Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy

by Bill Mesce

  “Well, let’s not have that, then.”

  “How did you know?”

  Himself, of course. The Boss. She had only to smile and I knew it’d been him.

  “I’d just as soon not have bothered you wi’ it,” I told her. “Not my idea, you know. Didn’t mean to trouble.”

  “I’m glad he told me. Saves you having to tell a story. No sense you being cross with him over it. Not at this point.”

  “Can’t afford to be. He signs the checks.”

  “Quite. How is the old boy?”

  “He worries me.” I tapped my chest. “I think he’s not at all well.”

  She looked down at her plate, pensive. “I liked him. Always did.”

  “He is likable, as fire-breathing despots go.”

  Her smile flickered back, briefly. She pushed her plate away. “I thought I was hungry.”

  “Me, too.” I flagged the waiter over but we’d reached our alloI’ment on the wine. Cathryn settled for tea and I joined her. “You’re looking well, Cat.”

  “I’m looking like hell. And so are you.”

  I was unaccustomed to such bluntness from her, and took shelter behind a sip from my cup.

  “Look, Eddie, I appreciate your ringing me up. It is nice to see you again, actually. It’s nice to see you well and getting on —”

  “You know me. I could always find a way to manage.” That pensive look again. “Yes. You always could. I daresay you always seemed to manage so much better alone.”

  “That’s not true, Cat. I —”

  “You’re about to say something sweet and romantic about us, but…” She smiled sadly. “You were always a bit sweet, much as you tried to hide it, but you’re no romantic. Save yourself a charming lie. You’re just a touch lonely, I expect. That’s all.”

  “You could give me the benefit of the doubt.”

  “How long have you been back in England, Eddie? Singapore was when? February ‘42? This is 1943, Eddie, and it’s nearly Christmas. And when was the last time before you left for Singapore?”

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence. I felt the teacup cooling in my hands. I wondered if the cafe had anything stronger than wine.

  She sighed. “I’m not trying to fight. It’s long done; there’s no reason to fight. I’m glad you rang. It is nice to see you —”

  “And how well I’m getting on. So you said.”

  “It got me thinking. It’s been almost two years — more, if you go back before Singapore —”

  “So you said.”

  She paused a moment, then pushed on. “Well, this may not be the best time, but I don’t suppose there’ll ever be a good time. We really need to… formalize this —” She was back to her usual delicacy, seeking the least abrading word.

  “Situation?” I offered. “Condition? Circumstance?” For someone who’d downed only two glasses of wine — and a rather feeble wine at that — I was sounding quite acrid. “I think the legal term is separation, my dear.”

  “I’ve already been to the solicitor’s. Filed quite some time ago, in fact.”

  “Well, aye, why not? Let’s get on and be done wi’ it, eh? It is two years now, isn’t it? But if you’ve filed, there must be a villain, eh? There’s got to be a villain for it to work, eh? That’s the procedure, isn’t it? And I’m to be the guilty party? Of course. Typecasting, I think they call it in the cine. And if I’m to be the villain, there must be a villainy. Can’t process the paperwork wi’out a sin in the proper space. What’s it to be, Cat? Did I flog you regularly? Gamble away the family antiquities? Ah! Infidelity! That’s always a perennial favorite. Was I infidelitous, Cat?”

  She was neither angry nor upset. As I said: merely tired. “I wouldn’t put that down, Eddie. I never even imagined that. I’d wager that even since then —” She decided not to pursue that line. “Under the circumstances, he — my solicitor — suggested desertion. Abandonment. I agreed.”

  “Well,” I said, and tapped my spoon alongside my cup, a slow cadence, a death knell. “Appropriate, I suppose. As you say, under the circumstances. More true than not, eh?”

  “That was really your only sin, Eddie.”

  “Just the one?”

  “Just the one. It was just that you practiced it so well.”

  To which I could say nothing.

  “There won’t be alimony,” she went on, “nothing of that sort. You won’t even need to go to the hearing. I’ll have your copy of the decree sent round once it’s executed.”

  I nodded a thank you.

  “It is time we’ve got on with this. After all —”

  “Aye, it’s been two years. So you keep telling me.” I had no right to be angry; at least, not with her. “Sorry.”

  She nodded and stood.

  “Cat… I mean… I’m sorry about the whole bloody mess.”

  “I know.”

  She kissed me atop my head when she left, forgiving the errant schoolboy, then she was gone and I was alone at the table with cold tea and an uneaten meal. On the other side of the blackout drapes I could hear the rain rattle against the cafe windows.

  *

  “Well, what’d you expect, you silly sod?” He shook that large, grizzled head the way paters do over small sons whining that the cat scratched them after they’ve yanked its tail.

  “Um, pardon, but I think an erratum is in order. Weren’t you the wise old walrus who suggested I get back wi’ her?” His heavy brow rose, his eyes widened, fishlike behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. It was a stunning performance of ignorance. “Did I, now?”

  “Just this summer, wasn’t it? As I recall.”

  Completely ignoring the point, he eased back into the cracked leather of his chair, his thick fingers stretched across the wide expanse of his stomach, the deep furrows of his face transforming into something pensive. “Why is it if Jerry drops a wee bomb over Piccadilly, you’re off like an Epsom Downs champion and there before it hits ground? But nearly four months ago I suggest —”

  “Recommend.”

  “— suggest you try to patch it with the missus, and you wait until now —”

  “I thought it’d make a nice Christmas surprise.”

  “Next time buy her a hat instead. My missus likes hats.”

  I’d intended to head back to my flat from the cafe, but found the idea of lying huddled under a comforter with a bottle of cheap Scots whisky and the BBC’s mix of Christmas carols and war news a rather dim evening’s entertainment. Instead, I clip-clopped through the rain back to the paper’s office, pestered the night staff, loitered about the teleprinter scanning the bulletins: the opening of the Russian winter offensive against the German southern flank; Rommel pushing Tito’s guerrillas back into the Yugoslav mountains; buoyant reports from the Pacific following the fall of the Gilbert Islands; the stalemate in Italy Himself, late in his office as per the usual, beckoned me from the door of his sanctum. “Why not leave the lads to their work, eh, Eddie? There’s a good fellow. Now, in with you.” He’d closed the door behind us, dropped the blinds over the windows facing the newsroom, and reached into his desk drawer for two chipped teacups and a very fine bottle of the Irish stuff. I’d never understood what pretense the teacups supported, as the bottle frequently sat in plain sight.

  He poured us each a dose. “For the rain, the chill, or what have you. Biscuit?” On his desk stood a sad-looking Christmas tree handmade of cardboard, one of his missus’s home crafts projects. Next to it sat a Christmas tin filled with biscuits; as many as when the tin had first appeared several days earlier. “Now what’s all this, then? All this glumming about?” After which came the disavowal of responsibility and suggestion regarding headwear. “Good stuff, this,” I concluded, raising my cup.

  “Gift from Brannagh. I think he’s heard we’re going to pension off old Glatley next year and he fancies his seat on the city desk. This is his attempt to sway me.”

  “Is it working?”

  “As you say, it is quite good. But yo
u know I’ve always had you in mind for the chair.”

  “I’m not for a desk.”

  He poured himself a second splash. I frowned. His color had not been good of late, pasty and gray. The snarls he directed at the staff no longer seemed to have the same teeth behind them.

  “Should you be having another? What’s the doctor said?”

  “I haven’t been to the doctor.”

  “If you’re not going to be sensible, at least go down to see Caffrey. He does the Medicine and Science column. That makes him almost a medical man.”

  “I thought you were divorced,” he said, ignoring me. “Isn’t that what you’ve always said?”

  “That’s how it felt. The good-byes at the time certainly seemed final enough. I just never got round to the paperwork.”

  “So, all this time you’ve been saying you’re divorced, you were never really —”

  “We were separated.”

  “Why would you say you were divorced, then?”

  “Pour yourself another drink. To hell with the damned doctors.”

  “This business of the divorce —”

  “Why’d you tell her about the leg?”

  “She still loved you then, didn’t she? I thought she’d want to know. She should know.” He scowled into his cup, as if debating partaking of that second drink. “Probably still loves you. If they ever truly did, part of them always truly will. Even while they’re throwing your bags at you and telling you to piss off. Why’d you ring her, then? All of a sudden?”

  I shrugged.

  “Holiday doldrums and all that? Listen, my son, have you anything on for Christmas? Not the time to be alone, particularly in your state. You should come round. The missus’d be happy for the company.” He fondled one of the biscuits, rapped it against his desktop, tossed it back into the tin. The biscuits rattled together like gravel. “Don’t see why I should suffer one of her Christmas feasts alone.”

  “We’ll see. I should be off home.” I headed for the door. “One other thing, my son.”

  I turned. His glasses were on the blotter and he was rubbing his eyes. For years I’d believed he’d bury us all, but at that moment he seemed unutterably drained.

  “You have me worried. You came back from points Far East and I doubted you. Thought with the leg and so forth, well, you know, thought you wouldn’t be up to snuff and all that sort of rot. We — I — was very good about having you back, but very bad about putting you on the back bench. Well, I’m happy to say you proved me wrong with that business last summer, my son. Glad to put you back in harness, back on the first team. But of late… your stuff’s all right, as good as anyone on the paper, but it, well, it’s just off, eh? I know you, I know your stuff, and there may not be another eye in our circulation can see it, but I can. Someone in back of the string section out of tune, eh?”

  “This business with Cathryn —”

  He looked at me with a hard eye. “Please, my son. Tell that to yourself, but not to me. I’m thinking all this whatever-it-is is why you rang her. So what is it, my son? Any thoughts?”

  I stepped back to the desk, picked up my cup, and held it out for another dash, then drained it. “Haven’t a clue, frankly. Wish I did.”

  “Give it some thought, my son. Otherwise, you wake up one day and find it’s devoured you and there’s nothing left for me to abuse and exploit. Then where’ll I be?”

  I smiled and opened the door.

  “It’s our job to bear witness,” the great man said, sounding immensely weary. “Sometimes we witness one war too many, Eddie. If that’s it, then it’s time to get out of the game.”

  *

  It had been some time since I thought of poor old Harry Voss, but as I limped my way home, he came to mind. I thought it odd.

  After all, we’d been on speaking terms for only a few days back in August, and even at that had had painfully little in common. I was a hard-barked Scot who’d lost count of my wars, and Harry was a homesick Yank whose tenure in London marked his only exposure to armed conflict. I was better acquainted with the weathered Gladstone that had accompanied me round the globe than with my wife, while Harry openly pined for the woman who dutifully waited for him.

  Hardly friends. Just an accidental conjoining of a lonely soul and a sympathetic ear. Perhaps he came back to me then as I was feeling that same kind of loneliness — of feeling lost, unrooted — that he’d had. Perhaps right then I needed him to return the favor.

  Back in August, we’d spent a long night over coffee and a bottle. It was a wake of sorts. Poor old Harry, cradling the cast of a broken right hand, was mourning a few dead ideals. It was dawn and I had invited him to stay, rest, join me for breakfast.

  “I just want to go home,” Harry had said, and took his leave.

  I watched him from my window, shuffling along the bluish morning streets toward the court in Mayfair where he was quartered. A messenger waited for him in the orderly room of his billet, with orders that gave him just two hours to gather up his belongings and catch a train for Liverpool. By dusk, he’d been quartered on a Liberty ship, one of thirty-odd vessels making up an OB convoy that, by nightfall, was coursing through the North Channel and out into the North Atlantic heading for the States. Harry Voss had gotten his wish: He was going home.

  *

  The “cargo” of Harry’s particular ship, I learned much later, was American soldiers being rotated Stateside, most of them wounded. Racks of bunks had been installed in the storage spaces; the companionways and compartments of the vessel were thick with the smell of gauze and disinfectant. To Harry’s surprise, he found the men in those bunks and lurching about on crutches upbeat. They laughed, told jokes and stories; those with two good legs tried to dance in the confined spaces to records on the ship’s phonograph. The swathes of bandages seemed to matter little to them. Whatever they had suffered — or were suffering — they were, after all, going home!

  Their wounds seemed to matter more to Harry: the patches over missing eyes, the empty sleeves and trouser legs, the comatose mummified inside meters of gauze, rent bodies misshapen under blankets. There were hundreds of them on the ship, an army of the damaged and crippled, and so many of them painfully young.

  After his first visit, Harry never returned below decks. When a few of the more ambulatory cases appeared in the wardroom, or braved the North Atlantic winds on deck, he kept his distance.

  In recognition of his officer’s status, Harry was allowed a level of privacy not afforded the enlisted ranks, who were quartered en masse. He was assigned a cabin which he shared with three lieutenants. Since Harry was a last-minute placement, one of the lieutenants had to give up his place in the three-tiered rack of bunks and sleep on a folding cot that, when open, occupied nearly all of the compartment’s little deck space.

  “It was like being in a box of puppies,” Harry later reflected. The three lieutenants were friends, the pilot, copilot, and navigator from an Eighth Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress crew. They’d managed to get through their tour of twenty-five missions intact and now youthful, pockets brimming with back pay, intoxicated with survival, they were constantly laughing, endlessly prattling on about the enormous damage they intended to do to the stocks of liquor and unwary women Stateside.

  “We’re gonna swashbuckle through New York like the Three Musketeers!” declared the navigator.

  “More like the Three Stooges,” said the copilot.

  Harry slid out the door lest the slapstick eye-pokings and hair-pullings that followed inflict some collateral damage on him in the confined space.

  Their second night at sea, Harry was awakened by the screaming of the navigator, thrashing about on the folding cot. All Harry could make out was the name “Jordy,” shouted time and again.

  Harry waited for the man’s mates to climb down from the bunks above to wake and comfort the man, but other than the violent tossing of the tormented navigator and the usual rolling of the ship, the compartment remained silent.

 
The blackout curtain was drawn across the porthole, the only light switch on the bulkhead near the door. In the darkness, Harry started to fumble his way out from under his blankets to attend to the screaming young man, but a restraining hand lit on his shoulder.

  “It’s OK.” The pilot’s voice came to him softly out of the dark. “It’ll pass in a bit.”

  The following morning, all three of the bomber crewmen — including the nightmare-plagued navigator — were back to their usual puppying about, as if nothing had occurred.

  Harry spent as little time round the three whelps as he could, uncomfortable about the trio, feeling the weight of the differences in their ages and experiences. In the mornings, he would head straight for the wardroom, breakfast alone in a corner, and then, weather permitting, go on deck. He found himself an isolated spot forward, the gunwales of the bow gun tub an effective bulwark against the chill North Atlantic winds. The pilot found him there one morning and explained the situation concerning the navigator.

  There had originally been four of them: the two pilots, the navigator, and “Jordy,” the bombardier who’d shared their 17’s cramped nose compartment with the navigator. They’d been together nearly a year since they’d trained as a crew back at Randolph Field in Texas. A few days earlier, on August 17, the bomber puppies had flown their last mission as part of Eighth Air Force’s Mission No. 81 against the Germans’ main ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt.

  The mission was a brutal running battle with German interceptors five miles above the earth, from the moment the bomber stream crossed the Belgian coast until it reached the target area ninety minutes later, growing even more ferocious after the American escort fighters reached their range limit near Aachen. Before the day was out, the force of 230 B-17’s would lose 36 bombers and nearly 400 airmen.

  The bomber puppies’ ship was section leader, which meant Jordy was lead bombardier for the section. The other bombardiers in the section would watch the lead plane, releasing their bombs when the leader did. As they’d turned onto the bomb run, lining themselves up for their drop point, Jordy hunched over his Norden bombsight, trying to ignore the ugly black and red bursts of flak that jostled the aeroplane, sending shrapnel rattling against the aluminum hull.