by John Masters
He returned to the newspaper:
The master plan for 1918 is simplicity itself – hoard all our strengh until the Americans can join in with full force, and with a reasonable amount of actual experience at the Front; then attack, and keep attacking to break the German Army in the West before winter comes. If that cannot be achieved, hold during the winter, and continue the attack as early as possible in the spring of 1919. On the seas – destroy the German U-boat fleet by all possible means, including bombing the vile artifacts in their ports and harbours, and where possible blocking their routes of access to the sea. In the air – destroy German air power, to clear the way for bombing of Germany itself, first, to destroy German munition plants, and second, to bring home to the German people some small part of the miseries they and their leaders have inflicted on the rest of the world…
Simplicity itself … He thought of the old country problem about giving a horse a pill. You put it in a tube, insert the tube down the horse’s throat, then blow … but what if the horse blows first?
And it was depressing to think of the generals cheerfully planning through Christmas, 1918, and on into 1919 … 1920? 1921?
He was about to turn the page when an item in the Stop Press caught his eye.
Liner torpedoed.
His heart lurched and he felt sick. He read on fearfully:
Naval authorities at Queenstown report intercepting an S.O.S. call from the White Star Liner S.S. Mystic. She wirelessed that she was torpedoed at 11.57 p.m. yesterday and was sinking in heavy seas. Her position was given as 350 miles west of the Old Head of Kinsale.
The paper dropped from his hands, and he bowed his head, praying.
The 2nd Sea Lord sat grim faced at his desk, his naval assistant standing beside and a little behind his chair. Commander Tom Rowland R.N., stood in front of the desk, facing the admiral. He felt taut, as though preparing for some severe physical test – jumping across a wide, deep chasm, perhaps – but not nervous. He said, ‘Sir, I have been in the Anti-Submarine Division here for eight months now. Lieutenant Commander Danby thoroughly understands the work, and has some sea experience. Also, he is physically unfit for further sea duty. I request that he should take over from me – releasing me for duty at sea.’
The admiral said, ‘You are asking to go back to sea?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Any particular appointment you would like?’ The admiral’s tone was harshly sarcastic.
‘Yes, sir. Convoy work … or submarine hunting. Three weeks ago I submitted a paper to the Director, about forming hunter groups, of destroyers and mine layers, too …’
‘I saw it,’ the admiral said. ‘It is a good idea. But you will not be given command of such a group, if we do decide to form some … You are living with a young man, an ex-rating. You are still associating with Russell Wharton, and now with Arthur Gavilan, Ivor Novello, Noel Coward, and other notorious homosexuals. You don’t deny it?’
‘No, sir. They are my friends.’
‘The rating, too,’ the admiral sneered.
‘Yes, sir … Sir, as soon as the war is over, I intend to resign my commission. But while it is on, I ask to be allowed to do what I am trained for – command H.M. ships at sea. Plenty of R.N.V.R. officers beside Danby can do what I’m doing now, just as well, or better … but I am …’
The admiral snapped, ‘You are a bugger, Rowland. You will never get a sea appointment again … But wait a minute. Are you prepared to volunteer for a very dangerous job?’
‘If it’s at sea, yes, sir.’
‘It’ll be at sea. The First Sea Lord will probably give it his final approval tomorrow or the day after. If he does, you will get a chance to wipe the slate clean … one way or another. If he does not, you will resign your commission – because we don’t want you. I’m sure the Army won’t, either – but they’re going to have to have you … That’s all.’
Tom stiffened in salute, then turned about and left the big room, carefully closing the door behind him. There were all sorts of dangerous jobs going these days, but one very secret idea had been born in his own Anti-Submarine Division: a proposal to raid the German submarine bases on the Belgian coast in force, and sink blockships in the channels by which the U-boats had to get out to sea. It could be that. But after that, no more. He would have paid his debt, if he lived. He had entered the Royal Navy as a cadet at the age of twelve. At sixteen he’d gone to sea as a midshipman in a battleship. In the intervening twenty-three years he had served in destroyers, cruisers, battle cruisers and other battleships in every sea and ocean of the world. The White Ensign had been to him as a crucifix is to the religious – a talisman and a symbol of love, service, and faith. No more.
For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted in God, adorned themselves, being in subjection unto their husbands; even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord; whose daughters ye are as long as ye do well, and are not afraid with any amazement.
They streamed out of the little church into lightly falling snow, between two ranks of sergeants and bombardiers of Royal Field Artillery, the guard of honour, just as he had promised. Virginia clutched his good right arm with wild pride and love, her bouquet held to her breast with the other hand. Behind her walked her mother, in dark blue, the veil hiding her face, her head bent; then Stanley’s father and mother, come down from Leeds, the mother crying happily, her round red face glowing with happiness, and wet with tears; then others – girls from the W.A.A.C.s, old Basin Tits, June Adkinson, a sergeant major, Uncle John and Aunt Louise, Granny McLeod from Skye, so many, so many…
The photographers were waiting, and Virginia huddled close to her husband, smiling into his face – ‘Look up, please,’ the photographer cried – ‘this way … Come forward, madam …’ This to Virginia’s mother, Fiona. ‘You, too, sir, and you …’ They lined up, Rowlands and McLeods to one side, Robinsons the other. Mr Robinson was thin and perky, and had a waxed moustache; he was wearing a blue serge suit and a bowler hat, now held proudly in one hand against his chest. Fiona had raised her veil to look blankly at the camera. As soon as the photographs were taken she lowered it again.
Then they were in the big car, two other cars following. Fiona, squeezed between Mr and Mrs Robinson, stared at her daughter opposite. What sort of life had she chosen, deliberately, marrying this sergeant? When the war ended he’d have to leave the Army. Then what? Become a corporation dustman, like his father? Surely that was not possible, for Virginia’s husband. He – Stanley – had said that there might be a place for him as Gate Porter at Wokingham School, in Berkshire, close to Wellington. It was a school Guy had played against at both cricket and rugby, two or three times. Stanley had been sounded out for the job on the strength of his Distinguished Conduct Medal: but a Gate Porter was barely half a cut above a corporation dustman … and Virginia would have ten children, all of them with a Yorkshire accent you could make pudding out of, and not an H between the lot of them. Fiona’s own mother obviously thought it was all due to Fiona’s marrying an Englishman, and going south to live, instead of choosing a clan chief and settling on his domains.
Fiona was sorry Quentin couldn’t be here. A girl ought to be given away by her father, not some dug-out old captain she’d never known before she came to this ghastly place. Thank God Quentin had never been stationed in Aldershot since their marriage. Perhaps, if he had, she would not have met Archie. The thought of Archie, suffering agonies in some unknown hospital, being tended by God knew what rich and beautiful society women, made her wince so that Virginia, sitting opposite, beaming with happiness, said anxiously, ‘Are you all right, Mummy?’
‘Quite,’ she said.
She’d had no answer to her letter to Quentin yet. Perhaps Quentin hadn’t heard from Archie. Or … he wasn’t going to tell her. She writhed in inward pain.
Virginia watched her mother through brimming eyes. She was thinking of someone else, something else … she wasn’t here. Daddy wasn’t here –
fighting in France. Guy wasn’t here – somewhere over France in an aeroplane, perhaps dead. Granny wasn’t here – wishing this was all happening in Skye. Only Stanley was here, her husband, where he would be the rest of her life, close, for her to feed and shelter and write letters for, to have children for, and be the best wife in the world for, because he deserved no less.
The brigadier general said, ‘I’ve spent a long time over this matter, a long time. I’ve been trying to think what is the best course for me to take – for the good of your regiment as well as of the brigade … and of the Army as a whole.’
The new brigade major, this one of the Rifle Brigade, was standing to one side, looking pained but handsome: all brigade majors looked handsome, Quentin thought. The brigadier general wore the ribbons of the C.M.G. and the D.S.O. and a toothbrush moustache. He was quite young. He tapped the document in front of him on the makeshift desk and looked severe, but Quentin knew that his heart was not in it – not here at all, really; for yesterday the brigadier general had received news that he was to be promoted to major general and given a division in General Gough’s Fifth Army. The document before him was Quentin’s official report on the events of November 5 and 6, when parts of his battalion had for a while refused to obey orders. The report had gone all the way to Army Headquarters, and filtered back with the Army Commander’s brief, pencilled instruction: ‘Brigade Commander to take necessary action.’
The general said, ‘It is clear that for a period your battalion was in open mutiny, Rowland.’
Quentin said, ‘Very few men, sir … They were overwrought … I don’t think they knew what they were doing. They had been under great strain for a long …’
‘Concerted refusal to obey orders is mutiny!’ the general thundered.
‘Yes, sir,’ Quentin said. If the general had been there in front of Nollehoek in that first captured German trench line, he might have understood, both how the men felt, and the necessity of shooting that wretched lieutenant and sergeant. But the general had not been seen in the front line for two days before and four days after the attack.
The general calmed again. He said, ‘The principal mitigating factor here is that your battalion did in the end advance and take Nollehoek, and hold it. You must be given due credit for that, just as you must be held responsible for the mutiny. You are the commanding officer.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The general pushed the document aside and leaned on his elbow, regarding Quentin as man to man. ‘I was ready, before this incident, to recommend you for promotion. You have commanded your battalion, in the line, for some time now, have you not?’
‘Since April 22, 1915, sir,’ Quentin said. How many brigadier generals had come and gone since then? Five, he thought.
The general whistled, ‘I didn’t realize it was as long as that.’ He had only taken over the brigade in the spring, from a staff job at G.H.Q. He continued, ‘In view of this mutiny, I do not now consider you fit to command a brigade in the field – and, of course, as you have no staff training whatever, you can not be considered for a staff appointment. So I shall not recommend you for promotion.’
‘Oh, thank you, sir,’ Quentin said.
‘Eh? What?’ The general looked at him suspiciously. ‘You don’t want promotion? Or don’t you think you’re fit for it? What?’
Quentin realized his exclamation would sound strange to some: personal promotion was the aim and object of the general’s life, as everyone in the brigade had recognized since he took over. Quentin said, ‘I don’t know about being fit for it, sir. Others must decide that. But I don’t want to leave my battalion. The men have had a hard time the last five months. I would like to be with them until they have had a chance to rest and recuperate, be brought up to strength, and retrained … do my best to make it a regular battalion again.’
‘I see,’ the general said. ‘Very well then. You do that, and I’ll be checking on it. Or rather, the new brigade commander will.’ He nodded in dismissal, still looking puzzled, and a little contemptuous. Not want promotion, indeed! And Quentin a regular!
Quentin saluted, went out, and headed back for his battalion headquarters, in the same ruined schoolhouse in Wieltje where they had been when the German gas attack struck in April, 1915 – a day before the C.O. had been killed and he had taken over. He sat down at the rickety table and his new adjutant came in. Lieutenant Woodruff’s father ran a garage and taxi service in Walstone and Quentin had been hesitant about giving him the appointment. The adjutant was, after all, a C.O.’s personal staff officer and Woodruff wasn’t a gentleman, so there’d never be the closeness he’d had with Archie Campbell … but Campbell wasn’t a gentleman, either. Quentin gave up: Woodruff was a steady man, in his thirties, married, with children, good at figures and paperwork. There wouldn’t be anyone else like Archie.
Woodruff said, ‘Here’s the list of fatigues ordered from us, sir … a hundred and eighty men, fifteen N.C.O.s.’
Quentin growled angrily under his breath. The refrain of one of the battalion’s favourite songs passed through his mind … ‘The battalion commander had just a thousand men, but the brass hats buggered them all away.’ This was supposed to be a rest period … in the war everything went round in circles, the same events and emotions, the same heights of exaltation and depths of depression, the same dreary plains between, all passing in ordered and repetitive sequence.
‘Today we have to send home the name of the officer selected to go to the 8th Battalion in India, sir.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Quentin said. ‘I’m going to send Stratton. He’s had a lot of experience in France and they’ll probably give him a company out there. They certainly should … the rest of them must all be Territorials. When does he have to leave?’
‘At once, sir. With luck, he might be able to spend Christmas in Hedlington – he has to report to the Depot first.’
‘All right, tell him as soon as you can. I want to see him on his way back.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I hope word of his M.C. will come through soon … Are those men the R.M.O. said have gonorrhea ready? They’ll get docked pay, of course, but I want to find out which red light house they went to, and where. We’ve got to see that those places are properly inspected, so the men don’t get these foul diseases, and go sick, when we need them … for fatigues.’
The adjutant said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and marched out. Quentin waited. Poor devils. He composed his face sternly.
‘The 12th Division broke and ran, that’s why we never got what we hoped for out of Cambrai,’ 2nd Lieutenant Wylie said conspiratorially. ‘Our tanks broke clean through at first – then there was no one near enough to complete the job, and the Germans had time to pull themselves together … General Boy Bradford tried to get Corps to send a battalion up at once to hold Bourlon Wood, but the Corps commander had gone into dinner and wasn’t to be disturbed … And when the Germans counter-attacked, our fellows broke.’
Fred Stratton listened tolerantly. Wylie was the son of the battalion’s 2nd in command. He had a small and expressive face and loved to gossip. He was barely twenty but had fought with the battalion through the whole Nollehoek-Passchendaele series of battles, and it showed in the downturn at the corners of his mouth, the crows’ feet round his eyes, a haggardness belying the youthful down and roundness of his cheeks. He was now very animated, sitting in company headquarters with Lieutenant Fred Stratton, the acting company commander. He was just back from short leave, which he had spent in Paris, enjoying his first sex with a woman, courtesy of a young French war widow picked up at a boulevard café – by the lady, that is.
Fred helped himself to another spoonful of strawberry jam and spread it thickly on an Army biscuit. He’d just had dinner – but strawberry jam was not to be wasted, or allowed to grow mouldy or be eaten by rats – not even Hoggin’s; strawberry jam was almost as wonderful as a Blighty. Wylie was talking fast now, gesticulating like a Frenchman. ‘I heard about somethi
ng else, the worst railway accident in history. No one’s supposed to talk about it, but this lady had heard, from …’
‘… another admirer,’ Fred said. He was becoming quite at ease with the upper class now. Wylie was an old Harrovian, and his grandfather was a viscount. Fred was aware of these things, and they mattered, but they didn’t alter his manner now, as they would have a couple of years ago. He was neither truculent nor subservient. He had not quite lost his Man of Kent accent, but it was barely noticeable now.
The young man said, ‘Well, it might have been … she’s awfully pretty … Anyway, there were seven or eight hundred French troops being sent home on Christmas leave. They’d been bolstering up the Eyeties after Caporetto …’
‘We sent a lot, too. The battalion nearly went, I heard … Wish we had … would have missed that last show at Nollehoek, when old Kellaway lost his eye and Boy went napoo.’
‘… and when they got to Modane, the frontier station, they had to change from Italian to French carriages, but there weren’t enough engines, so the stationmaster said he could only send on so many of the troops and the rest would have to wait. Well, they were in no mood to wait and their officers knew it, so one of them stuck a pistol in the stationmaster’s belly and said, “Put on more carriages” – you know, the Hommes 40 Chevaux 8 wagons – and the stationmaster shrugged and ordered more wagons to be hooked on. And all the French soldiers piled in, far more than forty to a wagon, and off they went down the hill. And the engine driver soon had his brakes jammed on hard, but they wouldn’t hold the train … it was too big, too heavy, just as the stationmaster had said … and the brakes got white hot and set fire to the wagons, which of course are wooden … and then the brakes failed altogether, burned out, so the train went faster and faster … and the faster it went the more it fanned the flames, and all the wagons were like flying torches – the whole train was a torch, with the soldiers in the wagons screaming, all on fire, some jumping off, at seventy, eighty miles an hour … until finally the train left the rails and burned to ashes – with the soldiers. Then they got hold of every survivor – there weren’t many and everyone else connected with the accident, and told them that if they said a word, they’d be shot … the dead soldiers’ families were told the men had been killed in action, and lots of them are being given posthumous decorations and citations of all kinds …’