Authors: Michael Dibdin
The old man nodded curtly. He seemed rather put out at having his thunder stolen.
‘Quite so. But the question was, what was I to do? I thought of telling one of the officers, but how could I explain it all to a stranger, who didn’t know the place or the people? Then I had what seemed at the time like a stroke of luck. As I said, fresh troops were constantly arriving in preparation for the attack, and one day as I was returning from fatigue duty I happened to see Maurice’s friend Aubrey Deville in a lieutenant’s uniform. Taking my courage in both hands, I approached him and explained the situation. It seemed a great presumption for a lad of my age, a housekeeper’s son and a raw recruit, to presume to interfere in such matters. I didn’t blab out my suspicions of Rupert, of course. I merely told him what I had seen that night, saying that since the discovery of Maurice’s body I felt I could no longer keep silent. At first Deville listened with a condescending sort of smile, but as I spoke this slowly faded and his eyes began to probe away at me like a surgeon searching a wound. When I’d done, he stood there as silent as a statue for what seemed like an eternity. Then he nodded curtly and told me to report that afternoon to an old farm behind the lines that served as a junior officers’ mess for that sector. The afternoon was a quiet time for us, when we tried to get some sleep, for we were up all night on fatigues, digging huge pits. But orders were orders, so rather regretting my rashness already I duly went to the farm, where I found Deville and a group of other officers sitting around on old ammunition boxes. My heart almost failed me when I recognized Rupert Jeffries among them. But military discipline has the great advantage that no one expects you to act naturally. I marched forward and came stiffly to attention with no more expression than a pillar-box. Aubrey Deville told me to stand at ease. “Now I want you to tell us all what you told me this morning,” he says. So I did. When I had finished, Deville turned to the others and said, “You have heard this lad’s evidence. I can vouch that it is true. But I can do no more than that. I can tell you what happened afterwards, and I can reveal how Maurice came by his death.”
‘Naturally this caused quite a stir. “When Maurice told me that he had seen this woman,” Deville went on, “my first thoughts were of grave disquiet for my friend’s health. All of you here knew him to some extent, but few perhaps appreciated the extent to which the catastrophe which has now overwhelmed us preyed upon his mind in those months. Maurice was increasingly distressed by the prospect of a war which he considered would plunge society into a new Dark Age, so much the more terrible than the first as our capacity for organized inhumanity is greater. In those final months of seclusion in the country, this idea had come to preoccupy him to an extent which alarmed even those of us who shared his concern. Thus when he told me about this woman who had supposedly come wandering across his lawn at midnight dressed in a shift, I feared the worst. If I agreed to sit up and watch with him, it was not in any hope that any woman would actually appear, but merely from a desire to verify my fears with a view to urging Maurice to consult a specialist in nervous diseases. But although the spirit was willing enough, the flesh proved too weak, and after waiting in vain for many weary hours, spent listening to Maurice’s increasingly incoherent eulogies of this woman he claimed to have loved all his life, despite telling me he had seen her for the first time a few weeks before, I retired to get some sleep, having begged my friend to do likewise. Scarcely had I reached my room, however, than I heard Maurice’s voice calling out, “Who are you? Where are you going?” The room I had been allocated was in the east wing, so I could see his window from mine, and when I looked out I beheld him gesturing frantically towards the lawn. As young Matthews here has testified, there was absolutely nothing to be seen. Maurice had already told me that he intended to follow the woman if she should appear again, so when he abruptly vanished from the window I knew what to expect. I felt that he should not be allowed to roam about all alone in the middle of the night, brainsick as I now knew him to be. Quickly drawing on again the boots I had just that moment put off, I hastened downstairs and let myself out of a side door.
‘ “Despite my haste, Maurice was already out of sight when I left the Hall, but the line of footprints marked in the dew on the lawn showed me the way he had gone. I followed it to the gravel path which leads from the other wing past the church to the west gate of the park. It was a fine night and I had no difficulty in finding my way. However, when I came to the gate I was at a loss. I knew that Maurice could not have gone out towards the village without rousing the gatekeeper, of whom there was no sign, but he might either have turned right towards the stables or left along the old track leading up into the woods. Then, looking in the latter direction, I seemed to see a flurry of movement about half-way up the hillside. The next moment it was gone, swallowed up in the darkness of the trees, but I immediately started running that way as fast as I could. The track was straight and steep, treacherous and uneven, the mere memory of a road. At that hour, by that light, it looked inconceivably ancient, as indeed it may well have been. The woods seemed to lower above me like a bank of fog. Once I entered their vast penumbra I could see only fitfully, by snatches. Gradually the track levelled out, and I knew that I must have reached the crest of the hill. The night was perfectly calm and still except for the sounds of my own progress and the small noises of creatures going about their business, killing and being killed. I could see almost nothing but the parting of the trees against the hazy sky, which showed me my way. At length this strip of sky broadened out as the trees on either side fell back. I thought at first that I had reached the other side of the wood, but then I saw that it was only a clearing, although a large one. In it stood a house, separated from the track by a garden with a low wall. The garden looked as wild and overgrown as the underwood itself, but the house was surprisingly handsome and large, much too imposing for a woodsman’s dwelling. It may have been a hunting lodge dating from the time when those woods were a royal demesne. However that may have been, it was now quite clearly untenanted and in a state of abandonment. I was about to pass on when a jarring noise startled me. After the gentle forest murmurs I had grown used to, it sounded as loud as a shot, but I soon saw that it had been made by someone opening a window high up in one of the gables of the house. The next moment Maurice appeared at the window, smiling and waving. Overcome with relief, I hailed him. He took not the slightest notice of me, however, but continued gesturing and smiling as before. My relief rapidly turned to alarm as I realized that these demonstrations were not intended for me. ‘Yes, yes!’ he cried loudly. Then, to my utter horror, I beheld my friend step out and stand on the ledge. I shouted at him repeatedly, endeavouring to awaken him from his fatal delirium, but he was no more aware of me than a lover alone with his mistress is aware of the barking of a distant dog. His face was pale, rapt and ecstatic in the moonlight, even at the moment when he stepped forward off the ledge. A moment later I heard the terrible impact, like a sack hitting the ground. I rushed forward and found my friend lying on the stones of the yard. His face was uninjured, and on his lips the blissful smile I had seen before was just beginning to fade. A moment later it had gone, and his features started to set in the calm mask of death. But I had no doubt then and I have no doubt now that Maurice Jeffries died a happy man.
‘ “For some reason that conviction served only to increase my mortal terror of the place where I had witnessed these uncanny events. I took to my heels and ran back the way I had come as fast as I could, intending to raise the alarm. But once I was out of the wood and back in the civilized precincts of the Hall, I began to realize how incredible my story would sound. Of course, I was not to know that I had a witness in young Matthews. On the contrary, Maurice had impressed on me that he had told no one else about the woman. Surely if I were to offer such a tale, at five o’clock in the morning, as an explanation for a man’s violent death, I would come under the gravest suspicion myself. After some reflection, therefore, I determined to wait until it was light, then ride out to the house in the wood as if for exercise and report the discovery of Maurice’s body as though I had come upon it for the first time. It was not only to spare myself that I took this decision, but also to protect the Jeffries family from the pain and embarrassment of having to confront fully the fact that Maurice had done away with himself in a fit of madness. Perhaps I was wrong. Had I been sitting quietly in my study all evening, deliberating the issue judiciously, I might have acted otherwise. But after the horrific experience that I had just lived through, I was not quite myself. And all would have been well enough, except that when I returned to the clearing the next morning, Maurice’s body was not there.
‘ “I was absolutely astounded. I searched the house and the garden without finding anything. In the end I began to wonder if I could have imagined the whole thing. Had it been nothing but an unusually vivid dream brought on by my wakeful night and Maurice’s story? In any event, the arguments that had induced me to remain silent the night before now applied with redoubled force. In the absence of the corpse, I was left with nothing but a tissue of wild improbabilities which I had no hope of bringing anyone else to believe, since I could scarcely believe them myself. No doubt if hostilities had not broken out immediately afterwards, I would have told someone sooner or later. As it was, the matter rested there until I heard that Maurice’s body had been found. But I was still at a loss what to do until Private Matthews approached me this morning. Here was a witness who would support at least half my story. I resolved to risk the rest and break my silence.” ’
The old man broke off suddenly, his jaws working away as though he was chewing. His breath came in little puffs through his nose. It reminded Steve of the way the stotters acted when they overdid the glue, and it suddenly occurred to the boy how easy it would be for Matthews just to keel over and never get up again. It would seem natural. The stotters had to work hard to damage themselves that badly, but the old man was like a wasp in October: bumbling, vulnerable and doomed.
‘That was as much as I heard about the matter,’ Matthews went on at last, ‘for the next morning, just after dawn, the great attack began. It was a beautiful summer day. The sun was shining, and when our guns finally fell silent you could hear the birds singing. Then the officers blew their whistles and off we went. I wasn’t afraid. We’d been told that the enemy had all been killed by our bombardment. My chief concern was to act the part and not disgrace the uniform I had tricked my way into. I tried hard not to fall like a lot of the others. We were all carrying heavy packs and I supposed they must have lost their footing somehow, but I remember saying to myself, “Here I am, a mere boy, and if I can carry on then
you
should be able to!” Then I felt something pluck my arm. It might have been someone tugging at my sleeve to attract my attention, except there was no one near. The next moment I tripped over someone lying on the ground and fell headlong like the rest. When I started to get up, I saw to my surprise that there was no one left on his feet, although just a moment before there’d been hundreds and hundreds of us walking up the hillside. I thought that there might have been an order that I hadn’t heard. “Do what the others are doing” was the general rule of Army life, I’d learned, so I decided to stay where I was. My arm ached, and when I rubbed the place my hand came away all red and sticky, as if I’d been eating blackberries. I realized then that I’d been hit. It didn’t bother me much at the time. I’d seen worse at home, like that time the miller’s son got his leg caught under a millstone they were changing. What I didn’t understand, though, was where the bullet had come from, if the enemy were all dead. I thought perhaps I’d caught one of ours going the wrong way. I could hear all manner of yelps and groans around me, mixed in with the twittering of a lark overhead. I thought I could hear a woodpecker too, and that was strange, for there were no trees near.
‘The slope we were lying on, smooth and bare, reminded me of the hillside above the village. The sun grew hotter and hotter. I couldn’t understand why we had been ordered to lie down, and after a while I called to the man I’d tripped over and asked him what was going on. I got no answer, so I crawled over to him. The dust all around started kicking up, the way it does when the first big raindrops hit during a summer storm. That was another strange thing, for there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. When I got close enough, I saw why the man had taken no notice of me. Young as I was, I’d seen dead men before, and I knew he was dead. Then another man nearby started to lift himself up on his arms, making a kind of noise that made me look at him. I hailed him, but then the woodpecker sound started up again, and all of a sudden the man’s face just disappeared, the way your reflection does if you drop a stone in a pond. It was then that I finally twigged what had happened. The enemy hadn’t all been killed. They were sitting pretty in their trenches, and as we advanced they’d opened fire with machine-guns and cut us down. And the men lying on the ground around me weren’t obeying some orders I hadn’t heard. They were wounded or dying or dead.
‘By now the sun was scorching, and when I tried to reach the water bottle in my pack I got hit again. What was making the dust kick up, I learned, was bullets. The enemy had snipers on the lookout for any movement and one of them got me through the foot. After that I could do nothing but lie still, or as still as I could with the pain, pretending to be dead. Later on, great clouds of smoke came billowing across from our side, and I saw men running forward inside it. Another attack had started, and I hoped for a moment to be rescued. But straight away that damned tap-tap-tapping started up again, and when I looked again the men were gone. After that the enemy laid down a barrage into no-man’s-land, where I was. Shrapnel started flying all around, along with other things. I saw what I thought was a glove bounce on the ground just in front of me, and when I looked again I saw that it was a man’s hand cut off at the wrist. When it finally started to get dark, I set off to try and crawl back to our lines. At first I tried to avoid the bodies that were lying everywhere, but in the end I just dragged myself over them, planting my hands on their stomachs and my feet in their faces. They weren’t all dead, either. Many moaned and moved when I touched them, and one even begged me to shoot him, just like a child pleading for a sweet. It came on to rain, which made everything slimy and the going even more difficult. As day broke, I realized that I was still a long way from safety.