The party packed into the car, still unexpectedly six. Dupont conversed with polite, tacit sympathy, identifying himself with the unknown derangement of plans which all had suffered. He behaved as if he were an embarrassing but useful prisoner—a double agent, for example, about to be sent off on some dangerous journey. He may even have persuaded himself that such a destiny was possible.
He addressed himself particularly to the French civilian, perhaps trying to allay his own suspicions. Dupont was a type to be successful, Virian decided, as minor business man or major traitor, for he had an insistent cunning. He talked and talked, closely watching with eyes that held a decent pretence of geniality the impact of his words. The failure in the hut was very understandable. Dupont was tiresome; Dupont’s fat face was that of a crook; but it was impossible to treat him with anything but courtesy. To draw a gun before his face was a task as awkward as to get him out of the office without giving him a small order.
Smith had been pale and self-controlled when he returned from the hut. He now returned to his puzzling and case hardened temperament. He asked sharply where he was to go.
Well, where? Just a drive. Out for a drive. A pleasant occupation for a family on Sunday afternoon. Such aimlessness was intolerable. An order had to be given, some destination found.
‘Oh, stop at the first pub when we’re off the downs,’ Virian replied, his voice military and exasperated.
It was a considerable place, more of a roadhouse than a pub, which had no doubt been gay enough before the war with thirsty and fast-driving youth. Now, however, the long lounge was vacant and frustrated of purpose. Fireplace and imitation beams had been excitably decorated with paper flags and regimental badges. All this dust-laden patriotism, exposed to sunlight, had the depressing unreality of a night-club on the morning after. Smith, Dupont and the Frenchman sat down at once and together, as if bound by a hard, common experience, in a corner of the room.
‘I won’t drink with him,’ Medlock whispered. ‘God damn it, there are limits!’
Virian carried three drinks to Dupont’s table, and himself remained with Medlock and the French major at the bar. For once he found himself in wholehearted sympathy with Medlock. A curious atavism, to refuse a drink with a man you were about to kill. He couldn’t remember that there was any such law of hospitality in the Christian religion; it was wholly pagan—a rule of Viking hovel or Arab tent. Where the devil, he wondered, had he inherited it? And why should Medlock observe it, too?
The French major seemed also unwilling to join Dupont, either from the same scruples or because he was busy disassociating himself from the whole affair and its mismanagement. The three of them drifted through the door to a bench on the clean stone flags outside. After a while the other Frenchman joined them, confidently leaving Smith along with Dupont.
‘I must offer my excuses,’ he said. ‘I did not anticipate—’
Here, away from the victim, his character no longer appeared of any extraordinary determination. He admitted nothing (and one could hardly put the direct question), but plainly for him as for them this was a first experience.
‘Look here!’ Virian exclaimed, suddenly as compassionate for the civilian as for Dupont. ‘I am prepared to go back and report that this can’t be done.’
‘But, alas, it must be done.’
‘Why? We can keep the blighter in prison for you. If they can’t find a way of holding him, it’s their business to think of one. What do you say, sir?’ he asked the French major.
‘Me? I have not the right to interfere. It is your service which took Dupont, and your service which had requested us to get rid of him. Sooner or later our duty as Frenchmen must be done, but I admit I should prefer it to be by due process of law.’
So, even to him, there was no point in immediate punishment. There was a more complex, far more insistent motive for Dupont’s death than mere justice. Fayze and his precious colleague in Spain were terrified lest their too impulsive act should become known to the enemy, with whom they had a rogues’ agreement that kidnapping and assassination were barred. Such unsporting practices would have interfered with the daily game of collecting information. The end of all fun and promotion—like placing a bomb on a football field. Fayze didn’t at all want his agents kidnapped by way of retaliation; so Dupont could never be allowed to mix with other internees, to appear on any list, to write a letter or answer a question. He had to vanish for good.
It was the uncleanness of this necessity which revolted Virian. For this, for the sake of what in the end was nothing but inefficiency, he and Medlock and young Smith—it was the youth of Smith which appalled him, whether or not the man was callous—were to be turned into murderers.
‘What about our orders?’ Medlock asked.
‘Damn our orders! If we report that the thing is too risky, they must accept our opinion. I’m not saying that Dupont doesn’t deserve to be shot. I’m saying that we can’t take the responsibility.’
‘That is between you and your superiors,’ the French major remarked unhelpfully.
‘And mercy—doesn’t that come in?’
‘One can have too many scruples,’ added the other Frenchman, his voice bitter with longing for the simplicities of peace.
He, at least, had no doubt that Dupont’s sentence was just. He had become more deeply obsessed than they by the demands of war and civil war, so that in his eyes this killing served a spiritual purpose which transcended its vileness. It was only the incapacity of his own hand which tormented him.
‘Well, we’ve got them. So why not admit it? We hate this. We can’t go on expecting you to do it, and looking the other way. We can’t go on testing Smith to breaking point by making him drink with Dupont just as if the man weren’t a ghost come back from the grave. Why not admit that we do have scruples and take the brute back to prison?’
Virian let himself go. A limited and painful eloquence. It couldn’t be for the defence, since his client—they all acknowledged it—was guilty; it couldn’t even be for mitigation of sentence, since that sentence, though highly irregular, though the motives behind it stank to heaven, was just. No, it seemed to him in retrospect that he had preached the virtue of mercy in futile abstract, as any poet or parson.
‘The defeated cannot afford mercy,’ cried the tortured executioner.
It was astonishing that a man could pronounce so neat and closed a phrase with such emotion. Evidently it was the profession of faith with which he comforted his soul—and unanswerable by citizens of a nation which did not for a moment believe itself to have been defeated.
Virian got up—it would do no harm to let the leaven of mercy work in his absence—and went into the lounge to look after Smith. His conscience was raw on every surface.
Smith was playing shove ha’penny with Dupont, like an old, experienced warder in the condemned cell.
‘All right?’ Virian asked. ‘How are your glasses?’
‘Don’t mind if we do, sir’.
Virian went over to the bar and ordered two stiff gins. He beckoned to Smith to join him.
‘Would you like to go outside for a breath of air?’ he asked.
‘I’m all right, sir,’ Smith answered, with a strong, impatient accent on the ‘right’.
Hidden in the impenetrable sternness of youth he carried the drinks away to his corner, and resumed his game with Dupont. Virian returned to the others, telling himself that he was the only man among them who was not fit to be a soldier.
The French civilian, with the quick sympathy of his race for emotion, put a friendly hand on the Englishman’s shoulder and said:
‘I cannot permit Dupont to live. The responsibility is mine.’
‘But what do you suggest?’ Virian asked harshly. ‘Are we to go back to that damned mine-shaft?’
‘No. Somewhere else, I beg you.’
‘I can’t take you anywhere else. My superiors have worked this out very well. I’ll say that for them at least.’
‘In the hu
t I cannot—arrange it.’
‘But that is only what I am saying,’ Virian insisted. ‘It can’t be done—for the reason that it’s humanly impossible for us.’
‘You would report that?’ asked the French major.
‘Certainly. Without hesitation.’
‘We should appear to be cowards.’
Medlock gave a grunt of scorn. As an old professional soldier, he had no objection to appearing a coward so long as the situation called for cowardice. Only amateurs and Latins bothered about appearances.
‘And who the hell cares?’ he said.
‘Alas, it must be done,’ repeated the civilian.
‘But you’ve just said it can’t be done.’ Virian almost shouted.
‘I say the hut is too small,’ the other insisted. ‘You are slow. You wait for traffic. I wait for you. And then by that time Dupont is not where I want him. I say that I cannot’—and his voice, though it was low, vibrated with agony—‘I cannot raise the pistol before his eyes.’
It was the note which Virian had already heard, for a single instant, in Smith’s voice also. Through the door he could see him still playing his forced and melancholy shove-ha’penny with Dupont. The situation, futile and mismanaged, was intolerable to all of them. They were like children who had broken the back of an animal by brutal thoughtlessness and then were without courage to put it out of pain—and he himself the worst of them.
This couldn’t go on. Mercy. No mercy. It can’t be done. It must be done. That civilian and Smith had first call on any mercy. If this infirmity of purpose went on much longer, one of them would hysterically free Dupont, or take him out and shoot him before the eyes of some astonished farm labourer.
‘Damn Fayze! Damn his precautions!’ he cried. ‘Listen! We get out of the car. You walk at once up to the hut with Dupont in front of you and Smith behind you. Medlock and I go to our posts on the road. We shall all arrive at about the same time. Unless there is traffic right on top of us, we shall give no signal. As soon as Dupont is over the threshold—do it! He’ll have his back to you, and he will never know a thing.’
The decision was instantly and gratefully accepted. Virian had fought for Dupont’s life and Virian had condemned him to death. He himself was well aware of what he had done. Inconsistency be damned! If one couldn’t have heaven, then hell was preferable to chaos.
‘Well, Dupont,’ he said, breaking up the shove-ha’ penny game, ‘let’s have another shot at it.’
The sound of his own voice in that unfortunate phrase, which he had cheerfully pronounced without thinking, made him wince and turn away.
Dupont hoped politely that the luck would be better, ingratiating himself like a circus pig that had been trained to smile. He left the board, and took down his coat and hat. He had plainly decided that for this day at least he had nothing to fear. The drinks, the genial delay and the resolute acting of his companion had put him at ease.
As Dupont heaved at his tight overcoat, Virian caught Smith’s questioning eye and beckoned to him to remain behind for a moment.
‘Same positions, but it will be done through the back of the neck the moment he steps into the hut. A few seconds, and all over.’
Smith ran his tongue round his lips, and seemed about to speak. There was no longer any light of adventure in his sturdy, blue eyes; they had matured, as if searching deeply, far down beyond the presumed limit of his vision, into probable consequences.
‘Yes? What is it?’ Virian asked, trying to put into his smile the eagerness which he dared not show in his voice.
‘O.K., sir,’ said Smith.
He drove the party back to the mine-shaft. The journey had the nightmare quality of life in reverse. Pub to lowland hedges, to grey villages under the downs, to clean sweep of hill turf, to the crest of the road and first glimpse of the hut—all the way back, inevitably, to the hated beginning that should have been left for ever.
The French civilian told Dupont to get out and walk up to the hut. He himself followed a pace or two behind, and Smith strolled purposefully after.
Medlock hurried to the curve of the road; Virian up the blind hill. There was a car approaching which would be on them in twenty seconds. He made no signal. That was time enough if all went smoothly.
He looked round. Dupont was just entering the door of the hut. He saw the Frenchman’s pistol sweep up in a curve and cross the threshold alone, as if it were some tenuous body independent of those before and behind. The shot, too, was thin and strained. Louder and more final was the double thud of planks thrown back into place. When the car passed, Smith and the French civilian were already walking down the hill.
On the way home they all talked very heartily. Someone laughed, and there was a sudden silence. After that, they all laughed if there were reasonable excuse. Smith put his bravado into his driving. It was brutal. He didn’t seem to care whether they ever reached London or not.
‘God, he put the wind up me!’ Medlock said to Virian, obsessed by his companion of ten years before. ‘And that blood on his boots—’
Smith hadn’t noticed the blood. He had only heard it when he lifted Dupont’s shoulders. They made him get out and wash if off in a stream.
‘God, he was a tough, and no mistake!’ Medlock persisted. ‘I don’t mind telling you—he used to chase me around in my dreams.’
‘He said the same of you,’ Virian answered.
‘Eh? What do you mean? What do you mean? I thought you didn’t know him.’
‘No, I didn’t know him. But I saw a letter of his.’
‘He wrote about me?’ Medlock barked indignantly.
‘About you … and me … and especially Fayze. Smith was just one of his civilian clerks. Temporarily unfit for general service, worshipping his boss and longing to work for him on a real secret mission. Fayze wasn’t the man to lose a chance like that; so he used him, and put him into uniform for the job. He told Smith that it was a trial trip, that if he had the nerve to assist us in every way…’
Medlock put down his drink and retched.
‘That bastard Fayze!’ he shouted.
‘Yes. But, if it’s any comfort to you, in his dreams there are two of them to chase him around. Smith killed himself a week later. It was his letter to his parents that I saw. Fayze got it before the police. I need hardly tell you that it went no further.’
4
The Battle of Mussolini
TIME had dealt fairly kindly with both of them, thickening the loose limbs once burnt and slendered by desert sun but leaving them their fine-drawn regard for duty and each other. War was still a vividly remembered way of life, though now being recorded by historians too young to have experienced it. They had the facts right, Tarmer said, but not the day-to-day feel of them.
The old friend with whom he was lunching—and had once lunched, if you could call it that, every day for two oppressive years—received this remark with one of his personal silences as if a fuse were slowly burning down into sensitivity.
‘A chap in the paper,’ Bill Avory exploded at last, ‘was actually complaining that nobody ever entertained the public with a good story of an escape from an Italian prisoner-of-war camp.’
‘There were mass escapes when Italy packed up. A lot of fellows got clear away as we did.’
‘Before that, he meant. He said that an officer’s duty to escape had been less obvious in the casual climate of Italy than when subjected to the melancholy emptiness of German discipline.’
The fact that Avory exactly remembered the precious and exasperating phrase proved that it cut, and that he found truth enough in the slander to spoil the image which two prosperous, middle-aged citizens conceived of their adventurous youth.
‘I wonder if it wasn’t far harder to escape in Italy,’ Tarmer suggested.
Avory insisted that it couldn’t have been. There was no denying that the climate had been casual—so casual that a monk had been readily allowed to come into the camp for cocoa, and there had been goats in
the outer perimeter.
‘It seems absurd that we couldn’t just walk out,’ he said.
It did, in retrospect. Even Tarmer, whose conscience was far tougher than his friend’s, felt a shade of guilt as he remembered the failure of tunnels, of impersonations, of attempts to stow away in ration carts. On the face of it, both of them were examples of the lack of enterprise which that young critic of war on paper had mentioned. Prisoners in Germany did seem to have been more ruthlessly determined.
But Italians had more imagination than Germans and were less bound by routine. It had been impossible to calculate in advance where any of the guards would be idling at any given time. If you laid plans to take advantage of the usual genial but quite effective chaos, you would hit a night when discipline was of cold, Teutonic standard; and if you timed exactly …
‘We could never time exactly,’ he reminded Avory. ‘We had to work out an average.’
And even when they had averaged for week after week the guard changes, the movements of the Ditch Patrol, the interludes when illicit litres of wine were hoisted up by string to the five watch-towers, they would find all their ingenious calculations dislocated because Colonel Colonna’s wife was giving a party and in need of orderlies.
The Colonel—that flamboyant old chevalier of the Mediterranean who commanded the camp—undoubtedly would have liked to invite all his prisoners, accepting their parole in the politest manner of the eighteenth century. He deplored the military honour of the twentieth which compelled them to make nuisances of themselves to him and his government.
‘Your journalist sounds like that pompous ass, Fantle,’ Tarmer protested. ‘He always made escape sound easy, too.’
Wing-Commander Fantle had been the Senior British Officer. He took his responsibilities so seriously that he had no time for manners. Nothing ever prevented him from saying what he chose to his fellow prisoners, but to Colonel Colonna he could only speak through an interpreter. He had therefore chosen Captain Tarmer to be his adjutant in preference to more submissive officers. Tarmer could translate his imperial protests into fluent Italian.
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