‘Yes, Grandpa. I’ll remember.’
‘Then, that would do nicely, coming from you.’ The old man leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. ‘I think, George,’ he said, ‘that we can go home now.’
The year ended in gloom and the Somme died, mourned by no one.
It had been a victory of a sort, but it had been an empty victory because the British casualties had been higher than those of the Germans. They had gained nothing but a few miles of shell-torn ground which were of use to no one, and finally the mud, stirred up by the rain and the bom- bardments, had become so impassable the attack had stopped for the simple reason that it was no longer possible to move.
It was now being said the battle had been fought to relieve Verdun, but that had come to an end before the Somme had even started; and all they had to show for it were a few miles of broken trenches, ruined fields and obliterated villages with their scattered graves marked by rusting helmets, wooden crosses or bayoneted rifles, while the glowing idealism of the New Army had found its end in the hills and valleys of Picardy.
Churchill was not hoodwinked with the talk of victory, and even came to Yorkshire, full of indignation and splendid rhetoric, ostensibly to ask the Field Marshal’s views but in reality to expound his own in the hope of receiving support.
‘This open ground to which we struggled with such appalling loss of life,’ he said, ‘was entirely without strategic significance. The capture of Verdun would obviously have been of value to the Germans. But what were
we
after? There was nothing beyond the German line of any military value whatsoever.’
Even Lloyd George had been to see the old man, trying to tempt him to London in an effort to topple the military hierarchy he so disliked. But the Field Marshal refused. He was too old now and he knew it. Nobody of his generation seemed to be still active. Even Kitchener was dead now, drowned when the ship taking him to Russia had been mined off the coast of Scotland.
The war seemed to be turning Europe into a form of hell. Most people were apathetic, not only towards the enemy but also towards their own political and military leaders who seemed to have no idea what to do next. The old belief that they would smash their way through had given way to the feeling that eventually there would have to be a negotiated peace, but nobody could accept anything that would leave the Germans still occupying Northern France and Belgium, something that would be tantamount to a defeat. Yet the Germans would never give them up because
that
would be tantamount to a defeat for them.
The New Year was surprisingly quiet. England was a country these days of women, because all the men were in France and everyone had become silent in a sort of sullen resignation. One no longer offered condolences about death because every family in the country seemed to have been affected by it. Everything was short, and in some of the villages round Braxby it seemed that the Somme had wiped out the whole of the male population under forty.
A few people seemed to be doing well, however. Lloyd George had become Prime Minister at last but he was curiously without the power to do what he wished. The military leaders still seemed to be making plans and, as he read about them, the Field Marshal felt a sense of guilt that he could not feel at one with them. Business was also booming and Walter Cosgro had bought a shooting box in Scotland from some family whose sons had all disappeared in the holocaust across the Channel and no longer had need of it. Robert’s fortune had also increased and he had received a knighthood for his work.
There was an uneasy feeling in the old man’s mind that they were going to lose the war. The Russians were in a state of chaos and the French, bled white by their losses, were said to be mutinous. Jutland had been a disaster, the great naval victory everybody had been expecting ever since 1914 turning out instead to be a fiasco with over-caution allowing the German fleet to escape. Finally the U-boat campaign had reached a climax that left the country desperate for every kind of necessity, and the newspapers could think of nothing but to castigate the politicians who seemed far more concerned with the success of their own parties than with the result of the war.
But, while the Somme had been a disaster for Britain, there was little doubt but that it had been a disaster for Germany also. While British casualties had been enormous, German losses were very nearly equal, something apparently borne out by the fact that the Fatherland had put out peace feelers at the end of the year.
There seemed little to hope for but the entry into the war of the United States with her legions of fresh young men. Rumours that they were intending to come in on the Allied side had been circulating for three years and German-American relations had finally been severed. But the phrase, ‘America on the verge of war’, that the newspapers had pumped out so regularly, seemed to have grown so old and tired nobody believed there was any truth in it any more.
It was as the Field Marshal, no longer willing to go to London or be part of the war in any way, gloomily considered the future, that a letter arrived from Helen in Berlin.
It came via Holland as usual but, with the blockade round Germany growing tighter, the letters were fewer these days and there were inexplicable delays as if the Dutch, with no wish to be embroiled, were behaving with extreme caution. The letter had been forwarded to Switzerland and finally to France. The date was December and to their surprise it was not addressed to both parents as Helen’s letters usually were, but to the Field Marshal alone, and it bore his full rank and every one of his decorations, so that it had a derisory, sarcastic look about it. The old man opened it warily, conscious that it contained a shock.
Karl-August had been killed commanding a Bavarian brigade on the Somme and Helen’s resentment, already showing against her own country since the previous year, had suddenly become deep-seated and passionate.
‘Why did you kill him?’ she wrote. ‘How could you kill your own son-in-law?’ With the letter addressed only to him, the accusation was thrust directly at the old man. He was a British soldier and, in his daughter’s wretchedness, was therefore alone responsible for the death of her husband.
He read the letter slowly, watched by his wife. There was no sign of forgiveness in it, no sign of understanding. Helen’s grief had embittered her and there was only accusation and anger.
‘I no longer wish to call England my country,’ she announced. ‘Until now, I could never forget where I came from, despite the blows that have been delivered against my adopted country. I even tried to forgive the blockade that is forcing German people to go hungry and has caused my children to do without many of the things they need. Now all I can be aware of is that England has killed my husband and left his children fatherless. I wish to have nothing more to do with you.’
The old man read the letter in silence then, without a word, he passed it to his wife. His eyes bleak, he saw the tears come into her eyes and roll down her cheeks.
‘Oh, Coll–!’ She tried to speak, but was unable to and she broke off and hurried from the room, her hand to her eyes.
The old man sat in silence as the door slammed behind her, his eyes on the folded sheet of paper on the floor. His thoughts were confused and he was totally unable to put them in order. He had no idea even where to start. He had long been aware that the war had become a watershed in the lives of everyone. The Empire would never be the same again. It would end up impoverished, its classes – those societies on which it had been so securely built – destroyed. No one would ever trust anyone again. The old honest calm life would have vanished and in its place would come a new raucous existence that might satisfy the young but could never satisfy people brought up in a more gracious age.
He tried to think of his daughter and her family, but it was so long since he’d seen them he couldn’t even remember properly what they looked like and he rose hurriedly and fumbled clumsily in a drawer until he found a photograph. As he stood staring at it, his heart thumping wildly, oppressed by the weight of misery, the door burst open and Josh appeared at a rush. Seeing the old man, he stopped dead.
‘Grandpa, what’s the matter?’
The old man thrust the photograph away and sat down hurriedly. ‘Your Uncle Karl’s been killed.’
The boy started to say something, then sensing that his grandfather was racked with unhappiness, he changed his mind and, instead, crossed to the old man to do the only thing he could think of. As he patted the old veined hand, for a moment the old man seemed unaware of it, then he grasped the boy’s fingers and clutched them tightly.
‘There must be no more war, boy,’ he said fiercely. ‘There
cannot
be any more war. Let us finish this one as soon as possible and then forswear it for ever.’ He suddenly became aware that the boy held the daily paper. It had to come from York and arrived in Braxby on the nine o’clock train so that it never appeared at the house until mid-morning.
‘What is it, boy?’ He made an effort to thrust aside his wretchedness. This child was the future and must be treated as if he were. ‘What have you there?’
The boy smiled, a little uncertainly before the old man’s bleak look. It was so long since he’d seen his German relations, he’d almost forgotten them. Indeed, at school it had sometimes been wiser to do so, and he was glad now of the opportunity to push the matter from his mind.
He lifted the paper up, opening it wide and holding it in front of him. ‘America Joins With All Her Resources,’ the headline announced.
The boy’s smile widened. ‘The United States have come in,’ he said.
It gave them something to talk about and took their minds off Helen’s bitterness, and to the surprise of the household the first result of the news was the arrival of a letter from Virginia.
It was from Richmond, was addressed to the Field Marshal via the War Office, and was signed ‘Micah Burtle Love, Lieutenant, 12th Cavalry.’
For a moment it jabbed at the old man’s liver with the memories it raised. Over fifty years before he had been captured by a Micah Burtle Love in Maryland and helped a wounded Micah Burtle Love off the field near Parks’ Bridge before taking over his command for the Wilderness and Yellow Tavern. His mind, occupied with the grey despair of No Man’s Land in France, was suddenly filled with memories of a long-forgotten campaign where men fought hand-to-hand and were not butchered in thousands by enemies they never saw. There was a swirl and a romance to the name even. Micah Burtle Love. The old man’s mind swung back over the years to Jeb Stuart and the frail glory of a war where men had still gone into battle carrying flags and wearing cloaks; where, dammit, his own wife, Augusta, had appeared before him carrying a sash, a plume and a locket containing one of her curls, which he’d carried with him then and ever since wherever he went.
His eyes were faraway when his wife appeared. The letter had made him realise just how old he was. His contemporaries were all dead now. Only Evelyn Wood seemed to be alive and these days they never met, two old men who had fought in forgotten wars living on their memories. ‘Bala-bloody-clava? Christ, no wonder we’re losing the war!’ The laughter and the derision jerked at his liver again.
‘Who is it?’
The sharp question as his wife appeared at the door cut across the memories, carving like a knife through his emotions.
He thrust the letter at her and she stopped dead.
‘It must be – no, it couldn’t be – my cousin, Micah, died in 1912. It must be his grandson.’
The old man looked again at the letter. ‘American soldiers will very soon be in Europe, sir,’ he read. ‘But I shall be arriving ahead of them. A great many young men joined the United States Air Service when war broke out in 1914 and we have now volunteered for immediate service abroad. Some will go to France to be trained by our new allies and fight with them until our army can supply us with airplanes, some will go to Italy, some to Canada. I requested that I might be sent with the batch that will come to England, because, I said, I had English relatives. I trust you will not mind this, sir, nor the hope I have that I may call on you…’
‘Good God,’ the Field Marshal said. ‘He’s coming here.’
It was clear that new battles were brewing up and, through his contacts, chief of whom he rated his grandfather, who had contacts of his own far more illustrious and reliable than the contacts of any other boy at school, Josh was aware that the war had entered a new phase.
But before that happened, his father returned from France on leave. It startled Josh to see how he had changed. He was a colonel now, in command of the Regiment – the only regiment that Josh acknowledged – but he suddenly seemed like an old man. There were lines on his face that the boy had never seen before and grey streaks in his hair. It gave him a faded look, though his manner was as brisk as ever.
It startled him, too, to see the passionate way his mother clutched this almost strange officer with the row of ribbons on his chest. He could understand that she was glad to have him home but, remembering how several of his friends at school had lost their fathers, he could only put down the way she clung to him as springing from a fear that he might not have come at all.
As he swung his small daughter into his arms, Dabney saw his son watching him gravely.
‘Hello, Josh,’ he said.
Hugging his father, Josh was aware of the strange smell about him. His uniform was stained and seemed to have absorbed some of the stink of France.
‘How are you doing at school?’
‘All right, Father. I’m not at the bottom of the form.’
Dabney’s face wrinkled in a smile that was as the boy remembered. ‘I’ll bet you’re not at the top either.’
‘No, Father. About half way. Top half, in fact. That’s not too bad, is it?’
Dinner was a quiet affair and Josh noticed that his parents hardly took their eyes off each other.
‘What’s it like in France, Father?’ The silence was becoming intolerable.