Other Paths to Glory (13 page)

He spoke quite without rancour or sadness; it had all happened so long ago and in another country, and a million other Dickie Dysons and snipers had died since then, too many to allow even a particle of feeling to be expended on them.

‘And what happened then?’

‘Ah, well strictly speaking I can’t tell you, because I passed out as he tumbled back on top of me, poor chap. And the next thing I remember was lying in Battalion Aid Post, next to the schoolmaster from the tank. But they told me what happened … You see, there was one of my acting corporals with me, George Davis, who was my sergeant-major at Ypres the next year … and as Dickie fell back into the hole he dropped his shotgun.’

‘His shotgun?’ said Audley.

‘Yes, one or two of our chaps - the officers, that is - went into action with them. Harry Bellamy of “D” Company had a silver-chased one, a real beauty. He claimed it made the war more of a sporting occasion, though I believe the Germans regarded shotguns as
un
sporting. Actually, except for the need to keep reloading they were quite sensible weapons for close fighting … Anyway, when Dickie dropped his, Corporal Davis snatched it up quick as lighting and shot the German with it -he was only a few yards away, and Davis had seen the flash.’

And Davis, being an ex-gamekeeper, would have probably been more deadly with his own type of weapon than with a rifle, reflected Mitchell.

‘But that’s only what they told me, of course. I didn’t see it with my own eyes. In fact I missed the really remarkable part of the whole show.’

Audley cocked his head on one side.

‘Remarkable?’

The General looked to Mitchell for confirmation.

‘I don’t think that’s too strong a word for it. It always seemed like that to me when I heard about it afterwards, anyway.’

Audley also turned to Mitchell.

‘And is this your mystery, Paul?’

Mitchell had an uneasy feeling that after waiting so long for it, Audley would find the climax of the Poachers’ achievement something of an anti-climax. He bent his attention to the Official History again.

‘
All the officers and senior NCOs of the feeding companies now being killed or wounded,
parties of Riflemen nevertheless debouched from the eastern side of Bouillet Wood. Although for
the most part leaderless, but still in good heart, they pressed down Scrub and Scarab Trenches
towards the Prussian Redoubt, negotiating several makeshift bomb-stops which had been hastily
constructed by men of the German 155th Reserve Grenadiers. Machine-gun fire from the Redoubt
now began to slacken, the whole area having been under heavy shellfire (though whether from
British or German artillery is by no means clear).

Entering the Redoubt, the surviving Riflemen found that the garrison had been almost wiped
out by the bombardment and that
every dugout had been blown in. Although the handful of German soldiers remaining resisted
with great gallantry, fighting to the last man, the position was effectively in British hands by
7.30
a.m.
’

He raised his eyes to meet Audley’s.

‘Well, that’s it.’

‘That’s … it?’ Audley looked puzzled.

‘As far as the Poachers are concerned. There were two or three NCOs left and about sixty-five riflemen. Out of about three hundred who went into the wood, plus a handful of Berkshires.’

‘Seventy-nine all told,’ said the General.

‘There were two Australian brigades who came up in support immediately after - ‘

Mitchell tailed off as he saw the disappointment in the big man’s expression.

‘Jesus Christ! They took the Prussian Redoubt, don’t you see?’

Audley nodded slowly.

‘Yes. A great feat of arms, you said. I see that.’

‘They weren’t meant to - ‘

‘Hah! And we weren’t even meant to think of trying,’ the General observed. ‘In the unlikely event of getting through the wood we were supposed to dig in at once on the edge.’

Audley stared from one to the other of them.

‘Yes, I understand that too. But where’s the - ah - the mystery?’

‘The mystery?’ The General sat back, contemplating the word. ‘Well, perhaps “mystery” is a trifle strong. But the Germans did behave in a most extraordinary manner, no doubt about that.’

‘The Germans?’ Audley repeated in surprise. ‘I thought we were talking about the Poachers.’

‘Good gracious me - no!’ The General laughed. ‘Our chaps behaved foolishly, even suicidally. But that was quite understandable, perfectly understandable.’

‘Understandable?’ Audley said in the controlled tone of one determined to hide his bewilderment.

‘Why, of course. You see, I don’t think they had the slightest idea where they were. We’re talking blithely about woods and villages and front lines and redoubts, but it wasn’t like that at all … My dear fellow, I remember arriving on the Somme - that’s one thing I shall never forget, never …’

Audley started to speak, then stopped as though some instinct had warned him off.

‘It was like nothing I’d ever expected,’ said the General. ‘You see I imagined, as most people did, that there’d be a sort of drill trench … trench, wire, no-man’s-land, enemy wire, enemy trench and so on, but it wasn’t like that at all. To me it looked all like no-man’s-land, you could hardly tell the line from what wasn’t the line. It was just a mass of shell-holes … And, you know, you talk of attacking a redoubt - the Prussian Redoubt was built into the ruins of an old chateau, I believe - but it wasn’t visible, it all looked alike. You didn’t know when you were in your line or theirs, except for the smell. The difference was the smell: dead Germans didn’t smell like dead British - I don’t know what they ate or drank …’

He focused on Audley, nodding his head as though suddenly aware that he was digressing.

‘I’m sorry - but you see there we were, in our first battle, and only a handful of us had seen the maps and none of us had ever seen the top of that ridge … That was what was so wonderful about them, our men - they just went on and on, even after three-quarters or more had been killed and wounded, and they hadn’t any idea where they were. -Maybe that’s a mystery, if you like, eh? Or maybe you think we were all soft in the head - that’s what my grandson maintains.’

Soft in the head. And that was what father had maintained, thought Mitchell.

Grandfather victoriously dead at twenty-seven in the hole he’d punched in the Hindenburg Line and father getting up at daybreak to milk the cows, with another world war going on around him. They couldn’t both be sane, that was the only certain thing, not both of them.

‘But it was the Germans who behaved - well, out of character, to put it mildly.’

‘How out of character?’

‘They made such a hash of it, and that wasn’t like them, you know.’

‘Well, no one’s perfect all the time,’ Audley chided him mildly, ‘not even the German Army.’

‘My dear fellow - ‘ The General leaned forward in his chair ‘ - they were the old German Army, the old German Field Army-‘

The old German Field Army. This might have been Charles Emerson talking now: if the British dead on the Somme had been the cream of the nation, irreplaceable as men, the German dead, equally numerous, had been the cream of the army, irreplaceable as soldiers.

‘ - and they were damn good. Dug like moles and fought like tigers … blow a mine under them, and they’d be back in the crater before we could get there; take a trench, and they’d come back at you before you could blow your nose - wouldn’t give an inch back in ‘16. But
that
morning it was different.’

The General raised a thin finger.

‘They should have counter-attacked us in the wood - but they didn’t. And they should have reinforced the redoubt as soon as we were in the wood - but they didn’t… What did they do? They shelled the redoubt before we got there, knocked the blazes out of it … Bad enough to be shelled by the enemy, but to be shelled by your own side as well - !’

Audley started to shrug, then stopped as though unwilling to show the extent of his disappointment any further.

‘Hardly the first time that’s happened. But presumably they were simply taken by surprise.’

‘Surprise?’ The General grunted comically. ‘Then we were surprised as much as they were. It was a godsend we had those Australian Brigades to hand, even though we’d done all the hard work. We’d have lost the lot if it hadn’t been for them, I tell you.’

‘I mean, surprised at the direction of the attack,’ said Audley patiently. He turned to Mitchell. ‘You said the main attack was on Hameau village - the Prussian Redoubt was an accident.’

He was sharp, thought Mitchell. That had been the generally accepted explanation for the whole extraordinary affair, which had been almost as embarrassing for the British as the Germans. For while the main thrust towards Hameau had been a disastrous failure, the Australians had gone on to take the two much-feared ravines, which had fallen into their hands like ripe plums once the redoubt had fallen. While the main part of the Corps was battering at the door, the Poachers and the Australians had lifted the whole thing off its hinges.

‘How did they explain it?’ Audley pursued him relentlessly.

‘No one really knows. The Hameau attack pulled most of their reserves westwards, it’s true. And there was a garbled message sent back to their divisional headquarters quite early on, about 6 a.m., that we were in the Redoubt - ‘

‘Which was absolute poppycock - as I told Emerson when he came to see me last year,’ said the General. ‘I can vouch for that of my own knowledge, because I was right up front as we went through the wood towards the end, and I wasn’t hit until after six. Which means we weren’t even out of the wood then.’

This time Audley did shrug.

‘”The fog of war”,’ he murmured. ‘And it was a garbled message, you said, Paul. It could account for their shelling their own men, anyway.’

There was no mystery in Audley’s mind about the taking of the Prussian Redoubt, Mitchell saw that with all the bitterness of a man who sees a favourite anecdote devalued to a minor and rather esoteric footnote. Obviously nothing short of the Angels of Mons qualified as mysterious to Audley.

‘I don’t agree,’ he said obstinately.

Audley looked at him lazily.

‘It doesn’t matter, actually.’

‘It doesn’t - ?’ Mitchell’s hackles rose. ‘So we’re just wasting our time?’

The lazy look was transformed into a mischievous grin.

‘Not at all! I mean what I think doesn’t matter, not what you think, Paul. If you reckon it’s a mystery that’s good enough for me.’

‘Eh?’

‘Because Emerson will have thought the same, and that’s the line we need to follow.’

Mitchell’s rising irritation was blotted out by the realisation that he had been had again, had like the very tiro he was: Audley had laid down the rules of the game less than half an hour earlier, and he had clean forgotten them.

‘Is there anything you could tell Emerson now that you didn’t tell him last year?’

Audley addressed the General.

‘Is there anything fresh you’ve remembered?’

‘Anything fresh?’ The General’s lip curled. ‘My dear fellow, at my age you don’t remember things, you forget them. And half of what I do recall, I wonder if it ever happened, or if I haven’t read it somewhere. In fact I’d forgotten half of what I’ve told you until Emerson dredged it out of my memory … It’s all a very long time ago, you know, a very long time.’

A very long time ago, that it was; nearer sixty years than fifty. Working so closely with it, reading the letters and the despatches, the memoirs and the communiques, scrutinising the maps and the photographs, Mitchell knew that he sometimes fell into the trap of losing those long years between. It was difficult to appreciate that Hameau Ridge was ancient history when there were still men alive who remembered it; it was even more difficult to accept that other men had been born, had fought in another great war, had raised families and had died in those years since Second Lieutenant Leigh-Woodhouse had climbed out of his trench in the darkness and had set out for Bully Wood.

‘And in any case you couldn’t have told him about the Prussian Redoubt,’ mused Audley to himself aloud. ‘So what could you have told him that he didn’t know already?’

They stared at each other in silence.

‘If it’s the Prussian Redoubt you want to know about, then you should ask my old sergeant-major - at least, he was my sergeant-major the next year at Ypres. He was an acting corporal then. The man who shot the sniper with Dicky Dyson’s shotgun - George Davis. Lives over the hill at Elthingham. And his memory’s much better than mine, for a fact.’

Damn, damn, damn.

And yet George Davis couldn’t have answered every question, otherwise Emerson wouldn’t have wanted to speak with Leigh-Woodhouse also. Indeed, he might not have answered any question at all…

‘George Davis,’ Audley repeated the name. ‘And failing him, who else? Are there any other Poachers still alive? Men who might remember?’

Men you might have recommended to Professor Emerson, General Leigh-Woodhouse -

Audley had put his finger on the possibility an instant ahead of him: it was not what the General knew, but who he knew.

‘One or two - not many of us now, you know,’ the General said. ‘But George Davis is your man, you know. Besides, you can see him straight away, and you won’t be able to talk to the others until next Thursday at the earliest.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they’re over there at the moment, that’s why. First week in October every year - the i9ist Division Old Comrades’ Association goes back to the battlefields.’

DEATH’S KINGDOM

HE HAD EXPECTED THE TERMINAL
to be less crowded than on a working weekday, but it was as busy as ever. Yet the people eddying around him seemed to provide no protection: he felt exposed and obvious, and as lonely as a small child on his way to a new boarding school. Under Audley’s protection he had almost become accustomed to sailing under false colours, but here and alone that veneer of confidence vanished utterly, leaving him naked.