The Bloody Red Baron: 1918

I shook. My vision clouded red. I was dying again. We can kill each other, Charles. I have seen Dracula do it, and contemptuously spit out in a great stream the blood he has taken. That was how he murdered Armand Tesla. This is true death, from which there is no returning. This is the death I shall meet at dawn.

Two attendants held Manfred's arms, wrenching him away from me. His mouth was still attached to my neck like the sucker of a carnivorous plant. With a wet snap, it came free. Manfred shook his head, my blood dripping from his lips. Unsupported, I crumpled. Ten Brincken's stepped over me to examine the Baron. That told me where I was in his priorities.

The Professor clapped his hands and called for the fliers to leave off their drinking. For those who had lost control, attendants had wooden-handled devices like tongue- depressors. A touch of a silver spatula causes enough pain to shock a vampire free of red thirst.

I felt myself lifted into a sitting position. I was as pliable as a broken doll. General Karnstein had taken notice of me. With a pointed forefinger, he slit his wrist and raised blood to my lips like water to a wounded man. I had not the strength to swallow but Karnstein let blood dribble into me. His line is pure and strong, but it was hours before I was fully recovered.

From the floor, I looked up at Baron von Richthofen. He turned away from me, but I could see the flush of my blood in his shaved hackles. Then, I fainted.

That night, Meinster's flier died. Murnau's skull became that of a huge rat, but his flesh did not change. Bone burst through his skin. The next day, we were sent from the chateau, duty done. That is all I know. You must think of this, for I believe it to be the important kernel of my story:

he

has shaped them,

he

has given them his blood,

he

has made them into something new.'

Winthrop must have asked her to be more specific.

I mean Dracula. He is the ringmaster of the Flying Circus, and the Red Baron is his star act.'

13

Dr Moreau and Mr West

The duckboards were warped and ill-fitting, but it was best to walk on them rather than the mud. The top layer was frozen but boot-shaped holes showed where others had sunk to the knee in viscid filth.

'We don't see many civilians parading through here,' said Lieutenant Templar, a handsome new-born with a quizzical eyebrow. The breed prefer to fight their wars from armchairs in Boodle's.'

'Boodle's is not my club,' Beauregard said, treading carefully.

'No offence meant. It shows pluck to come this far when you don't have to.'

'You are right. Would it were that I was possessed of such spirit. Sadly, I do have to be here.'

'Worse luck, then.'

The slip-trench was ten feet deep. Its higgledy-piggledy sandbag walls were mortared with frozen mud.

A projectile overshot the line, sailed above at a decent altitude, and exploded a hundred yards off, where fields were patched with the last of the snow. Earth rained down. Templar shook like a dog, raising a halo of loose dirt. Beauregard brushed the shoulders of his Astrakhan coat.

'A whizz-bang,' said the lieutenant. 'Nasty beasts. Fritz has been lobbing the little devils all week. We think they're trying to fill in this thoroughfare.'

The slip-trench fed men and materiel to the front line. If breached, the blockage would have to be cleared.

Another shell whizzed over and banged in the abused field.

'Fritz's calibrations are off. That's two they've laid back there.'

Beauregard looked up. The late-afternoon sky was grey, dotted with wind-whipped earth fragments, trailed across with smoke. Faint in the low cloud were the buzzing black shapes of flying machines.

'If those bats report back to Hunland, the gunners will make a few twiddles and drop whizz-bangs right where we stand. It won't be pretty.'

Early in the war, a reporter wrote up such a situation in The Times, boosting home front morale with a picture of cheery Tommies capering in the knowledge that the enemy's heavy guns consistently missed their positions. Devoted readers in Berlin passed on information to the German artillery, who made adjustments with devastating upshot. Journalism was now strictly regulated. Well-intentioned boobs did more harm with jingo puff than iconoclasts like Kate Reed with trenchant criticism. Beauregard would rather have the white cliffs of Dover defended by Kate than by a regiment of Northcliffe's flag-waving grubs.

'Hurray,' Templar exclaimed, 'the Camels are coming.'

A triangular formation of British aeroplanes closed on the German spotters. The gunfire was a tiny sound, like the chattering of insects. The aerial battle was fought in and above the clouds.

'There's one down,' Templar said.

A winged fireball burst through cloud, wind shrieking around it, and streamed towards No Man's Land. It ploughed noisily into the ground.

Air supremacy meant preventing the enemy from using his aeroplanes to gather strategic intelligence. The Germans, and to some extent the Allies, wasted column inches on daring deeds of the knights of the sky, but it was a nasty, bloody business. As things stood, a British observer, unless he ran into Richthofen, was more likely than his German opposite number to bring back details of troop dispositions and gunnery emplacements.

Another German came down, slowly as if approaching an airfield. The machine went into a spiral and crumpled in the air as if colliding with an invisible wall. The pilot must have been dead in his cockpit.

'The slip-trench stays open to fight another day.'

Looking about, it did not seem a particularly notable achievement.

It was a fairly quiet afternoon at the front. Both sides bombarded non-committally, but there were no big shows on. Rumours flew that enemy divisions from the Eastern Front were filtering through Europe, freed by the peace negotiated with the new Russia. Naturally, the rumours were true. Beauregard had reports from the Diogenes Club's associates in Berlin that that Hindenburg and Dracula were preparing for Kaiserschlacht. In a last push to victory, the remaining resources of the Central Powers would be thrown into a costly stab at Paris. 'Schlacht' could be translated as 'attack', but also meant 'slaughter'. Knowing what was to come might not be enough to put a stop to it, especially if carefully gathered intelligence was ignored by the likes of Mireau and Haig.

Now they were near the front itself. The impact of shells was a permanent low-level earthquake. Everything shivered or rattled: tin hats, duckboards, mess kits, equipment, cracking ice, teeth. Beauregard was interested not in forward positions but in an odd, underground emplacement just to the rear of the line.

Some months ago, he had learned Dr Moreau was supervising a front-line hospital, presumably ministering to the sorely wounded. This was the same researcher whose vivisections had earned him repeated expulsions from learned bodies and exposure in the popular press. Beauregard had run across the scientist before, in the thick of