8: I Learn of Brigadier Fenlon’s Death

...and Open the Sealed Envelope

I was still in private medical practice in London when in June 1914 a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb terrorist shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne. The Archduke was an ally of the German Kaiser Wilhelm. Germany openly sided with Austria’s desire for revenge on Serbia. By contrast, Russia, self-designated ‘Mother-of-Slavs’, aligned with the South Slavs and called up her troops. The British Prime Minister announced his intention to declare war if the Kaiser marched into any state allied to Britain. Nevertheless, the Imperial German Army invaded Belgium whose national security we guaranteed. The trains of war were running at full speed. By August the British and German Empires were at each other’s throats.

The moment war was declared I engaged a locum to run my surgery and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. I was sent to a casualty clearing station for wounded allied troops at Malassises, near the French town of St. Omer, part of the chain of evacuation. Casualty Clearing Stations were expanding into forward areas and in some cases could take up to 1,000 patients. We restored them to health, to return them to the Front, or we designated the irreparably crippled as “Blighty” cases and shipped them back to England. Or we buried them.

By 1915 a deeply distressing phenomenon was becoming almost epidemic. Soldiers labelled shell-shocked were coming in from the fighting at Bellewaarde. They had refused to go into battle any longer and were accused of cowardice and desertion in the face of the enemy. They reported medical symptoms, including tinnitus, amnesia, headaches, dizziness, tremors, and hypersensitivity to noise, but no physical injury of note.

I knew of no rapid cure for such extremes of mental trauma yet after just a week or ten days the men were forced to undergo a field general court martial. The outcome was taken for granted. The field general courts martial in France lasted less than 20 minutes. Many were convicted and shot at dawn for cowardice.

Rumours abounded that in two or three weeks a second battle would commence for control of the strategic Flemish town of Ypres. I was told to be ready to move up to a station nearer the fighting. During my time in India I always had a reading book with me, either in my saddle-pocket or in the cartridge-bag, a Walter Scott for example – ‘Waverley’, or ‘A Legend of Montrose’. Now I looked through the collection of escapist reading selected for me by Foyle’s Bookshop. Among them were Wells’s ‘The Sea Raiders’, Childers’ ‘Riddle of the Sands’, E.M. Forster’s ‘Howard’s End’ and ‘A Room with a View’, Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’, and Chesterton’s latest novel ‘The Flying Inn’.

The patriotic staff at Foyle’s had bound (gratis) each work in pig’s leather to protect the pages from the blood, sweat, gun oil, dust and ashes that might arise under heavy enemy fire.

***

Soon after my return to the Front I took a few hours away from the military encampment for coffee and Pernod and a quiet read of Kipling’s ‘Kim’ in St. Omer, at Le Passage Merveilleux. A lieutenant from the Army Service Corps was seated at the next table reading a newspaper. When he stood up to leave he stepped across to my table and saluted, holding the newspaper towards me.

“I have to get back to my unit at the Front, Major,” he said. “Would you like my copy of The Times? You’ll be very welcome to it.”

I accepted gladly.

Through habit reinforced by war I turned first to the obituaries columns. I leapt to my feet in dismay. My old Army colleague, Captain, then Brevet Colonel, and now Brigadier Fenlon had passed on to the Elysian Plain, killed in the first German gas attack of the War. I hurried from the café to cable commiserations to the bereaved widow.

Fenlon’s demise freed me from my pledge. I was now at liberty to read the narrative I had smuggled from his cell covering the events surrounding Brigadier-General Delves’s strange death. The next day I gave assurances to the Camp Commander I would be back on duty within the week and set off for England.

At Victoria Station I hailed a landau to take me to Cox & Co, the bank at Charing Cross. I retrieved the sealed envelope and made my way to Boodle’s reading-room for the first time since my encounter with Fenlon seventeen years earlier. This time, dressed as I was in the uniform of a Surgeon Major, there was no questioning at the entrance about membership. With a 6-cup teapot on a teapoy in the Reading-room I broke the seal and slit open the envelope.

‘St. Peter Port Gaol

22nd June, 1898

A true account of the death in Guernsey of Brigadier-General George Delves.

On the 18th inst. I, Colonel Michael Fenlon, son of Lieutenant-General Sir Marcus Fenlon (dec’d), was taken into custody by the Guernsey authorities, accused of the murder of Brigadier-General Delves who commanded the 1st Infantry Brigade at the Battle of Maiwand against Ayub Khan and his insurgent forces 18 years ago, the terrible defeat which involved my own E Battery/B Brigade, Royal Horse Artillery. In a few weeks’ time I face trial before a judge of law in the Island’s Cour en Corps.

The law as it presently exists forbids me from acting as a witness in my own defence. I would refuse to do so anyway. There would be no point. No matter what I would say, the jury (known here as ‘Jurats’) would be told by the Crown prosecutor I was directly instrumental in Delves’s death. I believe they would find my account entirely improbable and condemn me to death. It is my fervent hope Mr. Sherlock Holmes will attend the hearings on my behalf and sway the jury, though with a proviso I have insisted upon, that this confessional document will remain sealed in the vaults of Dr. John H. Watson’s bank in London until after my death, even if, Deo volente, that occurs after many more years of service in Her Majesty’s Royal Horse Artillery upon being found not guilty.

I came to the Channel Island of Guernsey one week ago at the invitation of Brigadier-General Delves. He commissioned me for expenses and the sum of £100 to go over his memoirs of the Battle and correct any errors of fact. I looked forward to it. The fight at Maiwand was the most seminal battle I was ever engaged in. The defeat on the Helmand showed the British Army was no longer invincible. It had adverse consequences for our Empire as a whole. Never was it more true that ‘Into the valley of Death Rode the 600...Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die’. The words from Tennyson’s description of the Battle of Balaclava could equally have been penned after the Battle of Maiwand.

Word spread like wildfire throughout the Raj and Afghanistan. Details in the Indian native newspapers were even further embellished by the imaginations of the writers but the core of their reportage remained true, the pith helmet and the redcoat’s bayonet no longer dominated the world. As our routed troops fled to the uncertain safety of Candahar, pursued relentlessly by the triumphant Sirdar Mahomed Ayub Khan, panic-stricken telegrams were being sent out by the British Governor of Bombay to Simla, Cabul and London containing news of the grievous disaster. Many in senior positions at the War Office and at the highest levels of government at the time believed the Raj to be a powder-keg, merely requiring a carefully-applied taper to explode. I have it on good authority that when the news from Candahar reached War Secretary Childers in London he ordered a veil of silence to fall upon it. As a consequence of this order, the door was left wide open for all and anyone present at Maiwand to write their own account as suited them, not least Delves, the commanding officer whose confusing and contradictory orders sent so many gallant men to defeat and death.

Nevertheless, when Delves commissioned me to come to Guernsey, I agreed to make no judgment on his recollections of the battle itself, (or at least not until their publication), and would not have done so except for a most ugly discovery on first perusal. Until this week I had no idea why Delves chose to fight Ayub Khan from the position we initially occupied, a location exposed both to enemy observation and the unbearable heat of the July sun. Resupply of ammunition and potable water for men and animals was an unsecured three miles away.

As agreed, on the morrow of my arrival on the Island I went to the Brigadier-General’s hotel rooms at around 3 p.m. He had vacated them for the afternoon to allow me to work undisturbed. The weather was unusually cool. The memoirs lay at the ready on an escritoire by an open window allowing in a draught of air to clear the wood-smoke from the crackling fire. A heavy Chinese gilded brass crane candlestick with a pewter candle-snuffer and fresh candle stood at the side of the desk. Delves’s gold toothpick rested like a quill in the empty ink pot. Three or four sliced-in-half lemons had been tossed into a wastepaper basket. At that moment neither the positioning of the toothpick nor the lemons meant anything to me.

I began to read the document, correcting in pencil as I went along. Early on, to my embarrassment, he had inserted a flattering reference to my own actions – ‘E Battery of B Brigade Royal Horse Artillery. Captain Fenlon commanding stood fast, firing until the last moment, two sections (four guns) limbering up when the Afghans were a mere 15 yards away. I recommended him for the CB (Mil), which he duly received from Her Majesty The Queen Empress.’

I continued reading. At Page 24 I was surprised to find the next dozen or so pages had no writing on them, yet each was numbered in proper sequence. I concluded Delves had more information to add, and the pages were numbered for that reason. I did notice a scribbled letter F at the top right corner of each. The F sparked something in my memory but I couldn’t place it. I read on, making the occasional amendment until my hands began to stiffen from the cooling breeze coming through the open window.

Rather than shut out the fresh air I moved my chair to a position in front of the fire. I continued reading, sitting close to the flames to get warmth back into my fingers. Soon I turned back to check an earlier amendment. To my astonishment I saw brown lines appearing on the blank pages. In an instant I remembered what the letter F stood for. Intelligence Agents put certain letters at a corner of their correspondents to tell the recipient how to develop a secret message. In this case F stood for ‘Fire’. Some form of heat was to be applied. The blank pages were not awaiting further notes, they were already filled with writing.

I knew when certain fruit juices are used as an invisible ink – that of lemons particularly – and exposed to heat under a clothes iron or over a candle flame the acids turn a different colour and the message becomes visible, something Delves would have become far more acquainted with than I. Earlier in his military career he had been Quartermaster General to the Bombay Army. A Quartermaster General has control of the Army spies in India.

Intrigued, I lifted the candle from the candlestick and lit it from the flames of the fire. I held it some inches below the start of the first blank page. Almost at once the words ‘Most Secret’ appeared, with code words ‘That Day’, in turn followed by ‘Only for the eyes of…’.

I found myself reading aloud the names of heads of several of the greatest families in the Queendom, a list straight from the pages of Burke’s Landed Gentry. This was followed by a cabal of general officers who had served in India, including a brigadier-general, a major-general and a lieutenant-general under Delves’s command at Maiwand. What on Earth was this all about? I asked myself.

I heated page after page with the candle. The no-longer-blank paper revealed a conspiracy of the first rank. Blind rage – murderous rage – began to surge through me. According to this version of events, it was not that Delves had badly misread every stage of the battle, as it had seemed to us on the spot. Far from it. Unknown both to us lower order of officer, or even the War Department in London, the manuscript revealed the futile charge into the Afghan valley of death had been deliberately planned in the greatest secrecy by the India High Command. More than a fortnight earlier, pundits in British pay had made the High Command fully aware of the strength of Ayub’s forces. They knew our 2700 British and Indian troops would be outnumbered 7 to 1 by the combined forces of Ayub’s regular Afghan army troops and irregular hordes of fanatical Ghazi warriors. Delves was fully aware of the enemy’s infantry and cavalry, and above all the fact Ayub’s 6 batteries of modern 14-pounder Armstrong Artillery had the Napoleonic feu d’enfer to blow apart any precipitate full-frontal attacks such as those Delves inexplicably and repeatedly ordered on the day.

Now it was becoming clear to me. Delves and the India High Command were not looking for one more small victory from us, applauded back home but soon forgotten. Instead, in a stupefying endeavour, every one of us on the field of battle was to be thrown to the wolves. The cabal’s deliberate objective was for Maiwand to become an utter disaster, to achieve an overwhelming rout of our own forces. We were to be pawns in the ‘Great Game’ waged over Afghanistan between the British and Russian empires. With such a toll, in such unimaginably horrible circumstances, all England would be incensed. The Public would thirst for Afghan blood. Parliament would be forced to vote every sou required to advance in force into Central Asia to beat back Russian expansionism.

The reasoning behind the plan for our overwhelming defeat did not come out of the blue. There was a page of reference notes on the terrible disaster at Isandwhlana some 16 or 17 months before Maiwand. The British force entered the Zulu Kingdom with the intention of crushing the ruler Cetshwayo and adding his kingdom to the Transvaal and the other South African territories we already controlled. Instead, Delves noted, ‘At Isandwhlana our battling men were overwhelmed by the attack of an Impi of Zulu warriors some 20,000 strong. Our troops fought to the last. Few escaped the thrust of the assegais in spite of our discipline and modern weapons’.

He quoted a special correspondent arriving at the scene of the massacre of British troops, that ‘We began to stumble over dead bodies in every direction, and in some places...the men were found lying thick and close, as though they had fought until their ammunition was exhausted, and then been surrounded and slaughtered’.

Other scattered notations from the terrible defeat followed, such as ‘Colours of the 24th Regiment fell into Zulu hands’.

Finally, and most telling, in capitals, Delves had quoted verbatim the reaction of the London Times: ‘THE POWER OF CETEWAYO MUST BE BROKEN. SWIFT AND TERRIBLE RETRIBUTION MUST BE EXACTED’.

In effect, an identical terrible outcome had been planned for Maiwand – hinc illae lacrimae! – formulated in the greatest secrecy at Simla but now to be buried for ever. Maiwand was to ensure the Great Game was to be settled in Britain’s favour once and for all. Delves and the cohort of High Command officers had determined Maiwand would be a second Isandwhlana, calculating it would result in the same outpouring of anger and grief in England which led to the overwhelming defeat of the Zulus six months later at the Battle of Ulundi, the capture and burning of the royal kraal of Ondini, the death in exile of the Zulu king.

According to the document I was reading the plan now, at the highest level these 17 years later, was to exonerate the commanding officers, Delves in particular, and to hide their culpability for the defeat by excoriating all ranks below Brigadier (except for me, see above) as cowards who fled the minute the going got tough. By contrast the record of the commanding officers would be rewritten in a truly heroic light. The truth had been washed off, the historical record overwritten.

Why, one might ask, were we to be sacrificial lambs? It was because by 1880 the members of the cabal disagreed vehemently with the British Government’s foreign policy. Fed up with Gladstone’s obsession with Irish Home Rule and his muddle and incompetence in foreign affairs, the cabal decided it would well worth the loss of a few thousand British and Native troops if that would compel an unwilling Prime Minister to order a take-over of Afghanistan. Maiwand was to ensure the Great Game being played out between the Russian Empire and the British Empire was to be settled in Britain’s favour once and for all. The cabal had decided England would only be able to maintain our grip on India, the Jewel in the Queen-Empress’s Crown, by gaining full control over the Afghan Emir, forcing him to turn his country into a vast buffer state between Russia and India.

It’s true the Russian Bear was forever loitering on the borderlands, invading and absorbing States contiguous to Russia’s heartland. Czar Aleksander Nikolayevich was forever scheming to make incursions into India by way of Khiva and Bokhara khanates to wrest suzerainty from us. The Czar’s map-makers, officers, interpreters and native pundits were roaming across vast stretches of Asia to gather military intelligence. They had gained strong influence over the Emir. A British Resident sent to counter it left for Cabul with an armed escort but was turned back at the Khyber Pass on the direct orders of the Emir.

In page after page the terrible truth unfolded. There are many battles this century involving groupings of imperial infantry, artillery and various deployments of cavalry which we won in defiance of the same or greater odds. Maiwand was not to be one of these, and for a very particular reason. The caution and military guile the situation called for were not on Delves’s agenda. There was to be no clever use of the terrain, no circumspection in the face of immense odds against us. We were not being commanded by a Wellesley, a Gough, a Clyde, or a Napier, but a Delves. Maiwand was to serve a dual purpose, by our fearful losses of men and materiel force the British Government to take control of Afghanistan once and for all, but also to be the launch of Delves’s apotheosis as an Imperial martyr. On a page of the secret writing he had listed the initials of ‘those who have promised to implement my wish to be buried in Westminster Abbey alongside General Lord Henry Hugh Manvers Percy’.

Prospective martyrdom explained why Delves was seen galloping to that portion of the battlefield wherever the fire seemed hottest – twice, thrice, men at his side were struck down by the bullets of the enemy. In the event, as History tells, Delves’s incompetence even in trying to get our own forces wiped out by a vastly more powerful foe meant he turned the action from a would-be ‘glorious defeat’ into a most inglorious rout. It explains the bitter and humiliating fact that from first to last Ayub Khan appeared to out-manœuvre us. The Afghan Sirdar had been allowed to choose a position we should ourselves have occupied. Consequently he was able to force us into an ambush where his guns had the best of ours, where his cavalry had the advantage, and where his infantry were better handled than ours.

In my emotional state I heard the cries of the Departed calling out to me from the Great Beyond. I sensed their ghosts peering over my shoulder as I read. The candle in my hand was shaking so badly I had to blow it out. I put it on the mantle and sat staring into the fire. Now I understood why Delves had obliged us to advance encumbered by so many camels yet with so few horses. He had been made well aware horses would be vital to the placement of our artillery. Too few horses were found for the transport of ammunition, forcing us to burn the wagons and dump most of the smooth-bore ammunition into the Helmand River. It explained why the guns of E Battery were straight away deployed in dangerously advanced positions on the flat, open floor of a valley, wide open to superior enemy artillery. It explained why Delves made such little use of the ravines within the vast, hard-packed desert, why he refused to delegate authority to his officers, despite the fact no Commander, not even Bonaparte, could be everywhere at the same time. Above all it explained why by noon when we had already lost half our men, Delves failed to call for a tactical withdrawal to defensive positions at Candahar to fight again another day.

In a further irony, instead of going down in military history as a second Custer, dying heroically for his country, by the end of the day Delves thought better of it. When his horse was shot from under him, rather than pursuing the aim of making a glorious sacrifice of his own life, taking all of us with him, he took up the offer of rescue from a warrant officer of the Scinde Horse. Thereon he stayed hidden among the wild scramble fleeing to Candahar, a surging, seething, bleeding sweat-stained mass of humanity who in their agony and terror gave a mark to the enemy which they took advantage of from the neighbouring cliffs with their long jezails. The ploy to garner unstoppable public pressure for funding to take control of the Emirate of Afghanistan died in the Afghan dust.

Now, nearly 20 years on, Delves aimed to transform a defeat described as the most abject ever suffered by the British Army at the hands of tribesmen into a vainglorious story of a heroic commander utterly betrayed, a warrior let down by his troops. Now, below the blank appearance of the pages, Delves was seeking to bury forever the origins of the catastrophe. He was claiming his hand had been forced by the initial advance of Lt. Maclaine (E Bty guns) to beyond the ravine. Because of this “unauthorised” advance, Delves complained, “I was compelled to send the cavalry and artillery in support at once and hasten on the infantry”, adding, “Consequently the whole affair was precipitated, and I had lost the opportunity of reconnoitring the enemy and selecting the position in which I would give battle.” Thus a Brigadier-General planned to attribute all his troubles to a dead subaltern and the cowardice of the rest, Tommy, Hindu, and Gurkha alike.

It was now clear why Delves had asked me to edit his memoirs (though just the pages he had wanted me to read), why he had deliberately paid me such a compliment so early on, with the crude reminder it was he who put my name forward for the decoration. He knew the moment the memoirs were published I would be forced to maintain complete silence. Otherwise, if I submitted a corrective account to the London Times as had flashed into my mind, I would be left to the mercy of a general court martial on a charge of criminal libel and slander, my motivation questioned. The consequent court martial would be rigged to find me guilty. My expectation of progress up the ranks would be at an end. I would even face imprisonment and expulsion from life in the Army.

Again and again in the intervening years I had asked myself, what was Delves doing so far from Candahar with a force of less than 3000 men? Why didn’t he entrench our position and wait to be attacked, instead of giving all the advantage to Ayub? Why didn’t he assume responsibility to retire carefully upon Candahar or at least sufficiently near the town to be supported by General Primrose, who commanded substantial forces in the area? Now I had the answer.

Maiwand itself was reflecting back at me from the coals of the fire. In my state I could still call up the roar of Ayub’s Armstrongs and visualise our Martini-Henry breechloaders versus their Jacob’s rifles and jezails, and the final hand-to-hand stage fending off the deadly Afghan Khyber knife and tulwar sword.

A month after the battle I was ordered to return to the spot, tasked to map out the positions of the graves and other military information for a rumoured Court of Enquiry. Everywhere dead camels and mules were mummifying in the dry air. So headlong had been our retreat the mutilated human corpses had been roughly sewn into blankets and abandoned in the open sun. I joined a burial party under Brigadier-General Daubeny where we found and buried eighty bodies. The stench was awful. I managed to identify a dozen found in the shallow graves, all with just a few spadesful of earth over them. Most had been dug up by jackals, the flesh stripped from every bone except the fingers and toes. We stood while a brief funeral service was read over the disarticulated skeletons, unsure whether each grave contained the right assembly of long bones for a single soldier or a mix of two or more of my former comrades. The Regimental Band of the 7th Fusiliers played the Dead March of Saul. Everyone present among the living wept as we were brought to attention. A three-volley salute was fired. The echoes faded.

It was time to wend our way to Candahar. We turned our backs on our fallen comrades, leaving them to their eternal rest in soil not of their choosing.

Seated in the Old Government House hotel I determined not to turn my back on these brave men. So overwhelming were my emotions I could envisage only one solution. Without delay, before this version of history could get into circulation and be believed, I had to bring Delves’s life to its end. But I was here in Guernsey, alone, in territory I hardly know. How could I dispatch him yet not be hanged for his assassination?

I replaced the sheaf minus the blank pages on the escritoire next to the ink pot holding the gold toothpick, the nib Delves had used to engage in the secret writing. I hurried from his quarters, leaving a note to say I was progressing well, that having arrived without writing-paper the blank pages would serve my purposes to make extensive notes in the right sequence. ‘Shall we,’ I suggested, ‘meet for dinner at the OGH Curry Room around 8 p.m.?’ adding, ‘Curried fowl on me, washed down by a generous vintage of Moët and Roederer?’

An hour later a knock on my door heralded the arrival of a reply: ‘Dear Colonel, rather than a meal at the hotel let’s do a round of the pubs. We can toast our fallen comrades. Start at The Guernsey Arms around 8? The hotel desk can direct you. Delves.’

Delves was already seated at a window table at the Guernsey Arms when I came through the door. There was a small carrier-bag at his side. He was in parade dress uniform complete with medals and white gloves.

“I didn’t have time to change out of this uniform,” he explained. “This afternoon while you were at work, the 2nd Battalion Wiltshire Regiment at Fort George honoured me with an invitation to take the salute on a parade.”

“Certainly a very singular honour,” I agreed, although I knew of no example of an officer from one regiment taking the salute at another regiment’s parade. Before I was arrested I encountered a battalion officer. It had been all brag and bounce. There had been no parade that afternoon. I took it he wore the uniform to remind me of the great disparity between our ranks.

Delves asked what I thought of his memoirs so far. I told him I had found his recollection of events “extremely interesting” and thanked him for his effusive description of my own small part in the battle. He made no reference to the blank pages I had removed and taken with me.

The noisy clientele began to encroach on us. We left to continue at a second pub. I needed time alone and a clear head to work out a plan to see to his last before he could demand the return of the blank pages. After several glasses of the pub’s excellent Martinique Rhum Agricole I told him I was ready to return to the hotel.

“Nonsense, Fenlon!” he insisted. “Far too early! We must make more of a night of it!”

He picked up the carrier-bag and forcefully suggested we should take a cab to the New Moon Inn in rural St. Martin parish. He used the phrase “for a last drink”.

Upon our arrival Delves produced a bottle of Ceylon arrack.

“A souvenir of our time on the North-West Frontier – you’ll remember the stuff, Fenlon,” he said, “so deadly I heard the Tommies calling it ‘Fixed Bay’nets’.”

He took the arrack across to the landlord, instructing him to add an equal amount of brandy and fill two tall glasses with the rough mix. Throughout the evening Delves had been unusually jocular. Convivially he turned to inform the assembly at large it was a mix which subalterns in India drank to excess to counter the bacterium Vibrio cholerae in contaminated rice.

The laden glasses were brought to us. I pretended to drink my share of the concoction, waiting to tip a good measure of it into the layer of wood-shavings on the floor. Delves had still not made any reference to the blank pages. Why not? Why had he not given a good reason to ask for them back at once?

At around 9.45 I left the table to go past the counter to the vin. On my way I came to an abrupt halt. Behind the bar was a large mirror reflecting the area we were occupying. Delves’s white-gloved hand was tipping something into his drink, the one hand partly covering the hand holding a phial, like a conjuror performing a card-trick. I engaged the landlord and his wife in pleasantries while my eye remained fixed on our table.

With the bottle empty, Delves pushed his glass across the table and replaced it with mine. Quickly I moved on to the toilet. When I returned, Delves called out boisterously, “Colonel, if go back to the hotel we must, a last drink to old times, may they never be forgotten”.

He clambered to his feet, removing his gloves and placing them on the table, saying “But first I too must visit the vin”.

I bent over the glass in front of me. I could neither smell nor see any clue in it as to why he had replaced mine with his. If the phial contained further arrack it would prove too strong for my stomach. I slid the glass back across the table and regained mine, tipping half of it into the Aspidistra pot at my side.

Delves returned. He pointed at my glass.

“Drink up, then, Brevet Colonel!” he said loudly. We raised our glasses and drained them to the dregs, calling out “To fallen comrades!”.

I paid the landlord for the brandy and we left the pub. I felt a surge of panic. I needed to think. How would I carry out my plan to terminate his life and thereby scupper any chance of his memoirs living on and taking root? My old No. 2 model Smith & Wesson revolver was in a wall-cabinet at Army quarters. Even if I had brought it with me, the ammunition chambered in the .32 rimfire long calibre could well be traced straight back to a serving officer. It was true I have my Regimental uniform with me which includes a fine sabre from Afghanistan, but again, if a corpse was found separated from its head by a single blow, questions would be directed at which instrument could have done the deed with such ease, and who might own it.

Alternatively, an encounter with a botanist on the outward-bound ferry provided interesting information. I expressed an interest in his subject. Not entirely tongue-in-cheek, he advised me not to venture into the island’s countryside to forage. Some years ago there had been the death of three people in St. Sampson’s Marais from eating a plant which – confused by the attractive smell – they took to be the flat leaved parsley or perhaps water parsnip or water celery, but turned out to their disadvantage to be the deadly Hemlock Water Dropwort.

Putting on a ghastly imitative grin my botanist companion told me the three coffins had to be kept shut. The poison constricts the victim’s breathing and leaves a sardonic rictus-like death grin spread across the corpse’s face, entirely unsuited to such a solemn occasion.

He went on to mention the prevalence of Amanita phalloides on the island, the Death Cap mushroom, whose deadly amatoxins work silently for three or four days before causing liver and kidney failure and death, but for my purposes three or four days could be too long. By then Delves would have expected to get my report. It could be sent off immediately to the English Mainland. If I were going to put an end to him, it had to be as soon as possible.

We had left the pub well behind us. It was late at night. St. Martin is a sparsely populated parish. There would be no better opportunity to act than at that moment. Uneasily I fingered my leather belt.

As it turned out, fate stepped in – or to be precise, fate had stepped in a few minutes earlier, at the exact moment we had shouted out a toast “To fallen comrades!”. I had successfully disposed of most of my glass into the plant pot. Delves had drunk his down to the very dregs.

On our exit from the pub Delves produced a brand-new hand-held electric light. Rather than take one of the waiting cabs he suggested we walk the first mile or so towards St Peter Port to breathe the fresh night air. We might, he remarked with a deprecating smile, even sit for a while in a favourite spot of his, famed for its tranquillity, a Methodist chapel’s burial ground some quarter of a mile along our route.

A few yards down the lane the electric device tumbled from his grasp. His breathing became laboured. The face turned blue, with miosis of the eyes. His right hand reached out to catch hold of the hedge. He turned slowly towards me. As a dreadful accusatory look spread across his face he pitched forward. I hauled him to his feet and got him as far as the burial ground. He lay between the graves unconscious, his face black as though he had been garrotted.

A passing trap rushed us to the hospital. The two doctors on duty examined him and asked me how much Delves had imbibed over the evening. I said a good deal more than me, at least a half-bottle of rum followed by the larger part of a bottle of arrack and at a guess four or five fingers of brandy. The doctors administered twenty minims of compound spirit of ammonia which seemed to help his breathing. He was injected with restoratives and the heart stimulated with galvanism. To no avail. He passed away just after midnight. The doctors decided an excess of drink had caused his death. During the day which followed, the Wiltshire Regiment offered to pay for a plot in the Candie cemetery if I would contact the family for their consent.

The rest may be read in the Guernsey Press. The autopsy reported chloroform and morphia in the contents of the stomach. An empty Chlorodyne phial found somewhere around my seat at the New Moon Inn has come into police possession, the two prints on it apparently mine. An Assistant Constable by the name of Renouf came to the hotel to take me into custody. I realised at once that Delves set out to kill me that night as expeditiously as I had planned to kill him. It explained why he had failed to enquire after the blank pages, it explained the excessive cordiality – but what gave him such certainty I had stumbled across the secret writing? His rooms were on the second floor. He could not have looked in at the window to observe me seated at the hearth.

Sitting in this cell, my only hope lies in Mr. Sherlock Holmes arriving deus ex machina to my rescue. The bottle found in the wood-shavings under the seat at the New Moon remains damning evidence. How my fingermarks got on the glass bottle I have no idea. I have not held a phial of Chlorodyne in years, yet it is entirely possible that same phial may send me into the dark valley in which all paths meet.’

He signed himself off with a touch of bravado:

‘Bvt. Colonel Michael Fenlon. Recently Military Attaché accompanying General Antonio Baldissera to take command in Ethiopia.’

I turned to the pages which had held the secret writing. The years in a damp tin box at my Bank had done irretrievable damage. Not a word could be read, not even the scribbled capital letter ‘F’ on the top right corner. I put the pages together with Fenlon’s narrative back in the envelope. A steward brought wax and a taper. Once more I sealed it with the signet ring left to me by my father, engraved with the family crest.