The Case of the Fighting Soldier: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  Mind you, there were other outdoor demonstrations besides these on the ranges: anti-tank operations with mines and flame-throwers, for instance; smoke attacks, attacks on parachutists and supposed air-borne troops, and various guerrilla exercises. The students would also have three long spells of night operations, but those we were spared. All I can repeat is that as far as I was concerned it was a marvellous week, and invaluable as a rehearsal. As for the Home Guard personnel who would go through the full Course, I couldn’t help thinking they were exceedingly lucky people.

  That week also had made us of the staff well acquainted with each other. The Colonel was rarely in the Mess, and Collect was not a gregarious soul either, but the rest of us spent most of our leisure there. I did a lot of my work in the inner reading-and writing-room, and Staff was often in there too. Ferris, Mortar, Flick, and less often Compress and Harness kept the bar going, though it hardly seemed worth while our having a separate bar. The idea, however, in the Colonel’s mind was that the staff ought not to make themselves too familiar in the N.A.A.F.I. of the Home Guard, which was out of bounds for us as far as drinking was concerned.

  One evening before dinner I was doing some writing when I heard voices raised in the bar. You may have gathered that I am the Nosiest of Parkers; at any rate I put away my writing and went to investigate. At the bar were Ferris, Mortar, and Staff, and I was in time for the following words from Mortar.

  “Young feller-me-lad, what you don’t keep on remembering is that I was a fighting soldier when the cradle-marks were still on your backside.”

  The tone was suave and condescending. Mortar was one of those people who could tell the filthiest of stories in a voice of such charm and good breeding that only afterwards did you realise how unspeakable a yarn it had been. Ferris, by the way, was holding a glass in his right hand, and his left elbow was resting on the bar counter, while a smile of quiet amusement transformed him into something avuncular and genial.

  “What’s all this?” I said. “A spot of leg-pulling?”

  Mortar beamed at me. I’ve told you that he and Ferris regarded me as definitely on their side.

  “Hallo, sir. Have a drink.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I will. I’ll have a sherry, and I’ll pay for it myself.”

  He stared. I smiled.

  “You know the regulations. No standing treat. That won’t stop me from drinking your very good health.”

  “Dammit all, sir, the Colonel stands a drink,” he told me.

  “So shall I when I’m a Colonel,” I told him. It wasn’t a particularly amusing remark, but we laughed. Staff didn’t. He was standing just a little aloof, rather flushed and very much on his dignity. He wished me a good-health as I drank to all, then finished his drink and said he had a job to do. When he’d gone I shook my head at Mortar.

  “You really mustn’t keep baiting Staff,” I said. “The last thing we want in a show like this is bad blood. We’ve all got to live together.”

  Mortar shrugged his shoulders. “I know, sir, but he’s so damn’ conceited. He’s a bloody young whipper-snapper.”

  “Honestly, sir, he’s devilish offensive,” Ferris said.

  “You listen to an old man for once,” I said. “First of all, though, damn the regulations and you two have a drink with me.”

  When we’d said, “Here’s how,” and Mortar had added his private toast of: “May the skin of your bottom never cover a banjo,” I talked to the two like a Dutch uncle.

  “You two are fighting soldiers,” I said. “Everybody grants it, but there’s no need to keep harping on it. The Colonel was a fighting soldier, unless he’s not entitled to his ribbons. I’ve been one myself.”

  “We know that, Major,” cut in Mortar.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But the point’s this. Staff may be what you call a fighting soldier, too, even if he hasn’t had the chance to prove it. There’s not so much wrong with this generation, you know. So you, and you, Ferris, pipe down on the fighting business. If the time comes when young Staff definitely shows a yellow streak, then you can reopen the subject, and I’ll be with you. Meanwhile, live and let live.”

  That was the gist of what I told the two fire-eaters. That same night, just when I was turning in to bed, there was a tap at my door and Staff came in. In less than no time he was unburdening his soul to me. Captain Mortar was making his life hell, he said. He could stand up for himself in argument and he didn’t mind being contradicted in private, but Mortar was treating him like dirt in front of N.C.O.s and men, and Staff said he was damned if he was going to stand for that.

  I was rather sorry for Staff, in a way, and I talked to him, too, like a Dutch uncle. I told him to pipe down a bit on the theory business, and to try going out of his way to be friendly to Mortar and Ferris his satellite.

  “Wipe out all your preconceived notions,” I said. “If you’d been under heavy fire and gone through the things those two have gone through, you’d see their point of view.”

  Placating Mortar, he said, would be about as effective as placating a rhinoceros, but when he left my room I think I had knocked some sense into him, and I was hoping there’d be an end of unpleasantness, even if I had to confess to myself that Staff was far from a likeable person. But I did like Mortar. I should say he was as brave a thing as ever stood on two feet, and he never bragged by giving evidence to prove it. If I had still to pick a man to be alongside me in a tight corner, I would go no farther than Mortar.

  I liked Ferris, too, though for me there was always something more menacing about him, for all Mortar’s airy talk of gore. I still recall his lecture on guerrilla tactics by night, and the murderous knife he suddenly produced from his leg, and how his eyes gleamed as he demonstrated the quick upward thrust in the dark, and the twist of the knife before the withdrawing. It made my blood freeze as he did it, and yet in what I might call ordinary life Ferris was the mildest man alive. It was he who bought a kitten for the Mess, and looked after it. And, of course, there was his hobby of stamp-collecting.

  One evening he took me round to his room, where I saw a couple of albums that represented, so he said, the pick of his collection. He was engaged in re-cataloguing, and I had to own that I was as ignorant about stamps as could be. He soon made it interesting, especially when we were looking at certain Spanish War stamps, which were certainly rare already and likely to become very valuable indeed.

  “Isn’t it rather dangerous leaving them in a place like this?” I said, for they were in the drawer of a flimsy chest against the partition that separated his room from Mortar’s. He merely smiled quietly in that likeable way he had and said his batman was reliable, and, after all, the drawer was kept locked. I don’t really know why, but I never mentioned to him that I knew George Wharton. Perhaps I said nothing because George and I, and he and George, had been talking confidentially.

  Well, the week came to an end, and I was in many ways sorry. The Colonel and I, with Collect more than once thrusting himself upon us to help, reviewed results and agreed finally on the new syllabus. Everything was typed out by the Sunday morning and notices suitably posted. The afternoon was one of activity, particularly for Harness and his office, and for transport, for the latest hour of arrival for the students was five o’clock.

  The whole two hundred and fifty vacancies were taken up, and when we assembled for dinner that night the huge dining-room was filled. We of the elect sat at the high table, and I could run my eye along the assembled Course. They were a fine body of men, ranging in Home Guard rank from Major down to Lance-Corporal. Many had pretty high rank in the Service, and there was one retired General who was now a Second Lieutenant. One heard all sorts of accents from the broadly provincial to the pukka and even the refained, but there was no doubt about the patriotic leaven in the lump. I felt something of a thrill at the prospect ahead, and I could think myself also a lucky man.

  After the meal and the loyal toast the Colonel made his somewhat lengthy speech from the high table, and I
had the suspicion that he must have practised it for the devil of a long time before the glass. But it was a good speech on the whole, especially where he said that Peakridge, new and without tradition, was in the hands of every Course that assembled there. His voice lowered rather too dramatically when he mentioned the always present possibility of accidents, and the consequent need for rigid discipline and prompt obedience to orders.

  After the Colonel had sat down, Flick gave messing details, and Harness announced general routine. Then the staff filed off down the gangway between the standing students, and the immediate preliminaries were over, that night I waited for sleep with too impatient an anticipation, and I lay awake long after my usual time. Had I known what that Course was going to produce, I doubt if I’d have slept at all.

  Chapter IV

  On the Monday morning the dry bones stirred and the camp was bustling with life. That previous week of rehearsals, much as I had enjoyed it, seemed by comparison something forced and childishly elementary. The whole atmosphere of the place had changed.

  The Colonel was anxiously and fussily keen on making the school more than a success, and it was he who wanted the stamp of the pukka to be imprinted from the very start. I turned out at eight-thirty to watch the first fall-in on the parade ground, where Harness was in charge, and in his best regimental voice. Over and over again he put that double company through its paces, and made no bones about making the scathing remarks associated with the training of raw recruits. Just before nine hours the double company marched off, and for a first effort it made a brave show.

  I felt something of a thrill as I saw the men swing away. There, I thought, went a visible witness to the virtues of democracy. Those two hundred and fifty men, of ages from under twenty to anything up to seventy, drawn from every trade and profession and represented by every social class, showed what free people were prepared to do in their own defence. Those two hundred and fifty were the representatives of two hundred and fifty towns, villages, and hamlets, in each of which was a Home Guard battalion or company or humble platoon, ready for Hider if ever he came.

  As for the two hundred and fifty who formed the Course, they looked fit and keen, and the smartness of their movements was a revelation to me, in spite of Harness’s upbraidings and exhortations. But it was in the lecture-room that one really became aware of the keenness. I found it disconcerting at first talking to men whose eyes were on their notebooks and then on myself, with faces disappearing as others bent down to write. But the real test was at the end, when I asked for questions. My first request produced a barrage, and there wasn’t one that wasn’t pertinent. When my lecture was over and I was making my way through the room, I was still besieged by students who wanted to know this and that. As a result of that and similar reports by others of the staff, the Colonel instituted a special half-hour from six o’clock to six-thirty when the staff assembled in the N.A.A.F.I., which was closed for other purposes, and became a kind of Advice Bureau.

  Just one other word about myself, for you’ll probably be thinking that with only three lectures of an hour each to be delivered in a fortnight, I was about to have a remarkably easy time. But there was more to it than that. The Colonel and I took alternate half-days of general supervision, so as to keep a constant finger on the pulse of things. Then at the end of the second week there were all the notebooks to examine and to assess the passing-out standards of students according to the instructors’ reports. That would mean at least two days off my supposed week’s leave at the end of two complete Courses. That supervision, taking me as it did to lectures and demonstrations, and all over the camp, was to be invaluable at the investigation into the first of the tragedies that happened. What I propose to do, therefore, is once more to give you the highlights. You may regard them as a series of apparently disconnected happenings. I prefer to say that I am making you wise before the event. You will see only the pertinent happenings before the tragedy when I came to look back I had to sort out the pertinent ones from a score of other happenings.

  One other little thing. I am a student of human nature, and you may not see things through my eyes, hard as I may try to make you do so. Mind you, I am not boasting. To be a student is to be patently ignorant, but perhaps you will allow me to explain for your own benefit just what the statement means. My wife used to accuse me of staring at the contents of any new room into which I was shown. That was my collector’s instinct, appraising other people’s pictures, furniture, and china. That became less of a passion when I began years ago working with George Wharton. Then I had to transfer my instincts of curiosity to people. I got in the habit of trying to place strangers, and of assessing the motives of acquaintances, and generally of trying to get clean into the skins of the people who mattered. That’s all that I mean by being a student of my fellow men.

  The Home Guard simply loved Mortar and Ferris. They knew what their own role was in defeating Hitler’s attempts at invasion, and they liked to be taught by practical men. The lectures on guerrilla warfare were the most popular of all, and no wonder.

  “You know there’s a sentry or a watcher just ahead of you in the black night,” Mortar might say. “What would you do? You freeze into immobility like a cat. Ever watch a cat hunting? Have a look at it next time and watch what it does. Watch it move forward inch by inch. You wouldn’t hear a sound if you were half an inch off it. Then it springs, like a marble from a catapult, and God help the mouse or the bird. Now one of you come here. Not you—that big fellow.”

  Up would come some strapping fellow to the platform. Mortar would say all lights were going out, and he himself was to be the stalker and the student the sentry. Off would go Mortar’s boots and out would go the lights. In about a couple of minutes there would be a shout of “Lights on!” There would be Mortar with that sentry’s throat in his grip.

  “No weapons, gentlemen. Not even Mr. Ferris’s little knife. Just get your hands like this, and your legs like this and then hold on. Try it in your dormitory hut to-night. Try it in your drill halls when you get home. If you’re the bigger man, don’t wait for him to collapse. Just give a little jerk like this. Wait for the crack of the bones, then that little job’s over.”

  One thing I should relate which struck me as rather amusing at the time. I was going by Flick’s room one evening when I heard the very deuce of a clatter going on inside. So astounding was it that I tapped at the door and peeped inside. Two startled and very sheepish people regarded me—Harness and Flick. They had been practising that thuggery business, and I had to laugh as I apologised for the intrusion, for their faces were red and the sweat shining on their foreheads.

  “Boys will be boys,” I said. “And who was the winner?”

  “Look at his fists,” Harness told me indignantly. “Just like a pair of hams. I reckon I ought to be handicapped.”

  “Look at the shoulders on him,” Flick told me, with a brogue which I have never attempted to convey. “He’s the one who should have the handicapping. And what about yourself, Major?” he told me. “What about you and me having a try?”

  “God forbid,” I told him, and hastily backed out of the door.

  Then there was Ferris, a fanatic when it came to killing Germans, anywhere and anyhow. That twist of his knife still curdled my blood, and the menacing voice was as bloodcurdling too. The greatest tribute I can pay to Ferris is to say that during his guerrilla lectures there were few notes taken. Men were so eager not to miss a word or a gesture that their eyes rarely left the speaker’s face.

  One thing did strike me as peculiar about Ferris’s illustrations, and yet I suppose there was no real reason to think them so. He was talking to a British audience, and yet he never based his own hatred of the Hun on such things as indiscriminate bombing, which should have had a sure appeal. What he told his hearers was the record of murder, massacre, and duplicity in Spain. Nothing peculiar about that, you may say, for his sole experience had been in Spain, and the man himself was a Spaniard, incredible though it was
to take him for other than English.

  To sum up Mortar and Ferris—who, by the way, was to me also so essentially British that I never thought of him as Ferrova—I will say that about Brende and Staff, excellent lecturers though they were, there was always something a bit too academic. Each knew his subjects pat, but there was the one thing lacking. Each lacked the fervour of killing. Don’t think I’m aping the fire-eater, but I knew, as the Home Guard knew, that in this war you either kill or get killed. And the Home Guard were at Peakridge to learn how to achieve the one and avoid the other. From Brende and Staff they learned things; from Mortar and Ferris they not only learned but they experienced.

  Between Mortar and Ferris there was never the faintest suspicion of jealousy. Each quoted the other, and they dovetailed perfectly. Each praised the other to me behind that other’s back. Mortar said his greatest ambition in this war was to spend a few dark nights in France in Ferris’s company. Ferris spoke of Mortar as of a superior officer in whom one had unlimited confidence. I thought even more of Ferris after that, for in Spain it had been the younger man who had held far the higher rank and had made the greater reputation. And so much for what I might call things in the open. Behind the scenes; behind the stirring, pulsating life of the school and its colour and movement and noise, other things were quietly and dangerously stirring.

  Mortar had a genius for making enemies. Harness never really liked him, but he was the only one on the borderline. The rest made no secret of their dislike or loathing. Staff and he were no longer on speaking terms, so I was a failure as a peacemaker. Slowly we began to form up into two definite camps, with myself as a kind of liaison officer. Mortar, Ferris, and Flick—though less definitely—were one camp, at least at first, and the Colonel, Collect, and Staff the other. Brende, as a Warrant Officer, had only courtesy access to the Mess, and rarely availed himself of it, but he was very definitely an anti-Mortarite.