Swavely had arrived the night before Alec. He boasted that he’d wasted no time at all. He’d found his way around, made connections, and so learned about the hospitality of certain brothels (the swank ones) that opened their doors, usually barred to common soldiers, to them on special nights once or twice a month (provided the doorman approved your looks). The doorman gave the nod to Alec, who pulled Swavely in behind him. Thus the two had gained entrance to the Chabanais, the celebrated high-class whorehouse lately and extravagantly patronized by King Edward the Peacemaker, rest his soul.
Their admission, gratis, although offered as a gesture of goodwill, was also very good for business, and the proprietress knew it. The trim figures of young warriors in uniform brightened her stage picture. (Sailors in whites were for that reason most warmly welcomed.) Alec and Swavely soon discerned that not all the women in the crowd were employed there. Some were tourists with their naughty beaux, but many were clients themselves, out to enjoy the night. They found the show of virility stimulating—otherwise deprived, as they were, of the sight of healthy young men by the war. And while it was understood that the ladies would not need to pay a tariff to the management for any pleasures incidentally provided by the visiting men-at-arms, it was likewise understood that they would treat the boys to drinks and, should a tryst result, pay to rent one of the rooms available on the premises.
There were other female clients who did not seek the company of men, but of one another and of certain demoiselles of the Chabanais. The proprietress catered to them likewise. And of course many of her patrons were men who sought men, whom she also served with tact. She could rely on this special category of customers to turn out in large numbers on her open military nights. She prided herself on attention to details: her ability, for example, to call upon those few youths in the city—no more than could be counted on the jeweled fingers of her hands—who would agree to be photographed in certain ways together, suggestively but tastefully. (Cabinet cards were for sale at her desk.) In addition, she knew a larger group of fellows willing to perform in shows and to make themselves available to customers, with a percentage of their fees going to the house.
For his part, Swavely had been assured by “reliable sources” that Frenchwomen found an English uniform irresistible. Should one—or two!—of these Parisian femmes take a shine to him, he’d give them such a time. Wishing to minimize his competition, he suggested that he and Alec separate. They agreed to rendezvous after midnight in the foyer; if one of them should fail to appear, that meant he was amorously occupied. Alec, without disclosing why, was also glad to split up. Before going off on his own, he watched Swavely stake out a spot across from the open doorway to a dining room where he could observe groups of clients of both sexes being served at little tables by waitresses wearing only high-heeled shoes and stockings and black ribbons around their necks. Swavely, bug-eyed at the naked girls, tried to appear bored. He smoked his cigarette carelessly, even scornfully, hoping a show of insouciance would prove seductive.
Alec wandered the corridors. His pal’s enthusiasm had sufficed to bring him here tonight, but he’d no expectations for himself. He thought he might view the scene for an hour or so, then go back to their grubby hotel to wait for stories of Swavely’s adventures. Meantime, other prowlers often caught his eye along the corridors and stairways—women made themselves smile, men tried to appear stern and stalwart. As the night grew later and the crowd drunker, the lust turned more overt and the come-hithers more explicit. The scene was becoming grotesque, like the drawings in the program of the Golden Calf, where brutality and madness mixed together with the city’s high life. He’d heard that part of the front was only seventy miles from London’s nightclubs. How much closer must it be to Paris? Tonight at the Chabanais everybody wanted to dance and drink and kiss and fuck, the war’s desperation driving the frenzy.
At last he found his way to where his kind belonged, a dark hallway on an upper floor with doors left ajar to invite watching or joining in. Through one he saw an old fellow—an aristocrat, to judge by the top hat on the floor—begging a thug to thrash him harder. Alec shuddered. From another room he heard a honky-tonk piano playing Scheherazade. A pantomime was in progress there, more to his taste. He joined about a dozen others watching two “Moroccan” lads, dressed in the mode of Arabian Nights, acting out an amorous scene with overblown gestures of desire and hesitation, which led, of course, to canoodling and the removal of their sheer Persian trousers. Then a strapping fellow, turbaned, with an earring, entered the scene. He menaced the lovers with his stage scimitar. At first it seemed he wanted to punish them for their unspeakable transgression against natural law, and so the audience booed, but soon it became clear that he wanted to transgress himself, and the booing turned to cheering. He coerced one of the lads to embrace him. He was so rapt with the pleasure of holding the comely youth in his arms that the other was able to seize the scimitar and turn the tables. In order to punish Mr. Turban, they prepared to rob him. They made him undress. He shyly stripped to the tune of a snake dance on the piano and, to no one’s surprise, revealed a heavenly physique, shaved and glistening. When the only bit of clothing left on him was a tiny sex pouch bursting with its contents, the lads peeked inside. Pleased with what they saw, the lovers forgave their assailant, tossed away the sword, and made a merry threesome.
Silly as it was, the show had taken hold of Alec, seizing his mind by way of his cock and accomplishing its commercial objective. He wanted what he saw; he might even pay for it. Suddenly a man embraced him from behind. Alec was about to break the hold with a kick when a familiar voice murmured into his ear, “We two might give them a far bigger eyeful, now, couldn’t we, darlin’?”
* * *
Staff Corporal Ivanhoe Blunt had mastered the art of Wearing the Uniform. His tunic, detailed in red, was meant for headquarters, not battle, and had been tailored to ensure that it glorified the fine figure it covered. He was a regular at the Chabanais, also a favorite. His allure was so good for business that the proprietress often welcomed him herself. He now guided Alec to a couple of chairs in a quiet anteroom where they could drink and talk.
Van had put off enlisting for service as long as possible. “I’d the farm to run,” he said, “and my own poppet Phyllis to dandle, still toddlin’ and ploppin’ down on her sweet behind. Why should I abandon the land that my people took generations to gain? To fight the family feuds of our Johnny-come-lately overlords, the Saxe-Coburgs, and their fuckin’ German kindred?” Only when Van could see no way to dodge the impending draft did he sign on, grudgingly. “Oh, I fumed for days. Leave me alone, is all I was askin’, to guard my own house from the Hun, not to die like a rat in some Belgian ditch.”
When he did volunteer, he did so with one intention paramount: to survive the war by any means and survive it intact. “I’ve a child and a home to live for. And Mabel, the best woman in the world, she’s too young to be makin’ her way in the world as a widow with a fatherless babe, or, should I be maimed, to spend her life luggin’ a useless cripple of a husband back and forth to the toilet.”
In the army, he soon learned to make the most of his assets. It was an open secret that some officers liked to keep the best-looking Tommies at hand. Not a week into training, a major approached Van to serve as his orderly. He had no scruples about accepting. “Only it pained me that I’d never been servant to any man before, and now I’m tidying up his quarters day and night, and him gaping at my buttocks the whole time with his tongue hangin’ down. But I put my life before my pride.” He went on, “We both knew what he wanted. When I helped him dress, his prick would stand stiff as a flagpole on parade. But I’m tellin’ you, they’re all bollixed, these Harrow types. If the man had only once said to me, Blunt! Let’s go at it, for sure I’d have told him, Yessir! I even fancied the fellow a bit. But he couldn’t admit his own wants and I wasn’t about to make it easy on him.”
After some months in the major’s service, Van caught the eye of a
staff colonel, who poached him away from the lower-ranked officer and had Private Blunt promoted to corporal. “So ended my stint as a chambermaid, praise the Lord God Almighty!” The colonel brought Van to Paris, where he was now permanently stationed. “The old fellow’s a bit more relaxed than the major, with an arm about me now and again and feelin’ the muscles. But Alec, I promise you, I’m not blatherin’ on in this manner to brag—”
“It’s a good story, I’m glad for you.”
“Hear me now: I know how to get you on staff—”
“What’s that?”
“I’m sayin’ if you’ll give me the word, I’ll get started on things tomorrow. I’ll drop a few hints and shuffle some papers, and once the officers get a look at you, they’ll want to keep you near. Within a week, I’m quite certain, you’ll be out of harm’s way and stationed at headquarters.”
Alec couldn’t take in this proposal or even think straight, not with tonight’s distractions: the sex show, and Van’s nuzzling and groping, and this brandy they now were sipping. They could strip down and have at it right there: others would watch and cheer.
He shook his head to clear it and looked into his friend’s eyes. More than sex, he wanted Van to hold him, caress him, comfort him, tell him that Maurice was on his way home. He stammered, “I, I’m—”
Van pulled his chair closer. “It’s about your gentleman, ain’t it?”
“How’d ya know?”
“Osmington, darlin’; news gets about. Mabel heard from your folks, or maybe from someone who’d heard from them, that you’d visited home to say goodbye on your way to enlist in Cardiff, you and your gent, Mr. Hall. They say he’s most courteous, no airs about him at all, and handsome as he can be.”
Alec lowered his eyes.
“Aw my sweet Jesus, Alec—not killed, is he?”
“There’s been no word for a while now.”
Van took his hand. “Listen. Will you do that, please? And look at me.” Alec did so. “How sad would it be for him to come back from the war and learn you’d died in battle? Do as I say. Stay with me here for his sake. We’ll watch out for each other.”
26
In the autumn of 1918, everybody was blue, even the diehard jingoists. This reversal of mood had been abrupt. Only weeks before, during the summer, morale was skyrocketing, when the Yanks were arriving in France by the hundreds of thousands. Some said there were two million! How fresh they looked, fit and chipper with their spanking-new uniforms and broad-brimmed hats. To hear them talk, you’d think they planned to win the war on their own and rescue the feeble Old World from its own folly. They were earnest, if unseasoned; they fought hard if naïvely. With a bit more know-how, surely fewer would have died.
By no means did they win the war on their own, but they did make the crucial difference. The Kaiser’s General Ludendorff had tried his best to crush the Allies last March—before the additional muscle had time to arrive from the States. To that end he unleashed his new weapon, the storm trooper, a human machine fueled by pep pills, geared for surprise attack with a flamethrower and light machine gun. At first this innovation proved effective. The storm troopers were returning the pace of the war to its beginning, with Germans claiming miles of territory at a thrust instead of paltry yardage. Once again they seized the places near Paris they’d been forced to give up in 1914—like the forest of Crépy, whence their artillery could fire on the capital. A million Parisians fled.
The storm troopers were efficient at taking territory, but they couldn’t hold it. Their speed worked against them, because they advanced farther and faster than supplies could reach. They took to looting for food: that slowed them down, and their deep penetration into France exposed them to the enemy on three sides. So finally these elite fighters proved as mortal as ordinary soldiers. But, trained at great length and staggering expense, they could not be replaced. Germany was running out of men. When the Americans, fresh and well-fed, joined the Allies, the German-led Central Powers found themselves outnumbered. Thus they were once more beaten back from Paris, from Reims and Amiens as well, pursued by the French innovation, tanks, produced by the hundreds in their auto factories. The tanks pushed the Germans back to their last edge of defense, the Hindenburg Line. At last, refreshed by the Americans, the Allies broke through.
Germany was hungry. War had devoured the nation’s food as well as the flesh of its men. Berlin kept trying to feed her soldiers, but the city itself was starving, and what reached the battlefront was stretched, adulterated, unhealthy. Hunger weakened the army’s resistance to sickness: it was said their medics were treating a half million cases of influenza. Their spirit was starving as well. This Great War was no longer a showdown of national character: Teutonic knighthood versus Gallic hypocrisy; German idealism versus English greed. No, it was no longer even a contest. In their hopelessness, they sometimes surrendered rather than die. One of them, laying down his rifle, approached his enemies with his hands above his head and called out in English, “Don’t you know? The war is over!”
Hearing this German soldier speak English confused Alec. Was the man telling the truth? Did he truly know something being withheld from his foes? The British troops had long since stopped trusting their commanders. Turkey had surrendered, they heard, the Austrians were suing for peace, and wasn’t Ludendorff himself asking for an armistice? What were the bigwigs holding out for, Lloyd George and Poincaré and now fucking Woodrow Wilson, playing God with his Fourteen Points and his League of Nations? Useless old men, too weak even to end a war that was already over. Let them take the bullets themselves! So the soldiers were waiting every day for news that didn’t come. Meanwhile, as they had been for years, they were rotated from their second and third lines to the front for yet another week in the trenches. How wretched it would be to die now, or to be maimed, when the end must be near. Why keep fighting? But they were offered no choice except to dodge bullets or take one in the head for treason.
Alec had been offered a better choice once, but that was two years ago now, when Van asked him to stay in Paris. He’d chosen not to remain in safety while his beloved might still be in harm’s way. So on the day after their night at the Chabanais (where a generous demoiselle had rewarded Swavely’s defense of her homeland with an hour he would always remember), the two Royal Welsh Fusiliers reported for transport to the front.
A most frigid winter ensued. “Bleedin’ fuckin’ Ice Age,” Swavely called it. Alec survived the cold with Risley’s scarf tied around his face. The ugly thing did keep his lips from freezing. Unfortunately, it also made him laugh, thinking of Risley squinting to count stitches, and the laughter hurt: the rush of icy air would burn his nose and throat. When he’d try to stop, he was like a kid not wanting to giggle in church, so he’d laugh all the more, his thoughts running off to the “fuckin’ Ice Age” of woolly mammoths and dancing mastodons. He couldn’t help himself. The cold made him crazy.
When relief came at last, it was unwelcome. In February 1917, Private Scudder was granted five days’ leave to attend his father’s funeral. As mother and son followed the coffin from their cottage to St. Osmund’s church, Alec’s heart lurched between grief and rage. “Da! Couldn’t you’ve waited?” he thought. “Just till after the war? There’s too much dyin’! With me gone and Fred too, how will Ma endure?” Aderyn leaned heavily against him as they walked arm in arm along barren lanes. She was getting old and before long would likely need care.
Fred arrived from Argentina on the last day of Alec’s leave. Even though their time together was short, the brothers found an hour to bicker behind the closed door of their old bedroom. Fred blamed Alec: “If you’d sailed with me as you’d promised, instead of chasin’ after your grand Mr. Hall, you’d be livin’ safe overseas, likely married and settled. Ma and Da would have followed you and we could all take care of her now.”
“Great prognosticator, ain’t you, Freddy?”
“It’s true! Didn’t she tell me as much? They’d have followed me and Jane bu
t for you stayin’ here. And once you’d enlisted, that was that. On no, they wouldn’t leave you behind. It was frettin’ for you that hastened his death, and seein’ how she fretted too.”
“Did I ask for this fuckin’ war? What do you think I’m fightin’ for? I’ll tell you what for: it’s so’s you insurance purveyors can enjoy your easy life in the colonies.”
“One’s got nothin’ to do with the other.”
“You’re blind if ya can’t see it, and ya haven’t the brains to imagine a battle. You just don’t know.”
“We can’t leave her here by herself.”
Aderyn opened the door without knocking. “Enough of this, both of you. I shall go nowhere. Who’d tend your father’s grave?”
Fred threw up his hands: “Tuh…”
Several weeks later Alec got a letter from Fred, who’d spent the rest of his time in Osmington trying to persuade their mother to come back with him to Argentina, to no avail. He wrote, “I’m not proud of doing it, but it had to be done.” At the dock, Fred invited her onboard to his cabin for a last goodbye and to see one more picture of her granddaughter. He asked a steward to bring them tea, and while she was cooing over the photo, Fred slipped something into her cup. She woke six hours later, far out to sea. Fred had booked her passage without telling her and procured a powder from the village druggist “to help our grieving mother sleep.”
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