Night of the Generals

At HQ in Amiens, everyone was shouting at once. A double . dozen telephone lines were manned, staff officers hopping to pass on grave news from points along the front. Lieutenants with brooms shifted markers on a map table the size of a tennis court. Bombardment shook solid walls. There were fires in the town. Shells were falling just short of the outskirts. Fall-back positions on the roads were being hurriedly manned. This was the big push everyone had expected.

Bone-tired after another stormy Channel crossing and dispirited in the aftermath of My croft's funeral, Beauregard was shunted into a corner by panicking strategists. It was coincidence he was so close to events. He was ordered to report to HQ to hand over to Mr Caleb Croft a list of the Diogenes Club's operatives behind enemy lines. It would be almost his last duty in the war. After that, he was free to go home to Cheyne Walk and think about writing his memoirs.

Croft was expected directly from Maranique. Condor Squadron were in the skies, represented on the table by a wooden arrowhead painted red. A broom pushed the arrowhead towards the black oval that was the Attila. The blocks representing Allied troops were mixed up, probably reflecting their actual dispositions. The Central Powers had thrown so many men into the onslaught that HQ had run out of the black blocks that symbolised them. To make up the shortage, a subaltern tore strips of paper and rubbed Maltese crosses on them with bootblack.

Beauregard rubbed his tired eyes. Battle smoke from a hundred cigarettes swirled over the map. The air in the command room tasted foul.

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig was on the telephone to Lord Ruthven, holding the receiver to his chest while he relayed orders to messengers, who passed them on to telephonists, who delivered them to officers in the field, who presumably told their men what to do. There was some sort of a plan. Haig was not at all discouraged by the attack. His red eyes glowed like electric lights. The pin-sharp points of his jagged teeth shredded his lower lip, spotting his chin with his own blood. As he commanded, he almost foamed.

Winston Churchill, despatched from London to be in on the bloodshed, was in the thick of the excitement in his shirt-sleeves, collar undone, silk hat on the back of his head. He shouted facts and figures around his burning cigar-stub. He must have fed within the hour, for he was blown up like a red balloon, fingers like red sausages, veins throbbing in his temples.

General Jack 'Blackjack' Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, was eager to get into the game. He stood at one end of the map with clumps of American troop blocks in each fist, an eager gambler newly arrived at the table with chips to squander. By his side was 'Monk' Mayfair, a carnivorous apeman who might have been one of Moreau's surplus patients got up in a general's uniform and a cowboy hat.

The impression Beauregard got was that vampires like Haig, Churchill and Pershing welcomed this end to the boredom of entrenched squatting and bomb-ducking. They were fairly squiffy from the excitement of it all. According to reports, the lines were breached in a dozen places. German cavalry units were galloping into the fray in the wake of the tanks.

A grey presence made itself known. Croft surveyed the map with a thin, smug smile. At the relay of another report, the Condor Squadron arrowhead was shoved against the Attila oval.

Croft ignored Beauregard. Since his advancement, the Diogenes Club had ceased to exist for him. Beauregard felt the list of names heavy in his inside jacket pocket. He could not help but feel that the agents he and Smith-Cumming had so carefully placed and nurtured would be literally wasted by a more ruthless spymaster.

Haig held the Prime Minister at bay and shouted Tell the bloody fool to retreat' into another telephone.

'This is absurd,' the Field Marshal announced to the room and Lord Ruthven. 'Damned Frog won't fall back. Mireau is shovelling his men under tank-treads when we've perfectly sound rear positions prepared. Le retreat n'est ce pas francais. No wonder his men want him impaled.'

A blue block representing Mireau's French divisions was taken off the map and thrown away. A black block advanced over them.

'The Mireau problem seems solved, Prime Minister. C'est la guerre.'

Beauregard was chilled. From this room, it was too easy to believe the war a matter of maps and toys and blocks and brooms. Discarded blocks littered the floor, getting under officers' boots. Each meant a hundred or more casualties.

Enemy strategy was a three-pronged push, with Paris as the objective. With tanks and aerial assault and long-range bombardments, Dracula's forces were trying stop the Allies falling back to prepared positions, spreading enough panic in the ranks to turn strategic retreat into a rout.

'It's a question of numbers,' said Haig. 'The enemy can't have enough troops to waste.'

Once the Allies had fallen back, unbelievable death would rain down upon the advancing Germans. On unfamiliar territory, after four years hiding in tunnels, they would be liable to be cut down by mortar, bomb, machine-gun, mine, flame-thrower and heavy gun. Both sides were abjuring subtlety to go at each other with sledgehammers, pounding directly at the most obvious spots.

'They may have a million men,' Churchill advised Haig. 'An iron steamroller ploughing across Europe.'

'We've more than a million,' the Field Marshal declared. 'We can pour in the Americans.'

Pershing bared fangs and whooped, 'The Yanks are coming.'

Mayfair capered off to take a telephone in one gloved foot and grunt orders to the American positions. Pershing, caught up in the moment, tossed American blocks on to the map, a desperate gambler trying to spend his way out of a losing streak by upping the stakes with each spin of the wheel. Mayfair kept up the stream of deployment orders.

The building shook from nearby shell-bursts. Dust sieved down from the ceiling on to the table. Beauregard brushed his shoulders. Winthrop must be with Condor Squadron, in the thick of it.

'We're digging in and fighting back,' Haig announced. 'We'll see some of those blasted black blocks off the map in no time.'