The First Casualty

by Ben Elton

  ‘Damn it then, if your objections are neither moral nor religious can you please tell me in simple terms what they are?’

  Kingsley paused. He knew that his answer would not sit well with the judge, the gallery or the wider public outside, but he could think of no other.

  ‘Intellectual, sir.’

  ‘Intellectual! Thousands of brave men are dying each day and you speak of your intellect?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I do. It is intellect that sets man above the beasts.’

  ‘It is conscience that sets man above the beasts.’

  ‘The two are surely connected, sir. It is intellect that informs a man what is right and conscience that determines if he will act on that information.’

  ‘And your intellect tells you that you should not fight this war?’

  ‘Yes, sir, and my conscience forces me to respect that advice. This war is…stupid. It offends my sense of logic. It offends my sense of scale.’

  THREE

  A visitor

  Shortly before the supper bell on the evening before his sentencing, Kingsley was told to expect a visitor. It would be the first time he had seen his wife in almost three months.

  Being more than usually dedicated to his work, Kingsley had waited until he had passed the age of thirty before endeavouring to find a wife. It was generally acknowledged amongst his colleagues that Agnes Beaumont had been worth the wait and that in winning her Kingsley had made the finest catch in all his celebrated career.

  From the moment that he first set eyes upon her over the egg sandwiches and Victoria sponge at a police charity cricket match in Dulwich, Kingsley’s heart was entirely lost. He knew instantly that he would devote every fibre of his being to her pursuit. They made a disparate couple. Her soft golden curls, blue eyes and rosy cheeks were in sharp contrast to his own somewhat stern, head-masterly appearance but, as Agnes was wont to point out, opposites are well known to attract.

  ‘It’s Darwinian, I think,’ she would tease. ‘If beautiful girls did not marry hideous men then their hideousness would go unchecked down the generations and before long a race of gargoyles would be produced.’

  More than ten years his junior, Agnes truly was a daunting goal for a middle-ranking police detective with no fortune whatsoever. Not only was she vivacious and beautiful but she was also the daughter of Kingsley’s ultimate superior, Sir Wilfred Beaumont Commissioner of Scotland Yard.

  ‘If you want a successful career in the police,’ Kingsley’s friends had assured him at the time, ‘there is only one rule: never, repeat never, lay a finger on the Commissioner’s daughter.’

  But in love, as in so much else in his life, Kingsley made his own rules. He knew that Agnes Beaumont was the right girl for him, and when Kingsley knew that he was right all further argument was useless.

  A celebrated débutante, Agnes had been presented to the King in the 1910 season, during which her looks and personality had ensured that she outshone numerous girls of far more elevated rank than her own. The Beaumonts were a Leicestershire family who, although never quite noble, could trace their lineage back to before the Reformation. They had their own pew in the church at Willington and over the generations had built up a large estate in the surrounding county. Agnes’s grandfather had been a junior minister in the second Salisbury government.

  Outside the aristocracy itself, stock did not get much better than the Beaumonts.

  Kingsley’s father, on the other hand, had been a physicist at Battersea Technical College and his mother a newspaper sketch artist. It was said that it was from his mother that Kingsley had inherited his uncanny eye for detail.

  It was true that in terms of rank and status Kingsley had got the better of the match but Agnes did not feel that way and, after initial doubts, nor did her family. This was the twentieth century, after all. The Chancellor of the Exchequer himself was a Welshman of lowly stock, who, in partnership with the aristocratic young Home Secretary Winston Churchill, was ushering in a new age of egalitarian social reform. Who could tell what such a man as Kingsley might achieve? The early years of the century had seen a massive expansion in the work of the Metropolitan Police. London was by far the richest city in the world, a polyglot metropolis of some seven million souls, the centre of the largest empire the world had ever seen and the principal home port to a merchant fleet that carried more than 90 per cent of the world’s trade. This was a town with plenty of scope for crime and consequently an equal measure of opportunity for energetic and ambitious police officers. The tall, handsome and (as he would tell you himself) rather brilliant Kingsley was just such a man.

  And his foreign antecedents? Well, as Agnes loved to point out, were not the Royal Family themselves recent German immigrants?

  Kingsley was already seated when Agnes entered the visitors ‘hall.

  Ever since the first time he had made her blush, Kingsley’s private name for Agnes had been Rose, and if a rose is beautiful when set within the beauty of a garden, how much more beautiful is it when found within the bounds of prison walls? Kingsley’s whole being shook with misery as he watched his wife make her way across the long grey room with its heavy stone floor and forbidding grille, behind which the inmates of Brixton Prison were privileged to share precious moments with their lawyers and their loved ones.

  Agnes was dressed soberly as befitted the times and the sombre situation. She had forsaken the modish, calf-length dresses which, to show off her shapely ankles, she usually wore with high-buttoned boots. She had instead chosen a floor-length skirt of dark brown wool with matching jacket. Her starched white blouse was buttoned high up under her chin and her hair was pinned severely.

  Despite this gloomy ensemble and an uncharacteristic pallor, she turned every head as she passed along the ranks of other visitors who sat before the grille. Such beauty was rarely glimpsed in the bleak community of HM Prison Brixton.

  Agnes sat down in front of Kingsley but declined to meet his gaze, preferring instead to fix her eye upon the bench.

  ‘Father is waiting with the car,’ she said. ‘I shan’t keep you long, Douglas.’

  Kingsley had not looked for any sign of warmth or sympathy and so he was not surprised when he found none.

  Devastated, but not surprised.

  Secretly he had always allowed a tiny part of himself to hope that she might yet forgive him, but in truth he knew she never would. In the long months since he had first told Agnes what he intended to do, she had left him in no doubt as to how she felt about it. Probably the hardest moment of his journey to trial had been the night when Agnes had forsaken their marriage bed, leaving in her place an envelope containing nothing but a single white feather.

  ‘Now that you are convicted I shall seek a divorce,’ she said.

  ‘Is a conviction sufficient grounds?’ Kingsley asked. ‘It’s not an area of law I am familiar with. I thought that adultery was required.’

  ‘I might have forgiven you that,’ Agnes replied, tears suddenly starting in her eyes. ‘Adultery is at least a crime committed by a man!’

  Kingsley did not reply, for he could think of nothing to say. Intellectually he considered his wife’s attitude simply ridiculous, pathetic even. Emotionally it was a hammer blow. There had been a time when Agnes’s simplicity and lack of seriousness had charmed him; now that it stood between her and any possible understanding of what he was trying to do, it made his heart ache.

  ‘Yes,’ she continued, ‘I could have forgiven you much but not this shame, Douglas. Not this shame!’

  ‘Ah yes. The shame.’

  Kingsley knew that this and this alone was his crime as far as Agnes, second daughter of Sir Wilfred Beaumont of the Leicestershire Beaumonts, was concerned. Not cowardice. He knew that she did not believe him to be a coward. Part of the charm that had swept her off her feet in the hot and romantic summer of 1910 had been Kingsley’s obvious devil-may-care gallantry. He was not a modest man and he had certainly not been so foolish as to keep his three citations a sec
ret from her wide-eyed admiration, and of course his dashing but level-headed handling of the Sydney Street Siege had been much reported, particularly as it made such a contrast with the rather over-excited reaction of Churchill, the young Home Secretary, who had been much criticized for irresponsibly putting himself in the line of fire.

  ‘If only you had been a coward,’ Agnes continued, ‘then at least I might have understood.’

  But it was clear to Kingsley that Agnes would never understand. How could she? How could any wife understand that at a time when women of every type and class were giving up their husbands, brothers and sons to the slaughter, her husband, her handsome, famous husband who was neither coward nor moral zealot, had refused to go? She had found it difficult enough during the period of Kitchener’s volunteer army, when men at least chose their fate. Kingsley’s position in the police and his relatively senior age of thirty-five had partly excused his absence from the forces, but now that conscription had been introduced and still Kingsley would not do his duty the shame was simply too much.

  ‘You know that I am cut off by all our friends,’ Agnes said.

  ‘I imagined that would be the case.’

  ‘Nobody calls. I receive no invitations. Even Queenie has given notice.’

  Kingsley’s conscience ached for Agnes. To be snubbed by her own cook would have been a hard blow indeed for a proud woman like Agnes, but Queenie’s departure was inevitable for she was a woman of fiercely jingoistic disposition. Kingsley recalled her telling him proudly of having camped out all night on a pavement in order to witness the funeral of Edward VII. She claimed that it had only been the lumbago she was sure this adventure had induced which prevented her from doing the same thing for the Coronation of George V.

  ‘In two years’ time your son will be six,’ Agnes continued. ‘What prep school do you imagine will take him?’

  ‘How is George?’

  ‘Why would you care?’

  ‘That is unworthy of you, Ro — Agnes.’

  ‘You do not destroy the lives of people you care about,’ Agnes snapped. ‘At least we don’t do it in Leicestershire.’

  Silence fell. For a moment Agnes’s manner softened very slightly.

  ‘He misses you. He speaks of you constantly. You’re his hero, you know that.’

  This heartbreakingly ironic observation provoked further silence, which again was broken by Agnes.

  ‘Fortunately his age protects him from our shame but that will not always be the case.’

  Kingsley drew deep breaths and gripped tight the chain that linked the cuffs at his wrists to those at his ankles. Forsaking his son had been the most difficult part of his whole dreadful undertaking. It was almost unbearable for a man to bring disgrace upon his family, a fact of which the Ministry of Information was clearly well aware. Every railway and Underground station carried the current crop of posters designed to play upon the most vulnerable part of a man’s conscience. ‘Daddy? What did you do in the Great War?’ — that was the phrase which some brilliant propagandist had coined. It was accompanied by a haunting portrait of a small boy putting the question to his comfortably seated but hollow-eyed and guilt-ridden father while his tiny sister looked on, innocent of Papa’s awful shame. It was not a question which Kingsley’s son was ever likely to have to ask, for what his daddy had done in the Great War was currently in all the newspapers.

  ‘I’m sure we could all have forgiven you,’ Agnes said, ‘had you been a genuine pacifist. But this…to ruin yourself, to bring down your family for mere matters of dry argument…

  ‘I do not approve of this war,’ Kingsley said gently.

  ‘Yes! So you have assured me a thousand times,’ Agnes hissed back. ‘Do you think I approve of it? Do you think Lady Summerfield, who has two boys dead and another blinded by gas, approves of it? Nanny Wiggen, whose only brother fell in the first week but who still devotes herself to George whilst you skulk in here, does she approve of it? Our friends? Our neighbours? Douglas, we have scullery maids whose husbands and lovers are making the sacrifice that you are unwilling to make. Do you think a single one of them approves of it?’

  ‘Then they should join me here, for if they were all to do so along with their husbands and lovers then no further sacrifice would be necessary.’

  ‘Yes, and we should all be overrun by bloody Germans! Is that what you want?’

  Kingsley had heard Agnes swear only once before in his life and that had been in the agony of labour.

  ‘No,’ Kingsley said finally, ‘it’s not what I want. You know I love my country.’

  ‘But you will not fight to defend it.’

  ‘This war is destroying it. Don’t you understand? This war is actually destroying the very Britain we are fighting to defend. It will destroy all of Europe. It’s a stupid war.’

  ‘It is not your place to say that, Douglas.’

  ‘I wish it wasn’t but it is. It’s everyone’s place. I tell you this war will ruin everything. It is Europe gone mad.’

  Agnes rose to go but then almost immediately sat down once more.

  ‘I loved you, Douglas.’

  ‘I still love you.’

  ‘I don’t want your love. I do not want the love of a man who brings down his family for an idea! Who would sacrifice his wife and son not for his heart but for his head. You think yourself too good for this war, Douglas. It offends you. You set yourself above it. You think it beneath your mighty intellect because it’s messy and cruel and utterly terrible, whilst other men die for those very same reasons! Stupid men no doubt in your view…

  ‘You know that I don’t think…’

  ‘Yes, you do! You think that if only the politicians had as much sense as you they would never have started this business, and if only the people were less foolish they would refuse to see it through. What is that but thinking yourself above it all? Cleverer than the rest? As I say, if only you truly were a pacifist, Douglas, one of those awful blaggards one sees speaking at Hyde Park Corner who claim to understand the word of Jesus better than the rest of us and seem to think that the Germans are all sweet and kind and terribly misunderstood…But you’re too clever to be a pacifist. You prefer to choose the wars you would fight and oh, isn’t it such a shame, this one isn’t good enough for you!’

  The bitter sarcasm masked Agnes’s pain but now the tears came. She pulled a handkerchief from her cuff and blew her nose, then she slipped the wedding ring from her finger and slid it discreetly beneath the grille that separated them. Kingsley stared down at it.

  ‘Take it,’ Agnes said quietly.

  He picked up the ring and put it on his little finger.

  ‘I still love you, Douglas,’ Agnes added, almost whispering now, ‘and I always will. I think that is the hardest thing of all.’

  Then she rose to her feet once more. This time she would clearly not be sitting down again.

  ‘We shall not speak again, Douglas. You shall hear from me via Mr Phipps at the Downey Street Chambers.’

  ‘Very well,’ Kingsley replied.

  ‘When we are divorced, will you allow George to take his grandfather’s name? My name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you. Goodbye.’

  Agnes hurried from the room as quickly as her fast-dissolving dignity would allow. For a moment Kingsley was visited by the recollection of her turning and running from him in happier times, in the summer of their courtship. It had been at the Gardens at Kew, which they had visited for a Sunday picnic. He had begged a kiss, a kiss which she most clearly intended to grant him but not before a suitable chase had ensued. He had chased her for fully half an hour before winning his prize. Agnes had never been easily won over in any part of their lives together.

  Kingsley watched her disappear from the room, wondering if his heart would break. Logic informed him that of course it would not. The heart was no more than a muscle, a pump which distributed blood about the body; it had nothing whatsoever to do with a man’s emotions. But if that
was the case, why did it ache so?

  FOUR

  The Lavender Lamp Club, London

  On the same evening that Kingsley was receiving his visitor at Brixton Prison in south London, in Frith Street just off Soho Square a very different kind of reception was under way. Captain Alan Abercrombie, late of the London Regiment (Artists Rifles), was bidding farewell to a few friends at the end of a short period of leave from the Western Front. He was not in uniform — uniforms were banned at the Lavender Lamp, or Bartholomew’s Private Hotel to give it its proper title. Soldier patrons were invited to remove their tunics and don one of the beautiful silk dressing gowns that hung from hatstands in the entrance hall of the club.

  The Lavender Lamp had got its name from its proprietor’s preference for gas lamps, which he liked to shade with lavender-coloured screens imported from Italy.

  ‘Gaslight is so much softer and more romantic,’ Mr Bartholomew explained to guests who enquired how it was that such a wealthy establishment had not yet gone electric. ‘One cannot make love under electric light, it’s so terribly brutal. It leaves nothing to the imagination, dear. I doubt that Mr Edison was a very romantic soul. Although I must concede that it is to his genius that we owe the happy fact that I may still hear the voice of dear Oscar, although Oscar himself has long since left us.’ An early wax-tube recording of Oscar Wilde reading ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ was one of Mr Bartholomew’s most treasured possessions. Mr Bartholomew always claimed to have been, in his youth, intimate with the great writer but nobody really believed him.

  Inspector Kingsley would certainly have heard of the Lavender Lamp Club, which was an exclusively male establishment. He would have been aware that some of the things that went on in the upstairs rooms by the light of Mr Bartholomew’s gas lamps were highly illegal, and had Kingsley been a witness to them he would reluctantly have been forced to make an arrest. But the police never visited the club (with the exception of one or two highly placed officers who went there on a non-professional basis), for this was no low brothel but an exclusive social club where gentlemen of status who shared certain tastes met privately behind heavily barred doors. Nobody got past Mr Bartholomew and his sturdy porters whom Mr Bartholomew did not know personally or who had not been personally recommended to him. At the Lavender Lamp Club patrons were free to drop the constant, grinding pretence that they wore like a cloak in almost every other circumstance of their lives. For a happy hour or two, they could be themselves.