The Ludendorff offensive had put paid to that aim: every man was needed at the front to stem the great German bid to drive the British army into the sea. They were now the mainstay of the Allied fight, given the French had been bled dry at Verdun and the Russians had thrown in both the towel and their tsar. His baptism of fire had removed any trace of callow romanticism from Callum Jardine.
He was under the command of a grey-faced captain leading a hastily gathered force from at least ten different regiments, seeking to contain the flank of an ever-increasing bulge. Fighting was close, personal and mobile, not the trench warfare he had expected; at least any trenches he and his platoon occupied were the shallow ones they dug themselves in the hard earth for one night’s occupation only.
Food was intermittent, washing or a change of clothes out of the question, and often ammunition was only acquired by begging from a neighbouring unit. They were pushed very slowly backwards by repeated German assaults, each time extracting more in the way of death than they suffered.
Battle comes down to that before your eyes, so it was only much later he found out what a close-run thing that last great German offensive of the war had been. Erich von Ludendorff had thrown in every man he had, only to be sucked into a giant salient, one he could not hold for lack of numbers and reserves still fit to do battle, so slowly, that sack started to deflate.
The Yanks had begun to arrive in force, part of the reason why the Germans had cast everything on that one throw, and panic had finally unified the Allied command under Marshal Foch. Now Jardine became part of his relentless drive that threw back the enemy and gave them no respite until they had pushed back past their start line, then on through the supposedly impenetrable Hindenburg Line.
When they took prisoners, the first noticeable thing was their obvious hunger — the German army was lacking in food and, when questioned, ammo and men, as well as the will to continue, while behind them their country was sliding inexorably towards a bloody communist revolution, which forced the abdication of the Kaiser and the advent of a civilian government that sought an armistice.
The young lieutenant who stood up on that early November day, when the guns went silent, to look over the shattered battlefield before him, was a very different sort from the near-boy who had stood on this deck. He had his own wounds to carry, none of them serious, and a memory of men he had led, dying under his command, this while he had seen four commanders come and go, one through cracked nerves, the rest in death, as had a dozen fellow lieutenants. Lanchester had been there that day, as filthy and mud-caked as he, carrying the same physical complaints, cursing the idiocy of granting the Germans a peaceful end to a bloodstained conflict.
It should have been enough, that war, but it was not.
He decided on a night in Paris, and that meant dinner at Taillevent, one of the oldest restaurants in the city. After a sumptuous meal it was a taxi to the Gare de Lyon to catch up with Le Train Bleu, running south to the Cote d’Azur. Leaving behind the smoking industrial chimneys of outer Paris it was hard to imagine this country he was passing through, with night falling, as one in the grip of political turmoil, but it was, the left and right at riotous loggerheads, the Popular Front versus Action Francaise.
He went to sleep in his wagon-lit as it raced past grey stone buildings and woke when it was passing the red-tiled roofs and houses with sun-bleached walls that formed the outskirts of a city he knew well, teeming Marseilles. He had spent part of his childhood here and loved it: how much more romantic to read was The Count of Monte Cristo when you could actually look out and see the Chateau d’If from the Corniche?
Lunch was five wonderful courses as the luxury train followed the coast, the sky that deep Mediterranean blue, the landscape burnt scrub backed by high hills, with occasional fields of lavender on one side, beaches and sea opposite, on through what had been the playground of the rich until the Depression either wiped out the fortunes of the wealthy visitors — Churchill had been one — or so lowered the value of the pound that not even wealthy Brits could afford a four-month stay to avoid their national winter.
The home of Sir Basil Zaharoff was, like many dwellings in Monte Carlo, built into the side of a hill. He was not a man to call upon unannounced and Jardine had sent him a letter before going to see Amherst, though given he had dealt with the old man before, he was sure he need not wait for a reply. Reputedly the richest man in Europe, Zaharoff had many soubriquets, the least attractive that he was the original ‘Merchant of Death’. Cal Jardine had always found the infamous arms dealer courteous, of lively mind and a person of wide interests and strong personal attachments.
He was shown into a large study overlooking the yacht-filled harbour to find his man sat behind an enormous desk, before open windows. ‘Captain Jardine?’
‘That, Sir Basil, is not a title I use, quite apart from the fact that my fellow officers, serving and retired, think it infra dig to use any army rank in civilian life below major.’
‘Why would that be?’
‘Captain is a naval rank and vastly superior to its army equivalent.’
‘Ah, your English habits, so strange to we foreigners, regardless of how much time we spend in your country.’
God he’s aged, Jardine thought: the moustache was dropping, the goatee beard straggly and the skin falling from his cheeks, but that was not a comment one would make to anyone, and certainly not to a person of his eminence.
‘You will forgive me not standing to greet you, my legs are not what they once were.’ An arm was waved to invite him to sit, to which Jardine agreed; he was offered an iced cocktail, which he accepted, and then engaged in twenty minutes of polite conversation, which he enjoyed. ‘But you have not come to see me for the chit-chat, I venture.’
‘No. I have been engaged to see if I can get some modern weaponry into Abyssinia.’
It was hard for such a wracked face to fall but his did. ‘Oh dear, Jardine, that is not, I think, very wise.’
‘When was what you and I do wise?’
‘You hoist me, as you say, on the petard.’ That was nonsense, of course, Zaharoff being one of the wisest men he had ever encountered: he might be an arms dealer, but he was knowledgeable and no hypocrite. ‘You know I am no longer active, I have retired to this prison for the rich.’
‘But I suspect you know who is.’
‘I hear things, that is true, for I have kept many of my contacts; but I will say this, it will be hard to purchase modern weaponry for such a cause, and I suspect not easy to get it to where it is needed if you can.’ He began to tick off the sources. ‘Belgium and Czechoslovakia are the least scrupulous as of this moment, but you would require very deep pockets, especially without political clearance from your own government.’
‘My government must know nothing of what I am doing.’
‘Something I suspected must be the case, Jardine, or why come to see an old fellow like me, eh? Discreet purchase raises the cost — and substantially, my friend — quite apart from the fact the rascal Hitler is now being open about his rearmament programme instead of doing it in secret, as he and the General Staff have been doing for a decade and a half now. The two countries I mentioned will need to look to their own armouries in the face of his actions — they border Germany, after all.’
‘I won’t mention a figure, but I suspect money might be constrained.’
What Lanchester had mentioned did not go far in Zaharoff’s world, but typically he did not ask him the source of any money, it being none of his concern.
‘The Italians are pouring much treasure into the Abyssinian venture, more, in truth, than they can afford.’
‘They are overextended?’ The emphatic nod was good news: it meant that the tactics outlined by Amherst had an even better chance of success — nothing drains money like an open-ended conflict.