Authors: Phillip Rock
He took a notebook and pen from his bag, lit a cigar, and settled back in the seat. He began to write in Pitman shorthand, the strokes and curls flowing across the page as fast as he could form his thoughts....
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Monday, June 20, 1921. Observations and reflections. By train from Folkestone to London.
            How many times, I wonder, have I been on this train and taken a seat by the window and written in a journal? Times beyond count. A milk run in 1915 and '16. The carriage jammed then with men coming back to Blighty on leave. The mud of Flanders still on their boots, that glazed “trench look” in their eyes. Only half believing their luck. Only half believing they were not in fact dead and being transported to hell.
            “I took you for a German.” That look of hate before she heard me speak in unbroken English. There had been that look during the war. The cold stare at my civilian clothes. The acid remark: “Been to France on holiday?” The atmosphere always warmed when I told them I was a newspaperman. They were well-informed men. They despised most war correspondents for good reason, but most had read my pieces and appreciated the honestyâeven after the censors had chopped out the more unpleasant bits. They had raised reading between the lines to a fine art and knew what I was saying about the war.
            “I took you for a German.” The hate runs deepâhere and everywhere. “I took you for a Frenchman ⦠[the man on the train from Saarbrucken to Berlin, ignoring me coldly because he had heard me speaking French at the station; warming up after our passports were checked before leaving the occupied zone] ⦠a damned frog bastard.” We spoke German and I told him I was from Chicago. Second-generation German-American. “I have an uncle in Milwaukee,” the man said. “You Yankee fellows backed the wrong side. You'll find out.”
            Who knows? As Jacob Golden used to say, there are no heroes anymore. We are all villains obsessed with the idea of kicking civilization to bits. The only animal on earth who fouls its own nest and makes a virtue out of slaughter.
            The man at the cemetery pitied me. The faint smile, the glow in his eyes. The righteous look seen on the faces of the devout when told that one no longer believes in God. But I admit it took all the courage I had to walk away from her grave. It's easier to hang on. To return once a month, or three times a year, and “visit.” I'm sure the man from Dover does just that. He visits, passing the time of day with his dead sons. The woman I saw once by the grave of her husband, seated in a little folding chair. “Talks a blue streak,” the caretaker told me. “Comes across from London twice a year and tells him all the news of the family. They get a bit daft, poor souls.” Hanging on. Blocking the reality of oblivion from the mind. A mere prolonging of pain. Like sawing off a leg with a penknife where one quick swing with a sharp blade would be more humane.
            The war itself too painful to comprehend for most people. The statistics just starting to be printed. A million English dead. Twenty-seven percent of all young Frenchmen. God alone knows how many Germans, Russians, Austrians, Italians, Turks, and Serbs. And who can tally the continuing cost of the peace? How many dead from famine? Typhus? Influenza? The figures are meaningless anyway. No one can grasp them. Each digit a person. Ivyâslender, dark-haired, violet-eyed. Naked and loving in our bed. Reduced in importance to a single number on a list. The old man's sons. John and Hubert. Who were they? What did they do? Will we feel their loss? Two more numbers added to the tally sheet. Nine hundred thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven left to record, to personalize, to focus on a once-living face.
He put notebook and pen on the seat beside him, removed his reading glasses, and wiped them with a handkerchief. Through the window he could see a changing landscape, the greens and golds of the countryside blending into the smoky gray of towns, the blistered fringes of London. He reached for the notebook, and as he picked it up, the letter from Arnold Calthorpe slipped out from between the pages. No answer required, but he had to give it some thought.
CALTHORPE & CROFTS
Publishers
Bloomsbury Square
London
      Dear Martin:
            I trust this reaches you before you depart from Paris. Both Jeremy and I congratulate you on your new job. Very impressive. I wish your appointment had taken place before we printed the jacket for the book, but that can't be helped.
            Martin, as we discussed last year,
A Killing Ground
is quite likely the best possible book at the worst possible time. First reviewsâor rather, lack of themâappear to justify that prediction. Only the most liberal, socialist, or pacifist press has bothered to review it so farâand there aren't many of those left in Britain these days! We are anything but disappointed, asâalso agreed between usâmaking money is not the object. We feel pride in printing it, just as you feel pride in having written it. However, we must face up to the fact that the book may come in for criticism designed to discredit it and you. A “muckraking” charge as example. Give some thought to rebuttalâa thousand words or so on just why you wrote such a savage exposé. Something we could send out as a “letter of publication” to any Tory paper that takes a swipe at you. This need not be done at this moment, while you are so busy and temporarily “uprooted.” After you get settled, drop by the office and we will discuss it.
Sincerely yours,
A. T. Calthorpe
He put the letter back in the notebook, then picked up his pen and began to write.
            Regarding Calthorpe. How he thinks I can avoid charges of muckraking is beyond me. It is muckraking in the purest meaning of the term. But then I'm a Chicago boy, a town where muckraking is something of a fine art.
            I wrote the book as my own personal catharsis, a way to cleanse my soul of gall. All those months covering the peace conferences at Versailles. Day after day observing the haggling over spoils. The fixing of blame and the establishment of costsâthe peacemakers like so many lawyers wrangling over an accident case. And out there, along the old trench line of the western front, lay the dead. No one spoke for them. They were only mentioned as adjuncts to noble phrasesâthe “glorious dead” ⦠“not in vain” ⦠“fallen heroes” in “the war to save democracy” or “the war to end all wars.” And there they were in the boneyards, the millions who could just as well have been strangled at birth for all the good they had done to
save
or
end
anything.
            An observation through the window. Rows of dark brick houses. A factory flanking the railroad line. Men standing in front of locked gates carrying signs: “Not a Penny off the Wage.” No pastorals here. A tiny glimpse of postwar England. Strikes and more strikes with over a million out of work. The pickets look shabby and ill fed. How many of them, I wonder, came back from the war believing Lloyd George's promise that they were returning to “a land fit for heroes”?
            And so much for that.
J
OE
J
OHNSON, EDITOR
in chief of the London office of the International News Agency, was waiting for him at Charing Cross, pacing up and down the platform, chain-smoking and anxious. As Martin left the carriage, Johnson spotted him and hurried over, grinning with relief.
“Jesus, I was starting to worry you might not have been on the train.”
“Well, here I am,” Martin said.
Johnson glanced at his watch. “Kingsford set up a cocktail party at the Cafe Royal. A meet-the-new-boss affair. If you hadn't shown up ⦔ He left the implication of that unsaid. “You have about an hour and a half. Have you got a change of clothes? You look like you slept in that suitâin a field.”
“I have the use of a flat in Soho. My trunks should be there by now. Don't worry, I won't disgrace myself, or Kingsford.”
“Everyone is invited. Fifty, sixty people. You're really getting up in the world, Marty, and it couldn't happen to a better guy.”
“Thanks, Joe, but they should have picked you.”
“Like hell. I get enough Kingsford memos as it is. European bureau chief. Jesus Christ. I'll tell you the truth, Marty, Lou drank himself into a straitjacket because Kingsford was hounding him twenty-four hours a day with cables. Now it's your turn. I'm torn between patting you on the back or sending a note of sympathy.”
“I can handle Kingsford. I didn't ask for the job; he asked me. I run the bureau my way and he can stay in New York and write all the cables he wants, but not to me.”
Joe Johnson looked dubious. “Well, we'll see. Maybe you're a tougher sonofabitch than you look.”
“You can bank on that, Joe. I don't mellow with age.”
He squeezed into the older man's little Austin and had no sooner closed the door before they were gunning away from the curb, down Pall Mall and up Regent Street into Soho.
“Lower James Street,” Martin said, wincing as they narrowly missed a pedestrian running to catch a bus. “The flat's above the Ristorante Velletri.”
“Want me to wait for you?”
“No, that's okay. It's only a block or two to the Cafe Royal. I'll just clean up and walk over.”
“Don't get sidetracked,” Johnson said gloomily, “or Kingsford'll have my head on a plate.”
Jacob Golden had bought the spacious six-room dwelling after being expelled from Balliol in 1911. It was, he had told Martin, his gift to himself for having shocked and dismayed every don at Oxford for two years. A Hungarian restaurant had occupied the ground floor of the two-story building; but when the war started, the Hungarian owner and his cooks and waiters had been marched off to an internment camp, and an Italian family had taken over the premises.
“Ah! Signor Rilke!” Marco Velletri, owner and chef, greeted Martin with a bear hug and a garlicky kiss on the cheek. “It has beenâoh, too long, no?”
“Over three years too long, Marco.” He returned the
embrazzo.
“Did Signor Golden leave the key?”
It had been left as promised. His trunks and crates of books had arrived from Paris and were neatly stored in the spare bedroom. A note from Jacob was pinned to the mirror above the dresser.
Saturday
      My dear Rilke:
            Welcome back to jolly old Britainâalthough why anyone would give up a perfectly decent job in Paris is quite beyond my comprehension. Make yourself at home. Champagne in the kitchenâcold if Marco remembered to put ice in the box. I'm off to Macedonia to investigate starvation there. My chaps want full report on the reasons why. Told them that the reason for starvation is because there's no ruddy food. Not good enough for the jolly old League of (almost all) Nations, which has a penchant for quadruplicated reports on official forms. Mine will be a masterpieceâas always. And, as always, will be filed neatly away and forgotten while the Greeks continue to eat mud and straw. You may put that in your journal somewhere as an observation of despair.
I am, sir,
Yr. mo. Hble. St.
Jacob
There was no time to do more than remove some fresh clothing from one of the trunks, take a bath, shave, and search a trunk drawer for a missing black shoe. Ivy's photograph was in the drawer, under a loose pile of assorted socks, and he placed it on the dresser before leaving the apartment.
The INA cocktail party was being held in the Chelsea Room on the third floor of the Cafe Royalâa large gilt and red-plush room overlooking Regent Street. The party was in full swing when Martin arrived, a string quartet playing in a far corner drowned out by the babble of voices and the clink of glasses. Scott Kingsford spotted him and pushed his way through the crowd.
Scott Kingsford was more of a salesman than a journalist, a quality he would have been the first to admit. In ten years he had turned his International News Agency into the second most powerful news-gathering service in the world. He had done it by having an instinct for what newspapers would buy and what newspaper buyers wanted to read. That instinct had made him a millionaire at forty-five. But he wasn't content to sit back on his laurels. He wanted INA to be the biggest agency of all and was willing to spend money to see it happen. That meant hiring the best talent on the market, and spending money to experiment with less traditional forms of news gathering and dissemination, Marconi wireless transmission being his current project. To Europeans he was the epitome of the brash and obnoxious American, an image he did his best to uphold.
“Martin,” he called out, coming at him like a bear. “This is your party, kiddo. Get a drink in your hand and I'll take you around.”
He was proud of Martin Rilke. Acquiring a Pulitzer Prize winner as a bureau chief was a feather in his cap, a major coup. He introduced Martin to the staff of the London office, which would be his working base, and to the large number of British journalists who had been invited. Martin knew most of the people at the party and introductions had not been necessary, but it pleased Kingsford. After the circuit of the room had been made, Kingsford steered him to a relatively quiet corner of the bar.