Blackstone and the Great War (12 page)

‘It might well – in time,' Carstairs agreed, ‘and possibly, in a week or two, you will be back here in France. But when a soldier is holding off the enemy, he does not ask himself what the long-term result of the action will be, he merely performs his duty as he sees it at that moment.'

Blackstone's sudden laugh echoed round the room.

‘It's all a big bluff, isn't it?' he asked. ‘A career soldier like you wouldn't dare to cross General Fortesque. It would look too bad on your record.'

‘You're right, I
am
a career soldier,' Carstairs admitted. ‘I was
born
a career soldier. Even as a child, I dreamed of serving my country honourably – and I have, both in India and East Africa – of becoming a high-ranking officer, and of finally retiring, with my memories of my service, to live the life of a modest country gentleman.'

‘And are you seriously trying to tell me that you'd risk all that just to get me out of the way?' Blackstone asked sceptically.

‘That is the third time you've completely missed the point,' Carstairs told him. ‘Becoming a colonel – or perhaps even a general – is no longer a possibility. I'm fighting in a war which I will not survive. I am already one of the walking dead.'

‘You might survive it,' Blackstone said. ‘Somebody has to.'

Carstairs shook his head. ‘You're wrong,' he said. ‘My death may come sooner, or it may come later – but it will come. But
until
it comes, I intend to do my duty as I see it. The men depend on their officers, and their officers depend on me – and I will not betray them.'

‘I'm sorry I laughed at you,' Blackstone said sincerely. ‘It was very wrong of me, because though we may disagree on most things, I do respect you for the way you stand up for things that you believe in.'

‘And perhaps, under other circumstances, I might respect you,' Carstairs replied. ‘But, under
these
circumstances, you are nothing but a cancer, trying to destroy all that is finest and most noble about my country – and I simply will not let that happen.'

There was no more to say – no more that
could
be said – and they both knew it.

Blackstone sat perfectly still, staring at the wall. It was several minutes since Captain Carstairs had left, and in that time he had scarcely moved a muscle.

Was there a chance that the captain was right and that he was wrong? he agonized.

Was it possible that he was seeing everything through eyes blinded by prejudice – that his vision of the world, though for entirely different reasons, was just as narrow as that of the officers?

If so, then perhaps Soames really was the valiant, honourable man that Carstairs thought him to be.

If so, then perhaps one officer
was
incapable of killing another – whatever the provocation – because of the way he had been brought up.

Perhaps it was all true, and he himself, a poor orphan boy, simply didn't
understand
!

He shook his head, angry with himself.

He had always relied on his own judgement, he thought. And this judgement of his was not something that he had inherited easily from proud, privileged parents, nor had beaten into him at an expensive public school. It belonged to no one but himself, and was based solely on what he had seen and what he had experienced. And he
had to
believe it – because it was the only thing he had.

Feeling a little better, he took a sip of his beer, and decided he could quite get used to it.

He placed the bottle back on the table, and began to consider the implications of Carstairs' threat.

If he tried to speak to any of the officers, he would be sent straight back to England, the captain had said – and he had meant it.

‘And why exactly should that bother you, Sam?' he asked himself.

He had never wanted to be sent to France in the first place, and now he was there, he saw the virtual impossibility of ever solving the murder.

So why not just give in now? Why not ensure his rapid return to England by defying Carstairs' orders?

No one on the other side of the Channel – not even his bitterest enemies in the Yard – would find any reason to blame him, because he would just have been doing his job.

‘You could be out of here within the hour, Sam,' he said.

But even as he was speaking the words, he knew it was not going to happen, because he had never walked away from a challenge in his life, and because he felt he still owed something to old General Fortesque.

‘So if you are staying, how in God's name are you going to get around the restrictions?' he mused. ‘And more to the point, where the bloody hell are you going to find an assistant from?'

NINE

T
he building was both large and impressive, at least by St Denis standards. It stood at the edge of the village, and had the words Bureau de Poste picked out in brickwork over the main entrance. It was not a post office any longer. The locals who might have once required its services were gone, and when the British Army had taken over the village, the place had become its telegraphy office.

There was only one man inside when Blackstone entered the building, a sergeant with a round, open face.

He looked up. ‘You must be that policeman from Scotland Yard,' he said. ‘Inspector Blackstone, isn't it?'

‘You're very well informed,' Blackstone replied.

‘My name's Winfield,' the sergeant said. ‘Well informed? Of course I'm well informed – I'm the
telegrapher
. And I know more than just your name, Inspector Blackstone,' he added with a grin, ‘I know that you're not exactly the most popular Englishman in France at the moment – especially with Captain Carstairs.'

‘He's been telegraphing London about me, has he?' Blackstone asked.

‘Twice today,' Winfield confirmed. ‘Of course, I can't tell you what he's actually said about you—'

‘I don't think you need to,' Blackstone interrupted him. ‘I'd like to send a telegraph myself, if that's all right.'

‘You're supposed to have official authorization to send telegraphs,' Sergeant Winfield said.

‘I have,' Blackstone replied, laying a piece of paper on his desk.

The sergeant scanned it, then whistled softly.

‘It says here that I'm commanded by the War Office to give you unlimited use of this facility.'

‘I know.'

‘You must have friends in very high places.' Winfield grinned again. ‘Is it genuine, this document – or just a clever fake?'

‘It's genuine,' Blackstone assured him.

‘Not that I care – one way or the other,' Winfield told him. ‘I'd probably have sent your telegraphs anyway, even without authorization. I like coppers, you see – my dad was one – it's only the army I can't bloody stand.'

‘You're
in
the army,' Blackstone pointed out, with a smile.

‘Yes, I am, and I'm still only a bloody sergeant. Turned my request for a commission down, didn't they, the poncy buggers. Well, screw them!'

‘About the telegraph,' Blackstone said, bringing him back to the point. ‘I'm sorry, but it's rather a long one.'

‘How long?' Winfield asked.

Blackstone told him.

‘You call that
long
?' the sergeant asked, tapping his finger on the desk as if he were already transmitting the telegraph. ‘That's nothing to a man like me. I once had a contest with the three other operators, to see which of us could transmit the complete works of Shakespeare the faster. Real cocky buggers, they were – thought they'd walk all over me.'

‘I take it they didn't,' Blackstone said.

‘You've got that right,' Winfield replied. ‘By the time they admitted defeat, I was well into
Macbeth
, and they were all still stuck on
The Taming of the Shrew
. It was an outright massacre.'

‘So I'm lucky to have you, rather than one of them,' Blackstone suggested.

‘Bloody right, you are,' Winfield agreed.

The afternoon shadows had lengthened in St Denis. The cricket match was long since over, and the soldier on punishment duty in the square had finally been taken off the wheel and allowed to hobble back to his tent, where he would rest his aching limbs until the next day's long punishment began.

Other than that, not much had really changed in the village since Blackstone had arrived in the early morning. There were still soldiers being put through pointless drills on the temporary parade ground; still soldiers queuing up outside the brothel, hoping to be doing a little drilling themselves; and still soldiers – having neither any duties to perform nor any money in their pockets – wandering aimlessly along the village streets like the lost souls they actually were.

And then Blackstone suddenly saw a soldier who was doing none of these things. This soldier was sitting on the edge of the fountain next to the limber, and cupping his head in his hands.

‘Are you all right, Mick?' he asked.

The boy slowly raised his head, and looked up at Blackstone through reddened eyes.

‘You didn't tell me you was a copper, did you, Mr Blackstone?' he said accusingly.

‘I would have done if you'd asked,' Blackstone replied, ‘but somehow it never came up in the conversation.'

Mick forced a grin to his saddened face.

‘No, I don't suppose it did,' he agreed. ‘In that railway carriage, you were too busy forcing me to my knees, and later on I was too busy apologizing for being such a bloody idiot.' He paused for a moment. ‘Anyway, I never told you I was a hooligan, neither – but then you wouldn't have had to be an inspector from Scotland Yard to work that out, would you?'

‘Why have you been crying, Mick?' Blackstone asked.

‘I haven't!' the young soldier said vehemently. ‘I'm a hard case, me – and hard cases don't never yowl, whatever happens to them.'

‘Why have you been crying?' Blackstone repeated firmly.

‘'Cos, underneath it all, I'm not a hard case at all – I'm nothing but a big soft girl,' Mick said. ‘You remember my best mate, Sid Worthington, don't you, Mr Blackstone?'

‘Of course I do.'

‘He told us that he wasn't never going to see his twentieth birthday, didn't he?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, he was right.'

‘How did it happen?' Blackstone asked.

‘They split us up,' Mick said. ‘We thought we'd go through the whole war together, like the mates we've always been, but the moment we arrived here, they split us up.'

‘Go on.'

‘The platoon that Sid was posted to was serving on the front line. He'd only been there for about half an hour when the Huns fired a mortar into his trench and blew half his bleeding leg off.' Mick sniffled. ‘Would it  . . . would it have killed him straight off?'

‘Yes,' Blackstone said – because there was always a
chance
it might have done.

‘That's something, then,' Mick said. ‘I wouldn't like to think of him suffering a lot.'

‘It's rotten luck that your friend died that way, but this is going to be a long war, and, for your own survival, you simply can't afford to let it drag you down,' Blackstone warned him.

‘It's not just Sid's death that's getting to me – though that's bad enough,' Mick said.

‘Then what else is it?'

Mick's face contorted, as he struggled to find the right words to express himself.

‘Did you ever see that recruitment poster?' he asked finally.

‘Which recruitment poster?' Blackstone asked. ‘There've been so many different ones since this bloody war started.'

‘The one that I'm thinking of had this soldier right in the centre of it. He'd got his bayonet fixed on the end of his rifle, and he was going over the top.'

‘Yes, I know that one,' Blackstone said.

‘There was this streaked red and green sky behind him.' Mick paused. ‘I said maybe that was because the sky in France
was
red and green, and everybody laughed at me. But how was I supposed to have known – one way or the other – when I'd never been outside London?'

‘You couldn't have known,' Blackstone said soothingly.

‘Anyway, it turns out that the sky over here is just as blue as the sky back home, so they were right to laugh at me, weren't they?'

‘It's never right to laugh at other people,' Blackstone told him.

‘So what I still don't understand is why they made the sky in that poster red and green?' Mick persisted.

It was all to do with group psychology, Blackstone thought. The propagandists at the Ministry of War had read the works of Gustave le Bon, and knew those were just the colours they needed to use in order to manipulate the emotions of undereducated, unsophisticated lads like Mick.

But even if he could have explained that to Mick, it would only have made the young man feel even more inadequate.

‘Maybe, when they came to make the poster, they'd run out of blue paint,' he suggested.

‘Could be,' Mick said, agreeing easily – and making Blackstone feel just a little bit guilty. ‘Yes, that might well be it. They soon ran out of a lot of things once the war started. Anyway, I was telling you about the poster, wasn't I?'

‘You were.'

‘This soldier was standing against a green and red sky, but he was all in black – his uniform and everything. He was a sort of  . . . a sort of  . . .'

‘Silhouette,' Blackstone supplied.

‘That's the word,' Mick said, ‘a silhouette. All black 'cept for his bayonet, which was shining white. So,
because
he was all black, you couldn't see what his face looked like. But you didn't need to! And do you know why?'

‘Because you already
knew
what it looked like,' Blackstone guessed.