The Command

by Christopher Nicole

  The young couple had been out on their own on several occasions, and the previous night had been their farewell engagement.

  ‘Well...’ Ian looked somewhat embarrassed. ‘We went to this night club. Apparently it’s all the rage in Berlin at the moment.’

  ‘Any good?’

  ‘Damned embarrassing, as a matter of fact. They had a floor show, half a dozen quite beautiful girls. Then they stripped.’

  ‘To a mixed audience?’ Murdoch was shocked.

  ‘Oh, well, the Germans don’t look at these things the way we do. I mean, they take off their clothes the moment the weather warms up. The thing was, these girls took theirs off, and then at the end, they turned out to be boys. Well, men.’

  Murdoch gazed at his son. ‘You took Annaliese von Reger to an obscene show?’

  ‘Steady on, Dad. She took me. She’s been there before.’ ‘A seventeen-year-old girl?’

  ‘As I said, that’s the way it is, in Germany.’

  ‘And you approve.’

  ‘Well...I don’t disapprove. She’s a most lovely girl.’

  ‘I suppose she has stripped for you, like her compatriots.’

  ‘I only wish she had.’ Ian grinned. ‘I guess it’s still a shade cold. But she and her parents have always gone naked at their summer cottage in Bavaria, in the summer. Didn’t you know?’ he asked innocently.

  ‘I’ve never been here in the summer,’ Murdoch growled.

  ‘Everyone does it,’ Ian continued. ‘Last summer Anna went to camp with her friends. Boys and girls. And took everything off to swim. That’s why they’re all so healthy-looking.’

  ‘Tall, tanned, terrific, and taken,’ Murdoch suggested. ‘Maybe she is. But does that matter?’

  He was right, of course. Lee had not been a virgin on their wedding night, and it had not mattered to him. In fact Lee’s girlhood experiences had no doubt helped to create the strength that had enabled her to withstand the worst Chand Bibi could have done to her. While poor Linda Ramage had undoubtedly been a virgin on her wedding night.

  But he wasn’t going to approve. He didn’t want to approve of anything in this new, Nazi-controlled Germany.

  *

  ‘It had been so wonderful having you to stay,’ Margriet told him. ‘I only wish there had not been so much business. We have had no time to talk. But I also hope it won’t be another nine years before you visit Germany.’

  ‘Well...’ Murdoch temporized. ‘You should try visiting us, in England.’

  ‘I would love to do that, Murdoch. But Reger would never come now, when there is so much happening here. And he would not let me go alone.’ She smiled. ‘He is positive I am just awaiting the opportunity to jump into bed with you.’

  ‘Wherever could he have got that idea?’

  ‘Don’t you even like me a little?’

  ‘You are a most beautiful woman, Margriet. But our time was more than thirty years ago. We were children.’

  ‘Children.’ She sighed, and looked across the hall to where Ian and Annaliese were saying goodbye to each other. ‘How I wish we were children again.’

  ‘It might be quite fun,’ Murdoch said, without thinking. And found himself imagining Annaliese naked. He felt quite ashamed of himself.

  *

  ‘I reported all my conversations to both the War Office and the Foreign Office, of course,’ Murdoch said.

  ‘And what was their reaction?’ Churchill asked.

  ‘They varied between two extremes. One was of the opinion that the Germans have every right to re-arm. The other seemed to feel that Hitler is going to be a passing phenomenon. In the middle there was total indifference about what is happening in Germany.’

  ‘Yes. When you think that the Oxford Union recently voted, almost unanimously, that they would never be prepared to fight for King and Country, it really makes you wonder what we are coming to.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something, Winston. I wish to God you had a ministry. Preferably the War Office.’

  Churchill grinned. ‘I can make a damned nuisance of myself, even from a back bench. Why don’t you give me some facts and figures, and I’ll ask a question or two. What are your plans now?’

  ‘Back to the grind. And I mean that literally; the grind of tanks. But first...’ his turn to smile. ‘I have a fun family summer coming up.’

  *

  The ancient rafters of Broad Acres rang to the roar of the singing voices, ‘Never been twenty-one before, now you’ve got the key of the door.’ Helen Mackinder beamed at her brothers and parents, her aunts and uncle and cousins, and Lee’s eyes were unashamedly moist.

  Murdoch saw Harry step outside on to the porch, and quietly followed him. He had been aware, since his return from Germany, that his youngest son had something on his mind. It was difficult to determine what it could be. Harry had had a far more brilliant scholastic career at Wellington than either of his brothers, and had done well at sports, too. He was tall and strong and as fit as any young man of seventeen and a half should be. But he was not the confiding kind.

  Murdoch found him leaning against one of the uprights, looking out over the meadow, and the graves of Buccaneer and Mars; Brutus was still at stud.

  ‘Bit noisy in there,’ he commented.

  ‘Bit,’ Harry agreed.

  ‘Still, one of the pleasures of growing old is having several children and celebrating their various events,’ Murdoch said. ‘Your mother and I are inclined to anticipate them, one after the other. I suppose there is always the chance that Helen will suddenly produce a fiancé, but barring that, I would estimate the next event of importance will be your passing out parade from Sandhurst.’ He paused, but as Harry made no comment, he continued, ‘I imagine you’ll just make that before they pass me out of the army, for good.’

  ‘I don’t think I will,’ Harry said.

  Murdoch frowned at him.

  Harry continued to look at the graves of the horses. ‘Dad, I don’t want to go to Sandhurst.’

  Murdoch was too surprised to speak.

  ‘I mean,’ Harry said, ‘don’t you think two Mackinders in the army at one time, I mean as junior officers, is enough?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it,’ Murdoch confessed. ‘Every male Mackinder has always gone to Sandhurst, since it was founded. But I suppose Colonel Lowndes would feel a little overloaded with the brood. You could try the Guards. Your uncle-in-law did well at that.’

  ‘Dad, I don’t want to go to Sandhurst,’ Harry repeated.

  ‘Well...is it the navy? Or the air force. I’d have no objection, you know.’

  ‘I don’t want to go into the forces at all,’ Harry said. ‘I don’t want to have to fight anyone. I don’t want to see people killed and be torn apart myself, Dad.’

  Murdoch could only stare at him. ‘But...’ He meant to say, ‘What do you want to do?’ but instead it came out as, ‘Why on earth not?’ Again, he meant, what is your objection to battle and warfare, but it didn’t sound like that.

  Harry’s face twisted. ‘Just let’s say I’m too God damned scared, Dad. Because that’s the truth.’

  Chapter Twelve: England 1933-38

  Murdoch was again quite struck dumb.

  ‘So there it is, Dad,’ Harry said. He gave a little shrug, then went back inside to where his sister was being kissed by everyone in the room.

  Murdoch followed more slowly. That a Mackinder would not want to join the army, eventually, he supposed was inevitable. That a Mackinder would ever make a confession of cowardice was unthinkable. It was in any event absurd. How could a boy like Harry have any idea of the many facets which went to make up courage — or cowardice? He knew them all himself. He could remember the rolling gut and the dry throat of his first South African patrol, when he had been only a year older than Harry was now. His principal fear had been of proving a coward, when the shooting started. His CO, dear old Tom Holt, had reassured him that when the first shot was fired at him he would think of nothing else but killing the
man who had fired it. Holt had been absolutely right.

  That determination to beat the other fellow to the exclusion of all else had carried him upwards throughout his career. He had known no fear when standing over Colonel Edmonds’ wounded body with bullets flying around him — only anger. That had earned him the VC. Again he had not been afraid when captured by the Boers. He had not immediately known that his old friend Reger was fighting with them, but his emotions had again been anger, that he had been careless. Apprehension, as to what they might do to him, had followed later. But the fear had never outgrown the anger — or the determination to escape, by any means to come to hand. And the means had been there...an eighteen-year-old-girl named Margriet Voorlandt. How that act of courage had come back time and again to haunt his conscience.

  After that he had recognized and anticipated the pattern, knowing that all doubts, all apprehensions, would vanish the moment he saw his enemy in front of him. He had not even known actual fear when riding into Mahrain, alone, to face Chand Bibi. Again, he had been angry, and aware that a job had to be done. It was that anger, and grief over Manly-Smith’s death, that had led him to execute her without trial. He did not regret what he had done; he had meant to do it ever since she had written him that first letter, confirming Johnnie Morton’s accusation. But all that was experience. It was not something of which you could convince a seventeen-year-old boy.

  *

  ‘I guess maybe it’s a throwback to my side of the family,’ Lee suggested, as they lay awake next morning. ‘We’ve been peaceful people for generations.’

  ‘Oh, yes? I seem to have spent half of my life trying to keep your brother from getting his head shot off. And how about you, in Mahrain, rushing around like an aggressive houri?’

  ‘Well...I was angry, I guess.’

  ‘That’s what it’s all about.’

  She rose on her elbow to look at him. ‘Murdoch! You’re not going to take it out on him?’

  ‘Of course I’m not. I’m going to pretend to be as proud as hell of him, proud as hell to have an academic in the family. Which university has he chosen, Oxford, or Cambridge?’

  Lee lay down again, stared at the ceiling. ‘He doesn’t want to go to either Oxford or Cambridge.’

  ‘So maybe he is more American than British. That’s okay by me, too. I’ve always had a high regard for Harvard.’

  ‘Not Harvard.’

  Murdoch turned his head. ‘Then what does he want to do?’

  ‘He wants to write.’

  Murdoch sat up. ‘Write? Write what?’

  ‘Well, novels, I guess.’

  ‘How the hell can you write novels at seventeen? For God’s sake, what is he going to write about? Schooldays at Wellington?’

  ‘He must have something he wants to write about. We haven’t discussed that.’

  ‘Well, he has to learn how to write, hasn’t he? So he must go to university somewhere.’

  ‘That’s the whole point. Harry claims no really worthwhile novelist ever went to university. He says the whole point about being a novelist is having a totally individual point of view. He says it is hopeless trying to belong to a clique or a school or a body or a faculty, because then you’re just reproducing the views of that body or whatever.’

  ‘Where’d he get all of these theories?’

  ‘I have no idea. But he must have been thinking pretty deeply about it. He wants to leave school, and get out into the world, and travel, cut all ties with home, and learn about life.’

  ‘Because to be a writer means he can’t belong to a family either, is that it? Especially one with as pronounced views as his.’

  ‘He didn’t say that. But it could very well be true.’

  ‘And how does he propose to live, while he’s on this worldwide grand tour?’

  ‘He said he’d earn a living. But...I promised him an allowance.’

  Murdoch looked over his shoulder at her.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘We can’t let him starve. It won’t be much of an allowance. He won’t be able to afford any luxuries. I always want him to remember that home is best. But it’ll keep the wolf from the door.’

  ‘And you approve of the whole idea?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I hate it. I hate the very thought of it.’ She sat up too and put her arm round his shoulders. ‘But he is a human being, Murdoch. He has a right to live his own life the way he wants to. I’m counting on the fact that he’s also a product of you and me. He’ll come round, given time.’

  *

  Ian and Fergus were more amused than annoyed by their little brother’s odd fancy. Helen was more annoyed. ‘Oh, really, Harry,’ she protested, ‘you are utterly absurd. What will my friends say?’

  ‘Well,’ Harry replied. ‘Maybe you’ll find out who are your friends.’

  He left that autumn, on a ship for America. He had letters to his Uncle Harry, and Lee felt fairly sure he would be well looked after. In fact, she wrote and asked her brother to do that. Harry Caspar had not married again, following the disaster of his first attempt. Now in his early sixties, and with the stock market gradually recovering and business in general improving, he was back to writing, a novel this time; he would be, Lee felt, the perfect foster parent for her errant child.

  Murdoch had to hope she was right in her estimation of Harry’s character. In any event, by the end of the year he was more concerned with watching events in Germany, and with continuing his training of the mechanized cavalry. Because he had the oddest feeling that they were going to be used, before too much longer. International tension seemed to be increasing every day, and if the British Parliament and newspapers seemed to be doing their best to ignore continental problems, he did not feel those problems were going to go away.

  They arose in the main from the successive acts of the new German Government. Harry Mackinder had barely left Southampton when Germany withdrew from the League of Nations and from the Disarmament Conference which had been sitting now for some years without reaching any positive decisions.

  The following year came the sensational news of the elimination, by Hitler and his black-shirted Schutzstaffel, of a large part of the brown-shirted storm troopers, the street fighters who had first carried the Nazis to power. If world opinion was shocked by the idea of the German Chancellor decreeing the murder of his principal associates, the German people apparently were not, and when Hindenburg died that August, they almost unanimously elected Hitler President in the General’s place. Murdoch wondered how the Regers had fared in the Night of the Long Knives, as he remembered that one of their sons had been in the SS and the other in the storm troops. But no word came out of Germany to him, personally.

  That Christmas tensions shifted in another direction, as Italian and Ethiopian troops clashed at the wells of Ualual, on the borders of Italian Somaliland. This was well remembered territory to Murdoch, and to retired RSM Yeald, with whom Murdoch often had a glass of beer in the village pub, and like the old war horses they were, they reminisced about their campaign against the Mad Mullah thirty years before.

  ‘Those were the days, General,’ Yeald said sadly. ‘When cavalry were cavalry.’

  ‘And when we were young men,’ Murdoch reminded him.

  ‘That, too, sir.’

  ‘I wasn’t even married,’ Murdoch said thoughtfully. ‘But you were, Sergeant-Major.’

  ‘Oh, indeed, sir. That girl of mine was just a year old when we sailed.’ He peered into his beer. ‘It’s a rum world.’

  For the Yealds more than anyone else, Murdoch supposed. He made a point of driving into the village every day to buy a newspaper from Jennie, who grew prettier every day, it seemed. Until the morning when the paper was sold him by young Bert, eleven years old.

  ‘Mum’s gone off,’ he said. ‘She’s joined up.’

  Murdoch was astounded, but a few days later Jennie herself came up to Broad Acres to call. ‘I’ve joined the army,’ she said defiantly. ‘Well, everyone thinks there’s going to b
e a war, and there was this advertisement for volunteers for the new women’s army, and...’ She looked from Lee to Murdoch, and flushed. ‘I wanted to do my bit. I’m to train to be a driver. Who knows, Sir Murdoch, one day I may be your driver.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ Murdoch said.

  Jennie’s flush deepened. ‘I’d like that too, Sir Murdoch,’ she said.

  ‘That girl,’ Lee observed after Jennie had left, ‘just worships the ground you walk on.’

  ‘And it should be the other way around,’ Murdoch said.

  ‘She’s Ralph’s wife.’

  ‘I prefer it the way it is,’ Lee said.

  *

  The clash at Ualual remained a subject of discussion and negotiation about rights and wrongs and indemnities for most of the year, while in Germany the Saar, under the government of the League since 1921, voted by an overwhelming majority to be reunited with the Fatherland. No sooner had that been done than Hitler denounced the disarmament clauses in the Versailles Treaty, and announced his intention to re-arm Germany just as quickly as he could.

  This again shocked the world, and there were vigorous protests by France, Britain, and Italy...but only protests, and while accusations were still flying back and forth, Hitler concluded a naval agreement with Britain, by which he promised not to build a fleet in excess of thirty-five per cent of the strength of the Royal Navy. While the English newspapers were carrying headlines about Herr Hitler’s earnest desire to remain friends with Britain — as shown by this treaty — and French newspapers were carrying headlines about British betrayal of the alliance — by signing the treaty at all — Murdoch was in London, and lunching with Churchill.

  Churchill had remained out of power, both because of his refusal to accept any idea of dominion status for India — in which direction Murdoch felt he was rather trying to do a Canute — and because of the repeated prodding questions he asked in the House of Commons regarding Hitler and German re-armament, which he knew, from various information gathered from friends, including Murdoch, had been proceeding even before Hitler denounced the Versailles clauses. Today he was absolutely furious.