by Robert Ryan
‘I’ll bet. Just wanted to say, glad to have you with us, sir.’
‘Good to have something to hide behind for a change?’
The corporal’s teeth showed surprisingly white in the darkness as he smiled. ‘Yes, and to have something Fritz don’t have. It’s a good feeling.’
‘We’ll do our best.’
‘Ready for loading, sir,’ shouted his gearsman from the open doorway, his voice all but swallowed by reverberating metal.
‘Thank you, Phibbs. Right, G for Glory. All aboard. Calling at all stations to Flers.’ He tried to keep the tremor from his voice, but he wasn’t sure he succeeded. Still, he received a polite chuckle from those around him. The tankmen stirred into action, relieved, no doubt, that the waiting was over.
‘Good luck, sir.’ It was Cross, the infantry lieutenant. ‘Corporal Tench there will be leading you to the start of the crossing.’ He pointed at a pale-faced young man who was attaching a lamp to the back of his belt. He switched it on and it glowed red. Halford gave him the thumbs up and took a gulp of water.
‘See you in Flers,’ he said to Cross.
Cross grinned with everything but his eyes. ‘I hear you can do a good brew-up on that thing’s engine.’
‘I’ll have one waiting. Sugar?’
‘Two please, sir.’
They shook hands, an awkward and brief moment, and checked their watches. Cross pulled out his Webley revolver. ‘We’ll be right behind you.’
‘Best place,’ said Halford, low enough that Tench wouldn’t hear.
He stepped through the narrow doorway into the familiar stew of heat, sweat and fumes. From now on, normal conversation would be impossible. He wriggled into the commander’s position and nodded to his driver, the perpetually glum but highly talented Sergeant Yates. Both men pulled on their leather helmets and lowered the new-issue goggles with dangling chainmail visors. The idea was to stop the burns from ‘bullet splash’, the sparks and hot metal that flew around the inside of the tank when it came under fire. Now the crew all looked liked a cross between medieval knights and strange, leather-carapaced insects.
Hatches would have to be shut, but Halford wanted to wait until the last moment to seal himself into this steel world. The viewing prisms were worse than useless, and it was often like driving blind. It was worth risking a bullet through the skull to be sure they were heading in the right direction. He put his face close to the open visor of the tank, hoping for fresh morning air, but, as usual, it was a breeze polluted by effluent and decay that drifted in. Tench was on the road ahead, with the white tapes – much of which had been trampled into the mud – on either side of him. Five thirty. Time to go.
One last drink of water. A final prayer. A wipe of the palms. A valedictory mental message to his loved ones. Little acts, repeated in one form or another a million times along the line.
Halford picked up the spanner from the side of his seat and banged four times. Shut all doors, it said. Then he gave two rat-a-tats with the tool. There was a clash of gear teeth, a curse loud enough to be heard over the engine, more oaths, then an answering clang of the spanner and the driver let in the clutch. G for Glory gave a reluctant judder and then, with a mighty creaking and squeaking, the first tank began its long slow roll to war.
The old woman lay at the bottom of the stairs, her neck twisted at an unnatural angle. A terrible domestic accident. Those old slippers on her feet had become tangled with her robe. She had plummeted head first, no doubt screaming as she went. But there were no neighbours near this little cottage on the outskirts of Great Wakering to hear her dying cries. Poor Mary Wallace. Just a few months short of her seventieth birthday. Candles would be lit in church.
It had taken Ilse Brandt, as she now thought of herself once again, some considerable time to arrange the tragic scene quite so artfully, and now her damaged arm was throbbing with pain. After a search through the kitchen she had found a bottle of meat and malt wine, which she had drained. Now she sat, waiting for first light, when she would make her move.
Twenty-four hours had passed since the crossing of the Broomway. They would have found the abandoned lorry very quickly, and would have seen the blood stains from that bitch’s lucky shot. Brandt had stolen a bicycle, but not pedalled too far, barging in on the old woman with a tale of having fallen off her bike into a ditch. It was the best way of explaining her ragged appearance, the blood down her arm and the bruise on her face.
The woman had patched up her arm and as she cleaned the wound, it was obvious to Brandt that her suspicions were aroused. No fall from a bicycle would make such a gouge in the flesh. She had insisted on fetching the local doctor. That was when it became necessary to snap her neck.
She had hidden the bicycle and laid low, not stirring. She had heard army boots on the road outside and various vehicles racing by, but she suspected they had assumed she had fled the immediate vicinity on the bicycle, which she had dragged into the kitchen. There had been a knock at the door at midday, but she kept completely still and out of sight. She moved around only after dark, feeding on cold cuts from the larder.
If only the signalling rendezvous with the submarine had worked out. How different things would have been. Still, it was no use having regrets. She would never get anything done.
She knew that soon she would have to go through the woman’s wardrobe and find something that might be the kind of clothes a Miss Deane or a Miss Pillbody would wear. Something that didn’t smell of mothballs or old age. She would use rouge or powder to hide the bruise from the stone that had struck her. Then she would head, not to London, but back north once more. She would report to Silber, the postal censor, in person. She knew the secret of Elveden now. Landships. It sounded fantastical. But that was why she had had to get off the island. It was surprising how many people would discuss the indiscretion that had them incarcerated. She had had thought Sherlock Holmes’s vision of the landships the ravings of an old man, but when Watson arrived he, too, had talked of them. And so had that damned redhead.
Her arm throbbed once more at the mere thought of Mrs Gregson. If only she’d shot her and then stripped her clothes off. Or killed them all out on the Broomway. What, was she going soft? No, following the poles was a two-person job. She had needed the Gregson woman. Still, one day they might meet again, and then she would put everything right. But first, she had to share what she had learned. It might be a day or two before she could deliver it to Silber. But the news of the existence of these armoured ‘landships’ would reach Germany soon enough after that. After all these weeks, what was the rush?
FORTY-NINE
The going was painfully laboured. The route to Chop Alley was slow, the road clogged with men and machines moving to their own assembly points, and the guide tapes had been laid running next to the communication trenches, just inviting G for Glory to slither in sideways. To make matters worse, it had started to rain and the road was slippery, even for the tracks. Negotiating a corner took four of the crew working in absolute unison with steering, gears and differentials. It was a slow creep rather than a smooth turn, and felt as cumbersome as it must have looked. Halford knew the four-miles-an-hour calculation was now wildly optimistic. He doubted they were running at more than two. Perhaps it would improve as they moved onto no man’s land.
He followed the red light of Tench towards the front, aware of the thin line of grey that suggested dawn – and the opening barrage – wasn’t far off. In some places he could see the road was blocked by the curious, some openly laughing at the great steel monster that was rolling their way. Tench was gesticulating wildly for them to get out of its path.
Then, over the space of perhaps a hundred yards, the infantry fell away. The white tapes also came to end. That was no man’s land ahead, Halford was certain. He instructed Sergeant Yates to speed up and the machine gave an eager lurch. For a tank, anyway. Halford indicated that all visors, doors and escape hatches should be closed and they sealed themselves in. Now he was looking
at the red guide light through a glass prism.
Which meant he had to peer hard when the beacon wobbled and then moved wildly from side to side. He pressed his face forward, just in time to see Tench stagger and slump to the ground. He’d been hit.
‘Stop!’ Halford yelled, banging the spanner as hard as he could. G for Glory groaned, juddered to a halt and slipped into neutral.
Halford pushed up the visor. Ahead was indeed the no man’s land he had heard so much about, as featureless as a black lake. He doubted whether there would be many more landmarks out there, even when dawn did put in an appearance.
He could make out the prone shape of poor Tench, lying motionless a few feet from the track that would have squashed him into the ground. Another figure, an officer, was crouching over him, removing the still glowing guide light.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Follow me!’ the man cried, looping the lamp through his own belt before dragging Tench to one side.
Brave chap, Halford thought. He wouldn’t want to be out there, exposed to sniper fire with a glowing red light that almost invited ‘Shoot me’.
Halford leaned back in his seat, pulled the visor hatch shut, gave the order to engage gears and they crept forward again. Over the engine he could hear the crump of the occasional shell, and there was a whiff of gas a few moments later. But the clumsy gas masks with their fogged eyepieces meant viewing through the prisms or periscopes would be almost impossible. He could see the officer ahead of them slipping on his respirator, though. The tankmen would just have to try to power through without.
A ping. Then another ping, as if they were being fired at by a boy’s peashooter. Then a louder bang and a shout. Halford turned in his seat. One of the gunners was clutching his arm. A round had come through the thinner metal of the sponson.
‘You all right?’ he mouthed over the relentless clattering of the Daimler.
The gunner nodded. ‘Don’t worry about me, sir.’
Christ, Halford thought. The side sponsons weren’t bullet proof after all.
It was then the tank lurched onto its side, slithering out of the horizontal, throwing half the men against hot pipes and metal surfaces. The engine gave a strangled screech and stalled. A strange ticking silence came over the interior as each man, stunned, tried to reorient themselves. They had toppled into a crater.
‘Fuck,’ someone said. ‘How did that happen?’
Both Yates, the driver, and Halford, peered through the prisms to see how the guiding officer had brought them to this pickle. There was the crack of shattering glass and Yates was pushed back, his face full of splinters from the prism and a messy hole punched into the bridge of his nose.
‘We have to get her out of here,’ said Halford, as more rounds screeched off the frontal armour. ‘Get the boards under the tracks.’
‘But Ralph—’ said a shaken Phibbs, pointing to the slumped shape of the driver.
‘I can bloody well drive,’ snapped Halford, heaving the dead man from his position.
Phibbs tried the port sponson door, but it was wedged against the mud of the crater and would move only an inch. He staggered up the slanting floor, grabbing at handholds as he went, and managed to push open the starboard sponson’s hatch. There were strange noises rending the rain-sodden night now – snaps, crackles, whistles, whooshes and booms – preliminary, probing attacks from both sides until the dawn onslaught proper.
Four of the men had already de-tanked when another figure came inside. Halford recognized him as Levass. It had been he who had picked up Tench’s red light. He had led them to the edge of this deep shell crater and marooned them. He who had . . . had he shot Yates through the observation slit? And killed poor Tench in the bargain? But that would mean this man was a traitor at best, a deranged monster at worst.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Halford asked.
‘Abandon tank,’ Levass instructed.
‘Certainly not. We have a machine-gun position to knock out.’
‘You will never make it across in this machine.’
‘Not with you in front of us. Get out of my car.’
The sound of the gunshot filled the tank, snapping at their eardrums. It took a long time for the ringing to die away, about the same as for each of the three remaining tankmen to realize they hadn’t been shot. Levass had put a bullet from his pistol through the engine.
‘I think you had better go,’ said Levass. ‘This tank must not fall into enemy hands. Now!’
He waved the pistol around and Halford and the others all came to the same conclusion at once. That Levass was utterly insane. Without a word they filed out into the drizzle, heading back to their own lines and the infantry who had been deprived of their precious cover by this madman.
As he bolted the door after them, Claude Levass was well aware they would all think him crazy at best, a deranged traitor at worst. But this was no more insane than pitching your best weapon at the Germans only to have its secrets discovered. The corrupted fuel had been intended to stop them dead in their tracks, before they engaged the Germans. But someone had discovered it far too soon. In fact, the poor quality of the machines had almost done his job for him in many cases. Of the forty-nine landships scheduled to attack, only about half were free of problems. And, he reckoned, if this one was seen to have failed on the opening gambit of the offensive, then perhaps the strategists might think again and pull the machines back to Yvranch, saving the march of the tanks for another day. The burning of G for Glory would be visible for miles, a visual signal that the landships had been unleashed too soon.
Of course, he was finished. But at the very least, Levass would have his day in court to tell the top brass how pig-headed and shortsighted they had been. And Cardew? Well, Cardew could take the blame for what happened at Elveden and the men in that tank. He was in no position to argue. The tiny quantities of the drug he had given the engineer to make him suggestible and pliant – the Mexicans called the Datura extract Esclavo de los Dioses, ‘Slave of the Gods’ – had been used in larger doses by the Aztecs to convince their human sacrifices that they were dying for a good cause. But even in the smaller dose, it must have disturbed the balance of Cardew’s mind. Why else would he have killed himself in such a melodramatic way?
Which reminded him. Levass took one of the sachets of powder he always carried with him from his top pocket and emptied the contents onto his tongue. It was bitter, but as soon as he swallowed he felt the rush of warmth around his body, the glow of inner strength from the drug. He did the same with two further packets, far more than he usually ingested. But this is an unusual day, he thought, as he opened the hatch to let the two carrier pigeons fly free.
Levass had unscrewed the cap of the first can of petrol and sloshed it over the front of the interior and was working on pouring the second over the engine when he heard the clanging noise. Several bullets had hit the tank – it was evidently becoming visible in the strengthening light – so he thought it must be a particularly large calibre round. Then it came again, a rhythmic rat-tat-tat. Someone was hammering at the sponson door.
Levass put down the half-empty can and drew his pistol once more. He turned the metal lever and pushed open the door, straining against gravity. The tank was at such an angle that he could just see the head and shoulders of the new arrival. It was Major Watson, a metal bar in his hand.
‘A word, Levass?’ he asked, as casually as if they had met in the bar at his club.
A machine gun chattered. There was answering rifle fire. The attack on the German position had started, without the benefit of G for Glory.
‘I’m going to burn this,’ Levass said. ‘You might want to get away.’
‘That’s as maybe, but I am feeling rather exposed out here. Can I climb up?’
‘Are you armed?’
‘My pistol is holstered.’ He made a show of tossing the bar away.
Levass grunted and stepped back, leaving the major to struggle with the mass of the do
or and the tricky ascent unaided. Levass was more intent on keeping his own pistol trained on him.
‘You are alone?’ the Frenchman asked.
‘Very alone,’ said Watson, as he clambered inelegantly inside. ‘I’d hoped never to see the inside of one of these monsters again. In fact, I had hoped never to see no man’s land again.’ He caught his breath. The petrol fumes stung his eyes and he rubbed at them. ‘Yet here I am.’
The access door clanged shut under its own weight. Watson was reminded of the ‘special’ cells at Wandsworth Hospital, the horrible finality of the crash of metal on metal, closing in the deranged and damaged occupants for yet another endless night.
‘What do you want, Watson?’ demanded Levass.
Watson gasped his breath back before he answered. He was getting too old for this. ‘You have led me a merry dance since I arrived in France, you know. Been searching for you up and down the line. Luckily, one of the engineers spotted you following the tapes behind this tank.’
‘And you didn’t bring the police? Someone to arrest me?’
Watson pointed to the rear of the tank. ‘Oh, they are out there. Not the police, military or otherwise, but some officers to deliver you to the provost marshal. They let me come in ahead, just to save any . . . unpleasantness.’ There were those who wanted to shoot Levass on sight and have done with it. Watson thought it should all be done with due legal process.
‘I want a French court martial,’ Levass said.
Even in the dim light, Watson could see the Frenchman’s pin-pricked pupils. The man was on some kind of narcotic. He had to be careful. Reasonable. ‘This is a British tank. Let it be and we’ll see.’
‘It has to burn,’ Levass said. There was strange, metallic quality his the voice.
‘Burn this, and I’m afraid they’ll take you straight to the Tower. And I want to know what other tricks you have been up to with the other tanks. Lives are going to be lost—’
‘Thousands of lives are going to be lost in future because this great invention will be thrown away.’