They were wearing out. They were dying.
"If one of us went ahead, Skip," Yorkie said, "like he could tell them where to find us. I mean the rest of us. I'd have to be one of those who stayed, I know. But…"
"You don't know," Tyler said wearily. "It's at least forty miles before we get out of this sand and go west for Nefta. That would be another four or five days supposing 1st Army's got that far. But even then they couldn't send a vehicle down here to pick you up. In any case, we're in enemy territory, give or take."
That day they hadn't found a bush, and were crouching in the lee of a crescent dune, carefully lighting one cigarette from another, and smoking them in rotation. Absurdly, they had fewer matches left than cigarettes.
"We walked into this," de Carette said, "so we must walk out of it."
"Lecat didn't walk out of it," Maxim said, after de Carette had been silent for half a minute. "Professor Tyler says in his book that his leg went bad and he died of that."
De Carette sipped his wine and, blinking as if he had just woken up, gazed around the cool-warm room that was not hot or cold, and at the bright sky and the snow peaks outside.
"It was not his wound, not that. He was a peasant boy, from l'Auvergne – so naturally they had sent him to Africa. Naturally." De Carette chuckled to himself, without humour. "That is the way of the Army. John and I talked to him, we learned about his widowed mother, his older sister who might become a religieuse, the work on the farm that he had been taken from… he talked enough. He was not dying from that leg. We shot him."
Maxim nodded and waited.
"We needed the water, and the time. After that, we could walk thirty kilometres a day. It took us only a few days more to Nefta."
"And Yorkie's real name was Etheridge?"
"Yes, but I did not know until after. So always I think of him just as Yorkie."
"Did you ever meet Gerald Jackaman?" Agnes asked.
"The young man from Algiers? He was visiting the Americans at Tebessa, and he came down to debrief us, when we contacted 1st Army."
"Who actually shot Lecat?" Maxim asked.
"Who would have done it if you had been in command, Major?"
For a long time, as they wound down the hillside road, Agnes said nothing. Then: "So that's why Etheridge wrote to Jackaman. He was the first one they'd told lies to. I wonder if he'd suspected something all these years since."
"He seems to have accepted Etheridge's letter without asking any questions."
"Yes… So, they shot somebody on their own side, a poor wounded French boy. It haunts them all their lives, and one of them even changes his name, emigrates and dies of drink. I don't know… I wouldn't have thought that by the fourth year of the war soldiers would be that sensitive." She sounded disappointed. "Do you believe him?"
"As far as he went."
"How much further was there?"
"They didn't just shoot him. They ate him."
28
"Are you quite sure?" George asked.
"It has to be. You have to forget all the Beau Geste stuff about water being the only thing that matters in the desert. Those three went for well over a week, mostly through soft sand, and that's like snow. It isn't much warmer, either, in January: the temperature can go below freezing. If you're moving in that sort of cold, you're really burning fuel. I'm not saying they'd have died of starvation; they'd have died of thirst because they were too starved to do anything but sit down and drink up their water."
George put his cup and saucer down with a clang and stared around the room, looking for comfort. There was little to find. He had moved into the family set of rooms in Albany when he got the Downing Street posting and it became impossible to commute from Hertfordshire. Annette had done what she could to brighten the tall gloomy rooms with fresh paint and new lampshades, but she daren't change the furniture any more than George's mother or grandmother had dared. Coming in off the chilly stone staircase, Maxim and Agnes had walked through a time gate, back seventy-five years to the days when the Empire was built of solid dark mahogany and pictures of dead animals.
"You are absolutely certain they couldn't have taken enough food?" Sir Anthony Sladen asked. They were seated around one end of a vast dining table, George and Sladen on opposite sides, Maxim and Agnes at the top, in the witness box.
Maxim shook his head. "There were three men marching for something like eleven days and a fourth who lasted five or six – de Carette wasn't precise about the dates. But that's nearly forty days' rations. George – you've been in the Army. You know what a day's rations looks like, what it weighs."
"It's a long time since my Army days."
"It's a long time," Agnes said, "since you helped Annette carry in the groceries from the car."
George scowled at her. Sladen gave a cool smirk.
"They must have grabbed up some food from the last jeep," Maxim said, "but nothing like enough."
"Oh Lord." George shook the heavy silver teapot and got a sludgy sound. "Does anybody want any more tea?"
Nobody did.
"Tell me, Major, " Sladen leant his forearms precisely on the table; "why nobody, in all these years, has spotted what must be something of a, ah, discrepancy in Tyler's own book?"
"He's vaguer about the time factor than de Carette. He makes the whole march through the sand a poetic affair, trudging on under the moon, days and nights blending into one-"
"The St.-Exupery touch. I'm sorry."
"He even hints they may have got to Nefta a few days early and rested before contacting 1st Army. The shorter he can make the march, the smaller the food problem. But the big worry that he writes about is whether he'd get a court of enquiry: he'd lost all his vehicles and weapons and nine British soldiers, never mind one Frenchman."
"It could have been a real worry," George reflected. "A court of enquiry wouldn't settle for the poetic approach."
"What actually happened to this town – Ghadames, was it?" Sladen asked. "I'm sure you know, Major."
"A Free French unit under Colonel Delange came up from the south-east and took it at the end of the month. I don't think there was any shooting, the officers really had deserted."
"Thank you." Sladen and George looked at each other across the table. The afternoon dimmed in the Ropewalk outside, as quietly as in a country churchyard. It was a jolt to remember that the Piccadilly traffic was only a hundred yards away.
"So we have one desert town liberated," George said ruminatively. "At least two German vehicles destroyed, plus one Stuka, half a dozen or more soldiers dead – all for the cost of one patrol. About the same as a heavy bomber getting shot down. Not too bad an exchange, for those days. But also one French soldier, cannabilised. And a third of a century later, in comes the bill for that"
Sladen nodded in sombre agreement.
"Thank you, Harry," George said, but his voice was still heavy. "You've done just what you were appointed for: saved us a nasty scandal. I'll have to advise the Headmaster to drop Tyler."
"I wouldn't have thought he can do that off his own bat," Sladen said quickly. "But I'll be recommending the same thing to the committee."
Maxim stared from one to the other, disbelieving. "But all this happened around the time I was born."
"It doesn't matter if it happened as part of the banquet before Waterloo."
"But if you really want an agreement with the French, and Tyler's the only one who can get it…"