by Phillip Rock
A grave in Flanders. Far from the places she had hoped to see. Chicago, Illinois, on Lake Michigan. Railroads and stockyards.
No. I couldn’t face going to London and witnessing the pomp at the Abbey, not with her on this side of the channel. A quiet spot. Just the wind and a blackbird swaying on a cypress tree, and then, at eleven, the distant tolling of a bell.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
All the characters in this book, with the obvious exception of historical personages, are imaginary. The Royal Windsor Fusiliers will not appear on any list of regiments of the British Army, past or present, but all other regiments are real and fought in the actions mentioned.
I have tried to be faithful in the description of events, but this is not a work of history and if I have erred in places or taken license, may the historians forgive me.
No novel set against the background of the Great War could be accomplished without help from the works of other writers. I am especially grateful to the following: Gallipoli by John Masefield (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1918), for details of the landings from the River Clyde and the battalions involved; The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties by Ronald Blythe (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), for Mr. Blythe’s chapter on the Unknown Warrior; The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), for countless details; Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man (New York: Coward, McCann, 1929) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (New York: Coward McCann, 1930); Good-bye to All That by Robert Graves (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), a tattered paperback bought long ago which inspired the writing of this book in the first place; and to Martin Middlebrook of Boston, Lincolnshire, for the superlative historical craftsmanship of his First Day on the Somme (W. W. Norton & Company, 1972).
And a special debt from the heart to all the poets who died too soon.
P.S.
About the author
Phillip Rock
About the book
The Passing Bells Series
Discussion Questions
Read on
“Anthem for Doomed Youth”
by Wilfred Owen
An Excerpt from Circles of Time
About the Author
Phillip Rock
BORN IN HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA, in 1927, Phillip Rock was the son of Academy Award–winning silent film producer Joe Rock. Phillip moved to England with his family when he was seven, attending school there for six years until the blitz of 1940, when he returned to America and then served with the U.S. Navy toward the end of World War II. He spent most of his adult life in Los Angeles, and was the author of three previous novels before The Passing Bells series: Flickers, The Dead in Guanajuato, and The Extraordinary Seaman. He died in 2004.
Of The Passing Bells, Phillip Rock wrote, “The idea came to me when I was a boy and stood with my father in a London street at the hour of eleven on the eleventh day of November and first heard that awful minute of total silence as the entire nation stood with bowed heads remembering their dead. It took a long time to put it on paper.”
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About the Book
The Passing Bells Series
THE GUNS OF AUGUST are rumbling throughout Europe in the summer of 1914, but war has not yet touched Abingdon Pryory. Here, at the grand summer home of the Greville family, the parties, dances, and romances play on. Alexandra Greville embarks on her debutante season, while brother Charles remains hopelessly in love with the beautiful, untitled Lydia Foxe, knowing his father, the Earl of Stanmore, will never approve of the match. Downstairs, the new servant Ivy struggles to adjust to the routines of the well-oiled household staff while shrugging off unwelcome attentions, and the arrival of American cousin Martin Rilke, a Chicago newspaperman, threatens to disrupt the daily routine.
But ultimately, the Great War will not be denied, shattering the social season and household tranquility, crumbling class barriers, and bringing its myriad horrors home—when what begins for the high-bred Grevilles as a glorious adventure soon begins unraveling the very fabric of British high society.
He drove up to Flanders in the early summer of 1921 knowing that it would be for the last time. He had finally, after nearly four years, reconciled himself to the unalterable fact that she was dead.
So begins this haunting novel of war’s aftermath and the search for love and hope in a world totally changed. A generation has been lost on the Western Front. The dead have been buried, a harsh peace forged, and the howl of shells replaced by the wail of saxophones as the Jazz Age begins. But ghosts linger—that long-ago golden summer of 1914 tugging at the memory of Martin Rilke and his British cousins, the Grevilles.
From the countess to the chauffeur, the inhabitants of Abingdon Pryory seek to forget the past and adjust their lives to a new era in which old values have been irretrievably swept away. Charles Greville suffers from acute shell shock and his friend Colonel Wood-Lacy is exiled to faraway army outposts, while Alexandra Greville finds new love with an unlikely suitor; and to overcome the loss of his wife, Martin Rilke throws himself into reporting, discovering unsettling currents in the German political scene. Their stories unfold against England’s most gracious manor house, the steamy nightclubs of London’s Soho, and the despair of Germany. Lives are renewed, new loves found, and a future of peace and happiness is glimpsed—for the moment.
The final installment of the saga of the Grevilles of Abingdon begins in the early 1930s, as the dizzy gaiety of the Jazz Age comes to a shattering end. What follows is a decade of change and uncertainty, as the younger generation, born during or just after “the war to end all wars,” comes of age: the beautiful Wood-Lacy twins, Jennifer and Victoria, and their passionate younger sister, Kate; Derek Ramsey, born only weeks after his father fell in France; and the American writer Martin Rilke, who will overcome his questionable heritage with the worldwide fame that will soon come to him. In their heady youth and bittersweet growth to adulthood, they are the future—but the shadows that touched the lives of the generation before are destined to reach out to their own, as German bombers course toward England.
Discussion Questions
1. The “passing bells” of the title refer to bells tolled to announce a death; the book’s epigraph reads, “Let there be rung the passing bells to call the living, to mourn the dead.” Why do you think Phillip Rock chose to title the novel based on this idea?
2. In Book One, what seems to be the attitude of the Grevilles and their contemporaries toward the war—especially Charles Greville, Roger Wood-Lacy, and Fenton Wood-Lacy? How do they envision it?
3. Martin Rilke’s diary entries are embedded throughout the novel. Why do you think the author included Martin’s reflections? What did you learn from his perspective on events?
4. Did you find Joseph Golden a sympathetic character? What is his attitude toward politics and the newspaper’s role? Do you find Golden’s perspective realistic or cynical?
5. How does Alexandra Greville change as a result of becoming involved with the war effort? Were you surprised by her actions? Do you think she would have made the same decisions if she had met Robin Mackendric before the war?
6. In what ways does the war seem to disrupt the established social order in this novel? What challenges or opportunities does it present, for both upper-class characters like Alexandra and lower-class employees like Ivy Thaxton and Jaimie Ross?
7. Lord Stanmore stiffly dismisses Jaimie Ross’s suggestion that he learn to do his own driving, since the war has taken all of the eligible chauffeurs from the village. Why do you think he is so opposed to the changes brought on by the war?
8. The battle and hospital scenes witnessed by Charles, Fenton, Martin, and even Alexandra are an abrupt departure from the bucolic setting of Abingdon Pryory. What effect does the author achieve with this juxtaposition?
9. At the beginning of the novel, Charles Greville and
Roger Wood-Lacy are scholars with seemingly romantic ideas. How is Charles affected by the reality of his wartime experience? What did you think of his actions at the end of the novel? Did he do the right thing?
10. Why do Fenton, Martin, and Jacob carry out the plan begun by Charles? What do they hope the book will achieve, if anything?
11. In what ways do you think the Grevilles will be able to return to life as it was in the summer of 1914? In what ways will it never be the same?
12. Wilfred Owen was an English poet and soldier who served in the war and was killed in 1918. His realistic poetry described the horrors of trench warfare and contradicted public perception of the war. How do the themes of the novel echo Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” found on the following page, which famously opens with a reference to “passing-bells”?
Read on
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Written in 1917, published posthumously in 1920.
An Excerpt from Circles of Time
THE NEXT NOVEL in the Passing Bells series featuring the beloved Greville family, their household, and their friends in the aftermath of the Great War.
1
He drove up to Flanders in the early summer of 1921 knowing that it would be for the last time. He had finally, after nearly four years, reconciled himself to the unalterable fact that she was dead.
He drove slowly from Paris along the dusty, poplar-lined road to Amiens. All of his belongings had been shipped the week before to London and he carried nothing but a few clean shirts, some underwear and socks in a battered leather bag. He felt a peculiar sense of freedom, as though the past had finally been left behind and all the ghosts that had haunted him for so long had been laid to rest. In Amiens, there were tourist buses lined up in front of the Cafe Flor waiting to take sightseers out to the old trenches along the Somme. He stopped for a sandwich and a glass of wine and watched the people—mostly middleaged Americans and English—board the buses with their cameras and binoculars.He felt dispassionate about the sight. It had bothered him greatly in the past, but now it didn’t matter. It was just a tourist attraction they were off to visit. No different, in a way, from any other ruin or relic of history.
That it was different, few people knew better than himself. He had witnessed the war almost from the first day, a lowly twenty-three-year-old theater reviewer for the Chicago Express, picked to be their war correspondent because fate had placed him in Europe when the German Army crossed into Belgium in the summer of 1914. The editor of the Express could have sent a more experienced man, but he believed the war would be over in six weeks—three months at the outside—and vacationing Martin Rilke was on the spot, and could speak French and German besides.
He took the road to Albert and then on to Arras and over the Vimy Ridge to Bethune. There were still belts of rusted barbed wire to be seen, and here and there the burned-out hull of a tank entombed in a grassy mound that had once been putrid mud. Woods of shell-splintered stumps were growing again. A greenness had crept over the land, a blanket of grass and vine, sapling and leaf, to hide the places where a generation had been butchered.
He was known at the Hotel Gaillard in Hazebrouck as a man who came at least three times a year to stay for a few days. It was not the most popular of towns, Hazebrouck. A place to stop on the road to Dunkerque, or Calais. No more than that. The little town had escaped the shells, but a million soldiers had tramped through its streets on the way from Saint Omer to the front. “Boots and cannon wheels ground us down,” the mayor would say as he puttered helplessly in the ruined garden of his hotel, not to mention the vast dumps of shells and mountains of supplies, or the five thousand cavalry horses. The dumps and the horses were gone now, but their imprint remained on a bleak and trampled landscape.
From Hazebrouck the road went north over the slopes of Messines into Belgium and the Great Salient, past tortured earth still rank with rusted iron and death. Past the blasted sites of villages with names that rang like a dirge—Wytschaete and Hollebeke, Langemarck and Passchendaele. The lunar rubble of Ypres.
He had brought flowers, which he placed at the base of her cross, than ran a hand over her name, wiping dust from the black painted lettering. Ivy Thaxton Rilke—of the Imperial Military Nursing Service. Killed at the age of twenty by a shell.
“You knew her, then?”
Martin looked up. An elderly Englishman in well-tailored tweeds stood on the gravel path leaning on his walking stick.
“My wife.”
“Ah,” the man said with a sigh, as though a great mystery had been solved to his satisfaction. “I’ve passed often and wondered about her. There are so few women reposing here, you know. My sons are down the path a ways. John and Hubert.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s very lovely here this time of year. The trees are growing wondrously well. Do you come often?”
“Several times a year.”
“Really? Odd that we haven’t met before. I try to come over once a month. I live near Dover.”
Martin turned away from the grave and stepped off the wellclipped grass onto the path.
“This is my last visit,” he said. “I realize now that she’s gone.”
The Englishman smiled slightly. “Totally, you mean? I’ve talked to others who feel the same way and no longer come. I can’t share that belief. Death is a sleep, Swinburne said. My sons are in slumber.”
No, Martin thought as he walked back to the car, they are dead as Ivy is dead. Not sleep but death. Death, not sweet repose. He had faced the reality of the war and cut the knot that bound him to the past.
He left the wheezing Renault with a friend in Saint Pol-sur-Mer, telling him to keep it, or sell it, and then took the channel steamer from Dunkerque to Folkestone. Standing in the stern of the little ship, he watched the coast of France blend into the sea haze and slowly faded from view. A part of his life fading with it. A moment in time over. Sailing toward another.
He was thirty, a man of average height and sturdy build. His hair was flaxen and parted loosely in the middle. His oval, square-jawed face just missed being handsome—the mouth a trifle too wide; the thin, high-bridged nose a shade too long. His most arresting feature was his eyes, which were blue and merry, a paradox for someone who had seen so much of the world’s horrors.
He had a whiskey and soda in the station saloon and then took the 3:15 to London. It was an uncrowded train and there were only two other passengers in the first-class carriage. One of them, an elderly curate, went immediately to sleep, and the other, a large woman wearing a fox fur, sat as far from Martin as possible, as though she smelled the whiskey on his breath. He had forgotten to buy a newspaper, so there was nothing to do other than look out the window or write in his journal. The view was certainly worthwhile. England in June. The North Downs and the Kentish Weald. Soft, patchy sun on fields and woodland. Rain clouds to the east drifting slowly inland from the sea. He had seen England for the first time on just such a day. Both he and the world had changed drastically since that summer in 1914, but the English countryside appeared to have drowsed on, untouched by the past seven years. Heath and common, copse and hedgerows. Sheep, plac
id in the fields. Children gathering blackberries, waving at the train. But the pastorals of England, like the pastorals of France and Germany, were deceptive. Trees and pastures, gabled towns and thatched villages, implied an innocence and serenity that no longer existed.
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
The woman looked at him and stroked the black-button-eyed head of a silver fox.
“Not an odious cigarette, surely.”
“Cigar,” Martin said. “Havana, and very mild.”
The woman nodded her approval. “I find nothing objectionable about a fine cigar.” She continued to look at him, fondling the tiny, grinning head. “I took you for a German. You have that coloring.”
He managed a polite smile. “I’m an American, of German ancestry.”
“Oh,” the woman said, and looked away.
He took a notebook and pen from his bag, lit a cigar, and settled back in the seat. He began to write in Pitman shorthand, the strokes and curls flowing across the page as fast as he could form his thoughts. . . .
Monday, June 20, 1921. Observations and reflections. By train from Folkestone to London.
How many times, I wonder, have I been on this train and taken a seat by the window and written in a journal? Times beyond count. A milk run in 1915 and ’16. The carriage jammed then with men coming back to Blighty on leave. The mud of Flanders still on their boots, that glazed “trench look” in their eyes. Only half believing their luck. Only half believing they were not in fact dead and being transported to hell.
“I took you for a German.” That look of hate before she heard me speak in unbroken English. There had been that look during the war. The cold stare at my civilian clothes. The acid remark: “Been to France on holiday?” The atmosphere always warmed when I told them I was a newspaperman. They were well-informed men. They despised most war correspondents for good reason, but most had read my pieces and appreciated the honesty—even after the censors had chopped out the more unpleasant bits. They had raised reading between the lines to a fine art and knew what I was saying about the war.