The Passing Bells (36 page)

“I'm glad to be here, sir.” He sat in an antique chair and placed his briefcase on the oak dining table that served as the press lord's desk. “I have quite a few things for you to read, sir. Journals I've been keeping . . . observations that would never have passed the censors in Mudros.”

Lord Crewe settled back in his Biedermeier chair and folded his heavy hands across his vest.

“I don't like reading personal journals, Rilke. I like to read your writing in print—on the fourth page of the
Daily Post
—along with millions of other readers. Let me tell you something that you may not know. Those who wish to read about generals and the high strategy of this war read Repington in the
Times.
Those who wish to read about the flesh-and-blood men who are doing the dirty, dangerous jobs at the front read the
Daily Post
—specifically, they read ‘Gallipoli Sketches' by Martin Rilke, as do the readers of five American newspapers, three Canadian, two Australian, and
Leslie's Weekly
magazine. You have been away three and a half months and you've come back a famous man . . . an innovator. I do not hesitate to say that you've invented a new journalism—a new form of war reporting—not so much the story of great battles, but the stories of men. Human interest, Rilke—human bloody interest—that's your forte. Now you're back and I take it you don't want to return to Gallipoli. I can understand that. A sideshow, Rilke. The main blows will come in France this autumn. Sir John French and Joffre have a master plan in the works and I'd like your next by-line to read ‘Western Front Sketches' by Martin Rilke.”

Martin opened the briefcase and removed his notebooks. The knowledge that he was known around the world, read in a dozen newspapers, had not sunk in yet. Even if it had, he didn't feel like basking in the glow. His reason for leaving Gallipoli was contained in the notebooks that he pushed across the table.

Lord Crewe rested a hand on them for a moment and then pushed them away.

“I know what's in these, Rilke. They contain everything that the censors would have tossed out had they read them. I'm sure that you depart from sketches and try your hand at comment.”

“Lord Crewe—”

“No, Rilke, not Lord Crewe. You've more than earned the right to call me Guv'nor.” He leaned forward and folded his arms on the table. His eyes had a sailor's direct gaze. “I know what's going on out there. Nothing you can tell me could possibly outrage me. A brilliant concept bungled very badly. The landings were a disgrace . . . a waste of brave men. Hamilton sitting on his arse in a battleship far at sea and allowing two thousand men to stand around brewing tea at Y beach while a couple of miles away men were dying in droves at Sedd el Bahr . . . and Hunter-Weston doing the same damn thing with the landing force at Eski Hissarlik . . . permitting them to lolly about instead of pouring more men into that spot and sending them on the double down to V beach to take the Turk in the flank. Botched! The entire enterprise mangled. And the insanity of the Anzac corps . . . all those men jammed on a cliff not fit for goats. It will take brilliant high-command thinking to pull a rabbit out of that dark hat, Rilke . . . and there is no brilliance out there above the rank of bloody major! Now, what can you teach me in your journals that I don't already know?”

“Apparently nothing . . . but tell me, what does the average man on the street know?”

“What he reads in the newspapers.”

“Then let him read this,
Guv'nor.”
He tapped the journals with stiff, persistent fingers. “Run this on the front page . . . my observations and the comments of officers and men whom I've interviewed over the past three months. This is the
real
story of Gallipoli: a general staff that thinks the best way to go through a brick wall is headfirst . . . a government that's playing politics with the battle, feeding just enough men into it to keep it going but not angering the Western Front generals by shifting all effort there. It's a bloody mess, and the public has a right to know just how bloody and hopeless it is. If you people expect to win this war—”

The lord's fist came down on the stack of journals like a hammer.

“We
will
win. We'll win because if we do not, we cease to exist as a nation, let alone as an empire. The man in the street wants this war to be won. There is firm resolve on that point, and neither this newspaper nor any other will print stories that serve to undermine that determination by castigating our military leadership and eroding the people's faith in the army to win through . . . eventually.”

Martin smiled wryly and took from his pocket the tiny white feather and let it drift to the table.

“Part of that resolve you're talking about, I suppose. It was shoved into my hand outside Waterloo Station by a very pretty girl.”

“It's symptomatic, yes. I can't say that I approve of that kind of badgering, but it does reveal what the civilian population feels about this war. They want an all-out effort—every young man of fighting age in uniform, the Boche and the Turk on the run, no matter what it takes. They read the casualty lists . . . no one draws the wool over their eyes on that bloody score. They know how many lads died at Aubers Ridge . . . Neuve-Chapelle . . . and are dying now in the Dardanelles, and they would hang any newspaperman in effigy who told them that those men died for nothing.” He leaned back in his chair and toyed abstractedly with his gold watch chain, threading the heavy links through his fingers. “I'll tell you something, Rilke. Great changes are in the wind. This Gallipoli fiasco will topple many men and bring others to the fore. Asquith's days are numbered as prime minister, in my opinion. Churchill's career has been ruined. Kitchener's powers are being blunted. Lloyd George and David Langham are on the rise. The conduct of the war will be taking a new turn . . . more statesmen and less generals calling the shots. I don't know if that's good or bad . . . we're all feeling our way. There has never been a war to compare it with . . . no lessons of the past to guide us at all. I do know this, the war will go on until one side or the other breaks. This newspaper will report the war and that is
all
we will do. The day-to-day business of fighting it . . . the men and the events . . . the human drama as it unfolds. You write of those things very well, Rilke. You capture the bravery as well as the pain. I want you to continue . . . within the limits prescribed by the censorship regulations. Will you?”

Martin touched the white feather lying on the cover of one of his journals, shredded it into downy fragments.

“I guess I must. It has to be witnessed, doesn't it?”

“Yes. Let me read you something printed this morning in the
Telegraph
, dated Mudros, Thursday last . . . by-line a certain Robert Allensworth who did honorable reporting for the
Telegraph
in the Boer War.” Lord Crewe shuffled among the papers in front of him and drew out a copy of the rival newspaper. “I shall not read the entire article, just this part: ‘The lieutenant laughed gaily, a boyish laugh of pure delight . . . and he was a mere boy, fresh from the playing fields of a great and noble public school. “It was a jolly lark,” this boy soldier cried, “Brother Turk has no stomach for English steel, they ran like hares when we charged them with the bayonet. It was a jolly half hour and gave us all quite a hearty appetite for breakfast.” ' “ He folded the paper carefully and then dropped it into a wastebasket.

“I know Allensworth,” Martin said, watching the feathery fragments drift across the tabletop like lint. “He never went near the fighting. Came over from Egypt for three days and made up stories out of his own head.”

“There are many men like him . . . not too many like yourself. You may not be writing all the truth, but by God you're writing enough of it so that you should feel no shame. Your descriptions of the attack on the fourth of June made every Englishman who read them weep at the bravery and the heartbreak of it. The censors barely cut a word. It was good, honest reporting, Rilke, and you did a service for every poor Tommy who died on those bloody slopes. You may criticize the high command's handling of that attack in your journal, I don't know, but such criticism, printed now, would only give comfort to our enemies.” He pushed the slim stack of notebooks toward Martin. “Keep these to yourself. And don't look so glum, lad. A man can do only so much and no more in these times.”

He took a seat on the upper deck of a bus going along Fleet Street toward the Strand. The crowds that he looked down upon from the open-topped bus were anything but glum and dispirited. That a war was on was evident by the number of men in uniform, the recruiting posters on every letter box, and the white-feather girls prowling outside the cinemas, but the atmosphere in the city was one of lightness, as though the most pressing problem on this sunny afternoon was buying the right article in a shop or finding the best place for tea.

The briefcase felt heavy on his lap. Lord Crewe—
Guv'nor
—had been right, of course. The war had to go on, even if it shambled forward at the moment overburdened with inept and unimaginative commanders. Things would change in time, he supposed. Fresh minds rising to the top. Doubt about that gnawed at him. He had had the chance to observe the command structure of the army at first hand on Lemnos—the tight clique of brother officers above the rank of colonel, an esoteric fraternity that resented and feared outsiders. They had refused—politely, for politeness was inherent in their bones—war correspondents the permission to visit the battlefront until three weeks after the landings, and then only for limited times. He and Ashmead-Bartlett had ignored those restrictions when they finally reached the peninsula by the simple method of going directly to the front-line trenches, a spot where staff officers were loath to follow. A kind of vacuum existed between the men at the front and the men at headquarters. Operations were planned on maps at Lemnos without the staff officers having any clear idea of what those operations entailed for the men ordered to carry them out. Fifty yards looked a tiny distance on a map, a distance easily covered if one ignored the fact that every inch of those yards was barren of cover and under the sights of zeroed-in Turkish artillery and machine guns. The staff never talked of “the men”—that is, the tired, dirty, lice-infested, fly-plagued soldiers, weak from diarrhea—but always in terms of “the regiment.” “The Royal Windsors can do it. . . . One can always rely on the Lancashire Fusiliers. . . .” As though those dun-colored ranks living like moles were scarlet-clad phalanxes of immortals.

He tapped the briefcase and stared sourly at the crowded pavements. The holiday atmosphere irked him. Why? It was Friday afternoon, and people who had worked hard all week had a right to look forward to the weekend. Many of them probably had sons, fathers, brothers, husbands, or lovers at the front and felt the presence of the war keenly. That didn't mean that they should walk around in mourning or not walk around at all. He was annoyed at them because he felt a pang of guilt for sitting in perfect safety on top of a London bus holding on his lap journals of anguish and fear. The men he had written about—the English, Indians, Frenchmen, Australians, and New Zealanders, the sun-scorched, thirst-plagued infantrymen clinging to their toehold in the Aegean—might at this moment be corpses turning black on the dead ground below Achi Baba or Chunuk Bair. Charles among them. That thought made his palms sweat. He had sought out Charles on his first trip over to Gallipoli from Lemnos, not knowing whether he was alive or dead, knowing only that his cousin's battalion had been badly cut up leaving the
River Clyde.
“By gad, we can all be proud of the Windsors,” an elderly staff officer seated on the terrace of a café in Mudros, drinking Greek wine, had said the day after the landings. “Those chaps know how to die!”

The face of a woman in the crowd as the bus turned off the Strand toward Charing Cross Road. A slim, ivory-pale face. Thin, delicate features, slender nose, black hair. She had been in a uniform when he had seen her last; she was in a uniform now—the blue and red uniform of an army nurse. The bus slowed as a torrent of pedestrians crossed the street, heading for Trafalgar Square. He spotted her again, walking slowly, drifting along with the crowd. There was no point in yelling. She wouldn't hear him, and quite possibly it wasn't her at all. Clutching the briefcase to his side, he dashed down the aisle and half-ran, half-fell down the narrow curving steps to the bottom deck and then leaped past an astonished conductor into the street.

“Get killed that way, mate,” the man yelled after him.

Hemmed in by a crowd watching a recruiting drive of the London Scottish, kilted pipers parading under Nelson's column, he lost sight of her in Trafalgar Square. He climbed onto the pedestal of the monument in order to see better and spotted a blue and red figure at the far edge of the square walking slowly toward the Haymarket. A recruiting sergeant made a grab for his arm.

“That's the lad! There's nothing to beat the London Scots!”

“Sorry,” Martin said, pulling away. “Thought you were the Black Watch.”

She was standing in front of a dress shop, gazing reflectively at the display in the window. He studied her profile for a second and then walked up to her.

“Ivy Thaxton?”

She looked at him curiously and then smiled. “Why, if it isn't Mister Rilke . . . from Chicago, Illinois.”

“That's right,” he said, grinning broadly. “Railroads and stockyards. I spotted you from the top of a bus . . . knew it was you. . . . Or, anyway, hoped it was. How are you?”

“Fine. And yourself?”

“Swell . . . just swell.”

“You certainly look fit. Been at the seaside?” Her violet eyes were innocent enough, but he felt disquieted by their steady gaze.