Other Paths to Glory (17 page)

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.

THE SIGN POINTED
directly up the bare hillside, along a tractor-beaten track which was edged on each side with the merest wisps of grass; it was only the rarity of hedges that made this farmland different from England, and with it the relative absence of birds, as though the thrifty Frenchmen were determined to use every square inch of field-space, sharing it as little as possible with wild creatures.

But he would have known the place without a signpost, even though he had never before approached the eastern tip of the ridge from this direction: with Bouillet Wood in view on the skyline all the time it was impossible to become disorientated.

And that in itself was strange, for on his previous visit to this section of the front he had never been so aware of the wood’s commanding position. Now that it was closed to him, and maybe hostile too, he saw not only how it dominated the landscape but also began for the first time to understand why the men of 1916 had written about it with such loathing. They had been like ants, vulnerable under the eyes of the enemy above them, and if the defences of the redoubt under the demolished chateau had been far more formidable, those had been virtually out of sight: it was because they could always see the wood that they knew the Germans in the wood could always see them. He thought - and the thought came to him so quickly and suddenly that it stopped him in his tracks as though it created a physical barrier -
maybe someone up there is
watching me now, another rash ant unwisely straying into forbidden territory to be squashed
without compunction.

But that was ridiculous. He was just another Englishman doing what dozens of others must have done before him: he had gone to the other entrance and had stated his intention without equivocation - and had even made a fuss when he had been turned away. Now he was only doing what he had been told to do, and there was nothing suspicious in his action; it would surely have been more suspicious to have done anything else, or even to have done nothing else.

He lifted his field-glasses, sweeping the far distance to the south and west. There, just visible in the slightly fading light above its belt of surrounding trees, was the top of the huge redbrick Thiepval Memorial; there, peeping over the top of the Tara-Usna ridge, was the Golden Virgin herself… and there, much closer, was Bouillet Wood - Bois de Bouillet, Wald von Bouillet, Bully Wood.

He focused on the inner fence, against the dark background of trees and bushes. His first impression, that they were pressing against it, imprisoned by the wire mesh, was wrong: there was maybe a yard or two of open ground between the fence and the vegetation. Beyond that he could see nothing and could only try to recall what lay within.

The house had been built about two hundred yards in from the southern edge, long and low, with an inner courtyard; full of rooms for unborn Regnier grandchildren - unborn and never to be born … There were lawns round it, and straight geometrically-driven avenues cutting through the wood.

Just to the north, or north-west, of the house there had been a single tiny field of sweet corn, he remembered; between the rows, lying on the sticky rain-washed clay, unused British and German ammunition had been scattered thickly, green with age and damp, but still live enough when dried out.

Apart from the lawns and the avenues and that field there had not been a square yard of level ground in the wood; the trees had been allowed to re-establish themselves naturally among the craters and crude trenches which were themselves formed of interlinked craters, all fallen in now and softened by the fallen leaves of half a century. Perhaps in the bright sunshine of a summer’s day it might have passed for any piece of rough woodland, anywhere. But he had seen it first on a dark, rainy autumn day when it had been ugly and depressing.

He stopped his sweep along the wire as his eyes caught a tiny brief movement, a momentary shivering of the leaves which could not be accounted for in the surrounding stillness.

‘Can you see anything?’ said Nikki.

He lowered the field-glasses.

‘No. Just the fence. It’s the same as on the far side - it obviously goes right the way round.’

It was true: he could see nothing, the patch of undergrowth was motionless. But it had moved, of that he was certain.

‘And that’s the cemetery?’ She pointed to the low wall of dark grey bricks ahead to the left.

‘That’s right. See how thick the chalk is in the fields here - and there are bits of brick in it. This is where the old Chateau de Bouillet was, and then the Prussian Redoubt.’

And now and for all time the Prussian Redoubt Cemetery.

He pointed suddenly to the right of the arched gateway.

‘There! I said you’d see one - and there’s more than one. That’s from the recent ploughing.’

Stacked neatly beside the gateway were three very rusty shells.

‘Two British i8-pounders and a German 5.9 - or they could be two German whizz-bangs, I don’t know.’

‘What are they going to do with them?’ She stared at the shells fixedly. ‘They’re not going to just leave them there?’

Mitchell laughed.

‘Oh, no. The army comes round and picks them up from time to time.’

‘But aren’t they dangerous?’

‘Not unless you take gross liberties with them. There’s Hindenburg Line blockhouse I know, just over the Sensee at Fontaine-les-Croiselles - ‘

He looked back down the slope towards the way they had come, where he had left the car by the roadside. Without remarking on it he had heard the sound of a motor-cycle a few moments earlier, but now he was aware that the sound had not passed on into the distance, but had stopped abruptly at the bottom of the hill.

‘Yes?’

Two motor-cyclists.

‘Er - Fontaine-les-Croiselles, just near Arras,’ he repeated. In another moment they would start up again. ‘I trod on an unexploded i8-pounder lying in the grass there, a beauty - ‘

They had not started up. One rider had climbed off his machine and was sniffing round the car. The other stared up the slope, pointing with a black-gauntleted hand. He raised his field-glasses, but the close-up only confirmed what he knew already.

‘We’ve got company.’

Nikki followed his gaze.

‘Oh -‘ Her shoulders sagged. ‘Oh, no. The police!’

‘So what?’ He injected a confidence he didn’t feel into his tone. ‘For God’s sake, we haven’t done anything. At least, I haven’t - have you?’

‘Me?’

The squeak of protest was cut off by the renewed roar of the powerful engines. The rider who had examined the car circled his machine in the road expertly and swerved sharply into the track to the cemetery. An instant later his colleague kicked his own engine into life and turned to follow him.

Mitchell watched them with a sick certainty that he was their objective: on the road they had been disturbing enough in their black uniforms, helmeted and goggled to match; on the track, heading straight towards him, they were as malevolent as Cocteau’s outriders of Death.

But now he was letting the girl’s police-phobia get the better of him, he told himself. Butler had warned that the security forces were out in force in Picardy, and it was impossible that they could yet suspect him of being here under false pretences. So this was just a piece of routine checking, routine curiosity, routine officiousness. He only had to stand his ground and be what he was supposed to be, with little to fear except his own fear.

Unfortunately that was enough, and more than enough, to expose his false courage to his own contempt. If he owed nothing to Audley, he had a score to settle on Charles Emerson’s behalf and his own, not to mention the poor old man, George Davis. He even had a responsibility of some sort to the girl beside him to put on a brave face and bluff it out.

‘Now, whatever can they want?’ he heard himself say.

The voice was Captain Lefevre’s, full of insular confidence.

‘Well, whatever it is, please give it to them - don’t argue with them, Paul. They aren’t like your “coppers”, these animals.’

‘So you keep telling me - you’ll have me scared stiff in a minute.’

He managed a grin to match the words, a grin not wholly forced as the irony of the situation took hold on him. It was surely a sign of the times that the pure in heart no longer had the strength of ten, and this girl’s clear conscience was no more comfort than his own bad one. Indeed, with a bad conscience one did at least know what to worry about, he decided, remembering the fear and confusion of his meeting with Constable Bell.