Other Paths to Glory (16 page)

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.’

‘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.