Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

24

You could hear it before you could see it, Powerscourt said to himself, dressing reluctantly at a quarter to four in the morning in his vast bedroom looking out over the Thames. There they went, the dark waters of the river, swirling and slapping and gurgling on their long journey to the sea. The local birds were already welcoming a new day. His reception on arrival late the previous evening had been curt.

‘Ah, Powerscourt,’ General Page had said as he presented himself, rather tired from his journey the evening before. There was a long pause. Page had been universally known as Silent Page, ever since his first days as a trainee Sub-Lieutenant many years before, when Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister. The pause went on.

‘Sir!’ Powerscourt replied, feeling that some form of dialogue might yet be possible. Page was now staring intently at a large black notebook in front of him. He made no entries.

‘Good of you to come,’ he managed at last, and sank back slightly in his chair, as if the effort of speech had exhausted him.

‘Sir!’ said Powerscourt, feeling that his replies in this attempt at conversation were somewhat limited. He waited. Silent Page was now looking intently at the river, as if enemy forces might suddenly disembark and seize the hotel. Then he inspected his pencil, as if it too might have hostile intent. Suddenly he leant forward and began inspecting a form in front of him. Powerscourt wondered if it contained the staff orders for the day or just the dispositions of his troops for the next twenty-four hours. Silent Page took a deep breath.

‘Got to get you to sign this,’ he managed at last. ‘Official Secrets Act 1911, you know. You’ll have seen about it in the papers.’

‘Why?’ asked Powerscourt, who had always had a reputation for questioning the orders of superior officers, especially when he considered them unnecessary. This time the pause was hardly there at all.

‘Just sign the bloody thing, damn you. I went to a lot of trouble to get you here. Thought you might be useful.’

By Silent Page’s normal standards, this was virtually the whole act of a Shakespeare play in one go. Powerscourt was so surprised he leant forward and signed it at once, without question. This time the silence reverted to its normal pre-Shakespearian mode. The General looked again at the river, checking perhaps for another arrival of enemy marines. He stared again at the black notebook in front of him.

‘Breakfast’s at four tomorrow morning. For God’s sake don’t ask me any questions. I might not be able to give you the answers. Official Secrets Act, don’t you know.’

That breakfast was the strangest meal Powerscourt had been present at in all his years on the planet. The General was there, of course, conducting a silent reconnaissance on a pair of kippers. There was a German officer in civilian clothes and a monocle whose name, Powerscourt discovered later, was Ludwig von Stoltenberg, attached to the German General Staff. There was a sleek Frenchman, wearing the finest civilian clothes the Parisian tailors could provide, called Jean-Pierre Poiret. The two foreigners had taken to addressing each other in the other’s language, so the Frenchman spoke to the German in impeccable German and the German spoke back to the Frenchman in near perfect French. A simple question of politeness about the direction of the marmalade became: ‘Passieren die marmelade, bitte,’ from the French side of the Rhine, and ‘Passer la marmelade, s’il vous plaît,’ from the other.

The usual strange Continental breakfast offerings of cold ham and cheese were provided as a gesture of friendship towards the foreigners, but all three of them polished off a plate of bacon and eggs. When the marmalade had stopped travelling, Silent Page burst into speech again. Powerscourt noted with interest that the hostile kippers had been completely routed, with only a few bones left on the General’s plate.

‘Ahem,’ he began, ‘ahem, we leave in five minutes. I advise you to wrap up well.’

Each man travelled in his own car, a silent driver at the wheel. After five minutes or so they were deep in the English countryside and had to stop at a serious-looking gate, manned by a couple of soldiers, guns at the ready. As far as the eyes could see, a very tall wall, about eight feet high, guarded what looked like an enormous park. There were no buildings to be seen as the four cars set off up a long and winding drive that Powerscourt thought might lead to a Blenheim Palace or a Castle Howard. Instead they came to a second guardhouse, manned again by armed soldiers with sentries marching up and down the length of another wall, this time a little shorter, perhaps six feet high. Powerscourt wondered if these sentries were condemned to an everlasting patrol like the horsemen who rode round the Tsar’s Palace at Tsarskoe Selo outside St Petersburg twenty-four hours a day.

The little fleet of cars finally stopped at what looked like a large birdwatchers’ hide. Inside there were seats and binoculars and four telescopes and a grandstand view over the countryside. Silent Page suggested they make themselves comfortable.

‘It should — ahem — be fully light in a few minutes. Then the action will begin.’ There was a long pause, as if he were a weatherman consulting his charts before producing the forecast for the day. He stared out at the fields in front of him. ‘I’m told there will be no wind. We should — ahem — be safe here.’

Wind? Hostilities? Powerscourt felt a terrible apprehension running through his body. What on earth was going on? Why did they have to invoke the Official Secrets Act for something that was about to happen in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere? He grabbed a pair of binoculars and stared straight in front of him. He saw, about two hundred yards away, a series of trenches dug in parallel with a series of connecting trenches at either end, like a child’s parallelogram in a maths exercise book. He couldn’t see how deep the trenches were. He noticed that the trench area was almost completely surrounded by trees or by man-made hillocks, which looked as if they had only been created very recently. The German began walking up and down, muttering to himself in French. The Frenchman began to rub his hands together, as if he were about to enjoy the best meal that the Savoy Grill could provide.

A gun went off, firing from the far side of the trenches, Powerscourt thought. He could see no sign of anything landing. Perhaps it was a blank. The shot had a dramatic effect on his two colleagues.

‘Achtung Achtung!’ said the Frenchman.

‘Merde! Attention! Attention!’ said the German.

Both whipped fresh notebooks from their pockets and proceeded to virtually glue themselves to the nearest binoculars. Powerscourt did the same, wondering if he would be reprimanded afterwards for not having a fresh notebook to hand. The other two were focused on the trenches. Powerscourt turned his glasses across the landscape and saw what the others didn’t.

A young shepherd, complete with attendant sheepdog, was driving a flock of about thirty sheep towards the trenches. Fiddling with the controls, Powerscourt saw that the young man — he didn’t look more than twenty — was crying, and that the tears were running down his sweater as if he had been weeping for some time.

The sheep were driven into the enclosure surrounded by the trenches. They did not find them attractive, preferring to wander round their new enclosure. Powerscourt noticed that two large troughs of water had been placed at either end to keep the sheep in place. He glanced back up the hill. He thought he caught the glint of another pair of binoculars lurking at the edge of the trees. But however much he adjusted his controls, he never saw it again.

Looking to his left, Powerscourt saw that half a dozen goats were being driven down the little hill to join the party. They were roped together and their handler, a much older man, drove a post into the ground to keep them tethered as soon as they entered the enclosure. This man was older. He didn’t cry. But he scuttled off back up the hill as fast as his legs would carry him. He seemed to be saying something to himself as he went, possibly praying, Powerscourt thought. For he was now certain that something terrible was about to happen in this parallelogram hidden among the green fields of southern England.

His two companions were scribbling furiously, though Powerscourt saw that their eyes never left the enclosure. Then the gun went off again. This time it seemed to land in the centre of the parallelogram. A thin mist, or fog, settled over the trenches and the grass. Thinking about it afterwards, Powerscourt remembered that the animals made no noise at all. Their fate was met in silence. One or two of the sheep tried to run back the way they had come, to the safety of the trees and their weeping shepherd. After a dozen paces they staggered to a halt and lay down. Other sheep and a couple of goats began slumping to the ground. The parallelogram was turning into a death chamber.

The German began saying ‘Ave Maria’ very quietly in French, his eyes locked on the sheep; they were twitching furiously now, as if they could not control their arms or their legs. ‘Hail Mary full of Grace, Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce.’

The Frenchman replied with the Lord’s Prayer in Luther’s language. ‘Vater unser im Himmel, geheiligt werde dein Name. .’

Powerscourt was certain that the animals were dying, killed off by some form of poison gas. He thought of his son Thomas, and all his friends and contemporaries who might man the British trenches in a future war in Europe, spread out in their innocence the length and breadth of England, and he put his head in his hands.

‘Mère de Dieu, Priez pour nous, pauvres pêcheurs, maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort. Pray for us now, poor sinners, and in the hour of our death.’

All the animals were sinking to the ground now. Most of them lay flat on the ground, one or two still twitching feebly in their death agonies. The goats too were passing into the next world.

‘Und vergib uns unsere Schuld, wie auch wir vergeben unsern Schuldigern. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.’

Powerscourt was close to tears. Why were his fellow countrymen preparing to use this terrible weapon, for he was certain that the animals were merely an alternative to humans who could not be found to volunteer for such a dreadful death. Who had approved it? The Prime Minister? The Chief of the Imperial General Staff? The Archbishop of Canterbury?

The Frenchman was stuck at the end of his prayer, saying it over and over again. There were only a couple of sheep still writhing on the deadly grass. The cloud of fog had passed on and was drifting slowly towards the hill where the shepherd had gone.

‘Denn dein ist das Reich und die Kraft und die Herrlichkeit in Ewigkeit. Amen. For thine is the kingdom the power and the glory for ever and ever, Amen.’

Powerscourt promised himself that he would do all in his power to make sure that this gas was never used. Perhaps, he reflected ruefully, that was why he was here, to spread the word around the upper reaches of London society.

It was as they were leaving, the dead animals left in their place until the gas had totally cleared, that Powerscourt listened to what must rank as the most tasteless remark he had ever heard.

‘We Germans are not good at tact or at jokes,’ the German Colonel began, speaking now in perfect English, ‘but it seems to me that the gas did not draw any distinction between the sheep and the goats.’