The First Casualty Page 6

  ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ Kingsley said, inwardly computing what, if any, defence he might put up against these men as the first one stepped forward. ‘Good evening, Mr Cartwright.’

  Cartwright had murdered his wife and Kingsley had nearly got him hanged for it. He would have done so had Cartwright not contrived also to murder his daughter, who had been the only witness to the crime.

  ‘You owe me fifteen years, Kingsley,’ Cartwright snarled.

  ‘Mr Cartwright, you and I both know,’ Kingsley replied, ‘that by rights you should have hung.’

  ‘You can’t look down on me, you yellow-bellied bastard,’ Cartwright sneered. ‘Not now. I’d rather be a killer than a coward.’

  ‘It is quite possible to be both, Mr Cartwright, and you are.’

  It was not that Kingsley was without fear; he was as horrified at his immediate prospects as any man might be. It was only that even in these desperate straits his logical instincts prevailed. He knew that there was no profit to be had in pleading for mercy and experience had taught him that any strength, even if it is only a refusal to be cowed, can be of advantage in a fight. Therefore he resolved to make a show of courage and contempt. He was utterly alone in his fight for life: once he gave up on himself there truly was no hope left for him.

  The other two men, a burglar and a pimp, stepped forward.

  ‘Evening, Inspector,’ they said. ‘Remember us?’

  Kingsley braced himself. Placing his back against the door he dropped to a fighting stance with his fists raised and his knees bent. He was tall and fit and an excellent boxer — he had won a Blue at Cambridge — but his three antagonists were strong also. For all Kingsley’s skill, might prevailed and he hit the floor in less than a minute. He curled up in the foetal position as the blows rained down upon him until, coughing on his own blood, he lost consciousness.

  TEN

  Field Punishment No. 1

  On the morning after the welcome dinner in the officers’ mess, Captain Abercrombie faced the first duty of his new command. It was his unpleasant task to preside over a punishment detail involving a man from his section.

  A gun limber had been brought to what had once been the Wytschaete village square and now served as an improvised parade ground for the 5th Battalion. A small party stood before it: Captain Abercrombie, four officers of the Military Police and the prisoner Hopkins, who was cuffed at the wrists.

  A cold drizzle was falling and it seemed that what summer there had been in Flanders that year was already over.

  Abercrombie stepped up to address the prisoner.

  ‘I do not know you, Private Hopkins,’ he said, ‘and I had not taken up my post when the offence of which you have been found guilty was committed. I therefore take no pleasure in what is now required of me. However, the army code leaves me no choice.’

  Hopkins attempted to hold his head up and stare Abercrombie down but his whole body was shaking with fear.

  ‘We all have a choice,’ he mumbled. ‘Don’t assuage your conscience with me.’

  If Abercrombie had heard the man, he ignored his comment.

  ‘You have been found guilty of disobeying a direct order.’

  ‘I didn’t refuse to fight! I refused to put on a lice-ridden jacket! Would you have put it on, Viscount?’

  ‘You disobeyed an order. Repeatedly. You could by rights have been shot. Do you have anything to say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Speak then.’

  ‘Your poetry’s shit, Captain. ‘Forever England’? What a lot of lying shit. I’ve heard boys quote it, Captain. Sixteen-year-old boys parroting that shit as they marched off to their deaths. Forever England? Forever shit. Shit shit shit.’

  Abercrombie stood for a moment as if he had been struck. The colour drained from his face. It seemed to the policemen watching that the captain had to make some effort to collect himself.

  ‘Is that all, Private?’ he asked finally.

  ‘Yes, and more than enough.’

  ‘Field Punishment Number One!’

  Two of the military policemen removed Hopkins’s handcuffs and dragged him towards the gun limber. Then they lashed him across one of its wheels, spreading his limbs wide like the male figure in Da Vinci’s famous sketch, a copy of which Abercrombie had had pinned upon his wall at school.

  Hopkins hung upon the wheel all day.

  ELEVEN

  An uncomfortable convalescence

  Anyone who imagined that Kingsley had refused to be conscripted in order to avoid danger and pain would have been quickly disillusioned had they attended the medical room of Wormwood Scrubs in the early hours of the first night of his sentence. There he lay upon a hard wooden bench, unconscious and entirely caked in blood, while the prison doctor, woozy and boozy after being called from a fine supper, attempted to ascertain whether Kingsley’s back had been broken.

  As it turned out, no permanent damage had been done although the victim had been badly beaten. He regained consciousness in time to hear something of the doctor’s report. Kingsley could smell the brandy and cigars on the doctor’s breath as the medical man stood over him.

  ‘There has been considerable bruising and a few cracked ribs. Clearly the wretch has also been quite severely concussed, which means I shall be required to keep him here for further observation,’ the doctor said.

  ‘How long?’ Kingsley heard the voice of Jenkins enquire.

  ‘A day or two for certain, concussions can be dangerous things. I’ve seen a man get up and walk out as happy as a sandboy and an hour later — bang. Seizure. Dead.’

  ‘It would be no great loss. Send him back to his cell immediately.’

  ‘No thank’ee, Mr Jenkins. No thank’ee indeed. I like a quiet life and that means doing things by the book. By the book, sir! The only rule for them as likes a quiet life. I don’t mind ‘em dying. Oh no, happy with that, sir. Happy to be rid of ‘em and good riddance say I. But if they are to die then they must die by the book. By the book, I say! Which in the case of concussions means they must have been appropriately observed. If they die during appropriate observation then all well and good. If they die after appropriate observation none will be happier than I. What I cannot have is them dying in the absence of appropriate observation, for then they would not have died by the book and I, sir, should not wish to answer for that. The prisoner stays here, Mr Jenkins, until such time as he has been sufficiently observed.’

  The senior warder grunted in a resentful manner.

  ‘It’s a fine thing indeed that a fellow like this lies here at his ease while the boys he’s betrayed sleep and die in mud.’

  ‘I grant you that is so,’ said the doctor, his full belly straining his waistcoat, rich food and wine seeping from his every pore, ‘but the book is not concerned with what is just or right, it is concerned with what is in it. That is, what is legal and prescribed. And in this medical room, sir, the book is law.’

  ‘Well, perhaps it’s for the best,’ Jenkins conceded. ‘Could be questions asked if he didn’t make it through his first twenty-four hours in our care.’

  ‘In your care, sir. The prisoner was brought to me in this state and that fact will be duly noted, sir. In the book.’

  Even through his swollen eyelids Kingsley could see that Jenkins was a little troubled. Every nerve in Kingsley’s body was testimony to the savagery of the beating that he had endured. He was clearly fortunate to be alive. A senior warder would not wish to be held responsible for his death, for Kingsley was a high-profile prisoner. He might have been disgraced but he was still the son-in-law of the Commissioner of the London Police. Kingsley judged that for the time being he was relatively safe. Safe at least from being murdered, for no matter that he was now persona non grata, neither his family nor the authorities would be able to ignore his sudden death. Later on, things would change, the memory of his disgrace would fade, he would eventually pass from people’s minds…and then, well, if it were announced that he had fallen from some h
igh walkway while taking exercise, who would question the passing of a coward and a traitor?

  ‘Take your time. Let him have a week,’ Jenkins concluded. ‘Patch him up a bit. Then we’ll hand him over to some other ‘old pals’ of his.’

  ‘Yes, well, Mr Jenkins,’ the doctor complained, ‘I would be obliged to you if you could arrange to have him assaulted at a slightly more social hour next time. I do not appreciate being called from the due conclusion of my vittles. It impairs digestion and is most inhibiting to the maintenance of properly regulated bowels.’

  The warder and the doctor then departed, leaving Kingsley alone with his thoughts. And grim thoughts they were. It was clear to him that his already desperate situation was only going to get worse and that it could lead to only one conclusion. He was going to die, not immediately but quite soon. Unless of course he could find a way out.

  ‘So would yiz loik a shot o’ morphine, moi foin pacifist friend?’ Kingsley could not turn his head to look but he presumed that this was the voice of a medical orderly.

  ‘Oi could see yiz was conscious while those two bastards was gabbing on,’ the voice continued. ‘Jesus wept, yiz mosst be in a terrible load o’ pain. Oi can give yiz a bit o’ relief for that easily enough.’

  It was the first offer of kindness Kingsley had received for some time. It made him feel weak and emotional, as if he wanted to cry, something that he had not done since he was a child. Not even when he found the white feather on his pillow. Not even when he had returned home to find that his son had been removed from his corrupting presence. As the tears seeped between his swollen eyelids, causing the cuts to sting with the salt, Kingsley wondered whether he was crying for those things now.

  ‘Thank you,’ he whispered through swollen, blood-clotted lips, wincing in pain as the movement caused the splits in them to open up and bleed afresh.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘Not many in here are concerned about my comfort. ‘Not many at all.’

  ‘But you are.’

  ‘Well. All God’s creatures, eh?’

  ‘Why do you not despise me?’

  ‘Woi would Oi dispoice a man whom de King sees fit t’incarcerate?’

  An Irishman. And a Republican, of course.

  ‘Any fockin’ fellah dat annoys his precious Imperial fockin’ Majesty is foin boi miself. Now d’you want dis shot o’ morphine or don’t ye?’

  Strange to be finding comfort from such a source. How many times had Kingsley heard that same soft accent hurling hatred and abuse at him? Police relations with the Irish in London were almost uniformly hostile, particularly since the Easter Rising of the previous year, and it was an unfamiliar thing indeed for him to find himself on the receiving end of Irish good humour.

  ‘No thank you,’ he said. ‘But thank you all the same.’

  Kingsley did not want morphine. No matter what pain he was in he knew that above all he must keep his wits about him; they were literally all he had left. Besides which, years spent trying to police the bestial horrors in the labyrinths between the Strand and New Oxford Street had given Kingsley a morbid horror of drug addiction.

  ‘Suit y’self,’ said the orderly. ‘Oi hope yiz won’t mind if Oi do.’ Moments later Kingsley made out the tiny sound of a syringe being depressed, followed by an audible sigh.

  ‘Oh, very noice. Very noice indeed,’ said the orderly, his voice now slightly abstracted, ‘and all accounted for boi de book. Oi shall tell de doctor dat yiz had your shot as properly prescribed, so Oi’s hope yiz won’t be goin’ an’ contradictin’ us.’

  ‘No, I shan’t.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Perhaps you could give me a little water?’

  After the orderly had placed a cup to his damaged lips and then departed to enjoy his dreaming, Kingsley once more fell to considering his position and what if anything he might do about it.

  First of all he considered escape.

  People had got out of Wormwood Scrubs before and Kingsley flattered himself that his mind and eye were sharper than most. But to escape he would need all his strength and agility. Currently, beaten black and blue as he was, he had neither and was unlikely to recover them, for once he was released from the sickroom and back in the bosom of the prison population Jenkins had already made it clear that he would be attacked once more and then attacked again.

  With the option of escape only the most distant possibility, Kingsley tried to think along other lines.

  Surely he could not be the only pariah in the building? Reason told him that there were others like him who were outside the normal run of prisoners. Not conscientious objectors, he knew that. His had been a special case: those other objectors who had been dealt with by military tribunals had, if imprisoned, been sent to far less brutal establishments than Wormwood Scrubs. Only Kingsley had been treated as a common criminal.

  But were there others with whom it would be possible to form an alliance? Could he seek out those who were also threatened and form a non-aggression pact in which each would leap to the defence of the other if attacked? Even in the bleakness of his pain Kingsley could not help but reflect that it had been arrangements such as these that had brought all the dominoes of Europe crashing down together and created the disaster which was now consuming them. For a little while his thoughts drifted into a crazy vision in which the entire prison population was involved in a giant punch-up in the name of collective security. Chairs were smashed, pies thrown and suddenly the doors burst open and the room was filled with grotesquely gurning American constables hitting each other with comically ineffective truncheons. Like most people, Kingsley enjoyed visiting the new picture palaces and in happier days he and his little son had laughed along with everyone else at the antics of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops. Now, in his delirium, they provided a brief diversion from his current misery. When clarity returned once more, he mused that even if there were others like him in the prison, existing in fear on the fringes of the community, of what use would they be to him? Other persecuted individuals would be as defenceless as he and impossible to organize. Besides, the idea of seeking out the child-killers, rapists and other pariahs in an attempt to enlist their support in a defensive alliance seemed as obnoxious as it was hopeless.

  Kingsley needed to join a group. An established band within the prison that had the power to act collectively in mutual self-interest. But who? He had already discovered that the Socialists would have nothing to do with an ex-policeman. Were there any others amongst whom he could cast his lot?

  The orderly returned.

  ‘Oi heard yis laughin’, mate. Oi do tink dat’s hoily fockin’ commendable.’

  That accent once again. The accent of the outsider, the pariah, an Irishman in England knew all about what it felt like to be despised.

  ‘I was dreaming about the Keystone Kops,’ Kingsley whispered.

  ‘Ah yes. Hoily amusin’, Oi must say. Although if truth be tol’ Oi don’t foind watching policemen of any description a source of entertainment.’

  The orderly helped Kingsley to some more water, his hand less steady now as the morphine which he had injected worked its way through his system.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Kingsley said when he had drunk his fill, ‘but would you by any chance know any Fenians within the prison?’

  The orderly set down the cup. Addled though his brain might be, ‘Fenian’ was not a word that he could ignore.

  ‘Does Oi know any of de Brotherhood?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And woi would yiz be askin’ me that?’

  ‘Because, like me, they are incarcerated not for greed but for a principle.’

  ‘And you’d be an Oirish Nationalist then, would yiz?’

  ‘I don’t pretend that we are incarcerated for the same principles but they are principles nonetheless.’ Struggling to ignore the pain from his bruised and battered flesh, Kingsley attempted to concentrate his thoughts. ‘I wish to appeal to them for protection.’

  �
�And woi would de IRB give a fock about helping you, moi friend?’

  ‘I have told you. I am a fellow idealist.’

  ‘Doze are hard men t’be messin’ wit, Inspector.’

  It was a desperate idea and Kingsley knew it, the longest of possible long shots. If English trades unionists despised an ex-policeman how much more so would Irish nationalists? They certainly would not be inclined to help him out of pity. Was it possible that he could convince them he had something to offer? Names? Intelligence? Even a short period under their protection might give him time to recover and search out some means of escape. And if they turned on him, what did it matter? He was a condemned man anyway and at least the IRB were patriots, soldiers in their own way. Prisoners not of greed but of conscience. Better to die at their hands than be kicked to death by pimps and thieves. Kingsley felt confident that the IRB would at least dispatch him cleanly.

  ‘Oi hope yiz knows what yiz is doin’,’ the orderly added.

  ‘Not really, no,’ Kingsley replied. ‘But in my current position I don’t think it matters much, do you?’

  TWELVE

  Ypres salient, zero hour, 31 July 1917: the dawn of the Third Battle of Ypres

  Abercrombie could not seem to stop his throat from swallowing. Over and over again it gulped involuntarily as if some great object like a cricket ball had lodged itself inside and nothing could be done to shift it. He and his platoon had come up to the front shortly after darkness had fallen on the previous evening and had spent the night in this foremost trench of the British line.

  The hours of darkness had been terrible but splendid. Abercrombie, like every man in that line, had watched transfixed as the dark sky exploded and the German horizon ignited and burned under the force of three thousand British guns, each one hurling shell after shell after shell at the enemy. All night long the men of the Royal Artillery, who laboured just to the rear of Abercrombie and his men, had pushed themselves to the very limits of physical exhaustion in order to create a barrage that it was hoped would cut the German wire and pulverize their forward defences.