A Deadly Caper (Innocents At War Series, Book 2)

by Andrew Wareham

  They bombed twice daily, except for the occasions on which they went out for a third time, just before dusk to surprise the Hun. They amazed themselves several times, landing in near-darkness, but suffered no more accidents. They saw no observation planes either; the reports that came in suggested that the few that were up were generally quite shy, retreating at first sight of the RFC. Presumably they were under orders to do so, because it was ludicrous to think that they had become cowardly; they were biding their time, waiting for something new.

  On the last morning of the busy fortnight A Flight was ordered to bomb a target some forty miles north of the trench lines, very nearly at their practical limit.

  “Bloody great big supply depot, Tommy. Must be two hundred acres of it, from the reports Intelligence have given us. Two railway lines converging and a canal! Artillery shells and rations, apparently. Not much Archie close to, so Intelligence insists, and they suggest that it will be practical to dive below one thousand feet to bomb, and to use a mixture of Hales and incendiaries. What do you think?”

  Tommy peered at the map, traced a simple line of approach following the railway line in and then the canal out.

  “If it’s low-level then I ain’t circling round to bomb from the east and have a clear run home, sir. Better not wake them up to our presence. Follow the railway up from the south and dive, all four of us abreast, I think. Better than line astern – Tail End Charlie might get a reception from Hun gunners woken up by the first three. Bank hard to port and we pick up the canal. Five miles and due west over the church spire shown here on the map, and then we can see the trenches and climb over them and home. Artillery shells, did you say, sir? Definitely line abreast. What time do they want the raid for?”

  “Unspecified – they do not have a train to catch, Tommy!”

  “In that case, sir, let’s try for noon. We normally raid an hour after dawn and then in early afternoon and perhaps just before dark. A bomb at lunchtime might help them digest their sausage.”

  “I’m sure that Germans eat other things as well, Tommy. They don’t live on sausage, you know!”

  “Of course they do, sir. All the cartoons in the newspapers show them with sausages in their mouths.”

  “And to think, Tommy, that we are a fighting a war to maintain the British ideals of truth and freedom.”

  “Are we? Bugger! I do wish someone had only thought to tell me that last August, sir. I’d have emigrated.”

  “Go and brief your Flight, Tommy. It’s too early in the morning for this sort of thing!”

  “It’s a long run, gentlemen. We hold to an exact three thousand feet as we cross the trenches and until we find the railway line. We hope that the Hun has not got bright enough to put Archie along the line because they have worked out that we use the railways for navigation. When we reach the tracks, we turn to the north; that’s left, by the way. Hold up your left hands, gentlemen. Now hold up the other left, Fred. Well done! At that point we come into line abreast, myself on the right. Which side is that, Fred? Excellent – right first time! Hold the line as we dive below a thousand feet, to whatever height seems good to me. Keep an eye on me and drop the load when I raise my hand.”

  That was very clear, they thought.

  “Getting out, climb to the port, following the canal to the north-west. Five minutes, a little less, and you will see a church spire which is our next aiming point, then it’s over the trenches and home. Follow me, essentially. If I’m not there, Noah will take you home.”

  They thought it was a remarkably detailed briefing, far more in it than they normally bothered with.

  “It’s a longer distance than normal, chance for the wind to change or an engine to play up. If you have to pull out for a dicky engine, drop everything – no, not including your trousers, Drongo – and try to get across our trenches before you go down. We can’t afford to lose good pilots at the moment, so do your best to come back.”

  They checked their planes, paying attention to the bombs, looking to see that each was firmly clipped in place and that the nets of incendiaries were secure. Tommy had not ordered them to do so, but after losing Jack they had each decided it was a sensible idea.

  The take off run was longer than normal, fully bombed up. Fred noticed that he was in the air a good twenty yards before Drongo, then realised that he was a skinny sort of chap while Drongo, taller and more muscular, was probably three stone heavier. If he had thought about it, he would have asked for an extra bomb, to make use of his advantage.

  They took nearly ten minutes to climb to three thousand feet and reach the point where they would turn across the trenches, watching the engines for overheating, listening to their beat, satisfying themselves that all was well. Tommy led them into the turn and set the course he thought best, bearing in mind the wind speed and direction. There was cloud coming in from the west that he did not like, but visibility was good for the while.

  He picked up the railway line, hoping it was the right one; the bloody soldiers kept building new lines for their own convenience, and they did not get onto the maps for months afterwards. It was in use, at least – he could see a plume of steam just a few miles to the north, probably in fact at the supply dump. He started to lose height, hitting the blip switch to control his speed, and then to actually lose it. He wanted to reach the target area at sixty-five to seventy, just that few miles slower that would give him time to see what he was doing.

  It was the supply dump, he could see warehouses to one side and acres of land covered in lines and rows of grey pipes or posts – peculiar things which he suddenly realised were shells sat on their bases, thousands of them, tens of thousands. He edged towards the warehouses, tilted into a last dive, engine at full, raised his hand and pulled at the triggers to the bomb releases. He glanced left and right, saw that all were gone and pulled his nose up into a slow climb that would allow him to keep most of his speed; he wanted to be distant from the bangs on this occasion.

  No Archie and three other Bristols, each in their proper place.

  Normally he would take a quick circuit of the target, trying to see what, if any, damage they had achieved. This time, he wanted distance. There was a roar of explosions behind him, nearly a quarter of a mile away by now. Not as loud as he had feared. Certainly, no great chain of detonations running from shell to shell – perhaps they would not blow without a detonator. He would have to ask the armourer about that. Perhaps they had missed.

  Home safely, petrol in the tanks down to half a gallon he suspected. Rapid climbing used up the fuel in a way that level flight did not.

  He made his report, finding that he had to raise his voice to be heard. The ordinary background from the trenches was far louder this afternoon.

  “Bombardment prior to an attack. The Big Push in the morning. Fifteen hours of artillery fire to soften them up and then a last barrage to destroy the wire; should be a walkover in the morning, Tommy.”

  Mr Oakes told them that shells were stored with a plug where the detonator would be screwed in at the battery; most explosives would not blow up except with a hot charge very close to them, unless they had their detonator in place.

  “Mostly, they will catch fire instead. They burn hot but don’t generally blow up, with most modern explosives that is. Not like the old black powder, which was very dodgy stuff, from all I have read.”

  Intelligence reported a week later that they had burned out a warehouse full of uniforms and had been really lucky in that they had hit the main canteen just as the men were queuing up for their midday rations.

  “Better part of two hundred dead, Tommy. Twice that number wounded – a lot of burns. Very effective! Shut the place down for the better part of two days.”

  It went down as the most successful of their raids, for in most cases the reports told them that they had hit the wrong target, or had simply missed everything. Aiming was hit or miss, and miss seemed most common.

  The failure of the Big Push passed them by – they had ta
ken no part in the affair and had in any case suspected that it was likely that the trenches were too wide, too deep, too well-held to be taken by either side. Flying over them made it easy to see just how effective they were as defences.

  “Pity none of the generals have taken a flight over the trench lines, sir. They would learn what they were dealing with then.”

  “Hush, Tommy! It would be new, and we cannot have innovation among the brass hats – the shock might well kill them. We need a Wellington, Tommy. He fought his battles from the front, always able to see exactly what was going on. Our generals sit in the chateaux well behind the lines, believing what they see on their maps. They don’t use their own eyes, not as Wellington did!”

  The post came and Tommy sat down in the Mess with his letters. All was well, he read, Monkey had mastered the art of driving, with some facility, she thought, having hit almost nothing yet.

  He wondered just what ‘almost’ signified. Not to worry, she would have told him if it was important. What else.

  She was pregnant, due in September, it seemed. Lavinia was very well, though becoming remarkably large… What was that last sentence, again?

  “Good God! September!”

  He counted back on his fingers, decided that the timing worked, from all he had ever heard.

  “Good news, Tommy?”

  “September, sir.”

  Tommy realised that probably meant very little to his CO.

  “My wife, sir. A baby, in September, she says.”

  “My word! What have you been doing, Tommy?”

  They had a bash in the Mess, to celebrate the news.

  A Deadly Caper

  Chapter Ten

  The sickbay at the new camp near Larkhill on Salisbury Plain was bustlingly alive at three o’clock in the morning, young recruits literally by the score being supported, or carried, into the tent, most of them vomiting or dripping with uncontrollable diarrhoea. The single attendant on night duty was unable to cope, could not do anything for the more than fifty cases already on his hands; he had sent an emergency call for the doctor, but suspected that the old gentleman, returned from retirement and a friend to the whisky bottle, would be a long time staggering out of bed. He sent a runner for the Officer of the Day, who should have been there in any case, alerted by the noise and unwonted activity.

  A bad-tempered second-lieutenant arrived at the tent, was appalled by the stench, his mood not improved by stepping in something disgusting in the darkness outside the entrance.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “Food poisoning, sir. Bad. There’s men here likely to die, sir. Never seen one as bad as this, sir, not hitting so many nor so ‘ard, sir.”

  “Well, what’s it to do with me? I’m no doctor!”

  “Needs to get them off camp to ‘ospital, sir. Can’t do nothing for them ‘ere, sir.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “The Adjutant can, sir. Needs to get ‘im out of bed, sir, and call for doctors, sir.”

  “Can’t it wait till morning, till Reveille?”

  “There will be dead men by then, sir. I ain’t never seen the like, sir. Some of them can’t breathe ‘ardly and their faces are all sagging down like and they can’t make their legs to ‘old ‘em upright, like. Dunno what it is, sir, but it’s killin’ ‘em, that’s for sure.”

  The lieutenant dithered; he was as new as any of the recruits and had little idea of what he should do at ordinary times, far less in an emergency. The Adjutant was a dug-out from Boer War days, walrus-moustached and irritable, a frightening figure to very young officers.

  “God! There’s another bloody lot comin’!”

  The sound of violent nausea was heard frequently through the night; the young subaltern thought he would vomit himself if he was exposed to any more of the smell.

  “I’ll get the Adjutant up.”

  He ran to the Officers Mess where the senior men were billeted in comfortable huts – the subalterns shared tents. The Mess Sergeant was awake, alerted by the noise that something out of the ordinary was happening.

  “Many of the recruits are ill and dying, Sergeant Thane. We need urgent medical help. We must wake the Adjutant.”

  “Ill, or dying, sir?”

  “Dying, they are really bad!”

  The Mess Sergeant trotted off – he was too senior to run - politely waking the Adjutant and the Colonel too; then he sent a private to kick up the admin staff to man the offices.

  Dawn found the better part of one hundred recruits in hospitals in Salisbury and Andover and Devizes, swamping the facilities available. Less than an hour after that came the order from the doctors to close the cookhouse and the mess halls where the men ate and scrub them out with carbolic. A second order commanded the Adjutant to isolate and retain on camp every bit of the rubbish thrown out on the previous evening, including especially all waste foodstuffs, all tins and cans and food packets and sacks and bags.

  A group of medical men and pathologists arrived from London later in the day, suited themselves up much as surgeons did before operating, and began to examine the rubbish, starting with the cans that had held corned beef. The colonel asked what was happening, and how he was to feed eight hundred hungry recruits.

  “Bring cold food from elsewhere, sir. You are not to attempt to cook anything on this camp. Your own officers mess kitchen may be safe – the risk is yours to take. The problem appears to be botulism, poisoning by the botulinus toxin. There is no cure for the illness that results. You may expect a death rate of anything up to seventy per cent. Men who do not die may be ill for months; some may never recover their strength. The toxin harms the nervous system and may utterly destroy control of some or all muscles. The most common cause is poorly preserved meat or fish. We shall subject the corned beef to first examination, there seeming to be no other source of meat.”

  Four days later, deaths already topping one half of those affected, and the scientists had isolated the source of the toxins. They presented their findings at the highest level in the War Office, the deaths having reached the newspapers somehow; first investigations suggested medical staff from the hospitals talking to their local rags, they immediately contacting Fleet Street.

  “Stark’s Corned Beef, sir; the seven-pound cans. Imported from Fray Bentos in the Argentine, and relabelled in England.”

  “Is that usual?”

  “No, sir. It is most unusual, would certainly be in breach of a contract, and I do not doubt that the original importers would be very disturbed to discover the occurrence. Fray Bentos produce a product of better than average quality, one that may be trusted.”

  “You are quite sure that this was their beef?”

  “Markings on the cans are theirs, sir.”

  “How do they come to have the Stark label, then?”

  The spokesmen of the scientists looked particularly grave as he held up a can that had been cut open down the side and partially flattened.

  “You will observe that there is a seam on the side of the can, sir, soldered closed and airtight. The corned beef is prepared and raised to temperatures sufficient to ensure that it is wholesome and is poured into the cans, through the tops, which are then soldered closed. Occasionally there is a fault in the filling or air leaks in, or the meat is not brought to a high enough temperature, and the process of rotting can start, normally giving off a gas that causes the can to bloat. In common parlance, these are ‘blown’ cans. Consignments are inspected and the rare blown can is extracted and disposed of. This can was one such, sir. It has since been sterilised, I assure you, gentlemen!”

  He pushed it across the desk, under the eyes of the Minister for War.

  “Observe just here, sir, on the side, where the solder changes colour, the seam was penetrated. A steel spike, an awl perhaps, even a strong sail-maker’s needle, thrust through the seam will enable the gas to escape. A drop of solder on top of the hole made, and a new label that covers the seam, and all looks well. But the meat inside
is contaminated. Commonly, the contaminants are mild – loose bowels or stomach discomfort the sole result. The soldier thinks he should have drunk less beer the night before, and nothing more arises. Very rarely, a far more serious form of food poisoning results – salmonella perhaps, or in this case, botulism, which is the worst of all. Then men die, sir.”

  It was appalling; the Minister was horrified.

  “You mean that meat known to be poisonous has been sold to feed the troops!”

  “Yes, sir. I do not know the details, of course. In past examples, before the war, cans which had been sent for disposal were reintroduced into the shops and market stalls, quite deliberately for a profit. I do not know what has happened in this case. I would suggest, sir, that it is a matter for the police.”

  That was a different proposition.

  The police, if once involved, would quickly discover what had happened, presumably at the Starks factory; they would then prosecute, and quite possibly dig further, into the award of contracts and similar matters that were none of their business. There had already been attempts by ignorant policemen who had no idea of the way the country worked to investigate allegations of bribery and corruption. None of their affair – it had been necessary to cut some corners to bring the country quickly onto a war footing, but mere policemen would not understand that.

  The Minister considered the question, rested his head in his hands, spoke gravely.

  “Military affair, sir. Far better to give the investigation to the appropriate branch of the Military Police. It might have foreign ramifications as well, and that would demand enquiries initially at diplomatic level. We dare not jeopardise the continued importation of meat from South America – we must feed the people of Great Britain. We must proceed carefully, but thoroughly.”

  That seemed a sensible response and the medical and scientific gentlemen left the War Office, happy that they had raised the matter at the highest level.