Chapter and Hearse Read online

  Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador had allowed both those other parties to touch down without affording them any diplomatic niceties. The East Calleshire Regimental Association – in this instance, a group of widows and orphans – came into a rather different category. The accountants had talked about ‘widows and orphans’ as well, but they had referred to them in a financial context as potential assets for someone – he wasn’t quite sure whom. His secretary too sometimes spoke of ‘widows and orphans’ when she was producing reports, but why he never knew or asked.

  These widows and orphans – the Calleshire ones – were quite different. And something had given him cause to think that they weren’t going to be exactly assets either …

  The people coming off the aeroplane now were real widows and real orphans from an ill-fated Anglo-Lassertan military campaign of some twenty years ago which had come to be known as the Engagement at Bakhalla. This disastrous action had strayed uncomfortably near the Sheikh’s palace at Bakhalla, hence its name.

  Anthony Heber-Hibbs had deemed it appropriate – the words ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ were much used in diplomatic circles – that he give this particular tour a polite reception.

  He therefore advanced, a model of civility, right hand outstretched, towards their leader as she reached the bottom of the steps. Mrs Norah Letherington, a woman clearly born to command and looking every inch the late Colonel’s lady, responded with a firm – albeit slightly damp and sticky – grasp.

  ‘Is it always as hot as this here?’ she asked faintly as the heat rising from the airport tarmac hit her in an advancing wave for the first time.

  ‘I’m afraid so, madam,’ he said, replacing his formal headgear before the sun got at what was left of his hair.

  Mrs Letherington blinked in the glare of the sun and beckoned her trusty lieutenant forward to be introduced. ‘This is my deputy, Miss Ann Arkwright.’

  The Ambassador bowed towards a sandy-haired woman whose freckled skin would doubtless soon begin to suffer from the sunlight.

  ‘And –’ Mrs Letherington half turned as a young man in crumpled jeans and grubby T-shirt appeared at her elbow – ‘this is Colin Stubbings, who is acting as our military adviser for the tour.’

  Only years of training in the diplomatic service kept the Ambassador’s eyebrows in place rather than raised to his hair-line as he surveyed an unattractive youth who had not quite outgrown acne. Anthony Heber-Hibbs charitably attributed the incipient beard to the difficulties of shaving on a long-haul flight, but not even charity could cause him to forgive the libidinous logo on the young man’s T-shirt.

  ‘Your adviser?’ he asked politely.

  ‘Colin has made a special study of the Anglo-Lassertan campaign,’ she explained quickly, sensing his reaction, ‘especially the Engagement at Bakhalla.’

  ‘Has he?’ responded the Ambassador without enthusiasm.

  ‘He’s a student of military history at the university,’ she went on, ‘and naturally, since he lost his father out here – George Stubbings was a Sergeant in the action – he’s always taken a particular interest in what went on in the campaign.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Heber-Hibbs, hastily pulling himself together. ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you standing here in the sun. Very bad for you all, especially if you’re not used to it. Now, I understand that you’re staying at the Coningsby Hotel in Gatt-el-Abbas, so…’

  ‘That’s where the general staff holed up during the Bakhalla campaign,’ Colin Stubbings informed him. ‘Miles behind the firing line. And well out of danger, of course.’ He shrugged. ‘Lucky for some, you might say, but not for my mother.’ He hitched his shoulder in the direction of a large woman in a floral dress now descending the airline steps as if her feet hurt. ‘Most of dad’s platoon got wiped out.’

  ‘Colin,’ Mrs Letherington informed Heber-Hibbs, perhaps feeling some further explanation was warranted, ‘was awarded the Tarsus College History Prize for an essay on what Anthony Eden should really have done when Nasser annexed the Suez Canal.’

  ‘Did he indeed,’ murmured the Ambassador.

  ‘Instead of what he did do,’ added Colin Stubbings gratuitously.

  ‘Naturally,’ said Anthony Heber-Hibbs at his smoothest. ‘It wouldn’t have been a matter of speculation otherwise, would it? Only fact – which always gives one so much less scope, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t mind telling you that it’s fact that we’ve come out here for,’ announced Stubbings bluntly. ‘To find out what really happened at Bakhalla.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Anthony Heber-Hibbs.

  ‘“Theirs not to reason why”, of course, “Theirs but to do and die”,’ quoted Stubbings, ‘and die they did.’ He sniffed. ‘Not much of a poet, Tennyson, but at least he got Balaclava right.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ agreed the Ambassador, hoping that there had been no other parallels in the Engagement at Bakhalla with the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade, or, come to that, with the Charge of the Heavy Brigade either.

  ‘Someone had blundered,’ declared Stubbings firmly.

  ‘The Earl of Cardigan, I think,’ murmured Heber-Hibbs. ‘Or was it Lord Lucan? I’m afraid I’m not an authority on the Crimean War.’

  ‘I meant someone had blundered here in Lasserta,’ asserted Stubbings. ‘And we don’t know who.’ He paused and then added ominously, ‘Yet.’

  ‘It’s too soon for us to be able to examine the official records, you see,’ murmured Mrs Letherington obliquely. ‘The thirty-year rule and all that.’

  ‘We have to wait another ten years before we can look at them,’ put in Ann Arkwright from the sidelines. Her voice quavered slightly. ‘I lost my brother out here and I’d really like to know how and why before then.’

  ‘It’s ten years to wait only if the records aren’t embargoed for another fifty years after that,’ said Colin Stubbings. He sniffed. ‘I wouldn’t put it past them to do that either, things being what they were at Bakhalla.’

  ‘I quite understand,’ said Heber-Hibbs readily. Like almost everyone else he knew, the Ambassador considered thirty years much too soon for official records to be available to the general public. He did his best to sound sympathetic. ‘Difficult for you.’

  Personally Heber-Hibbs favoured a hundred-year rule, and, given the choice, he would have advised the authorities to leave records undisturbed for at least another hundred years after that for the dust from any battle to settle. Mercifully the Anglo-Lassertan campaign had been only twenty years earlier – well and truly inside the thirty-year rule. This, he was now beginning to realize, was something to be profoundly thankful for.

  ‘It’s what they usually do with official records when there’s something they want to hide,’ asserted Colin Stubbings trenchantly. ‘Mark them down as not to be opened for another fifty years.’

  Mr Anthony Heber-Hibbs, a man grown old in the Diplomatic Service, decided against enlightening the lad with the truth. What actually happened to records that might damage the reputations of either the living or the great and dead was much simpler than merely placing them under a dated embargo.

  They were lost.

  Without trace.

  Accidentally on purpose, you might say.

  ‘And we shall want to visit the cemetery, of course,’ Mrs Letherington was saying, her face clouding. ‘My husband’s grave…’

  ‘I quite understand,’ responded Heber-Hibbs gently. ‘And naturally if there’s any way in which my staff and I can be of assistance to your party…’

  * * *

  The Ambassador summoned his Military Attaché as soon as he got back to the Embassy.

  ‘Christopher,’ he said, ‘you’d better fill me in. I have a feeling that this party means business. What exactly went wrong at Bakhalla?’

  ‘Nobody really seems to know, sir.’ He frowned. ‘That’s the whole trouble.’

  ‘Which is why the widows and orphans have come out here with their battle guru,’ deduced Heber-Hibbs. �
��To find out. Go on.’

  ‘It would appear that one platoon of the East Calleshires suddenly wheeled away from the main action and disappeared out of view.’

  ‘Never seen again?’

  ‘Not alive,’ said Christopher Dunlop ominously.

  ‘It’s happened before, of course,’ remarked the Ambassador. ‘It’s not the first time.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘The lost Legion of the Ninth. Went missing north of Eboracum – that’s York to you and me – around AD 117.’

  ‘Never seen again?’

  ‘Neither dead nor alive,’ said Heber-Hibbs. ‘Like the lost army of Cambyses. That disappeared in a desert too.’

  ‘Cambyses, sir?’

  ‘King of Persia. Herodotus tells us that the king lost thirty-thousand men who’d been sent out to occupy an oasis in the desert. Never seen again either, not one of ’em.’

  The Military Attaché coughed. ‘They found this platoon of the East Calleshires all right, sir, but dead. They’d suddenly moved out of range of the covering fire, but no one could say why.’

  ‘Strange,’ mused Heber-Hibbs.

  ‘Wiped out to a man,’ the Military Attaché said. ‘At the time it was put down to lack of intelligence, but they weren’t really sure.’

  ‘Never a good thing,’ agreed Heber-Hibbs gravely. ‘Not having enough intelligence, I mean. Always makes for difficulties.’

  ‘I was talking in the military sense, sir,’ said Dunlop hastily. ‘I meant a lack of good intelligence.’

  ‘Ah…’

  ‘There were plenty of well-trained brains about at the time,’ Dunlop assured him. ‘No doubt about that.’

  ‘Which is something,’ said Heber-Hibbs, who had served in several foreign stations where there hadn’t been.

  The Military Attaché forged on. ‘It seems that the Colonel did all the right things – went by the book and all that – but he was blown up early on, visiting an observation post.’

  ‘Did the wrong thing for the right reasons, I expect,’ said Heber-Hibbs with a touch of melancholy.

  ‘As did his successor after he’d been killed – an officer called Arkwright, I believe. He very bravely went off into the desert in an armoured car after the missing platoon.’

  ‘The legion of the lost ones, the cohort of the damned,’ said Heber Hibbs, misquoting Kipling, ‘the poor little lambs who lost their way…’

  ‘Ye-es, sir. I suppose you could put it like that. But I fear it didn’t do any of them any good.’

  ‘And I dare say,’ sighed Heber-Hibbs, ‘there were good reasons for our involvement in this débâcle?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The Military Attaché cleared his throat. ‘As you know, sir, we have this long-standing defence treaty with the sheikhs of Lasserta…’

  ‘A half-baked agreement,’ responded Heber-Hibbs spiritedly, ‘hatched up between Sheikh Ben Mirza Ibrahim Hajal Kisra’s great-grandfather and Queen Victoria’s ministers…’

  ‘To come to the aid of the sheikhdom of Lasserta…’

  ‘A benighted country that was only a half-baked protectorate at the time,’ swept on Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the state in question with some vigour.

  ‘To come to their aid against their ancient tribal enemies if we deem it necessary,’ finished the Military Attaché. ‘I think that’s the exact wording.’

  ‘In exchange for what?’ demanded Heber-Hibbs rhetorically. He, of all people, was well aware of there being no such thing as a free lunch, in the world of international diplomacy as everywhere else.

  The Military Attaché took this question literally. ‘In theory, sir, in exchange for the Lassertans permanently keeping the Sultan of Zonaras at bay.’

  ‘Say no more,’ growled the Ambassador.

  There was, in fact, no need for either man to say anything. What had really been being defended at Bakhalla was the only known seam of queremitte ore in the free world. The hard-wearing qualities of this rare mineral had long been much prized by the armaments and space industries, as well as by more ordinary manufacturers. The Sultan of Zonaras was by no means the only man who would have liked to get his hands on queremitte twenty years ago – or now.

  ‘Not so much a case, sir, of trade following the flag,’ ventured the Military Attaché with an ironic smile, ‘as of the flag following trade.’

  ‘But we still don’t really know what made the Engagement at Bakhalla such a disaster, then?’ persisted the Ambassador.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I suppose I should have known myself, but I was Third Secretary in Chile at the time, with other things on my plate, and anyway Lasserta was a long way away.’ He frowned. ‘Surely, man, it shouldn’t have been too difficult to see off the Zonarans?’

  ‘It shouldn’t,’ replied Christopher Dunlop cautiously, ‘but it was.’

  ‘Well, let me tell you, Christopher, that there’s a cocky little lad staying at the Coningsby Hotel who intends to find out why it was.’ The Ambassador stroked his chin. ‘That is, if he doesn’t know already.’

  * * *

  Colin Stubbings didn’t know.

  But as a student of military history he did know that time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted. While the remainder of the party from Calleshire was bathing and resting, he slipped out of the Coningsby Hotel and made his way to Bakhalla in one of the battered vehicles that in the town of Gatt-el-Abbas constituted cars for hire.

  He found the site of the battle easily enough – a stretch of desert leading towards the Kisra Pass. It was this which had had to be held against the warring Zonarans in their advance southwards if Lasserta was to be saved. Tidily to one side lay the white-walled military cemetery, its occupants as neatly ordered as on the parade ground, but he would pay his respects there later – after he had found out what had gone wrong at the Engagement at Bakhalla.

  All he had to go on was what a surviving mate of his father had told him. ‘I couldn’t see what happened all that well, lad,’ the old soldier had said, ‘because I was over on the west flank with a bunch of Lassertans – not that they were up to much. Couldn’t really call ’em fighters. That’s why we were there, I suppose.’

  ‘Dad’s lot…’ Colin had prompted him.

  ‘It was a funny thing.’ The man had frowned. ‘Suddenly your dad’s platoon just wheeled away from the main advance and set off into the desert to the east, your dad leading. For no reason at all that anyone could see.’

  ‘But under orders surely?’ Colin had said, mindful too of The Charge of the Light Brigade and the disputed blame for giving the orders there.

  ‘Not that anyone would admit to giving,’ the old soldier had said carefully. ‘Proper Valley of Death it looked from where I was, and hellish hot. Didn’t stop the Adjutant going after them in an armoured car to see what they were up to.’

  ‘Leading from behind, I suppose.’ Colin Stubbings hadn’t forgotten ‘the sneer of cold command’ either.

  He’d got the shake of a grizzled head for an answer. ‘He bought it too.’

  ‘Communications all gone?’

  ‘There was strict radio silence. We’d got orders to advance and take up our positions behind a good layer of trees and scrub well up the wadi to the north – that’s where the blighters were coming from. There was nothing to the east but open ground. “B” platoon must have been a sitting target out there.’

  Stubbings could see the scrubland himself now. It constituted a broad band of low but thick growth to the north. He turned his head and looked east, and rubbed his eyes … To the east there was rather more in the way of trees, and much better cover than ahead. No wonder his father had led his men that way … it must have seemed like Sanctuary Wood in a wilderness.

  Puzzled, he went forward.

  His father’s friend had said there had been nothing to the east but he could see trees in plenty, and established scrub vegetation much more than – as the boys’ book had it – ‘twenty years a’growing’. Tall, well-grown trees �
��

  It was nearing noon now and the desert was at its hottest, shimmering in the heat of the midday sun. He advanced over the rough ground as quickly as he could in that oven-like temperature but seemed to get no nearer to the trees. Muttering under his breath something about mad dogs and Englishmen, he forged on. He got no nearer, though, to the thick band of growth to the east.

  Perspiring heavily, he was aware that the ground was falling away a little now, giving a better view of the heights of the Kisra Pass. That meant that ‘B’ platoon would have been especially vulnerable to fire from the north … ‘If you can see them, they can see you’ was a hard lesson learned in the First World War.

  So was ‘Know Thine Enemy.’

  He was still no nearer the trees.

  He stumbled on, weary now and more than a little thirsty. There was a disturbing heat haze coming off the desert and soon the broad swathe of trees ahead began to dance before his eyes. He would go as far as the trees and then turn back.

  But walk as far and as fast as he could, he couldn’t get to them.

  It was then that he stumbled and almost fell. That stopped him for a moment, and when he looked up again the trees had gone.

  All of them.

  He rubbed his eyes.

  There was nothing ahead but sand and desert.

  Nothing at all.

  Yet he hadn’t been dreaming.

  He was quite sure about that.

  He stood stock still while he gave the matter thought.

  His father – that unknown figure in a hallowed photograph, and dead before his son was born – could well have led his platoon to their deaths because of a mirage.

  Probably had.

  * * *

  ‘Sorry, Mum,’ he said later that night. ‘I don’t think the desert’s going to give up its secrets.’