The First Casualty Read online

  Every soldier recognized the strange and awesome beauty of the night-time barrage; no Chinese firework master could ever have imagined such a show as the airborne inferno which exploded over Ypres on the evening of 30 July 1917. The thunder of it bludgeoned the eardrums and its lightning dazzled the eyes. Men crouched beneath it, numbed and battered, as the pressure changes created by the thumping explosions in the air around them deadened their senses whilst at the same time fraying their nerves. And all night long Abercrombie and his men, along with nine full divisions of British infantry, sheltered beneath this sulphurous sky. Hiding in the dirt, sandwiched between the monstrous majesty of their own guns and the snarling teeth of the German wire that they knew they must face at dawn. For no one in all of Flanders could now have been in any doubt that the next big British push was about to begin.

  In the hour or so before dawn, the guns grew quieter and it was possible for those who wished to speak to make themselves heard.

  ‘Better place a lookout for submarines, eh, sir,’ Abercrombie’s platoon sergeant quipped. It was an old joke in the waterlogged swamplands of the Western Front but never more relevant than on that morning, for all night the rain had poured as if Mother Nature, offended by the carnage, was trying to douse the violence of the British guns.

  Abercrombie did not answer. On any other morning in his military career so far he would have answered. He would have given the sergeant a smile and produced some bit of dry wit to comfort his men, showing them that their captain was cool and in control. But on this morning Abercrombie could not answer; the cricket ball which he seemed to have swallowed had now grown big as a football. He was having trouble breathing, let alone trying to speak. His wit, which was his greatest weapon and also his trusty shield, had, at this moment of supreme testing, been denied him.

  Abercrombie wanted to be strong but his strength was draining from him, down through his waterlogged boots and into the mud below. During the night he had managed to collect himself for a moment and find the strength to give support to a subordinate. Stamford had passed along the trench escorting an observation team from the artillery. The young man’s face had been a picture of terror, enduring as he was his first artillery barrage. Abercrombie had offered him his hand and as Stamford had taken it, Abercrombie had squeezed it gently and their eyes had met as they had not done since their night together in London. Stamford had smiled and seemed a little calmed.

  Abercrombie was glad that he had managed to give some comfort to the boy who loved him but now he doubted he would ever be able to give comfort to anyone again. Least of all himself, for he feared that he would not have the strength to give the order to advance and so would be disgraced. Something had changed inside him. He had heard that this was not uncommon amongst men who had seen a year or two of constant service. Some brave men just stopped being brave. Abercrombie feared that he was such a man.

  He hugged himself to mask the shaking, and the football in his throat just kept getting bigger.

  THIRTEEN

  Silence after battle

  It was evening once again. The evening at the end of the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres, a battle that was to rage with increasing hopelessness for the next two months. General Haig had set the objective for that first day as the village of Passchendaele, some four and a half miles from the British starting point. Instead, about a single mile had been covered and at cruel cost. Nonetheless this represented a greater advance than almost any previous British assault of the war and the General Staff at least had pronounced the day a qualified success.

  Abercrombie was in no position to celebrate this small victory, for he found that he had been struck dumb. Eight hours earlier he had managed with a supreme effort to dislodge the ball in his throat sufficiently to give him enough voice to count off the final minutes before the assault began. The rum ration issued to every man in that last half-hour of waiting had done its work and loosened his choking throat, and he had been able to blow his whistle and wish his men luck before forcing himself upwards over the parapet ahead of them.

  But after that he was silent.

  He had done his duty and led his men into the withering machine-gun fire, proceeding in an orderly fashion towards the enemy line. He had taken one or two flesh wounds but had escaped serious injury, unlike the majority of his company, who had fallen around him.

  He had arrived at the German wire with the bedraggled remnants of the British first wave and had been involved in the bayonet work and hand-to-hand fighting which occurred as they took the forward line of enemy trenches.

  He had fought a decent enough battle, but now, however, sitting in the field dressing station to which he had staggered after the position he had occupied had been relieved, he knew that he was finished. Incapable of further action of any sort, he could not speak, he could scarcely hear and, as the organized chaos of blood, men and bandages proceeded around him in the crowded dugout, he wondered if he would even have the strength to walk towards the medical officer when his turn came to be diagnosed.

  ‘So, Captain. Lucky and not so lucky for you, I’m afraid,’ the MO said when finally he was seen, and an orderly was applying disinfectant to the shallow bullet wound he had taken in the shoulder. ‘Lucky, in that five inches to the left and this bullet would have killed you, unlucky in that three inches would have scored you a Blighty. As it is, back in the line tomorrow, I’m afraid.’

  But Abercrombie knew that he would not be in the line tomorrow. He took up a wax pencil which the doctors used for marking flesh to guide the operating crews and wrote upon his hand that he was mute.

  Later still, in the small hours of the morning on what would be the second day of the Third Battle of Ypres, the colonel who had welcomed Abercrombie into the battalion with such enthusiasm only three days earlier stood beside the regiment’s senior medical officer to discuss the surprising and distressing development.

  ‘I suppose even heroes get shell shock,’ he said with genuine concern. ‘Poor fellow, he’ll take this very hard when he comes to understand it.’

  Abercrombie had walked back a further two miles to an

  RAMC operating centre, a vast tent in which ten teams of surgeons and nurses worked simultaneously on the ever-lengthening queues of stretcher cases which were being carried back across the mud. Each patient had been previously marked for cutting with the wax pencils at the forward dressing centre. The surgeons had to trust to the diagnosis of their colleagues at the front, for there was no time now for further examination: every wound was seeping through its bandages, disease hung in the air and crawled upon the floor, and every man was in danger of dying if not sewn up immediately. The teams around the tables took no more than a brief glance at each newly sedated body before setting to work. The Royal Army Medical Corps was proud of the fact that during this third year of the war they were able to send almost 80 per cent of the wounded men they processed back to the front or at least into some form of useful war work. The men groused that the RAMC were getting so good that the only way to be permanently excused from the army was to die.

  In a corner of the vast tent, set slightly apart from the crimson mayhem, Abercrombie sat alongside a number of other dazed-looking cases, amongst whom was also Private Hopkins, the man whom only two days earlier Abercrombie had ordered lashed to a gun carriage. The two men looked at each other but did not speak. Neither was capable of it.

  ‘So the fellah can’t talk to us?’ the colonel enquired.

  ‘Not at the moment. Muteness is a pretty common symptom of shell shock,’ the doctor replied. ‘It doesn’t tend to last long but until it wears off we won’t know much about his real mental state.’

  ‘D’you think he’s gone loopy?’

  ‘Probably not. I should think it’s just nervous exhaustion. Most cases are, although if I’m frank I know pretty much bugger all about it. Not many people do really. The army never considered such matters before. But then battles didn’t last so long in the old days, did they? F
rom my experience those who do claim to know about shell shock always sound pretty bonkers themselves. That’s why I stick to a knife and a needle and thread, you know where you are with a patient from the neck down. Anyway, we’ll send him back to Beaurivage and see what they say.’

  ‘Damnable business really.’ The colonel sighed. ‘I hear he did awfully well today, got quite a few of his chaps right up to the wire.’

  He looked sadly towards Abercrombie then turned away, limping slightly as his boots touched the sticky coating of blood and gore that covered the floor of the tent.

  ‘Just a scratch, bit of shrapnel nicked me. Not a Blighty, I fear,’ he said as he began to hobble away.’ Shame that, could have done with a break. I hear the grouse are particularly thick on the moors this season. Not surprised, nobody left but women and clergymen to shoot at ‘em, I suppose.’

  ‘One thing, Colonel,’ the doctor added. ‘Abercrombie wrote me a note. He says he wants his satchel brought back from his trench. A leather case with papers in it. He was most insistent, not bothered about anything else but very concerned about his blessed papers. Could you arrange for it to be brought down?’

  ‘What? Yes, yes, of course.’

  ‘Fellows in his condition can get very fixed ideas and it’s generally easier all round if we can give them what they want.’

  ‘Right. Absolutely. Leather case. Papers. Will do.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The colonel shook his head sadly. ‘Splendid chap like that, eh? What a rotten shame. I suppose we all get a bit worn down in the end, don’t we? Damnable business.’

  He turned and made his way back through the mayhem of ten operating tables, at times having to step over the discarded limbs that littered the floor.

  FOURTEEN

  A potential ally

  On the evening that the colonel left Abercrombie sitting mute amongst the wounded and the dying, Kingsley was sleeping fitfully in his prison hospital bed. It had been nearly a week since he had approached his Irish orderly for help and neither of them had mentioned the matter since. Kingsley had resigned himself to the assumption that he could expect no aid from that quarter. What was more, he knew that he was recovering slowly and although he could not yet be moved he was uncomfortably aware that the day must soon come when he would be returned to the body of the prison where only beatings, and almost certainly fatal beatings, awaited him.

  He was woken from sleep by a hand over his mouth. Opening his eyes, he saw above him a man in prison uniform who held his finger to his lips for silence. Kingsley nodded gently to indicate that he understood and the man removed his hand from Kingsley’s mouth.

  ‘Raise him up a little,’ the man said.

  ‘Yes, sor. Certainly, sor,’ the Irish orderly muttered, clearly terrified of the prisoner who had woken Kingsley. He stepped forward and propped pillows beneath Kingsley’s shoulders so that he might see about the room.

  There were three men present besides the orderly, the one who seemed to be in charge and another two standing near the door. All were in prison uniform but they did not look like the prisoners Kingsley had so far seen. With the exception of the drug-raddled orderly they stood straight and, as far as Kingsley could make out in the flickering gaslight, their eyes were sharp. That was all he could see of their faces, however, for they were all masked, with rags knotted across their noses.

  ‘My friend here tells me that you’ve an interest in speaking to loyal Irishmen,’ the one who was in command said softly.

  ‘I’ve an interest in speaking to anybody who might be prepared to help me,’ Kingsley whispered through his bruised lips.

  ‘How do you think we could help you?’

  ‘You have power. That’s plain enough to see or else how could you have left your cells to come to me tonight?’

  ‘It’s true that we have a bit of influence about the place,’ the man replied. ‘Paddies everywhere, you see. Can’t get rid of us. We’re like flies on shit, so we are. Some doors are open to us. Sadly not the front one.’

  The man did not have the thick Dublin accent of the orderly and, despite the coarseness of his language, his voice was soft and educated. Kingsley imagined that he might be a product of Trinity College, whose professors did a fair line in nurturing enemies of the British state.

  ‘You know who I am,’ said Kingsley. ‘You know what I am here for.’

  ‘Yes. You’re the fellah who objects to the war because he thinks it stupid.’

  ‘Illogical.’

  ‘That’s right, illogical. Tell me, Inspector Kingsley, how do you feel about the logic behind the war the British have been waging against the people of Ireland these past thousand years or so?’

  Kingsley had of course expected this.

  ‘I regret that in the past I have not considered it as much as I should.’

  ‘But you’re considering it now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Being as how there’s not an Englishman left who’ll give you the time of day, you thought you might try your luck with the Micks.’

  ‘I suppose that is a fair summation of my position.’

  ‘How do you feel,’ the man continued, ‘about the ‘logic’ of them dragging Paddy Pearce and the rest of the boys from the Post Office in Dublin at Easter last year and hanging the lot of them for having the temerity to believe that Ireland should be run by the Irish?’

  ‘I think it was highly illogical. The British created another half dozen martyrs to inspire your cause.’

  ‘Well, I must say that’s very comforting. Especially coming from a fellah who was happily in the employ of the murderers at the time.’

  Kingsley had no answer to this and so he remained silent.

  ‘Well, now we should get down to cases, I think,’ the man said. ‘Can’t be out of our cells all night, you know. Wouldn’t do to push our luck. You are looking for protection, I believe, Inspector? The idea being, I presume, that we let it be known that any fellah as hurts you will shortly thereafter have to reckon with the Mad Micks? Is that right?’

  ‘I would appreciate such an arrangement very much.’

  ‘Us scary crazy Irish that steal babies from English mothers in order to feast on their flesh?’

  Once more Kingsley did not answer.

  ‘And what,’ the man continued, ‘I hope you’ll forgive me for being so crass as to enquire, would be in it for us?’

  ‘I…I can tell you something of what I know.’

  ‘And just what would a flat-footed London peeler know, Mr Kingsley?’

  ‘I was at one point with Special Branch. I still have contacts.’

  ‘Do you know the identities of any undercover officers?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Will you reveal them?’

  ‘For you to murder? No.’

  ‘At least you’re honest, Mr Kingsley. Fortunate for you, for I know a little about you and most certainly would not have believed you if you had said yes.’

  ‘Before 1909, before we had a proper secret service, it was the police who were your principal opponents in London.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Kingsley, I know that. I didn’t come here to listen to a lecture. What do you have for me?’

  ‘I can tell you something of what we know…’ Kingsley was improvising desperately. ‘We know that the IRB has infiltrated the Gaelic League. I am sure that Eoin McNeill would be surprised and horrified to learn how many of his precious Irish Language Conversation groups were in fact tutorials for bomb-makers and gunrunners. And also the Gaelic Athletic Association? How many of your men have been secretly recruited and trained whilst you all pretend to play football? Half the fellows who took part in the rising must have come to you that way. We know because we have men amongst you.

  ‘You do, do you?’

  ‘Yes. That was how we learned of Casement and his mission to Germany.’

  ‘Inspector, it was in the bloody papers.’

  ‘We knew where he was landing. We knew where to grab him.�
��

  ‘Sir Roger Casement was a bloody idiot who couldn’t keep his mouth shut if his lips were bolted together. His capture was no loss to us and small credit to you. Now then, let me ask you this. If you have British spies and coppers playing Gaelic football with the lads of the GAA in Donegal, will you give me their names?’

  ‘No.’

  The Fenian smiled.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I will not condemn them to die.’

  ‘Or, more to the point, because these spies do not exist.’

  ‘You may hope so.’

  ‘Inspector Kingsley, I expected better of you.’

  ‘I am sorry to be a disappointment.’

  ‘Neither the police nor your precious new Secret Intelligence Service have ever infiltrated the IRB in any significant manner.’

  ‘If we have, then surely you would be the last to know.’

  ‘If you had, then surely the British authorities in Dublin would have had some foreknowledge of the Easter Rising, Mr Kingsley. But they didn’t, did they? It took them totally by surprise.’

  ‘How can you be sure? We crushed it, didn’t we?’

  ‘Yes, you crushed it as you were always going to crush it, but not because of any brilliant intelligence work on the part of your spies, my friend, but because you are the fucking British Empire and you have a big army and we are a bunch of farmers and bank clerks equipped with the kind of shitty nineteenth-century ordnance which that fool Casement managed to beg from the Germans! And even if we hadn’t gone at it half-arsed like we did, putting only a thousand men on to the streets when we could have fielded ten times that, you still would have crushed it. Now then, Inspector Kingsley, let us dispense with your desperate fantasies and see if you have anything for us that is worth us saving your life in this prison. I shan’t ask you to betray your own because I know that you wouldn’t but you can betray some of ours if you’ve a mind. You were with the London Special Branch, what say you give me the names of half a dozen Irish informers, eh? That’ll buy you a bit of protection, my friend. Tell us the names of six traitorous Micks, laying pavements, digging holes and stirring tar in London, who all the while are keeping an ear open on behalf of the police.’