One Man's Flag

by David Downing

  It was indeed “bloody cold,” and the exposed area of skin between flying cap and scarf soon felt coated with ice. McColl clasped his collar shut in front of his throat and tried to look on the bright side—he might be freezing to death, but at least he was still aloft, with an hour’s respite until the dreaded moment arrived. Or moments. If the chute surprised him and actually opened, there was still the small matter of getting down in one piece.

  At least he didn’t have a basketful of restless pigeons in his lap, as most of his predecessors had done. According to Lansley, hundreds had been taken into occupied Belgium, each with a tightly rolled piece of paper containing a list of questions about the occupation, which locals were asked to answer and return with the homing bird. The pilot had also told him, with a perfectly straight face, that scientists in England were trying to crossbreed pigeons and parrots, so that verbal reports might be delivered.

  They were over the British trenches now, the line of Very lights stretching away to north and south. Guns were still audible in the distance, but silence reigned in this particular sector. Looking down at the dark expanse that separated the two lines, McColl wondered if men were out on patrol, mapping the enemy’s defenses, recovering the dead. “Shoveling them into bags,” as one soldier had said, in an exchange he’d overheard during the Channel crossing.

  In both British and German trenches, brief flares announced the lighting of cigarettes, and no doubt men of both nations were filling their dugouts with the same noxious gases that army food produced. Or maybe not. Maybe sauerkraut and bully beef generated subtly different farts. High above the fray, it was hard to believe that much else distinguished the armies below.

  The illuminated front gave way to darkened fields and woods. Behind the biplane the cloud-veiled quarter moon was still casting a faint light across the earth below; it would set in just over an hour, giving him time to land, hide his parachute, and work out where he was before the darkness deepened.

  The airplane’s engine droned on. It was too dark for him to read his watch, but he guessed they’d been flying for almost half an hour and would have crossed the Belgian frontier. There seemed to be more lights scattered below—villages, no doubt. Looking back over his shoulder, he caught a flash of moonlight reflected in a river or lake.

  God, it was cold. He rubbed his gloved hands together, hugged himself fiercely, and started counting seconds to pass the time. Hearing what sounded like a train, he scanned the earth below, and there it was, a shadow curling like a snake, one flickering orange eye where the blackout tarpaulin had been carelessly tied. At this hour it was probably an army train, and McColl wondered whether one of Cumming’s local watchers had already recorded its composition.

  How else could he take his mind off what felt like incipient frostbite? Practice his Belgian French?

  Professor Thistlethwaite had been much younger than McColl had expected, barely thirty in all probability, with a congenitally twisted foot that ruled out military service. They had talked for an hour in his university office, while rain ran down the windows and thunder rolled in the distance. Some of what Thistlethwaite had told him—the Belgian habit of making a stronger distinction between their short and long vowels—had been hard to grasp in the abstract but would probably become clearer once he was there. Other differences were easier to remember. What sounded like “vagon” in French was the English-sounding “wagon” in Belgian French—something a train watcher might need to know. And if counting the number in a train, then he should use the Belgian “eptante” and “nonante” not the French “soixante-dix” and “quatre-vingt-dix.”

  Meals were different, too. “Breakfast” in Belgium was “déjeuner” without the “petit.” And “souper” was any evening meal, not one taken late after seeing a show.

  It was all very interesting and might prove crucial. The German occupiers were unlikely to appreciate such linguistic quirks, but Belgians in their pay would be listening for such slips.

  The moon behind him was almost down. They must be getting near the drop zone.

  He wondered where Caitlin was at that moment. In bed, he supposed, and a damn sight warmer than he was. It crossed his mind that now that they had found each other again, dying would not be so bad. A morbid thought, but true. And death was certainly all around—so many millions of men, who only eighteen months before had barely given it a thought, were now contemplating their own mortality on an hourly basis. Would knowing how easily life could end encourage survivors to make fuller use of their own? Would those who had lived in constant fear ever be able to shake it off?

  He had always believed that his own near death on Spion Kop had made him more inclined to seize those opportunities that presented themselves. That might be the way most young men reacted. He hoped so.

  It was something he and Caitlin shared, he thought—a willingness, an eagerness almost, to take leaps in the dark.

  Though he didn’t feel that keen to take this one.

  As if on cue, Lansley’s foot tapped out the prearranged signal on the floor of his cockpit. Three taps to say good-bye, thirty seconds to prepare himself, and down he would go.

  Or fewer than thirty. He had only counted to twenty-one when he heard the scrape of the lever and, with appalling but thoroughly predictable suddenness, found himself plummeting earthward. The plane had vanished from view, the sound of its engine swiftly fading, before he remembered to pull the cord. After what seemed a very long second, the Guardian Angel jerked open above him and his speed of descent abruptly slowed, though not quite as much as he would have liked.

  It was only about ten seconds later that the grayness below him took form and shape and he knew he was falling into trees.

  Watching the Trains Go By

  Caitlin’s extra few days of research in Dublin did nothing to undermine her belief that some sort of rising was under active consideration. A day at the central library, whose excellent stock of seditious material bore testament to either great tolerance or great stupidity on England’s part, offered ample confirmation that Irish republicans certainly talked a good game. In article after article that year, the Citizen Army and union leader James Connolly had lambasted the Ulster Volunteers for their timidity. In only the last few days, he had suggested that “if Ireland did not act now the name of this generation should in mercy to itself be expunged from the records of Irish history.”

  It was true that the Volunteer leaders sounded less eager to take the military plunge. The previous May even the fiery Patrick Pearse had written that such action would make sense only if taken in self-defense, should the London government try to introduce conscription, or repeal the Home Rule Act, or attempt to disarm the Volunteers. And though Pearse himself had upped the rhetorical ante in recent months, other leaders like Eoin MacNeill and Bulmer Hobson still seemed firmly opposed to any sort of insurrection.

  But there were counterrumors swirling around in republican circles. According to one that reached Maeve, MacNeill had stumbled across a letter from Pearse to a Volunteer unit in Kerry that showed that military contingencies were already under discussion, but he had then decided not to investigate further. Why would he do that, unless he knew that a rising was off the table?

  And yet, and yet. Why try to lull the British authorities into a false sense of security if nothing was planned? Could Pearse and his friends be keeping other preparations from MacNeill and Hobson?

  There was no way to know. On Saturday she watched the Citizen Army march off down Marlborough Street lustily singing, “The Germans are winning the war, me boys!” On Sunday she followed Pearse and around a thousand Volunteers out to the site of an old obscure Fenian victory, where they drilled and listened to the sort of rousing speech that most must have heard a hundred times. The two watching G-men at the second event seemed by turns amused and contemptuous. As one told Caitlin, “Ireland’s real fighting men are in France—these are the mummy’s boys.”
/>
  She didn’t share the opinion, but it was hard to refute the implication that this ragged bunch offered little real threat to what Connolly called the “Robber Empire.” What could fewer than two thousand men do against the British army? If a rising was under consideration, then surely a defeat was, too. A glorious one, no doubt, but how many of the young men parading before her were ready to embrace martyrdom?

  The voices were German. Two of them, talking about something called “Hilde’s Heaven.” A dancer called Greta, with breasts like melons.

  McColl had a terrible headache and a throbbing pain in his right leg. When he tried to flex the latter, the shaft of agony almost took his breath away. He remembered the sound of splintering as he’d fallen through the branches and wondered how much damage he’d done to himself.

  He opened his eyes to a darkened room. Two pale washes of light at either end of a curtained window suggested that the night was over but offered little in the way of illumination. He wondered what sort of jail had curtains. A makeshift one, perhaps. There was probably a guard outside the door.

  The German voices had gone, and he wondered whether he’d imagined them. Not to mention Greta. But now there were footsteps nearby, the sound boots made on stairs.

  The opening door admitted no light, but the shadowy figure that crossed the room pulled back the curtains on a slate gray sky. The silhouette was female, the woman who turned toward him young and pretty, with dark, wavy hair that tumbled to her shoulders. The way she hugged herself reminded McColl how cold he was.

  She walked across to the bed and looked down at him. Her eyes seemed less than friendly. “I am Mathilde,” she said in French.

  “I am Jack,” he replied, raising a hand.

  After only a slight hesitation, she took it.

  “Where am I?” he asked. “And how did I get here?”

  She shook her head. “I ask the questions. Where were you supposed to go in Huy?”

  It was his turn to demur. “How do I know you’re not working for the Germans?”

  She nodded. “A fair point. So just tell me the password. If I’m working for the Germans and I don’t already know the address, that can’t help me.”

  As far as his aching head could determine, that seemed to make sense. “I was to ask for a copy of Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “And the reply should have been?”

  “We only have a first edition, which monsieur might find expensive.”

  “So how did I get here?” McColl asked.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Your parachute was seen coming down, and we managed to get you out of the tree and bring you here.”

  “Which is where? I thought I heard German voices.”

  “You are in Huy. The Germans were probably soldiers who had just had their breakfast in the café downstairs. A lot of them use it, because the food is better than the swill they are given at their barracks.”

  McColl found that somewhat alarming. “That doesn’t sound very safe. For me or you.”

  “It isn’t, and we will move you as soon as we can. But now we are waiting for the doctor. We think you have broken your leg.”

  “Oh.”

  “He may be some time,” she added. “He is visiting the district where your airplane dropped its bombs.”

  Her tone was enough, but he asked it anyway. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “A girl was killed, her father injured.”

  “He was supposed to drop them over the citadel,” McColl said, as much to himself as her.

  “He didn’t.”

  McColl felt terrible and knew that Lansley would, too.

  His look of distress appeased her a little. “Such things happen,” she conceded.

  There were more footsteps on the stairs. The man who entered was about thirty and carrying a traditional doctor’s valise.

  “The idea was to bomb the citadel,” Mathilde told the new arrival.

  “Why bomb anything?” was his curt response.

  McColl repeated what Lansley had told him. “If the Germans hear a plane and there aren’t any bombs, they assume that someone has been dropped behind their lines.”

  The doctor just shook his head and leaned over McColl. “Let’s get his trousers off.”

  The two of them pulled them down. They clearly tried to do it gently, but suppressing the urge to cry out took everything he had. “This will hurt,” the doctor now told him, reaching for the damaged leg.

  McColl braced himself.

  The fingers probed away at his calf for what seemed an eternity. Any longer and he would have passed out.

  “The bone is broken in two places,” the doctor told him. “I’ve reset it, and this afternoon I’ll come back with splints to hold it in place. Until then try to keep still. Do you have any other problems?”

  “A bad headache.”

  The doctor took a look at his head, then shone a small flashlight in his eyes. “I have aspirin,” he said, reaching for his bag. “Other than that we’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “How long before I can walk again?”

  “Six to eight weeks, maybe longer.”

  “But . . .” McColl let the implications sink in. He could hardly expect Mathilde and her friends to feed and hide him for all that time, but what other option did they have? They could hardly cart him to the frontier and toss him across. Or deliver him up to the Germans.

  “We’ll sort something out,” she said once the doctor had gone. “I expect you’d like something to eat. And we’ll fix you up some sort of toilet.”

  Caitlin reached Glasgow’s St. Enoch station on the morning of November 17, deposited her suitcase in the left-luggage office, and hired a taxi to take her across the city. The different columns of rent-strike marchers were due to merge in George Square, but by the time Caitlin’s taxi reached the area, the crowds were already proving too much for the traffic and she had to walk the last two hundred yards. As she reached the square, a swelling chorus of drums, whistles, and shouts announced the arrival of the main column from Govan, Mary Barbour at its head.

  After searching for a while, Caitlin came across Helen Stephens. A legal discussion was under way inside the Sheriff Court, which was just round the corner—the thousands now filling the surrounding streets were there to offer moral support and exert political pressure. There would be plenty of speeches.

  Once poster boards had been borrowed from shop fronts and hoisted across a line of shoulders, speakers were lifted up to address the crowd. Over the next few hours, Caitlin watched a succession of men and women—some famous, some not—sway to and fro on this makeshift platform, only a careless gesture away from losing their balance and tumbling into the crowd.

  It was heady stuff, but the real business was being done behind closed doors. The landlords had the law on their side, the tenants only justice. That and the crowd outside, and the threat of downed tools in the shipyards and armament factories, and the pressure of politicians who wanted to keep their war on the road. Soon after noon the word slipped out that the landlords had accepted defeat and had only asked that the tenants refrain from gloating.

  The crowd dispersed almost as quickly as it had gathered. The women had won their yearlong battle.

  Caitlin spent the evening in her hotel room, compressing it all into a thousand heartfelt words. Not since the Lawrence strike had she felt such a warm glow of triumph, such a sense of hope for what could be achieved.

  She still felt full of joy on the following morning as she approached the address that Jack had given her. All the houses on Oakley Street were terraced, but she had seen far worse areas in Glasgow, and the one his parents rented looked neat and well kept. The woman who answered the door was in her late fifties, small but sturdy-looking, with lovely blue eyes and a mouth like Jack’s.
/>   She seemed in high spirits, and Caitlin soon found out why.

  “I noticed you yesterday,” Margaret McColl said as she ushered her guest inside and hung up her coat on the rack. “Though of course I didn’t know who you were. Wasn’t that a wonderful morning?”

  “It truly was.”

  “Come through to the parlor, and I’ll make us some tea. This is Jack’s father,” she added as the elderly man struggled to his feet.

  He nodded but said nothing and after shaking Caitlin’s hand sank back into his chair with obvious relief.

  “Jack wrote to say you were coming, but he didn’t say much else,” Margaret McColl confided as she waited for the kettle to boil. “Only that you’d seen Jed in France.”

  “Jack and I met in China,” Caitlin told her and her husband, whose eyes were now closed. “If it wasn’t for the war . . .” she added vaguely. She had no desire to explain the previous year.

  “This stupid war,” Jack’s mother said, in sadness rather than anger.

  Her husband shook his head, though whether at her or the war wasn’t clear.

  “I had a letter from Jed yesterday,” Margaret said, putting the tea down in front of her. “I’ll read it to you.”

  It was a cheerful missive, full of family jokes, anecdotes of military life, and mockery of the French. “I know he doesn’t tell me anything real,” Margaret said, “and that he doesn’t want to worry me. Men often say that when they can’t be bothered, but Jed really doesn’t. He’s always been a good boy.”

  “Like his brother?” Caitlin asked mischievously.

  Margaret smiled at that. “Jack was never a bad boy. But older brothers . . . well, they always need to prove their point.”

  “Perhaps. I suppose my elder brother was a bit like that.”