The Elegant Lie

…

In the cold, grey dawn, Lieutenant Carter woke from his first night in the Ardennes in the attic of the farmhouse that Major Wharton had chosen as his command post. He lay on the floor, wrapped up in an army blanket which he had scavenged from a room downstairs. Its previous occupants, to judge from the mess they had left behind, had been steadily making their way through every piece of furniture in the house, smashing chairs, tables and entire chests of drawers and burning them all to stay warm. Now the fireplace was heaped with ash and the stubs of iron nails and brass hinges, folded in upon themselves by the heat until they resembled the petals of flowers. Scattered in the corners of the room were little foil envelopes that had once contained powdered lemonade and Nescafé from American C-ration packs. Where these men had gone, Carter had no idea. He already had the sense that people and vehicles were constantly in motion around him, and that no one seemed to know or care where anyone else was headed as long as they could fend for themselves. No wonder, he thought, that someone could disappear with an entire truckload of fuel. It was probably parked in some village square not far from here and no one was paying attention, because it wasn’t their business to look after it. The exasperation that Major Wharton had vented at Carter upon his arrival was starting to feel entirely reasonable, and he hadn’t even started work yet.

For a while, Carter just lay there, staring up at the thick plaster of mud and straw that made up the underside of the attic roof. Outside, he could hear vehicles moving around in the muddy lanes between the houses. Already he was learning to tell the difference between the Willys jeeps and the deep, throatier engines of the Dodge trucks. Now and then he heard the clattering roar of a tank, but that was always in the distance.

Making his way downstairs, he found Riveira cooking rations on a stove in the kitchen. The sergeant had emptied out a can of spaghetti into the shallow pan of a mess kit, on top of which he crumbled a handful of bone-coloured army biscuits.

‘Is that breakfast?’ asked Carter, nodding towards the plopping slurry in the mess kit.

‘I’m afraid so, sir. You’re on the front line now. There’s nothing but C-rations out here, and that means either pork and beans, spam or spaghetti, all of which taste pretty much the same after a while.’ He gestured at a pile of cardboard ration boxes on the counter. ‘Help yourself,’ he said.

Carter scrounged a mess kit for himself and fried up some slices of spam.

‘Where’s Major Wharton?’ he asked.

‘Inspecting the front lines,’ said Riveira. ‘He does that every day.’

‘How far is it to Germany from here?’

‘You could walk there in under an hour, but I wouldn’t recommend it.’

‘Do you ever see them◦– the Germans, I mean◦– out there in the woods?’

‘No,’ replied Riveira, ‘but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.’

There was no table in the kitchen, so Carter sat on the floor with his back to the wall while he ate the greasy strips of spam, washing them down with a canteen cup of powdered coffee.

When he had finished, he washed out the mess kit in a cattle trough behind the house and climbed into the jeep, where Riveira was already waiting.

‘Where to, sir?’ asked the sergeant.

‘I need to talk to the man they arrested for stealing that fuel truck.’

‘Well, they’ve got him at the police station over in Bütgenbach. It’s not too far away. I got to warn you, though. I’ve heard he is out of his mind.’ Riveira knocked the jeep in gear and pulled out of the alley. Soon they were driving along narrow lanes, with earth and hedges built up so high on either side that only at the crossroads could they see across the landscape.

They passed lines of soldiers shuffling along the road. The men were red-eyed with fatigue from sleeping in foxholes in the woods. Many had blankets wrapped around their shoulders, which made them look, at a distance, like a procession of stooped old women.

Bütgenbach was a slightly larger town than the one where Carter had spent the night. A group of women in stained and tired-looking dresses, all of them clattering along in wooden-soled shoes, gave the jeep the same look of weary impatience as it passed.

Riveira pulled up in front of the police station beside a monument to the dead of the Great War. A Belgian soldier cast in bronze looked out over the square, his eyes sea green with corrosion. The clouds had gathered, seeming almost balanced on the rooftops of the sleepy little town, and the first Morse code flicks of rain darkened the grey slate tiles.

Inside the police station, Carter was led to the one prison cell in the building by a guard who wore a dark blue tunic with silver buttons, polished like gunmetal at the elbows from where he had leaned on his desk, chin resting in his hands, and slept away the quiet afternoons. He also wore a pillbox hat that was slightly crushed, as if he had sat on it by mistake. What the guard lacked in bearing, he made up for with a magnificent moustache and a reassuring air of dignity.

The cell was barely wide enough for a man to stretch his arms. An opening near the ceiling looked out through a dirty pane of glass towards the eggshell sky. The prisoner sat on a bed, which was attached to the wall by hinges and two chains, allowing it to be folded up flat. He was a heavyset man with shaggy hair and a grey wool vest, beneath which he wore a brown collarless shirt. One trouser leg had been rolled up, revealing a bandage wrapped around his ankle. The man looked blearily at Carter and muttered something that caused the guard to raise his head slowly until he was staring at the man down the length of his formidable nose. The prisoner immediately fell silent.

‘Do you speak English?’ Carter asked the man.

‘Enough,’ replied the prisoner.

‘What is your name?’ asked Carter.

‘François Grandhenri.’

Carter turned to the guard. ‘Do you have an interrogation room?’ he asked.

The man did not answer, but turned and walked back to the foyer of the building, returning a moment later with a small stool, which he placed in the corridor opposite the cell. Then, squinting with one eye, he gave Carter a look, as if daring him to ask for something more.

Carter sat down and the guard left them in peace.

The first thing Carter did was to offer Grandhenri a cigarette. He did not do this out of compassion, but rather as a sign; a laying out of rules◦– which any prisoner would understand, whether tied up in a chair in a warehouse in the docklands of New Jersey or stuck in an airless concrete hole somewhere in eastern Belgium◦– that Carter needed something from him, and that his first attempt to get it would be with gestures of civility. Whatever happened after that was up to the prisoner.

Grandhenri reached through the bars and plucked the cigarette from between Carter’s outstretched fingers.

Then Carter removed a lighter, spun the little striker wheel until the wick caught fire, and held it to the bars.

Grandhenri leaned forward until the tip of the cigarette just touched the shuddering flame. Then he sat back, drawing in the smoke.

‘How did they catch you?’ asked Carter.

The man exhaled two grey jets of smoke through his nose. ‘I was climbing into the back of the truck. The driver did not wait. He started moving. I lost my grip and fell. When I hit the ground, I twisted my ankle so badly that I could not run away. My friends did not come back for me.’ He shrugged and smoked again. ‘There is nothing more to tell.’

‘They don’t sound like very good friends,’ said Carter.

Grandhenri paused. ‘There are different kinds of friend.’

‘Where are they now?’

Grandhenri leaned towards the bars. ‘Listen,’ he said quietly. ‘You should not be worrying about my friends, or your precious truck or even the man who was killed.’

Carter narrowed his eyes. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked.

‘Death is coming,’ said Grandhenri. ‘That is all you need to know.’

‘Who paid you to steal the truck?’ asked Carter.

Suddenly Grandhenri leapt up from his bunk and threw himself at the bars.

Startled, Carter rocked back, cracking his head against the wall so hard that flecks of light appeared to dance around the prisoner’s face.

‘You are not listening!’ Grandhenri’s voice rose to a crackling hiss.

The guard reappeared, striding down the corridor. He unlocked the steel door, not even glancing at Carter, who had no choice except to stand aside.

Grandhenri just stood there, trembling. ‘I’m telling you the truth!’ he said.

As the guard stepped forward into the cell, a short black object suddenly appeared in his hand, which had slid down through his sleeve. It was a ball of lead about the size of a man’s thumb, fitted with a metal spring that formed a handle, with the whole thing wrapped in horsehide. With a movement so slight it appeared almost gentle, the guard knocked Grandhenri in the temple with the leather-padded ball of lead. The tap from this weapon was so perfectly placed that the man just dropped to his knees and then fell forward onto his face. The guard emerged from the cell, locked the door again and turned to Carter. ‘The interview is over,’ he said. Then he walked back down the hallway.

By the time Carter had returned to Rocherath, Major Wharton was back from his inspection of the lines. He was sitting in the dining room, still wearing his gloves and a heavy woollen scarf around his neck. ‘Well?’ he asked Carter, setting the heels of his muddy boots upon the dining table.

‘I went to see the prisoner.’

‘Did he tell you anything?’

‘He said that death was coming.’

Wharton laughed. ‘You see? You were wasting your time.’

‘It sounded like he meant it.’

‘Of course he did!’ said Wharton. ‘For the past four years, that man has been living under German occupation and if he had tried the same stunt when they were around, he would have been shot days ago. But he didn’t think twice about stealing from us, even though we came to liberate his sorry ass. We’re all thieves here, Lieutenant. It is what time and circumstance have made us. Even you.’

‘I haven’t stolen anything.’

‘Of course you did!’ laughed Wharton. ‘You stole that blanket you slept in last night, and chances are it’s already been stolen from you. The rations you ate this morning were stolen from a depot back in Stavelot.’

‘Who stole them?’ asked Carter.

‘Nobody!’ exclaimed Wharton. ‘And that’s the beauty of it. Rations were simply requested for men who are no longer with us. Some of them have been dead for months. But we’re still picking up their rations so that we can get enough to eat. Is it a crime? Of course it is! Does everybody know what’s going on? Of course they do! Does anybody really care?’ Now Wharton stood, set his fists upon the table and leaned forward until he was towering over Carter. ‘Not when they’re sleeping in bunkers in the woods. Not when they haven’t been on leave in more than half a year. Not when they know that, for every soldier stuck here at the front, there are twenty back in France, or England or even in America, who have no idea what it’s like to get shot at by sixteen-year-old German kids who’ve never been taught how to play football or baseball, or how to dance with their girlfriends or to do anything you and I would think was normal for a teenage boy. All they know how to do is kill you. And they know how to die. And after you’ve been fighting them, all day every day, for so long you can’t remember what it’s like to do anything else, trust me son, you don’t lose too much sleep over a truckload of fuel, or a case of goddamned pork and beans.’

Carter sat there for a while in silence. ‘All right, Major Wharton,’ he said at last, ‘assuming that’s all true, what would you do now if you were me?’

The question seemed to catch Wharton by surprise. ‘Do you really want to know?’ he asked.

Carter held open his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘I’ll take whatever you’ve got.’

‘All right,’ said Wharton. ‘I guess I’d answer the question by saying that, from time to time, everybody gets handed jobs which seem like a good idea to whoever thought them up but which, when you actually put them into practice, have no hope at all of success. The problem is, the people who usually come up with the ideas aren’t interested in how you get it done. All they think about are the results, which leaves the poor bastard who’s been given the job, people like you and me, with no choice but to struggle with a task he knows will fail. So what you have to do is make it seem like you’re getting things done. You file a lot of paperwork. You disappear into dusty little corners where no one will come looking for you. You don’t ever tell them that it can’t be done. They’ll figure that out for themselves. Between that time and this, the best you can do is not get anyone killed, including yourself.’