In baggy civilian tweeds, Walsh felt dreadfully out of place in that sanctum of creased khaki, gleaming brass tunic buttons, shoulder straps, and swarms of the red collar tabs that showed officers of colonel’s rank and above. In uniform himself, he would have had to salute till his shoulder ached. As things were, his arm kept twitching as he fought down the conditioned reflex again and again.
Wavell was an erect, thin-faced man in his early fifties. “I can give you fifteen minutes, Walsh,” he said as he closed his office door to let them talk privately. Scotland Yard might be able to plant microphones in many different places, Walsh judged, but not here.
“Thank you, sir,” the ex-serviceman said. “I appreciate it, and so do my friends.”
One of Wavell’s bushy eyebrows rose an eighth of an inch. “Your… friends?” He let the word hang in the air. By the look on his face, he might have taken a bite of fish that was slightly off.
“Yes, sir,” Walsh said stolidly. “You may or may not have heard I was the bloke who had the bad luck to bring in Rudolf Hess after he parachuted from his Messerschmitt 110.”
“Were you, now?” The general’s gaze sharpened. “Yes, that’s right. You were. I remember seeing the report, now you remind me of it.
And so?”
“And so I wish I’d had a pistol with me and plugged him instead,” Walsh answered. “Then maybe we wouldn’t be in bed with Hitler now. My friends”-he deliberately reused the word-“still wish we weren’t.”
Wavell snorted. “They aren’t the only ones, I’m sure.” But he checked himself. “It’s up to the politicians to set policy, of course. The military’s here to back their play when the usual peacetime methods fail.”
“Invading Russia, sir?” Walsh said. “Isn’t that going a bit far?”
“If your friends are of the pink persuasion, Walsh, I don’t think we have much more to say to each other.” Twenty degrees of frost crisped up Wavell’s voice.
“They’re Tories almost to a man. Churchill was one of them, till he met that Bentley,” Walsh replied. Winston Churchill hated the idea of helping Hitler, not that Neville Chamberlain cared a farthing what Churchill thought. People still wondered whether the rich young man behind the wheel of the auto that ran Churchill down was truly as drunk as the bobbies claimed.
“That was a bad business,” Wavell said quietly, so he might have been one of those wondering people. He studied Walsh. “So you’re in with that lot, are you? No, they’re not pinks, no doubt of that.”
“I am, sir. It seems the best way to honor Churchill’s memory-and, to my mind, he was dead right about the Nazis.” Walsh hadn’t used the phrase with malice aforethought. But he quite fancied it once it was out of his mouth. “Dead right,” he repeated.
“I can’t imagine what you or your friends expect me to do about it, though,” Wavell said. “This isn’t Argentina or Brazil or one of those places. The army doesn’t interfere in politics here. It would be unthinkable.”
Walsh just sat there and waited. If General Wavell was talking about it, he was thinking about it. What he was thinking about it… Walsh would discover in due course.
The general glanced at his wristwatch. “Well,” he said with forced briskness, “I’m afraid I’ve given you all the time I can spare at present. There is a war on, you know, and someone does have to run it, or at any rate to try.”
“Certainly, sir.” Walsh got to his feet. “Is there anything you’d particularly like me to tell my friends?”
“Tell them… Tell them they don’t know what they’re playing at, dammit.”
“I think they do, sir. I think it’s the Prime Minister and his lot who’ve gone off the rails, not these other fellows.”
“You can say that. You’ve taken off the uniform. No, I don’t hold it against you-no denying you had your reasons,” Wavell said. “But I still wear it. If I were to speak in the same fashion, or to act in addition to speaking, it would be treason, nothing less.”
“General, I don’t know anything about that,” said Walsh, who knew far more about it than he’d dreamt he would before he watched that lone parachutist descend on the Scottish field. Taking a deep breath, he continued, “I do know we can’t go on the way we’re going. It would ruin the country forever. Anything would be better, anything at all. Or do you think I’m wrong?”
“I think-” Wavell broke off, shaking his head like a horse pestered by gnats. “I think you’d best go, Walsh, is what I think. And deliver my message to your associates.”
Walsh did, at a pub not far from Parliament. They kept no favorite table: that would have made it too easy for Scotland Yard, or perhaps the PM’s less savory associates, to arrange to listen in. Walsh didn’t think they could bug every table in the place. The noise from the rest of the crowd-more politicos, solicitors, newspapermen, and other such riffraff-drowned out the conspirators’ conversations. He hoped like blazes it did, anyhow.
Ronald Cartland slammed his pint mug down on the tabletop in disgust when Walsh finished. It wasn’t empty; some best bitter slashed out. “Good Lord!” the MP exclaimed. “The man has no more spine than an eclair! One of you, Walsh, is worth a thousand of him.”
Cartland had volunteered for service when the war broke out, and fought in France as a subaltern. That, to Walsh’s mind, gave his opinions weight and made his praise doubly warming. But Walsh thought his dismissal of General Wavell was premature. “I don’t know about that, sir,” he said. “He didn’t have the military police arrest me for treason, the way he might have done. He didn’t even chuck me out of his office. He listened to me. He may not be ready to move yet, but he doesn’t half fancy the way things are heading.”
“Who in his right mind would?” said Bobbity Cranford, another leader of the anti-alliance crowd. “But if he listened to you, old man, he’d better watch out for Bentleys the next time he crosses the road.”
That produced a considerable silence around the table. Walsh broke it by loudly calling to a barmaid to fill up his pint again. He needed the fresh mug. Cranford had reminded him they weren’t playing a game here, nor was the government. If it felt itself seriously threatened, it would lash out. Anyone who didn’t believe that had only to remember Winston Churchill.
Luc Harcourt unslung his rifle and carried it instead of leaving it on his shoulder. His regiment was heading up to the front again, and he wanted to be ready if they ran into any Russians. Besides, fronts here were far more porous than they’d been in France. Some enemy soldiers were bound to have leaked through what was supposed to be the line.
His boots squelched as he tramped up the road, but only a little. The mud didn’t try to pull off his footgear, as it would have a couple of weeks earlier. Pretty soon, both sides would be able to start moving again. There were prospects Luc relished more.
Up ahead, Lieutenant Demange was singing obscene lyrics to the tune of a peasant song about spring. Luc had known Demange since before the shooting started. Not many others from the old company survived, and even fewer in one piece. Knowing Demange as he did, Luc also knew those foul verses were a way for the reluctantly promoted officer to hide his own nerves about what lay ahead.
Anyone who didn’t know Demange so well would assume he owned no nerves. Luc had, for a long time. But underneath the chrome-steel salaud lay a human being. A nasty human being, but even so, Luc thought.
One thing Demange didn’t believe in was taking needless chances; a soldier had to take too many that were necessary. He carried a rifle instead of the more usual and less useful officer’s pistol. And he carried it, like Luc. He was ready for anything. And things needed to be ready for him.
“Halt! Who goes there?” a sentry called in nervous, German-accented French. “Give the countersign!”
“Your mother on a pogo stick,” Demange snarled. He might be here, but he still despised the Boches.
“Qu’est-ce-que vous dites?” the sentry said: a reasonable enough question. He added, “Give the countersign, or I fire!”
Demange did, which confirmed Luc’s thought about not taking chances he didn’t have to. The German passed him and the men he led. Well, why not? They were doing some of Hitler’s work so the rest of the Fritzes wouldn’t have to.
The trench system was well enough organized and shored up to show the lines hadn’t moved much for a while. What with the way Russia turned to mud soup as the snow melted, the lines couldn’t very well move.
Which didn’t mean the Reds were asleep behind their rusting barbed wire. The regiment hadn’t been in place for half an hour before an Ivan with a megaphone shouted at them in much better French than the German sentry spoke: “Here they are again-Colonel Eluard’s little darlings.”
How did the bastard know? Luc wouldn’t have thought any of the handful of Russian peasants he’d seen had
