Gifts of War (10 page)

I stirred my tea.

“I’ll take my chances,” I whispered, swallowing some of the hot liquid to disguise my discomfort. “The war may last a long time— and who knows what will happen or how it will end?” I raised my cup to her. “We’ve come a long way since eleven thirty-eight yesterday morning.”

She leaned forward and put her hand on mine. “Would you like to see … the baby?”

“William,” I said suddenly as it came to me. “I’m going to think of him as William. It’s a good, traditional name, strong, the name of the one man who conquered us. It’s not too far from Wilhelm, and I can’t just call him ‘baby.’ Yes, I’d love to see him.”

“William?” she whispered thoughtfully. “No, too … too formal. And it always gets shortened to Bill. I hate Bill.”

“Make it Will, then,” I said. “That sounds informal, the link to Stratford is obvious—and it can’t be shortened.”

“Will? Will?” She tried it out. “Yes, all right… why not? I like Will, and you’re right, it does recall Wilhelm without giving the game away. People will think the baby’s named after Shakespeare. He’ll have to know about his father someday, of course, but not yet, not until we see how the war turns out.

“Will?” She tried out the name again. “Yes, I like it.” She smiled. “Thank you. If he ever does get christened, why don’t I call him Will Henry?”

The next day, Monday, I was back in Stratford, at the Ag. It was, however, a day with a difference, for that Monday we in the advanced German course—there were about a dozen of us—had a lecture. It was given by a Colonel Pritchard, a slight man with unruly pepper-and-salt hair and a mass of broken capillaries that covered his cheeks like an elaborate wiring diagram. His talk concerned Germany’s prewar capabilities in coal mining, steelmaking, and shipbuilding insofar as it was relevant to her ability to wage war. The point of the lecture was to familiarize us with the sort of intelligence material we would be dealing with once we had finished the course—subject matter, words, concepts. His sources included books, newspaper reports, interrogation transcripts, aerial photographs.

Now it so happened that Montgomery & Mann had published some of Colonel Pritchard’s raw material and I knew several of his sources very well. So well, in fact, that I spotted what I thought was a small but significant error in the colonel’s argument. When he came to the end of his lecture and asked for questions, I put up my hand.

He nodded affably.

“Sir, in your discussion of German steelmaking capacity, you say that Germany overtook Britain in 1908. I don’t know whether you
think this is important, but in Trevor Kennedy’s survey—the work you quote—it says they overtook us in 1903, five years earlier.”

Total silence in the room. Except that I could hear a train far away.

Then Pritchard spoke: “So you’re saying I am wrong.”

I reddened. “It’s easy to confuse a three and an eight, sir. It’s probably a misprint.”

“Good grief!” growled Major Romford. “Apologize, Montgomery, for pity’s sake! Who do you think you are, Winston bloody Churchill?”

When I didn’t immediately do as he said, he exploded a second time. “Well, if you won’t have the grace to apologize, I will do it on your behalf—and I’ll see you later… in—my—office!” He turned to the colonel but the colonel waved him down.

“No, no. Let’s have this out.” Pritchard faced me. “Because it’s not a small matter, is it?” He passed his stubby fingers through the waves in his hair. “You’re saying, if I understand you correctly, that our estimates of German capacity are five years out—and five years in the wrong direction. Which means we may have seriously
underestimated
their capacity.”

I nodded. “If I’m right, sir. If it’s not a misprint.”

“Jee
-sus
!” breathed Romford. “You cocky bastard—”

“Well, it’s checkable,” said Pritchard, rubbing his jaw “And I’ll certainly check it, just as soon as I get back to the ministry in London.” He shifted in his seat. “But I’m interested to know how you are so well informed. When I asked for questions, I must say I didn’t expect that kind of question.”

“Exactly!” growled the major. “Quite out of order. I won’t
have
this kind of—”

“Shh,”
said the colonel. “Just a second. Let’s hear the young man’s answer.”

I told the colonel about my family’s publishing history, my interest in science, my two years in Germany, the books I had borrowed from the Stratford municipal library.

When I had finished, he nodded. “What were your impressions of Germany—did you like it?”

“Yes, I did. I know they’re the enemy but—”

“That’s all right,” he interrupted. “Any differences between us and them? Differences you think are—or were—important?”

I thought for a moment. “A couple of things struck me. Germany’s just as snobbish as Britain—more so in some ways. But they do give more respect to scholars and, in particular, to engineers. When I was there the engineers were just getting organized, into a professional group.”

“So?” snarled Romford.

“Yes,” said Pritchard, much more quietly, “why do you mention that?”

I shrugged. “Make engineers respectable and you get better-quality people becoming engineers. That means their ships and industry are going to improve, and they are going to invent new and more terrible weapons.”

“Any ideas?”

I nodded. “This new automobile technology… combine that with their steelmaking. Once you solve the problem of how an automobile travels over open country, you’re bound to get armored vehicles.”

Pritchard hadn’t stopped rubbing his jaw “Anything else?”

Romford’s gimlet eyes bored into me. I didn’t care. “The German navy is much more popular than the German army.”

“Why should that be?”

“The German army was originally the Prussian army, so all the other parts of the country have reservations about it. But the German
navy was only formed since the unification of the Reich, so it is German, not Prussian. At least to most people.”

“And from which you conclude?”

“That the German people will stomach a war at sea longer than a Stalemate on land, which you have at present.”

“You’re reading an awful lot into very little,” hissed Romford.

“That’s what intelligence analysis is, sometimes,” answered the colonel softly. “Sometimes we have very little to go on, sometimes nothing at all.” He cleared his throat. “You’ve seen service at the Front?”

“Yes sir. I was shot in the groin just after New Year, during an attack on Plumont. My pelvis was shattered.”

“That’s why he has a
limp,”
barked Romford. He made it sound like something that was catching.

“Well,” said the colonel, straightening his tie, “I’ll check the facts and let you know what I find.”

There were no other questions—no one dared risk Romford’s wrath—so the colonel picked up his briefcase, stood, we all saluted, and he left, with the major in his wake. Just before they exited the room, Romford turned and hissed in my direction: “God protect you, Montgomery, if you’re wrong.”

That night I went to meet Will. Sam hadn’t let me meet him on Sunday because, she insisted, the lockkeeper’s cottage was so untidy. I said I didn’t care but she said she did and that was that.

I arrived at the cottage at about seven, laden with some shortbread I had bought on the black market in Stratford, as well as two bottles of beer and one of lemonade, for mixing shandy.

Will, I was surprised to see, was a shade on the tubby side— “bonny” as the Scots say—but otherwise it was all I could do to restrain myself from remarking that he was the image of his father. It
was so true: save for his disconcerting lack of blond hair, his features recalled Wilhelm’s, from the shape of his face to the angle of his eyebrows, to the curl of his lips. If he thinned out as he grew up, he would become a good-looking boy.

He gurgled a bit, burped a lot, smiled a gummy smile, and contorted his features into a massive yawn. And that was it. There is, in my experience, a limit to the amount of time that you can spend talking to a five-month-old baby, but in any case soon after I arrived Will fell asleep. Sam put him to bed, I mixed her a shandy, and we sat down to dinner—pork, one of the advantages of living near a pig factory at a time of shortage, a sort of quid pro quo for being with the smell all the time.

We spent most of the evening talking about the hearing, when Sam’s immediate future would be settled. I reported that opinion among the gossips in the Lamb was still divided but that the news from the Front was so bad just then (the Germans had advanced all of three miles near Ypres after releasing chlorine gas) that many people were saying that if the father really was fighting at the Front, then Sam shouldn’t be abandoned by the village—that she might be abandoned by her man, permanently, at any time. Some of the more energetic Christians among the drinkers in the pub pointed to the Christmas truce, now receding into memory, as an example of what could be achieved by goodwill, and urged a similar goodwill in Sam’s case.

She was having none of it and was not at all hopeful. “You should see the way I’m treated in the shops. Like something that slid out of the canal.”

I thought back to that first day when I had followed her in the rain, when she had left the shop in the high street in such a hurry. Had the other women been having a go at her then?

“What will you do if the verdict… if the decision goes the wrong way?”

“If it comes to it, I’ll probably go back to London—”

“To live with your aunt?”

She shook her head. “Oh no. She’s churchgoing and wouldn’t allow a bastard under her roof in any circumstances. So I haven’t told her. Not yet. I’ll stay with one of my sisters.”

“Do they know about the … about Will?”

She nodded. “I wrote and told them. They came to the hospital when Will was born.”

“And what’s going to happen? Long-term, I mean.”

She poured more lemonade into her beer, to weaken it. “It’s early days. If the unthinkable happens, if Germany wins the war, if Britain is invaded, then Will’s parentage might help. What a thought
that
is.”

“You don’t… you can’t want that to happen, surely?”

“No, no, of course not. But it’s opened my mind. War does that to you, makes you think things you don’t want to think.” She looked toward the stairs of the cottage, as if she had heard Will move. Then she turned back. “I don’t feel any hatred toward the Germans, do you? I don’t know why we are at war anyway.”

I thought back to the Christmas truce, the fellowship of feeling among the men in no-man’s-land when they had caught those rabbits, the exchange of gifts, the universal hatred of the common soldier for the higher-ups. Wilhelm’s photograph burned a hole in my wallet, in my conscience.

“You’ve never thought about adoption?”

She shook her head and smiled. She was convinced Wilhelm would be back someday.

We sat on, talking companionably, Sam getting up every so often and standing at the foot of the stairs, to be certain that Will wasn’t stirring. She told me that Katharine, the chorister, babysat two nights a week, and at weekends when she was wanted, save for Sunday mornings, when she had to be in church. It appeared that her family was more sympathetic than most because Katharine herself had been born
out of wedlock, though her father, a bosun in the Royal Navy, had married her mother as soon as he had returned home on leave.

From what Sam said, it also appeared that the vicar led the opposition to her, even going so far—so she had heard—as to preach against “fornication” from the pulpit. That was another reason why she didn’t go to church.

Thank God the vicar wasn’t on the school board, I thought, and thank God he didn’t know about Wilhelm.

“Are you religious?” I asked.

She shook her head vigorously. “Are you kidding? How could a God allow someone to behave as my father behaved, or allow the
Titanic
to sink? Do you think a God would allow this war?” She shook her head again, less vigorously, more sadly. “How about you?”

I drank some beer before replying. “When you’ve seen what I’ve seen at the Front, it’s hard to believe in anything. Some of the men, though, had the opposite reaction—the carnage only convinced them there has to be a better world somewhere else.” I sat back in my chair. Outside, the light was beginning to go. “When I came to talk to the school, the headmaster asked me not to frighten the children, not to dwell on the atrocities.”

“Did he? Well, I don’t blame him, do you? Children have plenty of time to be frightened, after school.” She shifted in her seat. “What was that officer like, the German you met in the truce? Did you get on with him?”

Did my reaction give me away? I couldn’t help but redden, I was sure of it. Did Sam know whom I had met—had she guessed, had she worked it out, did she understand how and why I had found my way to Middle Hill? She couldn’t have.

“Young. We were all young. He was from Berlin.” That was safe enough. “Did I like him?” I hid behind my beer; I wanted to escape
this conversation, now, right now, and with a minimum of lies. “In another life I could have liked him.”

“Did you discuss family, girlfriends, did he have children?”

Would she never stop?

“Neither of us was married. He had a sister, like me. Then we discussed burying our colleagues.”

“Didn’t you discuss girlfriends? Did he have a photo maybe?”

I was reddening again. Reddening and sweating.

But then, on cue and mercifully, Will suddenly started to yell. Sam disappeared upstairs in a flash and returned soon enough with the young man in her arms. He was already falling asleep again. She laid him on the sofa.

I rose to go. It was safer than having the conversation continue. Outside the door, I stooped to kiss Sam on the cheek. At the last moment she changed the angle of her head, and our lips met.

Her mouth opened. Our tongues engaged. Our bodies pressed against each other’s. I was swamped by her smell, of soap, of perfume, of Will. I took the lead but she allowed me to do so. We stood for a long moment. When I opened my eyes, hers were closed, the skin on her eyelids smooth and pale.