Gifts of War (23 page)
Authors: Mackenzie Ford
If Tony
had
broken this or that regulation, his engagement seemed to soften military hearts as much as it had softened Sam and Lottie’s and we had the celebration as planned. Which is to say, I bought some whisky for the men and some gin for the women and we all got drunk, not just the happy couple.
Twelve days later, Tony’s unit did ship out and Faye, histrionic as ever, spent two days crying. Ruth came to the rescue, with the offer of a job in the uniform factory. Faye didn’t move out, but she did begin to pay rent.
Dear Hal
,
I’m at a place that the censors won’t let me name but I’ve asked them and I can say that it begins with an “S.” Someday S. will be known around the world. It’s never been the first place where you would wish to spend your holidays, even if you could afford “abroad;” but I know where it is and I know what happened there. Tens of thousands were killed
in a few hours
!!
I tell you, Hal, this war—horrific in so many different ways—is stretching my ability to describe how terrible it is. And that’s because we’re having experiences we lack the language for. Or, more accurately perhaps, we are having to use language in ways it was never intended, just as we are having to think in categories for which there are no categories
.
Take, for example, the reason I’m here: blood transfusion. When you train, you think of blood in terms of cubic centimeters, as something that fills a syringe or a test tube. If you prick a finger with a needle, or your nose bleeds, even though we say the blood “gushed” we don’t really mean it, do we? Maybe two cc’s are involved
.
Already, in blood transfusion, we are dealing in
pints
!! But at S., even that way of thinking went out the window. Sixty thousand men were killed on the first morning!!! I’ll repeat that, in figures: 60,000. Three times that number were injured. Half of those needed blood transfusions.
90,000 pints of blood, at least
. Eleven thousand gallons. Of course, we didn’t have it. Where I was we had run out by ten-thirty that morning. We took another delivery about four in the afternoon, but had run out again by six-fifteen
.
Here is an incident typical of what we had to do at S. all day long. A young boy—I remember he was called Sandy—was blinded by shrapnel. He had a white label looped in the second buttonhole of his tunic. That meant he’d been injured in the battle and had priority for treatment. We cleaned his wounds, gave him some morphine for the pain, and bandaged his eyes. Before he was shipped back to the hospital tent at the rear of the lines, I asked him, gently, if he minded if we took some blood from his arm. He said that if it would help save other men, then of course we could take it. I went to get my equipment. When I came back, Sandy had cut through his own carotid artery with his knife. He didn’t want to live. The blood was still gushing out of him—and this
time I mean
gushing
. Hal, I didn’t know whether to stanch his wound or collect the blood that was pulsing out of him!!
I miss you, Hal. (I miss a good old-fashioned G&T too, but, you’ll be pleased to hear, I miss you more!) At night, when the shooting stops, and when the sky is clear, I look up at the stars. The stars are the only things that the war hasn’t disfigured or obliterated. I think of our night under the stars, when we slept out in the garden at home and pretended to enjoy the sausages we had fried to a cinder But I mustn’t get nostalgic or sentimental. There’s no place for that here. Tomorrow won’t be any better than today. All we can hope for is rain. There is too much blood in the soil to be washed away in any other fashion
.
Izzy
Spending days reading the German newspapers, looking out for something potentially significant, one naturally encountered a lot of irrelevant information and pointless detail: sporting results, gardening tips, the bridge column, birth announcements. But then, one day, I came across something that had nothing to do with intelligence but was of great interest to me. It was an article in the
FAZ
. about the Thirty-second Saxon Regiment—Wilhelm’s unit. It wasn’t military information, of course; that wouldn’t have been allowed. The article didn’t say what had happened to the regiment, or where it was—nothing like that. It simply said that a unit from the regiment had won that year’s drill competition. The Germans helped to maintain morale by drill competitions, to which the public were invited. The crisp maneuverings of the companies taking part thrilled the public and boosted their morale as well as the troops’. And this year a unit from the Saxon Regiment had won.
This told me nothing about Wilhelm, of course, nothing at all. No names were mentioned. But it put him in my mind. To tell the
truth, given my living circumstances he was never very far away, but seeing the name of his regiment in print gave me a jolt. In particular, I realized that his photograph was still in my wallet. I was suddenly worried that Sam would find it and so, that very evening, I transferred the photograph from my wallet to the briefcase I took to work. I had told Sam and Lottie that I had signed the Official Secrets Act and that my briefcase was therefore off-limits so far as they were concerned, that I could be sacked, fined, or charged with treason and sentenced to death if I violated the Official Secrets Act, especially in wartime, and they accepted that. The briefcase was safe and so was I. I could have destroyed the photograph, of course, but I didn’t. I didn’t want my memory of Wilhelm to fade; it kept me on my toes. And without him I would never have met Sam. His photograph rooted me to the Front, reminded me that I had been at the sharp end and that, in a sense, I had
earned
Sam.
About a week or so after Faye began work at the uniform factory, under Ruth, we were sitting at the dinner table when Lottie said, “Faye! What’s happened to your engagement ring—where
is
it?”
Faye looked flustered and blushed. She stood up. “Oh, I took it off when I had a bath and forgot to put it back on again.” She slipped out of her chair. “I’ll get it.”
While she was gone, Lottie made a face at Sam. “I don’t believe that story for a moment, do you?” She gnawed at some cheese. “I mean, you don’t need to take a ring off,
ever!
Certainly not for a bath.”
Just then Faye came back in. She held out her left hand, brandishing the ring on her finger. “There. See? It was sitting just where I left it, in my room.”
There was an uneasy silence but we got through it. Then, a few days later, the same thing happened. Lottie drew attention to the fact
that the ring was missing again, Faye went off in search of it, and Sam and Lottie exchanged words. After the fourth time, even Lottie stopped commenting on it. Faye took off her ring during the day, when she was at work, and put it on again when she came home.
It was therefore no real surprise when, two weeks after that, on a Friday night, she was picked up by a man, who was to take her dancing. He came up to the flat and introduced himself as Cyril, saying he worked in the same shop in the factory as Faye did.
He was a strange man, this Cyril. He was nearer thirty than twenty and well on the way to being bald, with a thin, wispy mustache. When he spoke it was barely above a whisper, and when he walked it was more a quiet shuffle than walking proper. I can’t imagine what he was like as a dancing partner, but I took an instant dislike to him.
He didn’t endear himself to me either when, on his first visit, he saw Will and said, “So this is little Fritz, is it?”
“His name’s Will,” I said.
“But he’s German, right? Or has a Kraut father.”
I felt my jaw setting to one side. “His name’s still Will.”
He looked at me, then shrugged his shoulders. “Have it your own way.”
Fortunately, Sam was not present to witness this exchange, and I didn’t tell her.
At breakfast the next morning, I asked Faye about Cyril. “He’s not in the army, right? Any reason?”
Her mouth full of toast, she nodded. “Medical discharge. Trouble with his ears, getting over TB.”
The ears explained his soft voice.
“Is he a good dancer?” Lottie, I could see, was longing for a fight.
“Better than Tony, that’s for sure.”
Lottie needed no more encouragement. “You might as well sell
that ring, for all the time you wear it. Tony won’t like being two-timed—”
Faye erupted—that was the only word for it. “You haven’t even been one-timed, have you, Lottie?” She slapped the table. “What’s it like on that shelf, Lottie? A good view of everyone else having fun, but lonely, I’ll bet.”
Lottie blushed.
“I’d
hate
being lonely,” hissed Faye.
“Stop it, you two,” said Sam. She turned to Lottie. “You can’t blame Faye, not really. I know she’s engaged but… well, face facts: Tony could be killed at any time.”
“There’s no need for you to stick up for me!” hissed Faye. “I can do my own defending, thank you very much.”
Silence.
“So how was the dance?” I said at length, to cut through the atmosphere.
“Not much dancing, as it happened,” muttered Faye, grateful, I think, for the change of subject. “Some of the men started arguing about the war and in no time a fight had broken out.” She looked at me. “With the amount of blood spilled, your sister should have been there.”
“What was the fight about?” I said. “I mean, was there something specific?”
Faye drank some tea. “From what was said, it had something to do with gas. Someone said only the Germans would use it, that they were barbarians, and then someone else pointed out that we have used it, that it’s the poor people—the line soldiers on both sides—who get killed by it. That it’s not only the British who are victims in this war.” She spread more margarine on her toast. “That set everyone off—the idea that the Germans could be victims. I mean, people
couldn’t stomach that. Cyril went for someone, and in no time there was mayhem.”
“Cyril started it?” said Lottie.
“He was one of them. Yes.”
“And what happened?”
A pause while Faye chewed her toast. “The police arrived and he was arrested. I think he was kept overnight in the cells. I’m going down there later.”
“Oh, Faye. Don’t get mixed up in all that.” Sam reached out and put her hand on Faye’s arm.
Faye shook it off. “I can look after myself. In any case, I’m on Cyril’s side.” She glared hard at Sam. “We’re not as barbaric as the Germans.”
It was about now, I think, that we went to a concert at the Bechstein Hall, as it then was, in Wigmore Street. Later in the war its name was changed. All the property of the Bechstein Piano Company was seized by the government, and the hall auctioned off. Its original name was obviously too German for the times, and the new owners, Debenhams, changed it. (The change occurred virtually simultaneously with the royal family changing
its
name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor.)
Sam liked going to the Bechstein Hall, and she loved in particular the vocal recitals that were given there on Sunday afternoons. She was less enamored of the endless wranglings over whether it was unpatriotic to listen to German music, as some of the newspapers insisted.
“Brahms has been dead for decades,” she would say, “Schubert for nearly a century. What have they got to do with the war?”
I could see both sides of the argument, but I didn’t want a fight.
On the Sunday I am thinking of we were just leaving a concert where a Scottish soprano had been singing a variety of Schubert songs, and there were people outside the hall with placards, likening concertgoers to traitors and conscientious objectors.
Sam had insisted we come to this concert, so I asked her what it was that she especially liked about Schubert.
She turned her head toward me for a moment, then looked straight in front again. “He was Wilhelm’s favorite and… well, I’m sorry, Hal, but it would have been—it
is—
Wilhelm’s birthday today. I’ve tried to forget, but I can’t. Not for now. Being here, I felt… I
feel… that
much closer to him, I suppose. I’m sorry, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I don’t want to lie to you and you asked me a direct question. Given how you and I met, our agreement, if I were found out lying to you … what would you think of me?”
She squeezed my arm. “It’s not much, is it, Hal? Me promising not to lie to you. Not much of a commitment, I mean. But look what a mess Faye’s life is—she’s
living a
lie. I couldn’t do that.”
“What other favorites did Wilhelm have?” We had reached Baker Street, where we could catch an omnibus home. “If you tell me, I’ll know what
not
to talk about.”
She squeezed my arm again. “Don’t be silly, Hal. We don’t have to be so … regimented. But I can’t just forget him. You can pretend, if you like, that he never was, but I can’t. I won’t. Every time I look at Will, I see his father—the resemblance is quite marked. You need to know that. I don’t know how long Wilhelm will… you know what I’m trying to say, in a way that won’t hurt you …” She trailed off.
I did feel hurt, but then I told myself not to be so … so one-sided, a phrase Lottie had used. I had told Sam a lie, a massive lie; in fact, I too was living a lie, just as Faye was. And what would happen if
I
was found out in my lie? What would Sam think of
me?
