The Summer Before the War (45 page)

“I don't understand,” she said.

“It's quite simple, my dear,” said Mr. Tillingham. “I have decided I am much too lazy to begin the project again all by myself. It is much more efficient to use your excellent introduction as a basis for one of my own. You will provide a small afterword—purely personal reflections from a loving daughter; nothing of the academic—and we will put our heads together and discuss one or two changes to the letters we include?”

“You don't mean it, Mr. Tillingham?” she said, and she peered at him to see if perhaps he was feeling unwell, or overcome by his own champagne. His stern face revealed nothing, but he was slightly red with the effort of appearing so nonchalant.

“On the contrary,” he said. “It will give me a not insignificant moment of joy to see that woman's smug face crumple like a ball of paper in a freshly lit fireplace. It will quite outweigh the pain of having to compromise one's time or, say, a fifth of one's fee?”

Beatrice smiled and refrained from a strong desire to seize his hand and kiss it. “People should know that you conceal a soul of deep generosity.”

“I am sure it is merely a temporary spasm,” said Mr. Tillingham, looking horrified. “Pray do not mention that which would only incite further demands on my time and purse.”

“Then perhaps we can agree that twenty-five percent of the fee would suitably secure my full cooperation and my silence?” she said, laughing.

Daniel and Celeste were married quietly in St. Mary's at three o'clock in the afternoon. Her father supported her down the aisle, and Beatrice and Hugh were witnesses. Mr. Tillingham was the only guest, his role being to look severely at the Professor from time to time. Hugh had urged that their aunt and uncle be present, but Daniel had been adamant that they not be told. Beatrice could see the dismay on Hugh's face, and her heart ached at his distress. Daniel sent a telegram to his father, expecting a row, but was surprised to receive curt congratulations and notice of a substantial bank draft by return. As Beatrice heard Mr. Tillingham whisper to Hugh, while they filed into the church, his father's relief must have overcome any scruple about such a sudden marriage.

Standing in the lofty old church, resplendent with polished brass and the scent of late chrysanthemums in tall vases, Beatrice was filled with a rare sense of peace, with a feeling that the world did come right sometimes. She looked at Hugh, with his serious face, standing so upright and listening hard so as to be ready when called to sign the register. She thought him like her father, but then was forced to acknowledge that her father had been less dependable, less upright. Her father had often been spontaneous to the point of damage. He had given up positions, changed apartments, and fired valets, all at the most inconvenient of moments. His final journey home had been no better considered than so many of his schemes.

She could not imagine Hugh Grange having any sudden schemes—and that seemed like a perfect quality in a man. As they each threw a small handful of rice at the bride and groom in the churchyard, she wondered if she would see more of him before he went away. She had seen no engagement notice in the papers yet, and this gave her a strange comfort, unearthing some warmth of feeling she had long ago decided to lock away. She would be resolute in damping any such longing as might disturb the life she had made. But as she threw rice at the bride, she allowed herself the hope that he might ask her to take a walk with him.

“I hope all goes well at Daniel's hearing tomorrow,” she said as the bride and groom left in a hansom cab for the train to Hastings and the hotel suite that Daniel had arranged. He would bring his bride and his hotel bill direct to the morning's hearing.

“So do I,” said Hugh. “If all is resolved, we will leave for France together on Monday morning.”

“France?” asked Beatrice, her heart constricting in her chest.

“We're both bound for the front,” said Hugh. Beatrice felt ill. The front was no longer a grand adventure. Britain's Expeditionary Force was being slowly decimated at Ypres as the opposing armies entrenched in a grim line across Flanders. The outcome of the war was no longer the rousing certainty so touted in the papers.

“I wish you Godspeed,” she said, as all her small hopes shriveled away in the enormity of his departure.

The hearing was over before it could start. In the rough hut used as the Colonel's headquarters, Celeste's beauty, in a sober dress and a new pair of white gloves from Beatrice, dazzled the Colonel and his small group of assembled officers. Daniel asked the Colonel's blessing on his marriage, and the Colonel looked as relieved as a man reprieved at the scaffold. It would have been almost comical, thought Hugh, to have seen the Colonel try to conduct the hearing. It was surely a topic for which he would have had great difficulty uttering any of the words.

The young couple said their goodbyes on the parade ground, and many a soldier peering from the tents or passing by in formation wiped away a tear to see young lovers parted too soon by the regiment's impending embarkation. Hugh was to accompany Celeste home, and Daniel asked him to convey the news of his marriage and his departure to their aunt and uncle.

“Ask them not to come to the station,” said Daniel. “I would not like to be discourteous to them in such a public arena.”

“What about me?” said Hugh. “I'm leaving on the same train. Am I to have no one to wave me off?”

“You must do as you please,” said Daniel. “I would not deny you that comfort. I can get the sergeant major to hide me under a seat, if I must.”

“I will say my goodbyes at home,” said Hugh. He had a horror of what a scene might ensue at the train station. “What arrangements have you made for your wife?”

“I'm afraid I have made none at all,” said Daniel. “I suppose there is an allowance due her? I assumed she would continue to live where she is. Beatrice will take care of her.”

“I don't think it will do,” said Hugh. “She should go to your father.”

“Good God, no,” said Daniel. “Better the nunnery after all. What should I do, Hugh?”

“I will talk to Uncle John,” said Hugh. “Perhaps they will take her in.” He tried to keep his tone neutral, but he was desperate for Daniel to agree. Such an arrangement might be the key to restoring Daniel to the family in due course.

“It won't change my mind,” said Daniel. “But I would be grateful to you, Hugh, if you could speak to them tonight.” He grinned and shook Hugh's hand. “See you on the train tomorrow. Let the real war begin.”

The Colonel arranged for Hugh and Celeste to travel back to Rye on a heavy dray loaded with supplies bound for the station, and Hugh walked Celeste home to Beatrice's cottage, where she was welcomed with an effusion of exclamations and good wishes by Mrs. Turber, on whom Celeste's marriage had exactly the desired effect. It was to be hoped she would spread the good news as effectively as she had whispered the bad.

“I must go home,” Hugh said to Beatrice, lingering on the doorstep. “I must try to repair the breach between Daniel and our aunt and uncle.” He looked worried, and Beatrice longed to help him.

“Will they be very angry about the marriage?” she asked. The enormity of what they had done, conspiring to bind Agatha's nephew to Celeste for life without her knowledge, weighed heavily on Beatrice.

“These are difficult times, and what is done is done.” He paused. “Daniel and I leave in the morning, and I wanted to ask would you write to me?” he asked.

“I got into a spot of trouble for agreeing to write to Mr. Dimbly,” she said. “I was not aware that letter writing implied some other sort of attachment?” As she said it, she knew she was being coy and the words spilled awkwardly from her tongue. She hesitated and added, “I would not like to offend Miss Ramsey.”

“There is no obligation or attachment implied,” he said. He hesitated and then added, “It is always pleasant to get correspondence when one is far from home.”

“Then I will be happy to write?” she said, with a question in her voice.

He seemed to be struggling with some emotion. He caught up her hand and pressed it. “I cannot truthfully tell you I am entirely free of obligation to Miss Ramsey,” he said. “I am ashamed to say I may not have behaved in the most forthright manner.” He hesitated again and went on. “But I can tell you that she and I have no formal claims on each other.”

Her heart leaped as she waited for him to say more. He looked at her so intently that for one bright moment, she thought he might embrace her. “Hugh?” she asked, his name carrying a new intimacy.

“I fear the time is never right,” he said. “I leave for France and I would not for the world ask anything of you while I am not free.”

“Then your friendship must be enough, Hugh,” she said, and though her eyes grew blurry she would not shed tears to spoil his going. “And we will write to each other as friends.”

“You are the best of women, Beatrice Nash,” he said, and raised her palm to kiss it.

“Shall I come and see you off tomorrow?” she asked, though she wondered how she would endure it. She felt the same yawning loss she had felt at her father's going. She fought away the image of the cold river and the dreadful ferryman. Unlike her father, she prayed, Hugh would return.

“Please do not,” he said. “I would not expose you to the vulgarity of a railway station departure.”

“I will think of you often,” she said, blinking back tears.

“If all goes well with my aunt and uncle, I think they will come for Celeste,” he said. “Will you be all right by yourself, Beatrice?”

“I am used to my independence, Hugh,” she said. But as he walked away down the steep cobbled street, she had to hug her arms about her to keep from calling him back. Never before had she understood so clearly what independence might cost. She had never felt so alone.

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,

And all the little emptiness of love!

R
UPERT
B
ROOKE
, “1914 War Sonnets 1: Peace”

The cigarette did not
seem to help the shaking in his hands, but Hugh persisted in trying to force the acrid smoke into his lungs in the hope that it would at least clear out the stink of dried blood and iodine from his nose, his throat, and every pore of his skin. He knew he should wash and get to the officers' mess for his dinner, but exhaustion made it pleasant just to sit in the lee of the hospital's sun-warmed doorway and smoke the cigarette passed to him by the stretcher bearers as they headed out again for the long trip to the front.

The base hospital, to which he had been assigned since landing in northern France the previous autumn, was in a small village a few miles from the coast. It occupied an old winery, itself adapted from a medieval abbey. The ancient stone seemed to gather and radiate cold as the winter deepened, and the few windows let in little light, but at least the thick walls muffled the echoes of the big guns, which could be heard faintly to the east. Hugh had quickly found he hated playing the surgeon, making the morning rounds of the rows of the injured and indicating, with a crook of his finger, which cases he would take for the day. After a few weeks he had instructed his nurses that he would choose only three head trauma cases a day. For the rest of his shift he was to be sent any case considered most pressing.

Hugh often lost track of his hours as he stood on a brick floor slick with blood and worked through an endless train of stretchers heaved on and off his operating table. He rubbed his hands together slowly, his fingers dry and sore from hot water, carbolic soap, and the brush with which he cleaned his hands between patients. He never skimped on his hand washing, even when the nurses were holding together ripped arteries, even when he could hear the patients breathing blood. He was deliberate in his movements, moderate in the tone of his commands, and calm in the face of the most appalling injuries. This had earned him notice from his superiors such as he had long sought in his medical school years, but he took no interest in their praise now. The dream of acclaim and fortune as a surgeon, with a prosperous practice and a tall house in Harley Street, had been rendered insignificant and empty in the face of the daily carnage. His calm was merely a numbness that saved him from insanity.

He drew one last drag from the cigarette, feeling it burn to his fingertips, and resisted the urge to let the flesh burn. He dropped the butt and ground it under his boot, which was caked in blood, dirt, and great purple streaks of iodine. He stood up and stretched, moving his shoulders to slough off the twelve hours of hunching over wounded flesh in the shadows made by poor lamplight. The air was cold this early evening in late February, but at least it was not raining. It seemed to be always raining in France, a particularly spiteful gift from providence, never fierce enough to stop the fighting but damp enough to make every day painful.

“Good night, Dr. Grange.” A pair of nurses, swathed in long wool cloaks and thick boots, passed out of the doorway. He found his throat too dry to answer so he merely waved and watched their starched linen caps bobbing down the road like two white doves, incongruous against the bleak, muddy landscape. They had surprised him, the nurses, with their quiet endurance. It was harder for the women. Not because they were weaker, but because the patients, seeing a woman's face, that halo frill of a cap, would so often clutch for a hand and beg a momentary word of comfort—a plea for pity that no man would impose on him, the doctor. The job was hard enough encased in numbness and ticked off on medical charts. How much harder must it be to have that veil of professional ice pierced many times a day by a dying man whispering a message to his mother?

“Mr. Grange, I mean Lieutenant, sir?” The voice was familiar. “Is that you, Mr. Grange, sir?” The skinny private buried in the collar of an oversized wool trench coat was leading a rickety civilian cart, pulled by a gray wolfhound with one ear. The small cart was overloaded, its cargo securely roped under a canvas tarp. It could not have looked less like a proper military shipment if it had been covered by a circus tent. The boy pushed back his cap, and Hugh's tired brain slowly registered the angles of the face and the sharp eyes.

“Why, Snout, is that really you?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

“I'm in the war, same as you, sir,” said Snout, grinning.

“I mean what are you doing
here
?” said Hugh, stepping forward into the road to shake his hand. “I thought Colonel Wheaton's outfit was up north?”

“We were brought down to fill in some holes about twenty miles east of here,” said Snout. “We've been a bit in the thick of things, sir.”

“Is my cousin with you?” asked Hugh, trying to appear casual but gripped about the heart by the sudden fear of a bad answer.

“Yes, sir, he's fine,” said Snout. “They laugh at him for writing his poems while they're waiting to go over the top, but he's always first over when the signal comes.”

“And Harry Wheaton?”

“Got a piece of shrapnel in his arm and got promoted to captain,” said Snout. “Confined to camp, but he's still giving orders, and I'm his batman; so here I am tramping the entire countryside on his say-so.”

“What's in the cart?” asked Hugh.

“Colonel Wheaton's after giving a regimental supper, and Captain Wheaton sent me out to procure the necessary fancy stuff, like ham and champagne and tins of something called ‘foyes grass,' ” said Snout.

“Foie gras?” said Hugh. “You do not have foie gras on that miserable-looking cart!”

“I don't know as I do, sir,” said Snout. “On account of I can't read the foreign writing on the tins. But the man I got it off swore it was, and Captain Wheaton'll have to make do. There's a war on.”

“Will you come back to my quarters and have some tea, Snout?” said Hugh. Snout hesitated, and Hugh added, “Look, I know it's against regulations, but I'm so happy to see a face from home, and I have some biscuits I've been saving for just such a special occasion.”

“Come on, Wolfie, there's biscuits for us,” Snout said, tugging at the dog's harness. As Hugh fell in alongside the rather foul-smelling Wolfie, Snout turned to Hugh and broke into a large smile that showed he was still just a boy. “Well, Mr. Hugh,” he said. “People seem to think they can ask an old Gypsy like me to go round the regs all the time. But no one ever invited us for tea, did they, Wolfie old boy?”

Hugh smiled back, suddenly ashamed. In the back of his mind he had planned to ask Snout to carry a note to Daniel, also against regulations. He had assumed like everyone else.

“I think I have some potted meat too,” said Hugh. “If the wolf doesn't mind partridge.”

Hugh had planned to spend his two-day leave on the coast, where an officer who made it known that he was amenable to paying whatever the bill was might be sure of a plate of fresh oysters, a good roast dinner, and a bottle of red wine unearthed from the hotelier's private cellar. How the hotels managed to produce their small luxuries in the midst of war was a mystery to Hugh, but on his last leave he had been brought almost to tears by the appearance on his plate of a chocolate truffle.

Instead of the coast, however, his meeting with Snout had prompted him to request a pass to tour the forward aid posts and inspect the transportation of the injured between the front and the hospital. A week later, pass in hand, he hitched a ride on an ambulance going east, hoping to reach his cousin's billet by nightfall if Snout's highly individual directions proved accurate.

“If you was to inspect us and find us wanting, do you think they'd have to send us home?” said the driver, a fleshy corporal with a stained jacket and an unlit cigarette, which he had stuck in his mouth as soon as they left the hospital checkpoint. He leaned forward to wipe the fog of condensation from the windscreen. Outside a misty rain added misery to the road's bleak landscape of mud, dead trees, and apparently endless convoys of lorries, horses, and men moving slowly in both directions.

“It's not really an inspection,” said Hugh, thinking that war seemed to consist too much of this endless parade of troops and vehicles forever marching somewhere else. “It's just me having a look round, trying to get out of the operating room and get a better feel for how it all works.”

“He's just having a look round, Archie,” repeated the driver, in a thick Cockney accent. “A day trip like?”

“We can give you the full tour, guvnor,” said Archie. “With a stop at the souvenir shop on the way home, right, Bill?” They both laughed, and Hugh heard the insubordination but knew how they felt. His casualty station was always being visited by dignitaries—from senior-ranking army officers to the occasional lady journalist—who seemed to have no problem getting orders that allowed them to poke around and interrupt even the operating rooms with ridiculous questions and requests to review reports and logbooks.

“My only cousin is a lieutenant somewhere over towards the ridge there,” he said, nodding forward to the dim line of low gray hills in the distance. “We haven't heard from him in a while, so I'm hoping to see him.” There was a small pause, and then the driver, Bill, spoke in a less jocular tone.

“Been a rough time up there,” he said. “They had to call us in to help a few times, and we was piling 'em in, right, Archie?” Archie was quiet and looked out the window. Bill fumbled in his pocket and produced a match, which he struck against the dashboard and used to light his cigarette.

“I'm sorry,” said Hugh.

“We lost two of our stretcher bearers, and they lost more from who was up there already,” said Archie.

“Last week we seen a bearer come staggering out of the trenches, covered in blood,” said Bill. “A shell took out his partner and half the poor sod they was carrying, and he was so gone in the head he didn't even notice.” He laughed and sucked hard on his cigarette.

“Is he going to be all right?” asked Hugh.

“We gave him a shot of brandy and a cup of tea and pointed him back in the right direction,” said Archie. “Long as you got both legs and both arms, you're qualified to carry stretchers.”

“It's been a bit quieter since,” said Bill. “Expect your cousin is holed up in a nice dry cellar, sir. Playing whist and eating mulligatawny.”

“I doubt that,” said Hugh.

“Some mix-up with the quartermasters,” said Archie. “Sent this area twenty thousand tins of mulligatawny. Everyone's sick of it.”

“You can get two tins for a twist of baccy,” said Bill. “Not that we would be trading government supplies, of course.”

“Of course not,” said Hugh.

“Locals are sick of it too,” said Archie. “ ‘I say, got any
pandy burr
?' and they wave their hands about.
‘Non, non, pas di mully-tawnaay,'
they say.” Hugh smiled at Archie's phonetic approximation of the French
pain de beurre
. It was surprising how quickly the British Tommies had adapted the French language for their own use, though their vocabularies seemed to cover only food, drinking, and cursing.

“I heard some enterprising lad pasted chicken soup labels on his mully tins and sold 'em to a local farmer for rabbits,” said Bill.

“I heard the locals been pasting on labels of everything from pâté to spotted dick and selling to us right back,” said Archie. “Somewhere along the line someone's going to get shot, if you ask me.”

“So are you fixing up the injured?” asked Bill. “We just drop the poor buggers off and never get no reports of whether they live or not.”

“We have a good system now from the casualty station onward,” said Hugh. “Of course some of them never get past us. If they are too far gone, we give them morphine and offer to pass on any messages to their families.”

“We got our own system,” said Bill. “Anything more than three quarters of a man and we bring him in. Less than that, we give him a cigarette and keep his morphine for some other poor sod. Funny thing, but they don't seem to feel the pain when they're that far gone.”