Over and Out

by Michael Gilbert

  As he went down, his first instinct was to lift his feet out of the mud and regain the use of his legs. He concluded, just in time, that this was futile, and rolled over onto his face, flinging out his arms. It was an undeserved piece of luck that at this particular point the edge of the path had been built up, not by a number of small boulders, but by a single large slab of rock.

  His out-flung hands grabbed this. It was firmly enough embedded for him to pull himself up and roll over, with it and on it, until his body was lying across the path.

  He climbed shakily to his feet.

  The next two hours were among the most difficult and the most frightening that he could remember. He had to walk into the thickening mist, placing one foot carefully ahead of the other. In spite of his care there was more than one occasion when he found he had veered to the side and only saved himself from disaster at the last moment.

  When he reached the farm at Haut Kerque he wondered whether he was going to be able to ride his motor cycle, which was parked in a shed in the farmyard, or whether he should appeal to the farmer for first aid.

  When he had washed off some of the mud from his face at the cattle trough, he decided to risk the ride and an hour later he was stumbling upstairs towards the top-floor flat in the Rue St-Saulue in Montreuil that he shared with Tom Braham.

  Tom was writing at his desk when Luke came in. He was a difficult man to surprise, but the sight of a walking scarecrow brought him to his feet. The wind of his passage had dried the mud and formed a mask over Luke’s face through which his eyes and teeth showed, gleaming in the lamplight.

  ‘Don’t say a word,’ said Luke. ‘I’ll tell you all about it when I’ve had a bath.’

  ‘You look as though you could do with a bath. And a change of clothes. After that I suggest a drink.’

  ‘A strong drink.’

  ‘Such a draught shall be prepared for you as would have cheered a Viking warrior returning from Valhalla,’ said Tom. And you can use my best bath brush. The one you can scratch the middle of your back with.’

  An hour later, cleaned and refreshed externally, with his mind in tolerable working order, he seated himself on a chair opposite Tom.

  ‘Gentlemen of the French Guard,’ said Tom. ‘Fire first.’

  Luke did his best.

  The horror of the mud pool was still in his mind and he found himself shaken by an occasional spasm even when he was not consciously thinking of it. But he managed to control it enough to give a reasonably coherent account of his discoveries. His plans and notes had been in his wallet in the breast pocket of his coat and had survived immersion. He spread them on the table and Tom was studying them as he spoke.

  When he had finished, Tom poured him another drink and said, ‘You certainly stumbled on an important part of their organisation.’

  ‘A part? I thought what I’d seen was the whole of the opposition.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Tom calmly, ‘you weren’t really thinking. Continue imbibing that health-restoring drink and listen to Braham on Rudi Naroch. And his boys. Because, as I’m beginning to appreciate, it’s quite an organisation.’

  A file that he had opened seemed to be crammed with typescript pages.

  ‘The three cottages which you visited might be described as the fighting centre, but it’s clear that there must be, in addition, at least two important wings. A northern wing and a southern wing. Before I start telling you about the northern wing let me ask you a question. When you were scouting around those three cottages did you find a stable?’

  ‘Come to think of it, no.’

  ‘And did that strike you as odd?’

  ‘It should have done, I suppose. But I hadn’t much time for quiet reflection.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Tom agreeably. ‘I’ll do the thinking for both of us. For the most part, access through the swamp would be by the sort of raised pathways you’ve described, running north and south from their stronghold. When we are able to look more closely I expect we shall find others. But the one you came out by is strictly a footway only. And they need a horse and cart when they have to move a deserter.’

  ‘Or a body,’ said Luke, thinking of Marianne.

  ‘Right. And I’d judge from your sketch plan that the way out to the north towards Hondschoote and Wolveringhem is wider and more solid than the southern one.’

  ‘I hadn’t time to measure it, but yes, I’d judge that one’s wide enough and firm enough to take a horse and cart, if that’s what you’re getting at.’

  Very well. Then where is the cart? And, more important, where do they keep the horses?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘It’s obvious, when you think about it. They must have a standing arrangement with one of those farms you spotted on the northern edge of the swamp, to supply the cart and stable the horses and, no doubt, supply them with fresh food. Rudi’s boys won’t be short of money, and if there are luxuries—things they can’t get from a farm—they can do their shopping in Furnes or Poperinge.’

  ‘It makes good sense,’ agreed Luke. ‘And I told you there were signs that someone came in from time to time to do the housework. That would be someone from the farm where they keep the cart and horses.’

  ‘I think so. They wouldn’t want to spread their custom any wider than they had to.’

  ‘So now it’s up to us to get busy and find out exactly which farm or farms are co-operating with them.’

  ‘If you mean that you or I or one of Bernardin’s assistants is to scout around asking questions, forget it. They would be spotted at once, and would probably end up in one of those useful mud holes.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So we rely on local talent. Marc Cellier is now almost a hundred per cent on our side. So we’ll ask him to lend us his enterprising sons.’

  ‘Emil and Bo. “Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven’s joy”.’

  ‘A real tough pair of kids. They blotted their cupy-books over Marianne, but I’d say they’re now keen to atone for that indiscretion and help the cause. They’ll find out what we want to know, quickly and quietly.’

  ‘Splendid,’ said Luke. ‘So much for the northern wing; now let’s hear about the southern one.’

  ‘I can give it you in one word. Marianne.’

  ‘My mind is starting to work again. Slowly. You mean that she had a foot in both camps.’

  ‘I mean that ever since we heard about the German supplies of morphine we knew that these points of contact must exist. The Liebling brings in drugs and money, which have to be passed on to those members of the sisterhood who are on Rudi’s payroll. Marianne was certainly one of the distributors. But however suspicious that damnably ill-timed police visit may have made them, you can be certain they wouldn’t have knocked her off so quickly and so coldly if they hadn’t had substitutes available to them.’

  ‘Whom we must now locate.’

  ‘Through the good offices of his little friend Minette—who is rapidly becoming the richest whore in the north of France—Joe reckons he can name two girls at least with private addresses, one in the northern outskirts of Arras, the other in Béthune.’

  ‘And these are what you call the southern wing.’

  ‘With others, yes.’

  Luke said, the despondency clear in his voice, ‘So you, helped by Emil and Bo, will be pegging down the northern wing, and Joe, through Minette, will be locating the contact points in the southern wing, whilst I shall be sitting at home twiddling my thumbs. The only step I seem to have taken is an unhelpful one.’

  ‘How do you make that out? You’ve located the fighting centre. The point at which the attack will have to go in sooner or later.’

  ‘Located it, yes. And warned them that I was there. As soon as they see the broken tell-tales they’ll move their base.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Tom. ‘They’ll persuade themselves that the cotton was broken by a prowling fox or badger, or even by the wind. They won’t want to move. They’re very comfort
ably established.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  ‘Have a good night’s rest and you’ll see it the way I do. And, meanwhile, if you want something to get your teeth into, here’s a further communication from our old friend, Hickory. I haven’t had time to study it. Take it to bed with you. It should ensure that you sleep soundly’

  Dear Braham

  When I wrote to you last – my letter, incidentally, has not been acknowledged, I hope it came to hand – I promised to let you have any further thoughts that came to me.

  The handwriting, on this occasion, was neat to the point of pedantry, with its Greek ‘e’s and the tails of other letters carefully curled. The writer was evidently enjoying himself.

  As I pointed out in my previous communication, the ten groups of letters which you supplied did not, in themselves, represent a very promising field for crypt-analysis, which is normally based on the known frequency of different letters in different languages. It is an assumption that we are dealing here with the English language, but you realise that it might be French, Flemish or German.

  ‘Why stop there?’ said Tom. He was listening, next morning, with interest and some amusement, as Luke read the letter aloud. ‘Why not add Chinese and Esperanto?’

  ‘Why not indeed. Mustn’t make things too simple. Let me continue. There’s some good stuff coming I promise you.’

  The crypt-analyst starts by noting the repetition and the conjunction of the commonest letters. In English, E followed by T, A, O, I and N. You will find a full and interesting exposition of this in Edgar Allan Toe’s story, The Gold Bug. I pointed out that to arrive at a solution in cases of this son you would have to possess, if the transposition was arbitrary, a full copy of the number-letter substitution table. Or, if the transposition was based on a mathematical rule, then a clear idea of how that rule functioned.

  Thinking it over, it occurred to me that a cryptographer could base himself on pi.

  On what?’

  ‘Pi. P.I. The absence of an E at the end suggests that the reference is mathematical, not gastronomic. Indeed, this would have become plain to you had you read on.’

  ‘I’d give up long before then. But to continue.’

  That particular pi that I refer to is the strictly mathematical conception, not the more complex value which Lindemann, in his historic thesis on the differential calculus takes as 3.141592, but the arithmetical value which is arrived at by dividing 22 by 7.

  ‘As any schoolboy could have told you,’ murmured Tom.

  Producing the answer 3.1428576. This, as you will observe, contains all digits from one to eight. Had you let me have a rather larger piece of encoded matter it would have been simple to take the words or letters in that particular order and to read off the message in clear.

  Luke and Tom looked at each other.

  ‘Since, in fact, we have not got a lengthy message,’ said Luke, ‘the whole letter seemed to me—correct me if I’m wrong—to be a superb example of piss and wind.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Tom. ‘It has put an idea into my head.’

  ‘An idea which produces a name and address?’

  ‘It might do. I’ll have another shot at it this evening.’

  ‘Don’t let it keep you awake,’ said Luke.

  It was two days after the arrival of the letter from Hickory – in Luke’s view totally unhelpful, but apparently offering Tom a ray of light – that a further letter arrived.

  It had been addressed to Luke personally, care of the Foreign Office and it was evident from the numerous official stamps and scribbles on the envelope that it had pursued a troubled course through the rocks and boulders of officialdom.

  Surprisingly, it had taken only nine days to reach him.

  He had no difficulty in recognizing the clerical script of the Reverend Millbanke, Rector of Lavenham, the little Suffolk village in which he and Joe had been born and brought up.

  ‘You remember Frank Millbanke,’ said Luke to Joe. The three friends had fallen into the habit of meeting in Tom’s room as regularly as their different preoccupations allowed.

  ‘That old rector bod? Certainly I remember him. I remember he used to drag us into his sermons as examples to the other boys. You were the white sheep with a golden halo, whilst I was the black sheep that had gone astray. I ought to have sued him for libel. So what’s he got to say now? Has news of our many triumphs reached the village?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Luke. ‘No. He says that Oliver has turned over a new leaf and is making a model squire. He doesn’t mention Julian.’

  ‘Probably in gaol by now,’ said Joe.

  Tom said, ‘If you’d introduce the dramatis personae to me I should have a better chance of following the plot.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Luke. ‘Oliver and Julian Spencer-Wells are the sons of the late Sir George Spencer-Wells, who was the great white chief of our village.’ He added, with a grin, ‘First time I met Oliver I found him setting snares for rabbits—an illegal type of snare—and I knocked him down.’

  ‘Must have made you popular.’

  ‘Oh, Oliver forgave me. But, in his heart of hearts, his father never did. For me, the son of a game-keeper, to knock down the son of the squire was a perversion of the laws of nature.’

  ‘Yes. I follow that. He should have knocked you down. But why is the rector writing to you? Not to revive the old feud, I hope.’

  ‘No. It’s not the past he’s worried about. It’s the immediate future. Just listen to this.’

  ‘I’m writing to you to ask, at second-hand, Jot your help. This letter should really have come from Oliver, but I suppose he thought it would gain a more sympathetic reception if it came through me.’

  ‘After that most of the letter is about a young man called Robert Britain.’

  The sudden introduction of this name produced a pin-drop silence broken by Tom who said, ‘Spelt how?’

  ‘AIN. No real doubt that this is none other than Sergeant Britain, of the Bedfords, as you’ll find when I read on. I must have met him when we were both teenagers. Probably he was a holiday guest at the Spencer-Wells’s house and I was up there with a message—or a couple of pheasants—from my father.’

  ‘I gather you didn’t knock him down.’

  ‘Certainly not. Apart from disapproving of illegal snares I was a peace-loving lad. Not so young Britain. On the contrary—’

  ‘He joined the Bedfordshire Regiment at the outbreak of war, as a ranker, and he seems to have made a first-class soldier, at all events so far as military matters were concerned. He went with the regiment to France, and did so well that he was offered an immediate commission. Which he refused.

  ‘He is, I understand, rather a difficult character.

  ‘Lately he’s become very much involved with a pacifist organisation, Send Our Boys Home, and its leader and founder, Leonard Trench of the Metal Workers’ Union. Britain came home recently on a fortnight’s leave and promptly caught this influenza which has been decimating our army camps. It did, at least, secure him a further thirty days’ sick leave. He ought, in my view, to have put in for at least two months, which he’d have got without any difficulty.

  ‘I gather that he’s been spending the last few days speaking at pacifist meetings and I do know that he’s been regularly followed and spied on by our Intelligence people. I got this from Oliver, who has friends in the Foreign Office and it worried him a lot. After all, Bob was one of his oldest friends. They were at school together.’

  Tom interrupted the reading to say, ‘Then Britain’s an Etonian as well as a private soldier.’

  ‘The two things are not incompatible,’ said Luke with a smile. ‘In fact, he’s no longer a private soldier. He has attained the important rank of sergeant. But to continue.’

  ‘It seemed to Oliver that Britain has been persistently asking for trouble—more so recently than ever before—and that when he does get back to France he will need a friend at court. He has heard that you are in In
telligence and are connected with disciplinary matters.’

  ‘Which I’m not,’ said Luke.

  ‘And he hopes that you will be willing to stand between him and the trouble he has been so obstinately courting.

  ‘I would only add that jour father is flourishing. The arrival of food rationing has made his poaching activities, which he continues to pursue in spite of his more than seventy years, a matter of considerable importance to him and his wide and growing circle of friends in this locality.’

  ‘If he’s got an ounce of sense,’ said Joe, ‘he won’t come back at all. If I was him, I’d wangle another month or two of sick leave, and then get a home posting. If he does that, they could hardly peg him for attempted desertion or whatever.’

  ‘You might do that,’ said Luke. ‘But if I read his character rightly, it’s the very last thing Britain would be likely to do.’

  Tom said, ‘I agree. He’ll be back to face the music.’

  ‘If he’s determined to commit suicide,’ said Joe, ‘I don’t see how we can stop him.’

  Chapter Twelve

  So 1917 moved forward into 1918.

  It was to prove a year of destiny, of which the first six months saw the chances of victory and defeat balanced with excruciating niceness.

  Operation Michael, the great German offensive of 21 March, was a tactical triumph but, in the last analysis, a strategic defeat. One result of its early success was that the allies, at long last and reluctantly, handed over the supreme command of their armies to one man, General Foch, and the German tide was checked and Amiens was saved.

  Unlike the débâcle at Cambrai there could not, on this occasion, be any criticism of allied intelligence. The day, even the hour of the March offensive had been discovered. If it could not be halted this was simply, and deplorably, for want of troops, a shortage due to Lloyd George’s obstinate insistence on keeping badly needed men at home.

  The second round, Operation George, was a different matter.