Sally Spencer - Blackstone and the Great War

‘I try to share as little as possible with Captain Huxton,’ Carstairs said disdainfully. ‘But on this occasion — and more by luck than judgement — he might well be right. We lost fifty per cent of the platoon in the offensive, which means logically, that there’s a fifty per cent chance the killer was amongst them. But even if he survived — and any possible witnesses survived along with him — you still have no chance of making your case.’

‘And why’s that?

‘Let me tell you a story,’ Carstairs suggested. ‘I heard it from another officer, a man I’d trust with my life, so though I can’t personally vouch for it, I’m sure it’s true. It seems that a sanitary-man was in the area between the fire line and support trench one night, and was in the process of burying the night-soil he’d taken from the latrine when he was killed by a stray bullet. By the time he was discovered, rigor mortis had set in, and his right arm, which had been stretched out at the moment he died, was as stiff as a board. Well, I suppose the recovery party could have broken the arm, but they didn’t. They brought the dead man back to the trench and laid him out on the fire line, where he was to stay until the burial party could pick him up and take him to the graveyard.’ Carstairs paused. ‘We do like to give the men a proper burial whenever we can, you know.’

‘Now that is kind of you,’ Blackstone said.

‘Don’t you dare ridicule me in that way!’ Carstairs said, suddenly angry. ‘I care about my men — I might not like them, but I do care about them. And whenever possible, I treat their bodies with the respect they deserve.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Blackstone said.

And so he was, because he recognized that — within his limits — the captain was both a decent man and a decent officer.

‘But that’s not the point I was about to make,’ Carstairs continued. ‘They laid the dead man on the fire step, but because his arm was sticking out, it inevitably blocked a good half of the trench. And how do you think the other men reacted to that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Blackstone admitted.

‘Most of them treated the arm as if it were a turnstile at a football ground — just brushed it aside and, as they did so, said things like, “Don’t get in the way, you selfish old bugger.” Some of them actually shook the dead hand, and asked him how he was getting on. They’d known the man while he was alive — they’d been his comrades, for God’s sake — but now that he was dead, he was no more than a comic prop for them.’

Perhaps he was, Blackstone thought — but perhaps treating him as a comic prop was the only way they had of dealing with his death.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ he asked aloud.

‘So that you’ll understand what this war — more than any which has preceded it — has done to the common soldier. He feels no compassion — not even for his own kind. So why should he care who killed Lieutenant Fortesque? And even if he knew, why should he bother to tell you?’

They turned on to the fire trench. The platoon occupying it was lined up in strict military order, under the watchful eye of their lieutenant and sergeant.

‘If an attack comes, it will either be at dawn or dusk, and that’s why we’re always ready at those times,’ Carstairs told Blackstone.

If he’d been Captain Huxton, he might have added an oafish, ‘I know these things, and you don’t — and your lack of knowledge about what goes on here is yet another reason that you’ll never find your killer.’

But Carstairs, being more subtle than Huxton, knew there was no need to add it, because it was obvious enough, Blackstone thought.

‘None of those men will have been here the morning that Lieutenant Fortesque was murdered, will they?’ the inspector asked.

‘No,’ Carstairs replied. ‘The survivors of that platoon will have been rotated after the offensive. They’re most probably in the village of St Denis.’

As they approached the platoon, the lieutenant turned and saluted.

‘Anything wrong, sir?’ he asked with all the anxiety of a young man who does not fear death, but lives in perpetual trepidation of doing something which does not conform to the correct military code.

‘Nothing at all wrong, Toby,’ Carstairs assured him. He glanced at the platoon. ‘Your men are very well turned-out, under the circumstances. You’re doing a splendid job.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ the lieutenant said, with a barely disguised sigh of relief.

Carstairs looked up at the lightening sky. ‘Any minute now,’ he said to the lieutenant.

‘Any minute now, sir,’ the lieutenant agreed.

The stillness of the air was suddenly shattered by loud explosions from both the British artillery and the German guns.

Blackstone, who had been under fire more times than he cared to remember, still found it hard to believe that anything could generate this amount of noise.

‘The men call this the Morning Hate,’ Carstairs said, shouting to be heard above the din. ‘It normally lasts for about ten minutes.’

‘And does it achieve anything?’ Blackstone bawled back.

‘A few lucky shots might produce some casualties, and it certainly shreds some of the weaker men’s nerves — but apart from that, it doesn’t achieve a damn thing!’ Carstairs replied. He turned to the lieutenant, and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Could I have your periscope for a moment, Toby?’

The lieutenant handed the periscope to Carstairs, and Carstairs handed it to Blackstone.

‘Why don’t you take a look at the world outside, Mr Blackstone?’ the captain suggested.

Blackstone raised the periscope and looked out on to No Man’s Land. It was the barbed wire fence he saw first — a complex twisted tangle of wicked spikes, stretched tautly between strong posts and gleaming in the early light.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and imagined himself dashing across No Man’s Land under heavy enemy fire — knowing that his only hope of salvation lay in reaching the enemy trench — and then suddenly coming up against this evil, impenetrable web of sharpened metal. There could be no despair in the whole world quite like that, he thought.

Yet that was just what had happened to Lieutenant Fortesque’s platoon, the morning after he died. The big guns were supposed to have cut the wire, but they hadn’t — and there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

Blackstone took a deep breath, and looked beyond the fire to a meadow, glistening green as the sun caught the morning dew. There were summer flowers, too, poking up between the lush blades. But there were also holes — deep pits made by the shells which landed short of their target, and gouged up the earth.

Beyond the meadow was more barbed wire — German, this time — and beyond even that, the enemy lines.

‘Seen enough?’ Carstairs shouted into his ear.

‘More than enough,’ Blackstone told him.

‘Then we’ll go and look at the dugout,’ the captain said.

The dugout where Lieutenant Fortesque met his death was located midway down the section of trench.

Captain Carstairs opened the door, and waved Blackstone through.

‘Here you have it,’ he said. ‘The scene of the crime.’

The bombardment continued, but it did not seem quite as loud inside the dugout as it was outside, and when Carstairs spoke again, it was almost in his normal voice.

‘When you were looking through the periscope, did you happen to notice the pits that the shells had made?’ he asked.

‘It would have been hard to miss them,’ Blackstone replied, grimly.

‘They’re where the wounded crawl to die,’ Carstairs said. ‘There are bodies lying at the bottom of most of them. Once in a while, we get the opportunity to clear them out, but by then, the rats and the maggots have done their work, and they hardly look like men at all.’