Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [135]
Inspector Hildebrand sobered. He much preferred expanding on his success to any discussion of his failure. “We don’t know where they are. Yet. I’ve got my men searching now along the roadside. More than likely he’s done for the lot, but so far he’s sitting in his cell like a damned statue, as if he’s not hearing a word we say to him. But we’ll find them, never fear. And they’ll be dead as well, mark my words. Probably saved the woman for last, she got away from him, and he had to chase her. Just a matter of time, that’s all. We’ll find them in the end.”
He didn’t. In the end, it was Scotland Yard and Inspector Rutledge who had to sort through the tangled threads of deception and twisted allegiances. By that time it was far too late for Hildebrand to retreat from his entrenched position.
Ian Rutledge drove through the countryside with Hamish restive and moody in the back of his mind. Around them in the car the warm air carried the heavy smell of new-mown hay.
The scent of phosgene . . .
Will any of us ever be free of that memory? Rutledge asked himself. Of the silent destroyer that had rolled across the battlefields of the Front in clouds of gas? One learned quickly enough to tell them apart—mustard or phosgene or CNS. But familiarity had made them more terrifying, not less—knowing what they could do.
“It’s no’ the gas I can’t forget,” Hamish said roughly, “but the haying. August fourteen. I didna’ know there was an archduke getting himself killed somewhere in some place I’d no’ heard of. The hay ... and Fiona dusty with it on the wain, and the horses dark with sweat. God, it was fair, that August, and the MacDonalds swearing like wild men because they couldna’ keep up wi’ one MacLeod
“Yes, you told me that, the night—” Rutledge began aloud, and then quickly stopped. Corporal Hamish MacLeod had talked to him about the August haying the night he’d died. In France. Odd that memory turned on something as simple as the smell of new-mown hay!
And yet he was accustomed to answering the voice in his head out of old habit. 1916. The Somme. A bloodbath for months, the toll climbing astronomically, and men so tired their minds simply shut down. Assault after futile assault, and still the German line held.
Set against such appalling losses, one more casualty was insignificant. Yet the death of a young Scottish corporal had inscribed itself on Rutledge’s soul. It was Rutledge who commanded the firing squad that killed him, and Rutledge’s pistol that had delivered the coup de grace in the hour before dawn.
The act had been a military necessity. Hamish MacLeod had refused a direct order in battle; refused to lead his men one last time into certain death. Not cowardice, but exhaustion, and the sheer bloody senselessness of throwing lives away, had broken him. But for the sake of every soldier watching, an example had to be made. For the sake of thousands of men readying for the next assault, and example had to be made. You had to know, facing death, that you could depend on the man next to you, as he depended on you.
Rutledge could still feel that late summer heat. Hear the din—artillery, machine-gun fire, the curses and cries of the wounded men. Smell the sweat and fear. He could still see the grief in his corporal’s eyes, and the acceptance. It was a relief to die rather than lead his men back into the black hail of German fire.
And all for nothing!
The artillery shell found its mark an instant later, buried living and dead, officers and men, in heavy, stinking mud. Killing most of them outright, leaving the wounded survivors to suffocate before the search dogs could find them many hours later. And ironically, the next shell sprayed shrapnel into the machine gun position they’d failed to take all that long night.
Rutledge had barely survived.
Deaf and blind, badly stunned, he lay under the corpse of one of his men in a tiny pocket of air that had sufficed to keep him alive. He hadn’t known until someone had told him at the aid station that it was Hamish’s blood