now, in the middle of a plain swept by howling winds. Since we arrived on October 20, it has been raining without respite. I counted fifty-five days of downpour to eight grey days—a typical English winter, despite the assurances of the locals, who claimed the region had not seen such bad weather in living memory. A thousand of the 35 thousand recruits have already been repatriated with meningitis.
Such were the conditions in which we prepared ourselves for the greatest game of all, as Kipling put it. Our daily routine consisted of marching back and forth to the music of a military band, shouldering broomsticks for lack of rifles, running through sandbags with our bayonets, firing off two or three shots at a target that only our eagle-eyed Mohawk snipers could hit.
As time passed, discipline began to slacken. The men lined up unkempt at muster, stood at ease as the flag was being raised, saluted their officers in cavalier fashion—when they saluted them at all. The Highlanders took great pleasure in driving around the encampment, kilts tucked up, on top of a double-decker bus plastered with advertisements for My Lady’s Dress at the Royalty Theatre. When fatigue duty sounded, the gamblers would seek refuge in my tent, drawn by the warmth of the rum and the games of 421. It would have been unseemly of me to complain of their company, particularly since I contrived to divest them of their meagre resources. I must confess, though, that I did not feel the same intensity I’d experienced at Stonehenge in the company of the nurse. Perhaps the sole exception had been the night before, when a powerful gust had wrenched the tent from its moorings and the sodden canvas collapsed about our heads, forcing us to chase after the wind-strewn bank notes like so many chickens.
The British majors who would inspect us from time to time dubbed us “The Stonehenge Circus.” In their opinion, we might possibly be made into mediocre soldiers at best, providing that our mascots were shot. By mascots, they meant our officers.
An unskilled worker always blames his tools, but still, the equipment we had been issued was unlikely to aid our cause. My boots with their composition soles, conceived for the Boer Wars fought in the Transvaal, had already begun to disintegrate. The constant rain had shrunk my uniform, and it was now coming unstitched at the seams. My khaki cape was indistinguishable from a mud puddle. No matter. I’ve had occasion to wear formal dress several times, and have drawn admiring glances for my elegance—none too often, mind you, but it has happened. Never before had I felt quite so dashing. With my conquering brow, my ferocious upper lip and my victorious chin, I felt rather like a one-man militia. At night, I slept fully clothed.
In my opinion, the training period was a damnable waste of time, both for us, and for those awaiting reinforcements. The newspapers were predicting that the war would be over by Christmas. I had begun to fear that I would arrive in Flanders too late for the kirmess and, most of all, for the great game to which I was destined.
III
THE OTHER DAY, when I told my pretty bluebird that I was drawn to disaster, I had not lied. Nor had I told the whole truth.
I have always been the kind of person who walks the streets with an eye on the pavement, on the lookout for a stray penny. My gaze is drawn to the bottoms of ditches; I shake the bushes and turn over stones in hopes of finding an object worthy of adding to my collection. Without going so far as to rob graves, or steal from the dead, I find it impossible to pass a cemetery without wondering how many wedding bands and how many gold watches have, for sentimental reasons, accompanied their owners to the depths of their tombs.
I take no particular pleasure in watching a house burn. But once the blaze has been controlled, I delight in strolling through the still-smouldering debris, in which I never fail to find a stickpin or a piece of silver spared by the flames. As a result of scouring the ground beneath my feet, I’ve learned to detect, as if by instinct, the presence of things buried there, without so much as having to bend over. There are times when I feel I know secrets of which the man in the street is completely unaware.
Some might call me a vulture, but I do nothing more than appropriate what others have been unable to keep. Gold that has become separated from its owner falls by rights to he who first claims it. Such is the immutable law.
As far back as I can remember, I have always been obsessed by the notion that, one day, I will come across a fortune slumbering in a hiding place that no man has ever suspected. As a boy, I wolfed down stories of treasure hunts—The Gold Bug, King Solomon’s Mines, The Count of Monte-Cristo, Treasure Island, The Musgrave Ritual, The Man Who Would Be King. But nothing captured my imagination quite like the innumerable tales of the hidden gold of the Knights Templar. I dreamed not so much of inheriting their riches as of succeeding where so many others had failed.
Anyone can call himself a treasure hunter. But not every man can style himself the inventor of a treasure. So extraordinary is the calling that he who achieves it would warrant having his name enshrined in the pantheon of the great discoverers. It is an ambition I have never foresworn.
Clearly, High Bluff was hardly the most propitious of places to pursue such an enterprise, and so, up until the present, I had been obliged to settle for modest discoveries indeed. Flanders was a different matter entirely. Since time immemorial, the Low Countries have served as an invasion route. War has displaced entire populations that have left behind, buried beneath the earth, whatever they could not carry with them. It is hardly surprising that so many legends of hidden treasure hovered over those lands. Among them, more than a few, attested to by numerous sources, told of the gold of the Templars. For a dedicated treasure seeker, could there be any greater temptation?
Therein hangs the tale of why I hastened to the recruiting office in Winnipeg as soon as I learned that Germany had invaded Belgium last August 4. I would not have missed the war for an empire.
IV
OUR COMMANDING GENERALS finally concluded that the Canadian division was ready for action. One morning, King George V himself passed us in review, and Lord Kitchener, his Minister of War, took the opportunity to impart to us his recommendations. He instructed us to maintain friendly relations with those whom we were helping in the struggle, and that the honour of the British Army depended on our individual conduct. He warned us as well against the two great temptations that awaited us: wine and women. With women, in particular, we should avoid any intimacy that might adversely affect our health. Listening to him, you would have sworn that the lasses of Belgium and France were more dangerous than the Huns themselves.
His speech failed to impress me. As a member of the military police, whose red armband I now wore, I felt certain that women would be the least of my worries. My duties would consist of ferreting out spies, apprehending deserters and any fellow soldiers who failed to respect discipline; of directing troop movements and the evacuation of civilians. And, in the trenches, I would be called upon to fire upon the cowards who refused to go over the top.
I owed my assignment to the armed forces constabulary to the good offices of Lieutenant Peakes, who had personally recruited me. Broadly built and of above-average height, the lieutenant possessed what one might call an imposing bearing. With his imperial forehead, he stood a full head taller than anyone else. His knowledge of military history was as deep as it was broad, but for all that, his view of the Templars was ill-founded. In his view, they had been little more than armed bankers, and not at all true combatants. Conversely, he held the Roman legions in boundless esteem. He confessed to me that he had nearly been rejected for service because he had filled out his recruitment forms in Latin.
“Do you know why I chose you, Dulac?”
“Because I am such a poor shot that the infantry wanted nothing to do with me.”
“You are by no means a poor shot. When Cardinal Mazarin appointed a new general, he applied one single criterion by which he judged the man’s value: was he lucky or not? Well, it’s an open military secret that you possess a luck that
