The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  She did nothing more, for days. She was afraid. She did not know how afraid other suffragists had been. Her teeth ached with fear and she dreamed that they all fell out and stuck in her breakfast porridge, like bloody pebbles. She waited for a sign and knew she had it when she read that Sylvia Pankhurst had drawn, on a prison slate, an illustration to

  Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

  Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight.

  She wasn’t well. When she breathed out, she could smell her breath. She knotted her hair grimly, packed her bag, which looked like an artist’s bag, and set off.

  The way in was as Philip had described it, still accessible as it had been before Sir Aston Webb’s lovely new curves and clinical new spaces had been opened. She slid in behind two men wholly preoccupied by a heavy crate, straw-stuffed and unwieldy. She passed like a black spectre behind a white forest of plaster casts. She went on, and in, past tombrails and brass fenders and suddenly came on the Russian tomb where Philip had slept on the empty plinth, under the doves and acanthus leaves. Here she stopped and rearranged her possessions, the bag full of stones, the packet of buns. When Philip had hidden there, there was no electric lighting. Now, as the light died in the roundels of windows, she saw switches and systems of wires. She sat in the twilight, and then in the dark, letting her eyes grow used to it. She had bound her hair in a dark scarf. She looked around for the staircase with the iron rail, and did not see it. She waited. Night and silence spread. Cautiously she switched on a light and hid behind the tomb. Nothing stirred. The light, under a green shade, illuminated the white-tiled Gothic vaults. She needed a thread: she was lost in the labyrinth. She scuttled out of hiding, moving bent and hunched along corridors. She found the stone staircase and went up. At this point, she realised she had been idiotic. The door into the gallery was locked. Philip Warren had found and kept a key. She had not even thought about a key. She was like Alice for ever shut out of the garden, peering through the keyhole.

  Because the act required her to do it, she looked around, seeking out the answer there must be. And there was. There was a panel on the wall of the tunnel at the foot of the stairs, with a whole jumble of keys and screwdrivers hanging on tarred string and hairy string, all lengths. They were not labelled. She tried one and then another and saw she needed a longer and larger one. She found it. The door ground open.

  And there in the moonlight were the cases of gold and silver, gleaming and glinting. Hedda went up to them. There was the reliquary, there was the Gloucester Candlestick. There was no sign of any guardian of the treasure.

  If the breaking of the glass was not too loud a crash, she would have time to wreak real damage on the things. She was sweating. She was cold. She took off her coat, and wrapped a large sharp flint in it, and swung, cautiously. The glass held. Hedda was filled with hatred, and swung with all her strength. The sides of the glass coffin splintered and fell in. The blow was muffled but the shards rang out on the tiled floor.

  She took one of the Dungeness stones and brought it down on a little chalice, which was scraped, but held its form. Hedda was still alone in the high hall. She bashed a delicate spoon, silently enough, on a velvet mat which masked the noise. She turned her attention to the Candlestick.

  There it stood, unique, mysterious, with its writhing, energetic dragons and imps and foliage and helmeted warriors. She was feeling very odd. She remembered Tom, reading Tennyson aloud, in the Tree House. This thing was like the gate of Camelot.

  The dragon-boughts and elvish emblemings

  Began to move, seethe, twine and curl: they called

  To Gareth “Lord, the gateway is alive.”

  And Hedda did see shape-shifting, climbing, flickering movement on the object. She must destroy it. Instead, foolishly, she launched Tom’s hole in a stone at it. That glanced off a beast which was being slaughtered by a gnome with a knife. Hedda sank to her knees, as the warders came rumbling and creaking, and pulled her up, not too gently.

  She was shut up in a police station, and put on trial. She knew she exuded a stink of fear and stood upright in the dock, whilst tremors ran up and down her body as though she was giving birth to something. Some of the WSPU had come to support her, and their expectation of fearlessness was part of her torture. She had not asked to see her family. She was condemned to a year’s penal servitude for damaging government property and taken to Holloway Prison.

  In the cell was a Bible, and a book called The Home Beautiful. This caused her brief amusement. She had had a hot bath, which she needed, and had been given some worn, ill-fitting clothes, which she also needed, for her own were drenched by her body’s terror.

  She knew she must refuse to eat. She did not know if she had the courage to refuse to drink. She began to walk. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. The walls closed in on her and she began to sob, and went on walking. She decided she would refuse to drink, thinking confusedly that in that way she might die, which she appeared to want to do. She walked. She walked. She fell and picked herself up again.

  They brought her, as they brought all the hunger-strikers, a tray with a little jar of Brand’s Essence of jellied beef, an apple, some fresh bread and butter, a glass of milk. She did not touch it. She walked.

  • • •

  They brought the tubes, the gags, the clotted fluid (Sanatogen, from Germany). She did not fight, because she was shaking too much, but subsequently vomited over a wardress, and was slapped like a baby, for dirtiness.

  Once, which was the worst thing, she started thinking of the little jar of beef jelly as though it had the authority of the act she had performed. She must have the beef jelly. She must not. She must. She walked. To and fro, and then stopped and took up the spoon.

  The taste was intense, through her furred tongue. She gulped down the whole jar, spoon after spoon. A woman came in and said—with what Hedda felt was contempt—“That will set you up a bit, that’s the first sensible thing I’ve seen you do.”

  Hedda wept, retched and vomited, and was slapped. She knew now that she had disgraced herself and could not break her fast. She walked, the foul stuff was poured into her, she vomited, she walked. If you hold the funnel too high or too low the food is suffocatingly painful as it finds its way to places where it is not meant to go.

  They let her out, in July, under the Cat and Mouse Act, to make herself well enough to be reimprisoned without danger of death.

  There was a group of women, waiting for her. A group of suffragists who knew all about cleaning, and resting, and slowly feeding the recuperating martyrs. And her sister Dr. Dorothy Wellwood, who tried not to show her shock at Hedda’s cracking lips, blood-suffused eyes, sharp bones almost breaking the skin.

  “You nearly killed yourself,” said Dorothy. “We must get you well.”

  Hedda was muttering about beef jelly. Would she like some, said Dorothy. Hedda wept. She said Dorothy didn’t understand. “I messed it up.”

  “Only if you die. And I’ll see you don’t.”

  IV

  THE AGE OF LEAD

  50

  In May 1914 Diaghilev brought the Russian Ballet with music by Richard Strauss for a triumphant season in Drury Lane. They played Ivan the Terrible and Strauss’s Joseph. Rupert Brooke went to see them; Bloomsbury was there; Anselm Stern and his sons went with August Steyning. On July 25th the last performance staged both Joseph and Petrouchka, ending with the pathetic death of the living puppet. That evening the Austrian Ambassador rejected the Serbian reply to his ultimatum, and left for home. The Sterns also went home. It was prudent, Anselm said. There was conflict in the air.

  On July 31st Germany sent an ultimatum to Russia, and declared Kriegsgefahr, danger of war, and began to mobilise its men. The socialist world rallied round Jean Jaurès, who was still hoping for a general rising of workingmen against war. That evening, as he dined in the Café Croissant in Montmartre, he was shot with a pistol, by a young man who had been following him for a day. He di
ed in five minutes. On August 1st, as his death was reported, the French army mobilised.

  The City of London, troubled by dangers to the gold market, sent a deputation to Lloyd George, to say that “the financial and trading interests in the City of London” were “wholly opposed to intervening in the War.” Nobody expected war. Nobody was prepared for it. The financiers had believed that they lived in a world of financial and economic forces, so constructed that political forces were subjugated to the economic structures of prosperity and growth. Lloyd George remarked that “Financiers in a fright do not make a heroic picture. One must make allowances, however, for men who were millionaires with an assured credit which seemed as firm as the globe it girdled, and who suddenly found their futures scattered by a bomb hurled at random from a reckless hand.” The Economist advocated strict neutrality. The quarrel on the continent “was no more our concern than would be a quarrel between Argentina and Brazil or between China and Japan.”

  Saki, who had written so many stories of feral and irresponsible children mocking the respectable in English gardens, woods, and pigsties, had published When William Came—a grimly satirical tale of English society adapting very well to Hohenzollern rule. The story culminated with a planned ceremonial march of Boy Scouts past the German Emperor and the monument to his grandmother in front of Buckingham Palace. The Emperor waited. And waited. And no marching children appeared under the flapping flags in the Mall. English boys had cared for England’s honour. The wild children had a mind of their own.

  Colonel-General von Moltke was Chief of the General Staff of the Field Army of the German Empire. He had tried to refuse this position; he was sixty-six; he was, he thought, unlike his great uncle, too cautious, too reflective, too scrupulous, to make rapid decisions on which millions of lives and the fate of his country depended. The Kaiser had overruled his wishes. He would follow his uncle. He would direct the elaborate Schlieffen Plan, which required the German armies to march into Luxembourg and Belgium and seize their railways, in order to sweep round from the north and encircle Paris from the west. He did as he must and deployed his troops and trains.

  On August 1st 1914 he was called suddenly to a war conference in the Berliner Schloss, with the Kaiser, generals, ministers. These men were jubilant. The Kaiser ordered celebratory champagne. Von Moltke was told that Sir Edward Grey had promised the German Ambassador in London that Great Britain would guarantee that France would not enter the war against Germany if Germany promised not to attack France. The Kaiser, full of delight and relief, told von Moltke that now they need only fight Russia. The armies could now advance to the East.

  Von Moltke tried to explain that a million men, eleven thousand trains, tons of ammunition, guns, supplies, were already deployed, travelling west; patrols were already in Luxembourg; a division was behind them. The Kaiser rebuked him, telling him, with childish petulance, that his great-uncle would have given a different answer. Von Moltke could “use some other railway instead.”

  Von Moltke was humiliated. He recorded that, as he realised the ignorance and light-headedness of his leader, the childish failure to imagine the world as it was, something inside him snapped. “I never recovered from that incident,” he wrote. “I was never the same again.”

  Time was lost: the Kaiser countermanded orders; von Moltke sat in despair in his office and refused to sign the new ones. Then at eleven in the evening, he was recalled, to the Kaiser’s private apartments, where the head of state was half undressed, with a mantle thrown over his withered arm. He handed von Moltke a telegram from George V. The German Ambassador had been mistaken. Britain did not guarantee French neutrality.

  “Now you can do what you like,” the Kaiser told his commander.

  And the armies marched.

  51

  Some of them joined up immediately. Julian joined his father’s regiment and was sent to Officers’ Training Camp in Suffolk. He was good with guns and rode well. The sun shone. He made friends with another Cambridge man. He felt fierce because what was being attacked was the English pastoral he was studying—the woods and fields, the wild things, the cows, the sheep, the shepherds to a certain extent, the gathering in of the harvest. They said it would all be done by Christmas. His temperament was ironic; he believed in duty but not in glory and thought he must go steadily on to the promised end. He liked his men: it was necessary to like them, and he really liked them. He noticed when they were anxious and told them when they did well. In 1915 he embarked for France.

  Geraint went back to Lydd, and trained as a gunner in the camp on the shingle that he knew so well. He enlisted as a private, and then became a bombadier. He kept the little ring he had given Florence in the pocket of his tunic. He thought: when this is over, everything will be different, including me. The ocean voyage under the stars vanished like a mirage. Like Julian, in those early days, he seemed to see everything more clearly because it had all been called in question. He made drinking-friends in his platoon, one of whom had been an acquaintance when he was a boy running wild on Romney Marsh, a fishmonger’s son called Sammy Till. In 1915 he crossed the Channel and went north-west, towards Belgium.

  Florian and Robin Wellwood and Robin Oakeshott all joined the Royal Sussex Regiment. Florian was sent to France fairly quickly. The two Robins found themselves in the same platoon. They sat together amongst their gear in a shared tent. They had been together, or almost, at things like the drama camp when they were boys. They had the same red hair and the same smile. They did not know, being well brought-up, how to broach the subject of whether they were brothers.

  Robin Wellwood thought it would be insulting and hurtful to Robin Oakeshott to suggest that his Oakeshott father was a fiction. Robin Oakeshott thought he might embarrass Robin Wellwood by claiming the relationship which was never mentioned. Both of them shied away in their minds from the role Humphry Wellwood must have played in their origins. No one likes to think of their parents and sex, even in quite normal situations. But they stuck together, and did things the same way, and came to rely on each other.

  Wolfgang Stern was already on the battlefield, in the German Sixth Army, under Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. He was on the left of the Schlieffen scythe, retreating deliberately towards Germany to draw the French army outwards, away from Paris. The French soldiers wore a uniform from the past, with red trousers, a long great-coat, broadcloth tunic, flannel shirt and long underpants, winter and summer. Their boots were known as brodequins, which was the name of an instrument of torture. They carried a rifle, a kit weighing sixty-six pounds and a regulation bundle of kindling wood.

  The French officers believed in attack, and then attack, and then again attack. They believed they had been defeated in 1870 because of a lack of firmness and élan. They charged, heavily, drums beating, bugles sounding, their long bayonets held in their guns before them. They were very brave, and the German machine-gunners, including Wolfgang, mowed them like fields of grass. Wolfgang felt alien to himself, in his grey tunic and forage cap. But then, he had always been an actor. Now, he was acting a very competent machine-gunner. He was well fed and his commanders planned intelligently. The war would not last long. The Plan was working to perfection.

  Charles/Karl, the ex-anarchist, the socialist, the academic student of herd behaviour in war and peace, found that his intuition when faced with anarchist “deeds” of assassination, that he himself could not kill a man, was just. He went to tell his father that he was joining up. Basil Wellwood said he was glad, and sorry of course, and would give any help he could. Charles/Karl said he was not joining the armed forces: he was joining a Quaker enterprise called the Anglo-Belgian Ambulance Unit. These people provided stretcher-bearers to bring in the wounded and ambulances to take them to the hospital trains to bring them home. He said “It isn’t a lack of courage, Papa. And I do feel that I must do something in all this. And the ambulance units help everyone, they don’t discriminate …”

  Basil answered the unspoken thing.

  “
Some of your mother’s friends are refusing invitations. They don’t call on her. Many of them don’t.”

  “That would be better if I was a patriotic soldier. But I can’t, you do see?”

  “I try to see. You don’t lack courage. You have my blessing.”

  Charles/Karl gave him an envelope, marked “To be opened in the event of my death.”

  “I’m not being dramatic, I’m being practical. And you must promise not to open it before …”

  “Very well. I hope to hand it back to you very soon. All this should not last very long. Go safely.”

  Dorothy too had managed to join a new kind of unit, the Women’s Hospital Corps. This was the work of two resourceful women doctors, Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray. Unlike the Scottish women doctors who had been told to go “home,” they had quickly worked out that the War Office would simply turn them away. Both were suffragists and both had had long contentious dealings with the Home Office. So they approached the French Embassy, and the French Red Cross, and offered their skills, and medical supplies which would be paid for by their supporters. Money poured in, from suffragists and women’s colleges. A uniform was devised, for doctors, nurses, orderlies and managers. It was greenish-grey, short-skirted, with a neat loose long tunic, buttoned high. There were small cloth hats, with veils and overcoats. The women looked smart and purposeful. They had learnt that women must do everything more competently, more carefully, with more unrelenting discipline than men. In September 1914 they went from Victoria and Dieppe to Paris, which was full of wounded men. “An excitable British Red Cross lady,” said Flora Murray, “explained that nothing was any good here. The red tape was awful—all the arrangements had broken down. The sepsis was appalling. The town was full of Germans whose legs and arms had been cut off and who were being sent to Havre next day like that!!”