“I doubt that.” His grin had a spark of mischief in it. “Please tell me that Matron keeps current newspapers somewhere.”
“In her office,” I affirmed. “And no one’s taken black ink to them, either. I’ll get them out. Anything else?”
“There is one other thing.”
The idea of doing something to please him made me happy. “What is it?”
“Are you certain?”
I bit my lip. “This is going to involve breaking the rules, isn’t it?”
“Most certainly.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
“Well, if you’re offering,” he said, “I’d like to find my clothes. My own clothes, that is. The ones I was wearing when I arrived at Portis House.”
? ? ?
I wasn’t sure where the men’s belongings were kept, but it didn’t prove all that difficult to find out. I knew the key to whatever it was—a room, a storage closet—would be Matron’s alone, and that meant it must be in her office.
“My contact at the War Office confirmed that Mikael Gersbach did go to war,” Jack told me as I went through Matron’s desk drawer by drawer. “He got to Belgium in 1916 and marched to France. But apparently there was trouble.”
“What trouble?” I lifted papers on Matron’s desk. We’d tried her telephone, a vain attempt to put out another distress call, but the line seemed to be dead—not surprising with the weather outside. Vaguely I became aware that Jack was telling me this while I was half distracted so that the effect would be less upsetting. But I trusted him, and I let him tell it his way.
“He was bullied,” Jack said. “Rather mercilessly, in fact. He had a Swiss last name and an accent, for all that he was a British national. His fellow soldiers decided he was an undercover Hun. They saluted him as the Kaiser, held him down and painted Kaiser mustaches on him, that sort of thing.”
I stopped what I was doing. “That’s horrible.”
“It’s bad,” he admitted. “You have to remember that our soldiers were being trained to kill Germans. They had to be in the mind-set to shoot them, bayonet them, bomb them, mow them down. When you do that to a man, you can’t expect him to switch out of it so easily.”
“But he wasn’t German!”
“He was close enough, with the name and the accent. When Germans have killed your friends and relatives, when they’re shooting at you every day . . . Well, some men need a target for their rage and frustration.”
He would know more about it than I would, of course. I nodded and went back to my search.
“There are several incidents on record,” Jack continued. “In one, Mikael was stripped naked by a bunch of drunken officers and dumped in the center of the nearest town in the middle of the night. They’d painted the words KILL THE BOCHE on him. Boche was another word for German, like Hun. Two men got reprimands for that. In the second incident, they stole a helmet from a dead German soldier and put it on Gersbach’s head. Then they forced him at bayonet point to get out of the trench and stand in the open, right in the German sniper lines.”
I paused again. “I get the idea,” I said, sickened. “I don’t think I need to hear more examples.” I turned and saw Matron’s thick cardigan hanging from a peg, started going through the pockets.
“There were more reprimands for that one,” Jack said. “He was lucky to get out of it alive. Shortly afterward, his section of the line came under heavy attack. It was chaos, but there were several witnesses who agreed on one thing. At the height of the attack, Mikael ran.”
My fingers closed on a slim set of keys in Matron’s pocket. I turned and looked at Jack again. He was seated on the chair across from Matron’s desk, one leg crossed over the other knee as when I’d sat there using the telephone. “And did he run?” I asked. “Or was that another lie?”
Jack looked grim. “It happened. The witnesses were credible ones, and they all said the same thing. During an artillery attack, Mikael retreated, and they found him hours later, a mile down the road from the front line, sitting on the ground and weeping.”
Sweet, kind Mikael, Maisey had called him. Gentleman enough to spend time with his little sister and her friend. How many men like that had been sent off to the front lines, along with the strong ones, the brave ones, the bullies? Shamed by his father, given no choice, he’d been packed off to a hellish place against which he had no defenses.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He was court-martialed,” Jack replied. “In the army, desertion is a capital offense. The witnesses proved it, and he didn’t deny it. So he was sentenced to execution by firing squad.”
Maisey had said that she’d heard he’d been shot in some horrible way. “That’s barbaric.”
“It’s military justice, Kitty,” Jack said quietly.
“But if he was shot over there, then how . . . ?”
“He wasn’t. A lot of men were convicted of desertion and cowardice during the war, but most had their sentences commuted. Only a few were actually executed. An officer on the tribunal looked at Mikael’s case and decided that the bullying was a mitigating factor. He commuted Mikael’s sentence and sent him home on a dishonorable discharge.”
I walked slowly to the door of Matron’s office, thinking. I wandered up and down the corridor, looking for the nearest locked door, barely registering what I was doing. “He came home in disgrace,” I said. “He came home a coward.”
“Yes,” said Jack, following me. “I imagine his father was livid.”
I found a locked supply closet I’d never been shown, and touched the handle, running my finger along it. And then I stopped, turning absolutely still.
It is like how I heard they executed some of those Poor Fellows but I never saw one （execution） myself so I don’t know why I dream of it.
“His father did it,” I said softly. “His father executed him for cowardice. In that spot outside the isolation room.”
Jack leaned on the wall next to me and looked down at me. “There’s a record of Mikael’s body,” he said. “Dead of a rifle shot to the middle of the forehead. There’s a record of the father’s body, too. Nils Gersbach. Also dead of a gunshot, this time to the heart.”
“Who shot Nils Gersbach?” I asked no one. “Did Mikael fight back?”
Jack shook his head. “There isn’t an account of it. But I wonder, myself, if his wife wasn’t involved, or even Anna. There’s no record of their bodies. And no one has seen them since.”
I turned slowly, my mind churning, and faced him. “What do you mean, record of the bodies? Record kept where?”
“That’s where Maisey came in. Remember, she read the letter I received from my contact at the War Office, telling me what had happened to Mikael. I think she read it and suspected what may have occurred. She’d already suspected that Anna was dead. And if there are deaths, if there are bodies, there is one person who tends to know.”
My father is the local magistrate, Maisey had said. “Oh, God. Maisey’s father. Her father knew.”