

  Elsewhere a white-faced senior officer was saying to his ADC, ‘I warned them about this. Oh Christ, with the state of our reserves, if they break through they could keep going to the sea!’

  But Jack Denial looking out of his attic window dropped his eyes from the flaming sky to the garden below, where dimly through the mist he saw two men with rifles kneeling by a figure on the ground.

  Quickly he dressed and descended. By the time he got downstairs, the body had been carried inside. He sought out the guard commander.

  ‘Funniest thing,’ he said. ‘He came charging out of the dark like a crazy man. He wasn’t going to stop so they fired off one round at him. Down he went. But look, you can see, his back’s riddled with bullets. Oddest thing of all is, some of the lads recognized him.’

  ‘Recognized him, Sergeant?’

  ‘Yessir. It’s a man called Tomkins. Used to be admin corporal here till he went missing about a year ago.’

  Tomkins.’

  The name rang a bell. Denial had a card-index memory. He shuffled through it.

  ‘Tomkins. He was in the RFC supply truck with that Scottish driver, Shawcross, the one they found shot out in the Desolation,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know nothing about that, sir. If you’ll excuse me …’

  Denial walked out into the night and stood in deep reflection. His mind was toying with three names. Shawcross … Tomkins … Viney?

  And so he stood, completely oblivious to the cold, the mist, and, along the eastern horizon, the most concentrated barrage of artillery the German army had ever launched, the prelude to the Kaiserschlacht, the last great German attack by which General Ludendorff hoped to win the war.

  4

  Lothar had not slept that night.

  If Viney should return with a platoon of British soldiers hot on his heels, he wanted to be ready for a rapid departure. Hepworth he was certain would not bring any danger back to the farm, but in the event of a policy dispute between the two men, he was by no means sure who would come out on top.