The Longest Winter (32 page)

‘Your father sounds like mine,’ said James. ‘Mine could also propound the unanswerable when replying to a question.’

‘Fathers exist to profoundly propound,’ said Margaret, looking at the rim of deepening gold, ‘mothers are more practical. When I was walking out with my first young man—’

‘Your first?’ James gave her a smile. She responded with her pleasantly warm one. He thought her the kind of woman who would be handsome at an age when others looked old. ‘Your first, Margaret?’

‘James, I’ve not always been a vocational wallflower.’

‘You haven’t even arrived.’

‘Please raise my morale, do.’ She laughed. ‘But when I was walking out with my first young man I brought him home to Sunday tea. That was almost compulsory. No, it was direly compulsory. After he’d gone my mother, thinking in practical terms, said he was the most upright young man a girl could set her mind on. My father said a man as upright as that while he was still as young as that would turn a home into a church and every day would be like a Welsh Sunday. An adaptable Welsh girl might put up with that, he said, but as I was only part Welsh and my adaptability still unproven his advice was for me to keep a critical eye on the fellow. Although I was fairly enamoured—’

‘Enamoured?’ said James as they jogged down a gentle descent.

‘Be careful.’

‘No danger, not with Poppy,’ said James reassuringly.

‘I meant be careful, sir, how you mock me,’ said Margaret. ‘Well, although I was rather head over heels, shall we say, I was still very much my father’s daughter, so I did keep an eye on my young man. I didn’t find that too much of a strain as he was handsomely clean-cut, but I gradually realized it was my ears, not my eyes, which were hurting. I was being treated to long sermons, even if I only asked him the time. He spoke of time in terms of whether heaven or the devil was to prevail, and I felt he needed a pulpit more than me. So I gave him up. I knew I’d never be holy enough for him.’

‘And the others,’ said James, addicted to any woman with a sense of humour, ‘you gave them up too?’

‘Oh, they gave me up, I think.’ Margaret laughed again. ‘One by one. I was already interested in nursing and couldn’t devote nearly enough time to any young man. I was given up by seven in one year, while I was studying and training to pass my exams. I qualified when I was nineteen and only nursing seemed important to me then.’

‘It still does?’

‘I think it has to be like that,’ she said, ‘I think at my age—’

‘No age,’ said James.

‘At my age there isn’t anything else. When the war does end there’s going to be a depressing shortage of men and a depressing surplus of women, the women all needing to substitute something else for marriage. I’m fortunate. My substitute already exists and has been constant for several years.’

‘It’s not enough,’ said James, pulling his peaked cap farther down to shade his eyes from the huge ball of golden fire.

‘It has to be enough for me,’ said Margaret.

‘Work is satisfying, especially your kind of work,’ said James, ‘but it’s still not enough, or shouldn’t be. It can be creative, but not of life. Only people can create life. People are the result of life that went before and the propagators of life to come.’

‘Are you trying to be profound now? What do you suggest, James, that some men take two wives? With two I suppose a man can double his propagation rate.’

‘No, I mean that allowing for exceptions, as one always must,’ said James, ‘people aren’t meant to live alone. There’s no living creature designed by nature to be solitary.’

‘James, I can’t simply go out, find a man and tell him I’d like us to be creative together. To start with, he might belong to someone else. To become a non-solitary person I need help. Nearly all women do. Unlike men, we can’t ask for what we want. Society demands modesty from us.’

He halted the pony again. The sun-fired Pennines advanced northwards and grey-backed
sheep bunched on the rising slope of a wandering valley. The flushed western sky was slashed with red streaks.

She asked her question again.

‘Is it a girl you think about so often, James?’

‘It’s Vienna,’ he said.

‘Vienna?’

‘I’ve an obsession with the past,’ he said, ‘I need help too.’

She turned to him. She wished there had been more time, she wished the hours had not been so full of professional commitment, that she could have had something more than nursing.

‘I only seem to get kissed at Christmas,’ she said, ‘when they hang the mistletoe.’

‘Well, except at Christmas matrons and sisters are a little sacrosanct,’ said James.

‘You mean forbidden or forbidding?’

‘Untouchable,’ he said, ‘but not to all of us.’

He kissed her. She lifted her mouth willingly, gave it warmly. The pony nibbled at the grassy verge and the evening was as silent as if the world had stopped.

‘Thank you, James,’ said Margaret, and he knew she would consider being asked, would consider whether their needs coincided.

‘Margaret—’

‘James, we all have an obsession with the past, we all look back. It’s a sadness sometimes, knowing we can’t actually go back. We can’t even hold a second of time in our hands.’

It came out of that golden summer then, it came so clear and fresh, so well memorized,
and the moment with it, the moment that was Sophie.

I stood on the bridge and watched the river

Which passed by

As life does

For life is never still. Is it?

It is only a transient moment

That turns tomorrow into yesterday

Each second comes and is gone

As soon as it arrives

Even a year is a time that has gone

And tomorrow is another year

Full of many things unknown

That a day later are forgotten
.

No, never forgotten, he thought. And he knew that when it was all over at last, he had to try again. Despite all the bitter years, he had to.

‘James?’ Margaret’s clear grey eyes held his. ‘There’s not enough, is there, for us? You have to go back, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said James, ‘in the end I must go back. To Vienna.’

Later that evening he watched the sun go down in a blaze of fiery purple. He wondered about them. About Sophie. About Anne and Ludwig. About Carl.

The pass lay under the snow. When the summer came, if it ever did again, the melted snow would leave a rich green. But every winter was so long it seemed interminable. Locked in by the snow and the mountains, the pass was also barricaded by the iced sandbag bastions of war. On the north side were the Austrians, on the south side stood the Italians. Great barrier webs of barbed wire guarded the sandbag blockhouses and climbed the slopes on either side of the pass. The wire was draped in snow, which hung frozen from every strand.

For over three years they had fought for that pass, the Austrians in an endeavour to open up one more route into Italy, the Italians to get a footing on the soil of the Trentino region of the Tyrol. In France the opposing armies fought each other from trenches. In the Alpine territory the Austrians and Italians engaged in bitter and protracted mountain warfare. The men of both armies performed prodigious feats, whether at high or low altitudes, and amid conditions of intense cold, icy storms and enemy fire. They
fought for and from ledges scarifyingly precipitous, they fought as they were commanded to, clinging to positions that were death-defying. Guns were dragged up to heights of three thousand feet, and from there they blasted cannonades that made massive mountains tremble.

Here, around the pass and for the pass, the Austrians and Italians had long set the pattern of attritional warfare. They had climbed the slopes and cut the wire, they had climbed higher and crawled along ledges and ridges to bypass the defenders, and when bright light came they had been literally shot off the mountainside by those who waited on their own ledges. They had attacked massively in attempts to smother the barbed wire and overrun the iron-hard sandbag walls, and they had died. When they used gunfire to smother the wire in rock, snow and ice they only left it quivering. Sometimes, because it was so difficult to move the guns once they were in position, opposing batteries ventured into the more devastating realms of war by trying to blow each other to pieces. Frequently the echoing, vibrating thunder of the guns brought in its wake the slow, rolling, snowballing thunder of avalanches, the gigantic walls of falling white liable to bury friend and foe in awesome impartiality.

The winter of 1918 had come early. It was bitter and biting even during the first days of October. The snow-covered strands of barbed wire began to create their patterns of strange beauty. The men looked lean, gaunt, and were burned black
by the Alpine sun and winds. Sometimes only the fact that the Austrians stood north of the pass and the Italians south distinguished one from the other.

What counted was attrition, what counted more was to endure and survive attrition. They knew that. So they hated each other. They also, at times, loved each other. In this region, where fighting for every foothold was a hazardous exploit in itself, they were brothers as well as enemies. They all knew it was easier and safer to sit on the side of a mountain and wait for the other man to come than to go to him. The generals did not quite see it like that. They did not have the same attitudes as the men. They were not afflicted by boredom and a conviction that today was forever, that the war for the pass and the pass itself were symbolic of hideous permanency. The mountains would not change shape, nor the valleys, and therefore the pass was as it always had been and always would be. It could not be reduced and the war could not end.

‘This is a pass that can never be taken, so what is the point of still trying to?’ asked the Austrian commander of his staff.

‘It makes the Italians worry about us,’ said his staff.

The Italian commander said to his deputy, ‘What is the use of any further offensive?’

‘It doesn’t do to let the Austrians think we’ve given up,’ said his deputy, ‘and I’ve heard that General Ponticori is considering the very original tactic of a night attack.’

‘I hope he’ll be here to lead it himself,’ said the Italian commander, ‘it will be very original indeed then.’

Despite the fact that the war was going so badly for Austria, the empire almost bankrupt, in their tremendous and prolonged mountain war with Italy the hardened Austrian troops yielded nothing. In this sector their headquarters were in the mountain village of Oberstein. Out of the line and into Oberstein marched the 3rd Company of the 54th Regiment for a brief rest. In command of the 3rd was Carl. Major Carl Korvacs. He had been campaigning in the mountains for the last three years after a year of fighting the Russians in Galicia. He was twenty-eight. He might, to the careless young, have been any age. His face, tanned to burnt mahogany, was drawn and bleak, etched by the bitter winds into hard lines. His blue eyes had long lost their warmth. They reflected the grey of wintry war as he marched his men through the snowy streets of the attractive little town.

He had not seen Vienna or his family for a long time. A respite for a week or ten days in Oberstein was as much as he and his men could hope for, and even then they would be subject to instant recall. The mountain ridges above the pass awaited their return. They were hungry for the warm bodies of men, those ridges, although a man did not stay warm for long. The living lay almost as stiff and cold as the dead after a while. The dead lay with ice and snow embalming them, preserving them, turning them so purely
white that they no longer made an impact on the eye. But eventually they would be gone, most of them, unclamped from their icy tombs by the compassionate hands of men whose duty it was to somehow climb down to them. And those who could not be reached simply stayed where they had fallen, as whitely mantled as the mountains until warm summer uncovered them.

Carl still believed in Austria. But he no longer believed in the war. His only affections were for his men, for their courage and endurance, for their acceptance of the impossible and their attempts at the impossible. His was an established, experienced company, full of veterans who had survived every risk, every hazard, every engagement, and senior officers knew that Major Carl Korvacs and the 3rd could achieve that much more than other companies. But there was something about Major Korvacs which made them prefer to give him his orders by a runner or by a field telephone. To stand face to face with him could be a little uncomfortable. His eyes could convey a cold blankness even as he was saying, ‘Yes, Herr Colonel.’

He hated the pass. It represented the eternal stalemate and all mountain regiments disliked it intensely, although there were no areas of conflict they actually loved. A few months at the pass drained a man of what were left of his caring emotions and wrapped him about with a shell of indifference.

He saw his men quartered in the wartime barracks before making his way to a house called
Rosa Bella. He was to be billeted there for his rest period. The name itself, Beautiful Rosa, was sickly. His orderly, Corporal Jaafe, was already there, having gone on ahead to make sure things were right for him. Carl was not as tolerant of imperfections as he had been. The years of irresponsible rapture had gone, and for ever.

The house was imposing, its overhanging Tyrolean roof declining steeply, its timbers weathered and mellow, its chimneys smoking and creating circles of warm dampness in snow that still managed to cling. Corporal Jaafe opened the door to him. The square hall shone. The walls were adorned with pictures which Carl guessed were family portraits. The Trentino region of the Tyrol was Italian-dominated but still part of the Austrian empire. Some of the Italians, calling themselves patriots or irredentists, occasionally threw bombs as a sign that they wished the Trentino region to join with Italy, but the Tyrol was Austrian and had been since 1363, when by amicable arrangement it came under the jurisdiction of Duke Rudolph IV of Austria.