The First Casualty (32 page)

FOURTY-FOUR

Under the magnifying glass

Kingsley’s journey back to the Château Beaurivage took him all the rest of the morning and it was late lunchtime before he finally stood once more in front of the beautiful old house. He was surprised to discover how much he had been looking forward to seeing Kitty Murray again, and how disappointed he was when he discovered that she was not at the château. She had left in order to accompany some severely distressed men back up to that same railhead where Kingsley had first arrived at the battle zone.

‘Will she be accompanying them to England?’ Kingsley enquired of a medical orderly whom he met in the great entrance hall.

‘I hope not, sir. Things would be a lot less jolly around here without her.’

Kingsley very much agreed with the man, which rather disturbed him. The last thing he needed was any emotional complications clouding his judgement and he resolved to dwell on the diminutive Suffragette no longer.

Kingsley had returned to the château in order to see the military policemen whom he had ordered to exhume the body of Captain Abercrombie. An order which had not endeared Kingsley to the staff of the Château Beaurivage.

‘Digging up corpses is
not
the sort of thing we need around here,’ the senior medical officer complained as he scurried after Kingsley through the château towards the stairwell that led down into the cellar where the autopsy was to take place.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but I need that body,’ Kingsley insisted.

‘My patients have just come from a place where bodies pop up out of the ground continually, and they’re supposed to be safe from that here. If one of them was to see…

By this time they had arrived in the cellar, where the sergeant from Armentières was waiting for him with the corpse. It had been removed from its coffin and placed ready on a makeshift operating table built from boards and packing cases.

‘All present and correct, sah!’ the sergeant said, stamping the stone floor so hard that sparks flew from the nails on his boots. ‘One body. Dead. Previously belonging to Captain the Viscount Abercrombie, sah! ‘

It seemed a strange way to describe a corpse but Kingsley let it go.

‘I have run an extension cable to a portable generator which I have placed outside, sah, as I does not think you can do delicate stuff such as this by candlelight, sah!’

The sergeant had indeed wired up a sixty-watt electric light bulb above the corpse, which made the sallow whiteness of its skin positively glow in the otherwise darkened cellar. It was a truly macabre scene.

‘Thank you, Sergeant. That was extremely sensible of you.’

‘Sah!’ More sparks flew.

‘Right,’ said Kingsley, ‘this won’t take long.’

He approached the body stretched out upon the planks, naked save for a loincloth.

‘You buried him like this?’ Kingsley enquired of the senior medical officer.

‘Yes. His friend Lieutenant Stamford informed us that he had expressed a wish not to be buried in uniform.’

‘Really? I did not know that.’

‘We saw no reason to deny the request.’

Looking down at the corpse, Kingsley recalled the verses he had read in the newspaper in Folkestone library. He repeated them now.

‘
To mark the sacrifice I gave

Put ‘Forever England’ on my grave
. ’

There was silence for a moment.

‘Funny that the man who wrote that did not wish to be buried in uniform, eh?’

Kingsley bent down and looked at the wound in Abercrombie’s head. A single bullet hole almost exactly between the eyes. The wound had been washed, much to Kingsley’s annoyance, but still he inspected it.

‘Do we have a magnifying glass?’ he asked.

‘I anticipated that, sah!’ the sergeant said, producing one. ‘Good, well done. You know, Sergeant, when you find yourself demobbed, you should apply to Scotland Yard. You would be an asset to the murder investigation team.’

‘Thank you, sah. I shall remember that.’

‘Of course you’d have to give up the stamping.’

‘I only stamps ‘cos it is required, sah. Civilians are not required to stamp.’

Kingsley studied the wound. The magnification afforded by the glass was not great, nonetheless he detected specks of black at the entrance that he would not have expected unless they had been deposited there by the bullet.

‘Sergeant, you wouldn’t by any chance have — ’

‘Tweezers, sah?’

‘Yes, exactly, Sergeant. Tweezers.’

The sergeant produced a pair.

‘Well done, Sergeant.’

‘Borrowed them off a nurse, said I had a splinter. Best not tell her what you’re actually using them for, she does her eyebrows with ‘em.’

Kingsley set to work with his magnifying glass and tweezers, picking tiny bits of residue from the jagged flesh of the wound and depositing them in a saucer which the sergeant had also thought to provide.

‘I must say, Sergeant, you think of everything.’

‘Thank you, sah.’

‘And this exhumation has also been most efficiently carried out. Well done.’

‘Sah!’

Kingsley was crouched over the corpse, talking as he worked. Were someone to have entered the cellar at that point they might easily have thought that Kingsley was imparting some urgent wisdom to the dead body.

‘I can’t help asking myself,’ Kingsley continued, ‘and I know that you’ll forgive me for saying this,’ Sergeant, how was it that such a thorough fellow as you could make such an unholy mess of the initial scene-of-crime investigation? ‘

‘Well, sah…I assume you are aware that we was called off.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who called you off?’

‘Staff. The same Staff what put us on in the first place. We was in bed at Armentières when we received a call from Staff to attend a murder here at Château Beaurivage and to arrest Private Hopkins.’

‘They told you who to arrest, before you’d even attended the scene?’

‘Yes, sir. Well, he had been found with the gun after all.’

‘Who was this person from Staff?’

‘A Colonel Willow, sir. I don’t know him personally. Anyway, shortly after we attended the scene we received another call here at the château,’ which, as you may know, is on the telephone, saying that we should take our prisoner and depart without causing further disturbance to the medical work of the centre.’

‘Did that not seem strange to you?’

‘Well, no, not really, sir. The case was pretty cut and dried, and we do make a bit of noise when there’s a bunch of us.

‘Sergeant, when we are finished here I would like you to get in touch with Staff HQ and enquire after this Colonel Willow. I should very much like to speak to him.’

The sergeant assured Kingsley that he would, and for a few moments silence fell on the grim scene as Kingsley worked away at the entry wound between the eyes of the corpse. Finally he was satisfied that he had picked up all the evidence he could from that source.

‘Were you aware, Sergeant,’ Kingsley said, ‘that amongst Viscount Abercrombie’s effects only one boot was found?’

‘No, sir, I was not.’

‘Well, that was the case, and I know what happened to the other boot. It was used as a silencer. The killer put his gun down the leg of one of Abercrombie’s boots and shot the bullet through its heel. I have found rubber, leather and what I think are wool fibres too. Possibly the killer had filled the boot with socks. He must have taken the boot away with him when he made his escape.

‘Well I never,’ the sergeant said.

‘Quite extraordinary,’ the senior medical officer added.

‘Which also accounts for the fact that the bullet did not exit Abercrombie’s skull: its velocity had been reduced by the impact with the boot heel. And speaking of bullets, let us retrieve it.’

Using a scalpel and the tweezers Kingsley dug into the wound,’ delving deep between the eyes to extract the thing he sought. Having done so, he washed it off and took it upstairs to where there was more light. There, with the help of the sergeant’s magnifying glass, he compared it with the bullet he had taken from the German cook the night before.

‘Dear me,’ he said after a moment or two of investigation, ‘I had thought that I might require a microscope but this is as plain as day.’

‘What is, sir?’ the sergeant enquired.

‘Every gun is different, Sergeant. Not very different but different enough to leave its own particular signature on every bullet it fires. These two bullets were fired from different guns. ‘No, sir!’

‘Yes, sir! The gun which was found on Private Hopkins, the one which fired this bullet,’ and Kingsley held up the one he had brought back from the trenches, ‘did not fire
this
bullet, the bullet which killed Viscount Abercrombie. That fact and that fact alone clears Private Hopkins, for he was arrested on no other evidence than his possession of Abercrombie’s gun. Sergeant, you must release him.’

FOURTY-FIVE

Back into battle

That evening, despite the fact that he had not slept at all the previous night, Kingsley returned to the trenches. He did not feel he needed sleep now; the puzzle was beginning to show tiny signs of resolution and in Kingsley’s mind the hunt was on.

As he battled his way along the waterlogged duckboards that constituted the communications system of the Ypres salient, he saw a man in front of him, bowed down with barbed wire, slip and drown. Down or suffocate, all in an instant. Even as he watched, he knew there was nothing to be done, no time to do more than note such a gruesome example of the arbitrary barbarity of this war.

Eventually the duckboard pathway came to an end and Kingsley descended into the forward trenches, struggling up the communications slits towards the very front of the British line.

‘You there! You men!’ he shouted at the groups of soldiers carrying breakfast, fresh water and rum for the men who crouched beneath their parapets counting seconds. ‘‘C’ Company. Where can I find ‘C’ Company?’

Some men pointed up the line, others merely shrugged. Some pretended not to hear and others genuinely could not, for the barrage hurtling through the air above them was intense.

‘I must find a fellow named McCroon. Private McCroon, ‘Kingsley shouted through the rain and thunderous noise.

‘Who fucking cares?’ a voice shouted back.

What sanction could Kingsley threaten that would be worse than the sentence already passed on the tens of thousands of men scuttling about and skulking in those forward muddy holes? Men who were expected shortly to emerge from that mud and proceed in good order towards the German machine guns? Kingsley’s shoulder tabs gave him little authority here. He was alone and the man who shouted at him with such contempt was with his mates. The pre-dawn was dark, the rain torrential, the mud and water waste deep, thousands of cannon were firing, the noise was appalling. No one would miss one bastard copper who had made the mistake of venturing too close to where the real killing was done.

Besides, Kingsley reflected as he hurried past, the man was right. Who fucking
did
care? Why should the hunt for any individual matter in the middle of this terrible war? Particularly on a morning such as this one, when battle was once more to be joined in the Ypres salient which all the boys called Wipers? In an hour or two’s time most of the men whom Kingsley was passing would be dead. Nobody cared that Kingsley wanted to find a man called Private McCroon, and Kingsley knew that he of all people should care least. But he did care: some unanswerable compulsion drove him on and so he struggled, sometimes chest-high in water, along the crisscross of stinking and fetid mini-canals that made up the communications network of the British forward position.

The going was horrendously hard but the distances were no longer great and it was not long before Kingsley arrived in the most advanced excavations of the line. Beyond this point there was a thin ribbon of mud and wire and beyond that the German Empire. It had been thus at the time of the First Battle of Ypres and also at the Second, and it was thus once more in the Third. Nothing had changed in that dreadful place for years. The shells currently exploding just ahead of the line were rearranging the bones of the men who had died in the battle before, and the battle before that.

Some wag had chalked
Savoy Bar and Grill
upon a board.

‘McCroon!’ Kingsley called out. ‘Private McCroon!’

As he struggled along, he scanned the faces of the men he passed. He knew that McCroon’s unit was in the vicinity and he had some idea of what the soldier he sought looked like, but the minutes were ticking by and still he had not found him. The soldiers all looked the same, every one caked in mud, every one with his fag burning between his lips, every one hunched over his tot of rum, waiting, the water dripping from his helmet brim. Every one with an expression sitting somewhere between elation and terror.

‘Five minutes,’ an officer called out. ‘Fix bayonets.’

Even the shelling could not cloak the unmistakable sound of shearing steel being drawn en masse.

‘Remember, lads,’ a company sergeant major called, ‘not too deep now. No sense wasting good steel on a Hun. Three inches is plenty, in the neck or the chest, then pull it out and go find another one.’

‘‘C’ Company? Is this ‘C’ Company?’ Kingsley appealed to the sergeant.

‘It is indeed, sir. Have you come to arrest the Germans for us?’ The men about him smiled and raised their mugs of rum. A good CSM could turn nervous wrecks into heroes simply by being steady.

‘McCroon, I’m looking for a man called McCroon,’ Kingsley shouted.

‘With respect, sir, it’s less than five minutes to zero. I think you should look for him some other time.’

‘Some other time may be too late!’

‘Sir, we are about to attack. This is no place for any man not ordered in the first wave. Not even military policemen. So I suggest you take your leave, sir, or grab a rifle and spike and give us a hand.’

The boys gave a ragged cheer at this.

‘Sergeant, this is a matter of life and death!’

The CSM actually laughed. The men laughed also.

‘You hear that, lads? Officer says it’s a matter of life and death and there’s me thinking it was something important.’

Kingsley left them and waded further along the trench, pushing past the crowded men, every one now with eighteen inches of bright steel attached to the end of his rifle, the only shining thing in the dark grey of that wet and miserable pre-dawn.

‘McCroon, I must find a Private McCroon!’ Kingsley cried out and suddenly he could hear himself speak, for the thunder of the guns had stopped. It was like the moment in the Underground when a man raised his voice above the rattle of the wheels and the train stopped and he was left shouting over nothing but silence. Many heads turned at once.

‘Yes?’ a soldier replied, looking up from his cigarette.

‘ONE MINUTE!’ an officer cried out, staring at his watch as if all the world existed on its face — which for him, of course, it did.

A man stepped forward.

‘I’m McCroon. Who are you?’

‘I need to speak with you. Fall out.’

For a moment an expression of joy flooded across McCroon’s face. Was he to be granted a last-minute reprieve? But zero hour was upon them and it was too late for any reprieve. The officer who had just called out the time looked up from his watch in fury.

‘You, sir! Who are you and what the hell are you about?’

Kingsley might be wearing the uniform of a captain in the Military Police but by this time he looked like just another anonymous creature of the mud.

‘I am a policeman and I am taking this man out of the line. I wish to interview him.’

‘The devil you are, you bloody fool. You will do no such thing. There are no interviews here and no bloody policemen either. This is ‘C’ Company and we are about to attack!’

‘I must speak with…’

The officer raised his pistol and pointed it at Kingsley.

‘Stand aside this instant or I shall shoot you down. This company will do its duty. Every single man will do his duty.’

He glanced down at his watch.

‘Zero hours, boys, and the best of luck to every one of you!’

‘See you in Berlin, sir!’ a voice called out.

The officer blew his whistle, and all up and down the line other officers looked up from their watches and blew their whistles also. A chorus of whistling cut through the silence that had descended so suddenly. Then with a roar the men began to swarm up the makeshift ladders propped against the parapet walls,’ scrambling and gripping at the mud as the wooden posts sank down under their weight. As the first British heads emerged above ground a new sound was heard, which to Kingsley’s ear felt almost like a massive swarm of bees: the German machine guns two hundred yards away across the mud opened up.

The officer who had confronted Kingsley advanced a step or two, stick in one hand, pistol in the other, before staggering back under the force of the bullets that hit him and tumbling down into the trench on top of the men who were following. He was still trying to speak but there was blood geysering from his neck and chest and if he made a sound, Kingsley could not hear it. He fell back head first into the mud, with only his legs and boots to be seen.

‘Up, boys! Up, damn you!’ cried an NCO, and now the whole body of the trench seemed to heave itself over the crumbling lip of mud. McCroon went too: there was no question of staying. Army discipline did not allow men to hesitate once the whistle had blown. You got up and got on with it. A kind of hysteria gripped the men who had stood in the mud so long. They were finally to attack, to do their bit, to engage those bastards who had ruined everything with their frightfulness.

Kingsley felt he had no choice but to follow. He had come to speak to McCroon and McCroon was advancing in good order towards the enemy. Kingsley gripped hold of the ladder and launched himself up into the maelstrom.

He was later to ask himself what it was that caused him to follow McCroon over the lip of that trench and into the teeth of the German machine guns. He would very swiftly conclude that of the many emotions which crowded in on him as he ascended the rough ladder to the killing grounds, the foremost was the same desire that drove a million other men up those fateful steps.

The simple desire not to funk it.

Time and again Kingsley had heard soldiers speaking of just this fear. Not the fear of death but the fear of being found wanting, of having
let the side down
. Robert,’ Kingsley’s brother, had spoken of it often in his letters. ‘I am afraid of fear,’ he had written,’ ‘I only want to do my best.’ They all wanted to do their best. Indeed, after a yearning for home, Kingsley had read, the fear of letting the side down was the principal emotion expressed by the doomed generation that sat in ditches in France. Comrades living cheek by jowl in fear and squalor, dependent only on each other for comfort and support, and in each man’s heart the deep-seated desire not to let his mates down and the secret fear that when the ultimate test came, he might.

Kingsley was of course not bound by any ties of group loyalty to the men he followed over the top; he had not lived with them and suffered with them. He had not drawn ever closer to them as one by one they died. They were not his pals. Nonetheless they were his brothers, fellow men who faced appalling hardship and danger because they considered it to be their duty. There was a job to be done and it was up to them to do it. Kingsley knew that he too had a job to do,’ a different job but still a duty.

Here, as with the trench raid of the night before, was his chance to ‘do his bit’. To stand shoulder to shoulder with his dead brother but to do so without compromising the beliefs he held so deeply. He would
not
fight their war but neither would he shirk his duty. In his own way and by his own volition, he would
do his bit
.

The first thing that Kingsley focused on as he breasted the lip of the trench was clouds of blue, yellow, black and green smoke hanging over what he presumed were the enemy trenches. For a nervous second or two he feared that these different-coloured clouds must be gas; whether German or British was irrelevant to Kingsley, for he had no respirator. In almost the same instant that the panic had begun it subsided, for all around and ahead of him Kingsley could see experienced soldiers whose masks still hung from their belts or remained in their packs. Kingsley was thinking clearly, as he always did when in danger, and he knew immediately that this was not gas but the curious multicoloured residue of shellfire that was now all that remained of the British barrage which had lifted moments previously to allow the troops to advance.

Ahead of him Kingsley could still make out McCroon, although how long he would last was anybody’s guess. In fact how long any of them would last seemed a moot point as all around him men began to fall, blown to bits by the shrapnel from German artillery (artillery which supposedly had already been destroyed by the British cannonade) or mowed down by machine guns. Kingsley’s one hope was speed. The battalion were advancing at a slow trot, as they had been instructed to do, in order for the assault not to break up in a helpless scampering mêlée but to arrive at the enemy trenches as a body. Kingsley marvelled at the courage of these men as they moved forward in good order into the eye of a storm of exploding steel. Men fell continually but no comrade stopped to help them. Later perhaps, but for the present every man was instructed to advance and keep on advancing as long as he had blood and breath in him to do so.

Kingsley did not trot. This was not his battle and he was not under military command. He was a policeman in pursuit of a witness and so he sprang forward at a crouching run, leaping ditches and craters and dodging the corpses that were already beginning almost to blanket the ground.

‘You there!’ a voice screamed. ‘Steady pace, you bastard! Hold the line.’

Kingsley ignored him and ran on, past other men, some of whom also called upon him to quit his ill-disciplined personal assault. Kingsley ignored them all as he ignored the shrapnel exploding overhead and the streams of bullets coming in at waist height. Once more he had no choice but to trust to luck, and in so doing there came upon him a curious and illogical feeling of exhilaration.