Circles of Time (9 page)

“Martin Rilke is not a
German fella.
”

“A Yank then, with a Boche name. A bleeding newspaper wallah. By all rights you should have been booted from the service if not bloody well shot!”

Fenton's expression was stone. “I followed the King's Regulations to the letter with Charles. As for my giving the transcript to Rilke, there was no proof of it.”

“No proof of it,” the general sighed. Slumping back in his chair, he struck a match and relit his cigar. “As if proof were needed. The Yank circulated that transcript as an antiwar tract—the prattle of a shell-shocked man, young Greville condemning the war and Field Marshal Haig's handling of it.”

“He
was
my friend, sir. I owed him that much.”

The general snorted and puffed smoke like a dragon. “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his career for a friend! Greville's beliefs were the same as your own, I warrant, or you'd never have bound him over for court-martial so as to give him a public forum. It was a cheap dodge, and the War Office did not appreciate your actions. You talk about
proof
, by God. The only thing that saved your neck was
me
, sir!”

“I'm suitably grateful, I assure you.”

“But I can't save your career. You're a marked man. If you stay in the army you'll be handed every dog's job they can find. Nothing but bitter duty until they succeed in hounding you out.”

He opened a drawer and removed an official War Office envelope. “Your orders, sir. You are to embark on the P&O steamer
City of Benares
leaving Southampton twelfth July. You will disembark at Aden and proceed to Basra, then by train to Baghdad. From there you will go, by whatever transport is available, to Bani el Abbas on the upper Tigris and assume command of the Twelfth Battalion of the Sixty-fifth Brigade—a mixed bag: one company of West Lanes, an armored-car detachment, and two companies of Punjabis. You will arrive in the hot season, one hundred twenty in the shade—if one can find any shade. Fever off the river. Marauding Arabs and Kurds in the wasteland. Pure hell on earth. I doubt if Winifred will be overjoyed at your assignment.”

It was very quiet in the office, only the soft ticking of a wall clock and the distant hum of London's traffic. Fenton drained his glass and then leaned forward and placed it on the desk. He smiled wryly at his uncle, whose face seemed carved out of oak.

“You never told me the army would be an easy profession.”

“No, I never told you that.”

“And I never promised Winnie I'd leave it.” He reached out a hand. “May I have my orders, sir?”

The general held the envelope tightly between his fingers. “There's still time. Blythe has typed the letter.”

Fenton shook his head and took the envelope from his uncle's hand. He slipped it into his coat pocket and stood up. “Twelfth July. Not much time, and I have at least one important thing to do. Goodbye, sir.”

Sir Julian watched him leave the office and swore softly under his breath: “Damn fool.” There was no malice in the words. No bite to them. It was what he would have done, of course. A matter of pride. His own career had been under a cloud once, long, long ago. He had openly criticized a doddering fool of a brigadier for gross incompetence during an expedition in the Sudan. He had saved his own small force from disaster and had marched them back to the Nile, fighting every step of the way. His quick tongue had earned him a court-martial, at which, with the peculiar logic of the army, he was recommended for the Victoria Cross and then severely reprimanded and ordered off to India for hard duty along the northwest frontier. He had served his penance with fortitude and then had thrust his way back up the ladder of command. He offered a silent prayer that Fenton might one day do the same.

A
DISPATCH FROM
Spanish Morocco was on his desk when he got to the office at 8:30—three thousand words, like a chapter from
War and Peace.
Martin eyed it dubiously and then checked his daily calendar. A full schedule. Miss Shaw brought in a cup of coffee and a handful of Huntley & Palmer biscuits on a plate. He lit a cigar and settled down to work, tackling the Moroccan report. It was all good, readable stuff, but there was no market for it. Filler material at best. His blue pencil zipped and slashed like a surgeon's blade.

Next on his calendar was a correspondent from the
Telegraph
who had condescended to offer his services to INA in return for a salary that could only be described as princely. Martin remembered him from the war. The man had never gone up to the line, preferring to write his battle reports from his room at the Hotel Ritz in Paris using secondhand information. So much for him.

The interview was cordial but brief and the man left feeling slightly bewildered that he hadn't been hired on the spot.

“There's a man to see you, Mr. Rilke.” Miss Shaw's head around the door. “He has no appointment, but he claims to be a friend of yours.”

“His name?”

“A Colonel Wood-Lacy.”

He hadn't seen Fenton in over a year, but they kept in touch. He was not only an old friend but a source of matters military. Fenton had gone to France with the BEF in August 1914, a captain in the Coldstream Guards. He had survived Mons and the first battle of Ypres, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and the Somme offensives. The deaths of so many regular army officers, plus his own competence, brought rapid promotion. By 1917 he was brevetted a brigadier general, a young thruster obviously destined for further honors, but then he had fallen from grace.

“Gosh it's good to see you, Fenton. How'd you know I was back in London?”

“I had dinner with Jacob before he left. He told me the happy news.” He glanced around the office. “I hope I'm not intruding. Never seen such a busy place. Something momentous happen that I haven't heard about?”

“No. Just a normal day in the world. Poles fighting Russians, Russians fighting starvation, Riffs slaughtering Spaniards, Greeks murdering Turks and vice versa. I'll be blue-penciling most of it as being of no consequence. A serene day, in fact. Drop by when there's a war on.” He motioned toward a chair. “Get a load off your feet.”

“Are you quite sure? I hate popping in on people.”

Martin stole a glance at his watch. “I'm sending a feature writer off to Poland and I have a few things to talk over. Take about half an hour. Then I can leave and we can have a leisurely lunch. How does that sound?”

“Jolly good. Just find me a quiet corner and I'll stay out of the way.”

Martin headed for the door. “There's only one quiet corner in the joint and you're seated in it.”

During the thirty-five minutes that Fenton waited, a copyboy dashed in four times to deposit sheaves of Teletype messages. Having nothing else to do, he stood by the desk and read them. The events of the day, hot off the wire. It made depressing reading. He could envision a morning in which a report would end up on the desk telling of the ambush and massacre of British soldiers near Bani el Abbas on the Tigris.
The Gatling jammed and the colonel dead
… as the Victorian poem put it. Martin would probably scrawl a blue line across it as being of no consequence.

T
HE PUB IN
Magpie Alley was suitably dim and ancient, with black-oak tables and timbered walls. Its customers were divided equally between Fleet Street journalists and lawyers from the Temple, each group keeping strictly to its own side of the room. Martin ordered for them, whiskeys and the mixed grill.

“Now then,” he said to Fenton, “bring me up to date. Are you still waiting around for orders?”

“I got them this morning, read to me in person by Uncle Julian. I've been posted to some ragtag battalion in Mesopotamia—or, rather, Iraq, as they now call it. Prefer
Mespot
myself as being more indicative of the bloody country.”

“What will you be doing?”

“Keeping tribesmen from blowing up the pipelines. Guard duty for the Anglo-Persian oil company.”

“A man of your talents should be at the staff college.”

Fenton took a drink of his whiskey. “I'm not the sort of chap they want at Camberley—or even in the army, if it comes to that.”

“Why don't you take the hint and quit?”

“I wish I could answer that, Martin. Stubbornness, I suppose. But it's what I do. I'm a soldier and that's all there is to it. I put up with the gaff just as you put up with it in your job. I read a few of those Teletype messages a boy kept dumping on your desk. How can you wade through all that misery day after day and still keep your sanity? Why don't
you
pack it in and go off to some quiet village and write books about talking rabbits?”

“Because I'm not a talking-rabbit sort of writer.”

“And I'm not a country-gentleman sort of bloke. I took the king's shilling and I don't feel like handing it back.”

“Commendable but dumb.”

He smiled wryly. “Winnie's sentiments exactly. She once thought I was only marrying her for her money. She wishes now that I had.”

Martin signaled the barman for another round of drinks. He had a grudging respect for Fenton. The pressures on him to leave the army were enormous. Had his career been on the rise, it might have made sense, but it had taken quite a different course. His reasons for staying on could have been construed as a simple case of bull-headed pride, but Martin knew better. Fenton loved the British Army and felt intense pride in being one of its officers. It was as simple as that. To each his own.

“You're not taking Winifred to Baghdad, are you?”

“Christ, no. Not even to Cairo. She's with child again. You might pop up to Suffolk when you have a chance and see her while I'm gone. You have my permission to take the boat out for a sail.” He shifted his drink from hand to hand, frowning at it. “I didn't drop by your office to talk about my problems, Martin. Have you seen the Grevilles lately?”

“No, but I've talked to Aunt Hanna on the phone. And Alex sent me a long letter after Mackendric died. Why?”

“Alex would like to have Charles removed from Llandinam. She and the gaffer are at loggerheads about it—hell, about
everything
, if it comes to that. I agree with Alex. I don't think Charles should be shut away. I think she could help him.”

“What makes you think that? She was a nurse, not a psychiatrist.”

The mixed grills arrived, sizzling on the plates—fat lamb chops, kidneys, sausage, tomatoes, and crusty brown chips.

“Ah,” Martin murmured as he reached for knife and fork.

“I had a lengthy chat one day with our battalion MO,” Fenton said after a few minutes of silent eating. “In Ireland. Nice chap. Typical regular army sawbones. Never set foot in Harley Street. Chop off a leg … hand out a blue pill … all in the day's work. Well, I always think of Charles, and I brought up the subject of shell shock one night in the mess. This chap told me that when he had been medical officer with the King's Own he had refused to diagnose it as a specific ailment—wouldn't dignify it with a name. If some quivering bloke stumbled into his dugout after a bombardment, he'd give the poor fellow a blue pill, a double tot of rum, and then send him back to his unit. The more severe breakdowns, the truly palsied and incoherent ones, he'd send down to the transport lines with a note pinned to their tunics asking the transport officer to give them a couple of days' rest and then put them to work unloading lorries or something like that. He figured they were better off doing physical labor than being shut away in a hospital—and of more use to the war effort. A few weeks out of reach of the shells did wonders for them, he said, and eventually most of them came back of their own accord.”

“Kill or cure.”

“Something like that, but it worked. Alex told me that Mackendric had a theory about shell shock, too. He wasn't a blue-pill-and-rum doctor, of course, but he was dead set against shell-shocked men being stuck away in mental hospitals. He believed that if you tell a man he's ill, he will be ill; that mental hospitals only serve to impress upon their inmates the fact that they must belong there or they wouldn't be in one in the first place. He felt that eight out of ten would stand a better chance of recovery if they were sent home to their families.

“Interesting.” Martin chewed thoughtfully on a grilled kidney. “Is that Alexandra's belief, too?”

“Yes, but, as it comes via Mackendric, His Lordship won't listen to it. Probably considers the poor chap nothing but a seducer of fair English virgins.”

“They were married, for Christ's sake!”

“It was a race between the stork and the parson. Hardly the type of wedding a peer of the realm expects for his daughter.”

“Mack was a brave and honorable man, a legend in the Forty-third Division. I heard about him two years before I met him.”

“Quite beside the point. He may have been a legend, but he was thirteen years older than Alex and a married man to boot.” He pushed his plate to one side and lit a cigarette. “Alex said something last night at dinner that touched me deeply. She said that as long as Charles is shut away the war will always be a presence in the house. He casts a longer shadow than that, Martin. If there's any chance of his becoming even halfway normal again, I believe we're obligated to help him.”