by F. G. Cottam
‘Can I take it Waltrow and Tench were members?’
‘To Harry Spalding, they would have been Second Lieutenant Waltrow and Corporal Tench. And they were in it, alright, Martin. They were in it to the bitter end.’
Five
She had been anything but reassured by the visit to the boatyard at Lepe. She had been concerned on the way there about how I would react to setting foot once more on the Dark Echo. And when we arrived and were greeted, she had thought there was something entirely bogus about Peitersen. It was as though, she said, on the other side of the lobster pot and saltbox Yankee charm, there was nothing really there. His smile, she said, was like a sign saying ‘vacant’ in a brightly lit motel window. Despite my impression of how they got on, she had disliked him even more violently than I had. But she did not just dislike him on sight. She distrusted Peitersen, too.
In the aftermath of the Lepe trip, she felt an obligation to learn as much as she could about the mystery of the boat to which my father and myself seemed so determined to entrust our lives. Despite her detective skills, which were sharp and well practised, she said that she felt a certain hopelessness in doing so. She said it seemed it was unlikely to matter what she discovered. The scheme had already gained too much momentum for her to be able to arrest events now. The whole ill-advised, dangerous adventure had about it the pre-ordained nature of fate. She also had grave doubts about deceiving me. The Collins work was done and dusted. But I did not know that, did I? She was able to persuade herself with the reasoning that if she found nothing, I need never know about France and the deception. But if she did find something, it might help prevent my father and me sailing into some horrible tragedy. There were all sorts of flaws and contradictions in her logic, Suzanne knew. But after her encounter at the Lepe yard with Peitersen, she felt that she had to act.
She learned about the war service of Waltrow and Tench first from their obituaries and then in more detail from American military records she was able to bring up on computer, using BBC access, still claiming she was looking for information to do with her Michael Collins programme research. Her pretext was the IRA’s purchase on the black market of surplus American rifles after the 1918 armistice. It was a trade that increased steadily throughout the Irish Civil War. Nobody questioned this supposed line of enquiry. It sounded plausible enough. Searches in the American military archive for Waltrow, Tench and Spalding brought up some details about the Jericho Crew and the tantalising information that almost ninety years after it had been compiled, the file describing in full their activities in France and Flanders was still classified.
‘I learned they had a base,’ she told me. ‘It wasn’t an official base, a barracks or anything like that. It was a barn belonging to a farm about five miles to the rear of the Allied trench system near the village of Béthune in northern France. The land is still agricultural. The original farm still exists. They would gather in this building. If any of them became detached from the main party on a mission, or were left behind or lost, that’s the spot they would head for as soon as they could. Water, tinned provisions, fuel and spare clothing, and even weapons and ammunition were kept there.’
‘I’m amazed the stuff wasn’t all lifted by Allied units passing the barn. Even if they’d had a guard on it, the rations in particular must have been a temptation. Soldiers in wartime are not noted for their honesty over that sort of thing. Pilfering was rife on the Western Front, even among members of the same company, never mind the same battalion.’
‘I don’t think the Jericho Crew were the sort of people you stole from,’ she said. ‘Soldiers may not be terribly honest. But they are extremely superstitious.’
‘And you thought the barn might still be there?’
‘I thought there was a fair chance. This is rural France we’re talking about. Space is not at any great premium there, the way it is in England. There’s no urgent requirement for intensive farming. And farmers don’t knock any building down without a very good reason for doing so. They tend to be a conservative breed. They don’t seek out change for its own sake. I thought there was probably a fair chance the barn was still basically intact. And then I was able to identify it in an aerial photograph. I did that, like I did the preliminary research into Second Lieutenant Waltrow and Corporal Tench, without getting up from my chair in front of the computer at work.’
‘What did you find in the barn?’
‘I will get to that. First I should tell you about what it was the Jericho Crew did.’
I fetched us fresh drinks from the bar. I was tired after the trip from Antwerp. I was tired and grubby and the docking of the Andromeda in the grip of my hands that same morning seemed like a memory growing fond with distance already. Billy Paul’s adulterous pleading had been replaced through the bookshelf speakers behind the bar by Marvin Gaye, crooning plaintively about the good dying young. Sometimes the bad died young, too, I thought, fishing for change and examining my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. I thought of my father’s photograph of the Jericho Crew, of the look of shared derangement in their lost, youthful faces. I shivered, though it was not cold in the pub. I paid for and picked up our drinks and returned to where Suzanne sat. And she started to explain matters to me.
The Canadians invented the trench raid. They had a vigour and an obstreperousness that probably came from the outdoor lives they lived at home. They were not the factory fodder of industrialised England, used to manning a lathe slavishly in a factory in Birmingham or Leeds for a twelve-hour shift six days a week. They were outdoorsmen and the stalemate of the line forced them into ways of finding physical action to alleviate the tedium. So they invented the trench raid, carried out at night, to boost their morale and satisfy their youthful appetite for killing the enemy.
The weapons used were improvised, medieval almost in their design and the crude viciousness of their intent. They had to be silent. So they were basically variations on the knife and the club and the knuckleduster. They used machetes, daggers, bowie knives. The garrotte was a firm favourite, too, in the art of noiseless killing, but it required a degree of skill that came only from experience in the field. And it took a lot of commitment to choke a man to death.
The raids were daring and successful. They raised morale and did physical damage, and they added greatly to the burden of fear and fatigue faced by the men occupying the enemy trenches. They made sleep a liability. They made relaxation foolhardy. They spread stress and rumour and panic. They were the cause of men shooting at their own sentries and scout patrols. Altogether, trench raids were a big success, so much so that they were taken up by the Aussies and the New Zealanders and the Jocks. Eventually, even the English cottoned on to what an effective and economical tactic they represented.
By the time the Americans entered into the war, the trench raid was an established part of life at the front. And the farm boys from Kentucky and the boys from the swamps of Louisiana took to it like pigs to gravy. One junior officer in particular showed a real thirst for this bloody, guerrilla style of conflict. Interestingly, this fellow was not from the boonies. His name was Harry Spalding. He’d excelled both as a sportsman and a scholar at Yale. His people came from Rhode Island and he had been groomed for a banking career in New York. He was rich and clever and cultured, a lover of modern painting and poetry with a good command of the French and German languages. He had influential friends, or at least his father did. He had an easy charisma that made him a natural leader among the particular group of men chosen for the type of combat at which he proved to be so adept. And he was the bloodiest, most remorseless killer anyone on the staff of the American Third Army could remember ever having encountered.
One old colonel compared him to the Apache killers of the Indian Wars in which his own father had fought in the American West. But he came to believe that Harry Spalding was different from them, in the end. They had been skilled at killing. They were great hunters using their hunting prowess in the service of their own survival, faced wi
th the threat of extinction. Spalding seemed to possess the same preternatural gift for tracking his prey. He had the same lethal savagery in combat. But it was not a matter of survival for him. The old colonel, who was forcibly retired on the basis of it, said in a report on the Jericho Crew that Spalding seemed to kill with a sort of glee. He was a man who revelled in killing. In a conflict where civilisation was at stake, the report concluded, to rely on such men for important results was more than a contradiction. It was an abject surrender to the standards and values espoused by our enemy, the Hun.
The Canucks invented the trench raid. The Americans refined it. And the Jericho Crew turned it from an art into a science. They did detailed surveillance work during their night patrols across no-man’s-land. They carried out assassinations. They snatched intelligence personnel and interrogated them. They conducted acts of sabotage. They stole battle plans and brought back items of experimental ordnance for detailed examination. And they never lost a man.
‘Come on,’ I said, in the pub, as the bell tolled for last orders. ‘They never lost a man? You’re exaggerating, Suzy.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You had better explain.’
‘At home. I’ll explain at home. I’d kill at this moment, Martin, for a cigarette.’
‘Now you are exaggerating.’
‘Not by much, I’m not,’ she said.
It was true to say that the Jericho Crew never lost a man in combat. But they did suffer one casualty. The bloody nature of their work meant that their number, which was fourteen, included a chaplain. He was a Baptist minister. His name was Derry Conway and he was a staunch patriot, an old-fashioned follower of what, a generation earlier, had been termed muscular Christianity. He had been an outstanding athlete at his college and his faith in God was thought unshakeable.
Conway was assigned because of the bloody and incessant nature of the missions charged to the Jericho Crew. By late 1917, quite a lot had been learned about shell shock and battle fatigue, the psychological problems nowadays referred to as combat trauma. If men were to survive these experiences mentally as well as physically intact, they needed spiritual succour. That, at least, was the theory. It was the Reverend Conway’s role to provide this for Harry Spalding and his men.
But a month after being given the assignment, Conway was found hanged from a rope in the Béthune barn. His neck was cleanly broken. He had clambered on to a rafter with one end of the rope tied to it and the other forming a noose around his neck and he had jumped. There was a prayer book still clutched in his hand when he was found. Presumably he had taken it for comfort from a coat pocket before jumping. And despite the crude angle to which the fracture had forced his head, there was a smile on the face of Derry Conway’s young corpse.
The death of their chaplain left the Jericho Crew with thirteen members. And none of them was killed or wounded by the war they fought with such bloody distinction. But Suzanne managed to find out what had happened to eleven of them after the armistice. And she discovered that the members of the crew had not been so very fortunate in their efforts to survive the peace. All of the thirteen were dead before their fortieth birthdays. Gubby Tench had enjoyed the longest life of any of them. Though she felt that where Gubby Tench was concerned, enjoyed was probably an incompatible word applied to life. At least at the end of his life, Tench had seemed to be living in a sort of hell.
She took the train to Dover and the ferry to Calais. As she approached the coast of France, the fine April weather England was enjoying ended as the ferry was enveloped in a grey and persistent rain, washing from an overcast sky. By the time she got to Calais itself, the rain was heavy and unremitting. She hired a car and studied her map. She had managed to contact the farmer whose family had owned for generations the land on which the barn still stood. He had not sounded overjoyed on the telephone about her proposed visit. But neither had he forbidden it. Suzanne spoke some French, but the farmer was content to communicate in rudimentary English.
‘Tuesday,’ he had said.
She tried to establish a time.
‘Tuesday,’ he repeated, sounding amused at this insistence on such precision. ‘I will be here. Where else would I go?’
She tried to describe herself.
‘I will know you,’ he said. ‘Do not worry, madame. This is not an English farm. You are not a candidate for my shotgun.’ He laughed. She thought the joke a poor one.
The French countryside was flat and bleak and rain-defeated. The drive across it was monotonous. In an effort to distract herself from wanting to smoke, she switched on the car radio and tried to tune it. It was Suzanne’s opinion that French pop music usually consisted of several competing tunes hammered out in parallel by lots and lots of fundamentally incompatible instruments. And the French language did not lend itself easily to pop lyrics. None of the words scanned in the convenient way English did. So she searched for a classical music station. But she stopped pushing the tuning button as soon as she heard something familiar and vaguely welcome to her ears that wasn’t French.
It was the Prefab Sprout ballad ‘When Love Breaks Down’ sung plaintively by the failed priest. What had Martin said his name was? She knew it because it was a track from one of the wistful, whimsical albums Martin liked to listen to on the expensive audio equipment in the flat, equipment which he had bought and about which he could be so precious. She’d get the singer’s name in a minute. Nothing stayed on the tip of her tongue for very long. It was one of her talents. She had an excellent memory for detail.
Just then, at that moment in her life, she felt her talents both taken for granted and somewhat abused. She had lost her staff job through a round of BBC cuts, which she felt had left all of the fat in her old department intact while removing most of the muscle. She had been offered the choice of a severance package or a freelance contract and had opted for the latter. But there was something subtly degrading, she felt, about her freelance status. Programme editors and producers treated her differently now that she no longer had the protection of the BBC as an employer. There was more rudeness. There was more pressure. There were shorter deadlines. And programme makers who found it an effort to fight their own sexism or inclination to bully stopped doing so in their encounters with her.
The Collins documentary series was a case in point. It was being billed as definitive and, over three forty-minute episodes, she was confident it would be. But the producer had wanted the Big Revelation. That was how he put it, in his memos to the department, in his capitals. And the Big Revelation he wanted was that Michael Collins was homosexual. His reasoning for this, laughable to Suzanne, was Collins’ notorious fondness for wrestling colleagues and friends and his vanity over his appearance. She still had not decided whether the theory was a bigger insult to Collins or to the gay movement. But she had failed to find a single shred of evidence, physical, anecdotal or otherwise, to support it. And that was being interpreted as her failure, because the producer had a gut feeling about this and knew he could not be wrong. No matter that she had come up with hard facts about Michael Collins that the series would air for the first time. The atmosphere in the edit suite was poisonous. Three weeks before the transmission date, the sense of disappointment was almost palpable. Suzanne had done a brilliant job, she felt, that was being judged as somewhere between superficial and inept. And, as a freelance, she could ill afford a reputation for ineptitude.
‘Paddy McAloon,’ she said out loud at the wheel, remembering the name of the priestly novice turned rock star, startling herself, because the song was still playing and that couldn’t be possible, could it? Unless there was a version of ‘When Love Breaks Down’ that played for ten minutes. That was unless, of course, the station was just playing the same song over and over.
She turned off the radio, glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that there was nothing else on the road. She brought the car to a halt with two wheels on the grass on the roadside and lowered the window and then switched the engine off. The wi
pers stopped and the windscreen blurred and blinded with rain. She could hear rain patter on the roof and the grass outside the open car window. Essentially, it was a reassuring sound, rhythmic and familiar. But it did not offer reassurance now. She felt alone and vulnerable in a raw way, at odds with the smudged landscape and soft, rainy light. She would smoke a cigarette, she decided. It was almost noon and it would be her first of the day. She reached across to the passenger seat, where she had put her bag. It was a myth, of course, that tobacco calmed you and helped you to relax. But it was a myth she felt she very much needed just at that moment to believe in and take comfort from.
At just after one o’clock, she reached the track leading to the farm, two deep grooves in thin gravel and the black soil underneath it, determined by years and decades of heavy tractor wheels. There was a hedge to either side of the track, high and impenetrable. It was so gloomy that she was obliged to switch on her lights. And the track was longer than she thought, so long that she wondered if she had taken the wrong turning. But there was no going back once she had started, because the way was too narrow. And when the hedge petered out she recognised the pattern of low, old farm buildings beyond from the aerial photos she had studied on her computer screen.
The barn was not among them. That was a solitary building a half-mile across fields from the farmyard, the fields divided by a ditch lined by poplars. You reached the barn by following the ditch. You did it in a tractor or a four-wheel drive over the rough, rain-soaked earth. Or you walked there. You walked across the fields of northern France to your destination. From somewhere not far away, Suzanne could hear the persistent bark of what sounded like a large dog. The bark did not bother her. Farm dogs were territorial, but they were not generally vicious. A vicious dog on a farm took too heavy a toll on the livestock and she knew that the farmer, Pierre Duval, kept geese and chickens and bred lambs here.