Mitchell felt he had arrived at the vital point in the dialogue in a sufficiently roundabout manner.
‘And this group of mine, where are they going?’
‘Ypres and the Somme, same as most of ‘em.’
‘But where on the Somme?’
Whitton pointed.
‘There’s a bit of paper in compartment there, I guessed you’d want to know so I wrote it down for you.’
Mitchell unfolded the paper, which not only bore the Cords Coaches superscription but was also hideously and distinctively pink into the bargain.
Vimy Ridge -
‘They’re going to Vimy first?’
‘Aye. To see the Memorial, and that. You meet up with them there. Then Bapaume for the night.’
Bapaume, Le Sars, Guyencourt, Hameau No. 1 Cemetery, the Glory Hole, the Ulster Tower, Prussian Redoubt Cemetery, the Serre Road Cemeteries, High Wood, Pozieres Church, Thiepval Memorial, Newfoundland Park, Albert…
There was one name missing.
‘Is this the lot?’
‘The lot? They won’t even manage all those, lad, I can tell you. They’re not spring lambs any more, you ‘ave to let ‘em take their time. You rush ‘em and you’ll ‘ave one drop dead on you, mark my words,’ Whitton admonished him gravely. It was obvious that sudden death among his elderly charges was one of his biggest nightmares. ‘I don’t mean that. But you’ve left out Bouillet Wood, haven’t you?’
‘No lad, that’s private, that is.’
‘I know. But Monsieur Regnier always lets you in if you ask.’
Whitton gave him a quick glance, frowning. ‘Monsieur Regnier? How d’you come to know Monsieur Regnier?’
Mitchell was aware too late that in his eagerness he had maybe gone too far in showing such interest in Bouillet Wood and, in doing so, by revealing an unexpected degree of special knowledge. Also too late he remembered Audley’s parting advice to accept nobody on his face value … and because on face value nobody could be more innocent than Bob Whitton he had immediately forgotten every syllable of that advice. Talk your way out of this, Captain Lefevre!
‘I t-told you, I’ve been over here before, t-to France, I mean,’ he stuttered.
Too quick … Why would Captain Lefevre have met old Amaury Prosper Regnier?
Think, Captain Lefevre: why would Bully Wood interest you?
Euclid!
‘My regiment - ‘ Mitchell slowed his voice to a drawl ‘ - we used tanks for the first time on the Somme, Mr Whitton. One of them was used in the attack on Bouillet Wood. When I was over here in ‘71 I visited all the locations of early tank actions -Flers and Coucelette, Morval, Gueudecourt, High Wood and Bouillet Wood, Saucourt l’Abbaye - ‘
Whitton cut him off with a grunt; running battlefield tours had clearly not aroused his interest in the battles themselves - he had already indicated as much.
‘Aye - well, he’s dead now, Regnier is,’ he said.
‘Dead?’ Mitchell repeated sharply. ‘How?’
‘How?’ Whitton sounded as surprised by the question as Mitchell had been by the information. ‘Well, old age for a start, lad - ‘e was eighty if ‘e was a day. And ‘e had a bad chest, too. Bronchitis, I think it was. Just about a year since.’
Mitchell relaxed. A year ago ruled out the same foul play that had carried off Charles Emerson and George Davis, and the bronchitis rang true. As a liaison officer with the British Regnier had taken a lung-full of chlorine at Ypres in the first gas attack in 1915.
‘But you’re right,’ Whitton conceded. ‘’E always let us into wood. But new man won’t. His agent says wood’s private property, and that’s that. Won’t even let us use track past it to cemetery, the blighter.’
‘The Prussian Redoubt Cemetery?’
‘Aye. We’ve to use the road on t’other side, which means ‘alf a mile walk up the ridge.’
Mitchell lapsed into silence, letting his brain slip into top gear. He was sure he had something valuable to give Audley now, something that justified his earlier error. It could well be that the new owner of Bouillet Wood was as keen on breeding pheasants there as Amaury Regnier had been, yet not so much of an Anglophile as to be willing for them to be disturbed. But there was absolutely no reason why he shouldn’t let a couple of dozen old Englishmen walk along the track at its side and across the open ridge to the war cemetery, where the Poachers lay in rows beside their Berkshire and Australian comrades in the centre of what had once been the Prussian Redoubt. Even an Anglophobe Frenchman would think twice before doing anything like that: it was ungracious in a peculiarly unGallic way, and therefore suspiciously ungracious. He sensed a movement at his shoulder and in the same instant was conscious of the French girl’s perfume; after the impact of that first sight of her the fact that he could so quickly forget her presence struck him as rather disturbing. He was not himself in more ways than one, that was for sure.
He swivelled sideways in his seat.
‘I’m sorry - we must be boring you, mademoiselle.’
‘Not at all. You are a student of military history, naturally.’
She had an enchantingly husky voice, a positively come-hither voice. If that had led Whitton on to make a tactical error, then maybe the error was excusable.
‘Regimental history, anyway,’ he smiled at her, secure in his uniform for the very first time. Whatever the defects of his disguise might be, he had nothing to fear from a French girl.
‘And you are of a tank regiment?’
‘The Royal Tank Regiment,’ Mitchell nodded. He pointed to his badge, ‘That’s a portrait of the world’s first tank, mademoiselle.’
Mademoiselle MacMahon examined the badge politely.
‘Yes, Captain.’ The green eyes surveyed him. ‘But it is true, is it not, that France also produced tanks at the same time as the British - independently?’
Mitchell’s jaw dropped and he was forced to cover his confusion with an unintelligible sound.
‘Er - ah - ‘ For God’s sake, a French girl who knew about tanks - it wasn’t possible! ‘Well, yes - that is to say - yes.’
‘The Schneider and the St Charmond,’ added Mademoiselle MacMahon sweetly. ‘And later the Renault.’
Whitton gave an amused grunt.
‘She’s got you there, lad,’ he observed in the satisfied tones of one whose warning had passed unheeded. ‘I knew she’d ‘ave you one way or t’other.’
And more cruelly than the Yorkshireman could possibly know, fumed Mitchell. The Schneider had proved incapable of crossing wide trenches and the St Charmond hadn’t appeared in significant numbers until well into 1917. But how could he possibly say so, short of a formal declaration of war?
He compromised.
‘They weren’t actually used until 1917 - ‘ he began.
Mademoiselle MacMahon had no such scruples.
‘The British used them prematurely,’ she said accusingly. ‘There were at the Somme but a handful - perhaps fifty, yes? And half of them broke down before they reached the front line.’
That was exactly the sort of facile popular half-truth Charles Emerson had been engaged in demolishing, Mitchell thought bitterly, beginning himself to feel like one of the tanks which had come so painfully and secretly all the way from England, only to run into an unexpected and unfair obstacle in the last mile … No wonder Whitton had come unstuck with this beautiful opinionated blue-stocking.
But this time he was determined not to behave like a beginner: defeating her arguments presented no problem at all, and ordinarily it would have been a labour of love. But that would be the action of Paul Mitchell, whereas Paul Lefevre had been raised on the Maintenance of the Objective as the first principle of war and had bigger fish to fry than young Frenchwomen.
Paul Lefevre found it very much easier to swallow his irritation and smile charmingly.
‘I think we’d better argue that one when we know each other better, Mademoiselle MacMahon,’ he said. ‘But if you’ll allow me to change the subject -
“MacMahon” is a most unusual French name.’
‘Aye. Sounds Scottish to me,’ chipped in Whitton. ‘Are you a Highland lass in disguise. Mademoiselle, eh?’
The girl paused before replying, as though disappointed that the British tanks were moving out of her range.
‘In fact it is an Irish name,’ she said finally.
‘Of course!’ Whitton nodded at the road ahead wisely. ‘I should ‘ave realised. You’ve got proper Irish colouring, and that’s a fact.’ He half turned towards her. ‘And did your father come from Ireland, then?’
Again there was a slight pause. ‘No, Mr Whitton,’ she said. ‘It was the great-grandfather of my great-grandfather’s grandfather.’
‘And ‘e emigrated to France - all those years since?’
‘No, Mr Whitton. He did not emigrate, he fled from the persecution of the English, like many thousand other Irishmen. And he came to France to join the Irish Brigade in the French Army - to fight the English with twenty thousand other good Irishmen.’
She threw Mitchell a cool glance.
‘It is an unusual name, Captain. But there are plenty of others like it - Maguires and Dillons and O’Reillys. I think you might be surprised how many there are.’
They had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire - and a fierce Irish fire, too, which had evidently not cooled in two and a half centuries or more.
‘Have you served in Ireland recently. Captain?’
And there, of course, was the fresh fuel for the old fire.
‘No, mademoiselle. Happily not.’
She nodded.
‘But naturally! The English have not yet used tanks in Ireland. Armoured cars are sufficient for civilians.’
But there was a limit even to what Captain Lefevre could take. Particularly Captain Lefevre, in fact.
‘But we do have something in common, you and I, mademoiselle. Very much in common.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Oh, yes. You see my ancestors fled from persecution also, but in the opposite direction. They fled to England from French persecution.’ He grinned. ‘In fact that’s how the word “refugee” came into the English language - that’s what my French protestant ancestors were called. And, mademoiselle, the ironic thing is that our refugee regiments helped the English drive your ancestors out of Ireland. Tit for tat, in fact.’
It was going to be a bumpy ride up the line to the Somme.
2
A MILLION MEN had marched down the old Roman road into Albert, staring up at the great golden statue of the Virgin hanging precariously at right angles from the highest pinnacle of the shattered cathedral, but Mitchell had never heard the echo of a single footfall.
Only now there was a new ghost at his back to remind him of what lay beyond the town. For it had always been here, on the slope just beyond the high-water mark of the last German offensive of 1918, that Charles Emerson had stopped the car as though to draw breath before going on through the little town to the start lines of the 1916 British advance.
Obediently he slowed the car down and pulled in to the roadside, staring across the drab roofs at the second Golden Virgin, the replacement for that finally lost without a trace during the war’s closing convulsion. When the Virgin fell, the war would end - that superstition at least had been not far off the mark.
Abruptly he reached for the starter, conscious of the girl beside him.
‘I’m sorry. I suppose we’d better get on,’ he apologised.
‘There’s no hurry. Our rooms in Arras are booked, so if you want to stop and look at anything, I do not mind - I quite understand,’ she said.
‘Understand?’ He turned and looked at her questioningly. ‘Understand - what?’
‘Why - that you might want to stop and look,’ she replied, meeting his gaze candidly. ‘If there is a piece of France that is English it is here. If I were an Englishman I would not drive quickly past it. I would wish to see.’
Some comer of a foreign field…
‘Thank you, mademoiselle.’
She had mellowed appreciably during the past few miles, he decided. During the drive to Amiens they had fought to a Franco-Irish-Anglo-French stalemate, over a two-hundred-year battlefield stretching from the banks of the Boyne to the Suez Canal in 1956. But once Bob Whitton had left them to attend his ailing coach the fire had seemed to go out of their antipathy and they had moved from hostilities to truce, and from truce to armistice; it was as though the Yorkshireman’s presence itself had set them at each other’s throat. ‘My friends call me Nikki, Captain.’
And now from armistice to honourable peace? The change in her mood was quite startling now … but also undeniably gratifying, opening up most delectable possibilities, Walter Mitty dreams which until this moment had been too far removed from reality for serious consideration -
The next thing we’ll pray for -
We’ll pray for a wench:
O Lord, may we have one,
And may she be French!
Except that was a Bob Whitton prayer, unworthy of an officer and a gentleman, even a bogus one - and particularly a bogus one with other things to think about. He dare not forget that for one moment.
But friendship, platonic friendship, innocent and uncomplicated, might lend Captain Lefevre a little extra substance. Certainly, no one would look twice at him when they could look once at Mademoiselle MacMahon, and it would be worth seeing Audley’s face when he turned up with her on his arm.
‘And my friends call me Paul.’
He grinned at her: how very easy it was to live a lie when there was no alternative! It was positively habit-forming.
‘And we can agree to differ on past history?’
‘We can invoke the Entente Cordiale, can we not?’ She returned the grin, and then her face grew serious again. ‘You wish to see the battlefield - Paul?’
‘Why not?’ No time like the present. ‘We can see a piece of it before it gets dark, anyway. Is there anything you’d particularly like to see?’
‘I don’t know what there is to see.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘To tell the complete truth, I do not really know very much about your battle, Paul.’
‘But I thought you were an expert - all that stuff about tanks you fed me - where did that come from?’
She grimaced.
‘From a book. Monsieur Whitton told me on the phone an officer from the British Tank Corps was coming to join his party, so I tried to do my homework.’ She paused. ‘But it was a very terrible battle, that I know - as Verdun was for France.’
If anywhere had been the British Verdun, it had been Ypres, thought Mitchell. But there was no point in quibbling about it, it was relief enough to discover that she wasn’t such a bluestocking after all, and that he wouldn’t have to re-fight every inch of the Somme with her. The important thing now was to get a look at Bouillet Wood as soon as possible without being too obvious about it.
‘Terrible - yes, it was that sure enough,’ he nodded.
Only terrible wasn’t the half of it: if there was a word in the English language for the loss of fifty-seven thousand men in a few hours that first day, he’d never been able to find one. He’d always felt the same inadequacy at this precise point on the road out of Albert - the town had passed like a phantom - on the last rise before the German lines came into view ahead. But he mustn’t think of that now.
‘So where shall we go?’ She spoke softly now, as though she sensed his sombre mood.
Hameau Ridge without being too obvious.
‘La Boiselle’s just ahead - ‘ he thought for a moment ‘ - this is where the Tynesiders attacked - the Tyneside Scottish and the Tyneside Irish. And that’s the beginning of Sausage Valley on the right there - ‘ He pointed.
‘Valley?’ She peered along his finger. “Where?’
It was the identical question he had put to Emerson when they had first come this way: the awful Sausage Valley, in which wave after wave of the Geordies had passed through machine-gun fire on three sides o
f them, had loomed in his imagination like the Valley of Death at Balaclava. But when he had come face to face with it he had found that a thousand men had fallen in a few yards of gently dipping fields of sugar beet. He remembered General Leigh-Woodhouse’s memory of Bouillet Wood: ‘And you say it’s very small? But it does seem large when you can’t get out of it…’
He swung the car to the right just at the edge of the village, ploughing alongside a narrow, crazily-humped wilderness of grass.
‘There you are, Nikki: the Glory Hole. Guaranteed untouched by human hand since 1916.’
‘The - what?’
‘The Glory Hole. It’s an original piece of no-man’s land - the trenches were so close here they could bomb each other all the time without artificial aids. But don’t ask me why it’s been left, I don’t know why.’
Nikki craned her neck at the Glory Hole.
‘There’s a sign saying “For Sale” on it.’
‘Is there?’ He drove on slowly. ‘Well, I don’t think I’ll put in a bid. With all the unexploded shells and grenades still in the ground there it doesn’t strike me as a desirable property.’
‘Unexploded?’ She twisted in her seat to look back. ‘Do you mean they could still go off?’
‘I do indeed! And if we go walking across any ploughed fields or through any woods I wouldn’t go kicking any clods of earth or odd-looking piles of leaves, either. They’ve been known to go off bang.’
‘After all these years?’
‘Oh, sure. I kid not at all, mademoiselle: they last one hell of a long time, and just because they didn’t go off when they were meant to doesn’t mean they can’t ever go off. Not a year goes by without someone getting killed out here.’
‘Killed?’
‘Too right. A couple of children were blown up just before I was here last time - they were trying to take the brass nose-cone off one of our howitzer shells. And the year before that there were four farm workers.’
Other Paths to Glory Page 12
