The Dead Can Wait

by Robert Ryan

  ‘The trick is to win the war before the enemy can develop a counterattack. Hence the importance of the element of surprise.’

  Watson didn’t want to be drawn into further fruitless conjecture and so asked, ‘Is this the only training ground?’

  Levass nodded. ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘It’s all wrong.’

  ‘In what way?’ Cardew asked. ‘It was built by Royal Engineers. It’s based on—’

  ‘Loos. I know,’ said Watson. Everyone knew Loos; it was the first time poison gas had been used by the British. ‘A battle fought almost a year ago, and since that time the shelling and the rain have hardly stopped. Your battlefield is too clean. Someone must have pointed that out. Anyone who has seen the front line will know it’s much more challenging than this.’

  Levass and Cardew exchanged shamefaced glances.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘There’s nobody here who has actually, well, been at the sharp end,’ said Cardew.

  ‘Not in the top brass, perhaps, but . . .’ Watson watched their expressions turn sheepish. ‘What, nobody on the whole project? Churchill certainly has—’

  ‘Churchill is no longer involved on a day-to-day basis,’ said Cardew. ‘For better or worse.’

  Watson let a sigh of disbelief leak out. Churchill might be a blackmailing monster when it suited him, but there was no doubting his bravery and experience. The man had been out at the sharpest end of all, leading patrols into no man’s land, snatching German snipers and recce patrols. He’d tell them in no uncertain terms to rough up their ‘playground’. ‘I’ll talk to Swinton about this later.’ A thought occurred to Watson. ‘Hold on, Swinton was an official journalist at the front, surely he has relevant experience?’

  Levass managed a wistful smile at Watson’s naïvety. ‘Rumour has it, Major, between you and me, that he sat in a tent behind the line, debriefing officers and reading the daily action reports.’

  ‘Thwaites? Battlefield tactics. He must have seen that before.’ He pointed to the trenches.

  Levass shook his head. ‘Sandhurst and books. He was in South Africa.’

  ‘That was another kind of war altogether.’ Watson took off his cap and rubbed his forehead. The sun was well up now, and he was feeling hot in his uniform and not a little weary. He had managed three hours’ sleep at best.

  ‘But that has no bearing on my immediate task,’ said Watson. ‘I am here to discover what in that thing drove eight men insane and killed all but one of them. Correct?’

  ‘Yes, Major,’ said Cardew.

  ‘Then would you like to give me a tour of the suspect?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I have one question before we proceed,’ said Watson.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Have you or anyone you know of ever been to Africa?’

  ‘No,’ said Cardew. ‘Well, certainly I haven’t.’ Watson looked to Levass.

  ‘No, me neither. Thwaites has, of course. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Thwaites, yes.’ He thought for a moment before pointing to the tank. ‘Shall we?’

  The metal was hot to the touch, its strange paint scheme of pink, black and grey streaks slightly tacky under his fingers. Levass assured him the ‘camofleurs’ were hard at work on something more drab, less dazzling, than Solomon’s original patterns. But it was mostly Cardew who explained the working of the iron landship.

  It wasn’t as large as the machines Watson had read about in H. G. Wells, but the sheer bulk was still terrifying. He could imagine the impact of this strange apparition rolling out of the early morning smoke from a barrage, spitting fire as it came.

  ‘This is G for Genevieve, a female,’ Cardew said, slapping the nose. ‘And it weighs just shy of twenty-eight tons. It has four Vickers and one Hotchkiss machine gun. The males have six-pounder naval guns in their sponsons.’ He pointed to the turret-like extensions on the side. ‘And they weigh slightly more. It is designed, using these tracks, to cross an eight-foot trench. It’s thirty-two foot long with that steering gear.’ He pointed to the mangled, spoked wheels at the rear. ‘Which we are beginning to think is more trouble than it’s worth.’

  ‘How fast does it go?’ Watson asked.

  ‘Four miles an hour. Which means infantry can keep up with it.’

  ‘That’s four miles per hour over even terrain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I suspect the infantry will have no trouble keeping up with it. This thing will have to cross a sea of mud and slurry. What is its journey range?’

  ‘We think about twenty-six miles.’

  Watson knocked on the side with a knuckle. ‘How thick is the armour?’

  ‘Eight millimetre.’

  Watson raised an eyebrow in surprise. ‘The German SMK bullets can punch through ten.’ The SMK was designed to pierce the boilerplate that British observers and sharpshooters used to protect themselves in the trenches.

  ‘But only snipers have them, don’t they?’ asked Cardew.

  Watson shook his head at the naïvety. ‘Not for long, once these appear.’ As Cardew well knew, one thing was certain in this war: every fresh weapon gave rise to an appropriate counterstrike. The shock of the new did not last long at the front.

  ‘Can we go inside?’ Watson asked.

  ‘You might want to take off your tunic and what have you,’ said Levass, pointing at his belt and lanyard. ‘It is hot and it is tight.’

  Watson did as he was told, while Cardew removed his jacket and hung it on a branch. Levass offered to hold Watson’s. ‘I’ve been inside,’ he said. ‘There is nothing to see.’

  Watson took out a torch from his tunic pocket before he handed it over.

  Cardew ducked in through the opening at the rear of the sponson and his voice rang when he spoke. ‘In you come, Major. Watch your head.’

  ‘And everything else,’ said Levass.

  Watson took a last deep breath of clear morning air and stepped into the dark interior. He switched on his torch.

  ‘There. Now get your bearings.’

  The air was foul, he could taste metal on his tongue, but the inside wasn’t as gloomy as he had expected. The internal walls were painted white and there were enough hatches open to show the inside in half-light. His first thought was that it had been used as a storage dump: every inch around him was full of metal boxes. Only as his eyes adjusted did he realize they were full of ammunition for the machine guns. There was another stack of petrol cans. He tried to move and knocked his elbow on a rack holding fire extinguishers.

  ‘The males are even more cramped, what with six-pounder shells,’ said Cardew.

  Just forward of the centre was the huge Daimler engine, bristling with tubes and wires. Everyone would have to manoeuvre along the two narrow aisles situated on either side of that monster. Burns, Mrs Gregson had said. The majority of the injuries she dealt with were contact burns. Now he knew why.

  ‘Is eight the normal tally of crew?’ asked Watson, already feeling the strain in his back and neck from being bent double.

  ‘Yes. I know, it seems a lot. You need four men to drive the tank – a commander and driver up there at the front, then two gearsmen on the box back there to control speed and direction of each track.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Watson, pointing at a chicken-wire-faced box, high on the steel wall next to the machine-gun positions.

  ‘Pigeon coop. Each tank carries two pigeons for communications with tank command.’

  ‘Pigeons? What about radios?’

  Cardew grinned. ‘You’ll see. You can’t hear yourself think when she starts up. You certainly can’t hear anybody else, even over the radio.’

  Watson looked around the interior, trying to imagine it once the engine had throbbed into life. He shone his torch on the contraption, tracing four exhausts that vented through the roof. ‘Could fumes be blown back in? Could that be a factor in the deaths?’ he asked.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Cardew. ‘I mean, the engin
e exhaust isn’t nice, but it doesn’t cause insanity.’

  Watson moved over and examined the vertical exhaust tubes, shining his torch on each in turn.

  ‘Found something?’ Cardew asked excitedly as Watson lingered.

  ‘Only that I wouldn’t want to be in here for twenty-six miles.’ Or, indeed, one. ‘How were the men discovered exactly? I mean in what position and where?’ Watson asked.

  ‘Most of them were on the floor curled up in balls. Like this.’ Cardew put his arms over his head.

  ‘Hedgehogging, they call it at the front,’ said Watson. He’d seen men frozen in that position for days, unable or unwilling to come out and face the world. ‘And they were alive?’

  ‘You could call it that.’

  ‘And how long did it take them to die?’

  Cardew’s face looked pained at the memory. ‘God, it was terrible. I never knew that there really was a death rattle until . . . I mean, the noise in the throat . . .’

  ‘I know,’ said Watson gently. ‘How long?’

  ‘Some died within minutes, most an hour or two. The MO hung on for hours. And then there is Hitchcock. Last of them alive.’

  ‘And who declared them dead?’

  ‘Nobody,’ said Cardew. He gave a half-hearted laugh. ‘It was bloody obvious.’

  ‘Deaths still need to be officially recorded. Along with probable cause.’

  ‘Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? We don’t know the cause, probable or otherwise. And Captain Trenton, the MO, was on board monitoring conditions and performance. He died. So he was hardly in a position to fill out forms.’

  Watson ignored the young man’s sarcasm. He knew he appeared like an old-fashioned stickler for bureaucracy in the engineer’s eyes. ‘And the other doctors that were brought in?’

  ‘Well, as I understand it, they couldn’t establish a cause of death . . .’

  ‘So there is no death certificate?’

  ‘No,’ said Cardew. ‘I do believe the families will be informed they died in action—’

  ‘Good grief, man, that should have been done by now,’ said Watson, pinching the bridge of his nose, wanting to be out of this stinking sweatbox. He realized the heat, the claustrophobia and his own tiredness were making him irritable. But the crew’s families might be posting letters and making up parcels for men who no longer needed them. It would be a shock when they realized they had been writing to corpses. He owed it to them to solve this mystery as quickly as possible. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not your fault, I know. I’ll sort out the formalities.’

  Cardew lowered his voice to a whisper, so Levass couldn’t hear. ‘Listen, Major, you have to understand that this is being done at breakneck speed. Some would say too fast. The original plan was a thousand tanks, French and British, in one decisive hammerblow. Then, one hundred and fifty, British only, which didn’t please Levass and now . . . we’ll have a few score at best.’

  ‘And that’s not enough?’

  Cardew took a deep breath and his face closed up, as if he was uncomfortable with the truth. ‘They will work, sir, but only if deployed correctly. And that is with overwhelming surprise. You get but one chance at that. As you said about the SMK bullets, sir, and I was impressed that a man of . . .’ He cleared his throat.

  ‘Of my age?’

  ‘Of your background knew about them. The truth is, sir, as I said, the whole thing is being rushed.’

  ‘Rushed how?’

  A seam of anger was laced through the reply. ‘The quality of the workmanship and materials, the design, the engine power, the armour thickness, the training of the men, their safety and . . .’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘They’ve concentrated so much on building complete tanks to show off to their visitors, there are no spare parts. I don’t know if you know much about engineering, sir, but I would estimate that fifty per cent of these machines will have mechanical problems at some point. They’ll need spares. We haven’t got any.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Watson said. And he was. Not about the spares. But that young men were being rushed into harm’s way without adequate support. The sad fact was that this was nothing new in this war or any other.

  ‘Let’s concern ourselves with what happened inside . . . what was her name? Genevieve. The tanks won’t be going anywhere or surprising anyone if they kill their crew every time the hatches and visors come down.’ Cardew nodded his agreement. ‘So, I’ll need some lights in here, good lights. Can you manage that? And a boiler suit, or some kind of protective clothing.’

  ‘Yes, sir. The tankmen all wear overalls, so we have plenty of spares.’

  ‘Excellent. And I’ll fetch my magnifying glass.’ Watson looked around at the now-empty space, and heard its anguished ghosts calling him in harsh, metallic tones. ‘Something terrible happened in here, Cardew. And we’re going to find out what.’

  It was late afternoon by the time Watson had finished with the inside of the tank. When he finally emerged, his face was covered in grime, his eyes red from squinting through the magnifying glass, his throat dry and his stomach rumbling from a missed lunch. Lieutenant Booth, the intelligence officer, was waiting for him, standing alongside Cardew and Levass.

  Levass handed Watson a flask of water and he took three big gulps.

  ‘Well, Major,’ Booth asked. ‘What do you make of our Genevieve?’

  Watson shook his head to show he wasn’t answering questions.

  ‘Can you get me a crew list?’ he asked Booth.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Did the dead men have anything in common? Background? From the same town or village?’

  ‘No,’ said Booth. ‘We draw from all over, all classes. All we ask is they be mechanically-minded.’

  ‘But you can get me the personal records of the deceased?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll have them sent to your room.’

  Watson turned to Cardew. ‘There is a bullet hole in the engine.’

  The engineer nodded glumly. ‘Yes, I am afraid your patient took a pot shot at it when it happened.’

  ‘Hitchcock? Why didn’t you tell me? I asked if there was anything unusual. Isn’t a man shooting his own engine quite strange?’

  ‘Major,’ objected Booth, ‘the whole scene was quite strange. And quite traumatic. The bullet was the least of it when it happend.’

  ‘Has it damaged the engine?’ Watson asked Cardew.

  ‘I’d have to take off the valve cover and check the valve springs and the pushrods. But not too much, I suspect.’

  ‘So it could be repaired relatively quickly?’

  Cardew shrugged. ‘I would imagine a day or two at the most.’

  ‘Can you see to it, please? And the wheels at the back?’ He pointed at the twisted steering device.

  ‘We can scavenge a new set from another tank. Though they are proving worse than useless. A good driver can steer with just the tracks.’

  ‘Then get me a good driver,’ Watson replied.

  ‘What do you want to do, Major?’ Booth asked.

  ‘I’m going to fix up Genevieve and then we are going to take her back out over there.’ He pointed at the phoney no man’s land. ‘With all hatches closed.’

  ‘You won’t find many men keen to do that, Major,’ said Levass with a chuckle.

  ‘Well, I shall lead by example,’ said Watson, stripping off the boiler suit.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Booth.

  Watson slapped a hand on the side of tank. ‘Once Genevieve is repaired, I’m going to take her out for a spin.’ He let that sink it for a second. ‘Anybody fancy joining me?’

  Watson decided to walk back to the house alone, to have some thinking time. In truth, he was hoping that a voice in his skull would lay out the solution for him and he could get out of this place with its brutal death machines once and for all. But Holmes, or his mental simulacrum, was silent as he crunched along the pathway between the trees, the sun on his neck.

  ‘You stupi
d bloody berk!’

  The spat insult made Watson spin round, looking for his abuser, but there was nobody there he could see.

  ‘Show yourself!’ Watson demanded.

  ‘—calling a berk? Berk yourself.’

  That was a second voice. Gruffer than the first. It was a conversation of sorts.

  ‘—gasper. You tight git.’ A raucous laugh.

  Watson stood stock-still, his eyes shut, letting all his other senses turn down like the wick of a lamp while he concentrated on his hearing. It took more than a minute, his breathing shallow, the beat of his heart loud in his ears until he had it. The disembodied sounds were drifting through the trees like smoke, coming from his right. Well, you can follow smoke, Watson thought, by using your nose, and determined to try something similar with his auditory faculties.

  He set off, away from the path, pushing through a dense undergrowth of fern, nettle and bramble, frequently losing the telltale snippets of chatter and then stopping, until, like a bloodhound of sound, he picked up the trail once more and plunged on, heading due west.

  ‘Have you seen his wife? Ha.’

  ‘Oi!’

  The trees grew closer around him. The sunlight barely penetrated sections of it and Watson shivered at the sudden chill as he crossed a gully, dry at that time of year, and scrambled up a sandy bank, grasping at exposed roots for support.

  ‘Game of football?’

  ‘—ckin’ likely.’

  Now the talk was louder, clearer, coming from over to his left. He skirted through a thicket of hornbeam. Now he could smell cigarettes. There were men ahead.

  ‘I’d like to give him a boot up the backside. No, I would. He suggested I join this new unit. More pay. Special conditions. Oh, yeah, very special conditions.’

  ‘You’d rather you was over in the trenches, would you? Our Alf came back last year, one leg missin’. Won’t talk about it even now. But the nightmares . . .’

  ‘Yeah, well, all I’m saying is we should be doin’ something.’

  Watson kept his breathing shallow as he moved closer. Beyond the close-packed trunks he could see a rhomboid shape, parked just on the edge of the wood. Another tank, albeit one without the side sponsons. The voices were coming from in there.

  Then he heard another one, whispering in his ear. Only this time, the hot breath told him it was a real person at his shoulder. ‘Do not utter a sound, Major Watson. If you know what’s good for you, you will come with me right now!’