Bretherton

by Morris, W. F. ;

  “And you won’t get any from them,” cried Bretherton desperately. “This is nothing to do with Corps. G.H.Q. has given me authority to go where I consider I shall be most useful; and that is where I want to go—on the other side of the lines.

  “Dug in over there,” he went on earnestly, “is a division that I know will fight to the last man; and we are going bald-headed at it. Surely there have been too many poor devils killed in this war already without piling up the number uselessly in the last few days. If you put me over the other side, I can get that division moved back. This chit from G.H.Q. will cover you—I shall leave it behind, needless to say. Will you do it?”

  Major Impson polished his monocle with elaborate care on a large silk handkerchief.

  “And what about you, old bird—if Jerry catches you moving back troops without orders?”

  Bretherton shrugged his shoulders. “That’s my funeral,” he said.

  “Oh, quite!” agreed Major Impson dryly. “Very well put.”

  “Will you do it?” persisted Bretherton.

  Major Impson replaced his eyeglass and held out his hand. “Shake!” he said, with an exaggerated imitation of American accent. “Those staff wallahs always were bloodthirsty babes.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Bretherton climbed into a machine. Major Impson wished him good luck. A mechanic swung the propeller; the chocks were kicked away; the pilot opened the throttle; and the plane sped swiftly across the aerodrome and up into the night.

  V

  There was no moon, and from the great height to which they had climbed, nothing was visible below except the occasional flash of a gun and the distant string of greeny-blue “flaming onions” that mounted in the darkness towards some marauding plane. Then the pilot turned eastward and, with engine shut off, planed down through the darkness. Invisible, high up in the night sky, the plane glided silently across the lines, down a long incline that carried it far behind the German outposts. Far below, the dark blur of trees came into view; then the trees gave place to a wide stretch of open country, bordered by dark woods. The plane banked and turned into the wind; down, down it glided.

  Bretherton released the safety strap and waited with nerves a-tingle. Down glided the plane, bounced gently, and ran on slowly and unevenly. He hoisted himself out and slid to the ground. He waved his hand to the dark ball of the pilot’s head that projected above the cockpit, and turned and ran towards the woods that showed dimly against the sky. Behind him, the engine roared suddenly and startingly as the pilot turned, taxied across the field, and took off. He saw for a moment a dark, swiftly moving shape above the trees; heard the receding drone of an aeroplane, and then he was alone.

  He peered anxiously to right and left as he moved along the dark margin of the wood; for it seemed incredible that the roar of the aeroplane engine could have escaped notice. Yet no running figures came at him as he feared they might; no swift challenge rang through the night. His tense nerves relaxed a little. The area he had chosen to land in, the area between the German rearguard and their main body, was almost bare of troops, and with the possible exception of a few stragglers and the supply traffic on the main roads, it was unlikely that he would meet anyone in uniform. Indeed, this sparseness of troops that had made possible his landing unobserved now became a difficulty; for he had but a vague idea of his whereabouts and must rely upon passing troops for his direction and conveyance to Divisional Headquarters.

  But fortune favoured him. He scrambled through a hedge and found himself in a lane that led him, after ten minutes’ walking, to a broad road. Three lorries that passed a few minutes later gave him a lift to the Headquarters of a supply column, and there the senior supply officer placed a car at his disposal.

  He hoisted himself out and slid to the ground.

  There was frost in the air, and as he drove through the darkness to Divisional Headquarters, he felt cold, dispirited, and lonely, very lonely. He was one man among many enemies, and it seemed to him impossible that he could succeed in that which he had set himself to do. Some unguarded act must betray him. It was true that he had already successfully sustained the part of General von Wahnheim since the recovery of his true personality, but that had been for a short time only. Now he was to attempt to withdraw troops that had been ordered to stand to the last, and that action in itself must arouse suspicion, even if it were not immediately countermanded by higher authority.

  And he was depressed by the knowledge that he was a mental invalid. For he recognized that this second lapse of memory, good cause though there had been for it, admitted the possibility of a further lapse or lapses, one of which might be permanent, and he was chilled by the fear of it. But he realized that, for the time being, he must play his rôle to the best of his ability, and he forced himself to think in German, to forget his thoughts and sensations as Gerard Bretherton, and to concentrate on those that had been his as General von Wahnheim.

  His reception at Divisional Headquarters did much to cheer him. The staff were delighted to see their own General return. And he had arrived at an opportune moment. Colonel Jagenburg, though wounded that afternoon, had refused to be evacuated, but now he declared that he was quite ready to hand over the division to its own commander and could go back to hospital with a clear conscience.

  The unsuspicious and even joyful way in which he had been received by the men who, after all, as he told himself, had been his comrades for many months, did much to restore his confidence; and as he concentrated upon the many duties which, with the men around him and his surroundings, had once formed his familiar daily life, he found himself unconsciously dropping back into the cool, competent manner of General von Wahnheim. He could even remind himself of who he really was with no such feeling of nervousness as had at first possessed him.

  One other fact went far to raise his hopes of success. He learned that the division was now independent of the Higher Command, which had officially wished it good luck and a gallant end and left it to its fate. Little change had taken place in the military situation during the twenty-four hours that Bretherton had been absent, and he quickly mastered such changes in the disposition of troops as had been made.

  It was then that he nerved himself for the great effort. It was while following on the map the Chief-of-Staff’s summary of the situation that a fairly plausible excuse for retreat occurred to him. He stood now, facing the large map on the wall, and spoke to the Chief-of-Staff without turning his head.

  “I have been given a free hand,” he said. “And I have a plan for making the division’s swan-song livelier than was originally planned. We have enough room for manœuvre now, and my plan in to continue the retreat, but in echelon to the left—here.” He dabbed a finger on the map. “Leaving a screen on the original line of retreat to keep the enemy happy. Then, in two or three days when we are clear of him, the screen will stand and we shall come in with all our weight on his flank. A smashing blow of this sort should do him some real damage and will delay him longer than sitting down till we are wiped out; for, after it, he will advance very cautiously for fear of a further dose.”

  He turned suddenly with his hands thrust in the little side-pockets of his close-fitting tunic and looked at the Chief-of-Staff. The man was smiling, and there was a glint of affection in his keen blue eyes.

  “It sounds a very good scheme, General,” he said. “I like it far better than the sitting-down-to-be-wiped-out plan. It is sound tactics. And, if I may say so, the division will make its last bow in true von Wahnheim manner.”

  Bretherton turned back to the map with a sigh of relief.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  I

  For several hours, the staff worked hard upon the details of the move and the alteration in orders made necessary by this sudden change of plan. There was much hurried coming and going in the château, much ringing of telephone bells, and purring of dispatch riders’ motor-cycles outside in the darkness. Dawn was near before the last order was written and sent off; but already the m
ove-table had come into operation, and the veteran division in fighting kit, like a pefectly adjusted machine, had begun its retreat.

  The château was soon almost deserted. The Headquarters staff packed up and went back. Bretherton told them that he would remain with the rear party for a time and rejoin Headquarters later. His intention was to remain in the château till it was captured by the advancing British vanguard. Reports reached him that the rear party were in touch with that vanguard, and he pictured it, Gurney and the men of his old company, in the early-morning light feeling their way forward in the way in which he himself had taught them.

  A machine-gun unit of the rearguard arrived and began to fortify the château. Bretherton found a gun team in an ante-room overlooking the courtyard. They had propped mattresses against the window and were mounting the gun. But he sent them away; the château, he said, was not to be turned into a strong-point. And the machine-gun team departed to take up another position in the surrounding woods.

  At last he could relax. He had but to wait for the British vanguard. He sat alone in the G.O.C.’s room, huddled in an armchair, worn out from lack of sleep and by the hours of heavy strain he had undergone. His face was ashen in the dim light of the guttering candles.

  He rose wearily to his feet and threw open the shutters. The strong morning light flooded through the windows, dispersing the shadows in the corners of the big room and disclosing the burnt-out fire in the huge grate, the big map upon the silk-hung walls, the long low chesterfield, the dark polished wood of the grand piano, and the two or three small tables on the thick carpet.

  On one of these, a packet addressed to General von Wahnheim caught his eye. The typewritten sheets it contained proved to be Hubbard’s dossier which Captain Trierforchten had promised to send him. He dropped back into a chair and began to read. And as he read, scenes with the old company and battalion rose vividly in his memory and took on a new significance: Private Christmas standing red-faced in the little company orderly room whilst poor Melford read aloud the letter in answer to the advertisement of a “lonely soldier”; Hubbard superintending Private Christmas carrying out his sentence of answering all those letters; Hubbard with a pile of coins before him playing nap in the Motor Machine-gun mess; Melford hunting for the map that disappeared when the aeroplanes bombed Sericourt; himself under arrest in connection with that photograph in the newspaper; Hubbard with B Company in the little Somme valley when the missing map was discovered in an envelope bearing the battalion censor stamp. And many things that had formerly puzzled him were clear now.

  The document was a brief record of Hubbard’s activities from the German point of view. The German secret agent No. 304, a woman, made a practice of answering advertisements by soldiers. One reply she had received, not from a lonely soldier, but from his officer, Hubbard. Correspondence of a harmless nature was carried on between them, in the course of which she learned that Hubbard gambled and was usually very short of money. A photograph he sent her of a British officer outside a café she sold to a paper and sent him the proceeds augmented by German money. He was pleased with this, and other photographs followed, though none of any great military value. All of these she pretended to sell to newspapers and forwarded to him the money she pretended to receive for them.

  When on leave, he met her and was introduced to an invalid uncle, who, being unable to move about or read, liked returned soldiers to tell him about the war. Hubbard indulged the old man’s weakness, and in return was helped out of his financial difficulties. One or two maps and several photographs were sent to her from time to time and were paid for by the interested uncle. The fiction that this correspondence was harmless was still kept up, though he must have known by this time that she was an enemy agent. The letters were sent to various poste-restante addresses.

  Eventually Hubbard was captured in the great German drive of 1918, and in the hope of being set at liberty or of receiving better treatment, he declared himself to be a German agent. This statement was verified, but the German authorities had not sufficient confidence in the man to send him back across the lines, and they used him on odd jobs and occasionally put him in prisoner-of-war camps to report the conversation of prisoners.

  Bretherton put down the document with a grimace. A sordid story, he thought. The man had run true to type. He had the guts to be neither a good patriot nor a good traitor. And he had ended up on the losing side; had done more harm to himself than to his country.

  Among the papers were several photographic negatives, but that which most interested Bretherton was one of himself outside the café at Ruilly. He held it up to the light, with a wry smile. That negative had caused him much trouble in those old days with the old company—those good old days. He dropped the negative on the table with a sigh and walked to the window.

  II

  Desultory rifle and machine-gun fire sounded from the distance, and from time to time the woods echoed with the staccato reports of a battery of German field guns that had taken up a position among the trees in rear of the château. The tide of war was moving steadily forward, and Bretherton, by the window, knew that it could not be long before khaki figures broke cover from among the trees.

  But the knowledge caused no answering flutter of his pulses. The fatigue and strain of the long sleepless hours weighed heavily upon him. He was oppressed by a sense of the complicated hopelessness of war, of the futility of everything. Painful images flitted through his tired brain: Hubbard’s mean treachery; his own desertion of the Duchess Sonia, for whom that part of him that was von Wahnheim still yearned; his killing of two men of A Company; his fighting for the enemy that were yet his friends; his betrayal of those men who trusted him. And he had not even gained the information for which G.H.Q. had sent him; he had accomplished nothing, except perfidy and bloodshed and misery for himself.

  The sound of rifle fire had grown perceptibly nearer. The battery in the rear of the château had limbered up and moved back. In the woods, a new sound, like the ripping of calico followed by the bang of a dinner-gong, announced the approach of British field guns.

  He had achieved nothing, except this avoidance of further bloodshed by moving the division back… that and… Helen.

  The sound of a door closing softly behind him caused him to turn. At the far end of the room, in the shadow of the screen by the door, stood a woman in a long dark cloak. She advanced slowly across the threshold and threw open her cloak, revealing the white evening frock beneath. Bretherton caught his breath as the light from the long windows fell upon her face. There was no one he less desired to see at that particular moment.

  He bowed low, to cover his embarrassment. “My dear Duchess,” he stammered, “what brings you here at such a time and in such clothes?”

  She came forward, with a slow, shy smile and threw off her cloak. Glancing down at her evening frock, she answered: “As for this—well, you know my valiant effort to maintain some decency in this disgusting war. We dine respectably, though it be off a ration biscuit. But last evening we had sudden orders to move. Your dreadfully wise and grown-up plans had been changed all in a moment, and I had no time to change my frock. I was busy till dawn getting my patients away.”

  Her face took on a sudden, serious expression, and she came close to him, looking earnestly into his face.

  “I heard that you had been ill after you left me—that you had gone back for a rest. No one seemed to know where. And just as I finished packing off my damaged children this morning, I heard that you had returned and were here. At that moment Leo drove up in a car. And so…”—a faint colour tinged her cheeks—“and so after what… well, what did not happen because old General Ulrich interrupted us, I… I had to see you.”

  Grey figures were moving among the trees around the château. From time to time, the crack of a rifle came from the upper part of the building, where a sniper had taken up his position behind a chimney.

  Bretherton glanced despairingly around the room. “But you cannot stay here,” he
cried. “The British are close at hand. Listen! That is one of their Lewis guns.” He placed a hand on her arm and tried to lead her to the door. He did not look at her.

  She stopped him and, with a hand on either sleeve, gazed up into his face. “You are not angry with me for coming?”

  He shook his head despairingly. She let go his sleeve and stood with the tips of her fingers resting on a little table.

  “You make it very difficult for me… Otto,” she said.

  He threw out his hands beseechingly. “I… I am only thinking of… of your safety,” he answered miserably.

  She dismissed the fear with a little shrug of her bare shoulders.

  “Do you remember,” she continued, “that you once said that you could never bring yourself to ask any woman; and that certainly no woman would ever ask you?”

  He made a little movement of protest with his hands.

  “And I answered,” she went on bravely, with cheeks aglow, “that I was almost tempted to ask you myself. Well… I…”

  “And I,” he interrupted quickly, “said that as your friend, I could not allow you to place yourself in a position so dangerous and… and so undignified. Nor can I.”

  Her head tilted quickly upwards, and a wave of colour swept over her face and neck.

  He bowed stiffly before her anger. “I… I have been ill,” he said lamely.

  The colour faded slowly from her cheeks, and her eyes assumed a more gentle expression. They searched his face. “Yes, yes; I know,” she said. “But you look changed—different. What is it?”

  “Nothing… it is nothing. I have been ill; but nothing serious. Let us leave it at that.” His eyes met hers appealingly.

  She gazed at him for a few moments in silence. “Yes, you are changed,” she said at last, slowly. “I understand.” Her voice cut like a knife. She laid a hand upon her cloak.