Other Paths to Glory

by Anthony Price

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Very dead. You see, the shells that went deep are working their way to the surface all the time. Every ploughing helps to bring them up.’

  ‘Even after fifty years - they still come up?’

  Mitchell drew the car off the road on to the edge of a recently harvested beet field.

  ‘Not so many now, maybe.’

  There was no point in frightening her unnecessarily, but if she was busy watching her feet she’d be less likely to notice any particular curiosity he might display on the ridge.

  ‘But you can figure it out for yourself mathematically: we fired two hundred million shells, give or take a few million. And so did the Germans. Say ten per cent were dud - and on the Somme it was more like twenty per cent.’ He gestured at the landscape. ‘This whole place is planted with high explosive. When they drove the motorway through the old Hindenburg Line near Arras the construction gangs were paid special danger money.’

  That ought to do it - indeed, from the way she looked from the rolling farmland back to him, eyes wide, and then back again to the open, peaceful scene ahead it had already done it. Anything more would be over-kill now, except for the final masterstroke.

  ‘But it wasn’t all dud.’ He opened the car door. ‘If you come with me now I’ll show you.’

  He climbed out and stretched himself gratefully. The weather had improved steadily during the afternoon, so that now the sky was almost cloudless, with the first touch of evening pink in it. The next day would be fine and possibly even warm; only the suggestion of a chill in the air and the ploughed fields on the horizon towards Fricourt and Mametz betrayed the autumn. He could see very clearly the white stain of chalk mixed with the clay topsoil zigzagging across the freshly-turned earth, the tell-tale marks of the German trenches from which Sausage Valley had once been enfiladed. Fifty ploughings and fifty harvests had failed to erase those marks, so maybe they were etched into the land for all time, just like the spadework of the ancient peoples which the archaeologists studied with such fervour.

  As he came round the front of the car he noticed that Nikki was still inside.

  ‘It’s perfectly safe here,’ he reassured her. ‘It’s only the places that haven’t ever been touched, or the newly ploughed places you have to keep an eye open. Come on.’

  She emerged gingerly, following him off the road as though the ground under her feet was uncomfortably warm.

  ‘Quite safe,’ he repeated. ‘All you’re likely to find here is -‘ he bent down, staring at the line of pulverised earth left at the edge of the field by the harrow ‘ - this.’

  As he stretched his hand out to pick up the object beside her foot she came to an abrupt halt.

  ‘What?’

  He dropped his find into her hand. ‘Do you know what it is?’

  She stared at the little round ball, weighing it as she did so. ‘It’s heavy … but it’s not a bullet. What is it?’

  ‘A shrapnel ball. You don’t see so many of them now, but after the war they picked them up by the basketful - it was a job they gave to the unemployed.’

  He bent down again.

  ‘Here’s another one - we’re in luck. First time I came out here it took me a whole day to find one of these. I suppose yesterday’s rain washed these to the top. Both British, these little chaps -probably from the i8-pounder shells they tried to cut the wire with. Not very efficiently, I should think. Later on they developed a special fuse for the job, the 106. Cut barbed wire up a treat. But on July ist there was a lot of uncut wire.’

  He pointed to the line of straggly bushes on the turf humps ahead.

  ‘Not here, though. There was not much wire left here - not much anything in fact.’

  She followed him to the edge of the Lochnager Crater.

  ‘That’s what sixty thousand pounds of ammonal does when you explode it underground: you get a big hole,’ he said casually.

  ‘A big hole,’ she repeated mechanically.

  ‘When they first blew it - 7.28 a.m. on July ist - it was 450 feet deep and 450 feet across. This is where the Schwaben Hohe strongpoint was - not to be confused with the Schwaben Redoubt up Thiepval way … it’s not so deep as it was originally, but it’s the best one on the Somme. The Y Sap crater on the other side of the village is partly filled in, the Hawthorn Redoubt crater’s full of trees and bushes, and the High Wood ones are full of water. This is the best one to see.’

  She continued to stare down into the stupendous crater, pale-faced.

  ‘The 10th Lincolns took it - the Grimsby Chums Battalion. They started out in 1914 as a volunteer company raised by a grammar school headmaster from his old boys. This is as far as they got.’

  She raised her eyes at last, examining him with a hint of distaste.

  ‘How can you be so cold-blooded about it?’

  ‘Cold-blooded?’ he frowned.

  ‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you? Don’t you feel anything when you come here?’ She held out the shrapnel ball. ‘You just pick up - souvenirs?’

  He met her green eyes steadily.

  ‘What should I feel?’

  She lifted her shoulders in a gesture of helplessness.

  ‘The pity of it … But I suppose soldiers aren’t allowed to feel pity for other soldiers.’

  Mitchell wasn’t at all sure what his answer - Captain Lefevre’s answer - ought to be to that one.

  Suddenly she shook her head.

  ‘Not a fair question, I guess. Mort pour la patrie - that’s how we justify it in France - mort sur Ie champ d’honneur. One minute it is a field of cabbage, but with a machine-gun you can turn it into a field of honour with a single burst.’

  He sensed that the old argumentative Mademoiselle Mac-Mahon was still too close to the surface for comfort, and that it had been largely his own fault she was showing through now: his sombre silence before Albert had aroused her sympathy, but his behaviour since had struck the wrong note again.

  ‘Would you rather go straight on to Arras now?’

  ‘Not if there is somewhere else you wish to visit.’

  ‘Well - ‘ he shrugged ‘ - I thought we might have a look at Bouillet Wood.’

  ‘Bouillet Wood? But is not that the place from which Monsieur Whitton was turned away?’

  ‘That’s right. But it’s one place our old soldiers will want to see all the same. They’ll be very disappointed if they can’t.’

  ‘And you think you will succeed where Monsieur Whitton failed?’ She regarded him quizzically.

  ‘I’m not Monsieur Whitton.’

  She half smiled.

  ‘And you think the British Army will be more persuasive than Cords Coaches?’

  ‘It’ll be better-mannered, certainly.’

  He carefully didn’t return the half-smile; she might take as too flippant any reminder that other occupiers of Bouillet Wood had tried without success to keep the British Army out of it.

  But as they drove slowly on again he felt those unanswered questions of hers lying between them, inhibiting them both from further conversation. One way or another they had to be tackled, and perhaps in this at least he might allow Mitchell to speak for Lefevre.

  ‘You asked me what I felt,’ he began cautiously, ‘about this countryside.’

  ‘That was - I do not know the word for it - but none of my business, anyway.’ She stared directly ahead. ‘Would you say “presumptuous”, maybe? You are here because you were told to come here.’

  ‘But I have been here before, and that’s why I’m here now.’

  She looked at him.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So maybe you deserve an answer.’

  ‘No, I -‘ She stopped.

  ‘But you may not understand it, I’m afraid.’ He paused. ‘I feel nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ That wasn’t the answer she’d been expecting. ‘Nothing?

  ‘When I’m here - nothing …’

  The Hameau turning would be at the bottom of this road, on the left.


  ‘… I know what happened, and where it happened. And very often why it happened as well. Before I came here die first time I thought I would be choked up with emotion. But I wasn’t at all. I was just surprised how ordinary everything was - and how small everything was.’

  She said nothing to break the silence.

  ‘I should have known better. There was an Englishman who wrote a book about the battlefield just after the battle - he was a poet, actually, and a good one … He knew - he said it would all go back to the farmers and you’d not be able to recognise it in a few years. I didn’t believe him, so I was surprised, even a bit disappointed when I first saw it.’

  Hameau 2 km

  And an Imperial War Graves sign:

  Hameau No. 1 Cemetery, Hameau No. 2 Cemetery, Bouilletcourt Farm Cemetery.

  ‘It wasn’t until I’d been back in England two or three weeks, and I went for a walk in the country not far from my home. And it was all there, every bit of it; there was a little stream just like the Ancre - it’s a little stream, the Ancre, not a river - with watermeadows and willows, and there was a wooded hillside with a country house on the top, just like Thiepval - or like the old Bouillet chateau. And there was a ridge - Christ! you could pick up the whole of the Somme and put it down in a dozen different places in England, and not know the difference. And the only difference is that half a million men killed each other there - and if you look carefully you can pick up the odd shrapnel ball, or maybe a bullet or two.’

  He stopped abruptly, aware that this might be where the views of Mitchell and Lefevre diverged, and that he was now climbing to the crest of Hameau ridge.

  ‘We’re just about on the German front line now - we turn right at the crossroads here.

  That’s Bouilletcourt Farm just ahead, on the right. Big German strongpoint there, taken on the first hour of the Hameau battle. It was the only place the main attack did take, though.’

  He swung the car sharp right, past fields thickly spread with the chalk spoil from the deep German dugouts which the British had methodically blown in, one by one, during the savage fighting of that first day. Bouillet Wood lay directly ahead now, across four hundred yards of open country.

  But no longer open: there was a high wire fence - it must be all of ten foot high - cutting across the open plateau maybe a quarter of that distance from the edge of the wood; an ugly, obtrusive thing, planted along a scar of bare earth. Where the narrow metalled drive bisected the wire there was a tall double-gateway, as tall as the fence itself and strongly braced, with a black and yellow sentry-box just inside.

  Mitchell felt his heart sinking within him. The whole thing had a ‘No Admittance’ look about it, like some top security secret government compound dedicated to guided missiles, poison gas and germ warfare. Only the big red warning notice-boards were absent, nothing else was needed to stop travellers dead in their tracks.

  ‘This is all new,’ he growled. ‘I wonder what the hell they’re playing at?’

  ‘It does not look welcoming,’ agreed Nikki. ‘Whoever lives in the wood, he does not wish to receive visitors, that is very clear, Paul.’

  As they drew up in front of the gate a dark-suited man emerged from the sentry box.

  ‘M’sieur?’ The man made no attempt to open the gate.

  Mitchell could think of nothing but to go on with the plan he had originally decided on to gain entry to the house hidden behind the thick screen of trees. He wound down the car window fully and leaned out.

  ‘I am a friend of Monsieur Regnier’s. I wish to see him.’

  The man looked at him stolidly.

  ‘Monsieur Regnier does not live here,’ he said finally.

  ‘He no longer lives in the house?’ Mitchell feigned a mixture of surprise and annoyance. ‘Then who does?’

  The stolid look remained in position.

  ‘Monsieur Regnier does not live here,’ the man repeated.

  ‘Then who does?’ Mitchell said patiently. ‘I wish to speak to the owner of this property.’

  ‘It is private.’

  ‘I can see that it is private. I wish to go to the house and speak to the owner.’

  ‘It is private, m’sieur. There is no entry.’

  ‘Who is the owner?’

  No reply this time. Mitchell felt the blood go to his cheeks.

  ‘God damn!’ he muttered.

  ‘Paul -‘ Nikki put her hand on his arm. ‘He is an idiot. You’ll get nothing out of him.’

  ‘We’ll see about that!’ Mitchell clicked the door open and jumped out. Shoulders back, chin up, he heard Butler snap. It’s the man inside the uniform who is the soldier.

  He marched to the gateway.

  ‘I am a British officer and I wish to see the British war cemetery, which is the property of the Imperial War Graves Commission. Kindly open this gate at once!’ he ordered.

  The result was not in the least gratifying. The gatekeeper simply pointed back towards Hameau.

  ‘The war cemeteries are beside the village,’ he said politely but firmly.

  ‘I don’t wish to see those cemeteries. I wish to see the Prussian Redoubt Cemetery - over there - ‘ He pointed decisively through the wire. ‘I also wish to see Bouillet Wood.’

  The gate-keeper shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry, mon capitaine, the wood is private property. For the cemetery on the far side you must return to the public highway and drive round to the far side. There is a path from the road to the cemetery. It is the only way.’

  That had been exactly what Mitchell had feared he would say from the start: the reply that Whitton had received. And of course that was the official route to the Prussian Redoubt Cemetery. The short cut had been a kindly gesture on Regnier’s part, never a right-of-way.

  There was nothing for it but to admit defeat - for the time being the new defences of Bouillet Wood were too strong, its wire uncut - and retreat in good order, with dignity. He stared longingly through the fence at the trees, noticing for the first time that there was a second fence, of similar height and design, on their margins.

  But this wasn’t the time or the place to examine either of them, under the gate-keeper’s eye; he could do that at his leisure from the other side.

  ‘Very well,’ he snapped. ‘Nevertheless, I wish to know the name of the new owner so that I may address a letter of complaint to him. I shall point out to him that in Monsieur Regnier’s time visitors to the cemetery were permitted to use this driveway. His name, if you please.’

  ‘I regret, but that is not possible,’ the Frenchman replied coolly.

  ‘Not possible?’ This time he didn’t have to pretend outrage. ‘What do you mean - not possible?’

  ‘I have my orders. The wood is private. Entry is by invitation only.’

  The gate-keeper shook his head emphatically, and then retired towards his sentry-box before Mitchell had time to react.

  Nikki raised her shoulders sympathetically as he turned back to the car.

  ‘No good?’

  ‘Tchah!’ Mitchell grunted angrily.

  The exchange had been humiliating, and he was glad now that he hadn’t boasted in advance too confidently about his ability to succeed where Whitton had failed. But it was more than humiliating, it was decidedly suspicious, and the sooner Audley heard about it the better: if Charles Emerson had penetrated those fences where he had failed, the thing that he had seen with such fatal results might be concealed among the trees. There was certainly something there that somebody was prepared to spend a good deal of money to keep hidden, that was for sure.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ asked Nikki.

  ‘Hah!’

  Mitchell remembered who he was suddenly. A proper mixture of irritation, suspicion and determination wouldn’t be out of place in Captain Lefevre.

  ‘The whole thing’s very queer -I don’t know what they’re playing at. The man wouldn’t even say who he was working for, never mind why he wouldn’t let us in.’

 
‘Well, short of charging the gate I don’t see what we can do, Paul. And even then - you’re not in one of your tanks now, remember.’

  Mitchell stared morosely at the wire. The irony of it was that this must be almost the exact spot where the tank Euclid had gone into action, hosing down the edge of the wood with machine-gun fire in preparation for the Poachers’ attack.

  ‘There’s something strange going on in there,’ he repeated. ‘I’ve a good mind to get on to the local police and see what they have to say.’

  ‘The police?’ Nikki looked askance at him, as he hoped she would. ‘Oh, Paul - I wouldn’t do that!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, for a start it’s probably perfectly innocent - probably some tycoon who wants to be alone,’ she began breathlessly. ‘And our police aren’t like your cosy English ones - they’d probably arrest you for causing trouble. And we’d be stuck in some horrible police station for hours even if they didn’t. Honestly, I wouldn’t do that.’

  That was the typically French reaction he’d been banking on - a resigned ‘them-and-us’ suspicion of the forces of law and order which he had noticed even among his most respectable French friends. Although in some sense a Government servant, Nikki ran true to form.

  ‘Hmm…’ he pretended to consider her plea. ‘All right. But I’m darned well going to have a closer look at the place from the other side.’

  ‘The other side?’

  ‘The Prussian Redoubt Cemetery is on the other side of the wood, Nikki - that’s what we came here to see. It’s on the very end of the ridge. We can get to it from the road, Whitton said so. Then I can - I can make a reconnaissance of my own there.’

  He nodded at her judiciously: Captain Lefevre salving his injured military dignity by trying to create a mystery where there was none. That word ‘reconnaissance’ was a good touch, too; he had decided at the last moment not to abbreviate it to the more authentic ‘recce’ on the ground that she might not understand him. As it was, she regarded him doubtfully, as if she found his curiosity disturbing … It was either that, or maybe the prospect of visiting the cemetery upset her.

  Well, if the latter was the case she might as well get used to the prospect now as later: the trenches might have gone, the sandbags long since rotted, the millions of miles of barbed wire grubbed up and the tens of thousands of guns and tanks hauled away to be beaten into the next generation’s ploughshares, but the British had left one enduring reminder of their occupation of this narrow strip of France: they had left their dead.