Give Us This Day (81 page)

“By all means. There’s a rare show this year. Everything is responding to this sunshine. So that fool of a Czar has given way, has he? Well, that’ll set the cat among the pigeons and no mistake, for as like as not the Kaiser will follow suit, and after him, France.” He checked his stride, contemplating for a moment the result of full-scale mobilisation across Europe. “You think there’ll be war?”

“Grey seems to think there might be. Some of our people are beginning to hedge.”

“You mean the Cabinet is divided?”

“Right down the middle, I gather, from the people I talked to last night.”

“But good God, boy! If she’s fool enough to square up to Germany without provocation, why should it concern us?”

“We’re under an obligation to protect France’s Channel coast. Not an alliance, but a military arrangement. No more and no less, so far as I can discover, for they’ve kept very quiet about it. Nobody seems to know the true nature of the understanding, not even Asquith, and Lloyd George himself is confused. He told me last week all would depend on what happened to Belgium if the Germans attack France.”

It struck him then, as it had many times over the last few weeks, that politics lacked the precision of business, that hardly anyone practising politics had the ability, or even the wish, to think things through, as he and George and the regional managers were required to do when confronted with a choice of alternatives on a haul or contract. They invariably followed a policy of drift, leaving all the final decisions to civil servants and soldiers.

“What you’re saying,” he said, slowly, “is this. If Germany tries to get at France through Belgium, we’re in, like it or not?”

“That’s the general opinion at Westminster,” Giles said. “What would you make of it in those circumstances?”

He was a long time answering. He had seen many battlefields, had experienced the dragging pain of wounds, had witnessed, in the Crimea and India, scenes that would turn the stomach of the most enthusiastic flag-flapper in the country. Yet he realised that here was a question of principle that could not be dismissed in the way both he and Giles had opposed the South African War. The German Junker was a bully and a brute. Three limited wars, against Denmark, Austria, and France, had established that beyond doubt, and an easy victory following an invasion of Belgium would prove fatal to smaller nations and the security of the world in the years ahead. Beyond that, what would it feel like to sit here in Kent, with a triumphant Germany dictating peace terms in Paris and her jackboots stomping in Channel ports only a few miles away?

He said, at length, “I hate wars. Always have and always will. Small and local, or as big as this promises to be. But there are times when a man has to fight, as we found in India in ‘57. You can’t stand aside and let might take over from right. If it was anything more than a straightforward confrontation between jingoes in Potsdam and Paris, I’d fight and so will Grey if I know the man. You say the Liberals are split. Where do you find yourself, Giles?”

Giles replied, unhappily, “With you, Father, in those circumstances, and I told L.G. as much.”

The sound of the lunch gong reached them from the house, telling him that Henrietta must have seen Giles’s car and hustled. Adam rose stiffly from the arbour seat and paused to inhale the scent of a full-blown rose cresting the trellis work of the pergola. ”That’s a smell of youth,” he said. “Youth and renewal.”

They sat on after lunch, mulling over one thing and another. The navy’s preparedness. The part, if any, a small professional army like Britain’s could play in a war involving the clash of millions. How the Empire was likely to respond. What a professional like Alex would make of it and how long it was likely to last, and Adam snorted when Giles said a matter of weeks was the general estimate.

“Why do they say that?”

“The cost. The City men say nobody could face expenditure on that scale for long.”

“That’s damned nonsense,” Adam said. “Once war hysteria is aroused they’ll find the money to keep it going, and anyone who supposes modern Germany isn’t a tough nut to crack is a fool. We were bogged down for months before Sebastopol and half a century later it took us three years to round up sixty thousand Boer farmers. No, my boy, once it gets going it’ll be a fight to the finish, with half the world involved and casualties running into millions. The pity of it is that most of those damned fools poised on the brink have never heard a shot fired outside their game preserves. You saw what a local war cost Hugo.”

Giles said nothing and Adam changed the subject.

“How are you and that nice woman getting along, eh? They say second marriages stand a good chance if one of the partners has been happy in the past. You were always very much in love with Romayne. Does that make it easier?”

“I’ve been lucky,” Giles said. And then, with a smile, “Luckier than you in one respect. For I’ve run across two women who were prepared to take me on trust.” He got up. “It’s time I got back.”

“There’ll be a debate in a day or so, I imagine?”

“On Monday, depending on circumstances. I think Grey will make a statement to the House.”

He said, on impulse, “Could you use your influence to get me a seat in the Members’ Galleries if I come up to town? The public gallery will be packed.”

“I’d do my best, providing you don’t think…”

“That it would put too much strain on me? You let me worry about that. If that chap Grey speaks, I’d like to hear him.” His eyes filmed over and Giles, watching him closely, wondered what he was thinking. He went on, after a moment, “I’ve seen pretty well everything that’s happened in the last seventy years or so. Three monarchs buried, two Jubilees, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the fall of Sebastopol, the well at Cawnpore. This will reduce ‘em all to a sideshow. I’ll see you to the door, boy.”

They passed out into the blazing sunshine and he watched Giles manoeuvre the car in a tight circle to descend the drive. Soon the only evidence of his visit was a small dustcloud hanging over the old mill house. Henrietta came out and stood beside him.

“He looked very worried,” she said. “It isn’t his marriage, is it?” Suddenly, mercifully, he was able to make a grab at his vanishing sense of humour as he said, with a chuckle, “You have a way, my dear, of reminding one of essentials. No, no, it isn’t his marriage. That’s booming along, just as I predicted as soon as I set eyes on that woman. It’s other people’s worries, Hetty, and that’s Giles—too old to mend his ways.”

2

Despite Giles, who had sat here ten years now, Adam did not often honour the House with his presence. It had never, at any time in his life, had majesty for him, and latterly he had come to regard it as a kind of clearinghouse for specialised interests. But today was different. Old and cynical as he was, he was caught and held by the terrible tensions of the Chamber, sensing all about him a strain that had nothing to do with the high temperature outside, or the presence, in Whitehall and all the converging thoroughfares, of the crowds drawn there by the mounting expectancy of some cataclysmic change in their lives.

He glanced about him, his keen eye ranging the Government benches immediately below where he could spot a few of the men who had contributed to his daily ration of news this century, isolating the bland, slightly clownish face of Asquith. Beside Asquith, fidgeting a great deal, was the familiar figure of Lloyd George, a man he had never trusted, despite his patronage of Giles, and beside L.G., Sir Edward Grey, on whom most of the attention would be focused today.

Grey looked his part. A patrician, whose handsome profile had survived on into middle-age, and who was clearly under very considerable strain for every now and again, glancing at his notes, he tightened his mouth, as though what he was about to say was distasteful to someone who took his pleasures quietly beside English trout-streams and who was said (it was hard to believe) to be able to imitate over a hundred English bird calls.

Winston Churchill was down there, looking cheerful and slightly roguish. Haldane was there, champion of his son Alex, still far away in India, a rather Prussian-looking fellow, who had once made the statement that Germany was his spiritual home and was almost certainly regretting it today. And across the floor, crowded today with extra chairs, the lions of the Opposition, Balfour and Bonar Law, who had made fools of themselves over Ireland. Among the small Labour cohort, two men stood out, Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie, one looking like an arrogant young clansman, the other, whose integrity had always earned Adam’s respect, like the prophet Elijah ascending to heaven in a chariot.

Those fellows will oppose war, he supposed, Belgium or no Belgium, but they already had the look of men who had enlisted in a lost cause. MacDonald looked fierce and defiant, but there was tragedy in the eyes of Hardie.

The place was packed to the doors, every gallery full to overflowing; there had never been so many assembled under this roof since Gladstone’s day. Well, that was war and the rumour of war.

Grey was on his feet now and there was stillness, shattered momentarily by the sudden and distracting clatter of the Chaplain’s stumble against the extra chairs as he backed away from the Speaker. In a clear, level voice, and with no more than an occasional glance at his notes, he began by asking the House to approach the crisis from the standpoint of British interests, British obligations, British honour, proceeding from there, in the same measured tone, to describe the nature of the military “conversations” with France. No secret engagement existed. No agreement had been entered into to bind or restrict Britain’s course of action if France found herself at war with Germany on account of her treaty obligations to Russia. “We are not partners to the Franco-Russian alliance… We do not even know the terms of their alliance. What does exist is our naval agreement with France in consequence of which the French fleet is concentrated in the Mediterranean, leaving her northern and western coasts absolutely undefended…”

* * *

George Swann, at that precise moment, had made his initial dispositions, had descended from his tower and was sunning himself in the yard, all but empty seeing this was a Bank Holiday.

There was nothing more he could do.

For who among his competitors, he reflected, had been granted a kerbside view of the Archduke’s funeral in Vienna over a month ago? Or how many had received a direct tip from a source as reliable as old Albert Tasker up in The Polygon, to unload stocks before they plummeted? Yet he had ignored both warnings and it had fallen to his aged father to remind him that, in the event of war, a firm owning a fleet of heavy transport vehicles, and relying on three hundred trained mechanics to drive and service them, was a likely candidate for either bankruptcy or millionaires’ row, depending upon how he disposed himself.

Within ten minutes of hanging up his receiver, George was on his way to the yard. Within an hour of arriving there he had drafted a comprehensive telegram, running to three hundred words, to every viceroy in the network, giving them basic instructions about stockpiling motor spirit, conserving of machines and manpower, and half a dozen other matters that would alert them to the situation. Most of them (excluding young Rudi) would be as bemused as he had been by the long spell of blazing sunshine.

His imagination, once alerted, worked like a shower of sparks on a scatter of combustibles. In a memorandum, designed to follow his telegram by express post, he covered every conceivable contingency, from the commandeering of his vehicles by government agents, to the mass enlistment of his mechanics in one or other of the specialised army units that had proliferated since the General Staff had conceded the self-propelled vehicle a place among their priorities. He thought, sitting on a makeshift seat used by waggoners for their lunch break,
That’s about it, until I can see Scottie Quirt and get an estimate of future production out of him. They can’t close us now, providing those chaps out in the shires follow my guidelines. Given luck, we might even squeeze some contracts from the military and make a killing out of it…

* * *

There was no doubt now which side of the fence would see Grey’s elegantly trousered leg first. The cheers, breaking from the ranks of the Tories opposite, confirmed as much when he asked what attitude the country might take to the presence of the German fleet bombarding French ports a few miles away. Then, borrowing lavishly from Gladstone’s oratory, he underlined his point by declaring unequivocally: “Could England fail to take her stand against the unmeasured aggrandisement of any power whatsoever?”

Adam, his eyes focused unwinkingly on the elegant figure at the despatch box, thought,
It’s all over now… We’re in it sure enough…
And then, as Grey reiterated the pledge in favour of Belgian neutrality,
And why not? Had the fellow any real alternative? Has any one of them down there, including that leathery old fox Earl Roberts, perched up there in the Strangers’ Gallery?
And suddenly he felt old and tired. He extricated himself from his cramped seat and made his way into the lobby and thence into the yard, where the sun beat upon the necks of ten thousand Londoners almost blocking the movement of vehicles.

Giles must have seen him go and caught up with him as he stood with head bowed beside the plinth of Cromwell’s statue. “Are you all right, Father? Can you get back to your hotel alone…? I can’t leave now but I warned Arscott, George’s chauffeur…” But Adam, straightening himself, muttered savagely, “It’s the heat. No air in there… I’ll be all right, my boy. Get about your business.” But Giles would not and hurried off to the place where Arscott had promised to wait. Within minutes Arscott was back and helping Adam into the seat beside the driver’s, with Giles standing by anxiously. He said to the chauffeur, “To the Norfolk, if you can get there, and then home.” To himself, he said,
I’m too old for crowds
, as the car nosed its way southwest through thinning crowds, circling Victoria to approach the Strand from Piccadilly and Haymarket, for it was useless to attempt a more direct route.