‘I think we’ll need some towels here. The flies? Oh, I read a monogram. Recommended by . . .’ He paused. ‘I had a very good tutor, Staff Nurse Jennings.’
Good? The very best, Watson. The very best.
He ignored the comment. It was a trace memory, playing tricks on him. He was aware it could have no connection to his former colleague and friend because, should they pass in the street, Watson knew full well that Sherlock Holmes would no longer give him the time of day.
Sitting in just his singlet and longjohns, Ernst Bloch opened the box of cartridges his father had posted to him and removed the upper layer of the compressed cotton wool that swaddled them. He carefully placed ten of the bullets onto the baize covering of the portable card table at the foot of his bed. They lay next to the pipe he intended to enjoy as soon as he had finished this little task. He wouldn’t worry about the smoke from his potent black tobacco affecting his fellow soldiers, because there were none.
Bloch occupied his own cubbyhole in one of the deep, airless dugouts. He was curtained off from the regular troops in his own miniature Siegfried shelter. Nobody in the regular army cared much for snipers, not even those on his own side. The conscientious objectors who cleaned the latrines were held in higher esteem.
Bloch didn’t care. At least, unlike poison gas or the flamethrower, there was still a sporting element to his hunt for a target. It was a way of waging warfare that went back to the Crimea and the Edinburgh Rifles, who had first used telescopic sights to kill Russian gunnery officers. Bloch had done his homework; he could justify his trade in any argument, but it had long ago become tiresome. Let the cannon fodder grumble about him and his opposite numbers on the Allied side.
He weighed the first of the rounds on the little scales he had set up. Then the second and a third. All three were within a fraction of a gram of each other. Satisfied, he stood a steel ruler on its side. A half-moon depression had been milled out of it and into that he slotted the cartridge, adjusting it until he found the centre of gravity. He repeated this four times, noting the balance point was identical in each case. His father had followed his instructions to the letter.
Schaeffer came through with a cup of coffee for him and quickly retired, pulling the thick blanket that doubled for a curtain back into place as he went. He knew that Bloch didn’t want to be interrupted while he polished his ammunition or stripped down his rifle. A grunted thanks was the only exchange.
Bloch felt a vibration in the earth, an explosion high above, too distant to register as sound. The German trenches were dug deep and snug, excavated on higher ground, in well-drained soil, which meant they could easily reach forty metres or more into the earth. The British and French were in the soggy lowlands and they were living in shallow gashes in the earth, poorly revetted with wood and parapeted with sandbags to give them extra depth. He had been in the French trenches on a night raid in the early days, before he transferred to the sharpshooters. They were shameful.
‘Bloch.’
‘Sir.’ He put down the bullet he had been wiping with a cloth and stood to attention. The blanket was whisked back and an officer joined him in the compact space. It was the sniping section supervisor, Hauptmann Lux, a Saxon by birth, now attached, like Bloch, to the Sixth Army. Lux was not a tall man, but held himself well, and his uniforms always fitted immaculately. Next to him, Bloch always felt like the unfinished country lad he was. It could have been worse. Lux could have been a prick of a Prussian. That would have been unbearable.
Lux looked Bloch up and down, bemused at a man in his underwear standing ramrod straight, as if waiting for a kit inspection. ‘At ease, Bloch. Jesus, it’s hotter than hell down here.’ Lux took off his cap, wiped his brow and looked around Bloch’s impressively neat cubicle. His eyes fell on the needle-nosed bullets. He picked up the scales. ‘Private ammunition?’
‘My father makes them, sir. They reduce flash and smoke. But weight and balance are critical.’
Lux nodded, not really caring. Every sniper had his rituals, his superstitions and some specialist equipment he believed gave him an advantage over his fellows. ‘An officer today, I hear?’
Bloch knew Lux received a daily tally from all his snipers and, for corroboration, their spotters. ‘Sir.’
‘That is twenty-nine kills, I believe. Or at least, twenty-nine confirmed officers.’
‘Yes.’ The actual tally was close to a hundred, but, since his overenthusiastic early days when he shot anything that moved, he had become much more selective.
‘One more and it’s an Iron Cross, Second Class for you.’
Bloch remained impassive. He wasn’t doing this for baubles. He didn’t even do it because he hated the British individually; there were times when he felt sorry for the young officers he caught in his sights. But he detested the British imperial arrogance that led the country to think it deserved a hand in every nation’s affairs. He did this job because he believed in a strong Germany that wasn’t dominated by an insignificant island with inflated ideas about its importance. And he did it because he was good at it. ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘And a week’s leave.’
Now Bloch allowed himself a ghost of a smile. However, it didn’t do to dwell too much on the carrot of a few days with Mother, Father, sister and perhaps Hilde. The army had a habit of cruelly snatching away a furlough at the last moment on the flimsiest of excuses.
‘There are fresh British units moving into this section,’ Lux said. ‘Untested. Kitchener’s New Army. They’ve been a long time coming, eh? The theory is they will get used to trench life in a quiet section. Learn something from the Scottischers who are already here.’
Bloch was not surprised by Lux’s knowledge. The army’s intelligence about which divisions and regiments they were facing was always excellent. He assumed they had good spies somewhere over the wire.
‘A section defended by untried troops is an opportunity for us to try something different.’ Lux indicated Bloch should move to one side, then took out a map and laid it onto the bed, smoothing the folds with the flat of his well-manicured hand.
It showed two thick black lines, representing the opposing trenches, snaking across the page, the loops sometimes coming close, within, Bloch knew, twenty metres at some points, then diverging again so that no man’s land might be a void of a half-kilometre in width. Lux pointed to a red trace that had been drawn from Ploegsteert village through the nearby woods. ‘This road is the one they call the Strand. Here, Oxford Circus. Have you ever been to London, Bloch?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It doesn’t match Berlin. It is far dirtier, more squalid, but it has a certain grimy charm. And they know how to throw a decent dance, I will grant them that. Perhaps you’ll be there one day soon, eh? When it belongs to us.’ He carried on when Bloch did not reply. ‘This area,’ he pointed to the east of Ploegsteert Wood, ‘is The Birdcage and this is Somerset House. Brigade HQ for the British here. This is where the new officers will be briefed about the sector. And here . . .’ another stab at the map, ‘. . . is the church steeple of Le Gheer. Now, Bloch, thanks to shelling of the woods and a subsequent fire, we believe there is a clear sight-line from this steeple to Somerset House. A good sniper could lie low up there and perhaps pick off half a dozen senior officers at one session. Including . . .’ he paused while he took out a newspaper cutting, which he unfurled for Bloch, ‘. . . this man.’
Bloch studied the grainy photograph of a portly Englishman, a major. Like all snipers he knew his Allied uniforms. The man was emerging from the doorway of an official-looking building, a terrible scowl across his face, as if he were about to bawl out some unfortunate subordinate.
‘You know who this is?’
‘I think so, sir.’
‘Really?’ Lux sounded impressed, but Bloch’s cousin Willi was in the navy, and had often talked about this man, as if he were engaged in a personal war with him.
Bloch read the caption, just to be certain. His English was poor, but a name was a name and he certainly knew this one. ‘Yes.’
‘And you could recognize him through a rifle scope?’
Bloch looked at the pugnacious face once more and nodded.
‘Good man. Put a bullet through him and it’ll be an Iron Cross First Class and two weeks’ leave, Bloch.’
But it wasn’t the target or the double points for shooting him that exercised Bloch. He looked back at the ‘X’ marking the steeple and the wiggling traces of the opposing trenches on the map. His real concern was, whatever remained of Le Gheer church, it was firmly on the British side of the lines.
Watson stumbled out of the transfusion unit into a glutinous, all-enveloping blackness and paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust. It was as if his head had been wrapped in a thick velvet cloth and it wouldn’t do to break his neck stumbling over the taut guy ropes that played out from the tents in all directions.
He had no idea how many hours had passed since he first saw that jawless man – what was the name again? Lovell? Lovat? So many names, ranks and numbers, so many abbreviations that only hinted at God-awful wounds. The victims had come thick and fast, in such numbers he was initially forced to transfuse soldier-to-soldier, using syringes lined with paraffin wax to try to inhibit the clotting. It was preferable to the previous method, where the radial artery of one man was inserted directly into the median vein of another, and the flow controlled by sutures and thumb and forefinger, but very hit and miss compared to his new system.
Eventually, though, he had been able to collect donations of blood for citration from the lightly injured. Soldiers who agreed to be donors were rewarded with a weekend pass to be used before rejoining their battalion. Thus there had been no shortage of volunteers and he had created a small stockpile, which he had citrated, ‘typed’ and put on ice.
He wondered what that harpy of a sister-in-charge would say if she knew he had allowed the VADs to help draw the blood. And that all the soldiers had called them ‘nurse’. He shuddered to think what acid remarks she would draw up from her well of vitriol.
As his pupils dilated, Watson looked up at the sky and checked off a few of the familiar astronomical markers that were emerging: the Plough, Orion, and the iconic ‘W’ of the stars of Cassiopeia. This was clearly the same world he had always inhabited, under the same heavens. It simply no longer seemed familiar; he felt as if he had been whisked off to some distant planet, where the earth as he knew it had been subverted and distorted into a hideous simulacrum of the real thing.
Some way distant, he saw the flash of a star shell, briefly illuminating all beneath it with its sickly, over-white light, before it faded, leaving only an after-image on his retinae. There was still a war going on out there, even under cover of darkness. Although they were miles away, he could smell the trenches on the wind: a devil’s stew of overflowing latrines, unwashed bodies, cigarette smoke, stagnant mud and rotting corpses that clawed at the senses. Those who experienced the revolting aroma up close for the first time, he was told, were often physically sick. Within a week, they no longer noticed; indeed, they had become part of the stench.
Over to his left he could make out the grim rows of stretchers holding bodies stitched into coarse army blankets. A figure moved among them, sometimes bending down and shining a torch onto a label and writing on a clipboard. One of the padres, no doubt, finding out which of the men belonged to his flock and which to some other shepherd. Chaplains of every stripe, and the orderlies who acted as gravediggers, would be busy the next morning. Watson wondered for a moment how the man’s faith was holding up, but he was too weary to start a theological discussion.
He began a slow trudge uphill, towards his billet in the Big House, careful to favour his aching knee. He passed the pack store – once the groundkeepers’ shed – and skirted the rectangular beds of what must have been part of the old monastery gardens, now sad and neglected. He caught the scent of thyme and . . . yes, liquoricey wild fennel. Who knew when this patch would be growing their medicinal herbs or vegetables again?
The lawned section of grounds just before the stone steps up to the monastery was pitched with the tents that made up the nurses’ quarters. The flap of Sister-in-Charge Spence’s bell tent was open as he passed and he glanced inside. Clearly illuminated by a hooded candlestick reading lamp, she was seated at a chipped wooden writing desk poring over a pile of post, a thick brush and inkpot to hand. She was censoring. Something made her look up and she waved him over.
Watson hesitated, swaying slightly as a wave of tiredness broke over him. Unnaturally amplified sounds rattled around his cranium: a distant explosion that cracked the night sky, a man coughing his last some yards behind him, the hum of electricity wires feeding the larger tents, the whirring of clockwork from the mechanical oil lamps used elsewhere, the snorting of jittery horses from a nearby livery stable. He felt like closing his eyes there and then. But he shook his head clear, put one foot in front of the other and went across to Sister Spence.
‘Major Watson,’ she said as she stood, put the lid on the inkpot and snuffed out the twin candles of the reading lamp, ‘I thought some hot chocolate might be in order. Rowntree’s.’
‘That sounds splendid,’ he said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. He just wanted to get out of his ruined clothes.
She placed the kettle on top of the Beatrice oil stove and spooned the powder into two enamel mugs, talking as she did so. ‘No milk, I am afraid. I saw your two VADs giving out teas earlier. Very efficient.’ She looked over. ‘I hope that was all they did.’
‘They assisted me with transfusions. Sterilizing syringes and the like.’
The sly smile told Watson that she didn’t believe a word of that, but was prepared to let it pass.
She realized that decorum was dictating he kept one foot outside. ‘Oh, do come in, nobody is going to think two dry old twigs like us are up to anything improper.’