Barbara Cleverly - Tug of War

‘Can you tell me what evidence you submitted apart from the visual identification?’

‘Photographs.’

She went to a sewing table and automatically looked about her, although they were unobserved, before taking from the bottom three creased photographs and a bundle of letters.

‘I showed these to the director.’

The first photograph was a formal one taken on the steps of the pre-war school building on a clear, sunny day. The children, in their grey school smocks, were excited and overawed by the camera. M. Barbier stood on the right, the proud shepherd of his flock. The flock was, with little variation, dark-haired and chubby. Albert, on the left, stood out from the crowd with his light build and fair hair. His ethereal features, framed by a neat white collar, tugged at Joe’s heart over the gap of a quarter of a century. He wondered if Dorcas, stickily breathing chocolate fumes over his shoulder, had seen it: the same unfocused expression of dislocation and sadness, of other-worldliness that they had seen in Thibaud’s face.

In the second photograph the Langlois children were lined up in height order in a studio, grinning at the camera over their right shoulders. Four dark girls with square faces and dark eyes. Adrift by a few inches at the back and gazing at the middle distance Albert hovered, an alien presence.

The third was also a posed photograph, taken in Reims. The grown Albert looked straight at the camera this time, alone, defiant, wearing with some dash the tight tunic, red jodhpurs, knee-high boots and saucily tilted casquette of an artilleryman.

‘He loved horses, you see. He was very good with them. M. Barbier managed to steer him into the artillery.’

Joe passed the photographs to Dorcas.

‘What a fine man,’ she said quietly. ‘You must be very proud of him, madame.’

‘Always,’ was the whispered reply. ‘Always.’

‘Can you tell us when you last saw your son?’

‘It was in April 1917. We’d returned after the 1914 invasion thinking it couldn’t happen again. Papa Joffre had sent them all packing, hadn’t he? But we were wrong. They came again and it was worse this time. Hardly a village survived the bombing and the burning. We were caught up in it all. And it was just days before that when Albert turned up suddenly on leave. He’d walked all the way from somewhere up by Laon. .’ She hesitated, trying to remember.

‘The Chemin des Dames?’ Joe supplied. ‘Was he involved in that battle?’

‘That’s the one. Chemin des Dames. He was in the Fifth Army under General Nivelle. Albert told us he was on leave,’ she added uncertainly. ‘Langlois said it was all a lie. They wouldn’t have given leave to anyone at such a bad moment, he said. Albert must have deserted.

‘Albert was wearing his own civilian clothes, helping us to load our things on to the cart, when someone shouted, “The Uhlans are coming!”’ She shivered with remembered terror at the panic-raising call. ‘And the Boche flooded in. They shot the mayor who’d dared to confront them and rounded up fifty hostages. The usual behaviour. And when they retreated they set the houses on fire, marched the hostages out with them and fired cannon at the village until it was rubble. One of the hostages was my son. I never saw or heard from him again until I went to Reims last spring.’

Joe, who had been discreetly jotting down dates, closed his notebook. ‘I wonder. . is there anything at all, madame, that you could add to the information you have already given to Inspector Bonnefoye? Any detail of a personal and perhaps physical nature that might distinguish Albert? A scar or a birthmark of some description? A mark of which a mother might be aware?’ He could think of no more discreet way of phrasing his question.

She looked embarrassed and awkward. She opened her mouth to speak and decided not to. Then, shrugging: ‘The usual childhood marks. . scuffed knees. . cuts and bruises from falling off horses and out of trees. That sort of thing. Would you like to see his letters?’

As Joe agreed to this sudden shift of focus Dorcas stood and asked politely if she might be excused. She’d like to go back into the shop to buy some of the delicious dark French chocolate to take home. . better than anything they could get in England and made here in the village? They readily agreed to this tactful withdrawal from the next stage of the enquiry which promised to be rather tedious for a young girl.

Joe was intrigued by the small collection of letters written in a good copperplate hand on torn scraps of writing paper. One or two of the messages were almost obliterated by ominous brown stains. At the start jaunty and optimistic (and addressed solely to ‘ ma chère maman ’), the letters had become progressively sombre and hopeless. The most recent one was dated April 1917, just a week or two before his last appearance in the village. He spoke with despair of stalemate, with anger of the deaths of men in his company, the never-ending bombardment, the foul conditions in the trenches. He ended by saying he was just about to be called up the line to the front ranks again.

Joe looked for signs of censorship but found none. A second reading impressed him with the clever wording. No militarily sensitive information, no names, no positions were given. The censor’s pencil would have hovered and found no precise target and yet the tone, truculent and mutinous throughout, was deserving of censorship. It occurred to him that perhaps even the censor by this stage in the war had been of the same mind.

Had Albert, in his despair, nipped out the back way after all, as his stepfather claimed? It was probable, Joe decided. Or had he served his spell in the front line and been rewarded with an eight-day pass? It was at about that time that the army’s grievances, increasingly loud, had been heard, Joe calculated from the little he knew about the French end-game. Pétain had replaced the failing General Nivelle in the campaign of the Chemin des Dames and conditions for the men in the field had improved. Home leave had been granted again. It was possible.

He said as much to Madame Langlois who drank in every soothing word. So absorbed had he been by the letters and the eagerness of the mother to share them with him, he had lost track of time and wondered at last what on earth Dorcas could possibly be doing.

Laughter down the corridor reassured him. She came in, pink and smiling and obviously the best of friends with what Joe took to be the youngest Langlois daughter.

‘This is Julie, Uncle Joe.’

Julie giggled and bobbed. She gave Joe a long and appreciative stare before her bright eyes flashed a message sideways at Dorcas.

‘I’ve cashed up and locked the shop, Maman,’ she said in a voice which had none of the grating hesitations of her mother’s. ‘Dorcas has been telling me all about London. Did you know she came from London? And we’re the same age! She’s sixteen too! Are all English girls so small?’

‘Oh, I’d say Dorcas was pretty much average size for her age,’ said Joe easily.

‘Uncle Joe, I hope you don’t mind but I’ve offered Julie a lift into Reims. It’s early closing today and she’s visiting her married sister. She was going to catch the bus but I said we were going straight back and could drop her off.’

‘Well, certainly. If her mother agrees. Delighted,’ said Joe.

Slightly dubiously, her mother gave her consent, commenting that such an offer would at least save the bus fare and she didn’t see how Monsieur Langlois could have any objection, and they set off with the two girls installed on the back seat whispering and laughing together.

Joe made no attempt to tune in to their conversation, pleased to hear Dorcas chatting with someone more or less her own age and relieved to be free to marshal his thoughts.