Blackstone and the Great War (3 page)

‘And how
was
I looking at you?'

‘As if I was nothing! As if I was a piece of dog shit you'd stepped in! I've been getting that look all my life, and I'm heartily tired of it.'

‘I promise you, I wasn't looking at you as if you were a piece of dog shit,' Blackstone said.

‘No?' Mick said, disbelievingly.

‘No,' Blackstone repeated. ‘I was looking at you as if you were a bloody idiot.'

Mick chuckled. ‘Oh, that's all right then,' he said, ‘because, if truth be told, I'm
not
all that bright.'

‘Don't underrate yourself. You're sounding brighter all he time,' Blackstone told him.

‘Thanks for that, sir,' Mick said, sincerely. ‘I wouldn't have thrown you off the train, even if I'd been able to. That was just me being stupid.'

‘I know,' Blackstone said.

Mick hesitated before speaking again.

‘Are we all right with each other, now?' he asked finally. ‘I mean, are we pals?'

‘We're all right with each other, certainly,' Blackstone said. ‘I'd like to leave it a day or so before I decide if we're pals or not.'

‘Fair enough!' Mick replied, with a cheeriness which, despite himself, Blackstone found endearing.

There was another series of booms in the distance.

‘Why are they fighting at night, sir?' asked a new voice, which Blackstone recognized as belonging to Mick's friend, Sid.

‘They're
not
fighting in any real sense of the word,' Blackstone said. ‘They're just firing off shells.'

‘But what's the point of that, if they can't even see if they're hitting their target?'

Blackstone sighed. ‘Some shells
will
hit their targets – or, at least, when they're filling in their reports, they'll decide that whatever they hit
was
what they were aiming for all along. But the main point of the bombardment is not to
hit
anything – it's to wear down the enemy's nerves.'

‘Doesn't seem very sporting,' Sid said dubiously.

He's been wrong to call these lads
boys
, Blackstone thought – they were more like babes-in-arms.

After they had marched for another three miles, they reached the artillery batteries which had been making all the noise.

Some of the men broke step in order to take a closer look at them, but then one of the sergeants shouted, ‘What are you gawping at, you useless bleeders? This ain't August bank holiday on Hampstead Heath – keep moving.'

They were a hundred yards beyond the guns when a series of shells whizzed over their heads on their way to German-held territory, and though it was obvious that they were in no danger themselves, some of the soldiers still faltered, causing the men behind to crash into them.

Ahead of them – way ahead – they saw red flashes as the shells landed.

Sid laughed nervously. ‘Well, I certainly wouldn't like to be one of them Huns tonight,' he said.

‘The Germans have big guns too,' Blackstone reminded him. ‘Probably more than we have.'

And almost as if they had been listening to him – waiting for his signal – the German guns answered back.

It was the whooshing noise – coming relentlessly through the air at them – that alerted the young soldiers, and they threw themselves down in a panicked confusion of knees and elbows.

Then the shell landed – not thirty yards in front of them – first thudding heavily into the earth, and then exploding.

The ground shook, and the supine men felt tiny ripples of movement running along the length of their bodies.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus!' someone moaned.

‘Watch out for the shell casing!' one of the sergeants called out, in a calm, authoritative voice.

There was a curious hissing sound in the air, a little like the noise a mermaid might have made when attempting to sing underwater, and then small pieces of shell casing, some no bigger than a coin, began to rain down on them.

‘Right, excitement over!' the same sergeant said, after a few seconds had passed. ‘You can stand up now.'

The soldiers clambered awkwardly back to their feet.

‘Bloody hell, that was a close one,' Mick said shakily. ‘If we'd been marching a bit faster, it would have had us.'

‘I'm going to die,' said Sid, in a voice so calmly fatalistic that it chilled Blackstone's blood.

‘No, you ain't,' Mick replied. ‘You're looking at things arse-ways up, my old mate. That shell was a sign from heaven – it was a way of telling us that we've got a charmed life.'

It was a noble effort from someone who was obviously badly shaken up himself, Blackstone thought, but it seemed to have little effect on Sid.

‘I'll never see my twentieth birthday,' the young recruit said, his voice still eerily level. ‘I know I won't.'

‘Course you will!' Mick said, and now there was an edge of desperation in his words. ‘Bleedin' hell, Sid, you seem to have forgotten that your birthday's only
four days away
.'

‘If you manage to get back to Blighty yourself, tell Maisie I
would
have married her if I'd lived,' Sid said.

‘Come on, old pal, don't be like that,' Mick pleaded.

‘Tell her that she was the best thing that could ever have happened to a nobody like me,' Sid said, with sad certainty.

THREE

B
lackstone followed the red-bereted MFP corporal along the reserve trench, which was half a mile behind the front line. The trench itself was roughly twelve feet deep, and perhaps ten feet wide, he calculated. It did not run in a straight line, but in a zigzag, with a blind corner every nine yards or so. Duckboards covered its earthen floor, sandbags supported its earthen walls.

And it stank – God, how it stank!

Ever the professional observer, Blackstone found himself attempting to isolate each of the individual smells which worked together to make up the putrid, disgusting whole.

There was cordite, certainly, but that was hardly surprising, given that, even in the short time he had been in the trench, he had heard the sound of at least a dozen rifle shots, fired – almost certainly pointlessly – at the enemy lines.

There was the odour of the overflowing cesspits – mere holes in the ground, covered with planks – which the men used as their latrines.

There was a hint of cigarette smoke, the chemical sting of the lime chloride laid down to prevent the spread of disease, the mouldy smell of rotting sandbags and the rank odour of men's unwashed bodies.

And occasionally, when a slight breeze blew over the trench, he thought he caught a whiff of the decaying corpses, hastily buried in shallow graves in No Man's Land.

There were private soldiers in the trench. They were a miserable, bedraggled bunch, as different to the square-jawed confident heroes of the recruiting posters as it was possible to imagine. Some were squatted down, smoking, playing cards or talking in low, hoarse whispers. Others were huddled into the small dugouts, carved from the side of the trench, trying to catch a little sleep.

The soldiers did not look up as Blackstone approached them, but he felt their eyes following him once he had passed by.

They knew why he was there, he thought – they probably weren't supposed to, but they knew right enough.

The redcap came to a halt in front of a wooden door in the back wall of the trench, rapped on the door with his fist and said, ‘Visitor and escort, seeking permission to enter, sir!' in a voice which would have carried all the way across a parade ground.

There was a muffled response from inside, and the redcap opened the door and gestured to Blackstone that he should step forward.

The room that they entered was a substantial one, and a far cry from the holes in the trench in which the enlisted men did their best to get some rest. Close to the door was a table covered with a clean white cloth, on which sat a bottle of whisky and a set of crystal glasses. Beyond the table, there were a number of armchairs and a wind-up gramophone, and at the back of the dugout there were three or four beds with comfortable mattresses.

There were five officers sitting at the table, two captains and three second lieutenants.

The redcap looked first at one captain and then at the other, as if unsure of which one to address.

That was the army for you, Blackstone thought, amused at his obvious perplexity. The captain at the head of the table was probably the company commander, which, under normal circumstances, made him unquestionably the most important man in the room. But the other captain, as was evident from his badge, was a military policeman – which meant he was the redcap's boss – and that fact alone was enough to muddy the normally clear blue waters of military protocol.

‘You may go, Corporal,' the company commander said.

The corporal looked relieved that the decision had been taken out of his hands. He saluted – wisely looking straight at his own captain as he did so – wheeled round, and smartly exited the dugout.

From the expression on the redcap captain's face, it was clear to Blackstone that he was not entirely pleased with the way things had panned out, but equally clear that he felt he could say nothing about it in the presence of three junior officers and a mere civilian. The junior officers themselves were pretending to have a complete lack of interest in the new arrival, though when they thought Blackstone was not looking at them, they took the opportunity to study him closely.

‘So you're Blackstone, are you?' the company commander asked.

‘That's right,' the policeman agreed.

‘I'm Captain Carstairs,' the captain told him. ‘You may stand at ease, Blackstone.'

‘To do that successfully, I'd first have to have been standing at attention,' Blackstone pointed out. ‘And I wasn't.'

Carstairs frowned, then turned towards the younger officers.

‘I expect that you gentlemen are anxious to return to your duties,' he said.

The lieutenants nodded – recognizing an order when they heard one – and stood up.

‘Goodnight, sir,' they said in unison.

‘Goodnight Maude, goodnight Soames, goodnight Hatfield,' Carstairs drawled.

The three young officers crossed the dugout and walked past Blackstone. None of them looked directly at him – nor even so much as acknowledged his physical presence – but that couldn't cover up the fact that they had been bursting with curiosity when he first walked in.

‘Maude, Soames and Hatfield,' Blackstone repeated silently.

He would remember those names and those faces, just in case their presence in the dugout that night had been more than just a coincidence.

‘Do you have any questions you'd care to put to Blackstone, Captain Huxton?' Carstairs asked the other remaining officer.

‘I most certainly do,' Huxton replied. ‘You're a sergeant, aren't you, Blackstone?'

He had just about got the measure of the two men now, Blackstone decided.

Carstairs, despite his greying temples, was probably still only in his early thirties. He was the sort of man who would not find the burden of command an easy one to bear, but would do his best to fulfil the role honourably and conscientiously. As officers went, he was probably not a bad man, though, like most officers, his view of the world around him was probably as narrow as the one which could be viewed through a trench periscope.

Huxton was another matter altogether. He had a rounded face and a florid complexion, and his eyes told the story of a man who had gone through life with the firm belief that no problem was so large that it could not be solved by merely shouting loudly at it.

‘Are you stone deaf, man?' Huxton demanded. ‘I asked you if you were a sergeant.'

‘I used to be,' Blackstone replied. ‘I
used to be
a lot of things – but now I'm a police inspector.'

Captain Huxton lifted his whisky glass, and took a leisurely sip, leaving Blackstone standing there in front of the table, as if he were a guilty schoolboy who had been summoned to the headmaster's study.

Huxton smacked his lips in appreciation, put his glass down, and said, ‘I hear you served in India and Afghanistan.'

‘I did,' Blackstone agreed.

‘Well, that must have been a long time ago now,' Huxton reflected. ‘Soldiering has changed a lot since your day.'

No, it hadn't, Blackstone thought – not if these men were anything to go by. The weapons may have become more lethal, the tactics might now be very different, but the army was still the army he had known – and Carstairs and Huxton were the living proof of it.

‘We've had to lower our standards since this bloody war started, and the average age of my chaps now is considerably higher than it used to be,' Huxton continued, ‘but even so, you're much older than I'd normally consider acceptable.' He paused. ‘And then there's the fact that all my men are corporals, while you're a sergeant.'

‘Is that a problem?' Blackstone asked.

‘Yes, but not an insurmountable one,' Huxton said complacently. ‘I'm sure that as soon you've learned how we go about our business in today's army, you'll fit in well enough. But one thing will have to change – and change damn quickly,' he warned, his voice hardening and his finger wagging, ‘and that's your attitude. You're far too casual. I expect the proper deference from all my men – and I don't care how old you are, I expect it from you.'

‘You seem to be labouring under a misapprehension,' Blackstone told him. ‘I haven't been enlisted, and I won't be working for you.'

Huxton snorted in disbelief. ‘Of course you'll be working for me. I'm the Assistant Provost Marshal. Who else would you be working for?'

‘I won't be working for anyone,' Blackstone said. ‘My investigation will be entirely independent of the army, though I may, when the need arises, ask for the assistance of a few of your men.'