Waiting for Sunrise (27 page)
Lysander froze. He heard a squeaking noise. Rats? . . . But it was too sustained. Dripping water? Then it stopped. He slipped his torch out of his kitbag and the two Mills bombs. Pull the pin, count to three, throw and move away, smartly. These explosions would be the diversion, the cause of his ‘death’ that would allow him to make the French lines.
The squeaking noise started again. It was very faint. He was up against the first blocks of stone from the crumbled wall. He aimed his torch in the direction he thought the noise was coming from and switched it on for a second. In the brief flare of light he saw two white faces turn and look up from a trench-sap dug deep under the base of the tomb. He saw a man with a black moustache and a very fair young boy’s face and the turning spindle of a roll of telephone wire being unwound – squeaking quietly.
He switched off the torch, pulled the pin out of the bomb and tossed it into the sap. Clatter. Oaths. He did the same with the second and, in a running crouch, scrambled off in what he thought was the direction of the elms.
After what seemed an eternity he heard the bombs detonate – seconds apart – the flat
blap! blap!
of the explosions in the confined space below the tomb. Somebody started to scream.
Lysander dropped to his knees. The screaming continued, ragged and high-pitched. Almost immediately random gunfire began to come from both lines of trenches – sentries shocked awake by the bombs going off. Rockets curved up into the night sky – green, red, white. Suddenly he was in a world of glaring primary colours. Then came the whistle and thud of rifle grenades. A machine gun began to traverse. Lysander was now crawling on his belly, not daring to look up. He reckoned he must be sixty or seventy yards south of the ruin. Where were the fucking elms? Then he heard, in a moment’s silence, the anguished shout of, ‘
Foley? Foley! Where are you?
’ A powerful white light from a rocket showed him he was past the elms. He had gone further than he thought – now he needed to change course to find the willows and the drainage ditch. He huddled in a ball and shone his torch on his compass. He was heading straight for the German lines – east – he should be going south. He turned through ninety degrees and set off again. There was a cacophony of shooting coming from behind him and now he could hear the bass crump of big mortars being fired. His little diversion had got somewhat out of hand – he hoped Foley and Gorlice-Law had made it back safely.
He fell into the drainage ditch and thoroughly soaked himself from the four inches of water in the bottom. He squatted and leaned back against the bank, allowing his breathing to calm. A few more rockets were going up but the shooting seemed to be dying down. False alarm. Nothing of consequence. Just a scare.
He took out his map again, hooded his torch with his cupped hand and tried to see where he was. If this ditch was the one Foley had described then he had only to follow it a hundred yards or so before it began to angle right and bring him up to the French wire. Then all he needed to look out for were the green rockets from the French lines that would tell him where to come in. Assuming all was going to Munro’s plan . . . He looked at his watch. 3.30. It would begin to grow light in an hour or so – time to make a move.
He sloshed his way along the ditch and, sure enough, it did begin to bear right but then it seemed to come to an abrupt halt in the face of some ancient culvert. Lysander peered into the blackness. In theory, the front-line wire of the French Tenth Army should be facing him. But no sign of any of the green rockets that Munro had promised. Every ten minutes one would go up, he had said. Surely they would have heard the noise and the fuss caused by his bombs going off?
He thought then about the two bombs he had thrown into the sap below the tomb. He saw in his mind’s eye the snapshot of the two faces looking up at him – the man with the moustache and the fair boy – utterly shocked, astonished. Two signallers laying a telephone wire, setting up the listening post again, he assumed. He also had to assume that his bombs had killed or seriously wounded them both. There had been that screaming. Anguished, feral. The panic in the dark as the Mills bombs clattered off the stone. Fingers groping, searching, swearing frantically, then – BOOM! . . .
He felt himself start to shiver and he hugged his knees to his chest – no point in thinking about that, of what had happened to those two signallers. How was he to know that they would be there? No, he decided, the best course of action was to stay put and wait until sunrise. Then he might know what to do next.
It was rather eerie and beautiful to watch the sky begin to lighten behind the German lines and as the dawn advanced he was able to make out the key features of the landscape – there were the three elms to his right and in front of him the dark cross-hatchings of the French wire. The culvert mouth was a crude stone arch and rushes were growing thickly around it, drawing on the extra moisture the drainage ditch provided. A breeze sprang up and he began to smell the smoke drifting across no man’s land as braziers were lit in the trenches. He felt hungry – some crispy rashers of bacon and a hunk of bread dripping with hot fat would do nicely, thank you.
Very carefully he parted the rushes above the culvert and saw the dense wire of the French lines about twenty yards away. Very thick and professionally laid, he thought. He couldn’t squirm through that. He saw a grey column of smoke rise from the trenches beyond, snatched at by the breeze, but no sign of a breastwork of sandbags or a sentry’s loophole.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted.
‘
Allo! Allo! Je suis officier anglais!
’
After about five seconds he shouted ‘
Allo!
’ again and was answered by the crack of a rifle shot.
‘
Je suis un officier anglais! Je ne suis pas allemand!’
More shots followed but none came near him. Then he heard a shout from the French lines.
‘
Tu pense que nous sommes crétins, Monsieur Boche? Vas te faire enculer!’
Lysander felt a moment of helplessness. Maybe talking in French was wrong.
‘I’m English!’ he shouted. ‘English officer. I’m lost!
Perdu!
’
There were some more haphazard rifle shots. He looked over his shoulder at the German lines, hoping the Germans wouldn’t be provoked into shooting back, or else he’d find himself in a cross-fire.
‘
Parlez-vous anglais?
’ he shouted again. ‘I’m an English officer! I am lost!’
There was more swearing at him – colourful expressions he didn’t know or vaguely understood to do with various sexual acts involving animals and close members of his family.
He sat back in some despair. What should he do? He thought he might have to wait until night fell and make his way back to the Manchesters. Then it would be just his filthy luck to be shot by a nervous sentry, jumpy after last night’s exchange. But assuming he made it back how would he explain himself – the whole Geneva operation might be put at risk? Stupid fucking plan, he thought, anyway. Why did he have to disappear, ‘missing in action’? Why not simply go to Geneva as Abelard Schwimmer?
‘
Officier anglais?
’ The shout came from the French lines. Then, ‘Are you there?’ in English.
‘Yes, I’m here! In the ditch!
Le fossé
!’
‘Move to your left. When you are seeing . . .’ The voice stopped.
‘Seeing what?’
‘
Un poteau rouge!
’
‘A red post!
Je comprends!
’
‘That is the entry to come through the . . . Ah,
notre
barbelé
.’
‘I’m coming! Don’t shoot!
Ne tirez pas!
’
‘Coming ver’ slow!’
Lysander hauled himself out of the drainage ditch and began to crawl to his left, staying as flat as he could, suddenly feeling very exposed. He squirmed and wriggled along for a minute or so until he saw a red post hammered in by a gap in the maze of wire. He changed course and crawled towards it – now he could see it marked a zigzag path through the labyrinth.
‘
Je suis là!
’ he shouted.
He crawled slowly into the wire entanglement and saw the sandbagged breastwork up ahead.
‘I’m coming!’ he shouted, suddenly completely terrified, convinced he was being lured close just to be picked off. He held his cap up, his khaki English army cap, and waved it above his head. Strong arms reached for him as he gained the sandbags and hauled him over, lowering him gently to the bottom of the trench.
He lay there on the ground for a moment, his breath coming back, looking up at giants standing over him – bearded filthy men in dirty blue uniforms, all of them smoking pipes, bizarrely. They stared back at him, curious.
‘
C’est sûr
,’ one of them said. ‘
Un véritable officier anglais
.’
He was sitting in a dugout in the support lines, an enamel mug of black unsweetened coffee in his hand, experiencing a level of exhaustion that he’d never encountered before. It was all he could do to raise the mug to his lips, like lifting a heavy boulder or lead cannonball. He put the mug down and closed his eyes. Sleep. Sleep for a week. He had handed the sealed letter from his pack to the officer whose dugout this was – where the bearded blue giants had led him. Cigarette, that’s what he needed. He patted his pockets – then remembered he’d left them behind in Dodd’s dugout. Dugout Dodd. Wiley and Gorlice-Law. Was that Gorlice-Law’s shout for Foley? He just hoped that all –
‘There he is. Our bad penny.’
He looked round, blinking. Fyfe-Miller stood there in the doorway. Smart in a jacket with leather cross-belting, jodhpurs and highly-polished riding boots. The French officer stood behind him.
‘
Notre mauvais centime
,’ Fyfe-Miller translated for the French officer, making no attempt at an accent. He helped Lysander to his feet, grinning his wild grin. Lysander felt like kissing him.
‘Phase one completed,’ Fyfe-Miller said. ‘That was the easy bit.’
1. The Glockner Letters
The ferry from Thonon nosed into the quayside at Geneva, then its engines were thrown into reverse to bring its stern round and the whole little ship shuddered. Lysander – Abelard Schwimmer – almost lost his footing and held on tight to the wooden balustrade on the top deck as thick grey ropes were slung out on to the dock and seamen hitched them to bollards, making the ferry hold fast. The gangway was lowered and Lysander picked up his tartan suitcase and found a place in the disorderly queue of people hurrying to disembark – then it was time for him to move down the wooden incline and take his first steps on Swiss soil. Geneva lay in front of him in the morning sunshine – big apartment buildings fronting the lake, solid and prosperous – set on its alluvial plain, only the bulk of the cathedral rising above the level of the terracotta and grey rooftops, reminding him vaguely of Vienna, for some reason. Low hills and then the dazzling snows of the mountains beyond in the distance. He took a deep breath of Swiss air, settled his Homburg on his head and Abelard Schwimmer wandered off to look for his hotel.
After they had made their way from the front line to the rear, Lysander and Fyfe-Miller had been driven to Amiens, where a room had been booked for him in the Hôtel Riche et du Sport. He went straight to bed and slept all day until he was shaken awake by Fyfe-Miller in the evening and was informed that he had a train to catch to Paris and then on to Lyons. He changed into Abelard Schwimmer’s clothes – an ill-cut navy-blue serge suit (that already felt too hot), a soft-collared beige shirt with ready-knotted bow tie and clumpy brown shoes. If Fyfe-Miller had been planning to offend his dress sense, Lysander thought, then he had done a first rate job. He was given a red tartan cardboard suitcase – with some spare shirts and drawers in it – that also had, hidden behind the lining, a flat bundle of Swiss francs, enough to last him two weeks, Fyfe-Miller said, more than enough time to finish the job. The outfit was completed by a Lincoln-green raincoat and a Homburg hat.
‘Every inch the “
homme moyen sensuel
”,’ Fyfe-Miller said. ‘What a transformation.’
‘You’ve an appalling French accent, Fyfe-Miller,’ Lysander said. ‘The
Hhhhom moyn senzyul
– shocking.’ He repeated it in the Fyfe-Miller style and then as it should be correctly pronounced. ‘The “h” is silent, in French.’
Fyfe-Miller smiled, breezily.
‘
Quel hhhhorreur
. I can make myself understood,’ he said, unashamedly. ‘That’s all I need.’
They shook hands on the platform at Amiens.