‘But I thought you—’ Coulter began, and stopped.
Well, what was the use of saying that he thought Wrist knew, that he never dreamed he didn’t know? However he put it, it would inevitably look like boasting. And he was sure—indeed he well remembered—that any unnecessary dwelling upon danger had not been considered a soldierly virtue by that lost generation whom he could never hope to equal.
3
The Hut
THERE was a matter which they did not at first discuss, those two; for it was not until repeated doses of gin had deadened sensitivity that they were able to look each other in the eyes without uneasiness. Meanwhile their store of common memories, past misadventures that were always good for a laugh whenever two ex-security officers met, was rich enough to support unthinking conversation. Their enigmatic trade had been far fuller of the comic than of inhumanity. It was their job to suspect, but they were thankful when—with perhaps one yearly grim exception—their suspicions were proved lamentably wrong.
‘Fayze was a bastard,’ said the older man suddenly.
‘He was. But I can’t say he bothers me at this distance.’
Virian meant to say ‘it bothers,’ but couldn’t quite manage the word. The other, however, understood him.
‘No. Nor me. But it did. Spoilt my sleep for a bit. I don’t mind saying so now. How did you—well, get on afterwards?’
‘Sat on it,’ answered Virian non-committally.
He was obviously a man with a fine tradition of mental discipline behind him. His thin, dark face was mellow, and implied that he drew his strength from knowledge of human limitations and acceptance of human tragedy. He might have been twenty-five or so at the beginning of the war, that far-off period of which the two were talking, and a promising officer—a shade indecisive, perhaps, but slow to blame and much beloved by his men.
Medlock, the older man, was of a more plebeian type, with no more moulding about his face than the accidental contours of a chunk of rock. The hammer of fate could smash him into smaller pieces than Virian, and he knew it. He was contented, however, to be as he was, and hadn’t much use for complications. He was convinced—or once had been—of his own essential decency.
‘I didn’t like it,’ he muttered. ‘Didn’t like it at all. I’d been a regular sergeant-major and just got my commission, you see.’
‘That was why you didn’t protest?’ Virian asked.
‘What about yourself?’ Medlock retorted, catching the irony. ‘And why didn’t you?’
‘Oh, obedience,’ answered the other easily. ‘As an amateur soldier I felt I had to do what I was told. It’s a bit hard to analyse. The enemy outclassed us in skill and material. Well, all that was left in which we could equal him was an obstinate Teutonic obedience. His not to reason why, his but to do and die. A good many of us felt like that. You, as an old soldier, were far too sensible to find romance in mere obedience any longer.’
‘Hell of a thing to do,’ grumbled the ex-sergeant-major. ‘Order us to go out and shoot a civilian.’
‘They only asked us to see that he was shot,’ Virian corrected him.
‘Wouldn’t do you much good to tell that to the judge! We were present at a murder. Accessories. You get hung just the same.’
They began to go through the happenings of that day all over again, proper old soldiers (or old murderers) recalling every foot of the terrain, every hour of agony and disapproval since they had emerged from Colonel Fayze’s secretive office with set faces and a feeling that their integrity, their little personal shares in Christendom and civilization had been outraged.
The newly-commissioned sergeant-major had been the more horrified of the two. He was accustomed to see his instructions in black and white before he paid serious attention to them. War had to be orderly, and not for nothing was his temple called the orderly room. He claimed now, ten years later, that he had been on the verge of refusal, that he hadn’t seen any necessity for violence at all.
‘You did. You saw it,’ Virian insisted. ‘Don’t make things worse for your conscience than they need be. It had to be done. What was the name of that fat crook we bumped off?’
‘God, you don’t have to put it like that!’
‘But what the devil was his name?’
‘I don’t remember,’ Medlock answered impatiently.
‘Nor do I. Revealing, isn’t it? Gallant memory, always in the breach, always protecting us from night starvation! Well, it was some very common French name, so let’s call him M. Dupont.
‘Dupont had betrayed—and don’t you forget that!—a whole honeycomb of French Resistance cells. As a direct result, the Gestapo shot twenty-seven men and women, and sent Dupont to Spain for his own safety. Fayze’s organization kidnapped him there, and brought him to England in a submarine chaser. You knew that. And then they dressed him up in uniform and put him in a military prison as if he were an allied soldier being held for suspected espionage.
‘All very neat work! Secret service stuff right out of the books! But Fayze and the fool who did his dirty jobs in Spain hadn’t worked out what was to happen next. They couldn’t bring Dupont to trial because he hadn’t committed any offence under English law. And they couldn’t intern him because at that period in the war there wasn’t any quiet spot where no questions at all were asked. So they had to get rid of him, and persuade the Free French to do the shooting. I don’t wonder you forget why Dupont’s death was necessary. He was a sacrifice to inefficiency. But inefficiency is a much more potent factor in war than logic.’
‘Do you remember that dam’ tough with the blood on his boots whom they sent with us?’ asked Medlock with a movement of the shoulders that had been turned from a shiver into a shrug.
The dam’ tough had been the only man in the party who really looked as if he had been employed on this sort of mission before. A mysterious commando lad. At least they supposed he was commando, or from someone’s private army—though he wore a gunner’s badges on his neat, new battledress. He never said a word about himself, and asked no questions. The uniform, which lacked the individuality given by daily use, made it difficult to guess what he had been in civil life. He had a simple, unimaginative face, knocked about a bit by boxing or some other violent exercise, and it was firmly set to the job in hand. Virian and Medlock had been glad that they were accompanied by an apparent professional to whom as much as possible might be left.
They knew him only by the assumed name of Smith, and it was he who drove the car—a big, black saloon with two extra seats in the back. There were five of them altogether in the car when they went to fetch M. Dupont; Virian, Medlock and two Free French. One of the Frenchmen, who was the—well, it was understood that he had a personal score to settle with M. Dupont—was a small, sad, determined man in civilian clothes; the other, in uniform, was very much an officer of the French regular army. He was of their own sort, keyed up to the inevitable sense of duty, and with distaste clearly mapped upon his humane and honourable countenance.
They drove to the prison. Medlock and Virian signed for the body of M. Dupont, who was officially being held as a doubtful Free French soldier until his antecedents could be investigated. Dupont had gladly accepted and lived up to this fiction. He was clever enough to realize that the longer he was kept, the harder it would be to dispose of him.
When he was in the car, Dupont’s nerve began to fail. He asked Virian hesitatingly what their intentions were. They had the answer ready for that. Dupont must be reassured. If he were to put his head out of the window and yell for help, the law of England would automatically be on his side, war or no war. Keep him quiet till the end—those were Virian’s and Medlock’s orders.
Virian told M. Dupont that he was being handed over to his compatriots: that they were driving to a rendezvous out in open country where a Free French detachment would take charge of him. This made Dupont less apprehensive. He could have little doubt what his own countrymen would do to him sooner or later, but he was also very well
aware that, being good Frenchmen, they would have to invent a show of legality—which would be difficult when they were guests in a country with a tender conscience. A formal handing over meant, for a time, reprieve.
M. Dupont sat on the back seat between Virian and the French major. Facing them, on one of the extra seats, was the sad, determined personage, looking determinedly out of the window. In front were Medlock and the uncommunicative Smith. Dupont and Virian kept up a polite and desultory conversation.
‘Never been able to understand, I haven’t,’ said Medlock, ‘how you could sit there chatting away. In French, too,’ he added, as if an assassin’s proper language should be English.
‘It was easier than sitting grim, and saying nothing,’ Virian explained. ‘And Dupont helped. He was a very civilised creature. He didn’t like social embarrassment. Good Lord, if I hadn’t known his record, I should have put him down as just a bland, fat Frenchman! All for peace and decent living, he was. That was probably what made him take the Vichy side—that and money.’
They drove away over the sweep of the Wiltshire Downs in the direction of Bath. It was a golden day of late autumn, with just enough wind to ripple the massed spearheads of dying grass and to check the high-hovering clouds from ever settling on the sun. M. Dupont, released from the discipline and scrubbing soap of a military prison, was enchanted, and lavished courteous praise upon the English countryside. It reminded him, he said, of Picardy.
Their destination was a disused mine-shaft with a tumbledown building above it. Colonel Fayze had given them the map reference, assuring them that Smith had visited the spot already and that the building was unlocked. Two of the planks which covered and completely hid the mouth of the shaft had been loosened, said Fayze with an obscene wink, and could be lifted out. He had shown pride—a legitimate pride from the point of view of his office chair—in the excellence of his arrangements. The disposal of Dupont on paper had had his personal attention.
After an hour’s run, Smith stopped the car below the mine-shaft. Nothing was to be seen but an isolated hut of timber and corrugated iron, with a strong door from which the padlock had recently been wrenched loose; no derrick or abandoned machinery revealed the purpose of the building and the dark emptiness beneath the floor. Fayze had well chosen his theatre for the operation. There was no need for any bumping through country lanes into a suspicious remoteness, or for scrambling on foot through dense woods with a reluctant victim. The hut was within fifty yards of a main road. A car full of men could stop on the verge for a short while without arousing uneasiness in Dupont or other curious but less essentially interested travellers.
The only disadvantage was the frequent passing of traffic on the road which ran, level and clear, for a hundred yards past the hut and a little below it. At one end of the straight was a blind hill, and at the other a corner. To ensure privacy, both those points would have to be watched.
Dupont was left in the car with Smith, while the four others got out for consultation at a decent distance.
‘If Medlock stays at the corner,’ said Virian, ‘and I go to the top of the hill, we shall be able to signal to you when the road is empty.’
The French major appeared suddenly forlorn, his face that of a man who had known all along that he was an unreasoning optimist.
‘I thought that you …’ he began.
‘No,’ Virian answered firmly. ‘My instructions are just to keep the ring. It was definitely understood that you …’
‘I could not myself … my honour as an officer …’
‘Naturally, mon commandant,’ Virian replied, and looked questioningly at the other, so sad and wirily small and determined.
‘I have had my orders,’ that second Frenchman murmured, ‘to accord to M. Dupont the justice he has so richly merited. I shall obey. I beg you to believe that I do not say it with pleasure. But’—he sought their eyes with a simple honesty that, in the circumstances, was monstrous—‘he is a heavy man, and I shall need some help.’
‘This Smith,’ Medlock suggested. ‘The colonel said he was to make himself useful.’
True, Fayze had airily assured them that the mysterious driver was ready to do whatever he was told; but Virian was unwilling to force such responsibility upon any human being till there was some evidence of a real lack of sensitivity.
‘I’ll get hold of him and see what he says, if you’ll stand by the car, Medlock, and keep an eye on Dupont.’
He took Smith a little apart, and asked him what exactly his orders were.
‘To assist you in every possible way, sir,’ Smith answered.
Virian was uneasy. There was a light in the young eyes which looked uncommonly like hero worship. Yet Smith’s expression was tough and set. The very smoothness of the skin hid emotion more absolutely than the mobile lines of an older face.
‘You understand, of course, just exactly what the job is?’
‘I did the reccy with the colonel,’ Smith assured him.
He produced the word ‘reccy’ with a certain pride, which suggested to Virian that he had not been long in the army. Well, God knew what some of these young commando chaps, quickly, violently trained, must have seen and done already!
‘Then will you go up with that gentleman and the prisoner to the mine-shaft? He, of course, is going to—to take the necessary steps. And, look here, Smith, refuse if you want to! This is no part of your duty as a soldier.’
‘I understand that, sir.’
There wasn’t any shaking that firm professional. His attitude was so matter-of-fact that Virian began to doubt the value of his own scruples. He gave full credit to Fayze for choosing a murderer’s mate whose cold-blooded morale was an example to them all.
They took Dupont out of the car. The polite smile with which he had brightened his formal conversation was fixed at half its full extent. He looked at them, his eyes searching each face in turn with the uneasy instinct of an animal at the shambles gate.
The French major reassured him with deliberate ambiguity.
‘This is the rendezvous,’ he said. ‘It is here that you will shortly meet certain Free Frenchmen.’
Dupont again anxiously reviewed the faces. What he saw relieved him—for their orders were to keep him quiet, and even their eyes were obedient. His smile returned to its natural mobility. Two big drops of sweat trickled down his fat cheeks, shaved to a pig-like smoothness for the morning inspection of his person and his cell.
Smith, Dupont and the executioner walked up over the grass towards the hut. The French major remained by the car, torturing a cigarette between his fingers. Medlock went to the curve of the road; Virian to the top of the hill. So long as both held their hands in their pockets, the road was clear. When their hands were exposed, it was a sign that traffic was approaching. Smith stood by the door of the hut, relaying their gestures to the interior.
Virian could see a quarter of a mile of empty road. He put his hands in his pockets, dismissing quickly a thought of Roman thumbs. On a distant slope was a small convoy moving down towards him, but the job would be over by the time it arrived.
Medlock, at his end, kept his hands very plainly in sight. A baker’s van came round the corner, along the straight and up the hill past Virian—who now also revealed his hands, for the approaching convoy was too close. A motor cycle, a truck and six heavy lorries bumbled interminably past at regulation intervals and twenty miles an hour, adding to Dupont’s store three more minutes of October noon.
Medlock put his hands in his pockets. Virian waited for a far-away car, and damned the wheels that flashed in the sunlight for not turning more slowly. They passed, and he found his hands playing noisily with the coins in one pocket and keys in the other. He waited for the shot. It didn’t come. He was furiously angry. What were they doing inside the hut? After all this trouble! Why couldn’t they get on?
Ten minutes went by with no movement on the road but the lumbering, swift shadow of a carrion crow impatient to return to his perch. Then M
edlock’s hands came out with a gesture as if he were flinging at the hut the contents of his pockets. An oldish man, instantly recognizable as a retired colonel or general, deprived—and no doubt uncomplainingly—of petrol, drove round the corner in a dog-cart with his two little grand-daughters. He called in cheerful comradeship that it was a lovely day. Bitterly, Virian put him down as a merciful and honourable man. He could afford those virtues in the simpler wars that he had known.
Again both ends of the road were clear for long minutes, and again there was no shot. Medlock came striding back from his corner, his face that of a sergeant-major who was about to tell his paraded and incompetent squad exactly what he thought of it. Virian, too, hastened back to the car in fear lest his companion should hurl some blunt protest or, worse still, some unfeeling denial of protest, into so delicate an occupation.
‘Man doesn’t know his job!’ Medlock stormed.
‘Would you expect him to?’ retorted Virian.
The French major at the car turned on them, illogically angry as themselves. Some cutting irony at the expense of the English came beautifully shaped from his lips and died away as he became conscious of the brutal absurdity of any blame.
While they were staring at the hut, a melancholy procession came down the hill towards them—Dupont, Smith and the Frenchman, more sad than ever. Even Dupont looked disappointed. Very likely, he was. The Free French detachment, the larger public among which he would, for a little while, be safe, had not turned up.
Dupont was again left with Fayze’s tame tough, while the other four went aside.
‘Couldn’t Smith relay the signals to you?’ Virian asked.
‘Yes,’ the French civilian replied. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, then? Well then, for God’s sake?’ the major demanded.
‘The hut is too small. I cannot get behind him. Perhaps he will not let me get behind him. And to draw the pistol before his eyes—no, I cannot do it.’
‘Well, we daren’t hang about here any longer,’ said Virian. ‘Someone may get inquisitive, and start watching us. We had better drive off now and come back later.’
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