One Man's Flag

by David Downing

  He sat there gripping the Webley, dreading the sound of feet on the steps. The thought crossed his mind that this was what it must be like in the trenches, waiting to launch or repel an attack, fearing that this might be the end. How could they stand it? What else could they do?

  Hearing a sound on the steps, he raised the Webley and aimed it at the opening. Someone was coming up.

  And then relief spread through his body. Those weren’t soldiers’ boots on the stairs.

  “Maman says to tell you they’re gone,” Philippe said nonchalantly after sticking his head through into the space.

  He was gone in an instant, whistling his way downstairs. McColl wondered if the boy had any notion how close he’d come to being an orphan.

  Two Oaks

  On January 27, 1916, the British government announced that it was introducing conscription. The Military Service Act stated that all single men between the ages of nineteen and forty-one, and all of a similar age who had married since the previous November, would be liable for military service from this coming March. No reason was given that this should be necessary, but then none was really needed—the army was hemorrhaging men, and the supply of volunteers had dried up. As Caitlin noted sadly in the piece she wrote home, three million had not been enough.

  Ireland remained exempt, though nobody knew for how long.

  Visiting Sylvia Pankhurst in the East End, Caitlin found her busy with antiwar work. Sylvia still received many letters from soldiers at the front and, despite a barrage of government threats, continued publishing them in The Women’s Dreadnought. An increasing number concerned the executions of soldiers accused, often on the flimsiest evidence, of desertion or cowardice under fire. And this was an army, Sylvia said bitterly, that men had no choice but to join!

  It was two days later that Caitlin came home to a letter from Maeve. The envelope showed signs of having been opened, which wasn’t promising, but the letter was still inside and apparently unmarked. The interceptor had probably been bored by the latest goings-on among Irish women auxiliaries and either missed or misunderstood Maeve’s report of the “mystery surrounding our friend Jimmy,” which was now “the talk of the town.” Since they had no Jimmy in common, Caitlin could only assume that Maeve was referring to James Connolly, and any mystery surrounding him seemed likely to be newsworthy. She spent the rest of the evening finishing a piece on military executions and wired it off next morning en route to Euston station.

  In Dublin, Maeve was only too happy to tell all she knew. Around ten days earlier, James Connolly had vanished from his usual haunts without a word, only to reappear three days later without any explanation. Or, more precisely, without one that made any sense. When Connolly had still been missing, some had suggested he might have been kidnapped, but no one believed that now—the thought of the ICA leader receiving such treatment and uttering no complaint was simply inconceivable. Connolly reportedly told one colleague that he’d been on a walking tour, something he always “liked to do in the spring.” This might have been believable in March, but not in midwinter, and Connolly apparently realized as much—asked again where he’d been, he’d replied that “that would be telling.”

  The day before Caitlin’s arrival, Maeve had heard a new explanation. A male acquaintance at Liberty Hall had overheard a conversation between two of Connolly’s aides. According to his account, one of the aides, worried by his chief’s disappearance and sharing the fear that he’d been kidnapped, had gone to ask the rival Volunteers what they knew of Connolly’s whereabouts. The Volunteer leaders had pleaded ignorance and suggested, very unconvincingly, that perhaps the English had him. Now certain that the Volunteers had kidnapped his chief, the aide had given them two days to set Connolly free or face the wrath of the Citizen Army.

  “And two days later, there he was,” Maeve concluded.

  It was a mystery, and Connolly himself showed no inclination to solve it. Caitlin spent the next three days asking all the journalistic and republican contacts she had if they could help her unravel the story, but if any were able, none were willing. She didn’t doubt that he’d been with the Volunteers, and probably of his own free will. But why and what for? The two organizations had spent a lot of energy sniping at each other over the last year, but it wouldn’t have taken three days to iron out their differences. There had to be something more. Some sort of military alliance, perhaps. They might even have been setting a date.

  She had planned to take the ferry back to Holyhead, but it wasn’t running on the day she wanted, so she took the Liverpool boat instead. This arrived late, forcing her to take a hotel room for the night, and she was just getting ready for bed when shouting outside brought her to the window. On the street below, people were pointing up at the sky. Craning her head out, she saw nothing but stars—and then the word “Zeppelin” reached her ears.

  After hurriedly throwing some clothes back on, she reached the street in time to see two black shapes gliding across the star-filled sky. Sausages with tail fins, someone had called them, but they looked more like whales to Caitlin. Killer whales.

  As she watched, light flashed above the roofs to her right, swiftly followed by the boom of an explosion. And then another, and another. Within seconds bells were clanging on nearby streets and orange flames were licking up. Caitlin hurried down the street in their direction, keeping an eye on the dark shapes above, which were heading out across the Mersey.

  The first bomb had destroyed two houses and probably killed all their occupants—as Caitlin arrived, a small body draped in a sheet was being stretchered out of the wreckage. With the emergency services already there in force, there was nothing she could do but watch and mentally write her report.

  This was the future, she thought. Murder from above, indiscriminate and unforgivable.

  Two days later, walking down a street in Stepney, she saw a poster on a police station’s wall. The illustration was of a floodlit Zeppelin hanging above a darkened London; the words were intended to frighten. it is far better to face the bullets than to be killed at home by a bomb, a government propagandist had written. join the army at once and help to stop an air raid. god save the king.

  Lie upon lie, she thought. The whole war was a lie. And if by some strange chance a God existed, Caitlin hoped she had better things to do than save the King of England.

  By the end of January, McColl was walking without crutches. His leg sometimes hurt like hell, but the doctor was certain that the bone had knitted and foresaw no lasting complications. Once he could get himself up and down the hidden staircase with relative ease, he was able to spend more of his off-duty time in the rooms downstairs, and one cold evening in mid-February he went for his first walk outside. His eagerness almost cost him dear, when his other foot slipped on an icy patch and tipped him over, but this time the luck was with him and no new damage was done. He just lay there for several seconds, looking up at the heavens, lamenting his own stupidity.

  About two weeks later, Mathilde came by with a message from London. The train-watching networks had been reconstructed without him, but the other job he’d been given three months earlier—that of checking out bridges between Namur and Liège—still needed doing. And assuming he was well enough, Cumming would like him to get on with it.

  Mathilde was already preparing the ground. New papers were being forged, she told him. And he would be moving again, to Namur. There was a family there that owned a garage and could use a new mechanic to help the son and his ailing father. “You have some experience in this line of work?”

  “Some.”

  “Well, you are the owner’s nephew. You used to live in Louvain—you know what happened there?”

  “The Germans burned down the famous library, along with half the town.”

  “Including the records office,” Mathilde said. “So it’s hard for them to prove that someone didn’t live there.”

  “All right,”
McColl said.

  “And the other important thing,” she was saying, “is that the Germans are short of mechanics. They have called this man and his son out on several occasions, to check their vehicles in different camps. Which is why the owner has been given permission to bring you from Louvain and why you will have a pass that allows you to travel between there and Namur on the weekends.”

  “That sounds perfect,” McColl agreed. The idea of visiting a German military base to fix up a Kraftwagenmotor or two had a certain perverse appeal.

  “Not quite,” she demurred. “It will allow you to take the train down the valley, but if you’re caught getting off, you’ll still need a good reason. And if they catch you drawing bridges, they won’t even bother to ask for one.”

  A week later she was back with papers for Jacques Crasson, mechanic. McColl said good-bye to the Deflandres family, and took the local train from Huy to Namur. His papers were examined at the platform exit by a posse of Belgian and German officials and clearly passed muster. Following Mathilde’s directions, he walked to the garage.

  His new hosts proved as welcoming as Monsieur and Madame Deflandres had been, although he did detect a certain nervousness on Madame Crasson’s part. He was given the room over the garage to sleep in and started work next day; he was hoping there were no German calls for assistance until he was back up to speed—it had been almost two years since he’d put his head under a hood.

  The owner’s son, Martin, was about twenty, and his amiable disposition reminded McColl of Jed. There was a fair amount of work—McColl had expected the Germans to commandeer any usable vehicles, but special dispensations had been liberally distributed, particularly among those who collaborated, and several times in that first week he and Martin were sent out to repair a local bigwig’s pride and joy.

  The first German call for assistance came toward the end of his second week. He and Martin drove out to a rest camp near Charleroi, where a general’s staff car was making strange noises. While his partner put things right, McColl stood there watching the German soldiers and listening to the rumble of the distant guns. When Martin was done, the sense of relief was short-lived; the Germans, McColl now discovered, were keen to show their gratitude by offering up free meals. Luckily, none of those they encountered spoke more than a few words of French, and the food was surprisingly good.

  The weeks went by. Mathilde visited him twice, with jobs she needed doing in Liège. The first was simple enough: he had to drop off a sheaf of reports at a dead-letter office in one of the town’s industrial suburbs. After making doubly sure he wasn’t being followed, he approached the address he’d been given and tapped thrice, then twice, on the designated ground-floor window. The sash flew up, a hand grabbed the envelope, the sash slammed down.

  The second proved more complicated. Cumming had somehow heard that a Belgian group run by his army rivals were planning to blow up a bridge on the line running south from Liège to Jemelle and wanted McColl to dissuade them. That line was apparently one of the best-watched in Belgium, and Cumming was keen that the Germans kept using it. McColl spent several hours in a dingy riverside bar explaining this to two young Belgians, who were reluctant to abandon their long-cherished plan. In the end the only way McColl could win their acquiescence was by promising them other targets. Whether Cumming would have any was another matter.

  On the weekends he cautiously explored the Meuse Valley between Namur and Liège, noting the bridges against the kilometer posts from the train, then getting as close as he dared on the ground. Those that carried the tracks across the Meuse were substantial girder affairs, with commensurate protection, but there were many smaller bridges over roads and streams that didn’t seem guarded at all.

  He finished the report in the first week of March and took it to the window in Liège. He wasn’t expecting a reply in anything less than a fortnight, but when one eventually came, he hoped it would call him home.

  Toward the end of February, Jack Slaney turned up out of the blue and insisted on taking Caitlin out to dinner. “Despite rumors to the contrary,” no one had actually asked him to leave the Kaiser’s realm. But the authorities in Berlin had grown “a little tetchy” in recent months, and an extended furlough had seemed advisable. Having reached England from Holland, he was stopping a few days in London before going home for a couple of months.

  The restaurant he’d chosen—a small one near Leicester Square—had been recommended by a friend at the embassy, but Slaney found the fare disappointing. “I’ve eaten better in Berlin,” he said crushingly. “The U-boat campaign must be working.”

  “If it is, the British Admiralty’s not letting on.”

  “They wouldn’t. And it’ll get worse. Did the press over here carry that German announcement about armed merchant ships being fair game after March first?”

  “Oh, yes. The English wouldn’t miss an opportunity to remind everyone how utterly beastly the Germans are.”

  Slaney mopped up some gravy with a hunk of bread. “They’re all beastly, but I have to admit that the Germans take some beating. Have you been following what’s happening around Verdun?”

  “The latest big push. After watching the English and French bang their heads against walls for over a year, you’d think the Germans would know better.”

  Slaney grinned but shook his head. “It’s worse than that. I talked to a lot of General Staff people over the last few weeks—all off the record, of course—and even some of them are appalled. What do you think the Germans are hoping for at Verdun?”

  She shrugged. “The usual elusive breakthrough?”

  “Oh, no. They’d take one if they got it, naturally, but that’s not the point of the exercise. General Falkenhayn actually spelled it out. He said that Verdun, with all its forts, was the one place the French could not afford to lose, the one for which they really would fight to the very last man. And that’s the German plan, to keep sucking Frenchmen onto their guns until there aren’t any left.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?” Slaney was angry now, though at what or whom was harder to tell. “It means that men really are being taken like lambs to the slaughter. That the life of an ordinary man is not of the slightest interest to the bastards in charge. And I’m not just talking about the Germans.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “The point of the U-boat campaign is to starve the British into submission. Not the British soldier—the British. And the point of the British blockade is starve the Germans. Men, women, and children.”

  “I know.”

  “I know you do—I’ve read what you’ve written. And you’ve probably already realized what I’m going to say next, but just in case . . . There’s only one reason that we’ve been allowed to put such thoughts in print, and that reason is American neutrality. The moment Wilson drags us into this war, the shutters will come down. Look at the US papers now and you’ll still find journalists writing that this war is as stupid as any and more so than most. You’ll still find people saying that both sides have a case and that compromise is the only sensible way to end it. The moment we come in, that’ll all disappear overnight and journalists like you and me will have to go on long sabbaticals or do all our real writing between the lines. Because if we carry on telling the truth, things are going to get ugly.”

  An hour or so later, after he had seen her off on the Number 4 tram, she sat staring out at the houses on Kennington Park Road, feeling more depressed than she had for months. A part of her wanted to get away from it all, from Europe and all its self-inflicted sadness, to book a passage on the ship that Slaney would be catching in a couple of days. But she knew that she wouldn’t. Her work—her life—was here.

  The next message from London did summon McColl back to England, but not at once, and not in the way he expected. Mathilde arrived with it early one evening, and they spent most of an hour in his room above the garage discu
ssing Cumming’s requests.

  The Service chief wanted three bridges destroyed, preferably on the same night. Looking at the list, McColl remembered each one and noticed the common factors. They were all relatively small, far enough from the road to complicate the business of repair, and quite a distance from one another. Bringing them all down on the same night would both stretch the Germans’ resources and maximize the saboteurs’ chances of getting away—if different nights were chosen, those going last would find the authorities on maximum alert.

  The explosives would be brought in by plane, either on the night of April 9–10 or on the next one fit for flying. The chosen landing ground was a field southwest of Huy that according to Mathilde had been used on a couple of previous occasions. McColl was to help with the necessary preparations and then return with the airplane, leaving the Belgians to carry out the operation.

  “Do you have three men who can handle explosives?” he asked her.

  “I will find them,” she answered firmly. “And at least six people will be needed to light the fires for the airplane and to douse them once it has landed. The less time they’re lit, the better.”

  “You’ll need at least two for each bridge, one to keep guard while the other plants the explosives. So that’s six already, and I’ll be there, too.” He almost regretted missing the action, McColl realized. It would be more exciting, and probably much less dangerous, than spending another three hours aloft, a frozen sitting duck.

  “We will need to revisit these three bridges,” Mathilde said. “As near the time as possible.”

  “I will do that,” McColl promised. He had not been idle since his leg mended, but he still felt in debt to her and her people. Given the risks they ran, and the terrible cost of capture, he often wondered why more of them didn’t just keep their heads down until the war had run its course.