‘If there’s another mug of that coffee,’ said Sean. ‘It’s bloody cold tonight.’
Sean accepted the chipped enamel mug and hunkered down close to the brazier, cupped the mug between his hands, blowing on the steaming liquid and sipping noisily, and after a moment the others followed his example hesitantly. It was strange to be squatting like old mates with a General and the silence was profound.
‘You’re from Zululand?’ Sean asked the boy suddenly, his ear had picked up the accent, and without waiting for a reply went on in the Zulu tongue, ‘Velapi wena? Where are you from?’
The Zulu language came naturally and easily to Mark’s lips though he had not spoken it for two years. ‘From the north beyond Eshowe, on the Umfolosi River.’
‘Yes. I know it well. I have hunted there.’ Sean changed back to English. ‘Anders? I knew another Anders. He rode transport from Delagoa Bay back in ’89. John? Yes, that’s it. Old Johnny Anders. Any relation? Your father?’
‘My grandfather. My father’s dead. My grandfather has land on the Umfolosi. That’s where I live.’ The boy was relaxing now. In the brazier glow, Sean thought he saw the lines of strain around his mouth ironing out.
‘I didn’t think you’d know poor folk, like us – sir.’ Fergus MacDonald spoke with cutting edge in his voice, leaning forward towards the brazier with his head turned towards him so that Sean could see the bitter line of his mouth.
Sean nodded slowly. MacDonald was one of them then. One of those who were intent on the new order – trade unions and Karl Marx, Bolsheviks who threw bombs and called themselves comrades. Irrelevantly he noticed for the first time that MacDonald had ginger hair, and big golden freckles on the backs of his hands. He turned back to Mark Anders.
‘He taught you to shoot?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The lad grinned for the first time, warmed by the memory. ‘He gave me my first rifle, a Martini Hendry that blew a cloud of gunsmoke like a bush fire but would throw dead true at a hundred and fifty yards.’
‘I’ve hunted elephant with it. A great rifle,’ Sean agreed, and suddenly across an age difference of forty years they were friends.
Perhaps, for Sean, the recent death of that other bright young man, Nick van der Heever, had left an aching gap in his life, for now he felt a flood of paternal protection for the youngster. Fergus MacDonald seemed to sense it also, for he cut in like a jealous woman.
‘You’d best be getting ready now, lad.’ The smile was gone from Mark’s lips, the eyes were too calm, and he nodded his thin neck stiffly.
Fergus MacDonald fussed over the lad, and once again Sean was reminded of a trainer preparing his fighter in the dressing-room. He stripped off the heavy, voluminous great-coat and the battle-dress jacket. Over the long woollen full-length underwear went a woollen shirt and two knitted jerseys. A woollen scarf around the throat.
Then a mechanic’s boiler-suit which covered the layers of clothing in a single neat skin that would not snag, or flutter in a breeze to draw an enemy eye. A woollen balaclava over the head, and a leather airman’s helmet, and Sean saw the reason. The British steel helmet had a distinctive brim, and anyway was no protection from a Mauser bullet.
‘Keep your nut down, Mark, me boy.’
Knitted mittens with fingers cut out, and then thick loose gloves over them.
‘Keep the old fingers working, lad. Don’t let them stiffen up on you.’
A small leather shoulder bag that slung comfortably under the left armpit.
‘Ham sandwiches with plenty of mustard, chocolate and barley sugar – just the way you like it. Don’t forget to eat, keep you warm.’
Four full clips of .303 cartridges, three slipped into the thigh pockets of the boiler-suit—and one into the special pocket sewn into the forearm of the left sleeve.
‘I waxed each round myself,’ Fergus announced mainly for the benefit of the listening General. ‘They’ll slide in like—’ and the simile was crude and obscene, meant to show Fergus’ scorn of rank and class. But Sean let it pass easily, he was too interested in the preparations for the hunt.
‘I won’t show Cuthbert until the sun is right.’
‘Cuthbert?’ Sean asked, and Fergus chuckled and indicated a third figure that lay quietly at the back of the dugout. It was the first time Sean had noticed him and Fergus chuckled again at his puzzled expression and reached out to the reclining figure.
Only then Sean realized it was a dummy, but in the light of the brazier the features were realistic and the helmeted head rode at a natural angle on the shoulders. The model ended abruptly at the hips and below it there was only a broom handle.
‘I’d like to know how you are going to do it?’ Sean addressed the question to young Mark Anders, but Fergus replied importantly.
‘Yesterday the Hun was shooting from low on the northern slope of the hill. Mark and me worked out the angles of the two shots he made and we’ve got him pegged to within fifty yards.’
‘He may change position,’ Sean pointed out.
‘He’ll not leave the north slope. It’s in shadow all day, even if the sun comes out. He will want to shoot from shade into light.’ Sean nodded at the logic of it.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘but he may shoot from a stand in the German line.’
And Mark answered quietly, ‘I don’t think so, sir. The lines are too far apart here’ – the German line ran across the crest of the hill – ‘he’d want a shorter range. No, sir, he’s shooting from close in. He makes a stand in no-man’s-land, probably changes it every day—but each time he comes close as he can get to our lines while still staying in the shadow.’ The boy had not tripped on a single word now that his mind had locked on to the problem. His voice was low and intense.
‘I picked out a good stand for the lad, just beyond the farm house. He can cover the whole of the northern slope at less than two hundred yards. He’ll move out now and settle in while it’s still dark. I’m sending him out early. I want him to make his move before the Hun. I don’t want the lad walking on top of the bastard in the dark.’ Fergus MacDonald took over from Mark with an air of authority. ‘Then we both wait until the light is good and clean, then I start working with Cuthbert here,’ he patted the dummy and chuckled again. ‘It’s damned difficult to give him a nice natural look, like some stupid rooky sticking his head up to take a first look at France. If you let the Hun get too long a look at him, then he’ll tumble to the trick, but if you make it too quick, he won’t get a chance for a shot. No, it’s not easy.’
‘Yes, I should imagine,’ Sean murmured wryly, ‘that it’s the most dangerous and difficult part of the whole thing.’ And he saw the deadly expression flit across Fergus MacDonald’s face before he turned to Mark Anders.
‘Another mug of coffee, lad – and then it’s time to be getting on. I want you in place before the snow stops.’
Sean reached into the breast of his great-coat and brought out the silver flask that Ruth had given him on the day the regiment sailed.
‘Put some fangs in the coffee.’ He offered the flask to Mark.
The boy shook his head shyly. ‘No thank you, sir. Makes me see squiff.’
‘Don’t mind if I do, sir.’ Fergus MacDonald reached swiftly across the brazier. The clear brown liquid glugged freely into his own mug.
The Sergeant-Major had sent out a patrol before midnight to cut a lane through the wire in front of ‘A’ Company.
Mark stood at the foot of the trench ladder and changed his rifle from the right hand; another flare burst overhead and in its light Sean saw how intent the boy was on his task. He pulled back the bolt of the rifle, and Sean noted that he was not using the standard No. I short Lee-Enfield, which was the work-horse of the British army, but that he favoured the American P.14 which also fired the .303 calibre but had the longer barrel and finer balance.
Mark stripped two clips of ammunition into the magazine and closed, the bolt, levering a round of carefully selected and waxed ammunition into the breach.
/>
In the last light of the flare he looked across at Sean, and nodded slightly. The flare died and in the darkness that followed Sean heard the quick light steps on the wooden ladder. He wanted to call ‘good luck’ after the boy, but suppressed the whim and instead patted his pockets for his cheroot case.
‘Shall we get on back, sir?’ the Captain asked quietly.
‘Off with you,’ growled Sean, his voice gruff with the premonition of coming tragedy. ‘I’ll stay on a while.’ Though he could give no help, somehow it seemed like deserting the boy to leave now.
Mark moved quickly along the line that the patrol had laid to guide him through the wire. He stooped to keep contact with the line in his left hand, and he carried the P.14 in his right. He lifted his feet carefully, and stepped lightly, trying not to scuff the snow, trying to spread his weight evenly on each foot so as not to break the crust.
Yet every time a flare went up, he had to fall face forward and lie still and huddled, a dark blot in the electric glare of light against the sheet of white, screened only by the persistently falling veils of snow. When he scrambled up in the darkness and moved on, he knew he left a disturbed area of snow. Ordinarily it would not have mattered, for in the barren, shell-churned wilderness of noman’s -land, such light scrabble marks passed unnoticed. But Mark knew that in the first cold light of dawn an unusual pair of eyes would be scrutinizing every inch of the ground, hunting for just this kind of sign.
Suddenly, colder than the icy snow-laden air against his cheeks, was the deep chill of loneliness. The sense of vulnerability, of being pitted against a skilled and implacable enemy, an invisible, terrifying, efficient adversary who would deliver instant death at the slightest error.
The latest flare sank and died, and he scrambled to his feet and blundered to the dark, jagged wall of the ruined farm house. He crouched against it, and tried to control his breathing, for this newly conceived terror threatened to smother him. It was the first time it had come upon him. Fear he had known – had lived with it as his constant companion these last two years, but never this terrible paralysing terror.
When he touched the fingers of his right hand to his ice-cold cheek, he felt the tremble in them, and in sympathy his teeth chattered in a short staccato rhythm.
‘I can’t shoot like this,’ he thought wildly, clenching his jaw until it ached and locking his hands together and holding them hard against his groin, ‘and I can’t stay here.’ The ruin was too obvious a stand to make. It would be the first point the German sniper would study. He had to get out of there, and quickly. Back to the trenches. Suddenly his terror was panic, and he lifted himself to begin the crazed flight back, leaving his rifle propped against the ruined wall.
darkness. Mark froze instantly.
‘Ja!’ The reply was further along the wall and Mark found the rifle with his left hand settling naturally on to the stock and his right curling about the pistol grip, forefinger hooking over the trigger.
‘Komm, wir gehen zurück.’ Close beside Mark, sensed rather than seen in the darkness, passed a heavily laden figure. Mark swung the rifle to follow him, his thumb on the safety-catch ready to slip it. The German stumbled heavily in the treacherous snowy footing, and the wiring tools he carried clanked together. The man cursed.
‘Scheisse!’
‘Halt den Mund,’ snapped the other, and they moved on back towards the German line above them on the crest of the hill.
Mark had not expected a wiring detail to be out in this weather. His first thought had been for the German sniper, but now his mind leaped forward at this sudden good fortune.
The patrol would lead him through the German wire, and their heavy blundering tracks would hide his own from the sniper.
It was only when he had decided this that he realized with surprise that his panic had passed, his hands were rock steady and his breathing was deep and slow. He grinned without humour at his own frailty and moved forward lightly after the German patrol.
They were a hundred paces beyond the farm house when it stopped snowing. Mark felt the slide of dismay in his chest. He had relied heavily on the snow holding, at least until dawn, but he kept on after the patrol. They were moving faster and more confidently as they neared their own lines.
Two hundred yards below the crest Mark left them to go on alone, and began working his way sideways around the slope, groping his way painstakingly through the heavily staked wire, until at last he recognized and reached the stand that he and Fergus had picked out through binoculars the previous afternoon.
The main trunk of one of the oaks that had covered the hill had fallen directly down the slope, pulling up a great matted tangle of roots from the soft high-explosive-ploughed earth.
Mark crawled among the tangle of roots; selecting the side which would be in deepest shadow from the winter-angled sun, he wriggled in on his belly until he was half covered by them, but with head and shoulders able to turn to cover the full curve of the northern slope ahead of him.
Now his first concern was to check the P.14 carefully, paying particular attention to the vulnerable, high-mounted Bisley-type rear sight to make sure that it had not been knocked or misaligned during the journey across noman’s -land. He ate two of the ham sandwiches, drank a few rationed mouthfuls of sweet coffee and adjusted the woollen scarf over his mouth and nose, for warmth and to prevent the steaming of his breath. Then he laid his forehead carefully against the wooden butt of his rifle. He had developed the knack of instant sleep, and while he slept it snowed again.
When Mark woke in the sickly grey light of dawn, he was blanketed by the fine white flakes. Careful not to disturb them, he lifted his head slowly, and blinked his eyes rapidly to clear them. His fingers were stiff and cold; he worked them steadily in the gloves, forcing warm blood to flow.
He had been lucky again – twice in one night was too much. First the patrol to lead him through the wire and now this thin white coat of natural camouflage to blend his shape with the tangled roots of the oak. Too much luck, the pendulum must swing.
Slowly the darkness drew back, widening his circle of vision, and as it expanded so the whole of Mark’s existence came to centre in those two wide golden brown eyes. They moved quickly in the pattern of search, touching in turn each irregularity and fold, each feature, each object, each contrasting colour or texture of snow and mud and earth, each stump of shattered timber or fallen branch, the irregular rim of every shell hole, looking for shadows where they should not have been, seeking the evidence of disturbance beneath the new thin coat of snow, seeking, searching - for life, literally for life.
The snow stopped again a little before nine, and by noon the sky had lightened and there were holes in the cloud-cover; a single watery ray of sun fell and moved like a searchlight across the southern slope of the hill.
‘Right, Cuthbert, let’s draw some Hun fire.’
Fergus had marked each of the German sniper’s kills on the trench map the Sergeant-Major had loaned him. There were two black spots close to each other in the same section of trench. At those places the parapet was too low for the commanding bulk of the hill that commanded the front line. After five men had been killed at those two spots the parapet had been raised with sand-bags and crudely lettered notices warned the unwary.
‘KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN. SNIPER AT WORK.’
The two black spots were only fifty paces apart, and Fergus guessed that the sniper had achieved his successes here by waiting for a victim to pass down the trench. He would get a glimpse of a head in the first gap, and would be aiming into the second gap with his finger on the hair-trigger as the man passed it. He explained this to Sean Courtney as he made his preparations, for by this time Sean was so intrigued by the hunt that only a major German offensive would have lured him back to his headquarters. During the morning he had spoken to his aide-de-camp over the field telephone, and told them where they could find him in an emergency.
‘But make sure it’s an emergency,’ he had growled feroci
ously into the headset.
‘I’ll draw him from south to north,’ Fergus explained, ‘that will force the bloody Hun to turn away from Mark’s stand, it will give the lad an extra second while he swings back towards the ridge.’
Fergus MacDonald was good with the dummy, Sean had to concede it. He carried it two feet higher than natural man height, to compensate for the raised parapet, and he gave it a realistic roll of the shoulders, like a hurrying man as he passed it through the first gap.
Sean, the. young Captain and the beefy red-faced Sergeant-Major were waiting with a half dozen other ranks beyond the second gap, watching Fergus come down the boards towards them steadily.
Instinctively they all drew breath and held it as he came up to the second gap, all of them tensed with suspense.
Up the slope of the hill, the Mauser cracked, like a bull-whip on the icy air, and the dummy kicked sharply in Fergus MacDonald’s hands.
Fergus jerked it down out of sight, and fell to his knees to examine the neat round hole punched through the papiermâché head.
‘Oh shit!’ he whispered bitterly. ‘Oh, shit all over it!’
‘What is it, MacDonald?’
‘The bloody Hun – oh, the sodding bastard—’