Dead Man's Land

by Robert Ryan

  ‘Sir Douglas won’t be here long,’ said de Griffon. ‘Not in any hospital. I hear he doesn’t like to see the end result of his grand schemes.’ He winked. ‘Better to think of them as faceless pawns on a board, eh, Mrs Gregson?’

  The VAD wondered how he could possibly know this about Haig, but for once she kept quiet.

  ‘So, there we are,’ de Griffon announced, as if a mutual decision had been reached. ‘I’m going to get dressed now and I’d appreciate it if neither of you lovely ladies stood in my way. I’ll answer to Major Watson for my actions. Oh, and one last thing, Mrs Gregson.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind that tea before I go.’

  Watson’s first thought was to grab a wooden hay rake and push the belching hose back under the door. He scooped one off the wall and advanced on the cloud, but already, in less than a minute, the sickly-coloured fog was so thick he could hardly see the point of origin. He held his breath, turned his head away and sent the wooden implement into the mist, jabbing like an ineffectual prizefighter.

  The amorphous monster, however, struck back and within an instant Watson’s eyes were aflame as the chemicals attacked his conjunctivae. It was like having oil of vitriol flung in his face. He squeezed his lids shut as tightly as he could and retreated towards Lord Lockie. The horse could now smell the pungent gas and he began to shake his head and snort violently.

  Think, Watson. Think, man.

  He looked around the solid, stone barn, but the only windows were piercings high up by the roof line. There was no hayloft to clamber up to. At the end of each stall divider, upright wooden beams, fat and square, ran from the floor to the open rafters and tie beams. No doubt the roof tiles could be penetrated, if only he could reach them. But they were twenty-five feet away.

  Now he began coughing for real as the first of the corrosive molecules attacked his upper airways. He looked down. Tendrils of the whiteish gas were curling at his feet and slowly climbing his leg. Very slowly. The straw was rippling in places as rats and mice scurried away from the danger.

  Heavier than air.

  The phrase leaped into his head. Chlorine gas was heavier than air. He had to get higher. He put a foot on a crossbeam and heaved himself up onto a stall divider, clinging on to one of the vertical supports. Could he shimmy up that? Unlikely. If he did, would he be able to lift the tiles? Nearly every building he had seen hereabouts had lost part of its roof, but here it was maddeningly intact.

  ‘Help!’ he tried to yell, but that just ended in a terrible hacking. Now, though, even coughing was beyond him. He was choking. His throat was constricting. He fumbled a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, folded it and held it to his mouth and nose.

  Lord Lockie was stamping, thumping the ground and making strange barking noises. He reared up, and Watson’s perch shook under him as the hoofs thumped down. The horse did it again, his calls of distress louder. There were equine nose plugs, anti-gas hoods and goggles in sporadic use along the front, but Watson could recall no evidence of them in the stable. Man and beast were in this together.

  What was the antidote to chlorine gas? What did they soak those hypo helmets in? Calcium hypochlorite and glycerine. No help. But there was another possibility. The first anti-chlorine pads were impregnated with urine. The ammonia in the urine had a delaying effect on the gas. But, as he balanced precariously on the divide, he thought of the impossibility of trying to successfully soak his handkerchief in his own urine. Tricky to balance. And would his bladder comply? But perhaps there was no alternative except to try. He had to buy himself some time. With a free hand he reached down for his buttons.

  Lord Lockie reared up in the stall to his full height, his teeth exposed and head blurred as he tried to shake off the terrible burning that was afflicting him. His whole body quivered in pain and he flung himself against the side of the stall. There was a terrible crack and the wood underneath Watson twisted and splintered. He managed to hang on to the upright with one leg waving free. Then, the thrashing head caught the doctor a full blow on his flank. Watson found himself in mid-air, arms flailing, falling head first into a swirl of billowing green vapour, a series of gaseous arms that appeared to reach up to welcome him into their embrace.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  The cottage was as cluttered as ever. Not only with newspapers of every stripe, dating back ten years or more (he would get around to preparing and filing cuttings one day, he promised himself) but also the apparatus and materials for chemical experiments long forgotten or abandoned. There were also boxes of proprietary medicines, a complete set of the Illustrated London News and other periodicals stretching back forty years or more, four pipe racks, with an assortment of occupants, not one but two violin cases – although only one actually contained an instrument – and the evidence of recent meals, in the form of uncleared trays.

  Still, the girl was due in the next day. At least the crumbs and half-eaten chops would be disposed of, even if the rest was beyond her. As it was him. This was, he thought, truly the end of days. The flashes of inspiration at the Zeppelin had been welcome, but an anomaly. All too often his waking hours were spent existing in a fog of half-remembered intentions.

  He knew his faculties were dimmed. Had known it from the moment when his intellect had first failed him. No, failed was too strong a word. There had been blanks in his thought process, infinitesimal little moments where his brain had thought of . . . nothing. He doubted anyone would notice even now. But he knew they were there. It was like a conductor homing in on a horn player who was a fraction of a second behind the metre or a mechanic hearing the tiniest misfire of an engine. Most people wouldn’t be able to detect anything wrong, but a specialist could. And his brain had always been his special instrument.

  Pride had stopped him telling even Watson that this was the real reason for his retirement. He had not wanted to see out his days with diminishing powers. Better to pretend the bees were the sole attraction.

  He was sitting in front of the fire, wrapped in a woollen shawl, contemplating tea, when there came a knock at the door. He was always careful to leave a path through the accumulations of his bachelorhood, but the ease that the fire gave his joints was terribly difficult to abandon. Still, a second persistent knock sealed matters and he creaked to his feet.

  ‘One moment!’ he tried to shout, his voice, about as forceful as a rustle from the dried leaves that lay on his lawn, letting him down again. He cleared his throat and filled his chest with air on the third strike of the knocker. ‘Have some patience! I am coming.’

  The latch resisted his first groping efforts, and when it broke free, the door flew open in his hand. The startled telegraph boy took a step back when he saw the sallow, unshaven face, the white hair that needed a good trim and the yellowing teeth that populated the smile. He confirmed that the old man was the intended recipient, presented the telegram and, once it had been removed from his grip, he turned to go.

  ‘Just a moment, young Hargreaves,’ the old man said.

  The lad froze before spinning to face the doorway once more. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Your mother is a fine seamstress,’ he said. It wasn’t a question.

  ‘Yes, sir. She is.’

  He pointed to the boy’s name, elaborately stitched above the pocket of his red jacket. Both it and the trousers had been well tailored for the lad, but the stitching was the real clue to the mother’s proficiency with a needle. ‘That’s Bulgarian embroidery. Haven’t seen that in an age. Hold on.’ From the fluff and debris in his waistcoat pocket he fetched a sixpence and handed it to the boy. ‘Here. At least it’s not bad news,’ he said, holding up the telegram.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Young Hargreaves, too, could tell from the bulk of the message that it wasn’t one of those terse bringers of terrible grief that were often his lot to deliver. It had taken some getting used to, how his mere appearance in a lane could cause a ripple of fear through the households. A red-coated harbinger of misery, one of them had called
him. Young as he was, he sometimes felt like death itself, stalking the land, a stealer of innocent young souls. ‘Lot of bad news about.’

  ‘A lot,’ the old man agreed with a sage nod, as if he understood his burden. ‘Off you go, Hargreaves.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  He watched the boy remount his red bicycle and pedal off back to the post office where, no doubt, there were more grim tidings waiting to be distributed.

  The old man went back inside, slamming the door behind him and taking his place back at the fireside. Even the brief exposure to the outside had numbed his fingers. He had noticed it when he had been preparing the hives for overwintering. His circulation simply wasn’t what it had been. He rubbed his hands together before opening the envelope of the telegram.

  He read it carefully. As he did so, he felt like an engine starting up. He read it again, and now the pistons were pumping, the valves nicely oiled. His cranium hummed with power. A warmth other than that from the coals and seasoned wood in his grate spread through him. He stroked his chin. My goodness, he needed a shave. And perhaps a haircut. Simpson & Son in the High Street would fit him in. Not quite Truefitt, but highly serviceable.

  A third read of the staccato message, and now a plan formed. What he would wear, where he would go, what approach to take when he got there. Well done, Watson, for cracking the code. Although it was schoolboy-simple. Still, it had been easier for his pride for him to dress it up like that, eking out the apology for his boorish behaviour one letter at a time, than put the whole thing down in one solid mea culpa. And how had Watson rewarded him for his deviance?

  Why, perfectly.

  He stood with a speed that made his head swim. He steadied himself and bounded over the piles of newspapers to stand before the bowing shelves of the bookcase where, for the first time in many a month, he reached for his Bradshaw. His fingers had almost touched it when he felt a snapping sensation in his back. What felt like a jet of liquid pain shot down his thigh and he felt his right leg wobble and collapse completely, sending a fragile old man sprawling across the stone-flagged floor.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Bloch was convinced he was in trouble when he was intercepted by Lux’s driver at the railhead. He was late and the driver was obviously irritated. Bloch intended to blame this on the heavy military traffic that delayed civilian trains. In fact, it was because he had stopped off near the railway station in Brussels for a tattoo. It was very simple: a black, gothic-styled ‘H’ on his left shoulder. If anyone saw it, he would claim it stood for Heimat: homeland. He knew otherwise.

  The taciturn young man would give him no information other than the fact Lux wanted to see him at once. And that he had been waiting at the station for two hours. He pointed to the front seat of the Mercedes Torpedo. He clearly didn’t want Bloch mistaken for an officer. They drove northwest, away from the front lines and the Ypres salient, into the Belgian countryside. Bloch decided not to apologize for his lateness. Not to a mere driver.

  Where was he taking him? To another hare-brained scheme, no doubt. Perhaps Intelligence had another clue as to Churchill’s whereabouts. Lux, Bloch was certain, was not a man to let a near-miss stand. The thought of crossing over again made him feel sick, but he fought it. He wasn’t ready to sacrifice the afterglow of a night with Hilde just yet. He shuffled Lux and the Englishman to the back of his mind.

  For the first few kilometres the roads were crammed with DAAG transports and horse-drawn carts ferrying troops from their reserves places up to the front. Engineers were also at work creating a fresh crop of Feldbahn narrow-gauge railways, for moving men and munitions, the tracks scything across fields where need be. However, soon the traffic thinned, and the countryside, although denuded of colour by the poor weather, began to take on its usual peacetime appearance. Only the scowls that the occasional local threw their way as they drove through villages, and the German flags flying from town halls, suggested anything other than rural normality.

  After around fifty kilometres the driver turned the Torpedo off the main road, heading for hillier country, covered with thick strands of naked, deciduous trees. It was a welcome change of scenery after the monotonous flatness of the journey so far.

  Where the route passed through a cutting, there was a roadblock, manned by three serious-looking sentries who inspected papers and questioned the driver. Another two kilometres on, at the edge of the forest, was a more substantial barrier, a thick striped pole spanning a punctuation in a three-metre-high fence, which was topped by coils of barbed wire. This looked serious, thought Bloch. A prison?

  An echo of his original anxiety tweaked his guts.

  A twisting track led through the telegraph-pole-straight trees to a clearing, where six brand-new single-storey huts stood. Chimney smoke was rising from the nearest of them. There was also a group of field tents and, outside one of them, drinking coffee, stood Lux, wrapped in a greatcoat. The driver took the Torpedo close to him and pulled to a stop. Lux waited while the vehicle made a series of shudders and creaks before finally coming to a full halt with a sigh of relief.

  ‘Bloch. There you are!’ said Lux with what sounded dangerously like bonhomie.

  ‘I’m sorry I was late—’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. Here, let me get you some coffee.’ He signalled to one of the orderlies in the open-sided mess tent. ‘Schneider, take the car round the back. I won’t be needing it again.’ He turned back to Bloch. ‘How was the furlough?’

  ‘Good, thank you.’

  ‘You’d almost think this was real.’ He handed Bloch his tin mug of ersatz coffee. ‘Did you see that girl of yours?’ He smiled when he saw the expression on Bloch’s face. ‘As your senior officer, who do you think censors your letters and cables? Hilde, is it? Did you see her?’

  ‘I did, sir.’

  ‘All well?’

  Bloch couldn’t help himself. He smiled. ‘Very well, sir.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Lux winked, slapped him on the back and then eased him out of the way as the Torpedo drove off.

  Bloch was beginning to feel very uncomfortable. A jovial Lux was about as endearing, and convincing, as a wolf inviting you to drop in for tea and cake. The coffee was surprisingly good, though.

  ‘Manfred!’ Lux shouted to a figure that had emerged from the nearest hut.

  The gold lace around the collar and cuff told him that Manfred was an Etatmässige Feldwebel, although as he approached Bloch could see no regimental or regional insignia on the staff sergeant’s uniform. There was usually some sort of heraldic device to indicate the senior NCO’s allegiance. Manfred waddled slightly, thanks to an enormous stomach that gave him a low centre of gravity, and a patch covered his right eye. As he got closer, Bloch could see the skin of his face had a strange, glazed quality, the shiny surface peppered with tiny black dots, and one side of his mouth was pulled down, as if by a palsy. He saluted Lux, who returned the greeting.

  ‘Manfred, this is the man I was telling you about. Unteroffizier Bloch, der Speiss Manfred Loewenhardt,’ said Lux, using the casual term for a senior sergeant.

  Loewenhardt grabbed Bloch’s hand. ‘You are the young man who nearly got Churchill, yes? And only failed because of our own artillery!’ He began to laugh in the way that some Berliners – the accent was unmistakable – were driven to find humour in every situation. ‘Bad luck. But I know all about that, eh?’

  He grabbed Bloch’s arm, spun him round and the three walked towards the edge of the clearing and the beginning of the forest. ‘I always have to tell people about my eye. Get it out of the way.’ The mouth drooped even more on certain syllables, slurring them. Bloch leaned in to make sure he caught every word. ‘I was testing a new rifle. Austrian. And new ammunition. Breech blow back. Bolt took the eye. The phosphorus powder burned my face. Shrapnel severed a nerve in my face. I learned to shoot with my left eye, but they said my sniping days were over. So now, I teach people how to do what I can no longer do myself. Like a eunuch at a gigolo academy.�
�� More raucous laughter followed this.

  ‘Manfred has been running a sniping school in Hesse,’ said Lux, more soberly. ‘He kindly agreed to come here and set this up with me.’

  ‘A sniping school?’ Bloch asked. He’d had no such luxury. With him there was no theory or practice, just learning on the job. And if you weren’t a good student . . .

  ‘And we want it to be the sniping school,’ said Lux. ‘We only have a few candidates at the moment. But soon there will be fifty at a time. Each training for two weeks. Even with a failure rate of twenty per cent, we will be feeding more than a thousand snipers a year into our sector.’

  ‘A thousand snipers as good as you,’ added Loewenhardt.

  They were walking deeper into the forest now, bare branches above them crisscrossing the darkening sky, a multihued mulch of leaves beneath their feet. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  Lux stopped. ‘About here, I think.’

  ‘Lothar!’ shouted Loewenhardt.

  The ground to Bloch’s immediate right trembled, as if there was a local earthquake, and then came an enormous, yawning upheaval. From the detritus of leaf, soil and twigs, a young boy emerged, holding a rifle with a scope.

  ‘Jäger Lothar Breuchtal. This is Unteroffizier Ernst Bloch.’

  The kid held out a grubby hand. Bloch took it. ‘I have heard a lot about you, Unteroffizier Bloch.’

  Bloch looked at the carefully made leaf-litter netting that the young man had camouflaged himself with. ‘Very impressive cover.’

  ‘Thank you, Unteroffizier.’

  ‘Jäger?’ Bloch asked Lux.

  ‘A new rank for snipers. Equivalent to a corporal.’

  ‘And Lothar is our best Jäger. Never play hide-and-seek with him!’ laughed Loewenhardt.

  Bloch wasn’t certain what was going on. He looked to Lux for help.

  ‘We would like you here as a teacher. In concealment, target acquisition and evasion techniques. You aren’t the best shot we have. Close, but not quite. However, you are the finest at operating out there.’ He pointed back towards the lines.