Other Paths to Glory (18 page)

‘Stop worrying, Nikki. They’re just policemen.’

‘Policemen?’ She gave him a pitying look. ‘Have you ever seen our policemen handle a riot?’

The black figures were closing on them now in a rising crescendo of noise.

‘We’re not a riot. And I gather your rioters aren’t exactly boy scouts, either, are they?’

The pity was transformed into displeasure.

‘I was forgetting you wear a uniform too,’ she shouted.

Perhaps it was just as well there was no more time for this argument to develop, since it was clearly heading straight for Northern Ireland. But with a final burst of sound the motorcyclists drew up alongside them, one on each side.

For a moment both sides took stock of one another in a sudden silence almost as crashing as the noise which had preceded it. Then the nearest policeman raised his goggles and climbed stiff-legged off his motor-cycle.

By that time Mitchell had abandoned any idea of opening the dialogue, for with their machine-pistols slung across their chests and bolstered guns at their waists these two characters were a world away from Constable Bell and his notebook and pencil, Artillery like that explained Nikki’s sense of anxiety all too well, drying up any thought of argument on his own part: where Bell, unarmed, had been the arm of the law, what faced him now was the fist of the state with a weapon clenched in it, to be defied at one’s peril.

The policeman looked him up and down once more, as though to confirm his goggle-eyed view, and then raised his hand in a salute.

‘M’sieur. Vos papiers, s’il vous plait.’

The salute had caught Mitchell by surprise, his own hand already halfway to his pocket. He was glad Colonel Butler wasn’t present to witness his belated acknowledgment of the unexpected courtesy, which fell far short even of the standard required by the Cambridge University OTC.

Not that such slovenliness seemed to matter to the Frenchman: he removed one gauntlet and examined the documents with methodical care, his lips spelling out the words silendy. But he could go on reading them until doomsday for all the good it would do him, thought Mitchell, drawing strength from Audley’s assurance on their authenticity: there was nothing wrong with the bill of goods, it was the real thing. Only the goods themselves were counterfeit.

Finally the man looked up at him again.

‘Capitaine Lefevre?’

‘Yes - oui.’

‘You are on ‘oliday?’ The policemen had evidently decided to try out his English. ‘On leave from your regiment?’

‘No. I am here on official business. I have been asked to meet a party of old soldiers - anciens combattants de la bataille de la Somme - who will be visiting this place in a day or two. I am looking over the battlefield in preparation for that - ah - that duty.’

The policeman took a moment or two to assimilate the information. Then he gestured to Nikki.

‘And this is madame, your wife?’

‘Oh, no,’ Mitchell smiled. ‘This is Mademoiselle MacMahon of your Ministry of Tourism who has been assigned to help me. Mademoiselle’s presence here is a token of Anglo-French friendship for which we are very grateful.’

The policeman’s eyes flicked over Nikki and then returned to Mitchell, the eyebrows lifting for a fraction of a second to suggest a certain envy. It was like a shutter opening, revealing a human face for an instant, and then snapping shut again.

‘Vos papiers, s’il vous plait. Mademoiselle.’

Nikki’s credentials received the same thorough inspection, with the same eventual result.

‘Merci, mon capitaine - mademoiselle.’

The hand came up in salute again. Mon Capitaine had passed another test.

But success was something to build on, not to sit on.

‘Un moment -‘

No. Better to keep it in English, which was more flattering to the man’s ego.

‘ - I wonder - could you tell me one thing, officer.’

‘M sieur?’

’When I was last here, two years ago, Monsieur Amaury Regnier lived in the house in the wood.’ He pointed towards the fence. ‘Could you tell me who lives there now?’

The Frenchman frowned.

‘Why do you wish to know?’

That wasn’t the answer he had hoped for - it was no answer at all - but this time he was ready for it.

‘Some of the men I am to meet captured that wood from the Germans in 1916. Most of their comrades are buried here, in this cemetery. I had hoped we might visit the wood, but I have been unable to discover who owns it now.’

‘I am afraid I cannot help you,’ the policeman shrugged.

Then he looked at Mitchell sidelong.

‘But perhaps - you are resting nearby tonight?’

Mitchell turned to Nikki.

‘Where are we staying?’

God! That was the wrong way to put it, he realised too late as he saw her face change.

‘I m-mean, which hotel in Arras have you booked me into?’

‘La Belle Etoile in the Place Lloyd George, Captain Lefevre,’ she replied icily.

The policeman coughed politely - in fact so damn politely, that it was clear that he had formed his own interpretation of the nature of this example of Anglo-French friendship.

‘Very well -La Belle Etoile. If I am able to find out the answer to your question I will telephone the ‘otel.’

Mitchell watched them ride away, relief and embarrassment cancelling each other out within him. With an effort he turned again to meet the astonishing green eyes.

‘I’m - ah - sorry for putting my foot in my mouth.’

But the eyes were no longer arctic green, and she shook her head at him with an expression of half-amused resignation.

‘You’re all-British now, Paul - there’s no doubt about that.’

Mitchell was agonisingly aware that he was blushing.

‘But…’ She laughed out loud, gently, as though she was doing her best to save his feelings from total demolition ‘… but at least you know how to disarm French policemen - which is more than most Frenchmen are able to do.’

If that was the case, maybe there was consolation to be derived from his very gaucheness, humiliating though it might be: only the innocent should be so - so innocent. Perhaps that was what Audley was reckoning on.

Then the amusement in her face was gone, just as suddenly as it had appeared.

‘But now I will see your cemetery, Paul. And then it will be time to go, because it will be getting dark very soon - and I don’t think I will like it here very much then.’

She was quite wrong, of course - wrong to feel disquieted in this place, in these places, of all places.

Where the long rows of white headstones were, lined meticulously on their weed-free strips of tilled soil, carved just as meticulously - number, rank, name, regiment, age and day of death, regimental crest - there was no menace, only melancholy. Maybe outside, in the busy fields and roads, there were ghosts and unspent passions unable to rest because continuing life mocked them. But in the war cemeteries on the battlefields the dead had finally conquered the land and had no call to contest it with anyone.

Nothing would stir here until the last trump, and even then there would be no fuss or jostling for position, but only a quiet, well-ordered reunion.

Nikki pointed.

‘Look - poppies.’

Poppies, sure enough. A few late roses, dark red, blossomed between the stones, but some inspired gardener had carefully left the true flowers of the battlefield, the flowers of remembrance and forgetfulness, while removing every other weed.

‘I thought it was in Flanders that all the poppies grew,’ she added.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
… So she must have read that poem, or at least encountered it while doing her hurried official homework.

‘They grow wherever the topsoil is disturbed. Maybe they like the chalk, I don’t know.’

‘It’s very chalky here.’

He tore his gaze away from the name on the stone behind the poppies:

2103113 Rifleman A. SMITH RIFLE BRIGADE AGED 20.

One of the Poachers. So was the next one, and the next - and as far down the line as he could see. Somewhere along here, as likely as not, there’d be SECOND LIEUT. R. DYSON, General Leigh-Woodhouse’s friend.

I expect I
’
ll be saying
’
Good morning. God
’
in a moment or two
…

‘Chalky?’ He repeated vaguely.

When he finally focused on her he saw that she was regarding him sympathetically now, as though she could read his face.

‘Forget it - it’s not important, Paul.’

Beneath the provocative female - and the prickly Franco-Irish nationalist - there was a human being, and a rather nice one too, decided Mitchell, decisively shelving the last vestige of his plans for an amorous evening. They probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway, at that, particularly when he ought to be keeping his mind on a very different sort of objective.

‘Chalky, yes.’ The decision was like a burden lifted from his shoulders. ‘We’re right on top of the redoubt now. Do you see where those headstones have been laid flat over there?’

He pointed to the centre of the cemetery.

‘They are graves?’

She peered over the standing stones to where a whole group had been arranged horizontally.

‘I thought that was a pavement.’

‘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.