by Peter Albano
To celebrate Reginald’s release and anxious to have him meet her brother, Brenda arranged a dinner party at her home, including Lloyd and Bernice. Douglas O’Conner prepared a meal of roast beef, potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and Yorkshire pudding. French cuisine was beyond the Scotsman and Brenda had learned to prefer his plain but wholesome fare to the highly spiced dishes from the Continent. Nicole and Wendell McHugh served, Nicole hovering about Barry Cooper.
Brenda smiled inwardly. On the third night of Hugh and Barry’s stay, she had been awakened by what she thought were mice scurrying around in her closet or in the attic. But the sounds were coming from across the hall and they were rhythmic—a pulse as old as mankind. Then she realized her maid was entertaining a visitor. Restlessly, the young widow tossed and turned, warm thoughts of Reginald causing sleep to elude her until the early morning hours. From that night on, Barry wore a tired but happy smile on his face while Nicole walked with a new spring and relaxed air Brenda had not seen for over a year.
Slicing his beef, Reginald spoke of his ship as if she were an injured mistress. “Knocked about a bit,” he said. “But she should be ready for a go by spring.”
“And you, Commander?” Hugh asked, washing down a morsel with red wine.
Reginald smiled. “Not ready for the scrap yard yet,” he said. There were guarded chuckles from the men. “They want to relieve me of command of Lancer and give me a desk job at the admiralty, but I’m not ready for that lot.” He held up his hand, flexed his fingers, and gripped a wineglass. “See?” he said, raising the glass.
“Bravo,” Lloyd said. Everyone nodded encouragingly. There was a common spirit, an unspoken communion between the two men who had grappled personally with death that excluded everyone else in the room. Brenda had felt it on Lancer when Reginald had introduced her to his officers and she was convinced she saw envy on her brother’s face. A troubling memory came to mind.
“Reginald, you had a problem—a problem with a vice admiral. I hope you haven’t done anything—ah. . .”
The commander smiled. “Rash, Brenda? Is that what you mean?” He chuckled. “The vice admiral was Sir Rosslyn Watts. He planned the insane action that wiped out my squadron and put a cruiser down. He got the DSO and they shipped him out to the Falklands.”
Lloyd Higgins said, “If he’d lost the whole force, they’d have given him the Victoria Cross and made him first sea lord.” There was humorless laughter.
“Like a scene from HMS Pinafore,” Brenda offered.
The officers raised their glasses to the American. “Quite so, sister-in-law,” Lloyd said, grinning. “Gilbert and Sullivan knew the Royal Navy.” He turned to Hugh Ashcroft. They had become very close friends in a very short time. It was a trait Lloyd had learned in wartime where friends came and went in a blur. “I’m going to Chigwell tomorrow for three or four days. Would you and Lieutenant Cooper like to accompany me? We can provide billets for you. The food is terrible, but I can show you some of the latest in trench tactics. Can you take leave from your duties at the embassy?”
“Delighted,” Hugh said. “We’re an independent team—just inform the ambassador of our plans. Our orders are to observe and report at my discretion. As long as we write our monthly reports, Washington is happy.” Barry Cooper nodded agreement.
Lloyd finished his drink and held up his empty glass for Wendell McHugh, who rushed over with a decanter. “You won’t see anything on the Western Front new to Americans.” He smiled, a cruel, frightening look. “The same tactics used in your Civil War. The firepower has changed, but the stupidity of the generals remains.” Everyone squirmed uncomfortably. He drank deeply and eyed Hugh over his glass. “Would you like to know what it was like on the Somme?”
Bernice broke her silence. “Lloyd, not now. It’s too. . .” She turned away.
The colonel answered, “Sorry, love, he must know. It’s his job and the Americans may be in it soon.”
Silence, a thing of weight and substance that made Brenda’s spirits quail, filled the room. She felt a cold shudder race up her spine and she shook her head vehemently but remained silent, staring at three of the four men she cherished the most in this world: dear Reginald and his torn body; Lloyd, with his torn mind; Hugh, her only brother, sitting with an eager expression on his face, waiting for his chance to toy with the fates, test his manhood, or find whatever drove men to the crucible. Only Randolph was missing, and his face came back suddenly. Now she cherished him, too—dear Randolph driven by his search for his own white whale.
The Englishman pulled another Woodbine from his pack and put a match to it, focusing his eyes above Hugh and staring into a dim past that could never be past. Brenda’s thoughts moved to that evening long ago when, at the dinner table at Fenwyck, a drunken Lloyd had talked of the front. The horror of his words had been burned into her memory, but there was a fascination about the front that gripped everyone—a curiosity about mankind’s greatest lunacy that cast a hypnotic spell over all of the millions who would never see it, know it, ever chance dying in it. Even the servants stood quietly and waited as Lloyd exhaled a huge cloud of blue smoke.
The colonel was not drunk this time. His eyes were red-rimmed and watery, but not from liquor. He appeared to be under tremendous pressure like a boiler with a clogged safety valve. Brenda sensed his burden could only be relieved by drinking himself senseless or by an explosion of words—a torrent that could only temporarily wash the poisonous remembrances from his mind—but never his soul. She had never seen him so thin and in the shadows of the dining room’s weak light his sunken cheeks were dark hollows in old parchment. His eyes were as dark as tar pits and burned from deep sockets under huge, bony brows, thinning hair brittle and unkempt, and his white teeth seemed large, flashing ivory through thin lips so pale they were hardly visible. Brenda shuddered. Suddenly, she was looking at a cadaverous death’s head and she steeled herself as if she were about to hear words from the Prince of Darkness himself.
His speech was slow, methodical, as if his lips were scissors and he were clipping his words from an endless tape. “First, you must realize,” Lloyd began, “that most battles on the Western Front are races for the parapet.” He looked around at the curious stares. “It’s simple. You bombard your enemy and drive him deep into his dugouts, then you stop your guns and rush your infantry across no-man’s-land to his trenches and hope to reach his parapets before he does. Whoever reaches that parapet first lives, the others die. I had been briefed on Haig’s great plan in detail. We were to demolish the enemy with a seven-day bombardment that would deliver twenty-one thousand tons of high explosive on the Hun—one million five hundred thousand rounds.” He took another pull on the Woodbine. “Sounds like a jug full, doesn’t it.” He ignored the rhetorical question. “Haig said the bombardment would kill all of the defenders and all that we would be required to do was occupy the Jerries’ trenches and bury the dead.” He chuckled to himself. “But he wasn’t bagging Fuzzy Wuzzies this time. The Krauts are good soldiers—dig their dugouts deep and reinforce them with giant timbers. Only heavy guns can reach them, and we. . .” The next thought gagged him. “We fired a million of the shells from our eighteen-pounders.” He looked at the women. “Light, very light. Just a field piece that couldn’t even cut the Kraut wire.”
“You must have had bigger guns,” Hugh insisted.
“Of course. Four-point-five-inch howitzers, a few batteries of nine-point-two divisional artillery, and a few fifteen-inch howitzers firing fourteen-hundred-pound shells. We needed hundreds of these fifteen-inchers. We had six for the whole bloody front. One was assigned to my corps.” He took a big swallow of cognac. “Daresay, it was spectacular, flame, smoke dust, and fountains of earth. That gave the game away.”
“What do you mean, Colonel?” Barry Cooper asked.
“I mean the small shells waste their power upward, flinging dirt and metal to the sky and not downwards where the H
un and rats hide. And the omniscient generals plotting brilliantly in their chateaus decided we would carry seventy pounds of equipment.”
“Good Lord,” Hugh whispered.
“Two hundred rounds of ammunition, two days’ rations, empty sandbags, rolls of wire, wiring stakes, Mills bombs, shovels, rockets, and even pigeon baskets and the like. Finally, the day of the attack came. It was seven-thirty. The bombardment ended. I blew my whistle and the Coldstreams went over the top.”
He emptied his glass, signaled Wendell McHugh, who recharged it. He drank deeply as if he were gathering strength for what was about to come. “We had about five hundred yards of no-man’s-land to cross.” He drank again and snickered. “A stroll in the morning sun.” The voice dropped and came from deep in his being—from the stygian depths where a man hides his most virulent, intolerable memories. “We were the first wave. We moved forward in long lines, stumbling in the shell holes and our own wire. No shouting, no fuss, no running; just solid English lads doing what they had been trained to do, dressing their lines the best that they could, arms ported, doing their bit for jolly old England. And it was all wrong. Immediately, I could see the Germans unlimbering their machine guns on top of Thiepval Ridge and their artillery began to come in and by the time we had cleared our own wire the Maxims began.”
He shuddered. “You should hear them. They sounded like a thousand mad blacksmiths pounding on sheets of metal. Popping, banging. From the front and from enfilade they cut us down. My battalion lost five hundred men and all of its officers in four minutes. Shot down in neat rows by sheets of bullets like scythes harvesting wheat. It happened along the whole bloody front. And the wire wasn’t cut, my lads had to rush back and forth trying to find a way through until they were shot down, too. Some places the dead were so thick a man couldn’t walk without stepping on dead Tommies. They choked shell holes, piled up on the German wire. In the sector next to mine, hundreds of the First East Yorkshire never even reached their own wire—were shot off their own parapets and stacked in their trenches like cord wood. And the brilliant generals had rear battalions leave our reserve trenches and advance in the open to give quick support. They were shot down before they could even reach our first line and our communications trenches were heaped with bodies, too. We had to throw them out like trash or die, too.”
Brenda had never felt so empty, helpless, defeated as she watched Lloyd. He rocked back, eyes half-closed, stubbed out his cigarette and lighted another one, and raised an eyebrow in Hugh’s direction. “But the British Tommy is the finest soldier on earth. Most of the following waves were shot down, but a few survivors kept on coming. A few of us found our way through the wire and bombed and bayoneted the Jetties out. Took their trenches and held them. We had sixty thousand casualties that first day—twenty thousand dead. But Haig had his great victory.” He drank and put the cigarette to his lips. “You should’ve heard the screams of the wounded. Many were gut-shot. Horrible. They screamed like maddened banshees and we had to ignore them—move on. There were so many the orderlies couldn’t reach them all. Some were out there for days, died slowly. They gurgled near the end—cried for their mothers. It tore a man’s guts. . .” His voice thickened to the point where the words would not come and he punched the table with a gnarled fist, breathing deeply.
“Lloyd, darling—please,” Bernice beseeched him. “Enough.”
“No, love. I must. They’ve got to know—everyone’s got to know,” he managed. He moved his rheumy gray eyes to the American officers, drank, and brought control back to his voice with a deep sigh. “And it went on for days, for weeks, for over three months, attack and counterattack and the dead piled up by the hundreds of thousands and the great generals chortled about their victories but never got their breakthrough.” He looked around the room slowly. “Do you know they actually had three cavalry divisions waiting to pour through holes in the German lines?” He laughed bitterly. “There were plenty of holes, all right—in Tommy serge.”
He sagged in his chair, gripping his glass with one hand, his cigarette with the other. “So you see,” he said to no one in particular. “We have a lot to learn.”
Hugh spoke softly. “What would you suggest?”
The colonel looked up and there was new strength in his voice. “The tracked armored vehicle code-named tank. Winston Churchill has been advocating them for over a year and ordered hundreds built.”
“But they’ve been used,” Barry Cooper said.
“Misused in small numbers—only thirty or forty and their breakthrough went for nothing. Haig had his chance at Flers and Courcelette and botched it. Churchill wanted to wait—attack with hundreds. End the bloody business with them once and for all in one stroke. All Haig did was alert the Krauts, allowed them to prepare defenses.”
“Infantry tactics?” Hugh said.
“Rushes by small groups—teams. Probe for weak spots along with tanks. Support each other. This is what I’ll advocate at Chigwell. Fighting in small teams is not new. Your American Indians fought this way. Those illiterate savages knew more about tactics than our general staff. Stand-up, walking attacks by massed battalions is suicidal. Didn’t work at Gettysburg and doesn’t work on the Western Front.”
A watery-eyed Bernice spoke to her husband. “But you’re posted to a training unit, Lloyd. You’re out of it.”
“I know, love. I know.”
“But you’d go back,” she insisted. There was a sudden tension between the couple and all eyes followed the exchange.
“I didn’t say that. I’ve never said I didn’t want blighty.”
“But you want to go back—I know it. I can see it in your eyes.”
He took her hand and held it on his lap. “These things are best discussed at home,” he said with new gentleness.
Her voice caught. “Of course, Lloyd. Of course. Let’s leave, Lloyd. I’m very tired.”
“Yes, love.”
Brenda glanced at the pedestal clock in the corner. She was amazed. It was nearly midnight. Numbed by Lloyd’s words, she saw her guests to the door while Hugh and Barry climbed the stairs silently. Reginald was the last to leave.
Standing at the door, they held each other and he kissed her with the strange restraint she had sensed in the hospital. “You’ve done the same—been through it, too,” she said. “How can men suffer this? What’s driving Randolph on his bloody crusade? How can you remain in those terrible battles like brainless machines waiting for destruction?”
“I have often wondered this, too, Brenda.”
“Lloyd would return to the Coldstreams. I’m sure of it. Bernice knows. And you to Lancer. And Randolph won’t come home. But why? Why?” Her voice trembled and she felt herself slipping to the edge of hysteria.
He pursed his lips and squinted thoughtfully. “I can’t say it’s duty. That’s too simple—too trite.”
“Then what is it?”
“The others—the fear of letting down the others—my crew, I’d say.”
Brenda stared into the unblinking blue eyes. “It’s more than that, Reggie.”
“More?”
“Yes. It’s a fascination with death. You’re gamblers. It’s born into all of you. It’s the ultimate roll of the dice, isn’t it, Reggie?”
He turned his eyes away from her stare. “I don’t know. I’ve never thought of it that way.” He shrugged helplessly. “It’s possible. It’s as good an explanation as any other for this bloody lot.” He turned toward the door.
She could not allow him to leave like this. Her hand on his arm stopped him and he turned back to her. She looked up at him and spoke softly. “You promised me a dinner, Reggie.”
“I know, darling. As soon as possible. Just the two of us.”
She traced a finger over his cheek. “I’ve never been to a cinema, Reggie. Everyone’s talking about Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Tillie’s Punctured Romance.”<
br />
He chuckled. “Tillie’s Punctured Romance—Charlie Chaplin was funny in that one. He started in a music hall, you know.”
“I’ve never been to a music hall, Reggie, either.”
He smiled warmly. “Variety theater, they call them. Loud and noisy, but not as bad as the cinema.”
“Take me.”
“You’re sure?”
“Dinner and then a music hall.”
He pulled her close and kissed her with a hint of his old fervor. “Dinner and then the Palace. I hear they have thirteen new acts. They can sometimes be vulgar,” he warned, running his hands over her back. “Actually, music halls are cockney in origin and much of the humor comes straight from Lambeth—the gutters of Lambeth.”
“I know. But even the Prince of Wales and the king himself have been to them.”
“All right. But, daresay, I warned you.”
“Saturday night, Reginald?”
“Yes. Saturday night.”
She tightened her arms around his neck and pushed her body hard against his. For a moment the restraint was gone and they held each other hungrily; mouths open, tongues darting, thrusting and exploring. A deep atavistic heat spread from deep within her, and she pressed herself against him, moving her pelvis in a grinding motion against his arousal, feeling a drive to pull him down with her on the sofa behind them here and now, servants and guests be damned.
A cough behind her broke the spell and they parted. It was McHugh. “Sorry, missus. But it’s the nipper.”
“The nipper?”
“Yes, missus. Bridie says Nath’n ‘as colic. ‘E’s bawlin’ ‘is ‘ead off for ye. Bit o’ a temp’, she says.”
“Tell her I’m on my way.”
McHugh left with a “Yessum.”
She turned back to Reginald. “Saturday night, Reggie—if Nathan’s all right.”