The Wood Beyond (15 page)

The battalion was still in the reserve area outside Arras when I got back from leave but we knew from the bombardment up to the north that something big was coming off  -  so we didnt expect to stay there much longer. And now this - about three this morning - the ground shaking like egg custard and the sky to the north all burning red as if the devils had tunnelled their way out of hell.

We were eating breakfast before we found out that our sappers had set off this huge mine under the Germans on the ridge near Messines. There was a hole in the ground as big as Bradford - one signaller said - and the Jerries were surrendering in their thousands - most on em stark naked cos the blast had blown their clothes off. Our boys were just walking through the gap in the German line not even having to bother about guns because the blast had jammed all them as it hadnt destroyed.

Some of our new lads were keen to get orders to get on up there - among them Archie Doyle. I hadnt been best pleased when I found him in our platoon when I got back off leave - but hes not daft and hed soon worked out it were better to act like an old mate of your corporals than an old enemy. So he was huffing and puffing about how we were missing our chance for a bit of easy glory till Jammy said - Thas not been here long enough to get chatty Doyle - theres some of us have heard it all before. Aye sarge - pipes Chuffy Chandler - but weve not heard a bang like that before - which Jammy had to admit was true.

Then Lieutenant Hurley - old Hurly Burly we called him came along and said we were moving. We all thought it would be up to Messines but gradually we realized that we were going too far north for that - and finally Hurley confirmed it - we were heading for the Salient.

That soon shut up all those whod ever been in the Salient before. In all that stinking festering front line the Salients like a bloody great boil sticking out towards the enemy. Hurly said wed be all right - the Messines mine had taken the southern corner off the Salient and it was only to be expected thered be a follow up attack mounted there within a matter of days if not hours. By the time we got there the Hun would likely be in full retreat. And I’ll be Queen of the May - said Jammy right out loud. The lieutenant laughed - hes a decent sort and weve all got used to his little daftnesses like always wanting to look on the bright side of things.

We camped near Pop to start with which were fine - egg and chips in the Cafe des Allies with a good singsong to follow whenever you could duck off duties - red hot weather - lots of football matches - and would you believe it young Gertie whod landed a job helping Captain Evenlode the adjutant actually got his cricket team going till Jammy hit the only ball we had into a river - and that was the end of that. Pity the Frogs dont play - said Gertie. Nor Jerry either - I said - Could have asked them for a game. True - he said - though perhaps if Jerry did play we wouldnt be fighting this war.

Mebbe he was making a joke but I dont think so.

It had to happen. Orders to move up into the Salient came yesterday. First by train to Ypres then we marched to Zillebeke where we waited for dark before moving up into the line. We were sitting by the lake enjoying the sunshine when Jammy suddenly yells - Minnie left! Where the hell it had come from Christ knows. We should have been well out of their range - mebbe it had a following wind or Fritz was trying a new gun - but there it was - a little black spot in the air tumbling slowly towards us. Most didnt risk looking - when Jammy yelled Minnie left! you headed right and dived into the first hole you could find. Thats what we did all except Hurly Burly. Hed loosened his Sam Browne so perhaps thats what did it. Someone said they saw him shooting off like a scalded cat - only he didnt head right but left - and all that was left of him wasnt worth collecting in a bucket.

It didnt feel like a good omen and we were more down than usual as we prepared to follow Jammy through the dark into our front line position. Then he was called up by the adjutant and a bit later he came back with someone behind him.

Corporal Pascoe - he said - This heres our new platoon commander.

I knew who it was before I saw his face and heard his voice.

Hello Pascoe - said Gertie Grindal - Isnt this jolly?

Yes sir - I said looking at Jammy whose huge face showed nowt - Where exactly is it were heading sir?

Southeast corner of some wood - what do you call it sergeant?

Sanctuary sir - said Jammy.

Id heard some misleading names for some terrible places but this sounded to me like it could be the worst fitting of them all.

Especially with Gertie in charge. Thats it - he said - Lovely name isn't it? - Get the men moving then sergeant - and if they need jollying along just tell them were heading to Sanctuary and that should speed them up eh? Sanctuary!

part two

GLENCORSE

And nothing may we use in vain.

Ev'n Beasts must be with justice slain;

Else men are made their Deodands.

i

A Meditation for Remembrance Sunday

by Andrea Pollinger

Passchendaele was not so much an exercise in modern warfare as an experiment in mass suicide.

The contemporary equivalent would be to devastate an area of several thousand acres with a tactical nuclear weapon, then send in a force of unprotected men to occupy it. This, I am assured by men who did National Service in the fifties, was a tactic actually rehearsed by the British Army at that time, suggesting that little has changed, and the men at the top always want to fight today's wars according to yesterday's technology. Central to the tactical thinking of World War One, such as it was, stood the proposition that if you could punch a hole in the enemy line and send cavalry galloping through, then everyone would be home for Christmas ... or New Year ... Or Easter .. . or . . .

In fairness to Haig it should be said that his strategic plan for Third Ypres was more modest. His intention was to drive the enemy back to a line beyond Bruges and thus cut the U-boat supply line from Bruges to Ostend.

Initially there was supposed to be a simultaneous naval assault on the coast, but when the Admiralty decided this did not suit their convenience, Haig decided to go ahead, perhaps believing that the missing marine element would be supplied by his choice of battleground, basically an area of marshland which not even a complex system of drainage ditches and dykes had been able to reclaim for anything other than bog pasturage. No sensible farmer was going to sow seed on this land. But donkey Haig, having learned nothing from the ineffectiveness of the huge preliminary bombardment on the Somme a year earlier, sowed it with shells for ten long days.

This time not only did the long bombardment give the Germans plenty of warning of the attack, it also breached many of the dykes and dammed most of the ditches. And it started raining. Even a general might have been expected to notice that. And the general of an army that had been bogged down, literally and figuratively, in Flanders for nearly three years might have been expected to have gathered a little bit of intelligence about the terrain. But, standing aloof in giant ignorance, Haig ordered the attack to be pressed, and kept on pressing it for three long months, across marshland, in heavy rain, with ditches blocked and dykes destroyed, and the whole devastated landscape pitted with shellholes like the surface of the moon, except that here was no dry volcanic dust but mud; thick, cloying, drowning, sucking mud . . .

ii

Peter Pascoe stood and looked at the mud.

Where the water hit, it seethed and surged and wrinkled and writhed as if alive. He imagined being caught in its glutinous embrace, wrapped round, caressed, held fast and finally drawn down into dark slow-stifling depths. . .

He turned away and found himself facing Death.

'Ingenious, though I say it myself,' said Arnold Gentry with a rare flush of enthusiasm. 'Three tanks with graduated filters. This first one is wide mesh. It will catch anything bigger than a half-brick. The second smaller, pebble-size. The third superfine, textile fragments, fingernails, hair even.'

'Great,' said Pascoe whose genuine interest in and admiration for Death's work had established a relationship particularly useful in view of Dalziel's ill-concealed abhorrence of the man. 'There's quite a lot of material to get through though, isn't there?'

He turned his gaze on the great mound of earth brought from Wanwood House and deposited alongside Dr Death's patent sluice.

'We will get through it much more quickly than half a dozen constables crawling around with garden hoes,' said Gentry bridling. 'And infinitely more thoroughly.'

'Yes, yes, of course,' soothed Pascoe. 'My point exactly. I wanted you to know how much we appreciate you taking it on and releasing our men for other enquiries.'

It was his emollient skills that had got him here. He'd turned up at the station that morning in good time, in fact a few minutes early, but any hope he might have nurtured of gaining a few Brownie points vanished when he read the scrawled note on his desk.

Nice of you to show up, especially as we're short-handed. George Headingley fell in a puddle and got himself on the panel with a cold in the head which must be pretty small to get in there beside the bone. If you can spare a moment from your mourning, you might take yourself down to the lab and see what yon mate of yours is doing with the muck from Wanwood. I'm off to see Troll down the knacker's.

Dalziel assumed his subordinates knew everything about all current cases.

Like many of his assumptions, it was self-fulfilling. Pascoe had managed to catch Sergeant Wield on his way out and get a quick update. Wield's résumés were famously more informative than other people's disquisitions. 'Let that bugger run Parliament,' Dalziel had once remarked, 'and they could all go home on a Tuesday, which most on 'em probably do anyway.'

In exchange Pascoe had offered the to him still incredible news that Dalziel might have found himself a lady love. 'You mean yon animal woman?' Wield had interrupted. 'Aye, I thought he fancied her. Mebbe she reckons he's an endangered species. Gotta dash. See you.'

So, reflected Pascoe, might Pheidippides have felt as he staggered through the gates of Athens to see a news placard reading:
GOTCHA! Persians Stuffed at Marathon.

He and Gentry stood in companionable silence for a while, watching the water jets wash the first load of earth through the first filter. The level was getting low and various large stones and pieces of wood were becoming visible in the now almost liquid mud. Then something a bit whiter ... in fact as the water hit it, very much whiter . . . smooth . . . bowl-shaped .. .

'Hold on,' said Dr Death excitedly. 'There's something, let me see . ..'

He picked up a long bamboo pole with a metal circle and a net on the end and with the expertise of a gillie slipped it beneath the object and lifted it out.

'There we are,' he said with pale delight. 'That should please Mr Longbottom and even Superintendent Dalziel too.'

'Yes,' said Pascoe looking down with a marked lack of pleasure at the human cranium in the plastic mesh. 'I suppose it should.'

iii

 'Dem bones dem bones gonna walk around, dem bones dem bones gonna walk around, dem bones dem bones gonna walk around, now hear de Word of de Lord.'

Dalziel, recognizing his cue, said, 'You've missed a bit.'

Troll Longbottom turned sharply and said, 'My God, for a tun of lard, you roll soft, Andy.'

'Aye, and you start early. What happened? Flint up your jacksie kept you awake and you started thinking of breakfast?'

'I have been in my lab by eight o'clock every working day for more years than I care to remember,' said Longbottom reproachfully. 'What do you think?'

He stood aside so that Dalziel got a complete view of the bones laid out on the table. The Fat Man had been right about missing a bit. Wield's team had dredged up several more fragments before it was decided to accept Gentry's solution and use the sluice technique but the remains were still more than fifty per cent short of a full set.

'Good-looking fellow,' said Dalziel. 'How'd he die?'

'Not, I would hazard, by physical violence directed at any of the parts covered by, or indeed covering, the bones you see here.'

'There's some on 'em broken,' objected Dalziel. 'Or did you not notice?'

'Good lord, what it is to have a trained eye,' said Longbottom. 'Which one is it? The left? If you brought the other up to scratch, together they might have made the further observation that all these fractures are recent, caused I would guess when the contractors blasted, gouged, and bulldozed that strip of woodland in the summer.' 'So when will you be able to tell us owt useful?'

'Anything positive, you mean? Negatives too are useful, and I can give you some of them. Nothing has been detected yet in the organic matter recovered to indicate toxicity or disease . ..'

'Hang on. Organic matter?'

'Yes. Very little, but enough to work on in various little nooks and crannies.'

'This means it's not been so long buried then?' said Dalziel gloomily.

'Still hoping for prehistory, Andy? Sorry, that's definitely out. But dating is proving something of a problem for reasons too technical to puzzle your steam-age mind with. There are a surprising number of contradictions. . . but as usual, I see you want positive information only. All right. Male, five-eight, five-nine in height, fairly slight of build. And that's it as far as positive goes.'

'They should pay you by the word,' growled Dalziel. 'Any sign of clothing?'

'Curiously, no.'

'Why curiously?'

'I'd have expected some fibres at least in association with remains such as these appear to be. Of course once dispersion started, bones are heavy, fabric's light. I understand you are following Gentry's recommendation of pursuing your search via his sluice?'

'Aye. It made sense.'