Beauregard looked up. The late-afternoon sky was grey, dotted with wind-whipped earth fragments, trailed across with smoke. Faint in the low cloud were the buzzing black shapes of flying machines.
'If those bats report back to Hunland, the gunners will make a few twiddles and drop whizz-bangs right where we stand. It won't be pretty.'
Early in the war, a reporter wrote up such a situation in The Times, boosting home front morale with a picture of cheery Tommies capering in the knowledge that the enemy's heavy guns consistently missed their positions. Devoted readers in Berlin passed on information to the German artillery, who made adjustments with devastating upshot. Journalism was now strictly regulated. Well-intentioned boobs did more harm with jingo puff than iconoclasts like Kate Reed with trenchant criticism. Beauregard would rather have the white cliffs of Dover defended by Kate than by a regiment of Northcliffe's flag-waving grubs.
'Hurray,' Templar exclaimed, 'the Camels are coming.'
A triangular formation of British aeroplanes closed on the German spotters. The gunfire was a tiny sound, like the chattering of insects. The aerial battle was fought in and above the clouds.
'There's one down,' Templar said.
A winged fireball burst through cloud, wind shrieking around it, and streamed towards No Man's Land. It ploughed noisily into the ground.
Air supremacy meant preventing the enemy from using his aeroplanes to gather strategic intelligence. The Germans, and to some extent the Allies, wasted column inches on daring deeds of the knights of the sky, but it was a nasty, bloody business. As things stood, a British observer, unless he ran into Richthofen, was more likely than his German opposite number to bring back details of troop dispositions and gunnery emplacements.
Another German came down, slowly as if approaching an airfield. The machine went into a spiral and crumpled in the air as if colliding with an invisible wall. The pilot must have been dead in his cockpit.
'The slip-trench stays open to fight another day.'
Looking about, it did not seem a particularly notable achievement.
It was a fairly quiet afternoon at the front. Both sides bombarded non-committally, but there were no big shows on. Rumours flew that enemy divisions from the Eastern Front were filtering through Europe, freed by the peace negotiated with the new Russia. Naturally, the rumours were true. Beauregard had reports from the Diogenes Club's associates in Berlin that that Hindenburg and Dracula were preparing for Kaiserschlacht. In a last push to victory, the remaining resources of the Central Powers would be thrown into a costly stab at Paris. 'Schlacht' could be translated as 'attack', but also meant 'slaughter'. Knowing what was to come might not be enough to put a stop to it, especially if carefully gathered intelligence was ignored by the likes of Mireau and Haig.
Now they were near the front itself. The impact of shells was a permanent low-level earthquake. Everything shivered or rattled: tin hats, duckboards, mess kits, equipment, cracking ice, teeth. Beauregard was interested not in forward positions but in an odd, underground emplacement just to the rear of the line.
Some months ago, he had learned Dr Moreau was supervising a front-line hospital, presumably ministering to the sorely wounded. This was the same researcher whose vivisections had earned him repeated expulsions from learned bodies and exposure in the popular press. Beauregard had run across the scientist before, in the thick of another bloody business. By his estimate of Moreau's character, it seemed unlikely the man harboured a patriotic or philanthropic impulse in his breast. Yet here he was, in the worst place in the world, ostensibly risking his own skin to ease appalling suffering.
In consideration of Gertrud Zelle's narrative, he wished to consult Dr Moreau. If anyone this side of the lines could shed light on the darkness of the Château du Malinbois, he was the man.
Towards the front, the trench narrowed. More sandbags were exploded. Major earthworks showed where breaches had been shored up. Templar whistled a little tune, a strange chirrup. Beauregard had heard the new-born was a good officer, concerned for the men under him.
Three Tommies sat at a wonky table, smoking and playing cards. A hand stuck out of the packed-earth wall, cards fanned in a frozen white grip. After a few visits to the front, Beauregard was not shocked by the grim humour. The unknown soldier was too well embedded to be dug free without causing a collapse. His release would have to wait till after the war.
Beauregard remembered a cartoon of two British soldiers chatting in a shell-hole. 'I'm enlisted for twenty-five more years,' one says. 'You're lucky,' replies his comrade, 'I'm duration.'
Two men threw in their cards and the third consulted the hand dealt the dead man. If able to bet, he would have won. Aces and eights.
'Moreau's show is down here, sir,' Templar said, lifting a stiff canvas flap.
It was like the entrance to a mine. A tunnel sloped down, shored up with bags, floored with boards, roofed with corrugated iron. An electric light was strung up about twenty feet in, but there was darkness beyond. Treacly mud ran slowly from the trench into the tunnel, but was diverted into sluices. Beauregard could not imagine where the liquid filth ended up.
A high-pitched scream came from the tunnel, followed by lesser yelps and groans. The cries sounded more animal than human.
'It's always like that,' said Templar, eyebrow raised. 'Dr Moreau says pain is healthy. A person in pain can still feel. It's when you can't feel anything that you have to worry.'
Another shriek was cut through by a rasp like the downstroke of a saw.
'It's unusual to have a clinic this close to the line, isn't it?'
Templar nodded, it's practical, I suppose. But not good for morale. The situation is fearful enough without all this. Some of the men are spooked by the confounded din. They're more scared of being taken into the hole than of being wounded in the first place. Silly stories go around about the doctor using the wounded as experimental subjects.'
Beauregard could imagine. Given Moreau's reputation, the stories might not be all silliness.
'As if there were anything to be learned from torturing wounded men. It's absurd.'
Templar was a decent sort, for a vampire; perhaps too decent. Such saintliness often overlooked man's capacity for pointless cruelty.
Beauregard stepped into the tunnel. A curious miasma filled the enclosed space, a strong sulphurous smell. Wavering electric light made the walls reddish.
The lieutenant stayed outside, like an old-world vampire at the edge of consecrated ground.
'You can go on without me, sir. You can't miss it.'
Beauregard wondered if Templar were as immune from superstition as he claimed. He shook the young man's firm hand and walked past the light into the dark.
The tunnel ended at a solid iron door. Getting it down here and set into stony earth must have been a herculean task. An extraordinary soldier stood guard. Stooped almost double, he barely came up to Beauregard's waist. His arms were six inches longer than his sleeves, most of his brown face was matted with hair, large teeth pushed lips out in an apish grin and red marks, like healed wounds, showed in loose folds of skin around neck and wrists. His uniform bagged in some places and stretched in others.
Beauregard took the guard for a savage, perhaps indigenous to a South Sea corner of Empire. He might be a pygmy afflicted with gigantism. The war called upon all manner of King Victor's subjects.
At Beauregard's approach, the guard wrapped long fingers around a rifle and did his best to stand straight. He bared remarkable teeth, yellow bone-spurs in an acre of bright- pink gum.
'I'm here to see Dr Moreau,' Beauregard said.