The Passing Bells
Page 52
“I took you for a German.” The hate runs deep—here and everywhere. “I took you for a Frenchman . . . [the man on the train from Saarbrucken to Berlin, ignoring me coldly because he had heard me speaking French at the station; warming up after our passports were checked before leaving the occupied zone] . . . a damned frog bastard.” We spoke German and I told him I was from Chicago. Second-generation German- American. “I have an uncle in Milwaukee,” the man said. “You Yankee fellows backed the wrong side. You’ll find out.”
Who knows? As Jacob Golden used to say, there are no heroes anymore. We are all villains obsessed with the idea of kicking civilization to bits. The only animal on earth who fouls its own nest and makes a virtue out of slaughter.
The man at the cemetery pitied me. The faint smile, the glow in his eyes. The righteous look seen on the faces of the devout when told that one no longer believes in God. But I admit it took all the courage I had to walk away from her grave. It’s easier to hang on. To return once a month, or three times a year, and “visit.” I’m sure the man from Dover does just that. He visits, passing the time of day with his dead sons. The woman I saw once by the grave of her husband, seated in a little folding chair. “Talks a blue streak,” the caretaker told me. “Comes across from London twice a year and tells him all the news of the family. They get a bit daft, poor souls.” Hanging on. Blocking the reality of oblivion from the mind. A mere prolonging of pain. Like sawing off a leg with a penknife where one quick swing with a sharp blade would be more humane.
The war itself too painful to comprehend for most people. The statistics just starting to be printed. A million English dead. Twenty-seven percent of all young Frenchmen. God alone knows how many Germans, Russians, Austrians, Italians, Turks, and Serbs. And who can tally the continuing cost of the peace? How many dead from famine? Typhus? Influenza? The figures are meaningless anyway. No one can grasp them. Each digit a person. Ivy—slender, dark-haired, violet-eyed. Naked and loving in our bed. Reduced in importance to a single number on a list. The old man’s sons. John and Hubert. Who were they? What did they do? Will we feel their loss? Two more numbers added to the tally sheet. Nine hundred thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven left to record, to personalize, to focus on a once-living face.
He put notebook and pen on the seat beside him, removed his reading glasses, and wiped them with a handkerchief. Through the window he could see a changing landscape, the greens and golds of the countryside blending into the smoky gray of towns, the blistered fringes of London. He reached for the notebook, and as he picked it up, the letter from Arnold Calthorpe slipped out from between the pages. No answer required, but he had to give it some thought.
CALTHORPE & CROFTS
Publishers
Bloomsbury Square
London
Dear Martin:
I trust this reaches you before you depart from Paris. Both Jeremy and I congratulate you on your new job. Very impressive. I wish your appointment had taken place before we printed the jacket for the book, but that can’t be helped.
Martin, as we discussed last year, A Killing Ground is quite likely the best possible book at the worst possible time. First reviews—or rather, lack of them—appear to justify that prediction. Only the most liberal, socialist, or pacifist press has bothered to review it so far—and there aren’t many of those left in Britain these days! We are anything but disappointed, as—also agreed between us—making money is not the object. We feel pride in printing it, just as you feel pride in having written it. However, we must face up to the fact that the book may come in for criticism designed to discredit it and you. A “muckraking” charge as example. Give some thought to rebuttal—a thousand words or so on just why you wrote such a savage exposé. Something we could send out as a “letter of publication” to any Tory paper that takes a swipe at you. This need not be done at this moment, while you are so busy and temporarily “uprooted.” After you get settled, drop by the office and we will discuss it.
Sincerely yours,
A. T. Calthorpe
He put the letter back in the notebook, then picked up his pen and began to write.
Regarding Calthorpe. How he thinks I can avoid charges of muckraking is beyond me. It is muckraking in the purest meaning of the term. But then I’m a Chicago boy, a town where muckraking is something of a fine art.
I wrote the book as my own personal catharsis, a way to cleanse my soul of gall. All those months covering the peace conferences at Versailles. Day after day observing the haggling over spoils. The fixing of blame and the establishment of costs—the peacemakers like so many lawyers wrangling over an accident case. And out there, along the old trench line of the western front, lay the dead. No one spoke for them. They were only mentioned as adjuncts to noble phrases—the “glorious dead” . . . “not in vain” . . . “fallen heroes” in “the war to save democracy” or “the war to end all wars.” And there they were in the boneyards, the millions who could just as well have been strangled at birth for all the good they had done to save or end anything.
An observation through the window. Rows of dark brick houses. A factory flanking the railroad line. Men standing in front of locked gates carrying signs: “Not a Penny off the Wage.” No pastorals here. A tiny glimpse of postwar England. Strikes and more strikes with over a million out of work. The pickets look shabby and ill fed. How many of them, I wonder, came back from the war believing Lloyd George’s promise that they were returning to “a land fit for heroes?”
And so much for that.
Also By Phillip Rock
The Extraordinary Seaman
The Dead in Guanajuato
Flickers
Circles of Time
A Future Arrived
Credits
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa.
Cover image © by Richard Jenkins.
Copyright
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa. Cover image © by Richard Jenkins.
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
Excerpt from Circles of Time © 1981 by Phillip Rock.
THE PASSING BELLS. Copyright © 1978 by Phillip Rock. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
This book was originally published in 1978 by Seaview Books.
FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK PUBLISHED 2012
ISBN 978-0-06-222931-1
EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062229328
12 13 14 15 16 DIX/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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