“No,” Jane said, snatching at the only thing she could think of. “He’s considered reserve personnel, and doing home service.”
“Oh, that’s quite impressive, especially for someone so young. May I ask in what area?”
“That, I am not at liberty to divulge.” In for a penny . . .
Maude nodded, though Jane could not tell if she had actually made the sale or not. Maude looked as if she were still mulling it over, and if for no other reason than to get her off the track, Jane said, “I won’t need to sleep on it, after all. You’re right, Maude. I accept your offer.”
“To be deputy watch commander?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, then, all’s right with the world and God’s in his heaven.”
“I’m not sure I’d go that far.”
Reaching into the pocket of her cloth coat, Maude removed a creased pamphlet and said, “The duties are all outlined here.” She laid it on the mantelpiece, next to the Norwegian books. “If you have any other questions, you have only to ask.”
“Yes, thanks, I will,” Jane said, all the while shepherding her toward the door. “And thank you for stopping in.”
Outside, Mr. Slattery was just stubbing out the end of his cigar on the gravel.
“And I do hope your sister is well again soon,” Jane said, wearing the closest facsimile to a smile that she could muster.
Maude fluttered a wave over her shoulder before getting into the back seat, and Jane remained at her post until she was quite sure that the car had gone. Once she had closed the door, she put her forehead against the heavy oak frame and breathed a sigh of relief. Deputy watch commander, she thought. H. G. would have a laugh at that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
So deep underground, time passed unnoticed, or not at all. Wells could consult his pocket watch—the crystal had cracked, but miraculously the hands still turned—without knowing if it was noon or midnight. Everything seemed to proceed in a murky, jaundiced light, as thin as the fetid air. When he’d asked how they managed to get any oxygen down so far at all, Tommy had pointed out a ventilation shaft, with a hanging leather flap. “Got a bellows system up top, and when it’s safe and there’s no gas about, we use the blower. The flap’s for when it’s not.”
“Is it safe now?” Wells asked, and Tommy shook his head.
“Bombardment going on. Put your head up above ground and you’ll get it handed to you in a basket.”
“Who’s doing the bombing?”
“Does it matter?”
“How long will it last?” He could hardly hope to wait out the war here, drinking from brackish canteens and eating from salvaged ration tins.
“Long as it takes to kill every living thing.”
Tommy had been right about one thing, though—the French tins were better. Easily spotted by their white Chevalier-Appert labels, he had just finished a cassoulet pur porc and haricots blancs à la tomate. Hardly the Ritz, but perfectly edible.
Most of his time underground, Wells had spent working on his dispatches, wondering if they would ever see the light of day, much less print. Gradually, he had become aware of the extent of his surroundings. Nappy had crawled through what he had imagined to be merely a funk hole but was in fact another very narrow tunnel, before returning with, oddly enough, a ragged teddy bear. He had swapped a surplus German gas mask for it, with someone no doubt inhabiting a subterranean cavern similar to this one. Pressing his ear to the clay walls, Wells could occasionally hear voices, subdued, and movements, muffled. It was an entire world of moles, burrowed into the earth, and communicating through air shafts and drilled holes and tortuous, abandoned passageways. A world of ghouls—men who, as Tommy had explained on Wells’s arrival there, had no need of proper names as they were “dead men, anyway.”
It had taken Wells some time to fully appreciate the truth of that sentiment. Deserters from their various armies, they all faced the same fate—summary execution, if discovered and captured. Already reported as missing in combat and presumed dead, their names included on some newspaper roster in Munich or Marseille or Bristol, their families notified, their earthly possessions dispersed, they could never return to their former lives, any more than they could hope to escape the battle zone, which stretched for miles in every direction.
This war, Wells noted in his journal, was different from any other in so many ways—not only in its unfathomable casualties and barbaric weaponry, but also in its sheer geographical scope. A soldier at the Battle of Agincourt could, if weary or wounded or simply faint of heart, have traipsed into some neighboring forest, or over some empty green hill, and have laid himself down beneath a towering oak. A soldier in Wellington’s army at Waterloo could have at least caught a breath by lying flat among the dead, without being pulverized from above by unceasing shellfire, or smothered in a creeping ground fog of mustard gas. For soldiers in this war, however, there was no recourse. You either obeyed your orders to go over the top and into a withering fusillade of machine gun fire, from which you would be lucky to escape with only a serious maiming, or you could cut and run—but where? The lines stretched through entire countries, and went just as deep in every direction, and if you weren’t brought down by an enemy sniper, you were caught by your own comrades and court-martialed for your cowardice.
“Three platoons,” Tommy confided to Wells, his identity disc carefully tucked away under his collar. “Three platoons and every time I was the last one left. By the fourth, I was a bad luck charm and lucky not to get shot, accidental-like, by one of our own. I spent two nights lying in a foxhole in no man’s land, with a dozen rotting corpses—half ours, half theirs—before I found, at the bottom of the sinkhole, the way down here.”
“How long ago?”
“What month is it now?”
“February.”
“Three months, then.”
Wells made note of the story, and of others. Gradually, word had spread through the underground network of his presence there, and like penitents coming to confession, men who could no longer seek expiation above ground came to him to unburden themselves. Their stories were all unique, and all the same. One Belgian soldier was blind from a chlorine attack, a Frenchman had refused a command to stand up and walk directly into the enemy line of fire, a Canadian volunteer had enlisted with two boyhood friends who had been blown to pieces in front of his eyes and when ordered to somehow reassemble their bodies for burial, had punched the officer in the face. A capital offense.
Wells did his best to record the stories, to pass no judgment, to offer no cheap absolution—who was he to offer anything but an ear?—but he could no longer think of these wretched creatures as ghouls. Not even as deserters and shirkers. In the face of unthinkable evil, they had made an unthinkable choice. Asked to commit themselves to a ritual death, for a few yards of mud, they had rebelled. Were they madmen, or were they, quite to the contrary, the sanest of them all?
He knew where Major Friedrich Von Baden stood on the issue, though his story, as it turned out, was even more complex than the others. After his declaration that Wells had been heaven-sent to save England, Friedrich had retired to his makeshift bunk and dug out a notebook of his own. He had been reluctant to share it except when everyone else was asleep, absent, or paying no attention. And at first, Wells thought the man might have become delusional. He claimed to be the scion of an ancient Prussian family “of the royal blood, descended from Frederick Barbarossa,” and that as a result he had been privy to councils in the kaiser’s chambers in the Charlottenburg Palace in Lietzenburg. “Only two years ago, I was one of the honored guests at the marriage of his daughter, Victoria Louise. There I met both the czar and your own Prince of Wales.”
Exaggerated as his claim might be, Wells knew it could conceivably have happened—the royal families of Europe and Russia were all intimately intertwined, the bloodlines of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha coursing through the veins of monarchs who, instead of acting as loving cousins, were presently pursuing paths of m
utual annihilation.
Among his many accomplishments were saber duels—he bore the requisite scar on one cheek—steeplechases, and Alpine mountaineering. But in his youth, he had declined a career in the military—the standard occupation for Prussian nobility—to study medicine at the renowned Guy’s Hospital in the borough of Southwark. “And that is the reason I was—what is the word?”
“Recruited?”
“Yes, that is it. Recruited for the job, the very secret job in London. I could speak English, and I knew my way in the city. A year or two before this war was declared, I was called back to Germany. To be trained.”
“In what?”
“Extermination.”
And there the story first began to take on a shape that chilled Wells to the bone, especially because he could see, as Friedrich continued, its genesis in his own published works—works that Friedrich had enjoyed in his youth, that thousands of German readers had read in translation. Books that explored fantastical scientific ideas, carried to their extremes, and tales of future warfare waged with unconventional weapons.
“You are familiar with the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences?” Friedrich asked.
“Yes. I have—or, had—several friends there.”
“Ah, and you are much respected there. Not just for your stories, but for your articles about the topics of biology. They have helped to formulate many ideas, ideas that I fear are now to be used in this war. But did you perhaps ever know Dr. Koch?”
Though Wells had never actually met the man, who had died several years before, he knew him by reputation—Robert Koch had been the world’s most eminent bacteriologist, winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on tuberculosis, and after whom the Koch Institute of Infectious Diseases had been named. It was Koch who had revolutionized microbiology by inventing methods for creating and harvesting pathogenic bacteria, free from other organisms, in pure culture. “Koch’s postulates,” as they had come to be known, laid out the conditions that had to be met before any particular bacterium could be accepted as the cause of a specific disease. Wells had relied upon his findings in the creation of one of his own best-known scientific fiction stories, “The Stolen Bacillus.”
“I know of his work,” Wells replied, “but no, I never had the opportunity to meet him.”
“Dr. Friedrich Loeffler, then? Dr. Koch’s most able lieutenant, and successor, at the research institute?”
Wells racked his brain. He had attended several symposiums in Germany over the years, but Loeffler . . . Loeffler . . . it was only vaguely familiar. “Something to do with horses?”
“Ja, ja, that is the man. He was the man who discovered the virus of the hoof-and-mouth disease. He worked also on the deadly diseases of anthrax and glanders. His experiments, they were so dangerous that the institute said he could not do them in Berlin. What if it escaped the laboratories? He was sent to Reims.”
“Reims? France?”
“No, the small island of that name. In the Baltic. There, we had thousands of horses, all in neat and separate stalls—all very modern, very efficient—and we used them to make antitoxins. The experiments were not easy, and they took much time. But after we injected the horses with dead tetanus virus, for example, and then drew their blood, we were able to inoculate every German soldier against the disease.”
But where was all this going? Wells wondered. All he could say so far was that it did not bode well . . .
“I was among his assistants. And when Dr. Koch died, and Loeffler was called to Berlin to be in his place, I went with him.”
Even this far down in the earth, Wells felt a tremor in the dirt under his feet. Had a bomb landed just above? Or had an underground mine, packed with explosives, ignited? He saw Tommy look up from his magazine, watching the roof for a possible collapse, and when it didn’t come, go back to reading the tattered pages. Nappy was asleep, his head resting on the teddy bear like a pillow.
“But how is it that this information about a tetanus vaccination will help me to save my country?”
“Because the high command changed the work. Now they were not trying to save lives. They were using the research to find ways to kill—horses, mules, donkeys, cattle, all pack animals—by the millions.”
Wells was stunned, and Friedrich could see it.
“Your armies need these animals to drag artillery, ja? To deliver supplies? To be cavalry? To be food? Without them, an army cannot fight.”
“True enough.”
“When I knew that this was now the mission—no, I said.”
“You said no?”
“I am a German nobleman, and I am a doctor. I am not a barbarian. I do not kill horses, I do not kill civilians.”
“Thousands of them die here every day,” Wells scoffed.
“Never by my hand,” he said, shaking his head.
Wells waited. The story so far had been intriguing, to say the least.
“Take this,” he said, pressing the ragged notebook on him. It looked as if it might fall apart at any second. “I will not be party to crimes.”
Wells accepted it.
And then, removing a sealed letter from his pocket, he handed that over, too. “I do not want harm to come to this person.”
Wells saw that it was addressed to a Miss Emma Chasubel, Head Nurse, Communicable Diseases Ward, at Guy’s Hospital in London. “Please to deliver it for me.”
“What’s in it?”
Here, Friedrich hesitated. “There are . . . certain sentiments.”
“Ah, a love letter.”
“I was not able to say goodbye in a proper manner.”
So, now he was to act the part of the go-between in a war-torn romance?
“But it is more than a billet-doux. Miss Chasubel had a patient—this was just before the outbreak of the war—and he was delirious. His name I cannot remember—he lived in England, but was of German ancestry—and so she asked me to translate some of his ravings. He seemed to go back to German in his fever talk and in scraps of paper he wrote on.”
“What were these ravings about?”
“Horses. Churches. Saints. London.”
“A plot?”
“I do not know for certainty. But I think yes.”
“Was it connected, do you think, to anything in Dr. Loeffler’s lab?”
Friedrich shrugged. “Many others worked under him, and I did not recognize the name of this man. But once they knew of my resistance, I was . . . disposed.”
“Dismissed?”
“Yes—that is it—and sent to the Front. To be rid of. I believe that the generals had orders—quite plain—to make sure I did not come back alive. That is why I had to take refuge,” he said, surveying the dank underground pit, “here.”
There was suddenly another explosion, but this one was not from above—this one was smaller, but more concentrated, and seemed to emanate from their own underground level. It shook Nappy awake, and caused Tommy to drop the magazine flat. Even Friedrich shot to his feet, his eyes wide.
There were cries from the tunnels, as a green mist started to descend from the ventilation shaft like a jungle snake. Nappy leapt for the leather flaps to close it off, but his one good hand was fumbling and the flap wouldn’t fasten tight. Tommy snatched up a gas mask—the English variety, a canvas hood with thick mica goggles—and yanked it down over his head.
“Catch!” his muffled voice shouted, as he tossed another one to Wells. Friedrich had scrambled for his own mask—the German model, with elastic straps—from under his bunk.
Wells had just gotten his on when he heard a muted blast from behind and, turning, saw, through the blurred lenses, a new and gaping hole in the wall. Scrambling through it was a gangly British officer—good God, was that Lillyfield under the mask?—with an electric torch shining in one hand and a gun blazing in the other!
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The first shot from Captain Lillyfield’s pistol caught Nappy in the gut, sending him reeling back onto the pile of coats. The second
shot exploded the teddy bear he had clutched to his chest.
Through the filtered mouthpiece of his hood, Wells was shouting for the firing to stop. But by now a pair of British sappers, also hooded and blasting away with their bolt-action rifles, had clambered into the chamber. Wells ducked behind the table as a bullet slammed into a lantern behind him, ricocheting and sending sparks and shards of isinglass flying into the pale green air.
Tommy was the next to go, holding up his hands and wildly plucking at his sleeve to show the Northumberland badge of St. George, but it made no difference. One of the soldiers trained his barrel on him and fired a shot that punched a hole in the hood, and he collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
Friedrich had immediately dropped to the floor, and through the mist and shadows scurried out, on all fours, through the main tunnel. Wells would have tried the same, but he was suddenly tackled around the knees as if in a rugby scrum, and driven hard to the ground. The breath was knocked out of him, and trying to draw in another—heavily laced with the glycerin and sodium thiosulphate that coated the helmet as a protection against chlorine—was painful in itself. The chemicals scorched his throat. He struggled to say who he was, but the man bearing down on him, covering him with his own body and gripping him by the shoulders, suddenly became familiar. It was Sergeant Stubb! Wells stopped fighting, and lay still, trying simply to regulate his breath. Lillyfield and the sappers had followed Friedrich, and seconds later Wells heard a cry of “No, I am a friend, friend to English!” before a burst of shots broke out.
Only a pair of candles lit the room, but by their feeble glow Wells could dimly discern the search party returning. Stubb rolled off him, and shouted to the others, “It’s Wells! Wells!” and then hauled him, wobbling, to his feet.
The captain clapped Stubb on the shoulder, then directed the two sappers to finish their job. Wells saw them wedge delayed charges into the walls. A cloud of green gas swirled in the tunnel behind them, and then they were all stumbling back out the hole they had blown in the dugout. Only a few yards on, they connected to the passageway Wells had first been taken down. He recognized it from the remains of its timbers and wheelbarrow tracks . . . and from the bodies of McCarthy and two of the men who had been with him on that initial voyage. They lay like rugs splayed under his feet, though their limbs were stiff and strangely contorted. This, it crossed Wells’s mind, was the only grave they would ever know.
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 13