The Passing Bells (62 page)

“It happens every time they ring that bloody bell.” Charles sighed. “I do wish they'd install something less strident.”

“Now look here, Charles,” Fenton said firmly. “The brass aren't fools. They'd know something was fishy if I put in such a request.”

“Not request, Fenton . . .
demand.
You have that right and the Judge Advocate General's office would be forced to hold a hearing. I hate to sound like a barracks room lawyer, but there it is. King's regulations.”

He looked pleased with himself, and Fenton's scowl deepened.

“You want a forum. That's it, isn't it, Charles? You just want to stand up before a panel and a stenographer and voice your outrage at what went on over there.”

“At what's still going on,” Charles said, so quietly they could barely hear him. “And will continue to go on . . . and on . . . and on. Yes. That is precisely what I want.” He folded his hands, the fingers as white as the writing paper they rested on.

“Christ,” Fenton said, pushing back his chair and standing up. “You're asking a lot of me.”

“Yes.”

“As a soldier I should turn you down flat, but I'm more than that, aren't I? I'm your friend. This won't change a damn thing. It's just a gesture that no one is going to appreciate, but if it will give you some kind of peace, then I'll do it.”

“Thank you,” Charles said, staring at his hands. “I knew you wouldn't let me down.”

Fenton sat in brooding silence during the ride to the railway station at Llangollen. It had started raining again, and the dark hills and crags of north Wales looked sinister in the gloom. They barely caught the London-bound train as it stopped briefly on its run from Holyhead. The carriages were filled with Irish troops from County Down and Antrim, most of them sporting bits of orange cloth in their hatbands to show their contempt for the “wearin' o' the green.” They were all in boisterous spirits. Out of training camp at last, heading for the war: “Look out, Kayzer Bill!”

“Bloody idiots,” Fenton muttered as he slumped into a seat in a virtually empty first-class compartment. An Irish colonel and his adjutant were the only other occupants, and the colonel glanced up curiously from a newspaper.

“Did you address me, sir?”

“No, sir, I did not. I was discussing the weather with my friend.”

“Yes. A man can drown in Wales when it rains. And the Taffies have the gall to say Belfast is wet!”

“I suppose you had no choice,” Martin said quietly after the Irish colonel had turned back to his paper. “He obviously has a fixation about this court-martial thing and if you had turned him down—”

“He might have killed himself. That thought had some slight effect on my decision.”

“What happens now?”

Fenton drummed his fingers on the window ledge and stared at his own reflection in the rain-streaked glass.

“I send in my—
demand
through the proper channels, and the Judge Advocate's office will set a hearing date. Before that happens there will be a few gentlemanly calls from various staff brigadiers in Whitehall, asking me to reconsider my action. I shall decline to do so on the grounds that I consider the shooting of one officer by another bad form. There will be a hearing, and Charles will be permitted to talk for as long as he wishes in order to explain, justify, or defend his act. The panel will then deliberate for a second or two and rule that no court-martial is warranted because of the mental condition of the accused. Charles will then be sent back to the hospital and quietly discharged from the service. Rather a waste of everyone's time, isn't it?”

“Reading about this frog general in the
Standard
,” the Irish colonel said, looking up. “Nivelle . . . hero of Verdun, they call him. Claims to have a plan that'll crush Fritz in twenty-four hours. Twenty-four years is more like it. The poor sod.” He turned pages and immersed himself in the sporting news.

“And the war goes on,” Fenton said wearily. “I'm glad Charles is out of it.”

“But he isn't out of it, is he? It's all spinning around in his brain. You were right in saying that he's seeking some kind of peace, and if his hearing will give it to him it won't be a waste of
everyone's
time.”

“No, I suppose you're right.”

“Would they allow me to be there? Not as a member of the press, but as Charles's cousin?”

“No. They wouldn't allow God himself to attend. There'll be a panel of two or three officers . . . a clerk stenographer . . . Charles, and myself. Charles could request counsel, what's known as a prisoner's friend, but that would have to be a fellow officer and he doesn't need one.”

“Please write me how it turns out . . . care of AP, rue Chambord. Will you do that?”

“Of course. When are you going back to Paris?”

“Sometime tomorrow. As you said, the war goes on.”

Wales had been corrosive to the spirit—so had writing up the request for court-martial. Both were behind Fenton now as he arrived at his mother's house in Suffolk, where Winifred was staying. He found solace lying on the bed with her, his hands moving gently over the great bulge of her womb.

“We're going to have a forty-pound baby. I swear it.”

“Twins,” she said. “At least I think so. I'm sure I can feel two distinct pairs of kicks.”

“Clever girl,” he murmured, kissing the taut skin. He could sense the life beating beneath the surface.

“Happy?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want sons very badly?”

“I want children very badly . . . sons or daughters. I'll leave that up to you. Surprise me.”

“Another few weeks.”

“Must be pure hell for you.”

“Not really . . . Just boring sitting around . . . and uncomfortable trying to walk. Your mother and Jinny wait on me hand and foot. I feel horribly pampered, like some grossly fecund queen bee. Do you think my body will ever get back into shape . . . or will I always be nothing but breasts and belly?”

“I like breasts and bellies,” he said, kissing both. “And I love you.”

They clung tightly to each other as the March winds moaned across the river and hammered at the casement window.

“You haven't said a word about Charles,” she said softly.

“There isn't a great deal to say. A sad man in a sad place. Just one more casualty of the Somme—Charles Greville and four hundred thousand other men.”

He didn't tell her about the request for the court-martial, or the fact that Charles had contemplated suicide. Winifred had enough to think about being with child and worrying about her brothers John and Bramwell, who had gone through the Thiepval attacks and were now back in trenches near Arras.

“Does Lydia see him often?”

“I gather he doesn't want to see her . . . or his mother. There's really nothing he wants to talk about except the war.”

And nothing that Fenton wanted to talk about less, but there was no escaping it. On the third morning home the telephone rang; a Brigadier Tydman was ringing up from London:

“About this court-marital request of yours for Major Greville. Sticky business, don't you know. . . . Be much better all 'round if you reconsidered it.”

“I can't do that, sir.”

“Can't, eh? Rather delicate, to tell you the truth . . . peer's son and all that. Chap went 'round the bend and plunked his own brother. Medical wallah of the Public Schools Battalion did the proper thing . . . certified him mentally unsound and sent him right up to Llandinam Hospital. That kept the whole sad affair quiet, don't you know. No point in kicking sleeping dogs now, to use a figure of speech.”

“I'm sorry, but I insist on a hearing.”

“I see. . . . Well, won't interfere with your rights as the lad's superior officer, although I strongly disapprove of your insistence. Rather harsh, I must say. Very well then . . . Hearing set for Thursday next . . . at Llandinam . . . North Wales. Better than bringing the chap down to London for it.”

“Make certain a shorthand stenographer is along.”

“We're quite capable of conducting a proper hearing,” the brigadier said stiffly. “Good day, sir.”

Paris, March 12, 1917

Observations and Reflections. Trying to catch up on this. Too damn busy writing personality pieces on General Nivelle, Pétain, and all the other new luminaries of the French Army to pay much attention to this journal. Papa Joffre of the big belly is out. Nivelle with his good looks, good English, good manners, and boundless optimism is very firmly in. Every shoeshine boy in Paris knows what Nivelle has in mind, as, I imagine, does every shoeshine boy in Berlin. Keeping secrets is not an Allied military virtue. A million poilus along the Aisne preparing to lunge for the chemin des Dames and burst through the Hindenburg defenses like water through a dike of sand. British to aid the offensive by striking around Arras. God help all of them.

Difficult even after ten days to write about Charles without experiencing a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach. Shell shock. No two doctors seem to agree on the cause. French medical officer I met at Maxim's one night says that shell shock is caused by a partial vacuum created by passing shells, affecting the brain cells. I believe that it means being shocked, period. Shocked by too many corpses, too much pain, too many hopeless attacks. Too many days and nights of never-ending fear. Shock after shock until the mind can no longer take any more punishment and begins to turn in upon itself. Charles is a shell shock case. Too much sangfroid for his own good. I know now what he was thinking when he stood on the parapet at High Wood and watched his men get slaughtered in the wire and among those nightmare trees. He was thinking the thoughts of the damned and keeping them bottled up inside. Something had to give in that noble head of his.

Lord Greville, ninth Earl of Stanmore. More sangfroid in action. I went to the house directly from the train, still damp from Wales.

“So, you saw Charles, did you?” he said when I handed him the letter. He opened the envelope and read the contents without blinking an eye.

“Thank you,” he said, putting the letter in his pocket as though it were a bill from his tailor. I was invited to stay for a drink, but sensed it was merely a gesture of politeness and so I declined. Aunt Hanna is up in Derbyshire, where they have a small estate, looking after William, who is recuperating there. And how is William? I ask. “He will never ride a horse properly for the rest of his life.” Odd answer. Charles is in such a delicate mental balance, he could end up not knowing a horse from a steamroller. Does the earl's attitude come with the blood? Cold and blue? Hard to say. May be no more than a pose. Bad form to reveal one's deepest emotions. The earl stands in his magnificent study overlooking Park Lane very much the way Charles stood on the top of his trench.

About fifteen minutes with Ivy, in the main reception room of All Souls. Is it possible she's my wife? Hard to believe. We held hands in a room about the size of Victoria Station, filled with the relatives of wounded men. Simple-looking people. Londoners mostly. The “lower orders,” as the earl would say. The Somme offensive has been over for four months, but the residue packs the wards. Eighteen-hour work shifts for the nurses, more for some of the surgeons. Over in Whitehall the lights burn as new offensives are planned. “Mum” and “Dad” wait patiently in the vaulted room to see their sons, bearing small gifts wrapped in newspaper.

“Assiduous diarist, aren't you, Martin?”

“Well,” Martin said, glancing up at the bureau chief, “I like to scribble away. I find it relaxing.”

“Care for a drink at the Café Bombe?”

“No. My hip's giving me hell. Must be the weather. I'll be able to predict rain till the day I die.”

“Take a week off. Go up to that house of yours in Saint Germain and forget your troubles. I just got a cable from Atkinson. That piece you did on Pétain . . . the ‘Warrior Monk' thing. First-rate reception. The
Atlantic
gobbled up the magazine rights. Congratulations. Your telephone work out there?”

“Sometimes.”

“Well, if anything comes up, I'll send the kid out to fetch you.”

And so this was a break, Martin thought as he took the Métro at Parc Monceau. He had had it up to the neck with interviewing generals and listening to all the theories on how the war could be won “
rapidement
.” At Louveciennes, troop trains rumbled north across the Seine. Bearded poilus stood in the open doorways smoking their pipes—impassive-looking men, veterans. The troops no longer waved and cheered from the trains as they had done during the first year of the war. But then no one was doing much cheering these days.

The house looked good to him, a place of his own, the deed signed, sealed, and delivered. Rilke Manor. Seven rooms and a kitchen. The trees in the garden were barren and stalky, but they would burst into greenery in the spring. The windows were tightly shuttered, and a pale wisp of smoke rose from one of the chimneys.

“What the—” He stood transfixed on the path and wondered if he should hurry down to the inn for help. But that seemed stupid. A housebreaker wouldn't light a fire. “Jacob,” he muttered to himself. And when he unlocked the door, there he was, standing in the hall looking sheepish.

“Now how in hell did you get in?”

“Penknife. Slipped it under a shutter.”

“That's nice to know,” Martin said irritably. “Why didn't you come by the office? I would have given you a key.”

“Didn't have the time, old sport. Two beefy
flics
were right on my heels.”

“Detectives?”

Jacob nodded. His face was haggard and there were dark rings under his eyes.

“Sûreté Nationale. I came a cropper, Martin. Only two issues of the paper, and every gendarme in Paris came pouring into the print shop, busting heads with truncheons. I dove through a window without a sou in my pockets and legged it out.”