Supply of heroes, p.2
Supply of Heroes, page 2
Douglas looked at his wristwatch. An innovation, wrist-watches were unknown until the war, and then, once issued to officers, they were ubiquitous. Other ranks got safety razors.
The War Train was due to leave in eleven minutes.
The press of Tommies quickened. They were carrying duffel kits on their shoulders and many balanced tied cake boxes their mothers had just given them. A newspaper story had run early in the war about a mother carrying a plum cake to her departing son, who wept when he received it, and since then it was all mothers knew to do. The sight of a soldier carrying a beribboned cake box anywhere in London now meant he had been dispatched.
Pamela said, “What I really want is that you stay.” She put her face against his shoulder. “Not just to have you, but to have you safe. I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be, darling,” Douglas said automatically.
After a moment, she asked, “Why is their hair shorn like that?” Pamela, still with her face against his shoulder, was looking sidelong at the hustling soldiers. Their hair was trimmed to the skin above their ears.
“Lice,” Douglas said, but he thought it an odd question for someone who’d just shuddered with fear.
“I read they cut it short like that in case of head wounds, for ease in treating them.”
Douglas stroked her cheek. “That’s another reason not to be afraid. They haven’t cut my hair, have they? I won’t be hit.”
She looked up at him. She knew as well as he did that junior officers were more likely than anyone to be killed. The original British Expeditionary Force had been liquidated the previous autumn at Ypres, where they’d barely stopped the Germans from outflanking the Allied line along the sea. In the six months since then, the Germans and the British had been attacking each other without effect along the brutal western trench line in Picardy and Flanders. A massive British force of eight hundred battalions of a thousand men each was in France by now, almost all recent volunteers like Douglas. Yet even this force had been matched by the Germans. The war had settled into stalemate, and though each side harbored the dream of breakthrough, the damage they inflicted on each other had been in no case decisive. They waged war, as some were describing it already, by attrition. Even on days when no assaults worth reporting occurred, an average of seven thousand British men and officers were wounded and killed. Subalterns, lieutenants, and captains, whistles blowing, led their platoons and companies out of the trenches, and that was why a higher percentage of their ranks fell than any other.
Pamela stared into her husband’s eyes, plying her fingers in the fringe of hair above his ears. “I couldn’t stand it if something happened to you.”
“It’s how I feel about you.” Douglas paused, considered whether to go on, then did. “It seems to me you’re the one who will be in danger. That’s why I wanted you in Ireland, not for my father’s sake. For yours. He would take care of you and of Timmy and Anne.”
“But we’re not in danger, darling. You are.”
Douglas nodded. “I should say good-bye to them.”
He turned. Standing in the arched entranceway leading from the waiting room a few dozen yards away was the nanny. He waved at her. She turned and disappeared into the waiting room.
Pamela said something, but in the din he did not hear her. He leaned forward and cocked his ear. “Shall I get you a pillow?” She smiled, though obviously with great effort, and indicated a nearby cart that was piled high with blankets and pillows covered in starched linen. An attendant stood by.
Douglas laughed. “He hasn’t sold many, has he? English officers can hardly go to war with their heads upon pillows, can they? What would the men think?”
Just then two officers stopped at the cart, one a major, the other a captain. The major took a blanket and a pillow and strode away, leaving the captain, with his pillow, to pay. It took a moment for him to find the coins. When he turned the major was already headed down the platform toward the first-class cars in which the officers rode. Hard as it was to imagine, this train was no mere London-Paris express. It went from Victoria three times a week with only the army for its passengers and the war itself for its destination. The journey would take not weeks or days, but only hours. The Front in France was closer to London than was Liverpool or York or Exeter, even if what went on there seemed as far removed as combat with the Boers or the dervishes had. Now, those had been proper wars. Wars belonged in places like the Transvaal or Sudan, not across the Pas-de-Calais.
“Tyrrell!” The captain with the pillow stopped short in front of Douglas and Pamela, and only then did they recognize him. It was Peter Towne, whom Douglas had befriended when they read law together at Lincoln’s Inn. They’d played cricket on the same team and they’d had adjoining chambers in their last year. Douglas had gone to London the year after he’d met Pamela at Coole Park. He might have studied law at Trinity in Dublin but for his longing to be near her. He had had the greatest successes of his life: prompt admittance to the bar, to her family’s affection, and to her heart. Towne had been at their wedding six years before, but they hadn’t seen him since.
“Good Lord!” he said. “And Pamela! How are you?” He kissed her cheek, then he and Douglas shook hands vigorously.
“And what’s this, Peter?” Douglas indicated the pillow. “Your battle shield?”
Towne blushed. “Oh, Christ, Tyrrell, my C.O. had to have one. What could I do?” His eyes fell on the regimental badge on the breast pocket of Douglas’s tunic. “What’s that?” He touched the badge with his stick. In Douglas’s regiment officers disdained the stick as an affectation.
“The Connaught Rangers, Peter.”
“Good God, Douglas! Connaught? A Paddy regiment?”
Douglas and Pamela exchanged a glance. Both were aware of the whiskey pouring off Towne’s breath.
He laughed. “But of course you’re Irish.” He smiled at Pamela. “One forgets.”
She smiled back at him. “No, one doesn’t.” Pamela may have been English, like Towne, but she wanted it clear whose side she was on even in this petty fencing. She remembered how Douglas’s Lincoln’s Inn friends never let up on him and it embarrassed her, as if they were like that because they were English and not because they were men. It was with their “good-natured” leg-pulling that men made their points and, if you asked her, how they kept each other small.
“You should be with us, Tyrrell.” He punched Douglas’s shoulder, ignoring Pamela’s implied disapproval. Towne still plowed through every thicket of personal awkwardness like a flogged animal. “We have an entire Inns of Court battalion. Fourteenth London. Regular Army. You qualify. I could get you in. Matter of fact, our old pupil master, Engleman, is the colonel.”
“No thanks, Peter. Fourth Connaught for me. It’s my home outfit. I returned to Ireland, you know.”
“I didn’t know. Good God, why?” Towne turned to Pamela. “He didn’t drag you along, did he? Poor Pamela.” He put his arm around her. “I warned you. You should have married me.” Not even Towne would have been so forward without being a little drunk.
Pamela slid gracefully, playfully, away from him to go to Douglas.
“I’m serious, Tyrrell. Inns of Court. They’re all our friends. Men from our time, just before and since. And it’s a London regiment, my friend.”
“Hence the pillow?”
“Damn your blasted cheek!” Towne threw the pillow at Douglas. It hit him and Pamela together, and fell to the ground.
Douglas picked it up and handed it to him. “Mind your cushion, Captain.” He smiled. “Where are you off to?”
Towne’s eyes flicked at Pamela. One saw him reading in his mind the stenciled sign they all were trained to carry there now, Careful What You Say. The Hun Has Listening Apparatus and Can Hear You. He looked down the platform, along the length of the train. His C.O. was gone in the throng of khaki.
“Béthune,” Towne answered quietly, but the name of the town told Douglas nothing. Béthune was the main railway juncture behind the British sector, and it served as a staging area. From Béthune units fanned out along the Front fifty miles to the north and south, to the sea and to Albert, near the River Somme.
“My regiment’s due at Saint-Omer,” Douglas said. All he knew about his destination was that it was near the border with Belgium.
Towne looked at him sharply. “Saint Homer’s the jump-off for Wipers.” He looked briefly at Pamela.
At that point in the war no Englishmen could speak the name of Ypres—or the slang version of it—without a shudder because of what its defense in November had cost the BEF. But the BEF, even decimated, had held, and now Ypres was a symbol of the Allied resistance. It would never be abandoned, but it would never be securely held either, because the Germans occupied the surrounding hills. Since autumn the steady “wastage” had continued. There were constant rumors that the next German offensive was about to come, but there were also rumors to the contrary. If the Germans ever took Ypres, they would be able to close off the British ports at Dunkirk and Calais and to sweep across Picardy toward Paris, forcing an Allied retreat all along the Front.
“What do you hear about it?” Pamela asked. She tightened her grip on Douglas’s arm.
Towne shook his head, suddenly sober. “Holding steady. I shouldn’t worry. We have Fritz outnumbered three-to-two all along the Front. He has his hands full with the Russians. We won’t see the big show this summer. We’ll be tending fence, won’t we, Douglas?”
Douglas nodded. “It’s what I’ve told her.”
“And now you Harps are here, Fritz wouldn’t dare move.” Towne flicked Tyrrell’s regimental insignia. “What’s that fellow’s name, Coochee something, the Irish warrior?”
“Cuchulain.”
Towne nodded and put his hand out. “Welcome to the fray, old man.”
Douglas shook his hand.
Towne turned to Pamela, as if to kiss her once more, but her expression stopped him. She did not release her grip on her husband’s arm. Towne touched the visor of his cap, raised his eyebrows, and went away whistling “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”
When Towne was gone Pamela turned to Douglas and asked fiercely, “What will it be like? What have they told you?”
Douglas shook his head. “They don’t tell you that. How can they?”
Pamela looked back toward Towne, but he had disappeared into the crowd. She said with a large sigh, “I hate it when they condescend to you, darling.”
“It isn’t condescension. It’s that we Anglo-Irish never fit their slots. We are not the peasants—or papists—they wish we were. They’d like to feel superior, but we have longer lineage and more money and better houses than most of them. And some of us”—he kissed her lightly—“have married out from under them the women they always wanted. Wouldn’t you resent us?”
Before Pamela could reply, their children came running toward them. They had broken free of their nanny. Anne, who was five, was imitating her two-year-old brother’s babyish salutation. “Da! Da!” they both cried. Soldiers made way for them and watched while Douglas stooped to take them in his arms. He picked them up together and buried his face in their squealing laughter. “Oh my ducklings!” he said, but then looked at Pamela. Her father was the one who’d called them “Doug’s ducklings.” Once more the loss of that good man hit him, and he felt a rush of hatred for the Germans.
The train’s shrill whistle blew again, but this time it did not cease for a full sixty seconds. It was impossible to speak. One could only stand mutely, thinking here it was, the dread moment, at last. Pamela closed her arms around her husband and their children.
When the whistle stopped, Douglas put the children down, kissed them, then let the nanny take them.
This last moment was for his wife.
In the railway station at Gort at the end of that weekend at Coole Park nine years before, Douglas had managed to draw her aside. Her parents were already in their train compartment, but her father was holding the door open, waiting. Douglas wanted to take her hand but didn’t dare. “May I see you again?” he’d asked.
“But isn’t that impossible?” She seemed as saddened by the prospect as he was. They’d spent all day Sunday wandering the fields of Coole Park, glorious hours at the end of which Douglas had taken her hand and held it.
“Not if I come to London, it isn’t.”
“But you’ve just returned here.”
“I’ll find a way,” he said. “I’ll run for my father’s old seat in Parliament.” He grinned cockily, but what he felt was panic that he would never see her again.
Then, even in front of her parents, she took his hand, a small breach of the Victorian code, but to Douglas and Pamela an explosive one.
He remembered it now and took her hand in his. Now she would be the one watching a train pull slowly away. He said, “I’m nothing without you. I’m nothing until I see you again.”
By now Tyrrell was the only soldier still on the platform. He began to back slowly away from her. She came with him. He pulled his hand, but it did not come free.
“Darling . . .” he said.
Steam hissed from the undercarriage of the nearest car. The railway man cried, “On train!”
Pamela started sobbing, a large breach of this code. “No, Douglas, don’t!”
He tried to pull away from her, but couldn’t. She simply would not release his hand. He felt a panic of his own, for this was completely unlike her. In nine years he had never seen her at this extreme of feeling, of need. Suddenly he saw his importance to her as if for the first time, and he too was overwhelmed. He reversed himself, going to her.
They kissed passionately and held each other.
“I love you,” he said, and then broke away as the train began to move.
Soldiers hanging from the windows of the rearmost car hooted. “Don’t leave her, Captain!” one called. “You’ll be sorry!”
“I love you, Douglas!” Pamela called through tears she made no move to wipe. “I love you!”
He leapt aboard, then turned at once to face her.
She began to run with the train, reached out to his hand and touched him once more, for an instant, as if they were partners in a relay.
The train moved too fast for her, but she kept running until long after it made sense to do so.
Before she could properly breathe again, he would be halfway to the war.
As for him, he stared back at her, hanging from the carriage doorway, until even the perfectly poised twin cupolas above Victoria’s mammoth vaulted roof were gone.
One image that the officers of the new British army then being fielded had of themselves was that they, unlike their stodgy professional predecessors, were a varied collection of fabulous personalities. It seemed so to Douglas as he made his way from compartment to compartment in the first-class cars looking for the Rangers he’d planned to meet. But something in the mood of those men made him uneasy. Subalterns in particular seemed given to raucous behavior as if they were on a school outing. In a way, of course, they were. One thing those men could all say for the war, it had put them back in each other’s company, at the altar of which they had been taught to worship during their school years. The war had rescued the bond they had made with each other, rescued it not only from the anonymity of their mundane postschool lives in which even their clubs, if they had them, were pale shadows of those bright communities of boyhood; but even more to the point, rescued it from their women. That bond was precious because it allowed them to indulge once more—puer eternis—in the spirited camaraderie not of youth precisely, but of youth’s license. Douglas was as appealed to by the esprit as anyone, but just then he was set apart by the fresh wound of his farewell and the attachment to Pamela that it revealed. He kept looking out the window, expecting to see, in place of the blurred landscape, her.
That a woman was his point of reference just then, instead of the brotherhood, made his perceptions somewhat different. He sensed the irony that these men setting off on a course of the most awful consequences should have had quickened a collective frame of mind that knows nothing of consequences. A pack of boys can do anything it wants because each member, by virtue of his membership, feels himself to be part of a life-force that is irrepressible, infallible, immune, destined to prevail. That was why on that train that day, once it had actually left London and its worrywarts behind, the men seemed deliriously happy. They laughed, joked, tugged at each other, tossed hats, and quaffed lemonade. They were not an army going off to war at all. They were a football team going to a tournament, and they couldn’t lose.
“Tyrrell!”
It was Towne again. He was standing in the doorway of his compartment. Behind him four officers were playing Crown and Anchor.
“Hello, Peter.”
“Here, come meet my friends.” Towne turned to the others. They were all captains. “Gentlemen, welcome Mr. Tyrrell, my chum from Lincoln’s. He prefers his Irish regiment to ours.”
“Chacun à sa chacune,” a portly officer said. The crack—to each man his own woman—seemed inappropriate, even though Douglas understood that the man’s purpose was to impugn the masculinity of the Irish even while chiding him for disloyalty to the Inns. Douglas hardly looked at him but still noted that in the first days of the war the previous fall, such an overweight specimen would never have been commissioned.
“You’re not a member of the London bar?” another asked without looking up from the dice game. This was his true offense, of course, to have proved himself worthy of the most exclusive legal circle in the world, then to have gone back to Galway.
“No, Dublin.”
“I have to pee,” a third said, slapping the dice on the table. He left without excusing himself or looking at Douglas.
Douglas and Towne turned away from the compartment doorway to face the open window in the narrow corridor. Douglas knew better than to take offense.
