There were twenty-seven members of the Directorate of Movements on the fourth floor of the Annexe, and many clerical and secretarial staff to serve them. Almost all of them were army officers who had been wounded and were unfit for active service. As he looked down the list of names Lysander found himself wondering – which one of you is Andromeda? Which one of you has been sending coded messages to Manfred Glockner in Geneva? Who has access to the astounding detail those letters contained? Where are you, Andromeda? Temporary Captain J.C.T. Baillie (Royal Scots)? Or temporary Major S.A.M.M. Goodforth (Irish Guards)? . . . He leafed through the typed pages, wondering what had made him choose Andromeda as the name of the traitor in the Directorate. Andromeda – a helpless, naked, beautiful young woman chained to the rocks at the ocean’s edge, waiting terrified for the approach of the sea monster Cetus – didn’t exactly conform to the stereotypical image of a man actively and efficiently betraying his country. ‘Cetus’ might have been more apt – but he liked the ring and the idea of looking for an ‘Andromeda’. The paradox was more intriguing.
But he quickly became aware as he contemplated Osborne-Way’s list that it would not be an easy process. He picked a name at random: temporary Captain M.J. McCrimmon (Royal Sussex Regiment). Duties – 1. Despatch of units and drafts to India and Mesopotamia. 2. Inter-colonial moves. 3. Admiralty transport claims and individual passage claims to and from India. He picked another – temporary Major E.C. Lloyd-Russell (Retired. Special Reserve). Duties – 1. Despatch of units and drafts from India to France (Force ‘A’) and Egypt (Force ‘E’). 2. Union of South Africa contingent. Labour corps from South Africa and India to France. 3. Supervision of Stores Service from the USA and Canada to the United Kingdom. Then there was Major L.L. Eardley (Royal Engineers). Duties – 1. Travelling concessions and irregularities. 2. Issue of railway warrants unconnected with embarkation. 3. General questions concerning railways and canals in the United Kingdom.
And so it went on, Lysander beginning to feel a mild nausea as he tried to take all this amount of work – these ‘duties’ – on board. He ordered a pot of tea and some biscuits from Tremlett. He thought of himself as a child on the roof of a vast factory peering down through a skylight at all the machinery and the people inside. Who were they? What were they doing? What was being made? All these strange jobs and responsibilities – ‘Railway Engineering Services. Accounts for work services. Occupation and rent of railway property. Shipping statistics. Labour Corps to France. Re-mounts to France. Long-voyage hospital ships. Despatches of stores to theatres of war other than France. Construction of sidings . . .’ They went on and on. And this was only one department in the War Office. And there were thousands of people working in the War Office. And this was only one country at war. The Directorate of Movements would have its equivalent in France, in Germany, in Russia, in Austria-Hungary . . .
He began to feel dizzy as he sat there trying to conceptualize the massive scale of this industrial bureaucracy in the civilized world, all directed to the common end of providing for its warring armies. What gigantic effort, what millions of man-hours expended, day after day, week after week, month after month. As he tried to come to terms with it, to visualize in some way this prodigious daily struggle, he found himself perversely glad that he had actually been in the front line. Maybe that was why they employed wounded soldiers rather than civil servants or other professional functionaries. These temporary Captains and Majors in the Directorate of Movements at least knew the physical, intimate consequences of the ‘movement of stores’ that they ordered.
Lysander personalized it, grimly. When he had thrown that Mills no.5 bomb into the sap beneath the ruined tomb it was the final moment in the history of travel of that small piece of ordnance – a history that stretched back through space and time like a ghoulish, spreading wake. From ore mined in Canada, shipped to Britain, smelted, moulded, turned, filled and packed in a box, designated as ‘stores to be transported from the United Kingdom to France’. Perhaps new sidings had been built in a rural railway station in northern France to accommodate the train carrying these stores (and what was involved in constructing a siding, he wondered). And from there it would be transferred to a dump or depot by animal transport whose forage was supplied through Rouen and Havre, also. Then soldiers would carry the boxes of bombs up to the line through communication trenches dug by ‘labour from the Union of South Africa’. And then that Mills no. 5 bomb eventually found itself in the kitbag of Lt. Lysander Rief, who threw it into a sap beneath a tomb in no man’s land and a man with a moustache and a fair-haired boy struggled to find it in the dark amongst the tumbled masonry, hoping and praying that some defect in its manufacture, or some malfunction caused by its long journey, would cause it not to detonate . . . No such luck.
Lysander found that he was sweating. Stop. That way madness lies. He thought of tips of icebergs or inverted pyramids but then an image came to him from nowhere that seemed to cohere with what he had been imagining more fittingly. A winter bonfire.
He remembered how, on very cold days in winter, when you lit a bonfire the smoke sometimes refused to rise. The slightest breeze would move it flatly across the land, a low enlarging horizontal plume of smoke that hugged the ground and never dispersed into the air as it did with a normal fire on a warmer day. He saw all the monstrous, gargantuan effort of the war as a winter bonfire – yes, but in reverse. As if the drifting, ground-hugging pall of smoke were converging – arrowing in – on one point, to feed the small, angry conflagration of the fire. All those miles of broad, dense, drifting smoke narrowing, focussing on the little crackling flickering flames burning vivid orange amongst the fallen leaves and the dead branches.
Lysander left Room 205 and wandered the corridors of the Directorate, passing other officers and secretarial staff as he went. Nobody paid him any attention, the ringing of the phones and the dry clatter of the typewriter keys a constant aural backdrop. He peered into one room where the door was ajar and saw three officers sitting at their desks all speaking into their telephones. Two women typists faced each other typing, as if duelling, somehow. He walked down the stairs and saw the signs on the other floors –
MOVEMENTS, RAILWAYS AND ROADS
INLAND WATER TRANSPORT (FRANCE)
INSPECTOR-GENERAL (ALL THEATRES)
IRISH RAILWAYS
He stepped out, feeling exhausted and a little overwhelmed, on to the Embankment and took some deep breaths of dirty London air. He stretched, flexed his shoulder muscles, rolled his head around, easing his neck, feeling weak and almost tearful at the magnitude of the task he’d been set. Who the hell was Andromeda? And, when he found him, what would happen then?
4. English Courage
‘You know,’ Hamo said over the noise of the engine, ‘I never feel nervous about anything in life but I feel strangely nervous today.’
They were in the Turner two-seater motoring towards Romney on Sunday morning, heading for Bonham Johnson’s lunch party.
‘I know what you mean,’ Lysander said, leaning towards him and cupping his hand around his mouth. ‘I felt exactly the same the other day when I went into the War Office. First day at school.’ He looked around and saw a signpost flash by – Fairfield, 2 miles. ‘Let’s stop at a pub or a hotel and have a drink first. Dutch courage. Why’s it called Dutch courage? English courage is what we need.’
‘Excellent idea,’ Hamo said. He was wearing a flat leather cap, reversed, and driving goggles. They had the hood of the two-seater down as the day was fine, though breezy. They both wore greatcoats and Lysander had his Trilby tied securely on his head with his scarf.