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.
Or what Wilder said . . . he said . . . there's this famous quote, by some officer—PoW, about his word-of-honour being stronger than any French locks-and-bolts. Meaning, that if they broke the rules he was honour-bound to teach them a lesson. But you're right about Lautenbourg, all the same
—'fishy', was how Wilder described that. But. . . so shouldn't we be digging there first—at Lautenbourg, where they started
—rather than here?"
Aske's voice was gentle now, and his question was innocently put, to conceal the suggestion in it that he still doubted the sense of Paul's actions. Yet there was also more to it than that, thought Elizabeth: having been repulsed once in his attempt to obtain a straight answer to the central question, he was manoeuvring to repeat it indirectly and obliquely.
"Here will do well enough." Paul found it harder to maintain his politeness, but he managed it.
Was it simply because Aske was homosexual, and a stranger associated with someone Paul distrusted? Perhaps all that was good enough for him, the irrational confirming the rational, and yet there was surely an edge of something else which she couldn't place ... If she'd been beautiful and desirable, and Aske had been heterosexual . . . then it might dummy3
have been sheer masculine irritation—three was a crowd, and she hadn't concealed her sympathy for Humphrey Aske, in spite of everything . . . But she wasn't, and he wasn't, so it couldn't be that, whatever it was.
"There—up ahead," said Paul. "I've brought you this way so you can get a proper view of it. The first time I came here I could hardly see my hand in front of my face. This is a great country for mist and fog, summer and winter. Both sides found that out in 1918."
Elizabeth craned her neck to see.
"Coucy," said Paul. "Once upon a time it was better to be the Lord of Coucy than a Prince of the Blood, they used to say."
A great castle . . . walls, with their massive interval towers, stretching for half a mile—or more, disappearing into the trees—crowning a high ridge above the plain.
"I'd much rather take you on to see the Paris Gun site, of course—that's why I came here first, back in '73 . . . castles don't mean a bloody thing to me. Battlefields are the places to see, they're where it's all at."
"Battlefields—" Aske caught his tongue again, before it could betray him "—it's an impressive ruin, I must say . . . Where do we go?"
"Follow the road up, through the gateway. Then I'll direct you," said Paul, in his Aske-clipped voice.
The road meandered up the ridge, twisting with its own logic until it turned finally under the walls and towers to skirt dummy3
their circuit. Elizabeth felt herself pressed into silence by the very weight of history, with Lieutenant Chipperfield of the Vengeful sandwiched between medieval Enguerrand III and twentieth-century General Ludendorff.
"Park here," commanded Paul. "From here we walk."
Elizabeth looked round, to get her bearings. They had passed through Paul's great gateway, but into a little town, not a castle—a walled town, which must be what she had glimpsed from below. And now they were in one corner of the town, approaching another gateway, which must belong to the castle itself.
No . . . the whole thing was on a bigger scale than that: this second entrance was only an outer gate, opening on to an immense grassy space dotted with trees—an outer ward much bigger than at her own Portchester, near home.
But Paul seemed to know what he was doing, turning away into the custodian's office with a curt "Stay here", leaving them to kick their heels on an empty square of gravel.
"I've never heard of this place." Aske blinked, and stared around as Elizabeth had done. "But then, judging by the lack of enthusiastic sightseers, I'm not alone in that... or maybe this is aperitif time . . ." He kicked his way across the gravel like a bored schoolboy, to a curious collection of rusty iron.
"This is never medieval—more like industrial revolution . . .
that iron trolley . . . and those look like I don't know what—
railway lines? Except they're curved—?"
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The gravel crunched behind them. "Slightly curved, for a circle with a ninety-foot diameter. But your dating is about right, Aske. Say, mid-1860s. Vintage Napoleon III."
Another period, and from the wrong Napoleon. They both looked questioningly at Paul Mitchell.
"And also significant. Cardinal Mazarin tried to blow up the great tower in the seventeenth century, only he hadn't got anything powerful enough to do the job. But there was an earthquake in these parts in 1692 that cracked it from top to bottom . . . didn't bring it down, but cracked it—which is one of our main clues, as it happens ... so when Viollet-le-Duc came to do his rescue job on the cheap for Napoleon III he fixed a couple of iron hoops round it, to hold it together. And these are bits of hoop—you can see more of them among the wreckage inside . . . Ludendorff 's explosive was powerful enough . . . Although it took twenty-eight tons of even what he'd got. Something like ammonal, I suppose."