CHAPTER ONE
Mid-December 1917: Consequences.
Second Lieutenant Jack Reynolds felt himself blowing hard as the dirt road reached the top of a slight rise through the copse. Remembering Eve’s words in the ward a month earlier – ‘You’re not going anywhere fast, Jack, you’re lucky they managed to save your legs’ – didn’t ease his mood. He stopped, slung his pack down and glared at his destination, the Haringe Chinese Labour Corps camp, spread out in the meadows below.
Its newness surprised him. He’d passed plenty of the usual squalid tented encampments on the way across from Poperinghe and expected Chinese labourers to have been given the dregs. But the two double rows of bell tents gleamed in the pale winter sun, as did the three larger marquees beyond them. That even seemed to be grass still between the rows and in front of the bigger tents. Obviously the ‘coolies’ – he shuddered at his recollection of the patronising term used for them – were being driven too hard to leave time for square-bashing.
And these were the men he’d been sent to betray…
The smug little chairman of his ‘Special Investigation Panel’ had said fifty thousand Chinese labourers were already here. And many more on the way. Jack shut off the recollection of that disciplinary farce. Memories of the deprivation and hunger he’d seen in Shandong Province before the War forced themselves on him instead. He knew that was what had driven the Chinese to sign up to work as labourers on the Western Front. Images of Tsingtao – those of Mai Li, above all – pushed themselves in. Where, he knew, they’d linger to haunt him even more as an officer in the camp down there. A daily reminder of her. Of his failure. Of his enduring guilt. Especially in the light of his present mission… He shook his head
. It didn’t bear thinking about.
Jack glanced at the bare woods to his right and left, but they offered no way out. He stared at a razed clearing in the copse. Caused by a stray bomb or long range-shell. The cluster of thin trees and saplings cut off at knee height made him see the Tsingtao cemetery once more. He screwed up his eyes but that only replaced it with images of the shattered wasteland of the Salient beyond Ypres. Another reminder…
His gaze jerked back to the camp and took in the one wooden building, at the front, close to the road. The Officers’ Mess? He winced at the thought. Promoted from the ranks only after Vimy, the bonhomie of the officer class out of the Line still grated on him. And the idea of having to conceal his real purpose made the prospect of socialising with fellow-British officers even more grim. You poor sod, a voice inside him sneered, what you’re here for deserves all the discomfort you get.
But he didn’t regret the sense of obligation to his men – in reality, all to do with his own pride, Jardine had scoffed – that had spurred his futile revolt. And landed him in this fix. Yet if he’d not written the letters, he’d be back in a fighting unit by now, with a chance of dying like all the rest. And at thirty, with nothing to lose or look forward to, wasn’t he ideal material for the ‘sausage machine’?
He heaved his pack onto his shoulder. Eve’s contemptuous term for the war no longer set his teeth on edge. He’d known even when she’d taunted him with it that she was right. But how ironic that he, of all people, who’d always done his ‘duty’, done what was expected of him, had then been accused of treachery. And so, as a consequence of trying to protest on behalf of his needlessly-sacrificed men, had been manoeuvred into this deception. Something that involved a far more shameful form of betrayal.
The recollection of why he’d been forced to the CLC only sharpened his guilt. That he’d had little choice brought no consolation. Wasn’t it an excuse he’d used so many times in the past? In agreeing to leave home? In turning away from the Boer woman pleading with him from behind the wire of the concentration camp? In leaving Mai Li? Little choice? Or just a failure of nerve?
Jack adjusted the straps of his pack. ‘Concentrate on the job in hand’ he heard himself say and the expression swung him back six weeks. To the Support Line and the blockhouse below Passchendaele. To his empty words of reassurance to Tom after the briefing, after…
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