‘No. They were like all the rest once, but they wouldn’t stand up straight - they kept sinking and falling over. So in the end they laid them flat. They had to do exactly the same thing at the Mill Road Cemetery, which is built on top of the Schwaben Redoubt.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of the German dugouts underneath. They’re gradually falling in.’
‘Underneath?’ She looked at him, puzzled. ‘You mean the dugouts are still there?’
‘Oh, sure. The one here must be quite close to the surface, actually.’
‘But didn’t they fill them in - after the war?’
‘And during. But the Germans used to dig deep, thirty or forty feet, and even more than that. Under the Butte de Warlencourt the galleries went down maybe six levels into the chalk. They had two years to get dug into the Somme, remember. They didn’t just sit on their backsides waiting for us - they put in all the comforts of home, heating, electric light, air pumps, kitchens, the lot. And we didn’t have guns big enough to reach any of it, which is one reason why we lost such a hell of a lot of men in ‘16. They stayed snug while we shelled them, and then popped up in time to catch us in the open when we attacked. Or they waited until we’d moved on, and then hit us from behind.’
‘So all the dugouts are still down underneath us?’ She repeated the question disbelievingly.
‘Ah well, we did learn in the end -‘ Mitchell began to feel that he was doing the British Army less than justice. ‘We underestimated them because we never dug so deep ourselves -because we didn’t intend to live here for the rest of the war. They became an army of defence and we became an army of attack. Which is why we won the war in the end.’
Nikki stared around her at the long lines of white stones.
‘It doesn’t look like a victory monument to me. Where are the losers?’
The jibe stung.
‘Under the victors,’ snapped Mitchell. ‘Every dugout entrance on this whole ridge was blown in the moment we reached it. There are more Germans under Hameau Ridge than - ‘
A sudden sharp explosion - a concussive crump which made him duck instinctively - cut off the end of the sentence.
‘What - ?’
The echo reverberated for a second or two, and then was lost in the sound of panic-stricken birds, disturbed from their evening roosts, trying to get airborne.
‘From there!’
The girl pointed northwards, across the downward slope of the field, to where the tops of the trees in Rattlesnake Ravine appeared over the edge of the dead ground, a hundred and fifty yards away.
Mitchell saw a hint of smoke - dirty grey - and as he watched it rolled upwards, not in the growing column of a fire bursting into life, but like a signal hidden under a blanket and then released in a single concentrated mushroom cloud with a fading stalk.
All along the tree-line of the ravine the birds rose, heavy-winged, screeching and chattering and falling away to the left and right of the smoke.
‘What is it?’ She took up his unfinished question. ‘Is it a shell?’
He watched, hypnotised, as the smoke thinned in the still air. It wasn’t possible - he had been talking gaily about it, but it still wasn’t possible. It was simply a cautionary tale.
‘Was it a shell?’
‘A shell?’
Damn it, she’d jumped to the conclusion because he’d prepared her for just such an event, as though it happened all the time.
‘I - I don’t think it’s that - ‘
‘Well, what is it?’
She frowned at him.
What was it?
One thing was sure: whatever it was, he didn’t want to find out.
‘Tree-blasting?’
He stared at the last wisps of smoke.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Tree-blasting?’
He wilted inwardly, knowing what she was about to say, what she wanted him to do - and what she expected him to do.
And, of course, what Captain Lefevre would have to do!
‘I’ll go and have a look.’ He swallowed. ‘You stay here.’
It was odd how his knees didn’t seem to bend the way they should, as though his legs were stiff.
It had been a potato field: there was dozens of tiny greeny-brown potatoes lying on the surface, like shrapnel balls.
It was a shell, sure enough. It couldn’t really be anything else. But that wasn’t what was scaring him.
The edge of Rattlesnake Ravine was humpy and uneven, like all the unploughed ground of the Somme, where the grass had grown on the untouched battlefield for half a century … This was where the Australians had come that day, very angrily too, because a prisoner had killed two of them with a hidden grenade. So we’d had a belly-full of mercy that day and there hadn’t been a single prisoner taken in the whole ravine.
A cart track at the bottom now, grass between the wheelruts, all very peaceful… It was more a very deep sunken road than a true ravine …
Acrid smell.
Tall bank of stinging nettles, partly beaten down.
Sweet-rotten smell - cow-dung smell -
‘Can you see anything, Paul?’
‘Go back!’
A boot, a dirty boot with steel studs on -
‘What’s the matter?’
A dirty boot with steel studs and a foot in it, with a spike of pink bone and tendons and a long flap of brownish skin with black hair bristling on it - God!
The sound of motor-cycles in the distance.
4
THE CAR MUST have been waiting for him, parked in the darkness just up the road from the Belle Etoile, because he had to wait no more than a minute before it came sliding alongside the kerb abreast of him.
The driver leaned across to the window.
‘Lefevre?’
‘Roskill?’
‘Jump in.’ The voice was casual and decidedly public school. ‘You’re a couple of minutes late. Everything okay?’
‘I was just getting into bed when you shoved the note under my door. I had to dress.’
Mitchell paused, undecided as to which of the two questions uppermost in his mind he wanted to ask first.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Not far.’
‘How did you know where to find me?’
‘Oh, we’re bloody good at “hide and seek” - didn’t you know?’
The over-casualness of the man’s voice began to jar on Mitchell when he suddenly remembered he’d clean forgotten the most important question of all - the one which meant everything and nothing at all.
‘“If one told thee all was betrayed, what wouldst thou do?”’ he quoted hurriedly, grateful that the darkness of the car spared his embarrassment at the gaffe.
‘Heaven be praised - I was beginning to get nervous,’ said Roskill with evident relief.
‘I would run away. It might be true.’
‘And that’s what I would do too, by damn! David’s sense of humour certainly hasn’t improved since I last worked for him, I’ll say that.’
He gave Mitchell a quick nod of sympathy.
‘We’re just driving about to make sure no one’s tailing you, and we got your address from the tours manager - the coach company fellow - what’s his name - ?’
‘Whitton.’
‘That’s the man. Got the War Department to phone him up at Amiens. Satisfied?’
It was as easy as that - ridiculously easy.
‘And we didn’t phone you or come barging into your room because the French are terrible fellows for tapping and bugging, far worse than we are. Journalist pal of mine in Paris always says hullo twice when anyone phones him, just to be polite to the other chap on his line.’
Mitchell digested the precautions, recalling his warm, comfortable room in the Belle Etoile and the innocently empty boulevards outside the hotel with immediate and fearful suspicion. He had let his tired mind relax back there for a moment, and now he had been forcibly reminded that such weakness was not permitted.
‘But nobody’s on to me?’
Roskill glanced into the driving mirror.
‘Nobody’s following us, that’s true. So you may be right. Better to be careful than sorry though, eh?’ He glanced at Mitchell again. ‘Tell me, are you another of David’s bright ideas?’
Mitchell was not so much surprised at the accurate guess about his amateur status, which his fumbling use of the recognition phrase must have rendered apparent, as by the fact that Roskill clearly wasn’t in Audley’s confidence. That being the case he could hardly give a straight answer, but an instinct warned him not to stop the question dead in its tracks without finding out what lay behind it.
‘Does it matter?’
‘Not to me it doesn’t, old boy - I’m just passing through, thank God. But to you…’
Roskill’s voice trailed off.
‘Half conscript, half volunteer, that’d be my guess.’
Again it was an uncomfortably accurate guess.
‘What makes you think so?’
Roskill shrugged.
‘Well … let’s say I don’t know you, but I do know David Audley very well. So I’ll give you a piece of advice, Lefevre - absolutely free: get back to your regiment as quickly as you can, even if it’s on its tenth tour in darkest Ulster. Get the hell out while you still can.’
He was being warned off again, this time half-flippantly in a very different style from Colonel Butler’s explosive disapproval, but nonetheless sincerely. And yet although the warning appealed to him as plain common sense he felt a perverse reluctance to accept it, even after the horror of this evening. It went beyond the original mixture of self-preservation and revenge now, and he suddenly felt an overriding need to pin it down in his mind.
It wasn’t simply curiosity, the need to know - the same insatiable need to answer questions in his mind, a drive which he had recognised but never quite understood …
‘Huh!’ Roskill broke the silence. ‘You’re hooked! I don’t know how he does it, but he does it: one look at you and he bloody knows where to fix it so you don’t even know he’s done it - ‘
‘Audley?’
Mitchell tried to sort out the mixture of regret, admiration and dislike in the man’s voice into some order of precedence.
‘Dr David L. Audley, MBE, MA, PhD - you’ll find out soon enough if you haven’t already. He’s quite a guy for getting results - he’s famous for it. But he solves trouble by making trouble, and someone always has to pick up the bill. This time it could be you.’
The bitterness was personal as well as professional, Mitchell was certain. But without knowing anything about Roskill he couldn’t gauge its justification.
Except that he did know one thing about Roskill: Get them to hire a light aircraft - Hugh Roskill’sfit to fly again…
‘Did you manage to fly over Hameau Ridge, Roskill?’
Roskill stretched and shifted his position, leaving the final ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you’ admonition unsaid.
‘No. I didn’t get to fly anywhere. Because over-flying the Somme is verboten.’
‘Forbidden? As of when?’
‘As of now. Light aircraft, private aircraft - nothing flies off the airline corridor or under their operational ceiling. The whole area’s under military control.’
‘They give a reason?’
‘Military exercises. Only there aren’t any military exercises: all we can pick up on our radar is a few choppers buzzing around. Someone’s conning us, looks like.’
Not conning, thought Mitchell. Or not deliberately conning. This was just the aerial version of the situation Butler had reported on the ground: something was happening in the Channel departments. Even the presence of those motorcycle police, and the speed with which they had summoned men to Rattlesnake Ravine, only confirmed that. The French security services were obviously -
Christ! He’d been dim! The explanation or at least one part of it - had been staring him in the face for hours now, and he’d looked right through it.
Even as the implications of the idea began to spread like ripples he felt the car slow down. Looking around he saw that they were in an anonymous side-street, with the lights of a main thoroughfare some fifty yards ahead.
‘This is where we pan,’ said Roskill. ‘David’s waiting for you in Number 17, just across the street - Flat Four. The front door’s on the latch, you can go straight up.’
Mitchell looked up and down the street.
‘Are you coming back for me?’
‘Not likely! It’s Paris for me now. Straight on to the motorway just outside town, and I’ll be there before midnight - the place’ll just be hotting up. Knocks Arras into a cocked hat for late night enjoyment, Paris does, you know.’
The interior of the car was striped with bars of light and darkness thrown through the Venetian blinds of a window in the house beside them. One bar told him that Roskill was grinning happily, like a soldier ordered back to base on the eve of an enemy attack, but as the man moved his head Mitchell saw that the happiness didn’t extend upwards to his eyes.
‘How do I get back to my hotel, then?’
‘Get back? Down to the bottom of the street, turn left three hundred yards and you’re back in Place Lloyd George.’
Mitchell regarded him with astonishment.
‘Three hundred - then why the blazes have we been driving all over the place?’
‘I told you - to see if you’ve got a tail. And then to slip it if you had.’
‘But I still don’t see why I should have a tail - I haven’t done anything, and nobody could possibly know me.’
At least, nobody could know Captain Lefevre anyway: he’d only been born the day before. Except that after this evening even that cry had a hollow ring about it.
‘Well, you’re a lucky fellow to have such a clear conscience -and such touching confidence too,’ Roskill chuckled grimly. ‘But don’t ask me for whys and wherefores. I’m just the taximan this time, thank God.’
He took a final look up and down the street.
‘You’re in the clear at this moment, certainly: you tell David that from me. On which happy note I must bid you adieu, old boy.’
Mitchell fumbled for the door handle.
‘Thanks for the ride … old boy.’
Roskill’s teeth glinted in the bar of light across his mouth.
‘Think nothing of it. Just one final thought though, Lefevre. You wanted me to take a look at Hameau Ridge - the old battlefield, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Who was that cartoonist chap - Bruce someone - who drew all the old trench jokes?’
‘Bairnsfather.’
That’s the chap. Always drew the same soldier. Little man with a walrus moustache?’
‘ “Old Bill”.’
‘Right. And he was the one who was in this shell crater full of mud and water during a bombardment and turned to his mate and said “If you know a better hole, go to it.” And that’s pretty damn good advice; it seems to me - as far as you’re concerned.’
Roskill had entirely misunderstood Old Bill’s advice, Mitchell reflected as he closed the door of the flat behind him. The whole analogy was off the point. And yet the warning was plain enough all the same, echoing Butler’s doubts of the previous day about the advisability of sending forth a sheep dressed in wolf’s clothing. Only in a crazy way he had nevertheless been enjoying himself. Even the moments of fear in retrospect had a quality of excitement which made them exhilarating. But this was no time for self-analysis; Audley was talking to him –
‘- and not followed at all? That’s good, Paul - because if Hugh Roskill says you weren’t, then we can rely on it. He’s a first-rate operative, is Hugh.’
That somehow made it worse, thought Mitchell: whatever Roskill thought of Audley, the big man had no lack of confidence in his subordinate. The relationship betrayed a defect in each of them: if the younger man was bitter to the very edge of disloyalty, the older one was totally unaware of his dis
affection. And if that cut them both down to human size it wasn’t exactly reassuring.
Audley regarded him solicitously.
‘You look tired, Paul. But that’s only to be expected, the first time on your own - here, sit down - have a cognac.’
He pointed to the bottle on the table.
Mitchell shook his head.
‘You look as if you’ve got something for me, too,’ said Audley. ‘You’ve seen something?’
‘Yes.’
‘What?’
‘A - fence.’
That was strange: he’d wanted to say ‘A foot’, but the word had refused to be said at the last moment.
‘A fence? What son offence? Where?’
‘On Hameau Ridge. There’s a double wire fence round Bouillet Wood. No trespassers.’
Audley frowned.
‘But you said you knew the man who lives there?’
‘He died last year. There’s a new owner now.’
‘Who owns it now?’
‘The man on the gate wouldn’t say. Nor would the police.’
‘The police?’ Audley took the information well, with controlled interest untainted by the least sign of worry. ‘How did you run into them?’
His coolness rekindled Mitchell’s confidence in him. ‘They ran into us. It was when we went to have a look at the wood from the Prussian Redoubt side.’
‘We?’ Audley pounced on the pronoun. ‘The interpreter was with you?’
‘You know about her?’
‘Her?’ Audley cocked his head questioningly. ‘The tours man told Hugh over the phone you’d be supplied with an interpreter - he didn’t say it was a female one.’
That sounded like Whitton right enough, though it was impossible to say whether he’d omitted that additional fact because of his quirky sense of humour or because he unselfishly wanted to give ‘a nice lad’ a clear run with a pretty girl.
Audley listened to his portrait of Nikki MacMahon with good-humoured interest.
‘Delightful. And a most accurate description too - go on, though.’
‘What with - the police or the fence?’
‘Whichever you like. It’s your story. Tell it your way.’
It would be logical to be chronological, thought Mitchell: to progress from the fence to the police, by way of Bouillet Wood. But the appalling image of the foot was overprinted on every other memory, becoming clearer every second while everything else faded.
Other Paths to Glory Page 15
