by William Boyd
‘You wouldn’t tell us anyway, would you?’ Gorlice-Law said, reaching for another biscuit. ‘Deadly secret and all that. Hush-hush.’
‘Have another drop of whisky,’ Lysander said.
He slept fitfully in his thin hard bunk, kept awake by his ever-turning mind and by Dodd’s long, deep snores. He heard the whistles of the dawn ‘stand-to’ and breakfasted on tea and jam sandwiches brought to him by Dodd’s batman. Foley arrived and offered to show him the front-line trench, to ‘have a gander’ at no man’s land.
The trenches at this, the furthest right-hand wing of the British Expeditionary Force, were narrow, deep and well-maintained, Lysander saw. Dry too, with a duckboard floor and a solidly revetted fire-step and a thick crowning berm of sandbags. Apart from the sentries standing on the fire-step the other soldiers huddled in scrapes and small half-caves hollowed out from the facing wall – eating, shaving, cleaning their kit. Lysander was amused to see that most of them were wearing shorts and their knees were brown – as if they were on a strange sort of a summer holiday – as he followed Foley along the traverses to a net-covered loophole. He was handed a pair of binoculars.
‘You’re safe enough from snipers,’ Foley said. ‘You can see through the net but they can’t see in.’
Lysander raised the binoculars and peered out over no man’s land. Long grass and self-seeded corn badged with rusty clumps of docks. In the middle distance, directly in front of them, was a small ruin – more like a pile of smashed and tumbled stones – and some way off were three leafy, lopsided elms with some of their main branches blasted off. It looked tranquil and bucolic. A warm breeze was blowing, setting the rough meadow that was no man’s land in easy flowing motion, the tall grasses and the docks bending before the gentle combing wind.
‘How far are their trenches?’ he asked.
‘Couple of hundred yards away, here. You can’t see them, the ground rises in the middle, ever so slightly.’
Lysander knew this, just as he knew that the shattered masonry was the remains of a family tomb. This was to be his reference point at night.
‘What about that ruin?’
‘They ran a sap out to it for a listening post but we bombed them out a month ago. They haven’t come back.’
‘I want to have a good look at it tonight, Sergeant. Are there drainage ditches?’
‘A few. Quite choked and overgrown. See that clump of willows – to the right?’
Lysander swivelled his binoculars. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s the start of the deepest one. Runs across our front then dog-legs into Frenchie’s wire.’
Lysander made some token notes on his map – he had his bearings clearer now – and he had his little torch and his compass. He should be all right.
‘What time do you want to go out?’ Foley asked. Lysander noticed the pointed absence of ‘sir’, now.
‘When it’s darkest. Two o’clock, three o’clock.’
‘It’s a very short night. Summer solstice’s just gone.’
‘We won’t be out long. I just have to confirm a few details. You’ll be back in half an hour. We’ll be back,’ he added quickly.
‘Mr Gorlice-Law is coming with us, it seems,’ Foley said. ‘He’s not done any patrolling yet. Captain Dodd thought it might be a nice dry-run for him.’
‘No,’ Lysander said. ‘Just you and me, Foley.’
‘I’ll look after the little chap, don’t you worry, sir.’ He smiled. ‘Best to keep the captain happy.’
In the afternoon two RFC spotter aeroplanes flew over the trenches and for the first time Lysander heard gunfire from the German lines. Then there was a distant shouting from somewhere in no man’s land. A solitary voice. The men began to laugh among themselves.
‘What’s he shouting? Who is it?’ Lysander asked Foley.
‘He crawls out most afternoons when it’s quiet and abuses us. You could set your watch by him.’
Lysander stood up on the fire-step and listened. Faintly but distinctly from the long grass came the cry of, ‘Hey, English cunts! Go home, fucking English cunts!’
Lysander thought he could hear laughter from the German lines also.
After the evening ‘stand-to’, he began to feel his nervousness increase again. Once more he silently ran through his instructions, mentally ticked off everything he had to do. Covertly, he checked the two Mills no. 5 bombs in his pack and verified, for the twentieth time, that the detonators were in. Gorlice-Law was full of enthusiasm for the patrol, blackening his face and cleaning and loading and reloading his revolver.
‘We’re just looking at the ground,’ Lysander felt obliged to tell him. ‘I don’t think it’s worth your while.’
‘I only arrived two days ago,’ Gorlice-Law said. ‘I can’t wait.’
‘Well, the first sign of trouble and we run for it.’
Dodd made him clean his face and set up the ‘dining table’ – half a door placed on two ammunition boxes – saying, ‘I don’t intend to sit down to eat with a blackamoor, Lieutenant,’ and they were served up a supper of tinned stew and biscuits followed by tinned plum-duff and the rest of Lysander’s whisky. As it grew darker, Foley arrived with the rum ration. It was strong liquor, Lysander thought, with a powerful odour of molasses and thick like cough medicine. He could see that Gorlice-Law was feeling the effects on top of the whisky – he had a glazed expression on his face and it was visibly obvious when he tried to concentrate – eyebrows buckling in a frown, lips pursed, his speech slow and deliberate.
Towards half past two in the morning, Lysander steered him up the trench to join Foley at the jumping-off point. A short wooden ladder was set against the facing wall opposite the gap in the wire. Foley wore a rolled-up Balaclava on his head, a dirty leather jerkin with a webbing belt around it, shorts, sandshoes and extra socks tied round his knees. He had a revolver in his pocket and a whistle on a lanyard round his neck.
‘Three blasts and we head for home,’ he said, looking at Lysander, askance.
‘What is it, Foley?’
‘You’re fully dressed, sir. Like you were going on parade.’
‘I don’t have any other kit with me.’
Foley had a tin of black candle grease and he painted some stripes on Lysander’s face. He turned to look at Gorlice-Law, who had stripped himself of jacket, webbing and puttees and had thrust his revolver in his belt.
‘You do everything I say, now, Mr Gorlice-Law. Understand?’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’
Foley put up a pink Verey rocket to let the battalion front know that a patrol was going out and they clambered up the ladder and over the sandbags, advancing at a crouch through the wire and on into the engulfing darkness of no man’s land.
It was a moonless night and yet Lysander was still astonished at how quickly he lost his bearings as they crawled through the long grass. After a minute or so he had no idea in which direction he was heading as he followed Foley – with Gorlice-Law bringing up the rear. A white flare went up from the German lines and for a few seconds the world turned brightly monochrome. He had a sudden temptation to stand up and see where he was. They all froze.
‘Where’s the ruin?’ he hissed at Foley as the glaring light dimmed and fizzled out.
‘About fifty yards, diagonal, right.’
‘Take us towards it.’
Foley changed course and they crawled on. A few miles north some kind of ‘stunt’ was taking place – star shells and distant artillery, the throat-clearing expectoration of machine-gun fire. Lysander glanced back – nothing was happening in the 2/10th Loyal Manchester Fusiliers’ trenches, however. Black sleeping countryside. Even the precautionary, exploratory rocket-flares seemed to have died down. Everybody keen on a good night’s sleep.
‘How far are we now?’ Lysander tapped Foley’s ankle.
‘Over that little rise and you’re there.’
It was time.
‘Stay here,’ he said to Foley. ‘Don’t leave him.’
‘No, sir. Don’t go alone. Let me come with you.’
‘It’s an order, Foley. Look after the lieutenant.’
Lysander crawled away from them up the slope – just the smallest undulation, but it gave him enough height to see the pale tumbled blocks of stone from the demolished tomb. He looked right for the ravaged elms and thought he saw their darker shape against the night sky. Ruins, elms, drainage ditch – at least he had physical reference points to aim for in the fluid blackness and the whispering grass all around him.
He slithered down the reverse side of the slope towards the ruined tomb. It must have been quite an edifice, he thought, as he drew nearer, some local dignitary who wanted his family name to last. Well, he hadn’t reckoned for –
Lysander froze. He heard a squeaking noise. Rats? . . . But it was too sustained. Dripping water? Then it stopped. He slipped his torch out of his kitbag and the two Mills bombs. Pull the pin, count to three, throw and move away, smartly. These explosions would be the diversion, the cause of his ‘death’ that would allow him to make the French lines.
The squeaking noise started again. It was very faint. He was up against the first blocks of stone from the crumbled wall. He aimed his torch in the direction he thought the noise was coming from and switched it on for a second. In the brief flare of light he saw two white faces turn and look up from a trench-sap dug deep under the base of the tomb. He saw a man with a black moustache and a very fair young boy’s face and the turning spindle of a roll of telephone wire being unwound – squeaking quietly.
He switched off the torch, pulled the pin out of the bomb and tossed it into the sap. Clatter. Oaths. He did the same with the second and, in a running crouch, scrambled off in what he thought was the direction of the elms.
After what seemed an eternity he heard the bombs detonate – seconds apart – the flat blap! blap! of the explosions in the confined space below the tomb. Somebody started to scream.
Lysander dropped to his knees. The screaming continued, ragged and high-pitched. Almost immediately random gunfire began to come from both lines of trenches – sentries shocked awake by the bombs going off. Rockets curved up into the night sky – green, red, white. Suddenly he was in a world of glaring primary colours. Then came the whistle and thud of rifle grenades. A machine gun began to traverse. Lysander was now crawling on his belly, not daring to look up. He reckoned he must be sixty or seventy yards south of the ruin. Where were the fucking elms? Then he heard, in a moment’s silence, the anguished shout of, ‘Foley? Foley! Where are you?’ A powerful white light from a rocket showed him he was past the elms. He had gone further than he thought – now he needed to change course to find the willows and the drainage ditch. He huddled in a ball and shone his torch on his compass. He was heading straight for the German lines – east – he should be going south. He turned through ninety degrees and set off again. There was a cacophony of shooting coming from behind him and now he could hear the bass crump of big mortars being fired. His little diversion had got somewhat out of hand – he hoped Foley and Gorlice-Law had made it back safely.
He fell into the drainage ditch and thoroughly soaked himself from the four inches of water in the bottom. He squatted and leaned back against the bank, allowing his breathing to calm. A few more rockets were going up but the shooting seemed to be dying down. False alarm. Nothing of consequence. Just a scare.
He took out his map again, hooded his torch with his cupped hand and tried to see where he was. If this ditch was the one Foley had described then he had only to follow it a hundred yards or so before it began to angle right and bring him up to the French wire. Then all he needed to look out for were the green rockets from the French lines that would tell him where to come in. Assuming all was going to Munro’s plan . . . He looked at his watch. 3.30. It would begin to grow light in an hour or so – time to make a move.
He sloshed his way along the ditch and, sure enough, it did begin to bear right but then it seemed to come to an abrupt halt in the face of some ancient culvert. Lysander peered into the blackness. In theory, the front-line wire of the French Tenth Army should be facing him. But no sign of any of the green rockets that Munro had promised. Every ten minutes one would go up, he had said. Surely they would have heard the noise and the fuss caused by his bombs going off?
He thought then about the two bombs he had thrown into the sap below the tomb. He saw in his mind’s eye the snapshot of the two faces looking up at him – the man with the moustache and the fair boy – utterly shocked, astonished. Two signallers laying a telephone wire, setting up the listening post again, he assumed. He also had to assume that his bombs had killed or seriously wounded them both. There had been that screaming. Anguished, feral. The panic in the dark as the Mills bombs clattered off the stone. Fingers groping, searching, swearing frantically, then – BOOM! . . .
He felt himself start to shiver and he hugged his knees to his chest – no point in thinking about that, of what had happened to those two signallers. How was he to know that they would be there? No, he decided, the best course of action was to stay put and wait until sunrise. Then he might know what to do next.
It was rather eerie and beautiful to watch the sky begin to lighten behind the German lines and as the dawn advanced he was able to make out the key features of the landscape – there were the three elms to his right and in front of him the dark cross-hatchings of the French wire. The culvert mouth was a crude stone arch and rushes were growing thickly around it, drawing on the extra moisture the drainage ditch provided. A breeze sprang up and he began to smell the smoke drifting across no man’s land as braziers were lit in the trenches. He felt hungry – some crispy rashers of bacon and a hunk of bread dripping with hot fat would do nicely, thank you.
Very carefully he parted the rushes above the culvert and saw the dense wire of the French lines about twenty yards away. Very thick and professionally laid, he thought. He couldn’t squirm through that. He saw a grey column of smoke rise from the trenches beyond, snatched at by the breeze, but no sign of a breastwork of sandbags or a sentry’s loophole.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted.
‘Allo! Allo! Je suis officier anglais!’
After about five seconds he shouted ‘Allo!’ again and was answered by the crack of a rifle shot.
‘Je suis un officier anglais! Je ne suis pas allemand!’
More shots followed but none came near him. Then he heard a shout from the French lines.
‘Tu pense que nous sommes crétins, Monsieur Boche? Vas te faire enculer!’
Lysander felt a moment of helplessness. Maybe talking in French was wrong.
‘I’m English!’ he shouted. ‘English officer. I’m lost! Perdu!’
There were some more haphazard rifle shots. He looked over his shoulder at the German lines, hoping the Germans wouldn’t be provoked into shooting back, or else he’d find himself in a cross-fire.
‘Parlez-vous anglais?’ he shouted again. ‘I’m an English officer! I am lost!’
There was more swearing at him – colourful expressions he didn’t know or vaguely understood to do with various sexual acts involving animals and close members of his family.
He sat back in some despair. What should he do? He thought he might have to wait until night fell and make his way back to the Manchesters. Then it would be just his filthy luck to be shot by a nervous sentry, jumpy after last night’s exchange. But assuming he made it back how would he explain himself – the whole Geneva operation might be put at risk? Stupid fucking plan, he thought, anyway. Why did he have to disappear, ‘missing in action’? Why not simply go to Geneva as Abelard Schwimmer?
‘Officier anglais?’ The shout came from the French lines. Then, ‘Are you there?’ in English.
‘Yes, I’m here! In the ditch! Le fossé!’
‘Move to your left. When you are seeing . . .’ The voice stopped.
‘Seeing what?’
‘Un poteau rouge!’
‘A red
post! Je comprends!’
‘That is the entry to come through the . . . Ah, notre barbelé.’
‘I’m coming! Don’t shoot! Ne tirez pas!’
‘Coming ver’ slow!’
Lysander hauled himself out of the drainage ditch and began to crawl to his left, staying as flat as he could, suddenly feeling very exposed. He squirmed and wriggled along for a minute or so until he saw a red post hammered in by a gap in the maze of wire. He changed course and crawled towards it – now he could see it marked a zigzag path through the labyrinth.
‘Je suis là!’ he shouted.
He crawled slowly into the wire entanglement and saw the sandbagged breastwork up ahead.
‘I’m coming!’ he shouted, suddenly completely terrified, convinced he was being lured close just to be picked off. He held his cap up, his khaki English army cap, and waved it above his head. Strong arms reached for him as he gained the sandbags and hauled him over, lowering him gently to the bottom of the trench.
He lay there on the ground for a moment, his breath coming back, looking up at giants standing over him – bearded filthy men in dirty blue uniforms, all of them smoking pipes, bizarrely. They stared back at him, curious.
‘C’est sûr,’ one of them said. ‘Un véritable officier anglais.’
He was sitting in a dugout in the support lines, an enamel mug of black unsweetened coffee in his hand, experiencing a level of exhaustion that he’d never encountered before. It was all he could do to raise the mug to his lips, like lifting a heavy boulder or lead cannonball. He put the mug down and closed his eyes. Sleep. Sleep for a week. He had handed the sealed letter from his pack to the officer whose dugout this was – where the bearded blue giants had led him. Cigarette, that’s what he needed. He patted his pockets – then remembered he’d left them behind in Dodd’s dugout. Dugout Dodd. Wiley and Gorlice-Law. Was that Gorlice-Law’s shout for Foley? He just hoped that all –
‘There he is. Our bad penny.’
He looked round, blinking. Fyfe-Miller stood there in the doorway. Smart in a jacket with leather cross-belting, jodhpurs and highly-polished riding boots. The French officer stood behind him.