Tug of War

Chapter Seventeen

Joe wondered if, over the hundreds of miles of land and sea that separated them, Brigadier Redmayne on his Scottish grouse moor was troubled by the curse he sent winging his way. That mosquito now settling on his left cheek — would Sir Douglas ever attribute the sharp sting to Joe’s summoning up of a stab of silent invective?

Dorcas was speechless. Joe guessed that the intimacy of the young pair had not progressed as far as this startling admission and could feel that she too was taken aback.

Joe replied calmly. ‘Have you never spoken of this to your uncle?’

Georges shook his head. ‘To no one.’

‘What a burden to carry by yourself all these years, my poor old chap!’ said Joe. ‘But, you say it yourself, you were only seven years old at the time of this terrible event — if indeed it ever occurred — and I agree, a seven-year-old is quite likely through simple inexperience to put a wrong interpretation on scenes he’s witnessed. Why don’t we all look at it again with adult eyes and see if we can make sense of it?’

Georges looked at him more hopefully.

‘Tell me some more.’

Judging by the boy’s silence that he had no idea where best to begin, Joe led him into a conversation, pouring out more coffee all round and trying to avoid anything resembling a police interview of the ‘Where did you last see your father?’ type. He remembered a Victorian painting with that very title. Sentimental, colourful and full of narrative power, it had been his favourite. A Royalist family had been arrested in their own home at the time of the Civil War by a company of Roundheads. The Cavalier father was missing, fled. His young son, a boy of about six, stood proudly, stiffly upright, in his blue satin suit on a stool facing up to interrogation by a squad of frozen-faced, dark-clad and totally menacing Parliamentarians. The boy’s older sister stood behind him in her white satin dress trimmed with pink rosebuds and she wept into her hands. His sister Lydia wouldn’t have wept, Joe always thought. She’d have given them what for. He identified with the boy and sent himself to sleep each night making up stories of increasing complexity with which he might have fooled the chief interrogator. For a change he sometimes played the part of this man who, on closer examination, seemed to have a more kindly face than the other soldiers. He leaned forward over the desk, keen and clever.

Instinctively, Joe had always understood that it was here the danger lay. They would never have succeeded in beating information out of such a boy but one sympathetic word, one well-placed question politely asked and he would be in the net.

Very well. Time to play the kindly chief interrogator.

‘How often did your father come home during those war years?’ he asked. ‘I know leave was hard to come by. . men went for years sometimes without seeing their families.’

He was on the right track. Georges replied at once. ‘Hardly ever. That’s the problem. I’m very confused about the times when my father came home. Once, he came home in the night and he’d had to go away again before I woke next morning,’ he said. This had obviously been a sharp cause of distress. ‘He left a toy horse on my pillow. My mother was always waiting. When she wasn’t out in the fields or at the hospital working. . She would sit moping by the window or sometimes on the top step with the dog. . we had a greyhound in those days. And she would talk all the time about what my father would say and do, how proud he would be of me when he came home. And he did come home. Three times in as many years. I marked them down in my day book. But it was always for a very short time and he’d have to ride off again. I’m not complaining, sir. It was like that for every child at that time. Millions of us were left fatherless. Some lost both parents. I’ve been lucky.’

Joe was glad to hear the boy’s refusal to indulge in self-pity.

‘Were you not evacuated to a safer place?’ Joe asked. ‘Couldn’t help noticing the bullet holes on the façade.’

Georges smiled. ‘Maman refuses to have them filled in. She says they’re a part of the history of the house and there they’ll stay. And yes, we did go away sometimes to my grandparents in Paris when the war came dangerously close. But mostly we stayed and hoped for the best. We had lots of soldiers through the house, billeted on us. And glad to have them. We always felt safer with men about the place. Maman cheered up when the house was full. She forgot about waiting and moping. And she felt she was doing her bit. She was very good at it. She’d sing and play the piano for them, cook whatever we had. Dress their wounds.’ He grinned at Joe. ‘She may look like a butterfly but she’s actually as tough as old boots. And she expected everyone to pitch in, even me, though I was only small. I remember working in the fields with frozen hands in winter, keeling over in the heat in summer and never daring to complain. I’ve never lost the habit.’ He held out with pride large square hands callused like a coachman’s.

‘Maman had a poster fixed up at the gates to encourage us all. A call to action to the women and children of France from the Prefect.’ He smiled and spoke the remembered words with emotion: ‘“Debout femmes françaises, jeunes enfants, filles et fils de la Patrie! Remplacez sur le champ du travail ceux qui sont sur le champ de bataille. Debout! A l’action! Au labeur!” “On your feet! To action! To work!” Hard work though! But we did it. We managed — just about — to take in the fields the places of those who were on the battlefields. We were even used as an overflow for the hospital once and I had to help with the laundry.’ He shuddered and pulled a face to disguise his passing horror. ‘That was a low point.’

‘Yes, you did it, old son, you did it!’ murmured Joe. ‘Kept the country going.’ And, after a pause, ‘I’m wondering what nationalities you had here? Actually — you might well have had me! I was based very close by.’

‘We did have a few English. Maman liked them the best. So did I. They were my good friends while they were here. Some of them came back several times. And some wrote to me when they got back home after the war. They missed their own sons, I think, or their little brothers, and I got quite spoilt. We still get Christmas cards from one or two. I have a friend called John who never forgets to send me a birthday card even when he’s soldiering abroad. And we had French units of course. Mostly French. There was a day when we almost had Germans!’

He smiled. ‘They made a terrible mistake. It was at the time when the whole area was swarming with all three armies. No time to get away — we just had to sit it out. We had a squad of English cavalrymen with us at the time when suddenly someone shouted that the Boche were on their way. And a German staff car was spotted coming down the drive. Just driving down as bold as brass! An officer and his driver. They’d taken the wrong turning and thought they were approaching their billet for the night. Sitting ducks for the English marksmen. They fired warning shots over their heads and called to them to surrender. The Germans fired back and those are the holes you see in the front of the house. They were taken alive but wounded and sent off for interrogation.’

‘Good Lord!’ said Joe. ‘I may even have carried out that questioning myself!’ He was reasonably sure that he hadn’t but Georges seemed excited at the coincidence and he decided to spin out the story. ‘I was with Military Intelligence recovering from a shoulder wound. We were brought an officer with a leather bag in his possession. Lots of bloodstained rubbish in there but also a map which quite obviously showed von Kluck’s forward planning. We were delighted to have it. Particularly as it showed he was planning a manoeuvre that played straight into allied hands. We didn’t get an awful lot else out of the officer but his sidekick, a taxi driver from Berlin, sang like a song thrush.’

His confidence won, Georges listened to a few more extracts from the war diaries of Captain Sandilands. ‘I say, sir, would you like to see my record of the war? My notebook? It’s very. . well. . naïve and badly written but it does give the dates when my father was about the place.’

‘I shall probably shed a tear or two but if you wouldn’t mind — that would be a great help. Good to have something concrete to go on in this shifting affair,’ said Joe. ‘No hurry.’

‘Well, the last date of interest you’ll find is in the summer of ’17. My father came home for a couple of days. And after that, nothing. No letters. No news. No sightings.’ The words were coming from him in uncontrolled staccato bursts. ‘It was said he’d been killed — disappeared anyway — during the battle of the Chemin des Dames. His body was never found. For good reason. He’s still here. He never left the château again. He was killed here. Buried here. My mother killed him.’