Blackstone and the Great War (16 page)

‘You're a remarkable young man,' the General said.

Patterson grinned again. ‘With all due respect to you, General, you know that's not true,' he said. ‘I'm no more than a reasonably competent middle-aged man,' he said.

‘So you are,' the General agreed. ‘Help me to my feet, please, Sergeant. My old bones are having one of their better days, and I would rather like to take a small turn around the gardens.'

THIRTEEN

W
hen Blackstone had started out from St Denis that morning, his ankle had hurt like the devil, but the closer he got to the front line, the more the pain had seemed to ease, and now that he was in the communications trench, it was hardly bothering him at all.

The trench was just deep enough to ensure that a German sniper wouldn't take the top off his head as he walked along it, just wide enough for him to be able to touch both sides of it with his outstretched arms, and though – when men or materiel were being moved – it could be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus at noon, he now had it all to himself.

He had just stopped to light a cigarette when the explosion came. The sound was muffled – no louder than he might have made by dropping a book on the floor – but from the way in which the walls of the trench shook, it was clear to him that if he'd been much closer, the noise would have been ear-shattering.

He could have turned around then – could have avoided the horror which he was almost certain would lie ahead – but his life had never been about running away, and after taking a puff of his cigarette, he continued his journey.

He reached the end of the communication trench, and stepped into a modern version of hell.

The shell had landed squarely in the fire trench, gouging a huge hole in the back wall, destroying some of the heavy sandbags, and sending others flying. Huge boulders of clayey earth were strewn on the duckboards, as if flung there by an angry giant, and the stretcher parties were having to struggle around them in order to get the groaning, wounded men to the nearest dressing station.

The whole trench stank of cordite and blood. A number of men who had been far enough away from the explosion to avoid injury sat on the ground, their faces blank, their minds disengaged. Others had manic grins on their faces, and one – a blond-haired boy with a thin pale face – was sobbing uncontrollably.

A bloodied corpse lay in Blackstone's path, its face a mishmash of muscle and bone, and its right arm missing. He stepped around it, wishing there was something he could do – and knowing there wasn't.

Further down the trench, a sergeant blew his whistle loudly.

‘Come on, you lads, snap out of it!' he bellowed. ‘That was unlucky, I'll grant you – but we can't leave the trench like this.'

Slowly, the men rose to their feet, and made their way towards where the sergeant was standing.

‘That's it, lads,' the sergeant shouted encouragingly. ‘Look lively, and we'll soon have it fixed.'

Like zombies, the men reached for the picks and shovels they would need to repair the trench.

The sergeant saw Blackstone looking at him.

‘It happens!' he said aggressively, as if he had read criticism in the other man's expression. ‘It bloody happens, whether we like it or not – and we just have to bloody carry on!'

Blackstone nodded, agreeing silently that, yes, it did happen, and, yes, they just had to bloody carry on.

He turned slightly, and saw the missing arm of the dead soldier, lying lonely on top of a wall of sandbags. He wondered if, amid this chaos, it would eventually be buried with his owner.

‘You're in the way!' the sergeant screamed at him. ‘Get out of the bloody way!'

Blackstone eased himself past the soldiers with their shovels, and their angry sergeant with his whistle. He wanted to tell them all that he understood their pain and their fear, but he knew that he didn't – knew that he was only a visitor to this war which had become the centre of their existence.

He turned the corner, and entered another world. In this section of the trench, the men were following their normal routine – filling sacks with sand, stacking the sandbags against the wall of the trench, and repairing the duckboards, all with a calm, steady work rhythm.

Did they know about the tragedy which had occurred in the next section? Blackstone wondered.

Of course they did! They could not have failed to hear the boom, and were well enough aware of what damage an exploding shell could do.

But since it hadn't happened to them, it was none of their business. If it didn't touch their own struggle for survival, it could be ignored –
must
be ignored, if they were to avoid going mad.

He spotted the man he'd come to see standing at the entrance to his dugout, and looking towards the other end of the trench.

Even from that angle – and at that distance – it was obvious that Hatfield was not in command of himself, let alone anyone else, he thought.

Blackstone had known a number of officers like Hatfield during his service in India – weak men who, because they had been born into privilege, felt it was their duty to serve their country in the army. They had been quite wrong, of course – they would have better served their country by staying
out
of the army, and letting men who knew what they were doing take charge – but there had been no telling them that then, and there was no telling them that now.

‘Good morning, Lieutenant!' Blackstone called out.

The words made Hatfield turn around, perhaps more quickly than he had intended to, and a wince of pain crossed his face.

‘Terrible mess in the next section of trench,' Blackstone said. ‘There's blood everywhere – and if the field gun had been pointed a fraction of a degree to the left when it was fired, that could have been you.'

‘It will be me,' Hatfield replied. ‘Sooner or later, it's
bound
to be me.'

‘You're probably right,' Blackstone agreed cheerfully. ‘There are some blokes who are both unlucky in love
and
unlucky at cards – and you do seem to be one of them. But if I was a betting man, I'd put my money on
Lieutenant Maude
surviving the war without a scratch – because he's the kind of man who always does.'

‘Perhaps he is,' Hatfield said flatly.

‘You are rather forgetting your manners, aren't you?' Blackstone asked.

‘My manners?' Hatfield repeated, mystified.

‘You never asked me how I was feeling this morning, which is really rather rude.'

Most other men in his position would have damned Blackstone for his impertinence, but Hatfield, after an uncomfortable silence of perhaps twenty seconds, forced himself to say, ‘So how
are
you feeling this morning?'

‘To tell you the truth, I'm getting a bit of gyp from this left ankle of mine,' Blackstone said. ‘And how are
you
feeling, Lieutenant Hatfield?'

‘I'm  . . . uh  . . . fine,' Hatfield replied, refusing to meet Blackstone's eye.

‘Really? When I saw you turn around just then, you looked a little stiff to me. A touch of the rheumatics, is it? That's an old man's affliction, you know. I should have thought a boy of your age would have been fighting fit.'

‘I
am
fighting fit,' Hatfield said, with an uncharacteristic burst of pride.

‘I'm certainly relieved to hear that,' Blackstone said. ‘But, as pleasant as it's been talking about health matters with you, that's not at all why I came here today, is it?'

Hatfield should have said nothing – he
knew
he should have said nothing – but once again, after a few moments of awkward silence, he felt compelled to speak.

‘So why did you come here?'

‘I came to bring you a present,' Blackstone said.

‘A present?'

‘Well, it's not really a present, I suppose. It's more a case of my returning your property to you.'

‘My property?'

‘You really should get out of the habit of repeating everything I say, you know,' Blackstone advised. ‘It makes you sound like you're not your own man at all.' Then he reached into his pocket, took out the tent peg mallet, and held it out to the lieutenant. ‘This
is
yours, isn't it?'

Hatfield folded his arms across his chest – and winced again.

‘I've never seen it before in my life,' he said unconvincingly.

‘You've never seen a mallet before?' Blackstone asked, in mock-surprise.

‘Well, of course I've seen a mallet before, but  . . .'

‘But not this one?'

‘That's right.'

‘Now that is interesting,' Blackstone mused. ‘Myself, I can't tell one mallet from another, but without even really looking at it, you're sure you've never seen this particular mallet before.'

‘I have no more to say to you, Inspector,' Hatfield told him, turning towards the dugout.

‘But I have a great deal more to say to you,' Blackstone replied, putting a restraining hand on the other man's shoulder. ‘I watched Lieutenants Soames and Maude lead their men out of St Denis last night, but I didn't see you. Now why was that?'

‘None of your business,' Hatfield said sulkily.

But he did not brush Blackstone's hand away with contempt, as Maude would have done. Nor did he take a swing at the policeman, which would probably have been Soames' instinctive reaction.

‘We both know you stayed behind in the village so that you could pay me an unexpected visit in the middle of the night,' Blackstone said, ‘and we both know that if you stripped off your jacket and shirt now, we'd find a big bruise on your chest that I made with my foot.'

‘That's not true!' Hatfield protested.

‘Well, it should be easy enough to prove, one way or the other. Are you willing to show me your chest?'

‘No!'

‘I thought not,' Blackstone replied. He frowned. ‘Do you know what's puzzling me?'

Hatfield – having at last learned the value of silence – said nothing.

‘It's puzzling me why Maude sent
you
to do his dirty work for him,' Blackstone said.

‘He didn't  . . .'

‘He needed to send somebody, of course. I understand that. I was getting far too close to the murderers for comfort. But you'd have thought he'd have sent someone who could do a
proper
job, wouldn't you?'

‘I have no idea what you're talking about.'

‘Of course you have! You know that I know that it was you who attacked me, and I know that you know it.' Blackstone paused again. ‘You could have finished me off when I was on the ground – Soames would have done, if he'd been in your place – but instead you ran away like a frightened rabbit, which, when you think about it, was awfully bad form.'

‘I didn't  . . .' Hatfield began.

‘So am I right in assuming that you
don't
want your mallet back?' Blackstone interrupted him.

‘It's
not
my mallet!'

‘Is it the same one you used to kill Lieutenant Fortesque?' Blackstone asked, as if the other man had never spoken. ‘Oh, I was forgetting, you
didn't
kill Fortesque – that
was
Lieutenant Soames.'

Hatfield looked almost as if he was about to burst into tears.

‘If only you knew what damage you were doing by being here, you'd put an end to this investigation of yours immediately,' he said.

‘Damage?' Blackstone repeated, mystified. ‘What damage are you talking about?'

‘You have no idea of what reputations you might destroy, have you?' demanded Hatfield, drawing on reserves of spirit that probably even he had not known he possessed. ‘You don't know what pain you'll be causing to some very fine people back home. You can't even begin to imagine the effect you might have on the war effort, right here in these trenches.'

‘Perhaps you're right,' Blackstone agreed. ‘But if you explained those things to me, I
would
understand, wouldn't I?'

‘I  . . . I can't explain,' said Hatfield, clearly drained by his previous effort.

And when he dove for the protective cover of his dugout, Blackstone did not try to stop him.

The two men had been walking slowly around the gardens of Hartley Manor for over a quarter of an hour, with General Fortesque leaning heavily on Patterson's arm for support. So far, not a word had been spoken, but the silence was not an awkward one – at least for the sergeant.

The gardens quite took Patterson's breath away. They were simply magnificent, he thought – like the best parts of the best London parks, only much better.

There were perfectly flat and manicured lawns. There were box hedges trimmed into weird and wonderful shapes. There were greenhouses growing fruits and flowers which the shoppers at Southwark's New Cut Market would – at best – have treated as oddities, and – at worse – would have regarded with extreme suspicion.

And there were peacocks – there were actually bloody honest-to-God peacocks – the colourful males strutting around with puffed out chests and tail feathers spread, the drab females waiting stoically for the ravaging which would come at the end of the display.

Now this was nature as it
should
be, he told himself – not wild and uncontrolled, but neat, tidy and organized.

Finally, they reached a series of ornamental fountains, and the General said, ‘I'm rather tired. I think I'd like to sit down now.'

‘Of course,' Patterson agreed, helping the old man gently down on to a marble bench.

The General sighed. ‘Does anyone ever
really
think they'll end up old?' he asked.

‘Not in the part of London where I come from,' Patterson replied. ‘But then, they're mostly right not to think it – because by the time they
would have
been old, they're already a long time dead.'