The Passing Bells

by Phillip Rock

  “Will you be leaving home?” Hanna asked.

  “Yes, in a way. We shall be living in a dorm. But I shan’t be far off. The Hargreaves gave their house at Roehampton to the Red Cross . . . as a convalescent hospital for officers. They’re jolly glad to be rid of it . . . such an awful barn of a place. They moved into a perfectly darling house in Portman Square.” She made a final pirouette. “Do you like me in it? Isn’t it chic?”

  “Dashed smart,” the earl said without conviction. “Are you sure you can do that sort of work? Some of those poor fellows will be quite badly off, you know.”

  Alexandra checked her image in a mirror and couldn’t help but smile at what she saw. An angel of mercy. The headband and veil suited her. Made her look like an especially pretty young nun. Not too concealing, though. One could still see her blonde hair.

  “I shall do quite well, Papa. I can feel it in my heart.” She drew herself up proudly. A Nightingale figure in the glass. “It might be difficult at first, but this is war and one must be prepared for some degree of travail and self-sacrifice.”

  The rain seethed on the drill ground, turning the churned turf into a morass. The platoon moved across it, ankle deep in mud. Barely half of the men were in uniform, the rest struggled along in cheap mackintoshes. A bowler hat or two was to be seen, but mostly there were cloth caps. The working poor were working at soldiering for a shilling a day. Only ten men had rifles.

  “Platoon . . . halt! Dismissed!”

  They streamed toward the barracks in a sodden mass.

  Second Lieutenant Charles Greville watched them go. He was properly dressed for a soldier of King and Country in a well-fitting uniform, decent boots, a British Warm coat. The uniform was not provided by the government; they merely gave him a token amount of money toward its purchase. The uniform came from Hanesbury & Peeke, Military and Clerical Tailors, the Haymarket, London. It had cost a great deal of money and was worth every farthing.

  Strangely enough, the men did not resent his martial magnificence in the least. When he stuck his head through the barracks’ doorway, they all grinned at him.

  “You chaps all right?”

  “Right as bloody rain, sir!” a gangly young man said, warming his backside by the potbelly stove. “Are we downhearted?”

  The platoon answered with fervor, “NOOOO!”

  So much for that. First Platoon, D Company, Second Battalion of the Royal Windsor Fusiliers was right as rain. Charles walked on to the mess, hurrying in anticipation of a whiskey and hot water—a double whiskey, come to think of it.

  The mess was crowded, the barman hard pressed to keep up with the demand. The Royal Windsors shared the mess with a new battalion of the London Rifles. “Quite unthinkable before the war,” the Royal Windsors’ adjutant had remarked sourly when the London’s officers had first entered the mess. The breaking of tradition didn’t faze the younger officers of either regiment. They were all civilians in uniform, a few short months removed from Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, the Inns of Court, or budding business careers. Sharing the mess gave them the opportunity to share their uncertainties at what they were doing—or trying to do. They were all candidly aware of their shortcomings.

  “I wish to hell I had just one NCO who knew the ropes,” a London Rifles lieutenant remarked moodily. “I feel such a bloody fool drilling the men with a book in my hand.”

  Second Lieutenant Roger Wood-Lacy, the Royal Windors, took a sip of his ginger beer.

  “The men don’t mind. I told my chaps straight out that I didn’t know the first thing about drilling, and we muddled through together. I must say, in all modesty, that we’re first rate now.”

  “When are they going to instruct us on trenches?” a downy-cheeked subaltern asked.

  “When we get to France,” Charles said as he joined the group at the bar. “I understand they’re building a training base at Harfleur, and they’ll run us through it for a week or two before sending us up to the line.”

  “With half our lads in macks, bowlers, and brollies,” Roger scoffed. “Fritz’ll die from laughing.”

  “All of the men will be in uniform by the middle of next week . . . and they’ll have Lee-Enfields and bayonets by then, too. Colonel told me this morning. That goes for the Londons as well.”

  “I hope you’re right,” a London Rifles officer said. “The lads find it difficult to feel like soldiers when they don’t look like soldiers. I marched my platoon over to Datchet Common the other day, and some horrid chap standing outside a public house wanted to know where I was going with ‘a mob of bleedin’ navvies’! If there’d been a man among us with a working rifle, I’d have ordered the blighter shot.”

  “He’d only have missed,” Roger said. “I doubt if there are ten men in your battalion or ours who know which end of the rifle does what.”

  Charles smiled sardonically and ordered his hot whiskey. He recalled Fenton telling him that the Guards never talked shop in the mess. That might well have been a tradition in the Royal Windsor Fusiliers too, but before the war, before the First Battalion, the regulars, had been destroyed at Ypres. New traditions were being formed at the depot in the shadow of Windsor Castle that were no doubt shocking to those who had known the regiment in peacetime. It was said that Queen Victoria used to watch the men drill from her sitting room window. She would have been dismayed if she had watched them now. But there was no point in reflecting on the past. There wasn’t an enlistee in his platoon who could have told him what the regiment had done at Blenheim, Oudinarde, Badajoz, Vittoria, Quatre Bras, Inkerman, or Tel-el-Kebir. Those battles meant nothing to them—mere faded lettering on the regimental colors, half-remembered names from dimly recalled school lessons. They were eager to make their own history, singing “Tipperary” as they marched in the rain in their wretched clothes.

  “What are you up to this afternoon?” Roger asked.

  Charles looked at his wristwatch. “Meeting Lydia at Charing Cross—if I don’t miss the train. I’ve got noon to midnight off.”

  “Lucky devil! Where are you taking her?”

  “Lunch at the Piccadilly . . . perhaps the theater. I don’t much care what we do. Lounging around on a sofa with a brandy and soda would suit me fine.”

  “Typical thinking of the active-service officer.” Roger scowled at the bubbles in his glass. “I suppose you heard the news about poor Winnie’s brother.”

  “Yes. Bad luck. Barely knew the chap . . . yet . . . well, it’s rotten. I’ll send her a letter.”

  “Got a note from Fenton this morning. They upped him to major.”

  “Still on staff?”

  “No, back with the Guards. In trenches near Béthune. He says they’re quite snug and enjoying the winter sports. Only a hangman would appreciate Fenton’s humor.”

  “Well,” he said lamely, glancing at his watch again, “you know your brother.”

  Did Roger? He wondered, seated in the train as it skirted the freezing Thames, if they would ever know Fenton again. Not the old Fenton, surely. “In trenches.” Those two words separated Fenton from the majority of mankind as completely as though he were on the far side of the moon. Being “in trenches” was an experience that only those who had been in them could possibly imagine. Those few survivors of the First Battalion who had drifted back to the Fusiliers depot at Windsor never talked about their experiences at Wytschaete in November. Never in fact even talked to each other, although they all shared the same memories of that hellish place. They kept what they had seen and done on White Sheet Ridge to themselves. There was a veil drawn about each man that was totally impenetrable. They had glimpsed purgatory and were not whispering its secrets to Dante or anyone else. Fenton would be the same, withdrawing behind his gift for sardonic understatement to blot out the horrors. The official communiqués from France told of heavy artillery exchanges from Aubers Ridge to the La Bassée canal. Fenton would be somewhere in that area, “quite snug and enjoying the winter sports.” He tried to imagine what it must be like
to huddle in an icy trench while shells slammed into iron-hard ground. He could not bring any vision into focus. It was a mystery that must await his own initiation.

  “How grand you look,” Lydia said as he pushed his way through the crowded station to meet her.

  “You look rather grand yourself,” he said with a grin of pure joy. She looked so beautiful in a Russian sable coat that he felt like sweeping her into his arms and kissing her right there in front of a thousand people—not that anyone would have cared or even noticed. There were soldiers kissing girls everywhere one looked among the battalion waiting to board a train for Folkestone, their packs and rifles stacked in momentarily neglected rows down the platform, and yet he pecked at her cheek almost furtively.

  “How demonstrative you are, Charles.” Her smile was cryptic. “Have you missed me terribly?”

  He took hold of her gloved hands. “You know I have.”

  “I would never know by your letters.”

  “Sorry.” He squeezed her hands as though to prove his sincerity. “It was almost impossible to write. We’ve been on the go eighteen hours a day trying to learn soldiering and teach it to the men. It’s been the blind leading the blind, but we’re starting to form into shape now and I’ll be able to come up to London more often.” He was about to add, “Before they ship us to France,” but thought better of it. There was no point in putting an immediate damper on the afternoon.

  She kissed him squarely on the mouth. “There! That’s a proper welcome. Kindly make a note of it, Lieutenant Greville.” He hugged her to him, but it was awkward—so much fur and wool khaki between them. Her perfume made him giddy. How exquisitely marvelous was the smell of woman! He thought of the dankly rancid odor of his platoon in the tar-paper and wood barracks, the haze from sodden cloth as they ringed the stove.

  “It’s so marvelous to be with you again,” he murmured, brushing his lips against her neck. “It seems like an age.”

  It seemed that way to her, too. This tall, uniformed, lean-faced man seemed almost a stranger in some ways. Not that he had changed that much in a physical sense—a bit thinner perhaps—but so much else had changed. The span of time between October 1914 and February 1915 could not be measured in months. It seemed like the gap between one century and another. She clung tightly to his arm as they walked out of the station. Ambulances were drawn up along the Strand for blocks, waiting for the hospital train from Southampton. They hurried past them in silence into Buckingham Street, where she had parked her car.

  “I thought we might have lunch at the Piccadilly grill,” he said as she handed him the car keys.

  “It’s terribly dull there. Nothing but grim-faced matrons and retired brigadiers. I took the liberty of reserving a table at the Cafe Royal . . . far from the orchestra, so we can talk, talk, talk.”

  Talking was out of the question except at a level near shouting that Charles found irritating. The Cafe Royal was jammed with men in uniform (most of them with the red tabs of staff officers on their lapels), businessmen, high government officials, and droves of elegant women (most of them considerably younger than their escorts). An orchestra played ragtime, and the dance floor was so densely crowded that couples could barely go through the gyrations of the “Grizzly Bear” or the “Temptation Rag.” The menu was extensive and the prices outrageous. It was not a place where second lieutenants took their girls on a second lieutenant’s pay. But he had left those modest trappings back at Windsor along with his muddy boots. In the Cafe Royal, he was the Right Honorable Charles Greville, heir to an earldom, and to hell with expense.

  The food was ambrosial after regimental boiled beef and greens, the Pouilly-Fumé pure nectar, but the orchestral thumpings and wailings, the squeal of the female dancers doing the maxixe, became too much to bear. He smiled ruefully and raised his voice above the din.

  “Rather difficult to talk here.”

  “Yes,” Lydia agreed. “Shall we go?”

  “Please.”

  It was raining again, an arctic drizzle from a black sullen sky. They drove to a house her father owned in Grosvenor Square, twenty rooms of Regency elegance, one of Archie’s many London residences.

  “Don’t you feel cramped?” Charles asked, eyeing the domed ceiling in the foyer with its skylight of stained glass, the long marble corridors, doorways framed in the Ionic order.

  “We do a great deal of entertaining lately,” she said, handing her coat to a maid. “This place is really more for Daddy’s friends at the ministry than it is for us.”

  “Archie in the government! I couldn’t believe it when I saw the announcement in the Times.”

  “Yes, on a war committee, and enjoying every minute of it. He and the minister are very much alike.”

  “Langham, is it?”

  “Yes. David Selkirk Langham . . . whirring like a dynamo . . . the Lancashire bantam cock . . . sharp of spur and tongue . . . soothing half of Parliament and irritating the rest.”

  “What exactly is your father doing?”

  “Applying the Foxe Ltd. method to the war effort. The three pillars of the company—advertising, efficiency, and quality. He started by criticizing the recruiting posters. Kitchener sticking his fat finger in one’s face will be replaced by more subtle inducements. And then there’s the problem of army rations . . . the system is quite inadequate for the million or so men Kitchener wants. Food distribution is Daddy’s game, you know. The whole purpose of Langham’s ministry is to get experts to handle the logistical problems of the war. He believes that war is far too complex a matter to be left to the military. He just recruited Lord whatever-his-name-is—you know, the London omnibus tycoon—to help solve the army’s transportation problems.”

  A fire burned in the drawing room, reflecting off highly polished wood, silver, and glass. It was an eighteenth-century room, large but warmly intimate. The maid drew the velvet drapes to shut out the bleakness of the afternoon while a butler in livery brought brandy in a cut-crystal decanter.

  “And yourself?” Charles asked. “What are you doing to keep busy?”

  “Oh, a rather ambiguous role in the war effort. I’m serving as Daddy’s social secretary . . . Langham’s too, in a way. I arrange small dinners here . . . dining room politics . . . Whig and Tory . . . capital and labor breaking bread and resolving to pull together for a change. I suppose it sounds rather silly and frivolous to you, but more things are accomplished over a good dinner and a fine port than one could possibly realize.”

  “What do you think can be accomplished after a fine lunch and a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé? Not to mention a rare old brandy.”

  “That’s really up to you, isn’t it?” she said, sitting on a divan and patting the cushion beside her.

  Charles waited until the maid and butler had left the room and then sat next to her.

  “I know what I’d like to accomplish . . . and will.”

  She looked at him intently and placed a cool hand against the side of his face.

  “Please, Charles. Don’t spoil a perfectly wonderful day by making promises that you’re in no position to keep. It isn’t fair to me . . . or you.”

  He drained his brandy in one swallow and set the bulbous glass on a side table.

  “That’s all in the past, Lydia. I know it is . . . I can sense it. Don’t you feel a great change in the air? A fresh wind? Oh, I don’t know how to put it exactly. A paradox. I mean to say, I rather dread the thought of going to France and having shells tossed at my head, and yet I’m glad we’re at war and happy to be a part of it. Something new and marvelously exciting is taking place in our lives. A clean start for a tired old world. The ranks are aware of it too—all those ex-clerks, delivery boys, apprentices. . . . They know that the war will change their lives utterly—break the molds, the ruts. That’s why they’re so cheerful and uncomplaining. Their uniforms, when they have them, are shoddy, the food is dull, the barracks damp and drafty . . . and yet they act like schoolboys on holiday.” He took hold of her hand and kiss
ed the palm of it. “We’ll be going across soon, at least that’s the talk in the mess. . . . Drive the Boche to the Rhine this spring and summer. When I get back, I shall marry you . . . and if my father doesn’t like it, he can lump it . . . and if he threatens to disavow me, I shall shame him in front of the peers. I shall go to the House of Lords and condemn him for his actions.”

  “Oh, Charles!” she laughed, “that’s nonsense.”

  “I mean it,” he said fiercely. “I mean every word. Or, anyway, I’d threaten such action and he’d back down in a hurry. By God, it’s young men who are fighting this war and it’s young men who must benefit from the victory. I shall not back off on my rights. That I promise you, Lydia.”

  He made an attempt to get down on one knee in front of her, but stumbled in doing so. The rich food of the Cafe Royal, the wine, the brandy, the glow of the fire, the fact that he had been up before dawn conspired to rob him of grace. His head spun and he sat at her feet and rested his brow against her knees.

  “Lord,” he muttered. “I feel like I’ve been drugged.”

  “Poor darling.” She bent forward and kissed the top of his head. “You must be exhausted. Would you like to take a nap?”

  “Yes . . . I think so . . . for an hour or two.”

  She stroked his hair, idly, unconsciously sensual. “We don’t have to go to the theater. You can rest . . . and then we’ll have supper here.”

  “I have to be back by midnight.”

  “I know. I arranged with Daddy to have Simmons drive you. The car will be here at ten-thirty. The night train is so horrid.”

  He nested his head in her lap and sighed with contentment.

  “Oh, Lydia . . . I feel such peace with you.”

  “And I with you, my darling. But come on . . . don’t go to sleep on the floor. You can stretch out in a perfectly luxurious bed.”