The End of Innocence (18 page)

It was late in the afternoon when the Darlington Rolls-Royce purred out of the long drive from Merrimack Hill. Seamus, Colonel Darlington's driver, drove while Helen and Wils sat in the back talking. For Helen, it felt like a ride in a tumbrel.

The woods of Lexington gave way much too quickly to the bricks of Boston, a city bustling about its business that late fall afternoon. Trucks, horse carts, and cars cluttered the roads. Ornate homes and soaring church spires became punctuated less frequently by the three-story lofts of the working class as they neared the town's center. A few blocks more and there were no more houses to be seen. They'd been replaced by the granite facades of banks, department stores, and government buildings. The city's clock tower cast its long shadows over the road below.

As they neared the ocean, the air became wet and carried with it the smell of tanneries and of fish stored in large metal warehouses. The sun had been bright at the start of the journey, but now it had begun to fade into the west.

Helen and Wils made plans, talking of inanities such as what to do with his car (his lawyer's associates would come for it), and classroom assignments (Goodman had also made arrangements there). The words they used came out paltry, useless, and false when compared to the emotions that engulfed them both. A touch, a word, a look could not possibly convey the desolation they felt.

* * *

The SS
Eliza
was a midsized cargo ship, up from Charleston. It was one of the two dozen owned by Jackson Vaughn's family. Dark gray and hulking, a smokestack rose from her middle, and from the lone mast at the front, four small flags flapped in the rising wind. Few portholes punctuated its hulk. The cabin quarters above the deck seemed small from the pier, but would provide ample room for the three additional passengers journeying to London.

The Vaughn family had offered the ship to the British government on four conditions: safe passage across the Atlantic, authorization to sell a boat full of military stores to the British army, a position for Jackson in the new experimental airplane division, and authorization to return Wils Brandl to Germany. The paperwork had been drawn up immediately and the shipping lanes opened, as if by magic.

The wheels of the car rumbled onto the cobblestones of the Long Wharf as Seamus pulled into the harbor. Helen heard bells toll, but she could not tell which ship's departure they signaled.

The mood of the harbor in the setting light was rushed and noisy. Fishermen in thick sweaters steered their boats to dock and called out for the scales to weigh their daily catch of cod or flounder or mackerel. Burly stevedores in coveralls shouted orders to a crane operator unloading steel beams from a towering cargo ship. Port authorities in dark uniforms walked along the pier with clipboards, stopping to speak to captains or bursars, and passengers jostled through the gangways with suitcases and boxes, searching for their ships.

As Helen and Wils alighted from the car, Jackson ran over and began to talk of luggage and papers. Helen turned to see that Riley was at the dock with Morris, loading a steamer trunk into a crate. He waved convivially and she walked to him. Morris went to call for a sailor to help nail the crate's lid shut while Jackson boarded the ship.

Suddenly she was there, alone with Riley.

He looked down at her. The wound around his eye was completely healed. “Glad you came, Helen. Wils would have been in a lot of trouble if we left without him.”

“I want to wish you well,” she offered.

He gave a slight laugh. “Will you congratulate me on my upcoming marriage?”

“What?” she asked, puzzled. “Marriage? To whom?”

“Edith.”

“But—”

“But what?”

She was confused. “I didn't think you were engaged.”

“Well, it turns out that thinking will do you no good. Sometimes our choices are made for us.”

“But you don't love Edith. You said so.”

“Helen,” he said good-naturedly, “please don't put impediments before my fragile will. I have only belatedly found my honor, and even if belatedly, I would think that you of all people would applaud. Do you love him?” he asked, gesturing toward Wils.

“With all my heart.”

She saw the muscles in his cheek tighten. “Why?”

“He knows who I am and loves me for it. And I'm better for that.”

He sighed. “My cousin has been a prince to me, even though God knows I've never deserved him.”

“You saved him from Archer.”

“No. I avenged him—and I'm lucky to have gotten off for it. If I had saved him in the first place, then he wouldn't have deserved me.” He picked up her hand and kissed it. “Until we meet again?” he offered.

“Godspeed, Riley,” she said and he turned away.

“Riley,” said Helen suddenly. “Be careful. France is about to fall.”

“Such lack of confidence!” he said. “I'll straighten them out.”

She laughed as he turned and walked up the gangplank into the ship.

The boat's bell sounded. “Hurry!” called Jackson to Wils from the ship's deck.

Wils was suddenly at her side. “Now?” she asked.

He gave her a kiss on her forehead. “I can make it until Christmas, Helen. Can't you?”

She nodded mutely.

Morris walked out, waving at the men. As he passed Helen and Wils on his way back to the dock, his eyes widened in surprise.

“You're with Helen?” he asked, incredulous. He shook his head as he walked away. “Women,” they heard him mutter.

They both laughed. “I love you,” Wils said.

She nodded. “And I, you.”

“Oh, and I have something for you.” He released her and handed her an envelope. “Read it after I go.”

She gave a brave smile. Then he took one last look at her: her cheeks were ruddy, her eyes bright. But behind them he saw a look of bewilderment.

He understood. He kissed her once more, gently, then suddenly pulled away and walked to the ship. “Stay there,” he urged.

Inside the cargo hold he found a cold, cavernous room, lined with steel beams and fitted with dozen of crates for shipment.

“Wils, there's something to eat in the main cabin,” said Riley, who was making his way to the upper deck. But Wils rushed past him to the steep steps. He held on to the thick ropes alongside the staircase and ran to the upper deck railing. There he turned and searched, and burst into a smile, seeing that she was still there. He waved furiously—unable to help himself.

The sun was fading; the sky striated in purple and navy and pink. The motion of the pier—the travelers, the crates, the stevedores, the fishermen—began to slowly recede.

He stood silently on the deck looking out to where he'd left his heart. Her skirts blew around her legs, her hair in the wind. She held to the dock's railing as if it were an anchor, waving back. Little by little the distance grew, until he could no longer see her.

Oh God
, he thought.
Don't let this happen. Not now. Let the war stop
, he prayed with open eyes.

All that was beautiful was going. Like a garden that withdraws into the ground before a very long winter.

* * *

It was only time
, she thought as the ship left her view. She had lived for years without him until now. Waiting a bit more could be endured. She had no choice.

She closed her eyes. Someday—someday—they'd sit idly in the same room, only a few feet apart from each other, knowing that they had forever together. She'd look up from a book and see him writing notes in the margins of his own. He would read for a bit, then come over and kiss her, eventually resuming his reading beside her. They would go to the symphony, and sit together at dinners, and drive to Maine along the rocky coast, stopping for picnics or for kisses that were no longer hurried, and no longer stolen.

They would talk of all the things under the sky and still have ever more time. But for this they would have to wait.

Helen walked back along the pier, barely noticing those pushing by her, with suitcases and anxious looks, arriving from a long journey, or eager to start one. She was numb. He was gone.

A young boy ran by and bumped her hand. The envelope fell to the ground. She quickly reached down and grabbed it.

“One moment,” she called to Seamus, still at his employer's car. She went into the waiting room of the inspection office and sat down in an old wooden chair under the dull light of an electric lamp. She opened the envelope and found a single piece of paper.

The Watch

by Wils, for Helen

Without so much as a “By your leave” you

Changed my perfectly calibrated watch

For one that stops when you leave a room and

Won't resume until your return. The watch

You could have kept, but you stole my breath too

And that I needed to say: “My heart was

In that watch. Keep it 'til the God of peace

Stills its motion at eternity's edge,

And a river spirits my soul away

To the source of your smile

And the place of God's laughter.”

* * *

Across the river, through the Square, in the Yard, and up the stairs of Hollis Hall, Professors Kuno Francke and Charles Copeland were working well into the night. They had come together once again to review the next edition of the
Harvard
Illustrated
Magazine
, a student monthly, for grammar and good judgment, of which there was little to be found between the ears of these young sops.

Francke sat on the faded divan before a warm fire in his three-piece suit, shirt still buttoned at the collar. He drank Copeland's scotch and laughed occasionally with his friend. It was one of those rare moments in his schedule that afforded a respite from the talk of war and defending his German heritage. Copeland was not one he need explain himself to. Such people were in rare supply these days.

For such friendship, he'd come to the squalid room each month to work. He understood why Copeland didn't move out of Hollis. The place brimmed with vigor. Yet the quarters had never been acceptable for a professor. The ceiling was too low, the bookshelves too few, and the smoke stains on the ceiling from the oil lamps untenable. But his friend could not be pried from Harvard Yard with a crowbar.

Kuno, in his less generous moments, thought it was because his friend fancied himself the heir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had once occupied that room. Even so, Copeland could keep Emerson's books and not his plumbing, paint, or settee. Modernization could make life better. But such arguments fell on deaf ears.

Copeland sat comfortably in his chair at his desk. His tweed jacket and glasses fit him perfectly. The only things out of place were the ends of his mustache, which he twisted as he read through the pages.

“Balderdash! I'm not sure why we don't just give up on these students,” he mourned. “I can't understand how any man could make such a fool of himself on one piece of paper.”

“Who is the writer?” asked Francke, looking up.

“Peter Brooks. He writes only in the passive voice!”

“Strange,” said Francke. “I have sometimes—on rare occasions—found young Brooks to be talented—almost gifted. Obviously not in this case, though. Did he get the facts right?”

“They seem to be in order,” responded Copeland. “But you know, a broken clock—”

“Yes, yes, Charles. Right twice a day,” Francke mumbled, returning to his proofreading.

Progress was slow. A number of freshman writers had joined, and little was satisfying. They saw the same mistakes year after year, Copeland thought with ill humor. “I'm too old for this!”

“How old are you, Charles?”

“Fifty-five.”

“Bah! There have been several people as old as that.”

Copeland's scowl at his colleague was interrupted by a knock at his door.

“What do you want?” he called in an angry tone.

“Message from President Lowell,” came a high voice.

Copeland frowned, straightened up, and answered the door. A young boy handed him an envelope and left.

The professor picked up a silver knife on his desk and opened the letter.

“Brandl has left us, Kuno.”

The German professor looked up and pursed his lips. “Prejudice begets all sorts of horrible things, many unintended and unforeseen.”

Copeland sat back down in his chair and shook his head. “Wilhelm Brandl, Godspeed,” he said quietly.

“I'll miss Wils,” answered Francke. “Do you think he'll return?”

Copeland looked over and shook his head. “I don't know. I don't know if Harvard will change too much for him. Or how he will be changed by the war.”

“You know, Charles, I got the impression you didn't even mind him being German.”

“Humbug! He was a gifted young man,” Copeland said, turning to his next page as he dipped his fountain pen in a well of red ink. “His last poem was a tolerable piece of work.” He began to mark up the page proof, but then stopped and looked over at the German professor. “Kuno, as you know very well, in Hollis 15 there is no north or south, nor east or west. He will always be welcome at my door.”

Flanders

When I tread the verge of Jordan,

Bid my anxious fears subside;

Death of deaths, and hell's destruction,

Land me safe on Canaan's side.

—William Williams, 1745, “
Guide
Me, O Thou Great Jehovah”

The Western Front

Monday, December 14, 1914

Noon

The quick-falling snow held no beauty for the soldiers of the newly formed Second Wiltshire Regiment. It fell from a gray sky, clinging to their boots and coats as they marched along the crowded supply road.

The snow had fallen since dawn. A thin crust barely covered the mud of the Belgian fields leading to the front. But there was enough snow to gum the wheels of trucks moving south stuffed with ammunition and food. Empty vehicles clattered back along the same narrow path, creating a magnificent traffic jam that stretched twenty miles back to the North Sea.

Soldiers trudged alongside the clogged roads through ruts and ditches filled with cold liquid mud, the uneven terrain twisting their ankles. And when they slipped they often cut themselves on road debris, or the sharp end of the spades stuffed in their packs. Riley had cut his ear three miles back when he fell, banging his head against a pallet of metal ammunition boxes that were being unloaded from a truck. The frigid air made it throb.

Lieutenant Rhyland Cabot Spencer marched south with his platoon, bespattered, cold, and quiet. A broken lorry had forced them to dismount and walk along the crowded road starting five miles back. Although an officer, he had chosen to do as his captain did, and carry the same burden as the enlisted men: sixty-one pounds of shovel, bayonet, compass, mess tin, canteen, maps, flashlight, rations, clothing, ammunition, pack, pistol, and rifle. He wished his captain had not been so egalitarian. The weight ground him even farther into the mud—in places it came up well over his knees. It was rare that the mud would reach a man's hat, he'd heard, but it wasn't out of the question. The soft ear covers from their cloth hats would just not suffice in these conditions.

The troops did not march with light hearts. They didn't sing and they didn't laugh. They stared in horror at the state of the men on the other side of the road, returning from duty in Ypres.

Riley was one of the thousand men of the Duke of Edinburgh's Second Wiltshire Regiment, formed west of London. His father had obtained an officer's post for him near Salisbury. He was a good shot, friendly with the men, and, as his father saw it, a natural for the PBI—the Poor Bloody Infantry. So he traveled to Devizes and provisioned at the supply depot before encamping at Weymouth for basic officer training.

The Second Wiltshires replaced soldiers in the British army's Seventh Division. When the assignment had been made, it looked as if Riley would be training at Weymouth for the duration of the war. The Seventh—the Immortal Seventh—had no need for green recruits. They had assembled eighteen thousand professional soldiers from the corners of the British Empire.

But that changed in mid-October, when nearly ten thousand immortals fell in fierce fighting before the weight of two full German armies. They'd been outnumbered in places ten to one and had been nearly encircled by the kaiser's onslaught. That they had courage and skill was indisputable. They had also been better trained and stood their ground. But now half were wounded, missing, or dead. Green recruits could not make up for the experience found in the minds and hearts of the men who'd recently been blown to bits. But they'd have to make do. There was still a war to fight.

When Riley decamped from Dunkirk that day, the sporadic battle lines ran from the North Sea coast of Belgium, south past the city of Ypres, and into northern France. For the past two months the carnage had been breathtaking, even for the most battle-hardened. It was said that the bodies of men and animals around Ypres lay so thick that God's quartermaster used the city for spare parts.

No white covering of snow could paint this a new heaven and a new earth
, thought Riley,
so God might just save the white stuff and spare them the pain of wearing it as they walked
.

The thousand Wiltshires knew where they were going. They walked to meet the five—maybe six—German armies not twenty miles away. Some said that it was possible they'd return. A few actually had. You just needed to keep your head and not have the bad luck to get shelled by a Black Maria or Fat Bertha.

And luck might very well favor them. The new captain of Riley's company was a lucky man indeed. Twenty-five-year-old Aubrey Tomkins was from the old Seventh, and his careful manner inspired confidence. He had been in the army, it was said, since he was sixteen, and his knowledge and skill were unquestioned. You wouldn't find him putting on airs. Despite the fact that he was walking in a full pack, his tunic, tie, and breeches showed him as the officer he was. His short blond hair defied military orders to stay down. The enlisted men said Saint George himself had guided the captain's shots in the last battle. That he had the vision of a prophet. And that his natural father was most certainly Irish, as his luck was uncommonly good. Well, good for one with the misfortune to have been at Ypres.

The captain had introduced himself to his four lieutenants upon their arrival at Dunkirk, and had set them on a course for the front lines, their company at the front of the new regiment. Tomkins marched alongside the column, keeping an eye on them. Occasionally an orderly would rush to him and he'd call the line to a halt. During these respites Riley would turn to his sergeant and discuss the latest issue of
Punch
magazine or the most recent Christmas package of tobacco and chocolate from Princess Mary to the troops. They'd talk about anything but the mud, which they were all to ignore. Every man had to step in it and complaining would only make things worse. Tomkins would call out to a few men and give them orders. These soldiers would leave to pursue their mission, and the rest would resume their march under the gray sky in the falling snow.

“Step aside!” called Captain Tomkins for a sixth time.

“Aside!” echoed Riley. Four platoons moved back, almost all in good formation. The men made way for an ambulance to push around a rations lorry. Riley looked at the back of the truck as it rattled past. It was packed full of men, on a day the battle lines were quiet. They fell back into place and marched again.

Riley surveyed the wet fields.
An old farm,
he thought—
a crop of death for now
. A hundred years at least had passed since the world had given a care about the towns surrounding Ypres. He certainly hadn't. It had existed for centuries without his help, and he'd prefer it go back to that state.

He'd been told a medieval cathedral stood in the city's center, a monument to the cloth trade in the times of King Canute or Charlemagne or some such. When the cloth markets moved, the city slipped into obscurity. He supposed children had played around the town's crumbling walls. Their fathers and uncles farmed in the surrounding villages of Wytschaete, Hollebeke, and Gheluvelt. They made tiles at Zillebeke and bricks at Zonnebeke. They poached in the king's woods near Passchendaele and Ploegsteert.

Their lives, like his, had been upended by that Prussian lunatic, the kaiser. That man, without a doubt, was even more annoying than Edith at her worst. At least Edith had only caused him heartache. But the Germans! They had marched half their army into France, half into Russia, and the third half—for it was very large—somewhere else around the world, blowing up ships and oil tanks and, in Riley's opinion, causing all sorts of unnecessary misery.

In September, the French, Belgian, and British Empire forces gained in France, pushing the Germans back past the Marne River and the Aisne. The Germans could no longer move west, so they raced north. Behind the French and British armies were the supply ports along the North Sea. If the supplies were gone, the British and French armies would soon be too. That seemed to be the German thought on the matter.

The British and French forces, for their part, thought they were pushing the final remnant of the German army back to the fatherland the Hun thought so highly of. In this they were mistaken, and their miscalculation gave way to terrible bloodshed.

The kaiser had thrust six German armies into the western battlefront, pressing on the Belgians in the north, the British in Belgium's center, and the French and British forces to the south. The Germans had superior munitions, better supply lines, and tens of thousands of fresh troops.

The British commander in chief had been in France at the time. He hurried north to Belgium with his main corps, pulling his tired armies north toward Ypres, fighting bitterly at La Bassée, Neuve Chapelle, and Armentières. He'd had no idea how hopelessly outnumbered his troops were. Their intelligence had been poor, and they had few artillery shells to use.

But they didn't know the odds, and that made much of the difference as the battle line seesawed back and forth. They should have despaired, but, ignorant of their condition, they did not let their hearts fail.

In the north, a few ragged divisions of the Belgian army bitterly engaged twelve fresh German divisions—more than two hundred thousand men. No matter their courage, they could not hold against such a force. The Belgians began to falter, and, sensing a breakthrough, the Germans pushed harder. Within two days the kaiser's armies had advanced over the choppy terrain of dikes and canals to capture outposts near the Yser River, almost to the British supply port of Dunkirk.

Dispatches Riley had read back at Weymouth showed that the Belgian king's army was nearly surrounded. The king's men threw themselves again and again at the Germans, but despite inflicting frightening casualties on their enemy—more than one hundred thousand—the kaiser's men came back in overwhelming numbers. The Belgian army was about to be lost, along with the ports of Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne-sur-Mer.

Then, in late October, Albert, king of the Belgians, turned the North Sea's salt water against his own country. He ordered the Yser River's floodgates opened and bombed dikes to flood the fields and canals, forming an impassable lake in front of the German army. His country was now Carthage—its fields sown with salt water, rendering them unusable. But he'd saved sixty thousand lives and every man, woman, and child in England heard of the feat. Riley heard the story read to him from the front page of the
London
Times
twice the same day while at training camp, once at breakfast, and another time at supper. It was a message of cheer to buck up heavy hearts.

The Germans, thwarted, had sent their remaining seventy-five thousand men south to fight the British along the center and southern battlefronts. Their casualties had been horrific, but their fury not spent.

And the news for Riley had been exceedingly grim. Nearly one thousand Wiltshires had been slaughtered in heavy fighting northeast of Ypres, triggering the Second Wiltshire's call into duty with the Seventh Division.

Fighting reemerged in mid-October on the Passchendaele Ridge, where the British weathered a fierce German artillery barrage. The British were more experienced than their German counterparts, and despite being outnumbered, held their ground for nearly a week. Finally Germany burst through the British lines at Gheluvelt, a village southeast of Ypres.

Riley's captain, Aubrey Tomkins, was one of the five hundred British soldiers who stormed back through the woods and across an open plain, all while under constant fire. Two hundred fifty made it to a château where twelve hundred Germans had stopped to rest. They opened fire on the twelve hundred. The Germans panicked and fled, and the British, once again, closed the road to Ypres.

Tomkins was promoted to captain and given command of two hundred fifty soldiers of the Second Wiltshire Battalion, the Twenty-First Brigade, Seventh Division. His command included four platoons of fifty each and four subalterns, one being Lieutenant Riley Spencer. Now their orders were to reconnect with the old Seventh, then commence south to La Boutillerie, a few miles south of Ypres, in France. By mid-November, the Seventh had once again become stalemated in Flanders.

The Seventh had lost nine thousand five hundred men—more than two entire brigades. Both sides dug in at points along the emerging Western Front, knowing they would once again have to face each other.

The kaiser had killed the best leaders of the British army. Their muddy boots were filled by lawyers and bankers, students and bus drivers. Riley had been hustled from his training camp into duty within a mere four weeks. Unfortunately, so had most of the soldiers who wore the simple emblem of the Seventh on their sleeve: a white dot on a black field.

And the jewel that had been Ypres—a medieval city where garments were once woven in gold and silver—was now a gutted shell. Cloth Hall lay in ruins, he heard, its slippery floor now used as a makeshift hospital. Priceless stained glass fragments dangled outside of their window cases, hanging from ligaments of tattered lead caning. The moans of the dying wafted through the broken windows, floating upward and dissolving in the noxious night air.

It was now almost winter solstice. Riley was thankful the days were not long—less time to see the damage done to the men and the terrain.

The snow was not beautiful to him, no matter what the poets said. Beauty to Riley these days was a pile of sandbags already in place to shore up muddy walls. It was food that didn't require you to take a bottle of bismuth soda pills with it. Water that didn't smell like sewage. A drink of spirits to still the pain in his shoulders and back.

He gave a slight smile as a loud convoy truck filled with artillery shells rumbled by. Beauty had once been a girl's bosom rising under a lace blouse. The smell of her hair. But that was a world far away.

Riley saw a mud-spattered orderly jog up to Captain Tomkins with a message. The captain's face gave nothing away as he read the order and snapped it back into his pouch.

“Spencer, Norton, Cotting!” Tomkins called. Riley shifted his rifle over his shoulder and beat a path to the captain. Sydney Norton, a beefy, ginger-haired lieutenant huffed over from his platoon, his breath visible in the cold. Private Cotting, the smallest of the three, fell in beside him.