The Passing Bells (64 page)

“Damned if I know.”

The Honorable Harold Davidson, Liberal member from Coventry, read his copy as he was driven to Parliament from his flat in Russell Square. He skimmed through most of it because he was a very busy man, but he read enough to add more fuel to his already burning distrust of General Sir Douglas Haig. He knew that the House disliked its members to openly discuss war policies, but after the first debate on the railway bill had been concluded to no one's satisfaction, he asked for the floor and launched into a tirade about Haig's mismanagement of the Somme offensives.

“I 'ave in my 'and a book. . . .” he shouted, beginning a thirty-five-minute speech. But hardly anyone remained in his seat to listen to him, not even members of his own party.

The Honorable David Langham left his usual afternoon meeting with the Prime Minister at number 10 Downing Street and told his driver to take him to Bristol Mews. Only two guests were there: the young Countess of Ashland—without her husband, as usual—and a tall, robust Australian captain who had been a professional Rugby player before the war. The captain and the countess were surreptitiously touching hands as they sat on one of the divans. Lydia Foxe Greville fixed Langham a gin and French vermouth cocktail and then followed him into an adjoining study and closed the door.

“I suppose you've come to bring me a copy of poor Charles's book.”

“Yes,” he said. “I have one in my briefcase. Care to read it?”

“Not if I can avoid it—but people have been ringing me up all day to tell me about it. The Greville family solicitor telephoned this morning, too. Charles is seeking a divorce. Of course, I shall be happy to give him one. I feel just awful, but Charles did bring all this trouble on himself, didn't he?”

“I suppose you could say that.” He reached out and touched her lightly on the face. “You look very drawn and beautiful and tired. I leave for Paris on Monday to have some things out with Ribot and Painlevé . . . also to have a private chat with Georges Clemenceau. Why don't we meet at the Crillon . . . say, Thursday next?”

“That might be nice,” she said. “London is so tiresome.”

Lieutenant General Sir Julian Wood-Lacy stalked the tiny office in Whitehall, slapping his booted leg with a leather swagger stick. Through the narrow window he could see Big Ben etched against the sky.

“I can't tell you how painful this is, Fenton.”

“I'm sure it must be, sir.”

“For the life of me, I can't fathom your obstinacy in requesting a court-martial.” He looked away from the window and slapped at his leg with the stick. “
A court-martial!
Damnedest thing I ever heard of! Well, what's done is done, as the chap said. Sir Wully was fit to be tied. He's thin-skinned as it is where Haig is concerned, and he found that little pamphlet, or whatever the hell it is, downright libelous, sir. How did that newspaper wallah get hold of the transcript?”

“I gave it to him.”

The old general nodded, almost sadly. “Always said I'd thrash you if you ever lied to your uncle. Well, dash it, sir, the truth hurts.”

“What happens now? A court of inquiry, I suppose.”

“Great Scott, no! The less done about this matter from now on the better. But it means a decided setback in your career, Fenton. No possibility of your becoming permanent commander of a line brigade. You'll be fortunate to find yourself sanitation officer in a Liverpool training barracks!”

“One other thing you used to say, sir. One takes what comes in the army.”

The general turned his back, clearing his throat loudly.

“Quite so, my boy . . . quite so.”

The telephone call was expected. Martin had already been on the phone for half an hour with the London bureau chief. His bag was packed and he sat by the telephone, waiting. When it rang he picked it up immediately.

“Martin Rilke?”

“Speaking.”

“Ah, yes, Davengarth here, Ministry of Information. You caused a bit of a flap here. Do wish you'd taken the trouble to clear the document with the press censor's office. Ah, well, the impetuosity of the fourth estate, what? Well, look here, Rilke, no point in your coming in here now. Your Mr. Bradshaw phoned us and said you were being reassigned . . . going back to America, I take it.”

“That's right. New York.”

“Well, bon voyage . . . and we hope to have you back here again one day. Perhaps after the war.”

“Yes,” Martin said, hanging up. “After the war.”

Lord Crewe turned the book every which way, then thumbed slowly through it, feeling the paper, tracing the clean imprint of type, sniffing the ink. A Benjamin De Haan printing job if ever he saw one. He laid it carefully, almost reverently, on his table while Ranscome, the feature editor, watched him expectantly.

“Damn fine little book,” the editor said. “Wish we could give it a play. No chance of it, of course.”

“That's correct,” Lord Crewe replied. “No chance of it. A bad wind for that type of sail.” He folded his large hands across his middle and leaned back in his chair. “Did we get that piece from Logan yet?”

“Just came over the wire . . . having it typed up now. He says the spirit of the troops at Arras is first rate . . . buoyantly optimistic, as he puts it.”

“Good. That's what people want to read about, Ranscome—the buoyant spirit of their lads.”

Jacob Golden carried the paper carton through the streets of Whitechapel until he spotted a bus heading for Charing Cross. He sat on the open top deck, savoring the sunshine and the wind, the heavy carton resting on the seat beside him. Traffic was heavy along the Strand, the huge War Savings rally in Trafalgar Square spilling over into the adjacent streets. He got off the bus and pushed his way slowly through the crowd, moving toward the throbbing drums and shrilling fifes of the London Rifle Brigade band. A man clutched at his arm and tapped the side of the carton.

“Sellin' ices, chum?”

Jacob balanced the carton on his hip, opened the top flaps, pulled out a book, and pressed it into the man's hands.

The man stared at it in surprise. “What's your game? London Bible Mission?”

“Something like that,” Jacob said, moving on into the crowd.

The Rifle Brigade band marched slowly with firm step round and round the broad stone platform at the base of Nelson's column, the sun glinting off fifes and the drum major's baton, the strains of “The British Grenadiers” stirring the crowd to cheers. Tiny Union Jacks in a thousand hands were being waved in time to the music. Ranged wheel to wheel in a square below the platform were artillery pieces of pristine newness, the proud gunners who stood before them having polished them like gems: 6-inch howitzers, 8-inch howitzers, a battery of field guns, and two monster 15-inch crushers that nearly dwarfed the lions that sat hunched far below the admiral's distant figure. And attached to each gun was a small neat sign, giving its price to the taxpayer in pounds, shillings, and pence.

“INVEST IN WAR SAVINGS!” a voice appealed over a loudspeaker, the words forming a rhythm contrapuntal to the martial music. “HELP THE BOYS DO THE JOB! YOUR KING AND YOUR COUNTRY NEED . . . YOU!”

Jacob stood by one giant olive-painted iron wheel, the barrel of the howitzer looming above him, angled toward the upper story of Admiralty House, which could be seen beyond Cockspur Street. Raising the carton above his head, he placed it on an iron flanged tread at the top of the wheel and then quickly climbed up the spokes and straddled the breech.

“ 'Ere, now!” a sergeant gunner called out. “Get off there.”

He reached down for the carton, picked it up, and held it in front of him. The gunner made a grab at him, but he propelled himself forward, thighs gripping the sun-warmed barrel, up and up and out over the crowd. He heard laughter now and shouts of encouragement from below.

“Pop down the spout, mate!”

He smiled at them. He saw an ocean of white faces below and fluttering squares of red, white, and blue.

“KAISER BILL SAYS KEEP YOUR HANDS IN YOUR POCKETS. . . . BRITTANIA SAYS . . . BUY THESE GUNS.”

He was on the lip of the barrel now, the carton before him. Reaching in, he picked up book after book and sent them flying off into the crowd—whirling flutters of paper, grabbed for by eager hands. Half a dozen constables shouldered their way through the crowd, hard-faced and implacable. When the final book was gone, he lay contentedly back along the great steel barrel and waited for the bobbies to climb up and get him.

He asked the taxi driver to wait for him and then hurried into All Souls. The hospital had never seemed so huge, or so crowded, and he felt a momentary panic that he wouldn't be able to find her, but the clerks at the reception desk located her without any trouble, and he was soon walking quickly down a long corridor toward the multiple-amputee ward, where she was on duty. She was his wife and he wanted her with him, but he knew the impossibility of that, couldn't even ask her as he held her hands tightly in an aisle between rows of beds, the mutilated men watching them with drugged eyes. He held her hands and kissed her on the cheek, and then a matron called for her impatiently from the far end of the ward.

He could still feel the softness of her skin against his lips as he sat in the back of the taxi. The driver sped down Gower and through a maze of streets toward Charing Cross Station, but crowds streaming away from Trafalgar Square suddenly blocked their progress like a wall.

“Sorry, guv'nor,” the driver said. “Can't be 'elped, but you won't miss your train.”

He didn't really care if he missed it or not. “Going home,” the AP man had told him. A wry joke. He felt that he was home now and on his way to a strange and alien place. He sat stiffly on the seat, not seeing the crowds or the line of big guns being hauled slowly out of the square and into Whitehall. The great iron wheels churned up paper, the wind taking the scraps and blowing them like pale leaves across the pavement and into the street.

B
OOK
F
OUR

November 11, 1920

Shall they return to beatings of great bells

In wild trainloads?

A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,

May creep back, silent, to still village wells

Up half-known roads.

—W
ILFRED
O
WEN
(1893–1918)

20

Hotel Gaillard, Hazebrouck

Observations and Reflections. Heaven knows there has been enough soul searching about it, but now it has been done and the rightness of it must wait for the verdict of history. Benteen of the
Journal-American
felt it would do more harm than good, would reopen the wounds now so delicately healed, but I argued against that, as did Fletcher and Wilde and the other AP men, as well as Warrington of UP. It seems, somehow, right to have waited for the second anniversary. Last year was too soon, the armies barely demobilized, the shock of the war still too numbing for any quiet reflection on it to be possible. But we have turned a corner now, stepped into not merely a new decade but what would appear to be another age. The promised return to “normalcy” made Warren Gamaliel Harding president-elect last week. Perhaps it is now “normalcy” to express grief in one final public outpouring and then permit the dead to rest forever in peace, forgotten except in our own memories. Anyway, the deed has been done. Two days ago, just up the road from here in Flanders, plain wood coffins containing the remains of six nameless Tommies—chosen at random from the forest of graves marked “Unknown” that stretch from Ypres to the Marne—were placed in a hut. A British officer was blindfolded and led inside. The coffin that he touched at random was carried out and taken to Boulogne. There it was placed in a giant casket of oak, the lid bound with iron straps, and where the straps crossed there was attached a great seal which is inscribed:

A British Warrior

Who fell in the Great War

1914–1918

For King and Country

A soldier unknown, a warrior familiar only to God. Today that poor flesh will be taken through the streets of London for burial in Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day. The gun carriage will be trailed by admirals and field marshals and the dead man's king.

Fletcher had suggested that I go to London, but half the world's press will be covering the story, and I preferred to stay on this side of the channel with Ivy and gather notes for my own elegy, starting in Paris and driving to Hazebrouck and Ypres in the Citroën.

Brief impressions. Convoys of trucks on the road to Albert, filled with bricks, bags of sand and lime. No more
camions
packed with troops inching toward the front. The monstrosity of a basilica at Albert, so badly shelled in 1916 and again during the German breakthrough in 1918, is being rebuilt, complete with new golden virgin high atop the tower. Beyond Albert there is nothing but a wasteland of dead ground, a moonscape of craters and tumbled-in trenches. Salvage crews still work, cutting and baling the miles of wire, and demolition men find and explode or defuse shells. Mametz and Trones and Delville and High Wood have been cleared of splintered trees and new ones planted. In time there will be glades and leafy paths on those scarred hills, and in time there will be cottages on the patches of brick dust where the villages had been. The view from Bazentin toward High Wood and Flers is something of a heartbreaker. How short the distances seem now, how vast they were then—paths of eternity. Such a small wedge of ground to have changed so many lives.