Gifts of War

by Mackenzie Ford

  There was also a big disagreement between us and the French about how much reparation the Germans were to be forced to pay. The French had their own war-audit unit, similar to ours, though they had concentrated on the naked financial costs of the fighting, rather than the moral costs. Their calculations of loss were much, much higher than ours and, privately, I didn’t think that the Germans, much as I had come to loathe them, had a hope in hell of ever repaying what the French wanted.

  No amount of money would bring Isobel back.

  Normally, we broke for lunch each day around twelve-thirty, a compromise between the American and French desire to stop at twelve and the British and Italian wish to eat later. I usually had a quick sandwich, a glass of water, and a smoke and then, because we were sitting all day long during the negotiations, took a brisk walk in the Versailles gardens. There was more peace among the chestnut trees and rhododendron bushes than in the palace itself.

  At the lunch break on the second day of the German session, I was walking back from the Jardin de France, admiring the façade of the Petit Trianon, when I scuffed my shoes on the gravel. There was a fountain nearby, surrounded by a circular pond with a stone rim. I stepped across to the pond, taking a handkerchief from my pocket as I did so. I rested my shoe on the stone rim and bent to wipe my toe cap. As I was doing this, the bottom half of two gray trousers appeared in my line of sight and a voice said softly, “Hal? Is that you?”

  I looked up.

  It was a German officer, an Oberstleutnant, or lieutenant colonel, the same rank as me. I recognized these things now.

  I straightened up, uncomprehending at first. We’d had nothing to do with German officers yet, or at least I hadn’t. They had only just arrived. How did he know my name?

  Who am I fooling? Whatever my head said, my body told me straightaway. A bolt of recognition shivered down my spine.

  Despite the lines on his face, the tired, liver-colored patches under his eyes, the exhausted expression, the longer but better-cut hair, the different uniform, my skin burned, my heart seemed to swell, my throat turned dry and it hurt to swallow.

  Wilhelm had survived the war.

  His cheeks were sunk; he didn’t fill his uniform properly. He was still handsome but he had lost his dash and swagger.

  But Wilhelm had survived the war.

  I had read that day in Northumberland Avenue that the Saxon Regiment, his regiment, had won a drill contest. Not with Wilhelm they hadn’t. He was a shadow of what he had been.

  Did I salute? We had shaken hands in no-man’s-land and, as he took off his cap, we did the same again.

  For a moment, neither of us said anything. My blood was pulsing through my ears. The back of my neck was damp with sweat. I felt my chest would explode.

  “What happened to you?” I managed to breathe in German.

  He smiled and, speaking in English, said he had eventually made it to major in his regiment, then been taken up by General Ludendorff as an adjutant on his general staff, where he had shown a talent for propaganda. In 1917, he had been seconded to the army propaganda outfit and was here, in Versailles, as liaison officer with the German press.

  “And you, Hal? Did I see you limping?”

  “Yes, I was shot, here—” I pointed. “It happened about a week after … after the truce. Hospital, convalescence, military intelligence at the war ministry, economic intelligence in Switzerland. I’m here as an expert on reparation—what the war has cost us.” I made a face. “I delivered your photograph,” I lied.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “What? What do you mean? How do you know? Have you been to England already? I know you said you would, as soon as the war was over, but… have you seen Sam?”

  He shook his head. “No, of course I haven’t been to England. Like you, I’m part of our official delegation. This is my first time out of Germany for more than a year. But I have seen Sam, yes.”

  “You have? Where? When?”

  “Three days ago, when all three of you stood outside the Hôtel des Réservoirs, where our delegation is staying. I was inside. You didn’t see me but I saw you, and I saw Sam.”

  I was flustered. Did this explain Sam’s behavior while she was in Paris? It couldn’t—she had been… changed ever since her arrival, since before she could have seen Wilhelm. “Why didn’t you … why didn’t you come out?”

  He shrugged. “Be realistic. In the first place, if I had come out, I’d probably have been lynched—the crowd you were with was quite aggressive. They stood outside the hotel for the first three days, shouting at us all day long.” He played with his cap; he was more nervous than he looked. “More personally, don’t forget that I used to be very much in love with Sam.” He swept a hand through his hair. “And, to tell you the truth, I still am, seeing her here, in beautiful Paris of all places. I had always promised to bring her here and… well, it was hard to bear.”

  Carefully, I said nothing.

  “But the main reason is that you looked so complete, as a family. Your young son looked tired, sitting on your shoulders, but he looked content; so did you—and so did Sam. I couldn’t… I couldn’t interfere. It wouldn’t have been right.” He ran his tongue over his lips. “We are all four years older—it’s nearly five since I last saw Sam. If I’d… if I’d introduced myself, who knows what ghosts would have been let loose?”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Had he not recognized the likeness between Will and himself—the eyes, the jawline? Perhaps we had been too far away.

  “You don’t feel… you don’t feel I’ve stolen Sam from you?”

  I had said it.

  “Did you? Maybe you did, in a sense. But it was I who asked you to give her my message. It was a risk—you would see how beautiful she was. But it was a risk anyway—if she didn’t hear from me for years, didn’t know whether I was alive or dead. And she was in love— I hope she was in love; anyway, she told me she was—with someone who was now the enemy. There was a war, I could have been killed, you were there … life has to go on. You met her through me, you told her about me, and if she preferred the certainty you offered, the Englishness, how can I complain?”

  He smiled ruefully.

  “I spent a lot of the war in propaganda, devising ways to make people hate the English more and more. And I can tell you, it worked. So, perhaps, by now, Sam hates the Germans, and hates the one German she once loved, or said that she did. It would be natural.”

  He swallowed. This wasn’t easy for him.

  “I survived but at one point our unit was heavily shelled and my quarters caught fire. My tunic was burned, with Sam’s photograph in it. I thought I had begun to forget what she looked like—but now I’ve seen her again and no, my memory was good. She was just as beautiful the other day as she was in Stratford all those years ago. And you’ve made her happy—I could see that. You’ve made a family together, and your side won.” Another effort at a thin smile. “My country is ravaged by strikes, violence, revolution. That’s not Sam’s world at all. If I’d introduced myself the other day, if I’d risked those crowds outside the hotel, how many wounds would I have reopened, including the one in here?” He pointed to his heart. “And what would it do to that boy’s life? What’s his name, by the way?”

  I could barely get the word out. “Will.”

  “After Shakespeare, naturally.” He nodded, smiling again, congratulating himself on working it out. “I’ve often wondered whether we would meet again, and how it would be.” He took a cigar from his pocket and offered it to me.

  I shook my head. “I’ve still got one left over from the three you gave me before.”

  “It was something, that truce, eh?”

  “Sometimes I think it’s the only sane moment in the past four years. I lost my sister. Gassed.”

  He shook his head. “We didn’t like firing those shells, you know.” He paused. “But we did. My brother made it. But still, the war was better for you than for me, I think. My country is devastated�
�and all for nothing.” He put his cigar away. “And at this conference the French will humiliate us. Already they make everything difficult. No staff in the hotel, bad food. Perhaps it is what we deserve.”

  What did any of us deserve, I wondered.

  The garden was emptying. The afternoon session was almost ready to begin.

  “Shall we meet again?” I felt I had to say it.

  “No,” he whispered. “Now that the horror is over, I’m not going to look back. I could, if I chose, say that I lost twice over. I was on the losing side in the fighting, and not there when Sam needed me. But I tell you, Hal, anyone who was in this war, at the sharp end, and survived … you can’t call that losing.”

  His voice almost broke. “Think of the people—the parts of people—that you and I buried between us, in our short stretch of the war, on just one day.” He shook his head. “I’m glad we met during the truce, I’m honored we were part of that, you and I. I don’t regret it, despite what has happened. I’m comforted to know that you told Sam about me and that she made her decision. I am sad, but I am free at last. I’m pleased we met today. What you have told me has freed me.” He put his cap back on and held out his hand again. “We shared a few moments of that precious truce, and now a few moments of the peace conference that will shape the world for Will and all the other children. How many can say that?”

  He turned and walked away.

  That encounter, and in particular my part in it, must count as the other really low point in my life. Now I had in effect betrayed Wilhelm twice: once in not giving Sam his photograph as I had promised, and a second time in not telling him of my first betrayal and not coming clean about his son.

  How I got through the rest of the conference that day I don’t know. As soon as it was over I rushed back to the Majestic and collapsed onto the bed. I was shattered. Naturally, I kept wondering whether Sam had seen Wilhelm in Versailles but I kept coming back to the conclusion that she couldn’t have: her changed demeanor, her subtly different attitude had been there from the very first moment she arrived in Paris, well before our near encounter at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. It occurred to me that she was the way she was because she had always hoped to be introduced to Paris by him—he had said he had always planned to bring her, and maybe it had reawakened her memory. But if that was the case, then at least part of Sam had never got over him, and she had been lying to me when she said, in the field at Edgewater, on the day we scattered Izzy’s ashes among the potatoes, in the field of the bull, that she had learned to love me.

  Izzy. I couldn’t sleep that night and so, around two A.M., I picked up my sister’s journal and started to read. It was vivid—I’ll give my sister credit for that. It started off, in a girlish way, as you would expect, written with more enthusiasm and élan than skill, but that changed after war broke out. I found that she could be much more acerbic about her brother on the page than in the flesh, but by then Izzy’s voice came through with such painful verisimilitude that I could forgive her anything. Her reflections on the early disasters of war were original, pertinent, and often darkly funny. The journal was roughly chronological but was also full of asides, flashbacks, ruminations on things that took her fancy—how people decorated their uniforms in the trenches to mark out their individuality, the smell of the Front, the various accents, some of which were mutually incomprehensible: this was Izzy at her funniest. Some of the episodes I was familiar with already from her letters. Having been initially skeptical, I began to see what my father meant about the journal being published.

  I reached an interesting section about her role as a nurse at the Front. She had of course sent me several letters in which she had described some of the horrors of what she had seen, and her multiple roles as a medical orderly, letter writer, part-time girlfriend, and confidante of the dying. But there were also some completely fresh reflections on the differences between the hospitals at the Front and those back home. I now learned that she—and my parents—had originally been misinformed about my own injuries. At first, they had been told I had lost a leg, even both legs, according to one account. She was beside herself with misery, railed against the war, and decided she would devote her life to taking care of me. Her relief when she found out that my injuries were much less serious than she’d thought was palpable, and she couldn’t understand why I was so depressed when my plight could have been so much worse. She thought it a mistake that I had been brought back to England, maintaining that if I had remained in France, among men who were much worse off than me, I would have recovered more quickly and never have been brought so low.

  Even here, though, I have to say, she was at times bitingly funny. Some passages needed editing but my father was right: Izzy’s journal was definitely publishable. All this and God knows how many lives she had saved, how many girlfriends she had written to, trying to console the inconsolable. On the platform at Stratford that morning I had told her I was proud of her. How pleased I was now that those had been my last spoken words to her. And how pleased I was, now, that she had fallen in love with Alan. Izzy had banged on about sex during our dinner at the Crown in Stratford, but there is a world of difference between sex and love and the fact that she had experienced love before she was killed… I was pleased for her for that. She had told me at Stratford about this new psychiatrist (“Sigmund somebody” she had said, meaning Sigmund Freud). Well, I’d read one of his books on her say-so (before Sam discovered Jung), and this Freud says that for a satisfying life we need two things and two things only: useful, productive work and love. Izzy, more than anyone, did useful work—not just giving blood transfusions but all that support for men about to meet their maker—and she also loved and was loved. My lovely sister, however short her life, had experienced the best of what this world has to offer. That was something for me to hold on to.

  Then I read the next section and… well, this is the beginning of the end of my story. In addition to her vivid prose style and cheeky sense of humor, Izzy had an excellent memory. The section I was reading was a frank—and very full—account of her visit to me when I was recovering from my operation in Sedgeberrow, including how, out of boredom, she had gone through my belongings, making the discovery that caused her to think that I was homosexual. Naturally, she then wrote up my explanation and description of the Christmas truce. She had read many of the press accounts of the truce and had neatly placed my experience in the wider context—my meeting with Wilhelm, our exchange of gifts, his request for me to give his girlfriend his photograph. Which she assumed I had done.

  And Sam had read her account.

  It was about half past four when I reached Izzy’s visit to me in Sedgeberrow. Outside, in the Avenue Victor Hugo, it was raining, water lashing against the windows. I could hear the clatter of horses’ hooves on the wet cobbles of Paris, the occasional swish of automobile tires through the puddles. I recalled that day when it had rained equally hard as Sam and I walked along the canal in Middle Hill.

  That Sam had read Izzy’s journal explained a lot. It explained everything. In particular it explained her manner with me while she had been here in Paris, for the break in the peace conference. The more I thought about it, however, the more puzzled I became. If she had read the passage, as I was sure she had, if she had decided that I had behaved—well, beyond all humanity—why had she come to Paris at all? Why not just turn her back on me and disappear, taking Will with her? Or why not have it out with me, there and then, in Paris— one hell of a fight, with every blunt truth aired? That she hadn’t followed either course of action didn’t make sense.

  Five A.M. came. I stood at the window, looking out at the rain. There were a few stragglers going home from their revels, uncertain on their feet, but most of the people I saw were the solitary night people—policemen, off-duty waiters, newspaper deliverymen, early morning bakers who had no choice but to be up at this sad hour. Will would be fast asleep now, the smell of soap about him. Occasionally, he would turn in his sleep and absently rub the
scar on his arm where it had been slashed at the Battersea fair. I had watched him do that on countless evenings when I stood over him, before silently bidding him good night.

  Five-thirty came, five forty-five. Was there a possibility still that Sam had learned to love me, and loved me even now; that she liked our life, looked forward to living in my father’s house; and that she understood my actions—that with a war on, with all the danger and uncertainty it implied, what I had done was forgivable? That I deserved some credit for saving Will’s life?

  Then I asked myself again the question I had framed many times over—whether love, the slow burn when you have learned to love someone, is ever the same as the explosion of love at first sight?

  Six o’clock came. I took a bath and, while I was in the bath, I finally realized what Sam had done.

  Everything at last, and for the first time, was out in the open between us. Now she was saying: Hal, you have to decide what to do. You, the man who wrote the book on the moral cost of the war, have shown an amorality beyond all conscience. She had kept her promise and had never mentioned Wilhelm’s name since that day in the field when we had scattered Izzy’s ashes, not even in Paris. So she was saying, in effect: Your actions got us into this situation, this predicament, this love story of sorts, and all via dishonesty, opportunistic deception, and luck. What are you going to do?

  Except, of course, that Sam still didn’t know everything. She thought she did, at long last, after a wartime of not knowing. But once again, and ironically—bitterly ironically—she didn’t have all the facts. But I did. I knew that Wilhelm was still alive, still in love with Sam. I even knew where he was! Once again, as before, at the very start, I was the only person who knew everything, who had the whole picture.