The Old Vengeful

Oakenshaw and Danny Kahn in the roll-call of names.

'Not just her letter, but the Conversations book as well.

David had people working on it half the night, and me working on what they came up with this morning.'

'Doing what, Paul?'

'Plotting the route they took after they broke out of the Lautenbourg Fortress.'

Aske half-turned, then his mouth closed on his unasked question and his eyes returned to the road ahead. But Elizabeth knew what was still plaguing him, because it plagued her equally; the only difference being that she knew that Paul himself didn't know the answer to it, and Aske thought he was being frozen out from the truth.

Why?

'And that was a minor epic in itself—a classic Colditz-style job,' continued Paul. 'Because they were shut up tight in an dummy3

old barracks between the town and the citadel, and there was no way they could get through the barracks' perimeter into the town.'

Why?

'So what did they do?'

He smiled. 'They climbed up into the citadel. They made ropes out of their bedding, and grapnels somehow—they were sailors, of course, and sailors are ingenious . . . And then they climbed down the other side, where the sentries weren't expecting anything. But it still must have been pretty hairy, because their ropes weren't long enough, and they had to make the descent in stages—that's the steep side of the Lautenbourg, which is alleged to be unclimbable. But they had these two ropes, which were just strong enough to bear one man's weight, and a thin one to pull the ropes back up for the next man. And the last man down fixed the knot so it would bear his weight, but then two of them could pull it free

—risky, but ingenious, as I said.' He shook his head admiringly. 'Tom Chard—he made it sound easy. But that's one hell of a cliff, with the wall on top of it.'

'You know the Lautenbourg Fortress, Paul?'

'Uh-huh. I was down that way a few years back, when the French started restoring the battlefield of Le Linge, above Colmar.' He smiled at her again. 'It's a 1915 battlefield, you see, Elizabeth, Le Linge is ... I just visited the Lautenbourg in passing, as it were. But then, oddly enough, I've visited most of the Napoleonic prison fortresses they used for our chaps in dummy3

1812—a happy coincidence, you may think.'

'No coincidence,' said Aske. 'Just an historical progression, really.'

'Historical, Mr Aske?'

'Or Napoleonic, Miss Loftus. Napoleon was luckier than the British: he had all his PoW camps ready-built for him—all the old frontier fortresses that he didn't need any more, having advanced the frontier far beyond them, and beaten everyone in sight. But, of course, when he was beaten in his turn, the frontier went back to where it had started—and all the PoW camps became fortresses again . . . Arras, Cambrai, Verdun . . . Do you recognise the names, Miss Loftus?'

To a historian those were names to conjure with from older wars, but Elizabeth knew what he meant: they were the great names of Paul's war, the sepulchres of three great European armies. And because Lautenbourg itself had been just such another fortress along that long-disputed frontier, it too had its 1914-18 battlefield.

And yet Lautenbourg didn't fit, nevertheless: of all Napoleon's British captives, only the handful of Vengefuls had been sent there, she remembered.

'Why were they sent to Lautenbourg, Paul? Did Tom Chard know that?'

Paul shook his head. 'He never even asked himself the question— and why should he? But what he does say is that they were marched towards Verdun at first, by easy stages.

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And then one morning a new escort took over, under a full colonel of the Gendarmerie—a hard man by the name of 'Soo-Shay'—and they went off in a different direction, and under close arrest, as though they were criminals.'

'To Lautenbourg?'

'Yes. And Lieutenant Chipperfield protested about it, because he'd given his parole in the usual way, and he expected to be treated according to the rules of war—like a gentleman.'

Aske gave a snort. 'Nothing unusual about that. Napoleon Bonaparte was a great man, but he wasn't a gentleman—he was always breaking the old gentlemanly rules, Professor Wilder says. Like encouraging his officers to break their comfortable paroles, and then complaining if a British officer he'd locked up broke out of prison . . . where they shouldn't have been put in the first place, once they'd given their word-of-honour. . . Because, the way the British worked it out, an officer could only escape after they'd shut him up in jail. If they didn't, then he couldn't escape. It's funny really: if Napoleon had played the game there wouldn't have been any escapes at all, not of officers and gentlemen. But he did—so there were lots of them.'

Elizabeth frowned, trying to remember Father's original brief paragraph on the fate of the prisoners. 'But it was unusual—

the way they were treated—surely?'

'It was, yes,' Paul agreed. 'What Tom Chard says is that they asked him a lot of silly questions . . . What it amounts to is dummy3

that 'Colonel Soo-shay' interrogated them, and didn't get the right answers. And then Chipperfield decided that, since they weren't being treated properly, and sent to the main depot at Verdun, they had a legal right to escape.'

'So they did!' said Aske triumphantly. 'It's exactly as I said.