The Old Vengeful

' On the morning of April 9th, 1917, the men of the British Fourth and Fifth armies had their first sight of a new German defensive position which was named by its builders the Siegfried Stellung, but which became known to the British as the Hindenburg Line.

' Sergeant Alfred Hannah, of the 2nd/4th Royal Mendips, saw the morning sunlight shimmering on what seemed like a river separating him from the village of Fontaine-du-Bois in the distance. Yet it was not water which had caught the light, but the sharpened points of a jungle of new barbed-wire 75 yards wide ...'

Elizabeth's flesh crawled as she remembered how she had torn her second-best skirt on a single strand of barbed-wire dummy3

on a ramble beyond the Trundles. Not your cup of tea was right!

She turned to the back flap, and Dr Paul Mitchell stared at her from it—a younger version, unlined and fuller- faced, and more arrogant too, but unmistakably the same man.

'Paul Mitchell was born in Gloucestershire on September 29th, 1945, twenty-seven years to the day after his grandfather was killed in action while commanding a battalion during the crossing of the St Quentin Canal. Dr Mitchell was educated at—'

So here, encapsulated, was all the research she had hoped to do, easily come by: school—grammar school or very minor public school, she couldn't recognise the name—Cambridge and a British Commonwealth Institute fellowship; then a research post with the Ministry of Defence (where did the Home Office come in?) and 'now researching the battle of the Ancre, the hard-won victory which led to the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line' , . . Definitely not her cup of tea, any of it; and yet the obsession with the 1914-18

War was here made explicable, even if she couldn't quite grasp the Theory of Contemporaneity which had drawn him from the Hindenburg Line to Jutland and HMS Vengeful.

'And here's the other one,' said Margaret. 'And the paperback of the one you've got there.'

The Battle of the Ancre was slimmer, but although Elizabeth had already had her fill of carnage it offered her critical assessments of the first book.

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'Is this the Mitchell you want?' said Margaret doubtfully.

The critics appeared to have approved of Dr Mitchell's work; though of course the publishers would naturally have picked their quotations with care, for effect.

She looked at Margaret. 'Do many people buy this sort of thing?'

Margaret shrugged. 'About the same as for your father's books, allowing for the fact that Portsmouth's just down the road from here, so I expect to sell more naval books. It's surprising how well all the war books go— astonishing, even.'

Margaret was CND—anti-Polaris, anti-Trident, anti-Cruise, anti-practically everything . . . Elizabeth had to make allowance for that, just as Margaret did her best to make allowance for Elizabeth being her father's daughter.

'And he's got another coming out in the autumn—I think I read about it in The Bookseller.' Astonished or not, Margaret never let her principles get in the way of her bookselling. 'I can't remember the title, but it has something to do with the Irish.'

' Watch by the Liffey,' said Elizabeth.

'That's it. But how—'

'I'll take the two hardcovers. Put them on my account, dear.'

Margaret was still registering surprise at her unsuspected specialist knowledge, and the temptation to increase the score was irresistible.

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'It comes from what the Irish soldiers did in France in 1914—

the Germans were singing their 'Wacht am Rhein' in the trenches, so the Irish gave them back 'Watch by the Liflfey', Dr Mitchell says.' She smiled sweetly at her friend. 'And I need the books, you see, because he's taking me out to dinner tonight—'

There was no ticket on the car and no traffic warden in sight, and the street was still empty except for a car parked even more blatantly further down, where the yellow lines were doubled, no doubt encouraged by her example.

She sat for a moment, reading more of the dust-jacket blurb:

' Seventeen months later, when he next laid eyes on that same piece of the Hindenburg Line, Lieutenant Alfred Hannah of the West Hampshires failed to recognise it at first: the village of Fontaine-du-Bois had vanished off the face of the earth, and rust had dulled the barbs of the wire.

But the wire was still there, unbroken ...'

What was it, she wondered, which drew men like Dr Mitchell

—he wasn't much older than she was—to the contemplation of such horrors? With Father it had been different—it had all been part of re-living glory for him, as well as pain. But Dr Mitchell . . .

She drove homewards abstractedly, her mind hardly on the road but ranging more on that conundrum, and then on her own recklessness in allowing herself to be propositioned so dummy3

easily by a stranger. And such a strange stranger . . .

Then, suddenly and out of nowhere, a brace of leather-suited teenage motor-cyclists from Leigh Park roared past her, waking her up to the discovery that she was out of town already and on the edge of Father's woods— her woods, now.