‘You said he told Danvers how bloody useless he was.’
‘That’s right.’
‘He told him personally — it didn’t come from the sergeant?’
‘No.’
‘And did Lieutenant Soames speak to any of the other Tommies in the trench directly?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Did he — or didn’t he?’
‘He didn’t.’
Now wasn’t that interesting, Blackstone thought.
‘Was Danvers completely bloody useless?’ he asked.
‘If I had to have somebody covering my back, Danvers wouldn’t have been my first choice,’ Mitchell admitted. ‘He was a bit too soft for my liking.’
‘Soft?’
‘Say you’ve got Fritz charging at you with a fixed bayonet, your first thought would be to stop him — to stab him in the guts — wouldn’t it?’
‘It would,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘And are you saying that that wouldn’t have been Danvers’ first thought?’
‘I know this might sound loony, but I don’t think it would have been,’ Mitchell said. ‘Danvers would have been more likely to look the bloke in the face, and start wondering if he had a wife and kids back home. Course, he’d eventually start worrying about himself. .’
‘But by then it would be too late.’
‘By then he’d be bloody well dead!’ Mitchell paused for a second. ‘Still, he wasn’t a bad soldier, in his own way, and he certainly didn’t deserve the sort of treatment Lieutenant Soames meted out to him,’ he concluded.
‘Tell me what happened out in No Man’s Land,’ Blackstone suggested.
Mitchell looked suddenly wary again.
‘Danvers got shot, and I got shot, and Lieutenant Soames dragged me back to the trench,’ he said.
‘What position were you in when you got shot?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Mitchell said — though it was perfectly plain that he did.
‘Were you on your knees?’ Blackstone asked. ‘Were you bent over in a crouch?’
‘We were flat-out on our bellies. That’s how you always cross No Man’s Land.’
Blackstone took a step back, and examined Mitchell.
‘The wound’s at the bottom of your left shoulder, isn’t it?’ he asked.
‘That’s right,’ Mitchell agreed, uneasily.
‘I don’t see how you could have got shot there if you’d been lying on the ground.’
Mitchell gave a half-shrug, which was all that his injured shoulder would allow him.
‘Funny things happen in war,’ he said. ‘You know that yourself.’
‘I’m investigating a murder,’ Blackstone said, with a new harshness entering his voice. ‘If anybody gets in the way of that, I’ll see to it that they’re punished with the full rigour of the law — and since it’s military law out here, that will probably mean the firing squad.’
‘But I don’t see what Lieutenant Fortesque’s murder could have to do with what happened out there in No Man’s Land,’ Mitchell said, in a voice so weak that it was almost a whimper.
‘Who said we were talking about Lieutenant Fortesque’s murder?’ Blackstone asked. ‘Tell me exactly what happened — while you’ve still got the chance.’
There is only one way to cross No Man’s Land, and that is on your belly. It’s easy at first — so easy that you feel you could keep going forever. But after a while, each extra few yards become an effort. And then it is every single yard you are struggling to cover, until you reach the point at which you feel that even one additional foot would be too much.
‘But you have to go on,’ Mitchell tells himself.
Because that’s what you’ve been ordered to do by your officer, and because you don’t want to admit — even to yourself — that you might not be as tough as the next man.
This night, the three of them — Lieutenant Soames, Private Danvers and himself — have only gone a hundred yards or so when Soames says, ‘I’m heartily sick of this!’
Mitchell feels a surge of relief.
Soames has had enough, he tells himself. He’s going to call it a night, and turn back.
But he soon learns that that is not what the lieutenant means at all.
‘Why should we crawl around like animals?’ Soames asks. ‘We’re men. We should walk on two legs, as God intended.’
Mitchell feels his stomach turn to water. ‘We’ll be bigger targets if we stand up, sir,’ he says.
‘Bigger targets?’ Soames repeats. ‘It’s the middle of the night, and it’s pitch black out there. We could be dancing around a bloody maypole, and they still wouldn’t see us.’
‘But, sir. .’ Mitchell protests.
And then he is aware that the dark shape to his left — which is Lieutenant Soames — is suddenly upright.
‘Stand up, Private Mitchell,’ Soames says. ‘You, too, Danvers. And that’s an order.’
If he stands up, there is a chance a random shot in the dark will pick him off, Mitchell thinks, but if he disobeys a direct order, there is a certainty that he will be facing a firing squad by the end of the week.
He stands up, and, from the noises he hears next to him, knows that Danvers is doing the same.
That’s when the flare goes off — a terrible crimson light, arcing through the sky.
The next moment, Mitchell feels a thud to his shoulder — as if he has been hit by the largest, heaviest sledgehammer that had ever been made. And then he is down on the ground.
‘Where was the flare fired from?’ Blackstone asked.
‘It’s hard to say,’ Mitchell admits — and he is being honest, rather than evasive. ‘I didn’t know anything about it until it was overhead.’
‘But once it’s reached its zenith, it starts to fall to earth again, doesn’t it?’ Blackstone asked.
‘Its zenith?’ Mitchell repeated.
‘Once it has gone as high as it’s going,’ Blackstone explained. ‘When it’s reached that point, it comes down again, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘So which way was it falling? Was it going to land close to the enemy’s trenches, or was it going to land close to ours.’
‘I wasn’t really thinking about that,’ Mitchell said. ‘I was much more interested in the fact that I’d been shot in the bloody shoulder.’
‘If you had to choose one or the other, which one would it be?’ Blackstone persisted. ‘Come on, man — think!’
‘It was falling towards the Fritzes’ trenches,’ Mitchell said reluctantly.
It would have to have been, Blackstone thought. Given the timing, it would have been too much of a coincidence for it not to have been.
‘Tell me what happened next,’ he said.
It feels as if a giant has taken hold of his arm, and is attempting to wrench it out of its socket, but at least there is some consolation to be drawn from the pain, because as long as he is hurting — and God, he is hurting — he is not dead.
Madness has broken out over No Man’s Land, with the troops in both lines firing wildly into the darkness. And soon, when the two sides are organized enough, there will be machine-gun fire raking the ground — because while no one knows exactly what is out here, everyone knows it needs killing.
Through the pain, Mitchell becomes aware that someone is talking to him.
‘Are you hit, Mitchell?’
The speaker is Lieutenant Soames, now no longer standing like a man, but flat out on the ground next to him.
‘I asked you if you’d been hit,’ Soames repeats.
‘Shoulder,’ Mitchell grunts.