Shadows of War (2 page)

‘Do you have a girl?’

Conrad hesitated. Then smiled. He didn’t want to keep her a secret. ‘I do actually. In London.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Anneliese.’

‘Pretty name,’ Burkett said, and then frowned. ‘Isn’t it...’

‘German?’ Conrad said. ‘Yes, it is. She got kicked out of Germany last year.’

‘Jewish, is she?’

Conrad glanced at his fellow officer. The question was posed innocently enough. One eyebrow was slightly raised, but Burkett’s face registered only mild curiosity. Yet Conrad realized he was being judged. Burkett knew Conrad was a leftie who had fought for the Bolshies in Spain. He knew Conrad spoke fluent German, although he didn’t yet know that Conrad’s mother was German herself. And now he had discovered that Conrad had a girlfriend who was not only German but possibly Jewish.

Conrad could deal with Burkett’s ill-informed judgements about himself, but not about Anneliese. Anneliese and people like her were why Conrad had joined the army. Conrad knew, because he had seen it, that Anneliese had courage. For her, the war against Hitler had been going for years, and it was a war in which there had already been thousands of casualties.

‘Sort of,’ he answered.

Burkett thought better of asking what that meant and took another slug of whisky.

‘There you are!’ Conrad and Burkett turned to see a tall, lanky figure with fair hair and a flushed red face standing at the door of the ante-room. The figure moved towards them, his eyes on fire.

‘Dodds! You are improperly dressed,’ Burkett barked. ‘We do not bring weapons into the mess. Go and hand it in to the armoury!’ Second Lieutenant Dodds was indeed still wearing his Sam Browne and service revolver.

Burkett squinted at Dodds more closely. ‘Are you drunk?’

At first Conrad thought Dodds was going to slug Burkett, or at least try to, but then he came to a halt in the middle of the room.

‘I might be drunk. But you are dead.’ He whipped out the revolver and pointed it at Burkett.

Colour drained from the captain’s face. He opened his mouth but nothing came out.

‘Put the gun down, Matthew,’ said Conrad, getting to his feet. The end of the barrel of the revolver was unsteady, but not unsteady enough that it would miss at a range of five yards.

‘Move out of the way, de Lancey. This has nothing to do with you.’

‘If you press that trigger you will be court-martialled,’ Conrad said. ‘Your life will be over.’

‘I don’t care,’ said the young subaltern. ‘My life is over anyway.’

Dodds was only nineteen. Conrad rather liked him. His father was a vicar in a rural parish in Lincolnshire. Although naive, he was enthusiastic, good under pressure and he had a kind of innocent charm that won over fellow officers and his men alike. Conrad had seen him reading and rereading letters from Angela, and he knew the boy was smitten. But this?

He glanced at Burkett, whose face was now white. The mess orderly, a lance corporal and the only other man in the room, was rooted to the spot.

Conrad took a step forward.

‘Stop, de Lancey! Or I’ll shoot you and then I’ll shoot Burkett.’

Conrad took a step to the left. He was as tall as Dodds, but had broader shoulders, so he hid Burkett from Dodds’s view. ‘Put the gun down now, Matthew.’

‘Out of the way!’ Dodds cried. He took a step back away from Conrad, his gun pointing straight at him. Conrad held Dodds’s eyes. They were bright blue, glittering through moisture.

‘Captain Burkett, I’m going to step twice to the left,’ Conrad said. ‘You stay behind me and then back off towards the door.’ There was a door at the back of the ante-room, which led through to the dining room. ‘Corporal O’Leary, stand back!’ he called to the mess orderly.

Conrad took two slow steps to the left. Dodds’s revolver followed him. Conrad could hear Burkett moving behind him.

‘I will shoot you, de Lancey,’ Dodds said.

‘No you won’t,’ said Conrad. ‘You might want to shoot Captain Burkett, but you don’t want to shoot me.’ He took a step forward.

He could see indecision replace anger for a moment in Dodds’s eyes, but only for a moment, before it was replaced in turn by a new decision. In that instant Conrad knew what would happen next, but before he could move, Dodds had whipped the pistol round and pointed it at his own temple.

‘Stop!’ Conrad shouted. ‘Don’t do it, Matthew!’

‘Why not?’ said Dodds. ‘I was going to kill myself after I had killed Burkett. I’m going to be court-martialled anyway – you said it. And now I’ve lost Angela, I may as well be dead.’

Conrad saw the boy’s terrible logic. ‘All right, Matthew, so you’re going to die. You’ve lost Angela. But why don’t you take a couple of the Hun with you? You’re a good officer. We’ll all be in France some time soon. You want to die, at least die fighting. Killing yourself now is the coward’s way out. And you’re no coward, Matthew. You are a soldier. A good soldier.’

Dodds was listening. ‘But after this, they won’t let me fight.’

‘I won’t say anything. Neither will Captain Burkett – will you, Captain Burkett?’ Silence. ‘Captain Burkett?’

‘No.’ Conrad heard a croak from behind him.

‘And Corporal O’Leary didn’t see anything, either, did you, O’Leary?’

‘No, sir.’

Conrad took another step forward and held out his hand. A tear crept down Dodds’s cheek. He let the gun fall to his side, and Conrad gently eased it out of his fingers.

Wiltshire, 6 November

‘What happened last night, Mr de Lancey?’

Lieutenant Colonel Rydal sat back in the chair behind his desk, his fingers steepled. Despite his grey hair, Rydal had a smooth face and an energetic air that suggested more youth than you would expect from a regular army colonel who had fought in the Great War.

‘Lieutenant Dodds and Captain Burkett had an argument,’ Conrad replied. ‘Over a girl. It blew over.’

‘Blew over?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I understand that Lieutenant Dodds drew his weapon?’

Conrad was silent. He wondered how the colonel had found out what had happened. Both Burkett and Lance Corporal O’Leary had promised to keep quiet. Conrad wasn’t sure he could trust Burkett. And O’Leary might have told his fellow NCOs. Either way, it hadn’t taken long to get back to the colonel.

‘What happened, Mr de Lancey?’

‘Lieutenant Dodds is a good officer, sir. It’s my belief that he will turn into a very good officer.’

‘Good officers don’t get drunk and wave weapons around in the mess.’

‘No, sir. But it’s likely we are all going to be in France soon. And I know that I would rather have Mr Dodds behind me, or next to me, or leading a platoon coming to relieve me. Men like him are valuable.’

‘Rather than Captain Burkett, you mean?’

That was what Conrad had meant but he couldn’t admit it. ‘In Spain I learned whom I could trust and whom I couldn’t. There were men like Lieutenant Dodds in Spain who fought bravely; many of them died bravely. And yes some of them got drunk and behaved badly. But I spoke to Lieutenant Dodds for a long time last night. I really don’t think he will cause trouble again.’

‘You don’t expect me to overlook this, Mr de Lancey? Without discipline this battalion would become a shambles.’

‘That’s right, sir. But with young officers like Lieutenant Dodds, this battalion will be able to fight and fight well.’

The colonel paused briefly, but only briefly. He was a decisive man.

‘I can’t risk Lieutenant Dodds and Captain Burkett being in the same company, can I?’

‘No, sir. But perhaps Mr Dodds could be transferred to another company?’

The colonel reached into his in tray and pulled out a sheet of paper. ‘I have a request here for the secondment of regular army officers to training camps for new recruits.’

‘Lieutenant Dodds isn’t experienced enough for that, though, is he, sir?’

‘No. But Captain Burkett is.’

Conrad tried to repress a smile. ‘I think Captain Burkett would be an excellent choice, sir.’ Conrad considered his next words carefully. ‘While I am sure that Captain Burkett would miss the opportunity for active duty, he would relish the chance to lick new recruits into shape.’

‘My thoughts exactly.’ The colonel tossed the sheet of paper on to his desk. ‘You know I was fifteen when the last war started, nineteen when it finished? I served six months in the trenches.’

‘Sir.’

Rydal examined Conrad. He saw a tall, fit officer in his late twenties, with fair hair and athletic build; the sort of man who could take care of himself and his men. ‘You and I are the only two officers in the battalion with experience of real war.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The first two regiments Conrad had attempted to join had turned him down, almost certainly because of his time in the International Brigade. He had wondered why Colonel Rydal had been different.

‘Once the last war got going, promotions accelerated, and I am sure it will be the same with this one. You haven’t been with us long, Mr de Lancey, but I like what I have seen of you so far. I need men like you as my company commanders.’

Conrad gave up repressing his smile. ‘I won’t let you down, sir.’

‘I’m sure you won’t. Now, there’s something else.’ The colonel pulled out another sheet of paper and examined it. ‘You have been ordered to report to Sir Robert Vansittart at the Foreign Office immediately.’

‘Immediately?’

‘Today,’ said the colonel. ‘I’ve no idea what it is about. Have you?’

‘No idea at all, sir. Although I did come in contact with Sir Robert last year.’

The colonel frowned. ‘Really? You have a shadowy past, Mr de Lancey.’

Whitehall, London

Conrad decided to walk from Waterloo Station to Whitehall. London was entering its third month of war, and Conrad did not feel at all out of place in his uniform. For over a year the city had been preparing, but now that war had actually arrived, there were some changes. Motor cars’ bumps and prangs in the all-encompassing blackout had demonstrated a need for white stripes on lamp-posts, kerbs and crossings. Tops of pillar boxes were daubed with yellow paint which would supposedly detect poison gas. Brown paper strips criss-crossed shop windows to minimize blast damage. And up in the sky, over the Thames, barrage balloons dipped and bobbed, now daubed a murky green rather than the silver they had sported when they were first hoisted.

Conrad was pleased with his conversation with the CO. He knew that in most other regiments, Dodds would be up for a court martial. He was convinced that he was right: Dodds would make a better officer under fire than Burkett, and he was impressed that the colonel had agreed. But he was worried that Dodds had lost his head. Conrad’s instinct was that the young lieutenant would come into his own when under the pressure of battle, but what if he was wrong?

Still, he was damned sure they would all be better off without Captain Burkett. And from what the colonel had said, Conrad might be commanding his own company in a year or two. If the war lasted that long, which Conrad feared it would.

He passed through Parliament Square and strode up Whitehall, glancing at the Cenotaph with its reminder of all those hundreds of thousands of young men, like Conrad, who had perished in the last diplomatic balls-up twenty years before. He turned left into Downing Street and, opposite Number 10, entered the grand palace that was the Foreign Office.

Conrad had met Sir Robert Vansittart, Chief Diplomatic Adviser, several times before, mostly over dinner at his parents’ house. ‘Van’, as he was known, was a friend of Conrad’s father from their school days at Eton. He was tall, almost as tall as Conrad, with square shoulders and a square jaw. He was known for his forthright opinions, especially on the subject of appeasement of Germany, and for that reason he had been shuffled out of his former position of Permanent Under-Secretary a couple of years before, although he still maintained the impressive office with its view over St James’s Park.

‘Ah, de Lancey, take a seat.’ Van indicated one of the ornate chairs in front of his desk. ‘Good to see you in uniform. How is soldiering?’

‘I’m enjoying it, Sir Robert,’ said Conrad. ‘I seem to have a facility for it.’

‘Well, let us hope you will not be called upon to fire a shot in anger.’

‘Actually, I rather hoped I would. That was the point of joining up, after all.’

Van smiled. ‘I trust your father hasn’t heard you say that?’

Conrad admired his father both for his courage and for the strength of his convictions. Viscount Oakford’s pacifism was well known. During the Great War, as Captain the Hon. Arthur de Lancey, he had won a Victoria Cross, lost an arm, and honed a determination to prevent his country’s return to such wholesale slaughter ever again. Conrad’s mother was from Hamburg. So the declaration of war two months before had been a personal disaster for Conrad’s family.

But for Conrad it was a grim necessity. He smiled. ‘Father and I differ on the subject of war and peace.’

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ said Van. ‘He never ceases to harangue me and Lord Halifax to bring this war to an early conclusion.’

‘Which is impossible to do without giving in to tyranny,’ Conrad said.

‘Perhaps. But there might be a way.’

Conrad’s pulse quickened. His suspicion as to why he had been summoned to Whitehall looked as if it was going to be confirmed. ‘Are the German generals finally going to do something?’

‘It’s an eventuality that we cannot discount. It is for that reason I summoned you here. Have you had any communication recently with your German...’ Van paused to reach for the correct word. ‘...friends?’

‘Not since this time last year.’ Conrad had received no reply to his letter to Theo on the first day of the war.

‘And who were those friends, exactly?’

‘You want names?’

Van nodded.

Conrad hesitated. When he had returned from Berlin the previous autumn, he had been determined not to betray Theo, who had warned him of leaks in the British secret service. But now Britain and Germany were at war, and Sir Robert Vansittart was at the centre of the government directing that war.

‘My friend Lieutenant Theo von Hertenberg of the Abwehr.’ The Abwehr was the German secret service. ‘His boss, Colonel Oster. Captain Heinz, another Abwehr officer. Ewald von Kleist, a well-connected Prussian aristocrat. General Beck, the former Chief of the General Staff.’