Blackstone and the Great War isb-3

by Sally Spencer

  There was a sound of footfalls in the trench outside.

  Maude lurched across the table, and placed the point of his knife against Blackstone’s throat.

  ‘If you make a sound now, I’ll kill you!’ he hissed.

  The door opened, and two men — one of them carrying an oil lamp — stepped into the dugout. The one with the lamp was Lieutenant Hatfield, and the one without one was Captain Carstairs.

  Maude dropped the knife, and sprang to his feet.

  ‘You went running straight to the beak, did you, Benjamin?’ he sneered at Hatfield. ‘Well, I suppose that’s all I should have expected from a man of your background.’

  ‘You will not speak in my presence without my express permission!’ Captain Carstairs barked.

  Maude came to attention. ‘I apologize, sir,’ he said.

  ‘As you have rightly surmised, Lieutenant Maude, Lieutenant Hatfield came to me and told me all about this unfortunate affair,’ Carstairs said. ‘It was the right thing to do — it was no more than his duty — and I will not have him criticized for it. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Maude said.

  Carstairs nodded. ‘Good. And now I would like you all to follow me, gentlemen.’

  He turned smartly, and left the dugout. He had not looked at Blackstone once, in all the time he was there.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Whatever the time of year, it always felt as if there was a slight chill in the trench in the hour before dawn.

  That morning, the chill seemed more intense than usual. It clung to the sandbags, and wafted along the duckboards. It enveloped the Tommies who were queuing up for their ration of rum. And it appeared to have frozen the three lieutenants — standing apart from their men — into the sort of statues that would later be seen mounted on war memorials in country churchyards.

  Mick had had two fears pressing down heavily on him. The first — more immediate one — had been that the rum would run out before he reached the front of the line, but now he had his tin cup of rum firmly in his hand, it was time for the second fear to come into its own.

  ‘I’ve never been into battle before,’ he told the man standing next to him.

  ‘I can tell that, just by looking at you,’ the other soldier replied, then took a small, careful sip of his rum.

  ‘Yes, this is my first time,’ Mick said, ‘and to tell you the truth, I’m a little bit scared.’

  The other man laughed. ‘You don’t want to waste your precious time being scared,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘Of course you don’t. Look at this way — if you survive the assault, you’ve nothing to worry about, have you?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘And if you’re killed by Fritz — well, then you really have nothing to worry about.’

  Mick took a sip of his rum, and felt it burn, strangely comfortingly, deep down in his stomach.

  ‘If I live there’s no problem, and if I die there’s no problem,’ he mused. ‘I’ve never thought about it that way before.’

  ‘Someone needs to say something,’ one of the officer statues — Soames — told the other two.

  ‘I’ve nothing to say,’ replied the second, Maude. ‘Not to you, and certainly not to this Judas.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Hatfield said.

  ‘For God’s sake, has Eton taught you nothing!’ Soames exploded. ‘You never — under any circumstances — apologize!’

  Hatfield nodded, acknowledging the truth of the statement, then took a deep breath.

  ‘I did the right thing,’ he said firmly. ‘We were all caught up in a cycle of madness, and killing wasn’t just the easy answer — it was the natural one. Somebody had to put a stop to it.’

  ‘Typical bourgeois thinking,’ Maude sneered. ‘You’re nothing but a costermonger in a bespoke uniform.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Soames said forcefully.

  ‘Enough?’ Maude repeated, surprised.

  ‘That’s what I said. Whatever happened in the past is over and done with. You and Hatfield are comrades who are going into battle together. You will shake hands, and you will wish each other good luck. And you will do it now!’

  Maude hesitated for a moment, then held out his hand. ‘Good luck, Hatfield, old chap,’ he said. ‘See you in Berlin.’

  And as Hatfield took the hand, they heard the sound of a whistle blowing — and knew it was time to climb the ladder and step out into a living hell.

  The oil in the lamp had run out shortly after Soames, Maude, Hatfield and Carstairs had left, and the dugout had been plunged into darkness.

  Blackstone did not know how long he had been there. His aching body screamed that it must be at least half a lifetime, but his mind told him it could not be more than a few hours.

  Initially, he had tried to escape, but whoever had tied him to the chair — probably Soames — had made an excellent job of it, and after a while, he had simply given up.

  As he sat there, with only the sound of the occasionally muffled explosion to distract him, he thought about his life — the women he had loved and the friends he had seen die. He wondered why his successes seemed to him so modest, and his failures so monumental.

  He did not think about the future — he was not sure he had one.

  When he heard the footsteps in the trench, he knew that matters would soon be resolved, but he was not sure what that resolution would be — even once the door was opened — because the light which flooded in temporarily blinded him.

  ‘How are you, Inspector Blackstone?’ asked a voice.

  ‘As well as can be expected, Captain Carstairs,’ Blackstone replied, as his vision returned.

  Carstairs produced a knife. It may well have been the same knife that Maude had threatened him with earlier.

  ‘We’ll have you free in a moment,’ he said, cutting through the rope which bound Blackstone’s wrists and ankles to the chair, ‘and by tomorrow you should be back in England, with all this unpleasantness left behind you.’

  Blackstone stood up, and began to walk around. The first few steps were painful, but then the pain eased as his circulation improved.

  ‘So you think all this “unpleasantness” will be behind me, do you, Captain?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Carstairs said confidently.

  ‘Then you seem to be forgetting that there’s still the small matter of a murder that I have to clear up.’

  ‘You’ll never find out who killed Lieutenant Fortesque,’ Carstairs said. ‘No one will.’

  ‘Fortesque committed suicide,’ Blackstone replied. ‘It’s the murder of Private Danvers I’m talking about.’

  ‘Danvers was killed by Fritz, and Fortesque was murdered by person or persons unknown,’ Carstairs said flatly.

  ‘Lieutenant Hatfield will confess,’ Blackstone told him. ‘It might take a while, but, in the end, he’ll spill the whole story.’

  ‘Unfortunately, Lieutenant Hatfield is dead, as are Lieutenants Soames and Maude,’ Carstairs said.

  ‘What!’

  ‘They all died bravely, defending the country that they love. They were heroes.’

  ‘You sent them out on a suicide mission,’ Blackstone accused.

  ‘I sent them to capture a German machine-gun position, and — after their deaths — some of the men they had been leading succeeded in doing just that.’

  ‘How many of our men lost their lives in capturing that position?’

  ‘I believe it was fifteen.’

  ‘You believe it was fifteen? You don’t know?’

  ‘In the confusion of war, it’s often some time before we have accurate casualty figures.’

  ‘And will the men who survived — the ones who captured the machine-gun nest — be able to hold it?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Possibly not.’

  ‘So they’ll die too?’

  ‘This is war, Mr Blackstone,’ Carstairs said. ‘Men die.’

  ‘So you’ve sacrificed perhap
s thirty men — though it could be more, because you won’t have the accurate casualty figures for some time — in order to save the reputations of three public schoolboys,’ Blackstone said angrily.

  ‘Sooner or later, all those men would have died anyway,’ Carstairs said, indifferently. ‘Most of the men who are currently serving with me will die before the war is over — myself included. But the regiment itself, though stained with the blood of its fallen, will emerge from the war with its reputation intact — and I will be able to go to my own death knowing that.’

  ‘You’re insane,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Perhaps I am,’ Carstairs agreed. ‘But it is just that kind of insanity which has transformed a small wet country, on the edge of Europe, into the mightiest nation on earth.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You have got what you came for, Mr Blackstone.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Indeed you have. You wanted three men, who you might choose to call murderers, to be punished for their crime — and so they have been. They are as dead now as they would have been if they’d been hanged or marched before a firing squad. You should be well satisfied with your work here.’ He paused again. ‘But are you satisfied, Inspector Blackstone?’

  ‘No,’ Blackstone admitted, ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Of course you’re not,’ Carstairs agreed. ‘And why aren’t you? Because we both know that yours is a mere tactical victory — that seen in terms of the wider history, you have lost, and the regiment has won.’ He shook his head, almost pityingly, from side to side. ‘So go back to England, Inspector Blackstone — because you can do nothing more here.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The White Cliffs of Dover had been visible ever since they set sail from Calais, but that had not stopped the enlisted men from crowding on to the lower deck to watch them getting ever-closer. There was some pushing and shoving for a better position as the voyage progressed, it was true — there was even a little shouting and complaining — but, on the whole, it was all good-natured.

  And why wouldn’t the soldiers be good-natured when, after enduring all the horror of the trenches, they were finally going home on leave? Blackstone asked himself.

  He pictured them turning up at their own front doors, and being embraced by wives and sweethearts.

  He could almost hear them telling those same wives and sweethearts that though this was only a leave, and they would soon be going back to France, there was nothing to worry about, because the war would soon be over.

  Perhaps they would even believe these assurances themselves, Blackstone thought.

  But he had seen quite enough — on his own short visit to the front line — to know that they could repeat the words a thousand times, and it still wouldn’t make them true.

  The two sides were too evenly matched — and too equally supplied — for a quick victory. The war would drag on until everyone, even the high-ranking officers sitting in their comfortable chateaux miles from the front line, was heartily sick of bloodshed — and then it would drag on a little while longer.

  He looked up, and watched the officers — almost all of them young second lieutenants — strolling around the comfortably empty upper deck. He did not begrudge them this moment of luxury, for while it was probably true that many of the enlisted men on this boat would eventually die in action, it was almost certain that most of these officers would.

  He went below deck, to visit those men who would not be going back to France — men who had lost arms or legs (and sometimes both); men who had half their faces blown off; men who lay on stretchers, groaning and holding their stomachs, as if that would take away the pain.

  He lit cigarettes for those men who could not light their own, and chatted to those who wished to talk.

  ‘Was it like this when you were soldiering in India?’ asked one of the soldiers who had lost a leg.

  ‘No,’ Blackstone said, ‘it was quite different.’

  ‘Was it as terrible as this?’ the soldier wanted to know.

  ‘All wars are terrible.’

  ‘But was it as terrible as this?’ the soldier insisted.

  The man had lost a limb defending his country, and deserved an honest answer, Blackstone decided.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘if only by the sheer scale of the carnage, no war has ever been as terrible as this — and I hope to God that no war ever is again.’

  Behind him — and amidst all this misery and suffering — he heard someone singing. He recognized the song. It was a ditty which was very popular in the music halls, and told the story of a patriotic young woman, who, furious at seeing a young man standing alone, marches up to him, and demands to know why he is not ‘fighting for your country as it’s fighting for you?’

  Blackstone turned around. The singer was sitting alone in the corner. He had only a stump where his right arm had once been, and it was this stump that he was serenading.

  He had reached the point in the song at which the young man answers the young woman’s question.

  ‘I would if I’d the chance,’ he crooned, in a cracked voice, ‘but my right arm’s in France; I’m one of England’s broken dolls.’

  As Blackstone took the stairs back up to the deck, he resolved to track down the writer of that sickly, sentimental song and give him just a little idea of what real pain was like by bloodying his nose for him.

  The White Cliffs of Dover had drawn much closer while he’d been below deck, and the boat would soon be docking in the port.

  There were two very important things he had to do as soon as he got back to England, he reminded himself, and it was only when he had done them that this bloody episode in his life would finally be over.

  They were in General Fortesque’s study, looking out on to the gardens and watching an old man examining a hoe and wondering what he should do with it.

  ‘I’ve failed you, General,’ Blackstone said. ‘I can tell you that your grandson was a fine officer and that his men would have followed him anywhere, but I can’t tell you who killed him.’

  ‘Can’t?’ the General asked sharply. ‘Or won’t?’

  It came to the same thing, Blackstone thought. The old man had already suffered enough, without heaping any further heartbreak on him.

  ‘I’m not sure I understand what you mean,’ he said aloud.

  ‘Was my grandson a homosexual?’ the General demanded.

  ‘Why would you ask that?’

  ‘Charlie used to play with Danvers’ grandson when he was a boy. The rest of the family disapproved — including his parents — but I didn’t want him growing up believing that the working man is nothing but scum, and so I overruled them.’ He smiled wistfully. ‘I could do that, you know — I was the head of the family.’

  Blackstone returned his smile. ‘And the head of the family is always right,’ he said.

  ‘I thought so at the time, and sometimes I still think it,’ General Fortesque said. ‘But then I also thought that as the two boys grew older, they would also grow apart. Yet even once Charlie had gone to Eton — and had a wide circle of friends drawn from his own class — he still found time for young Danvers. Of course, I never allowed myself to even contemplate the notion that there was anything improper or unnatural in their relationship. In fact, if you’d asked me only a few days ago, I would still have said that though it was a somewhat unusual friendship, that was still all that it was — a friendship. I would have said it, and I would have believed it — or, at least, I would have believed that I believed it.’

  ‘But you’re not so sure now that you did believe it?’

  ‘No, I am not.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Blackstone asked gently.

  The General sighed. ‘I caught myself writing a letter to young Charlie’s commanding officer, asking him to see to it that young Danvers’ body was repatriated,’ he said.

  ‘I know about that letter,’ Blackstone told him.

  ‘I may not have been to the front myself, but I have some idea of what it’s like out there,’
the General continued. ‘I knew that recovering Danvers’ body from No Man’s Land would be a hazardous business, and that men might be injured — or even killed — in the process. I myself had no particular wish to see the body returned to England — and as for old Danvers, he’s reached the point now where he probably doesn’t even remember having a grandson. Yet I sent the letter anyway. Why was that, Sam?’

  There was no point in pretending any longer.

  ‘Because you knew, deep inside, that that’s what Charlie would have wanted you to do,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Because I knew, deep inside, that that’s what Charlie would have wanted me to do,’ the General agreed. ‘So I’ll ask you again, Inspector Blackstone, was my grandson a homosexual?’

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘And now we’ve got that out of the way, perhaps you can tell me why he died — and who killed him.’

  Blackstone outlined the whole story, and as it drew to a close, he cautioned, ‘But you’ll never get anyone in the army to admit that’s what actually happened, you know.’

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ the General agreed. ‘Nor would I even try. The Soames, Maude and Hatfield families have all lost sons — young men who, whatever else they might have done, did give their lives for their country — and it is not for me to add to the anguish that they are already suffering.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Blackstone agreed.

  The General hesitated before speaking again, and when he finally did, he said, ‘Was this thing that went on between my Charlie and young Danvers merely an expression of their animal urges, or was there more to it than that?’

  ‘If it had been merely sexual, he would have kept quiet about it,’ Blackstone said. ‘But he had decided to come clean, even though he knew it would cost him almost everything he had ever held dear. I think you can draw your own conclusions from that.’

  ‘My late wife and I loved each other deeply, but true love doesn’t come to every young man,’ the General said.

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Blackstone agreed.

  ‘But when it does come, it is a glorious gift,’ the General continued. ‘And that, I think, is true whatever form that love may choose to take.’ He paused again. ‘Do you agree with me, Sam?’