The Passing Bells

by Phillip Rock

  WOMEN OF BRITAIN ANSWER THE CALL

  . . . to train as nurses in Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, the QA’s, or the Red Cross, or to learn the tricky business of stuffing lyddite into shell cases. Much jollier than waiting on tables or polishing the staircase banisters. The result of this exodus being that fully two-thirds of Abingdon Pryory was closed off, the furnishings covered with white sheeting. A house embalmed and awaiting resurrection. Dust settling gently in deserted corridors. Weeds peeking up through the flagstones on the terrace. He complained of neglect, the lack of help.

  “It’s the war, Tony,” was Hanna’s only reply. As if he had to be told! Charles in uniform, Roger Wood-Lacy as well. Not in France—yet. “In France.” What an ugly sound—ominous as the sounds he had heard in late October and during the first weeks in November, early in the mornings when the air was still, the rumble of artillery bombardments across the channel in Flanders. And then the casualty lists on the first page of the Times to be scanned over breakfast. Fifty-eight thousand names of the dead, wounded, and missing after Ypres alone. So many names that he recognized, could put faces to, the names of men he had hunted with, played cards with, but mainly the names of their sons. No, he didn’t need Hanna to remind him that there was a war going on.

  The chill lingered even after two cups of strong tea, the final cup laced with a dollop of Jamaica. There was a permanent frost on his spirits, and he felt incapable of dispelling it. God knows the paper was of no help. Nothing in the Times but the war, the lengthening number of names in the Roll of Honor. Not too many wounded and missing listed. The fighting had bogged down in the snow and freezing sleet. Many of the dead would be those poor devils who had finally, perhaps even mercifully, succumbed to wounds received in the summer and autumn at Mons, Le Cateau, the Marne, Messines, and Ypres. He glanced at the list with a heavy heart. Two names stood out. Gilsworth, R. T., Col. 1/Hampshire. Sutton, A., Capt. Royal Horse Guards.

  He remembered Andrew Sutton as a boisterous fifteen-year-old taking every jump with a wild, blood-chilling yell, like a red Indian. Damn fine horseman. He must send the marquess and Lady Mary a letter of condolence. The eldest son. Christ, what a terrible blow. And poor old Ronnie Gilsworth. How many times had they tramped through the fields above Pately Bridge after snipe? Some good news from the Dardanelles. Admiral Carden’s ships had successfully bombarded the Turkish forts on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Royal Marines had landed and poked about in the rubble without being fired on. The Turk had fled from the power of British naval gunnery. What they hoped to achieve in that remote corner of the world was not clear, but something was afoot. Strictly a navy show. Give the poor bloody devils of infantry a rest for a change, and yet the military seemed divided. The army very much against it. There was an article by Repington on page four:

  Defeat of the Central Powers in 1915 can only come by a decisive victory in France . . . in the spring . . . combined French and British offensive in Artois and Champagne . . . overwhelm German trench structure . . . power of the British cavalry to exploit infantry gains . . . the First Lord of the Admiralty is misguided in believing that sea power alone can bring the Turks to their knees . . . vast numbers of troops needed . . . consolidate peninsula and Asiatic shore . . . troop deployment to the east would seriously undermine the plans of Sir John French and Marshal Joffre.

  Dash it all! So much bickering back and forth between the services—not that he cared very much if young Winston Churchill was raked over the coals. Too bloody big for his britches, that fellow. Father died a lunatic.

  Coatsworth shuffled in with scrambled eggs and veal kidneys. He set the dish before the earl and removed the silver cover.

  “Ross is leaving us, m’lord,” he said, looking vaguely pleased.

  “What? Ross? Oh, I say.”

  “Yes, sir, just told us in the servants’ hall.”

  “Send the chap in after I’ve had my breakfast. Ross leaving . . . what a bloody bore.”

  The earl lit his first cigar of the day after first offering the humidor to his chauffeur, who preferred one of the earl’s Abdullah cigarettes from the tin of fifty on the table.

  “Well, Ross, I hear you’re rushing off to take the king’s shilling.”

  Jaimie Ross looked pained. “I wanted to join the army, sir. Nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to wear a khaki uniform, but the fact of the matter is I received a letter this morning by special post. From the Rolls-Royce company.”

  “The Rolls-Royce company?” Lord Stanmore’s incredulity showed on his face.

  “Yes, sir. In regard to a patent I took out on a carburetion system. The Rolls-Royce company had been interested, but felt it wasn’t necessary for their cars. But now they’re going to make aeroplane engines, sir, up at Enfield, sir, and they think that my system will make their engines run much more efficiently.”

  Lord Stanmore drew the cigar slowly from his mouth and allowed the smoke to bubble out. He was quite mystified.

  “Aeroplane engines?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ross said with great patience. He felt as though he were talking to a slow-witted child. “The army has ordered a great many aeroplanes, sir—for observation purposes and artillery spotting. What they have now are terribly slow, and the engine conks out if the machine turns upside down . . . drains all the petrol from the carburetor, sir. Same basic sort of trouble we used to have driving up Box Hill, tendency for the engine to stutter or even stall on steep grades.”

  “Upside down? Why on earth would they want to fly upside down, Ross?”

  “I suppose they can’t help it sometimes, sir. Strong winds . . . or evasive action.” The ash was growing on his cigarette, but he couldn’t quite muster the nerve to lean across the table and deposit it in the earl’s silver ashtray. He placed his hand behind his right leg and dropped the ash on the carpet, smoothing it into the nap with his foot. “Well, sir, I received this letter and the Rolls-Royce people want me to come up to Enfield to work with their engineers. They say I can do more to crush the Hun there than by enlisting in the ranks.”

  The earl studied him through plumes of gray-blue smoke. Curious. Ross, of all people—his Ross—getting a letter from Rolls-Royce. Quite incredible. Of course, he had known that the lad was mechanically clever, always tinkering with the cars and making them run better than when the factories had delivered them. Still, it was curious. The chap probably had little education, and yet he was considered too valuable to go to France. Charles had left Cambridge with first-class honors, and yet no one could find a greater use for his services than a second lieutenancy in the Royal Windsor Fusiliers.

  “I suppose these engines are quite important, Ross.”

  “Oh, yes, sir. I was reading just the other day in Mechanics and Journeymen—”

  “In what?”

  “Mechanics and Journeymen, sir, a periodical I subscribe to, very popular in the machinists and mechanics trade, sir. . . . Well, there was an article that caught my eye. . . . The editor of the journal wrote that it was going to be machines that would win the war, sir—better weapons, faster and more reliable aeroplanes—and that the men who produced them were more valuable . . . or, anyway, as valuable, sir, as Tommy in the line.”

  “Yes,” the earl mused, eyes half closed, “yes, I dare say.”

  “In fact, sir, they’re weeding out machinists from the army and sending them back to their lathes.”

  “Quite so. It was in the Times. When are you leaving us, Ross?”

  “They want me as soon as possible. Within a few days at the outside.”

  “Dashed inconvenient for me, I must say. Where on earth shall I find another driver?”

  Jaimie Ross shifted his feet uncomfortably. The cigarette had burned down to his fingers, and he was forced to crush it out in the earl’s gleaming tray.

  “There’s always Maddox in the village, sir.”

  The earl made a scoffing sound deep in his throat. “Man must be eighty if he’s a day.”<
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  “Or young Fishcombe, sir. He’s only sixteen, but he drives his father’s van.”

  “Yes, I suppose I could hire him.”

  “Or, begging your lordship’s pardon, why don’t you do your own driving? I could teach you in just a few hours. It’s really quite simple.”

  “I’m sure it is, Ross,” he said stiffly, “but I prefer to be driven.”

  He was struggling to prevent the patterns of his life from being irrevocably washed away. It’s the war, Tony. It explained the giving up of his stable, the shutting down of most of his house, the gradual turning of his gardens into an unpruned wilderness. It explained the departure of his chauffeur and the difficulty of finding a suitable replacement. One had simply to accept it all as a fact, an idea against which there was no possible argument. It was childish not to consider Ross’s proposal, but, surely, the war would be over by spring, and everything would return to normal.

  He took a glass of rum neat and felt better for it. Sleet seethed against the library windows. Hanna had been on the telephone to Lady Mary for an hour. When she finally hung up, she was dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief.

  “She’s taking it so wonderfully. Andrew died of wounds but was in no pain. Mary read me the letter his colonel sent. The boy was terribly brave . . . led his troop against a machine gun that was holding up an advance. Terrible . . . terrible . . . and yet Mary seemed so resigned . . . so fatalistic about it. And she has no fears for her other sons. John and Timothy are in France, and Bramwell is in an officer-training corps at Oxford. She told me that she senses an aura of invincibility around them. A holy shield.”

  “I never thought of Mary as being a religious person,” the earl said moodily, staring at the windows, the icy sheen across the leaded glass.

  “She isn’t. She believes there is a greater force than our modern conception of God . . . an ancient spirit that the Druids knew well. She told me once that she had felt that spirit surround her when she stood in the center of Stonehenge long ago.”

  “Utter rot,” the earl muttered.

  “Perhaps, but it comforts her.”

  “The ‘holy shield’ did damn little good for Andrew.”

  “She said only his body died. I’m not certain what she meant by that.” She twisted the handkerchief into a lace string. “Alex told me this morning that she has a surprise for us. The child sounded quite excited.”

  “Alexandra is always excited.”

  “Quite bubbly, in fact.”

  “Did you tell her that Winifred’s brother is dead?”

  “No . . . not yet.”

  “Ronnie Gilsworth was killed also. You remember him . . . Colonel Gilsworth . . . we used to go hunting together.”

  “Yes,” she said vacantly. “So many are gone in such a short time. Ours and theirs. I wonder if any of the Rilkes . . .”

  She could not complete the thought. She could expect no words of sympathy from her husband over the fate of her relatives in Germany. Anti-German feeling ran like a virulent fever throughout the entire country. There was even talk in Parliament of suggesting firmly to the Crown that the name of the royal house be changed from Saxe-Coburg to something more English. Mr. Koepke, the baker who had sold his bread and cakes in Guildford for the past twenty years, had been interned, taken away without a moment’s notice. Poor Adolph Koepke, who had always kept a small barrel of broken biscuits and jam tarts by the door for passing children to take free of charge, hauled off in a police van like a common criminal. The same children who had filled their pockets with old Koepke’s generosity had stood in the street and jeered, then scrawled DIRTY GERMAN across the windows of his shop with paint. Mrs. Kenilworth, sister of the bishop of Stoke, lived in Abingdon and had the misfortune of owning a dachshund bitch. A boy hurled a stone at it, and she no longer dared take the poor little beast out of the house except at night. Madness.

  She pulled and twisted the handkerchief abstractedly. There was a twelve-page letter from her great-aunt Louise, Baroness Seebach, locked in her sitting room desk. Martin had delivered it to her after visiting Germany in September. He had spent two weeks with the Rilkes and the Seebachs, the Grunewalds and the Hoffman-Schusters in Lübeck, Koblenz, Hanover, and Berlin. The baroness, ninety years old and, in Martin’s words, “sharp as a tack,” had entrusted the letter to him. It contained an up-to-the-second family tree painstakingly compiled by the old woman, showing the Rilkes and all their Germanic branches. So many names listed, so many young men—tiny asterisks beside the names of those in uniform. Cousin Frederick Ernst von Rilke’s two sons, Werner and Otto—Werner the same age as Charles, Otto two years older. They had been in the reserve officer corps at the university of Lübeck. Martin had met them and liked them. They were in active service now, the infantry. Were they alive or dead? The cold rain hissed against the glass and gave no answer.

  “Quite a remarkable country, Aunt Hanna,” Martin had told her. He had been impressed by the efficiency of the modern German state, impressed by the things that had always impressed her when she used to visit Germany every spring: the absence of extreme poverty, the slumless cities, the school system and the working conditions in the factories—a nursery school for the children of women workers at the Rilke chemical plant in Koblenz—the sunny, well-ventilated electric motors plant at Potsdam, so unlike English factories, which were like dark airless caves.

  “Werner and Otto showed me around. Very nice guys,” Martin had said.

  She glanced at her husband, who was staring into nothingness, brooding at the bleakness of the day, thinking no doubt of Andrew Sutton and Colonel Gilsworth. Tony had been fond of Werner and Otto. Otto had stayed at the Park Lane house for seven months in 1912 while studying chemical engineering at the University of London. He would not be fond of them now.

  She had always been proud of her German blood and proud of what Germany had accomplished in less than half a century. The Germany that her father had known had been a land of peasants and artisans, a plodding, early-rising, thoughtful, God-fearing folk who spawned out of their lean soil great thinkers—Goethe, Kant, Heine, Schiller—and then, under Bismarck, great doers. “Aus dem lern-folk soll ein That-folk werden,” Bismarck had promised, and now German industry was second to none in the world. Germany’s steel production dwarfed that of England’s. Its merchant ships challenged the British flag on the sea lanes. The roots of the war lay there—British fear of German expansion and German arrogance. Yes, German arrogance. It was not a perfect society by any means. Not Utopia. A rigid caste system dominated by Prussian militarism. No, not perfect by any means, but not a nation of red-eyed monsters either. German soldiers did not rape Belgian nuns on altar steps, did not spit Belgian babies on swords and bayonets and tie Belgian virgins by their hair to the clappers of church bells. All of that talk was propaganda nonsense, but it was believed as gospel truth, the ugly rumors spawned by the factual brutality of the German Army’s march through Belgium. Martin had witnessed some of that brutality. Werner had been posted to a regiment in occupied Brussels, and Martin had traveled with him as far as Louvain. Soldiers there, infuriated by snipers, seeing francs-tireurs hiding in every alley, kneeling behind every wall, had lost their heads and run amok, shooting a few innocent civilians and torching a few buildings. The fires had spread out of control until large sections of the old town, including the medieval library, had burned to the ground. An appalling incident, but that was war. One terrible incident after another. Martin had explained it all very well, seated at the dining table the night of his return to England, the center of everyone’s attention.

  “Some troops went berserk. I suppose you could say that the burning of Louvain is similar to the burning of Columbia, South Carolina, by Sherman’s troops during the Civil War. But, gosh, it was a shocking sight. Werner was horrified. We were all horrified. A colonel who traveled with us from Berlin wept at the sight of the—”

  “A Hun colonel?” one of the guests had asked incredulously.

 
“A German, yes,” Martin had replied quietly. “The man had visited Louvain long before the war when he had been a student at Heidelberg.”

  “A student of what? Butchery?”

  There was no point in trying to speak rationally or objectively about the war, or about the Germans. Any chance of that had fled during the terrible weeks in November, buried forever with the British dead at Ypres.

  “Mama . . . Papa . . . close your eyes!” Alexandra’s voice from beyond the library door. It was easy for Hanna to comply. Her eyes were already closed, her lips moving slightly in a soundless prayer, “Ach du lieber Gott . . .”

  The door opened. “You can look now!”

  Alexandra in a nurse’s uniform, pirouetting so that the long white skirt swirled, the white veil floating from beneath a white headband, red crosses on the sides of it.

  “How . . . summery you look,” Hanna said slowly, not trusting her voice.

  The earl look bemused. “What on earth . . . ?”

  “I joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Red Cross,” Alexandra blurted happily. “Jennifer Wiggins, Cecily, Jane Hargreaves, Sheila, and I all joined up together.” She made another dress model’s turn. “Do you like it? Summery, yes, Mama, because this is the summer uniform. The winter one is a pale blue serge with accents of red . . . but it doesn’t fit properly in the bodice. I shall have to return it to Ferris for refitting before they make the others.”

  “Others?” the earl muttered.

  “Three of each—three summer, white . . . three winter, blue. And a couple of heavy wool cloaks for cold weather. And I must get the proper type of shoes. We shall be doing so much walking, you know.”

  “What on earth do you know about nursing?” the earl asked.

  “Oh, we shan’t be doing that awful bedpan and dressing type of thing. They have proper nurses for that . . . elderly women. Our jobs will be to look after men who are convalescing. Push them in their rolling chairs . . . write letters for them if their hands are bandaged or their arms are in casts . . . read to them if the poor dears have been blinded. That sort of thing. There will be ever so much to do.”