Other Paths to Glory (23 page)

‘
D
’
accord,
’
said Audley.

Like hell, thought Mitchell.

THE OLD MEN
straggled up the pathway from the coach park in twos and threes, making their slow way towards the notice-boards which marked out the old British front line.

While they had gathered beside the huge pink coach they had chatted and laughed, but now they were silent, almost self-conscious. Indeed, they looked even a little lost, as well they might, Mitchell decided: the neatness of these restored trenches, with their mathematically precise rows of concrete sandbags and clean-cut concrete duck-boards must be as far removed from the Vimy Ridge of far-off memory as the smooth grass, and dark ranks of fir trees which surrounded them. Nowhere, not even the most well-ploughed and cultivated farmlands of the Somme, was further from the reality than this restoration of what had never been.

He watched Colonel Butler work his way from the back towards him, very upright and soldierly in his uniform and a living commentary on his own definition of what made a soldier: he had never looked quite right in any of the civilian clothes he had worn, they had been as false on him as was the uniform on Mitchell. Now he looked himself at last.

‘Over here, sir,’ called Mitchell.

Butler looked around him unconcernedly, nicked a piece of orange peel out of his path with his stick, and made his way into the German trench.

‘Where’s Audley?’ Butler’s eyes clouded at Mitchell’s salute. ‘Belay that - no one can see us here. Where’s Audley?’

‘Up at the Canadian Memorial on the top of the ridge, sir,’ said Mitchell carefully.

‘With the woman?’

‘Yes. We split up because - because that way she can’t watch both of us.’

Butler’s mouth tightened.

‘And naturally she went with Audley - he intended that?’

‘We reckoned she would - sir.’

‘So you want to talk to me, then?’ Butler cut straight to the point. ‘Make it quick then.’

Mitchell swallowed. Compared with Audley’s oblique approaches, Butler’s directness was unnerving.

‘We think we’ve got a lead. If you’ve got any Poachers in the coach I want to check it out with them as soon as possible.’

‘What lead?’

‘Some of the officers carried shotguns in the attack on Hameau Ridge. The French have got one of them, I think - one that was carried by a particular officer.’

‘Which officer?’

‘H. J. V. Bellamy - Second Lieutenant Harry Bellamy.’

‘Bellamy?’ Butler shook his head. ‘I’ve got one 29th Battalion officer, but not - ‘

He stopped.

‘But there was a Bellamy on the War Memorial at Elthingham - a second lieutenant.’

That’s the man. The squire’s son. You’ve got a good memory - ‘

‘Damn my memory. The man’s been dead for half a century.’

‘But he had a particularly beautiful gun, General Leigh-Woodhouse said so.’ Mitchell refused to let himself be outstared. And if this is his gun it’s been round here for half a century too.’

‘So what? He was killed and anyone could have picked up his gun, particularly if it was a good one. What the devil can it tell you now?’

‘I don’t know. But Charles Emerson found something here, and if this gun was it then it told him something.’

‘And if it is?’

‘Bellamy was in “D” Company. That’s the one which went in with the North Berkshires in the first assault - the one that disappeared over the ridge and never came back.’

Butler stared at him in stony silence for an elongated moment.

‘Very well. I can give you two men who reached Hameau Ridge, Mitchell. Captain Faversham - he was a subaltern in “B” Company in ‘16. Wounded on the edge of the wood, but he’ll have known Bellamy right enough … and Sergeant Hayhoe - he was sanitary corporal in “C” Company in the Somme attack.’

‘
What
corporal?’ Mitchell exclaimed incredulously.

‘Sanitary corporal - in charge of the latrine men,’ snapped Butler. ‘But don’t get the idea that’s funny, because it isn’t, not by a long chalk. Need a good man for that, a man who doesn’t shirk. You can sum up a unit by its latrines just as much as by the shine on their boots. And the sanitary men backed up the stretcher bearers in action out here - Hayhoe won the Distinguished Conduct Medal at Ypres in ‘17 for pulling wounded men out of the mud under fire.’

‘I wasn’t laughing,’ protested Mitchell defensively. ‘But you’ve found nobody from “D” Company?’

He realised as he asked the question that it was a stupid one: by dawn on that autumn day on Hameau Ridge there was no ‘D’ Company. No officers, no sanitary corporals, no riflemen. And even of the rest of the battalion there were only a handful left on their feet, the bewildered conquerors of the Prussian Redoubt. After two more years of war and nearly sixty years of wear and tear they were lucky to have any Poachers to talk to at all.

But Butler was no longer listening to him anyway; he had climbed onto the firestep of the trench and was staring across the huge craters of the fifty-yard strip of no-man’s-land which separated it from the British line.

‘Now’s your best chance to talk to Hayhoe on your own,’ he growled. ‘See the little one over there by the notice-board - the one all by himself? Always keeps to himself when we get to the battlefields and the cemeteries, Hayhoe does. Joins in the talk and the sing-songs in the coach and the hotel, but keeps to himself in the open. You go and talk to him now while I go and get Faversham.’

Mitchell studied the little man narrowly as he walked down the path towards him.

Sergeant Hayhoe, DCM, sometime sanitary corporal … that would be a problem, getting rid of the shit in the trenches when the fighting was static: weeks and months in the same place, going in and out of the line, you couldn’t just chuck it anywhere - and couldn’t do anything with it during daylight. So it would be another part of the busy night routine. It was odd that in all his researches he’d never thought of finding out about so basic and important a fact of life.

Little, but not frail: Hayhoe was wiry and compact, like a jockey, with a shock of badly-cut grey hair above a face weathered red and brown by wind and time, a Hobbit of a man who gave the impression that in his day he’d always been big enough at a pinch.

And a little old man now who took in Mitchell from head to toe carefully with a clear eye.

‘Mr - Hayhoe?’ Mitchell thrust out his hand. ‘My name’s Lefevre - Royal Tank Regiment.’

Cold, bony hand. But the grip was firm.

‘Pleased to meet you.’

Hayhoe nodded easily, the relationships and differences of age, rank, class and occasion all computed and balanced gracefully so that there was room neither for deference nor condescension in the greeting.

‘Goin’ to show us round tomorrow, the Colonel said - right?’

‘I don’t think I’d presume to do that, Mr Hayhoe. I think you know it all better than I do. I thought maybe you’d show me a thing or two, to be honest.’

Hayhoe examined him briefly for signs of insincerity, and then showed a couple of yellow teeth in a lopsided smile, shaking his head.

‘Might have done once, one or two places, not now though. Don’t recognise it now.’

He shook his head again.

‘First time I came out again - that was for the unveiling of the memorial at Thiepval, in the old King’s time, King George V -didn’t recognise it then. All gone, what I remember … an’ good riddance, too.’

‘You mean the trees and the grass had come back?’

‘An’ the smell had gone. Always had a good sense of smell I had - still have, too. Wished I hadn’t
then,
worse than the mines, an’ I never liked them either.’

‘The mines?’

‘Ah, I was in the pits when the war started, an’ glad to be out of ‘em at first, I was. But then it was out of the fryin’ pan an’ into the fire, an’ no mistake.’

He grinned ruefully at Mitchell.

‘I’d of liked nothin’ better than a good deep pit when Jerry was givin’ us what for.’

‘But you joined the 29th Rifles - the Poachers, I thought?’

‘That I did - ‘cause my elder brother did. A keeper on Lord Studley’s estate he was - when he joined up a dozen of us lads from the pit went along with ‘im an’ two others from t’estate.’

‘And they took you - obviously.’

‘An’ glad to. Wanted to make a good showing - an’ the head keeper said he’d rather ‘ave us shooting Germans than his lordship’s pheasants, bein’ as how he was going to be short-handed.’

A genuine poacher, he’d got, Mitchell realised. And of course that must have been how it had worked: if you were losing your young keepers for King and Country it was only common sense to take the young poachers out of circulation at the same time. It was an added irony that the poachers had thereafter taken over the battalion in the popular estimation.

He grinned at Hayhoe.

‘I’ve heard you got yourselves a reputation for a bit of poaching over here - until the Australians arrived.’

Hayhoe grinned back at him wickedly.

‘Arr - the Aussies - Anzacs we called ‘em then - they were the boys! Steal the shine off your buttons, they would. Good lads, though - Jerry was scared of them, I reckon. Don’t blame him.’

‘It was the Australians who relieved your battalion on Hameau Ridge, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right. Came through Bully Wood at the double when I was helping with the wounded - cor, and they were fightin’ mad then! “No prisoners” they were shoutin’ - “No prisoners”. They’d had some trouble with prisoners, that’s what one of ‘em told me, though I reckon it was more likely snipers - the wood was still full of them, like. No one really knew what was happenin’, not us and not Jerry neither, it had all happened so quick. An’ I was in this shell-hole with Mr Leigh-Woodhouse, all covered with blood - ‘

‘General Leigh-Woodhouse?’

‘That’s him. But he was just a boy then, of course, though he was a good officer, mind you - brave. Those officers then, it was all “Follow me”, not like later on … you could get bad ones then an’ it’ud be “After you, an’ don’t let me see one of you hold back” … but in the old Poachers they was all brave - too brave. They had different uniforms, see, an’ carried revolvers, and Jerry picked ‘em off like flies.’

‘I’ve heard tell that some of them carried shotguns - is that true?’

‘Shotguns?’

For a moment Hayhoe seemed not to understand the question.

‘Now you’ve mentioned it, some of ‘em did - like young Mr Dyson in our company. An’ he was lying dead in that same shell-hole, too, with Mr Leigh-Woodhouse. There was this Jerry prisoner too, just a kid, and this Aussie comes up and says “Stand up”, and Jerry stands up - and I
knew
what he was goin’ to do an’ I says “You can’t do that” an’ he says “You just watch me, mate” and he poops him.’

‘Poops him?’

‘Kills him - shoots him. “That’s settled the bugger”, he says, and off he goes cool as you like. I remember that just like it happened yesterday - “That’s settled the bugger”, he says. Cor!’

If Sanitary Corporal Hayhoe had felt any disapproval at Australian behaviour in 1916, the passage of time had erased it, reducing it to history. There was even a faint suggestion of admiration, a tacit acknowledgement that maybe the killer had been acting with instinctive logic better suited to conditions in Bully Wood at the time.

But that was a blind alley now.

‘Do you remember the names of the other officers?’

‘Of the old Poachers?’ Hayhoe looked at him. ‘Well, Lord St Blaizey commanded the battalion, of course - he was killed that morning, just outside the wood - him and the adjutant together. An’ my company commander was Captain Ashley, that was Lord Riding’s younger son - he was wounded. Lost an eye and a hand, he did, and he was back in France a year later - killed at Messines in ‘17, he was.’

It looked as though
Burke
’
s Peerage
and
Debrett
’
s
would have required substantial re-editing after Hameau Ridge.

Hayhoe closed his eyes.

‘Then there were our other company officers: Mr Leigh-Woodhouse and Mr Dyson - an’ Mr Ellison - he was killed by a shell, he was.’

‘What about the other companies?’

‘Arr, don’t remember them so well … “A” Company was commanded by let me think - that was Captain Pardoe, “B” Company was Captain Gordon. An’ “D” Company was Captain Barbury - Viscount Barbury, of course. That was my brother’s company, that was.’

‘ “D” Company?’

Hayhoe nodded.

‘Most of my friends, them I’d joined up with was in “D” Company. Best company in the battalion to be in, too.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Why?’ Hayhoe cocked his head. ‘Well, we were always having to dig these trenches - they had to be seven foot deep, four foot wide at the bottom and seven foot wide at the top. An’ when you’d done it - when you’d dug two yards of that - you were right for the day … Well, you see, there were a lot of miners in that company, my friends an’ some lads from the Forest of Dean an’ also from up Durham way, an’ they was just the kids for digging. Ordinary chaps, they couldn’t dig worth a damn, but us miners - we used to say “Come out of the bloody way, give us the spade”, an’ then we’d finish the job in half the time … I’d ‘ave given anything to ‘ave been in with them. But, of course, I wouldn’t be here now speakin’ to you if I had have been.’

‘Why not?’

‘Arr, because they was all killed, see.’

‘All?’

‘Every man jack of ‘em. They went up ahead of us with the North Berks Fusiliers for some reason, I never knew what for, an’ that’s the last time we ever clapped eyes on ‘em - never saw not one of ‘em again, not one - Bill, my brother, an’ my cousin Bertie, and little George Brett, an’ Herbert Bidwell, an’ Arthur Hough - ‘ Hayhoe’s voice quavered suddenly ‘ - good lads, all good lads - all from our village. I was the only one left, an’ when I went home for Christmas in ‘16 Herbie Bidwell’s mother came up to me, an’ she looked at me an’ she said “Why you?” Just that - she just looked at me an’ said “Why you?” and not another word.’

He wiped his hand across his face.

‘I never went home on leave again, not while the war was on, not until after the Armistice. Stayed at the YMCA in London instead.