Two Storm Wood, page 22
The smoke was thicker up here, tinged with the smell of boiled meat. A tall Chinese man came out of a tent, carrying a bayonet in one hand and a skinned carcass in the other – a rabbit perhaps, or something less palatable.
He found more Chinese men further on, of every size and build, all with the same dark, weather-beaten skin. Dressed in ragged tunics or long black overcoats, they squatted outside their tents, brewing tea over makeshift braziers. Some were reading newspapers, many smoked. They watched in silence as the wagon came to a halt and Mackenzie climbed down. Behind the silence, he sensed complicity. The men here knew. Perhaps the killer himself walked among them – was watching him even now. A trickle of sweat ran down the back of his neck. They might be interrogated, but among so many, where would the questions begin? Besides, would the Chinese talk? Would they side with white men against their own kind? Retribution would follow them home, far beyond the point where the British military could protect them – if it didn’t come sooner.
Mackenzie felt for the revolver at his waist. He was surrounded on all sides, not an officer or an NCO in sight. This was the madman’s turf, his domain. A single officer, lightly armed, could be easily disposed of. He would disappear, another nameless grave in a wilderness of nameless graves.
A track wound its way towards the crown of the slope, where a flagpole rose above the cones of canvas. A few yards further on, a Chinese man was playing a single-string violin, holding the small round bowl between his knees. To Mackenzie’s ears the music was raw and ugly, but half a dozen coolies were listening. Chinese labour signed up for five years’ service. Five years was a long time without the civilising influence of family. It was a year since he had seen his own, and that was too long.
A small parade ground was marked out with whitewashed stones. At the corner a sour-faced ganger with a cane in his hand was haranguing a section of men armed with shovels.
‘I’m looking for your commanding officer,’ Mackenzie said, as the men shuffled away. ‘Major Pickering.’
The ganger did not salute. He studied Mackenzie’s face, frowning openly, then raised his cane and pointed towards the far end of the parade ground.
The Company HQ was located in an Armstrong hut on the north side of the camp. Finding no guard, Mackenzie opened the door. He hadn’t placed a foot inside when a dog bounded towards him, snarling. Mackenzie stumbled backwards. The dog, a bull mastiff, was pulled up short by a chain around its neck. The other end was secured to a bolt in the floor.
‘Jasper! Down!’
An officer stood in the far corner, behind a desk. The dog whimpered, paced a circle in front of Mackenzie and slumped to the floor, its tail thumping against the boards.
‘It’s customary to knock,’ the officer said. ‘And generally advisable. Who are you?’
Mackenzie introduced himself. ‘I’m looking for the company commander.’
The officer had a bookish, unsoldierly demeanour. He was middle-aged with thin hair, a grey moustache and spectacles in thick frames. ‘Pickering’s the name.’ He gestured at an upright chair with a broken wicker back. ‘Take a seat. Don’t worry about Jasper. He only kills on command.’
Pickering’s sense of humour, Mackenzie sensed, was a pre-emptive defence against those who would belittle him, a poor substitute for authority.
He sat down. ‘I’m after information. The provost marshal’s branch is investigating an incident, and I need help to identify—’
‘What’s happened?’
Mackenzie wasn’t sure how much the other man knew. ‘It concerns some members of your company.’
Pickering put an unlit pipe between his teeth. ‘Who now? They haven’t caught that fellow Chang Ju Chih, I suppose?’
‘Who’s that? A runaway?’
‘A murderer. Killed a fille de joie in Amiens, and her three children. Last November, it was. Fine way to celebrate the Armistice.’
‘I’m here about a Lieutenant Kelvin and twelve Chinese labourers.’
Pickering took a moment to respond. ‘Lieutenant Kelvin is missing, presumed dead. Has been since the summer.’
‘It’s likely his body has been found.’
‘Likely?’
‘It hasn’t been possible to make a positive identification. That’s why I’m here. No tags were recovered.’
‘Then how do you know you’ve got Lieutenant Kelvin, if you don’t mind me asking?’
Mackenzie cleared his throat. ‘According to the Commandant of Labour’s office, the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth is the only company in the CLC to lose an entire section and an officer on the same day, at least in the area concerned.’
‘The area being?’
Mackenzie showed Pickering the message from Captain Temple. ‘West of Serre. An old German strongpoint known as—’
‘Two Storm Wood. I thought so.’
‘So you’ve been notified?’
‘Not a word, officially. There’ve been rumours.’ Pickering handed back the letter. ‘Didn’t know it was that number. Or that there was an officer – otherwise, of course, I’d have, you know …’
Otherwise he would have made enquiries as to whether the dead were from his company. In the event, he had done nothing.
‘Was it …?’ Pickering stared into the bowl of his pipe. ‘Was it as bad as they say? Were they …?’
‘Most of the men were shot.’ Pickering looked up hopefully. ‘Kelvin wasn’t one of them. He was singled out, along with two of the Chinese. We don’t know why.’
‘One hears these stories about China. Gangs, secret societies. They used to kill like that: slowly, like it was an art.’ Pickering shook his head. ‘Sickening. Are Kelvin’s family going to be told? Perhaps it would be better—’
‘That isn’t my responsibility, Major. It’s yours.’
Pickering’s fingertips traced the furrows of his brow. ‘He was a newspaper man, you know, before the war. In Shanghai. He wanted to join the infantry. Couldn’t pass the physical. Only man in the company who could speak decent Mandarin. He was closer to the coolies than most officers, which was to his credit, it must be said.’ He took off his spectacles and began polishing the lenses with a handkerchief.
‘You have the names of the other missing men?’
‘Of course.’ Pickering sifted through a pile of papers for what Mackenzie assumed was the company war diary. After flicking through a few pages he turned it round so that Mackenzie could read for himself. ‘There, the seventeenth of August.’
Mackenzie took out a notebook and pencil and copied down the list of thirteen names. Kelvin’s was at the top, followed by an NCO called Niu Yun-huei. He would pass the information to Graves Registration, but that still left the problem of which men were which. As things stood, apart from Lieutenant Kelvin, their names would be recorded over a communal grave.
‘It might still be possible to identify the dead individually,’ Mackenzie said. ‘At least some of them. I’d need volunteers from your company, men who knew them well – men with strong stomachs, needless to say.’
Pickering frowned. ‘Not sure I like the sound of that. Given the state of things round here, it might be better to let sleeping dogs lie. We don’t need a ruckus.’
The dead men had been stripped of their tags. A communal grave was what their executioners wanted for them – or no grave at all. Mackenzie was not going to let them have their way. ‘The fallen deserve marked graves if there’s any way we can provide them. That’s always been the army’s view. It’s the reason I’m here.’
Pickering closed the diary and put it away. ‘I doubt if the army was thinking of the coolies when it set you to work, Captain. They’re only here for coin, after all. Isn’t that so?’
‘Perhaps. It’s immaterial either way.’
‘Immaterial, really?’
‘If all Englishmen had been zealous to serve, there’d have been no need for conscription.’
Pickering sighed. ‘Very well, I’ll ask around. No doubt a few volunteers will step up. Some extra pay should do it.’
Mackenzie stared at the list of names. Pickering clearly had no idea that his men had been killed on the British side of the line. The possibility did not seem to have crossed his mind. Yet labourers rarely worked close enough to the enemy to risk capture.
‘Where was your company operating the day Lieutenant Kelvin went missing?’
‘As I recall, the whole company was busy building a light railway from Acheux, a priority assignment. The terrain to the east was utterly pulverised, nothing you could call a road for miles ahead, and the Third Army was pushing forward. Without the railway, most of the supplies would have had to go by mule.’
‘But you must have been well behind the front line. Where exactly?’
Pickering replaced his spectacles, his small mouth twitching. ‘Since the CLC came to France we’ve lost around two thousand men. If we’d always been well behind the front line we’d not have lost half that many.’
‘Excuse the presumption, Major. So where were you?’
‘North-east of Mailly-Maillet. We were close enough to the Huns that we lost men to shelling. Worked at night, when the lie of the land allowed.’
‘Kelvin and the others were found more than two miles further east. Have you any idea what they were doing there? Did they get lost?’
Pickering’s spectacles, though just polished, were evidently not polished enough. He took them off and began again. ‘I only learned of this after the event, you understand. I wasn’t on the scene that day. But a report came in that a huge stockpile of shells had been found, poison-gas shells. They were in some old German bunkers our boys had taken a day or so earlier. If the stockpile got a direct hit, it could have wiped out half a brigade. There was a concern the Huns might be targeting it with their big guns. Hence some urgency.’
‘Gas shells aren’t usually stored in forward positions.’
‘Of course not. But Serre wasn’t always a forward position. A year ago it was well behind the German lines, if only for a month or two.’ Pickering put his spectacles back on again. His eyes, made large by the lenses, were red-rimmed. ‘In any event, Lieutenant Kelvin went forward to assess the situation and see what could be done.’
‘Taking twelve men with him.’
‘Correct.’
‘Why? If all he planned to do was take a look?’
‘History does not relate. Perhaps he thought some temporary measures might be possible. Sandbags and so forth.’
Or perhaps the report did not ring true. It did not ring true to Mackenzie now. Had Kelvin been suspicious? Had he taken men with him for protection? If so, from whom? If he had been truly afraid, he could have stayed put. But then refusal to go forward, especially from a Labour Corps officer, would have been interpreted as cowardice.
‘This report, where did it come from?’
‘Someone turned up from the front lines, I believe, requesting assistance – an officer, in fact.’
Westbrook looked up. ‘So this was not an order. Corps HQ knew nothing about it.’
‘No, it was all very ad hoc. Events were moving fast at the time.’
‘And the shells?’
‘Shells?’
‘The poison-gas shells. Were they removed?’
Pickering frowned. ‘Not that I know of.’ It was obvious the question had never occurred to him. ‘Not by this company.’
‘But they were found?’
‘I couldn’t say. As the front moved forward, I expect they ceased to be a threat. Serre was taken a few days later.’ Pickering must have seen the impatience in the other man’s face. ‘Our objective was to complete the railway, Captain Mackenzie. Salvage was not our concern.’
A trickle of sweat ran down Mackenzie’s temple. He was close to the truth, to understanding – ahead of Westbrook, ahead of Whitehall. A few steps more and it would be his. And he would see that it was shared, no matter how ugly.
‘Major Pickering, do you know who brought Lieutenant Kelvin this report? Do you have a name?’
‘No. What does it matter?’
‘Please, Major. It may matter a great deal.’
Pickering shook his head. ‘I told you, I wasn’t there. Lieutenant Collins was in charge.’ Pickering pulled out a pocket watch. ‘He should still be at the dump, if you want to see him. He and Kelvin were friends. If anyone knows what happened, it’ll be him.’
The salvage dump lay a few hundred yards from Shantung Camp, next to the light railway that the Chinese themselves had helped to build. Mackenzie would have preferred to go alone, but Pickering insisted they go together, bringing the mastiff with them. The site was surrounded by wire and guarded by sentries.
‘A regrettable necessity,’ Pickering explained. ‘We’ve had a lot of thieving since civilians starting coming back. We suspect some of the coolies have been involved as well.’
Just inside the wire stood three piles of rifles, each higher than a man, the weapons numbering thousands. Demobbed infantry handed their weapons in at a depot. These were the rifles of the dead and wounded, recovered from the battlefields. Many would have been used to mark their graves.
‘I thought the Chinese were supposed to stay away from the civilian population,’ Mackenzie said. ‘Isn’t that army policy?’
Pickering scoffed. ‘In theory. In practice, it’s impossible to enforce a ban. In some places the locals are hostile – the Belgians especially – which makes things easier. In France the coolie has a better reputation. There’s been fraternisation aplenty, a good few women involved and no small amount of commerce.’
‘What do the Chinese have to sell, besides their labour?’
‘You’d be surprised. They started out making baskets, used the reed matting they were given to sleep on. Then silk embroidery and imitation flowers, all manner of knick-knacks. But it makes them money.’
‘What about opium?’
Pickering tugged on the chain, bringing the huge dog to heel. ‘Opium?’
‘Don’t the Chinese know a lot about that?’
‘Coolies are drawn from the lowest strata of Chinese society, Captain. Some latent criminality is to be expected. The important thing, as regards the war effort, is to limit the opportunity for the latent to become actual.’
They stopped in front of a rampart of shell casings. It was ten feet high and extended in an arc for a hundred yards, the brass sometimes yellow, sometimes rusted to a dark brown or caked in mud. Unlike the dead, this battlefield harvest would find its way back to England. It had a value that could be measured in cash.
‘Lieutenant Kelvin was very protective of his men,’ Pickering said, as they worked their way round, ‘more than was useful. He was inclined to blame their failings on a few bad apples, and grant too much licence to the others. He refused to see your typical coolie for what he is: essentially bovine and amoral.’
‘Did you have cause to reprimand him?’
‘I might have said something once or twice.’ Pickering tugged on the chain again. ‘Come on, Jasper.’
‘Were there arguments?’
‘The CLC is a constituent part of the British Army, Captain. Junior officers do not generally argue with their superiors.’
‘What was Kelvin concerned about? Anything in particular?’
Pickering bent down to pat the mastiff, which was alongside them, panting as it ambled past the mass of spent munitions. ‘Kelvin became preoccupied with secondary matters. He tended to forget that the purpose of the CLC is to support the army and help it fight. It’s not a branch of the Chinese Seamen’s Welfare.’
‘What secondary matters?’
‘I still don’t understand how this helps you.’
They rounded a corner. A platoon of Chinese labourers was trailing back from the railhead. A ganger tapped his cap with a cane. Pickering saluted, pulling the dog closer. By now the shell cases had given way to heaps of rusting iron: scraps of machinery, reels of wire, the scorched panels of a wrecked tank.
‘Major Pickering? What secondary matters?’
Pickering sighed. ‘Some coolies went missing. It was fairly obvious they’d done a bunk. They were seen in Acheux, consorting with the locals. The camp was nearby at that time, and the natives were … let’s say, friendly.’
‘You mean, women?’
Pickering grunted. ‘And it wasn’t as if we hadn’t had runaways before. There are swarms of Chinks in France these days, so there are plenty of places to hide. Still, Kelvin insisted there’d been foul play.’
‘On what evidence?’
‘None at all, except his supposed knowledge of the men in question. They were not the types to run off, he said. He’d taken up various allegations of mistreatment before – rarely substantiated and often involving other labour companies.’
‘Mistreatment by British troops?’
‘I can’t recall the details, but that was the gist of it. Then, quite some time later, a body was found, one of the missing coolies. That was when Kelvin went too far.’
‘Too far?’
‘He went over my head, if you must know. I learned – unofficially, mind you – that he even bypassed the Commandant of Labour. Took his wild allegations all the way to the adjutant general’s office at Third Army – where doubtless they were given short shrift. Still, it would have done nothing for the reputation of the company.’
Or its commanding officer, Mackenzie thought. As if the lowly status of the Labour Corps wasn’t bad enough.
‘Did anything come of these allegations?’
Pickering shrugged. ‘Can’t say. I rather doubt it. The Third Army was heavily engaged at the time, making headway at last. Hardly the time for housekeeping.’
‘And then Kelvin was murdered too.’
‘Apparently. Still, I fail to see how any of this—’
‘Who did Kelvin blame for the disappearances? Anyone in particular?’
Pickering shrugged. ‘Part of the East Lancashire Division was in the area. So naturally he pointed the finger in their direction.’
A whistle went up from a locomotive waiting on the line. A dozen wagons stood empty behind it. Light rain had begun to fall, the drops turning to steam as they hit the engine.
