No Man's Land Read online

  She’d been there earlier when the ambulance carrying Coleport had arrived. Jack Denial and Sergeant-Major Maggs had arrived simultaneously on the motorcycle combination. She had smiled in welcome, but Denial had been businesslike to the point of brusqueness. He wanted the man treated immediately and he didn’t want him in a ward with anyone else.

  ‘Then he’ll have to go into one of the huts,’ she told him sharply. ‘We can’t clear out a room in the main building, not even for the Assistant Provost Marshal!’

  This at last had won a smile from his reluctant lips.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just that he’s a prisoner. There’ll be a constant guard. You wouldn’t want MPs hanging around a general ward, would you?’

  ‘A guard? He doesn’t look as if he’s going anywhere in that state. What happened anyway?’

  The smile went.

  ‘That’s what I’m going to find out as soon as he can talk.’

  It was easy to provide an empty hut. After the bloody excesses of the summer, winter had stifled the killing impulse to an occasional outburst, and the hospital’s population had shrunk to numbers containable under the hotel roof.

  Coleport had been found to be suffering from severe bruising, cracked ribs and torn muscles, and he had lost several teeth. When the doctors were finished with him, Denial had set two men to guard him and then gone into the hotel with the chief MO for a discussion which lasted about twenty minutes. During all this time, Sergeant-Major Maggs had stood stoically in the doorway.

  Finally Denial had reappeared.

  ‘We’ll go and see our man now, I think, Mr Maggs,’ he said loudly. Then, stooping to Sally, he had added in a lower, gentler voice, ‘Our woman we hope to see later.’

  ‘Later?’ she said, not looking up. ‘You mean tonight? Tomorrow? Next week? Next year?’

  Her ill-tempered response was not due simply to his earlier brusqueness. They never talked of a future beyond their next meeting, and suddenly fatigue and irritation combined to make her long for plans outside the uncertainties of this war.

  He was silent a moment, then said unemotionally, ‘All of those. And half a century more, I hope.’

  His lips brushed her cheek and then he was gone, heading towards the hut, limp hardly noticeable, with Sergeant-Major Maggs in tow.

  For the next couple of minutes Sally sat in a delicious turmoil, staring at the records but seeing nothing except a future she had hitherto refused to contemplate.

  She had just got herself in hand again and begun to work properly when the door opened once more to admit a pair of soldiers in Australian uniform. One was a lantern-jawed man who looked as if he’d seen everything and found it wanting. His eyes ran assessingly over her body as if her trim uniform didn’t exist and he was noting every physical manifestation of her recent excitement. The other was a huge rock of a man with slabs of solid muscle moving beneath his tunic. There was nothing sexual in his gaze, but those eyes, green as emerald and just as hard, conveyed an impression of still menace which was far more disturbing.

  But when he spoke his voice was low and respectful.

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’, he said, coming to attention before the desk. ‘Looking for an Aussie corporal, Coleport’s his name. He’s under arrest. We’re his escort.’

  ‘Escort?’ she said, puzzled. ‘But he’s not going anywhere tonight.’

  ‘No, ma’am. Probably tomorrow, ma’am. We’ve been detailed to escort him back to his unit for trial when he’s fit, so if you could point us where he is.’

  It all sounded very reasonable, but Jack had said nothing of this, and there was something about this huge man which made her feel very uneasy.

  She stood up and said, ‘If you’d just wait here, Sergeant, I’ll fetch someone to deal with this.’

  As she moved from behind the desk, the big man stood aside politely. She gave him an instinctive smile which froze on her lips as his fingers gripped her forearm like a vice.

  ‘Sister,’ he said softly. ‘Just take us to where Corporal Coleport is.’

  There was no threat, no attempt at persuasion, but she felt a wave of pure terror sweep up through her body and she led them out of the main door as if her will had been invaded by a foreign power. That piece of herself which remained intact deep down was praying that Denial and Maggs would have completed their visit and left, but her heart sank at the sight of the motorcycle combination outside the hut.

  Viney said, ‘How many in there with him, Sister?’

  ‘Four,’ she said.

  Viney frowned. For a second she felt hope. Perhaps these were worse odds than they were willing to accept. But the hope quickly died. This man did not deal in calculating odds. He dealt in removing obstacles.

  ‘Right, Sister,’ he said. ‘In you go.’

  He rapped on the hut door with a German officer’s Luger pistol, opened it, and thrust her inside.

  Jack Denial was studying the patient’s temperature chart. In the furthermost corner of the room, Sergeant-Major Maggs was dressing down the two redcap guards whom he had caught playing brag.

  Denial’s eyes opened wide as he saw Sally. She gasped. ‘Oh Jack!’ and flew into his arms, effectively immobilizing him. Maggs, whose back was to the door, continued his scolding and so strong was the power of discipline that for a second the two redcaps hesitated to interrupt him. Then they made a sudden start for their weapons and Maggs spun round in alarm.

  ‘Steady, boys,’ said Viney, holding the Luger like a toy in his huge hand. The redcaps went quite still, like children playing statues.

  In the bed, the plastered and bandaged figure of Blackie Coleport said, ‘G’day to you, mates. Patsy, you mean Irish bastard, have you brought me no grapes?’

  Denial held the trembling nurse tight in his arms and said quietly, ‘What’s the meaning of this, Sergeant?’

  ‘It’s that bastard who scarred me!’ said Maggs urgently.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Viney and silence fell.

  Delaney, moving with great care, now removed Denial’s revolver and put the other MPs’ arms out of reach.

  ‘You fit, Blackie?’ he asked, giving his friend his full attention for the first time.

  The fat corporal rolled out of bed and stood upright, stripping the linen nightgown from his frame with exaggerated but not ungenuine groans. His ribs were tightly strapped and dressings were taped at regular intervals on his arms and legs, and the visible skin was blue and mustard yellow with bruising.

  ‘Jeeze!’ said Delaney.

  ‘Resisting arrest,’ said Coleport. ‘Twice. Here, give’s hold of that.’

  He took Denial’s revolver from Delaney’s hand and limped towards Maggs.

  ‘Fancy a bit of resistance now, sport?’ he said.

  Maggs from his great height regarded him with hate and contempt, but the gun was poking at his belt buckle and he did not speak.

  ‘Get dressed, Blackie,’ said Viney. ‘Time to go.’

  ‘OK,’ said Coleport.

  He turned slowly away, then swung back in a movement of tremendous violence, bringing the revolver up hard between Maggs’s legs. The sergeant-major let out a high-pitched, almost soundless shriek and doubled up. Coleport wrapped his arms around his ribs and grimaced, saying, ‘Christ, that hurt! But you saw him resist, didn’t you, friends? You saw him resist?’

  The two redcaps, whitefaced now, nodded their agreement. Viney gestured at them with his pistol.

  ‘Take his tunic and webbing off and tie him up.’

  Delaney had brought a small pack with him in which were several lengths of rope. As the two redcaps bound the sergeant-major, Denial said quietly, ‘Sergeant, I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’

  ‘Just call me Viney,’ said the big man. ‘Forget the sergeant. I’m a civilian now.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Why not? I volunteered in. Now I’m volunteering out.’

  ‘You realize what you are doing could cost you your life?’
>
  ‘Not in my army, sport,’ said Viney. ‘We ain’t so liberal with death penalties as you Poms. Man in your job should know his law.’

  To his mild surprise, Viney saw the gibe actually stung. He also saw that there was something more than mere terror in the way the girl clung to this officer.

  ‘You two acquainted already?’ he said.

  There was no reply and the sergeant laughed and said, ‘Patsy, toss us some rope.’

  He proffered a couple of lengths to Denial and said, ‘Tie her up.’

  Denial ignored the rope and spoke softly to the girl.

  Viney said impatiently, ‘Patsy’ll do it if you don’t.’

  Denial looked at Delaney who, having supervised the binding of Maggs and one of the redcaps, was tying up the third man himself, pulling on the rope till it cut cruelly deep into the flesh. Coleport was meanwhile slowly and painfully getting into his clothes.

  Denial spoke urgently to the girl.

  ‘Lie on the bed,’ he said. ‘It’s better this way. You’ll be all right, trust me.’

  Speechless with fright, the girl obeyed. Denial took the rope and began to tie her.

  ‘Now you,’ said Viney. ‘Get on the bed with her if you like.’

  It was a generously intended suggestion. Denial looked at the narrow bed and shook his head. Instead he sat on the floor and leaned back against the bed-frame.

  While Delaney tied him up, Viney tested the girl’s bonds.

  ‘Nice job,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, ain’t she?’ said Coleport, lecherous still despite his condition.

  Denial, though he had decided that there was little sexual danger to Sally in this expedition, spoke quickly to snuff out this flicker of eroticism.

  ‘Where will you go?’ he asked.

  Delaney jerked his arms behind his back with a violent pull on the rope and laughed, showing large yellow teeth.

  ‘He wants a map, Viney. Real joker!’

  Viney said, ‘Marseilles, mebbe. Catch a boat home.’

  Denial’s eyes flickered to Coleport and then he said rapidly, ‘Et votr’ ami, croyez-vous qu’il peut voyager si loin?’

  Viney smiled. The cunning bastard was checking how much Frog he spoke! The answer was practically none. He guessed the trend of the officer’s thoughts. Not speaking the lingo and with a sick man on their hands, they wouldn’t go any further than they needed to. Well, he was right, but much good would it do him!

  He said, ‘Finished, Patsy? Now gag them.’

  Delaney set to work with lengths of bandage and balls of cotton wool taken from a store-cupboard in the room while Viney assisted Coleport in getting into his boots.

  Denial said, ‘Do you have to gag the girl? She’ll say nothing.’

  A wad of cotton wool was thrust into his mouth.

  Viney replied, ‘Sorry, Sister. But you’ll find your voice quick enough when we’ve gone.’

  As if to prove him right, Sally found it now.

  ‘Oh Jack,’ she said. ‘Jack. Please. I love you …’

  ‘Touching,’ said Delaney, cutting off the words with a lump of cotton wool and winding a bandage round the pale cheeks.

  Viney meanwhile helped Coleport into one of the MP’s tunics and set the red-covered cap on his head.

  ‘Suits you,’ he said as he struggled into Maggs’s tunic. The sergeant-major was a big man, but the seams were stretched to tearing point by the time Viney got into it. Delaney followed suit with the third uniform.

  ‘There we are,’ said Viney. ‘It’ll take a brave cunt to stop us now. You OK, Blackie? How’re the legs?’

  For answer the injured corporal, clearly exhausted by the effort of getting dressed, gasped,

  ‘So it’s shift, boys, shift, for there isn’t the slightest doubt

  We’ve got to make a shift to the stations further out!’

  ‘You’ll do,’ said Viney, putting his huge arm round the man’s corpulent body. ‘Come on, Patsy.’

  The three men left. A few seconds later Denial heard the roar of his own motorbike-combination and then the putter of the engine faded into the night.

  Above him on the bed he also heard Sally struggling against her bonds and he willed her to lie still. In these circumstances the danger lay in overmuch activity and in panic. After a while to his relief she stopped moving and thereafter, apart from the occasional shift of position as one or other of the captives tried to obtain relief, they all lay still and waited to be discovered.

  It was two hours before they heard the door open to admit the redcaps’ relief guard.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ exclaimed a voice, and next moment one of the two newcomers was trying to undo Denial’s bonds while the other loosened his gag.

  He spat out the cotton wool and croaked, ‘On the bed. The nurse! See to the nurse!’

  The man who’d removed his gag stood up and turned his attention to the bed.

  Denial heard him gasp, ‘Oh sweet Jesus!’

  His hands came loose. He forced himself upright, ignoring the fiery agony as blood tried to re-enter constricted veins.

  On the bed Sally, still bound but with her gag removed, lay with her eyes wide open, her mouth agape. He touched her head. The skin was cold, the head lolled to one side and he saw into the open mouth.

  She had swallowed her tongue. She was quite, quite dead.

  PART FOUR

  ARRAS

  The Battle of Arras began on Easter Monday, April 9th, 1917. It continued till the end of May, solely to distract German attention and forces from the French Front on the Aisne, where a disastrous offensive had resulted in such huge losses that many French units mutinied and refused to return to the front line. Pétain took over from Nivelle and restored order and morale. Over 400 death sentences were passed and 55 executions carried out.

  Allied casualties at Arras were 158,660. It was on the whole adjudged to be a successful operation.

  1

  On Easter Monday Josh Routledge came out of the caves of Arras. The April air was white, not with the seasonal blossom which the unkind winds too quickly tore off the orchard trees in Outerdale, but with snow.

  Snow, blossom, it mattered not which. He was as indifferent to its presence as he was to the whining bullets and glowing shrapnel which ripped through the white pall the following day when the attack began.

  He rose with his fellows on command, went over the top, advanced till told to halt, then crouched in whatever hole they had reached with as much indifference to its safety as he had shown to the peril above. Up and forward, down and consolidate, up and forward …

  After a week they came out into reserve. Most of the men were excited by confirmation of the news, already rumoured at Easter, that America had at last entered the war. The stories grew in number and absurdity. A thousand ships were on their way packed with guns, plans and a million men. Battalions of Red Indians had been formed, warriors of incredible stealth and cunning! Western heroes like Buffalo Bill were training crackshots capable of putting a bullet in a Hun’s eye at five hundred yards from the back of a galloping horse!

  The futility of galloping horses was brought home to the men as they returned to the front line. Some fool had been hopeful that this push would lead to something like the rapid mobile kind of warfare which all the manuals described. The reserve lines were full of cavalry and, desperate for glory, someone had even brought a regiment within range of the German guns.

  The soldiers returning to the front passed their ghastly memorial. Mounds of dead horses, unburiable because of the hard chalky ground, lay rotting and stinking on every side. The weather had changed, sunshine pushing aside the snow, and the dead beasts; ripped and broken by shell and shrapnel, were given new life by a pulsating skin of feeding flies.

  Josh, untouched for a long time by human suffering and degradation, felt the sight of these unthinking, unquestioning animals burn into his soul almost to the point where pain might once more begin.

  Us too, he thought. Dumb beasts
for slaughter. Us too.

  But then the sight was behind him and he was once more in the familiar hell of the battle line where trenches, shell-holes, explosions, screams and the contorted bodies of the maimed, the dead and the dying were to his senses what fell and lake and the screeching of ravens and the bleating of sheep had once been.

  Sergeant Renton noticed Josh’s condition and was sufficiently concerned to remark on it to Lieutenant Maiden. But the officer who needed all his slender resources to hold his own tattered nerves together answered, ‘He’s still functioning, isn’t he? Still taking orders? For God’s sake, Sergeant, we’re all in a bad way! Kick him up the backside if he gives any bother. I’d have thought his bloody brother had given us all the trouble we needed from one family!’

  Silently, Renton turned away and went down the trench. Maiden was clearly no fucking use to man or beast, he thought. Trouble was, when he cracked he could be responsible for the deaths of many others, and all that’d probably happen to him was being shipped off home to rest.

  He saw Josh lying in a shallow dug-out in the side of the trench. From the earth above his head protruded a German boot. Renton stopped to speak to the boy but saw that he was asleep. In sleep, the distant, haunted look had faded from his face to be replaced not by peace but the inconsolable sadness of an unhappy child and from each closed eye ran a round clear tear, crystalline in perfection; last fragile symbols of purity and innocence in a world of the broken, the befouled and the betrayed.

  Sergeant Renton took a deep breath and passed on.

  2

  ‘Sergeant von Seeberg,’ said Lieutenant Bermann. ‘A job for you.’

  ‘If it’s in my power, I am yours to command, sir,’ said Lothar.

  ‘If, or not,’ said Bermann softly. ‘Our front line is being firmed up along its present position. The English will be trying to press on with their advance, so we have to give our men every ounce of artillery support. Pinpoint accuracy is what we need. You are to set up a forward observation post here.’

  He stabbed his finger at the map he held.