by Phillip Rock
Martin touched the white feather lying on the cover of one of his journals, shredded it into downy fragments.
“I guess I must. It has to be witnessed, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. Let me read you something printed this morning in the Telegraph, dated Mudros, Thursday last . . . by-line a certain Robert Allensworth who did honorable reporting for the Telegraph in the Boer War.” Lord Crewe shuffled among the papers in front of him and drew out a copy of the rival newspaper. “I shall not read the entire article, just this part: ‘The lieutenant laughed gaily, a boyish laugh of pure delight . . . and he was a mere boy, fresh from the playing fields of a great and noble public school. “It was a jolly lark,” this boy soldier cried, “Brother Turk has no stomach for English steel, they ran like hares when we charged them with the bayonet. It was a jolly half hour and gave us all quite a hearty appetite for breakfast.” ’ “ He folded the paper carefully and then dropped it into a wastebasket.
“I know Allensworth,” Martin said, watching the feathery fragments drift across the tabletop like lint. “He never went near the fighting. Came over from Egypt for three days and made up stories out of his own head.”
“There are many men like him . . . not too many like yourself. You may not be writing all the truth, but by God you’re writing enough of it so that you should feel no shame. Your descriptions of the attack on the fourth of June made every Englishman who read them weep at the bravery and the heartbreak of it. The censors barely cut a word. It was good, honest reporting, Rilke, and you did a service for every poor Tommy who died on those bloody slopes. You may criticize the high command’s handling of that attack in your journal, I don’t know, but such criticism, printed now, would only give comfort to our enemies.” He pushed the slim stack of notebooks toward Martin. “Keep these to yourself. And don’t look so glum, lad. A man can do only so much and no more in these times.”
He took a seat on the upper deck of a bus going along Fleet Street toward the Strand. The crowds that he looked down upon from the open-topped bus were anything but glum and dispirited. That a war was on was evident by the number of men in uniform, the recruiting posters on every letter box, and the white-feather girls prowling outside the cinemas, but the atmosphere in the city was one of lightness, as though the most pressing problem on this sunny afternoon was buying the right article in a shop or finding the best place for tea.
The briefcase felt heavy on his lap. Lord Crewe—Guv’nor—had been right, of course. The war had to go on, even if it shambled forward at the moment overburdened with inept and unimaginative commanders. Things would change in time, he supposed. Fresh minds rising to the top. Doubt about that gnawed at him. He had had the chance to observe the command structure of the army at first hand on Lemnos—the tight clique of brother officers above the rank of colonel, an esoteric fraternity that resented and feared outsiders. They had refused—politely, for politeness was inherent in their bones—war correspondents the permission to visit the battlefront until three weeks after the landings, and then only for limited times. He and Ashmead-Bartlett had ignored those restrictions when they finally reached the peninsula by the simple method of going directly to the front-line trenches, a spot where staff officers were loath to follow. A kind of vacuum existed between the men at the front and the men at headquarters. Operations were planned on maps at Lemnos without the staff officers having any clear idea of what those operations entailed for the men ordered to carry them out. Fifty yards looked a tiny distance on a map, a distance easily covered if one ignored the fact that every inch of those yards was barren of cover and under the sights of zeroed-in Turkish artillery and machine guns. The staff never talked of “the men”—that is, the tired, dirty, lice-infested, fly-plagued soldiers, weak from diarrhea—but always in terms of “the regiment.” “The Royal Windsors can do it. . . . One can always rely on the Lancashire Fusiliers. . . .” As though those dun-colored ranks living like moles were scarlet-clad phalanxes of immortals.
He tapped the briefcase and stared sourly at the crowded pavements. The holiday atmosphere irked him. Why? It was Friday afternoon, and people who had worked hard all week had a right to look forward to the weekend. Many of them probably had sons, fathers, brothers, husbands, or lovers at the front and felt the presence of the war keenly. That didn’t mean that they should walk around in mourning or not walk around at all. He was annoyed at them because he felt a pang of guilt for sitting in perfect safety on top of a London bus holding on his lap journals of anguish and fear. The men he had written about—the English, Indians, Frenchmen, Australians, and New Zealanders, the sun-scorched, thirst-plagued infantrymen clinging to their toehold in the Aegean—might at this moment be corpses turning black on the dead ground below Achi Baba or Chunuk Bair. Charles among them. That thought made his palms sweat. He had sought out Charles on his first trip over to Gallipoli from Lemnos, not knowing whether he was alive or dead, knowing only that his cousin’s battalion had been badly cut up leaving the River Clyde. “By gad, we can all be proud of the Windsors,” an elderly staff officer seated on the terrace of a café in Mudros, drinking Greek wine, had said the day after the landings. “Those chaps know how to die!”
The face of a woman in the crowd as the bus turned off the Strand toward Charing Cross Road. A slim, ivory-pale face. Thin, delicate features, slender nose, black hair. She had been in a uniform when he had seen her last; she was in a uniform now—the blue and red uniform of an army nurse. The bus slowed as a torrent of pedestrians crossed the street, heading for Trafalgar Square. He spotted her again, walking slowly, drifting along with the crowd. There was no point in yelling. She wouldn’t hear him, and quite possibly it wasn’t her at all. Clutching the briefcase to his side, he dashed down the aisle and half-ran, half-fell down the narrow curving steps to the bottom deck and then leaped past an astonished conductor into the street.
“Get killed that way, mate,” the man yelled after him.
Hemmed in by a crowd watching a recruiting drive of the London Scottish, kilted pipers parading under Nelson’s column, he lost sight of her in Trafalgar Square. He climbed onto the pedestal of the monument in order to see better and spotted a blue and red figure at the far edge of the square walking slowly toward the Haymarket. A recruiting sergeant made a grab for his arm.
“That’s the lad! There’s nothing to beat the London Scots!”
“Sorry,” Martin said, pulling away. “Thought you were the Black Watch.”
She was standing in front of a dress shop, gazing reflectively at the display in the window. He studied her profile for a second and then walked up to her.
“Ivy Thaxton?”
She looked at him curiously and then smiled. “Why, if it isn’t Mister Rilke . . . from Chicago, Illinois.”
“That’s right,” he said, grinning broadly. “Railroads and stockyards. I spotted you from the top of a bus . . . knew it was you. . . . Or, anyway, hoped it was. How are you?”
“Fine. And yourself?”
“Swell . . . just swell.”
“You certainly look fit. Been at the seaside?” Her violet eyes were innocent enough, but he felt disquieted by their steady gaze.
“Say,” he said nervously, “you’re not going to hand me a white feather or something, are you?”
“Why, whatever for?”
“Well, it happened once today. I guess I looked too healthy to be out of uniform.”
“You should have told her who you were,” she said heatedly. “The silly twit.” She touched his hand and smiled again. “I’m sorry if I gave you a turn. I was just being facetious. We’ve all read your articles in the Post. The men in the ward say you’re the only one who knows what the soldier goes through. I’m terribly proud of you, Mr. Rilke, and I do brag a bit about knowing you. Fancy! I used to make your bed!”
“Golly, that was a long time ago.”
She scowled. “Oh, the more I think about it, the angrier I get. All those feather girls are frumps. Nothing better to do with thei
r time than hang about street corners and shame young men.”
He touched the soft fabric of her uniform sleeve. “You’ve sure found something better to do with your time.”
“Yes. Joined the QA’s last September. Her ladyship helped me get in by writing a letter of recommendation. I’m not a sister yet, of course. It takes ever so much training to become that. I’m a probationer, training at All Souls Hospital in Holborn.”
“You’ll make it.”
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, “I will. I know how to work. And, oh, Lord, do they work us hard. This is my first afternoon off in weeks and I doubt if I’ll get another one for months.”
“When do you have to be back?”
“Eight o’clock.”
“It’s only four-thirty. Had tea yet?”
“No.”
“Neither have I. Will you join me? I have great respect for the QA’s. I met a dozen of your Sisters on Lemnos, and I owe every one of them a good cup of tea. There’s a White Manor in Charing Cross.”
“I understand it’s awfully posh,” she said doubtfully. “An orchestra and everything like that. I wouldn’t want you to go to any expense. I believe there’s an ordinary White Manor on Shaftesbury Avenue.”
“Ordinary places are for ordinary people. You’re special, Ivy. And anyway, I’ve got three months’ pay burning holes in my pocket.”
He talked about Gallipoli as they walked slowly toward Charing Cross and told her how he had met Charles Greville there, in the trenches at Cape Helles. She listened gravely, keenly aware of death and wounds.
“I hope that Master Charles is all right. That must be a hellish place. We haven’t received any of the Gallipoli wounded. They send most of them to Egypt and Malta. It’s just as well—we have so many coming in from Flanders.”
“Will they be sending you to France?”
“Not until I’m qualified to work on a surgical team. That might be nine months to a year from now. I hope the war will be over by then. Do you think it will?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Oh, dear.” She sighed. “Neither do most of the chaps I talk to in the wards. But one lad placed a little sign behind his bed. He lettered it himself very cleverly with a colored pencil. It reads, ‘Peace be with us in nineteen sixteen.’ Not that it will make much difference to him. He lost both legs and an arm at Festubert.”
Her somber, reflective mood changed as they walked into the plush elegance of the Grand Tea Salon on the second floor of the White Manor. An orchestra was playing a tango and many couples were dancing.
“Oh, my, isn’t it the grandest place!”
The tea was lavish—petits fours and éclairs, slices of Madeira cake and ices—too rich for Martin. He toyed with a piece of cake and watched Ivy eat.
“A welcome change from hospital food, I bet.”
She nodded and bit into a petit four. “Yes, they boil everything. I missed Abingdon Pryory at first. They had such good cooks there, didn’t they? I’m very fond of food, in case you haven’t noticed, but I never gain an ounce. Must be glandular.”
“Just youthful energy burning it off. How old are you, Ivy?”
“I turned eighteen in March. Getting on in life. Oh, dear, there are so many things I’d like to do . . . places I’d like to see. Do you know, this is the first time I’ve ever been out to tea with a man. Think of that!”
“Make the most of it then. Would you care to dance?”
“I never learned how. I’d hate to make a fool of myself in front of all these people.”
“Watch the dancers. None of them are very good . . . just having a good time. Come on, they’re playing fox-trots now. That’s easy to do . . . just walk backward while I hold you.”
“It doesn’t sound easy,” she said dubiously, “but I’ll give it a whirl.”
The first touch of her slender body made his legs feel weak. It seemed incredible how neatly she fitted against him. He marveled at that revelation and held her tightly.
“Am I doing it correctly?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” he said, brushing his cheek against hers, “you’re doing just swell.”
They danced until the tea dansant ended at six-thirty and the orchestra played its final number. It had been the most enjoyable couple of hours Martin had spent in a long time, and the most enjoyable she had ever spent, a fact that she made a point of telling him as they walked toward St. James’s Park.
“Oh, I did like that! I can’t wait to tell the other girls. And, oh, how beautiful some of those women looked in their gowns!”
“None as beautiful as you, Ivy.”
She stared ahead as though she hadn’t heard the compliment.
“Do you go dancing with lots of girls, Mr. Rilke?”
“Martin . . . please call me Martin. And no, I’ve been too busy to go dancing.”
“Did you go dancing in Chicago?”
“Sometimes. There were frat house dances occasionally.”
“I never went to a dance. Da didn’t approve of them. My da is a bit straitlaced.”
“Your father, you mean?”
“That’s right.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“Works in a shoe factory. He’s doing very well now. His establishment is making boots for the army. Queer, isn’t it? Times were so hard for him before the war and now he’s making ever so much money. Quite odd, if you stop to think about it.”
It would be light until nearly ten o’clock and this hour was the loveliest of the day, the sun catching the tops of the trees and all the buildings along Whitehall, the air cooling after the heat of the long day. The park was crowded with soldiers and their girls.
“I feel kind of silly carrying this briefcase, like some sort of door-to-door drummer.”
“I think it makes you look distinguished. I’m sure people think you just left Parliament and are on your way to see the king.”
“Taking my nurse with me, I suppose.”
“Yes. You’re subject to seizures and fits . . . like my Uncle Arthur, only Da says he only has fits when he suspects the publican of watering the beer.” She suddenly spread her arms wide. “Oh, I do love green parks! London would be such a lovely town if they’d only allow grass to grow in the streets.”
He took her hand and led her away from the path toward a grotto of trees.
“You’re such a happy soul, Ivy.”
“Do you think so? I’m not really. I’m a bit on the glum side most of the time. It’s being around so much pain. Oh, you have to keep cheery, Matron insists on that, but inside—around the heart—there’s always a dull ache.”
“Do you feel it now?”
“A little, yes. I mean to say, I’m enjoying myself and I’m awfully glad to be with you, but I have to be on duty in an hour and part of my mind is back in the ward. I’m in the amputee ward, you see—have been for the past nine weeks—and there’s such a terrible amount of sadness there.”
He dropped the briefcase and took her impulsively into his arms, pressing her to him, his hands strong against her back. There were couples all around them, seated or lying on the grass, under the trees, strolling by the dark green lake. No one paid the slightest attention as he kissed her firmly on the lips, as she kissed him. All the horrors of Gallipoli lay in the leather case at his feet, but all thought of them vanished for a moment in the sweetness of her mouth.
Hanna Rilke Greville lingered over her tea on the terrace of Abingdon Pryory; it was a high tea, with watercress sandwiches and thinly sliced ham and smoked Scotch salmon. She avoided large, heavy meals in the summertime, believing them conducive to gout in later years. Across the stone balustrade she could see William and four of his friends making a mockery of a tennis game, slamming balls into the well-rolled, clipped grass to see how high they could bounce or using their rackets as cricket bats and slapping the white balls into the trees. High-spirited lads, happy to be down from Eton for the holidays. Seventeen. A difficult age—not quit
e boys, not yet men. She knew that her son and his houseguests smoked cigarettes behind the stables and sampled the sherry; Coatsworth turned a blind eye to the latter while keeping the better casks firmly under lock and key.
The heat lingered, rising from the terrace stones. She fanned herself with a silk Japanese fan and watched the boys, leaping over the net now, back and forth, back and forth, like sheep over a fence. William was growing so tall. He would be taller than Charles. A fine, strapping boy and the apple of his father’s eye. So much like Tony—fine rider, good shot.
She felt a sense of dread the moment she saw the footman walk onto the terrace from the conservatory. His very age was disquieting. He moved so slowly and painfully on his old feet that it was really high farce to dress septuagenarians like him in livery. The poor man’s leaden countenance foretold doom. The pale blue envelope on the small silver tray he carried confirmed it.