Gifts of War

by Mackenzie Ford

  “Hal?”

  I sat down. “This will take half an hour and I need your undivided attention.”

  I waited while he got his pipe going and then told him what I knew, what had happened, what I had done—save for the fact that I had relayed everything to Sam and Lottie.

  He heard me out in silence, but the set of his chin grew grimmer as I proceeded. It took closer to forty minutes before I wound up. I waved the latest edition of the Bautzener Zeit. “This is today’s story. I think it’s a step too far.”

  Pritchard read it.

  He looked up. “Go on.”

  “It fits with the other stories, in that it’s an indirect reference to military affairs that has escaped the censor and makes us all feel clever, because we’ve read between the lines to detect a buildup. But ask yourself two questions. One, is it likely that all these incidents would escape the censor? And two, more particularly, is it likely that a locomotive would be named in this way before the fighting starts? Our locomotives are named only well after the event, when something has passed comfortably into history, become a legend, because of a stunning victory or some other achievement. All these stories are phony. It’s a setup.”

  Silence.

  “You followed her to a Swiss club. The Swiss may speak German, some of them, but they are neutral. What you heard wasn’t necessarily incriminating.”

  “Posing as a German-speaking Swiss is the perfect cover for a spy, sir. What has Genevieve Afton got to be nervous about, what has she made a good start at? She’s just started with us. Remember how quickly she ‘uncovered’ this Bautzen business? It’s all too convenient, sir, it’s a setup. I repeat: her father’s a vegetable. She cannot have gone to Bautzen with him as she said she did. She lied.”

  Another gloomy silence. “An earl’s daughter. Can it be? What a scandal if it’s true and it gets out.” He looked at me intently, sucking his pipe. He passed a hand over his face. “You’re right, Hal. Of course, you’re right. I don’t want to believe it but the dreadful gnawing I have in my gut says you’re right. We’ve been too obsessed with our own cleverness to see that there have been just too many little stories put our way. She could have made a good start at learning to play bridge, or to paint. She could be nervous about driving her first car, or going to bed with our anonymous ‘Swiss’ friend. But somehow I don’t think so.” He breathed out. “You’re right.”

  Another gloomy silence.

  Then: “You’ve had longer than me to chew on this, Hal. Advice?”

  I nodded. “Nothing precipitate, sir, nothing that gives the game away, nothing that shows we’ve rumbled Genevieve.”

  I lit my own cigarette. I only smoked when I was on fire.

  “There are three aspects to this. One, they know our unit exists and have infiltrated us. I suppose they could have guessed that an outfit like ours must exist somewhere but they have found us and we need to know how they did that. The fact that they have located us will damage our credibility if it gets out, so we must put it right ourselves, and keep it quiet, to maintain our position.

  “So … don’t fire Genevieve or arrest her in a blaze of publicity. We check out her background and find a plausible reason for moving her from here—to a position where she can do no more damage. You must do it quickly but it must not arouse suspicion, in her, her German contacts, or in anyone else.”

  I blew smoke into the room.

  “Next, have her German contact followed, see who he leads us to, and then, a month or six weeks from now, have them both arrested, for using drugs, or something like that. Have the police—not the army—raid the Matterhorn while Genevieve and her contact are there. Then, once they are separated from each other, throw the book at them.

  “Meanwhile, and this is the second aspect, you will have been using the recent intelligence—‘intelligence’ in quotation marks—to move our agents into the Bautzen area. Withdraw the ones you have already sent and don’t send any more. The Germans have been waiting for them, presumably watching for people who have been nosing around. Cancel everything, abort all operations in that area immediately.

  “Third, though maybe this should have come first, you’ll have to alert the top brass that our earlier intelligence, about a military buildup, was—well, wrong, that it was a feint by the enemy, but that we have now found out the truth. The brass are not going to like it, but the fact that we ourselves have spotted that we were being fooled may help a bit.”

  Pritchard nodded his agreement. “You seem to have thought of everything. The last two aspects are the most important, of course, but—thankfully—they are the most straightforward to put right. Moving Genevieve without attracting attention or suspicion, on the other hand, may take some thought—and thought takes time.” He stood up. “Still, that’s what I’m paid for.” He held out his hand. “You’ve done your bit, Hal, and you’ve done it well. Now don’t let me down for the next… however long it is. Keep up the pretense with Genevieve until I relieve you.”

  I went back to the Gym and congratulated Genevieve on finding the latest story. I then spent a difficult day trying to behave normally.

  That evening, as I reached home, Will came running—stumbling— toward me and wrapped his little arms around my knees, which was as high up as he could reach, as if he would never let me go again. Sam wasn’t far behind. It was all very gratifying.

  Sam gave me a grilling as to how my day had been and, once again, I broke the Official Secrets Act and told her. Later, she was as passionate in bed as she had been the night before. She took the lead. Having been a fairly silent lovemaker, she was now … rather less so. The next morning, Will came into our room very early also. I think he was checking I was still there. I loved all of it.

  I remember Sam was a bit on edge just then, because one of the girls in her class, a seven-year-old called Lily, had learned that both her brothers, a good few years older than she, had been killed at the Front. The girl had begun wetting herself in class.

  “What it must be, to lose two sons.” Sam held her cup of coffee to her cheek, warming herself as we had breakfast. “What must Lily’s mother be going through?”

  I knew what she was thinking, of course. “What was Wilhelm’s brother called—Dieter?”

  She nodded.

  “Was he in the reserve, too?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you not meet any of his family?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Did he ever show you any photos of them?”

  “Yes, once. His mother was tiny, tiny, yet she had given birth to two strapping sons.” She paused. “What if they’ve both been killed, like Lily’s brothers.” She rinsed her cup under the tap. “What a war this is.”

  I reached the office that day at about eight-thirty, as usual, and set my mind to coping with a long day, trying to act normally with Genevieve. About nine-thirty, however, Pritchard appeared at our table. Without warning, so that my surprise was genuine, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, affably enough, “Hal, I’m sorry, and it’s short notice—no notice at all, in fact—but I’m going to ‘borrow’ Genevieve from you.”

  We both looked up, perplexed.

  Pritchard addressed himself to Genevieve. “Special request from General Hamilton, my dear, head of maps. They have a flap on—apparently our people have captured a whole cache of enemy maps, a lot of them with German handwriting on them. He says he knew your father before the war—used to shoot with him—and he needs a German speaker to help decipher the scribbles, in case they are important and comprise intelligence that might date. It’s only for a few weeks— a month or so—then you can come back here.” He turned back to me. “Can you cope with just the three of you, until I can find someone to replace Genevieve?”

  “Do I have a choice?” I said as sourly as I could. “Couldn’t you have found a replacement before taking Genevieve away?”

  “I’m sorry about this, Hal, especially as we’re in the middle of this Bautzen buildup th
ing.” He looked down again at Genevieve. “But there’s some urgency, my dear, so I’m taking you away now.”

  He sucked his pipe and addressed me again. “I’m only a colonel, Hal. General Hamilton has three pips on his shoulder. You’ll have to make do, I’m afraid. I’ll be as quick as I can, I promise.” He held out his hand to Genevieve. “Come along, my dear.”

  She got up, collected her few belongings—and that was that. If she was disappointed, or suspicious, she didn’t show it, and in any case Pritchard had cleverly made it seem as though she was going to another “inside” job, where she could no doubt do yet more damage. She accompanied Pritchard out of the hall and no one made much of it. Neither Alan nor Eve seemed worried or bothered by the chain of events, so I concluded that, between us, Pritchard and I had pulled it off.

  I later heard that Genevieve and her contact were arrested—by the police—during a raid on the Matterhorn, where at least a dozen people were held. A certain amount of hard drugs were found (or planted?) on the premises and the club was closed down for a while. Once Genevieve and the German were safely separated, Genevieve was charged with contravening the Official Secrets Act and with treason. Before the arrests, her German contact had been followed and three other German spies identified.

  So Genevieve’s hurried cover for herself—her shooting “expedition” with her father—had exposed her and brought about her downfall. It was a lesson I never forgot. In the end she had damaged the Germans almost as much as she had damaged us.

  Dear Hal,

  We’ve just had a bunch of journalists, war correspondents, who came to see what we do in our unit. All men. I suppose that’s not too unusual or surprising but it did set me thinking. Maybe there’ll be a bit of interest, after the war, in the journal I—as a woman—am keeping. I’m sure a lot of soldiers, men, will write their memoirs, so why shouldn’t a woman? Will what I see and hear and feel be different because I am a woman? You know how against the war Ma was—I wonder, if she were to read what I have written, what she would say? Most of what I recall is grim but not all—I have seen men behave well out here. Not everyone loses their pride or their dignity. Far from it.

  The journalists brought some papers with them and, I am pleased to say, page five of the Times is still there, still doing its bit. Latest offering: “The Plumage Act has failed.” This act was introduced into Parliament to stop women from wearing osprey feathers on their hats, the osprey being rare and becoming rarer. Forget whether the flipping act passed or failed, whether the act is a good thing or not. Where on earth did they find the parliamentary time for such a debate? Wonderful!

  xxx

  Izzy

  The zeppelin raids on London had some effect on us. There were one or two raids directly over the Chelsea and Kensington area, but mostly they were more central—the Strand, Blackfriars, the City. As we had discovered the new motor omnibuses, so we had extended our exploration of London, taking a bus ride to begin with, then walking. Will, especially, liked this new arrangement: from the omnibuses he had a much better view of what was going on than from his push chair.

  We were on an omnibus one Saturday, going through Trafalgar Square, where there was both a collection of captured German cannons on display and a crater formed by an exploding zeppelin bomb, when he pointed and said, Tolier.

  “What?” I said. “What did you say, Will?”

  “Tolier,” he said again, pointing again.

  Sam, sitting next to me, nudged me. “It’s his word for ‘soldier,’” she said in a low voice.

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, I don’t know where it comes from.” She rearranged him where he was sitting on her knee. “Where do baby words come from? I can see that his word is a little bit like ours, but does he get it wrong because he can’t say ‘soldier’ yet, has he misheard, does he like his word, has he heard other children use it… ? Does he think he’s saying ‘soldier’?”

  Just then the conductress came to take our fares. All the staff on the omnibuses were women now, save for a few elderly men. The women wore leather gaiters to their knees and blue breeches.

  “Don’t you have any books about baby talk at school?”

  “No. Everyone’s too busy to bother about psychology. This new man, Freud, the Viennese doctor, says that a child’s mother is all-important—for a stable childhood, I mean—but all the rowdies we have at school, all the bullies, all the ones who can’t sit still for more than a minute on end, all the ones who answer back and are insolent … they are the ones whose fathers are away at the war, or have already been killed.”

  “Tolier,” said Will, pointing again.

  “If the father is at the Front, or dead, that puts pressure on the mothers. You, more than anyone, should know that.”

  “I do know that, of course I do. And I know that for me, for Will and for me, those pressures are so much less with you around, Hal.” She squeezed my arm. “It’s just that I feel we know so little about the psychology of children, of families. My own father was a drinker, and that proved catastrophic in the end. We know so little about the families behind our pupils, and the ones with the real problems are of course the very same tykes who don’t want to talk about what’s going on, or not going on, at home. So how are we expected to be able to help?”

  “Has something brought this on, Sam?”

  “No … it’s been in my mind for some time. But the day before yesterday, late, the house of one of the families who send their children to our school burned down. A zeppelin bomb had dropped a little way away. Their house wasn’t hit directly but it caught the blast of the explosion. It was a house without electricity—their lighting was gas, and the mantle was blown away and—”

  “Mantle?”

  “It’s a light piece of plaster, where the flame of the lamp burns.”

  “Ah, yes. I’ve seen them. What happened?”

  “The mantle blew away, the gas system lit back—and exploded, setting fire to the house.”

  “Anyone hurt?”

  “That’s the good news: no casualties. No physical casualties, anyway. But the family will have to go to the workhouse, they’ll miss school, they’ve got hardly any clothes left, and no toys at all. Even if they do come back to school, they’re going to be unteachable probably. We simply lack the means to cope with them, and they’re not the first and they won’t be the last.”

  “So what can be done?”

  “I don’t know.” Will had fallen asleep, soothed by the movement of the bus. “I just feel there ought to be some sort of service; some sort of expertise ought to be developed, for these … well, victims really, there’s no other word.”

  We got off the motorbus in a gloomy silence at Southampton Row and walked through Bloomsbury Square to the British Museum. When we arrived there our mood darkened still more. The gates were closed and a typed note, pinned to a placard, said that owing to the scarcity of curators, all of whom were on active duty, the museum was closed indefinitely.

  “You look pale, Hal. You should get yourself a girl—a woman—to look after you.” My mother had kissed me the moment I set foot in the house, and then she had stepped back. “Is your wound a burden to you? Do you… do you feel honor-bound to tell women about it? Does it… does it make a lot of difference?”

  I’d been home less than two minutes and already she was grilling me. My mother was like that. At least it meant that my father had kept his side of the bargain and not told her about Sam.

  Of course, my mother’s questions were spot-on. Sam’s predicament suited my predicament and formed part of the arrangement— and bond—between us. But I wasn’t about to tell my mother all that.

  “I don’t tell women straightaway,” I said. It was more or less true, in that it was the way I had played it with Sam. There hadn’t been anyone else.

  “But you have to tell them at some point, I expect, before it gets too serious.”

  I moved away without answering.

  Fortunately, my father came
in just then; he had been paying off the taxi man.

  “Drink, Hal?” he said, going to the bar. “Whisky?”

  “I’d love one,” I replied. I was tired from the journey, but I was also shocked, knocked sideways, torpedoed, as Izzy would say, by my mother’s appearance. Her complexion was florid—and not just her face; the skin on the backs of her hands was florid too. Her voice had deepened and she had lost weight. I did not like what I saw and I silently reprimanded myself for not coming home sooner. Izzy had been right to insist I make an effort.

  Dad gave my mother her gin and me a whisky. As I think I said, he himself always drank brandy and soda, an old-fashioned drink that I had never been able to get used to. We were in the library, which was a good deal smaller than the drawing room proper, and which I preferred.

  “I was just telling Hal he looks a bit thin, undernourished, and that he should get himself a nice girl. He needs to put on some weight.”

  “He’s not the only one,” said my father easily, and neatly moving the conversation away from me. “What are we having for dinner?”

  “Chicken, of course. But a big one, one of ours, one of the few we have left. You won’t go hungry, not for now.” She sipped her gin.

  “I’ll take out a bottle of the Montrachet, then,” my father replied. “It’s a celebration of sorts.”

  “Yes,” said my mother, setting down her glass on a small table. “Do try to get down here more often, Hal. It’s lovely to see you, and I worry so—”

  “Mother!” I growled. “Don’t give me that. You are very definitely not the worrying kind, at any rate not for a grown son living in London. Now, I can understand you worrying about Izzy—”

  “We had a letter yesterday!” she chimed in.

  “Good, I’d like to read it later. When he was in London, Dad told me she has a man.” He had let this news slip out, on the steps of the Athenaeum, as we were parting.

  My mother sniffed. “He’s married.”

  “That’s unlike you … to be so conventional, I mean.”