by Phillip Rock
Martin stood in a room off the office that, like all of the rooms in Lord Crewe’s suite, blended priceless antiquities with the practicalities of his profession. Egyptian artifacts from Luxor dwelt side by side with intermittently chattering Teletype machines. He stood by the windows, glass of whiskey in hand, and looked down into the gloom of Bouverie Street. The whiskey was exceptional and he was in the act of pouring himself another when Jacob came into the room.
“You might pour me one, too, Martin.”
Martin grinned at him. “You do look a bit shaky. How’d it go?”
“Rather badly. He’s dying, Martin.”
Martin stared at him, the crock of whiskey in his hand. “What did you say?”
“Dying. Our secret—under oath.”
“Of course.”
“A cancer—in the blood. He’s leaving for America next week. A clinic in Minnesota. Mayo Brothers, I believe he said. I don’t think he expects to come back.” Martin poured him a whiskey and he took the glass with a trembling hand. “Not that he gives much of a damn. A very fatalistic man, my father. But he has a fear of—wasting away. He went through that with my mother. I don’t know, Martin. I have a terrible feeling he’ll never reach Minnesota.”
“Is it that far advanced?”
Jacob shook his head and then took a big drink of whiskey. “Not outwardly, no. But it’s an insidious disease and he knows it. I think he’ll shortcut the inevitable pain and misery. I think he’ll slip over the ship’s rail. That’s an awful thing to say. But I think that’s what he’ll do. He—he has no fear of the sea.”
They stared at each other in silence. They could hear and feel the muted thunder of the presses far below them.
“I’d get that thought right out of my head if I were you,” Martin said hollowly. “Right out.”
Jacob glared at his glass and swished the remaining whiskey around and around.
“If he dies—if he goes—he’s leaving his share of the Post to me. Fifty-one percent of the stock. He told me, ‘Jacob, I trust you to do what’s right.’ That’s a bloody terrible thing to say. What in the name of God does he expect of me?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No. What?”
“Only your best, Jacob. Only your very best.”
LORD STANMORE FRETTED as he tried to secure a taxi in front of Waterloo Station. He finally stopped being a gentleman and stepped off the curb into the street, pointing his furled umbrella like a lance at an approaching cab.
“Taxi! Here!”
There were muttered grumblings from a few commuters standing in the queue, but the earl ignored them as he climbed quickly into the taxi and slammed the door.
“Strand,” he said. “Royal Courts of Justice.”
He settled back with a sigh as the taxi racketed away from the station and onto the approaches to Waterloo Bridge. It was a clear, bright morning, the Thames placid and olive green in color. A lovely day—or at least he hoped it would be a lovely day for Martin.
He had been strongly advised by Martin not to come. It was, his nephew stated over the telephone, a tedious journey at that early hour of the morning—the London train jammed with commuters—and the trial, he had felt, would attract some highly partisan spectators. Win or lose, there might be some nasty incidents following the verdict. The earl had dismissed the arguments, but had told Hanna and Alexandra that the trial date had been postponed and that he was going up to London on business. So much for that. A little white lie.
He felt justified in having told it when the taxi neared the law courts. There were policemen, mounted and on foot, patrolling both sides of the Strand from Aldwych to Chancery Lane. A most extraordinary collection of people could be seen on opposite sides of the wide street, shouting across at one another with highly vocal malevolence. On one side were a large number of men, many of them middle-aged to elderly, carrying small Union Jacks in their hands. Some of them carried well-printed banners reading: BRITISH LEGION—HONOR HAIG—RULE BRITANNIA. They appeared better dressed than the majority of their opposite numbers, who seemed a motley collection of young men of the lower classes, women, and crippled ex-soldiers, all of the latter wearing at least one piece of old uniform. They carried crudely painted banners that expressed a bewildering variety of slogans. NO WAR—EVER AGAIN … RED IS BLOOD, RED IS HOPE were two that caught his eye. The longest of these signs was held aloft by at least thirty women and it read: NO MORE WAR INTERNATIONAL—LAMBETH CHAPTER.
It was most curious. A tall, striking-looking woman stood in the street facing this monster banner and directing a chant of some kind, the words only dimly heard above the general noise. The woman, he realized with a dull shock, was Winifred Wood-Lacy.
The police kept the traffic moving steadily and the taxi pulled up in front of the law courts. The earl walked quickly into the grim, Gothic building and asked a uniformed man for courtroom “D.”
“Not a chance, sir. Filled up ’arf an hour ago.”
He drew himself to his full imperial height. “I am Greville, Earl of Stanmore. I believe there is a space reserved.”
There wasn’t, but it got him into the courtroom. He stood with a dozen others against the back wall. Scanning the seats, he saw Charles, William, and Fenton’s friend, Jacob Golden, seated in the third row. Well, he thought, at least they had a comfortable view of things.
The jurymen filed in and took their places. There was a long wait and then the King’s Court judge in his ermine robes entered his court, walking slowly, eyes on the floor as though lost in deep thought. The ritual of his entrance was proclaimed and the man sat in his thronelike chair for a full five minutes, still deep in thought, and then summarily dismissed the jury. There was a rolling wave of comment from the spectators. A gavel pounded wood until the sound stopped.
“I have dismissed the jury,” Mr. Justice Larch said in a flat monotone, “because it is my opinion, after reading most carefully through the evidence, that this case should rightly have been heard in chambers. Major General Sir Bertram Dundas Sparrowfield, through counsel, accuses Mr. Martin Rilke of defaming his name and honorable military reputation in a book written by Mr. Rilke and entitled The Killing Ground. The plaintiff charges Mr. Rilke with libeling both him and his staff. I do not, however, see the staff represented by counsel.”
Major General Sir Bertram Dundas Sparrowfield, despite a blurted caution from his bewigged counsel, lurched to his feet.
What an ordinary little man, Lord Stanmore thought. More like a village postman in appearance than a major general.
“I protest!” the general cried out in a high, squeaky voice. “I have always spoken for my staff—I speak for my staff now.”
The judge gave him a brief, baleful glance. “You may speak for them all you wish, Sir Bertram, but you may not represent them in this courtroom. Kindly resume your seat.”
The general sat down slowly.
“The facts of the case are clear enough,” the judge continued. “Mr. Rilke, a war correspondent then employed by the Associated Press, witnessed an attack against heavily fortified German positions in and around the village of Thiepval on the Somme on the morning and afternoon of fourteen August, nineteen sixteen, and, four years after the event, using his own notes, battalion log books, and the personal accounts of survivors of that attack, wrote a book on the subject. It is the veracity of that book’s contents that form the basis of this suit for libel, specifically pages two hundred twenty through two hundred fifty-five—the summing up, as it were. I have read that section over half a dozen times. It is critical of many actions performed, or not performed, by General Sparrowfield and his staff on that day. It is especially critical of the fact that the general and his staff were headquartered in a château nine miles from the battle without any reliable means of communication with those battalions committed to the assault....”
The general popped up again, red-faced and blustering. “I do protest, sir! My battalion commanders had been most thoroughly briefed—mos
t thoroughly briefed—all aspects.”
The gavel pounded. “I must warn the plaintiff,” the judge said, not unkindly, “that any further outbursts of this nature will not be tolerated. I must so advise plaintiff’s counsel.”
Both of the general’s barristers rose to their feet. “It will not occur again, m’lud,” they said in bleak unison.
“I trust not. It is most distracting. Now—where was I? Yes—critical of …”
Lord Stanmore had merely skimmed through the copy of the book Martin had sent him. It had annoyed him at the time. The past was the past. The war was over and should be laid to rest and forgotten like some hellish nightmare. He knew now that he had been wrong. The squalor … the horror of it … the gross, criminal mishandling of it … all needed to be burned into the very brains of people so that they would never, ever, think of war as a glorious national venture again.
“… Mr. Rilke criticizes the use of pigeons as a means of communications between the line battalion commanders and the general’s headquarters. This proved most unwise as the pigeons died when the wind shifted and the gas, which should have drifted into the German trenches, blew back onto the attackers. He also criticizes the decision to use gas in the first place after meteorologists had warned General Sparrowfield’s staff that they could expect unpredictable wind patterns on the day of the attack. They chose to ignore that advice, with disastrous results.”
The judge set aside his notes and leaned back in his chair. “Mr. Rilke, in my opinion, did not single out General Sparrowfield for censure nor hold him up to derision and ridicule. The attack of which he writes turned out to be a fiasco with an extraordinarily high percentage of fatalities and wounds among the battalions involved. Mr. Rilke did not invent that fiasco, nor did he picture it as being worse than it actually was. He does, in fact, state in his foreword that this particular attack was typical for the period, that it was but one of many hundreds that occurred with similar results. Mr. Rilke wrote an entire book of some three hundred pages about this one sanguinary event, and yet the official communiqué for that day reduced it to a mere six lines. Defeats and massacres were not extensively documented for public dissemination. A veil, as it were, was drawn over those melancholy times. Now that it has been lifted, one can easily understand why some people might well be discomforted by the light. It is such with General Sparrowfield, I believe. One can feel a degree of compassion for the plaintiff for being, one might go so far as to say, a victim of history, but the plaintiff’s suit for libel must be disallowed. This case is now dismissed.”
There was polite applause in the courtroom. The cheering began when the decision was made known in the street—cheering from one side of the street and angry exclamations from the other. The police moved majestically between the two factions, thin lines of blue and the stationary, patient horses.
“Father! Sir!” William pushed his way through the crush in the corridor as the courtroom emptied. Trailing along in his wake came Charles, Martin, and Jacob Golden. Lord Stanmore spotted them and stepped to one side of the doorway as the crowd poured out to mill about on the pavement in excited groups.
“Congratulations, Martin,” the earl said.
“Thank you, sir,” and then he was being dragged off into the crowd and borne triumphantly toward the peace advocates who were forming like a small army around the Strand island of Saint Clement’s Dane Church.
“There’s to be a peace march,” William said. “Along the Strand … the Mall … then through Green Park to Hyde Park. I don’t advise your joining it, sir. Tempers are a bit edgy in some quarters.”
“I can see that,” the earl said. “Not that I had any intention of joining a march—for war or peace.”
A small, angry knot of men passed by clenching rumpled copies of the Daily Post in their hands. A banner waved over them—HONOR FIELD MARSHAL HAIG. They were chanting: “Two, four, five, and six, tear the Daily Post to bits....”
They moved off up the street toward the pacifists. A mounted policeman trailed after them.
“Yes,” the earl said. “Rather a good deal of anger about.”
“Are you going back to Abingdon, Father?” Charles asked.
“If I can find a taxi in this snarl.”
“I’ll go with you. I get a bit uneasy in crowds.”
“Coming back to stay for a while?”
“Yes. Willie’s going over to Ireland to look at a horse.”
William was following the crowd, walking side by side with Jacob. “No More War International” had called for a demonstration on this day no matter what the verdict of the Rilke trial. A thousand or more people, the majority of them women, had come from all parts of England, Scotland, and Wales. They marched under their own banners: LEEDS CHAPTER—SHEFFIELD & BARNSLEY—BIRMINGHAM—CARDIFF. There was a sprinkling from France and Belgium, a lone Portuguese couple from Lisbon who had lost their son at Ypres. And mixed up among them were small groups of Socialists and Communists wearing red armbands. The staunch, bitter groups with their HONOR FIELD MARSHAL HAIG and BRITISH LEGION banners stood on the pavements and jeered.
There was no violence. The antipacifist crowd did not follow. The police controlled the traffic on the Strand and shepherded the marchers past Admiralty Arch into the Mall and on across Green Park toward Hyde Park Corner.
William pointed ahead. “I say, isn’t that Winifred up there with the Lambeth group?”
Jacob, eyes downcast, thinking of other things, looked in the direction William was pointing. “Yes, it is. Why Lambeth of all places?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. Probably because there isn’t a chapter from Cadogan Square!”
“I’ll just pop on ahead and say hello.”
“By all means,” William said. “Give her my fond regards.”
She was not surprised to see him. “I thought you’d be about somewhere—if you were back in England.”
“Got back first of the week. How are you, Winnie?”
“Fine. A mother of three now, or had you heard?”
“No. A boy?”
“Girl. I called her Kate. Not Katherine—Kate. I like good, blunt, positive names that can’t be messed about with. What on earth’s the point of calling a child Winifred if everyone is bound to call her Winnie?”
“I quite agree.” He smiled at her and she glanced at him.
“What are you grinning about, Jacob?”
“Your strident positiveness, I suppose. I was thinking of when we first met. You must have been—oh, fifteen or sixteen. No older than that.”
She frowned. “I don’t remember.”
“Don’t you? I came to the Cadogan Square house with my father for dinner. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, our most beloved ex-prime minister, was your father’s guest. I’d just come back from the Balkans and was surlier than usual. We talked for about a minute. You were, in my opinion, too plump, too mousy, and too boring to be tolerated for longer than that. How little one knows.”
She took his hand and squeezed it. “You’re a lovely man, Jacob.”
They were waiting in Hyde Park: thirty young men in dark clothes—black shirts and black ties. A few wore trench coats although the day was sunny. There was something ominous about their brooding silence, the way they stood watching, flanking the gravel path the tired marchers were taking toward Speakers Corner and Marble Arch.
“Reds … Reds … look at the Reds.” A chanting, rhythmic, unnerving in its orchestrated hate. “Yids … Yids … see all the Yids.”
A group of mounted policemen eyed them warily, but the dark-clothed men were not doing anything, not intimidating anyone.
“Reds … Reds … look at the Reds.”
A few of them suddenly detached themselves from the group and walked alongside the marchers. They carried bundles of crudely duplicated copies of the Dearborn Independent, The International Jew, and pamphlets with Benito Mussolini’s picture on the front. They tried to press their literature into the hands of the marchers.
/> “Read this, sir … read this, ma’am … the truth … the Jewish-Communist conspiracy … subversion of Christian ethics and decency … the bulwark of fascist morality. Read it, sir. Read it, ma’am....”
A gangly young man in a raincoat tried to press some pamphlets into Jacob’s hand. “Read it, sir.”
“Buzz off,” Jacob said quietly.
The young man fell into step beside him. He stared at Jacob for a moment and then said, “You’re an Ikey, aren’t you?”
“I said buzz off. You’re not wanted here.”
“Yes,” Winifred said sharply, taking a firm hold of Jacob’s hand. “Go away.”
The man noticed the gesture and sneered. “I wouldn’t sleep with an oily Jew if I were you, miss. Get slippery kiddies that way.”
Jacob jerked his hand from Winifred’s grasp and sent a straight-arm punch into the side of the man’s face. The man reeled off the path and fell clumsily in the grass, his broadsides and pamphlets scattering across the ground.
“You bastard!” Jacob said as he stepped out of the line of march and kicked the material. The papers flew into the air, sheets of newsprint flying off in the wind. “Bloody rotten filth!”
The small knot of Fascists surged forward, most of them screening Jacob from the peace marchers while half a dozen others waded into him with flying fists.
William came running as fast as his stiff leg would permit. He had anticipated the action as soon as he had seen Jacob send the man in the raincoat flying. Two young Fascists tried to stop him by grabbing at his arms. He shook them away like flies. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the pale, tense face of Osbert—the leader—Osbert’s British League of Fascisti a reality after all.
“Don’t be a damn fool, Greville!” Osbert called out.
But he was beyond stopping now. He burst through the screen of dark-clothed men like a runaway bull. A man turned away from punching Jacob in the ribs and aimed a blow at William. He took it gleefully on the forearm and then backhanded the man into insensibility.