SEVEN
Sitting in just his singlet and longjohns, Ernst Bloch opened the box of cartridges his father had posted to him and removed the upper layer of the compressed cotton wool that swaddled them. He carefully placed ten of the bullets onto the baize covering of the portable card table at the foot of his bed. They lay next to the pipe he intended to enjoy as soon as he had finished this little task. He wouldn’t worry about the smoke from his potent black tobacco affecting his fellow soldiers, because there were none.
Bloch occupied his own cubbyhole in one of the deep, airless dugouts. He was curtained off from the regular troops in his own miniature Siegfried shelter. Nobody in the regular army cared much for snipers, not even those on his own side. The conscientious objectors who cleaned the latrines were held in higher esteem.
Bloch didn’t care. At least, unlike poison gas or the flamethrower, there was still a sporting element to his hunt for a target. It was a way of waging warfare that went back to the Crimea and the Edinburgh Rifles, who had first used telescopic sights to kill Russian gunnery officers. Bloch had done his homework; he could justify his trade in any argument, but it had long ago become tiresome. Let the cannon fodder grumble about him and his opposite numbers on the Allied side.
He weighed the first of the rounds on the little scales he had set up. Then the second and a third. All three were within a fraction of a gram of each other. Satisfied, he stood a steel ruler on its side. A half-moon depression had been milled out of it and into that he slotted the cartridge, adjusting it until he found the centre of gravity. He repeated this four times, noting the balance point was identical in each case. His father had followed his instructions to the letter.
Schaeffer came through with a cup of coffee for him and quickly retired, pulling the thick blanket that doubled for a curtain back into place as he went. He knew that Bloch didn’t want to be interrupted while he polished his ammunition or stripped down his rifle. A grunted thanks was the only exchange.
Bloch felt a vibration in the earth, an explosion high above, too distant to register as sound. The German trenches were dug deep and snug, excavated on higher ground, in well-drained soil, which meant they could easily reach forty metres or more into the earth. The British and French were in the soggy lowlands and they were living in shallow gashes in the earth, poorly revetted with wood and parapeted with sandbags to give them extra depth. He had been in the French trenches on a night raid in the early days, before he transferred to the sharpshooters. They were shameful.
‘Bloch.’
‘Sir.’ He put down the bullet he had been wiping with a cloth and stood to attention. The blanket was whisked back and an officer joined him in the compact space. It was the sniping section supervisor, Hauptmann Lux, a Saxon by birth, now attached, like Bloch, to the Sixth Army. Lux was not a tall man, but held himself well, and his uniforms always fitted immaculately. Next to him, Bloch always felt like the unfinished country lad he was. It could have been worse. Lux could have been a prick of a Prussian. That would have been unbearable.
Lux looked Bloch up and down, bemused at a man in his underwear standing ramrod straight, as if waiting for a kit inspection. ‘At ease, Bloch. Jesus, it’s hotter than hell down here.’ Lux took off his cap, wiped his brow and looked around Bloch’s impressively neat cubicle. His eyes fell on the needle-nosed bullets. He picked up the scales. ‘Private ammunition?’
‘My father makes them, sir. They reduce flash and smoke. But weight and balance are critical.’
Lux nodded, not really caring. Every sniper had his rituals, his superstitions and some specialist equipment he believed gave him an advantage over his fellows. ‘An officer today, I hear?’
Bloch knew Lux received a daily tally from all his snipers and, for corroboration, their spotters. ‘Sir.’
‘That is twenty-nine kills, I believe. Or at least, twenty-nine confirmed officers.’
‘Yes.’ The actual tally was close to a hundred, but, since his overenthusiastic early days when he shot anything that moved, he had become much more selective.
‘One more and it’s an Iron Cross, Second Class for you.’
Bloch remained impassive. He wasn’t doing this for baubles. He didn’t even do it because he hated the British individually; there were times when he felt sorry for the young officers he caught in his sights. But he detested the British imperial arrogance that led the country to think it deserved a hand in every nation’s affairs. He did this job because he believed in a strong Germany that wasn’t dominated by an insignificant island with inflated ideas about its importance. And he did it because he was good at it. ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘And a week’s leave.’
Now Bloch allowed himself a ghost of a smile. However, it didn’t do to dwell too much on the carrot of a few days with Mother, Father, sister and perhaps Hilde. The army had a habit of cruelly snatching away a furlough at the last moment on the flimsiest of excuses.
‘There are fresh British units moving into this section,’ Lux said. ‘Untested. Kitchener’s New Army. They’ve been a long time coming, eh? The theory is they will get used to trench life in a quiet section. Learn something from the Scottischers who are already here.’
Bloch was not surprised by Lux’s knowledge. The army’s intelligence about which divisions and regiments they were facing was always excellent. He assumed they had good spies somewhere over the wire.
‘A section defended by untried troops is an opportunity for us to try something different.’ Lux indicated Bloch should move to one side, then took out a map and laid it onto the bed, smoothing the folds with the flat of his well-manicured hand.
It showed two thick black lines, representing the opposing trenches, snaking across the page, the loops sometimes coming close, within, Bloch knew, twenty metres at some points, then diverging again so that no man’s land might be a void of a half-kilometre in width. Lux pointed to a red trace that had been drawn from Ploegsteert village through the nearby woods. ‘This road is the one they call the Strand. Here, Oxford Circus. Have you ever been to London, Bloch?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It doesn’t match Berlin. It is far dirtier, more squalid, but it has a certain grimy charm. And they know how to throw a decent dance, I will grant them that. Perhaps you’ll be there one day soon, eh? When it belongs to us.’ He carried on when Bloch did not reply. ‘This area,’ he pointed to the east of Ploegsteert Wood, ‘is The Birdcage and this is Somerset House. Brigade HQ for the British here. This is where the new officers will be briefed about the sector. And here . . .’ another stab at the map, ‘. . . is the church steeple of Le Gheer. Now, Bloch, thanks to shelling of the woods and a subsequent fire, we believe there is a clear sight-line from this steeple to Somerset House. A good sniper could lie low up there and perhaps pick off half a dozen senior officers at one session. Including . . .’ he paused while he took out a newspaper cutting, which he unfurled for Bloch, ‘. . . this man.’
Bloch studied the grainy photograph of a portly Englishman, a major. Like all snipers he knew his Allied uniforms. The man was emerging from the doorway of an official-looking building, a terrible scowl across his face, as if he were about to bawl out some unfortunate subordinate.
‘You know who this is?’
‘I think so, sir.’
‘Really?’ Lux sounded impressed, but Bloch’s cousin Willi was in the navy, and had often talked about this man, as if he were engaged in a personal war with him.
Bloch read the caption, just to be certain. His English was poor, but a name was a name and he certainly knew this one. ‘Yes.’
‘And you could recognize him through a rifle scope?’
Bloch looked at the pugnacious face once more and nodded.
‘Good man. Put a bullet through him and it’ll be an Iron Cross First Class and two weeks’ leave, Bloch.’
But it wasn’t the target or the double points for shooting him that exercised Bloch. He looked back at the ‘X’ marking the steeple and the wiggling traces of the opposing trenches on the map. His real concern was, whatever remained of Le Gheer church, it was firmly on the British side of the lines.