The Passing Bells (31 page)

“Mama . . . Papa . . . close your eyes!” Alexandra's voice from beyond the library door. It was easy for Hanna to comply. Her eyes were already closed, her lips moving slightly in a soundless prayer, “
Ach du lieber Gott . . .”

The door opened. “You can look now!”

Alexandra in a nurse's uniform, pirouetting so that the long white skirt swirled, the white veil floating from beneath a white headband, red crosses on the sides of it.

“How . . .
summery
you look,” Hanna said slowly, not trusting her voice.

The earl look bemused. “What on earth . . . ?”

“I joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Red Cross,” Alexandra blurted happily. “Jennifer Wiggins, Cecily, Jane Hargreaves, Sheila, and I all joined up together.” She made another dress model's turn. “Do you like it? Summery, yes, Mama, because this is the summer uniform. The winter one is a pale blue serge with accents of red . . . but it doesn't fit properly in the bodice. I shall have to return it to Ferris for refitting before they make the others.”

“Others?” the earl muttered.

“Three of each—three summer, white . . . three winter, blue. And a couple of heavy wool cloaks for cold weather. And I must get the proper type of shoes. We shall be doing so much walking, you know.”

“What on earth do you know about nursing?” the earl asked.

“Oh, we shan't be doing that awful bedpan and dressing type of thing. They have proper nurses for that . . . elderly women. Our jobs will be to look after men who are convalescing. Push them in their rolling chairs . . . write letters for them if their hands are bandaged or their arms are in casts . . . read to them if the poor dears have been blinded. That sort of thing. There will be ever so much to do.”

“Will you be leaving home?” Hanna asked.

“Yes, in a way. We shall be living in a dorm. But I shan't be far off. The Hargreaves gave their house at Roehampton to the Red Cross . . . as a convalescent hospital for officers. They're jolly glad to be rid of it . . . such an awful barn of a place. They moved into a perfectly darling house in Portman Square.” She made a final pirouette. “Do you like me in it? Isn't it chic?”

“Dashed smart,” the earl said without conviction. “Are you sure you can do that sort of work? Some of those poor fellows will be quite badly off, you know.”

Alexandra checked her image in a mirror and couldn't help but smile at what she saw. An angel of mercy. The headband and veil suited her. Made her look like an especially pretty young nun. Not too concealing, though. One could still see her blonde hair.

“I shall do quite well, Papa. I can feel it in my heart.” She drew herself up proudly. A Nightingale figure in the glass. “It might be difficult at first, but this is war and one must be prepared for some degree of travail and self-sacrifice.”

The rain seethed on the drill ground, turning the churned turf into a morass. The platoon moved across it, ankle deep in mud. Barely half of the men were in uniform, the rest struggled along in cheap mackintoshes. A bowler hat or two was to be seen, but mostly there were cloth caps. The working poor were working at soldiering for a shilling a day. Only ten men had rifles.

“Platoon . . . halt! Dismissed!”

They streamed toward the barracks in a sodden mass.

Second Lieutenant Charles Greville watched them go. He was properly dressed for a soldier of King and Country in a well-fitting uniform, decent boots, a British Warm coat. The uniform was not provided by the government; they merely gave him a token amount of money toward its purchase. The uniform came from Hanesbury & Peeke, Military and Clerical Tailors, the Haymarket, London. It had cost a great deal of money and was worth every farthing.

Strangely enough, the men did not resent his martial magnificence in the least. When he stuck his head through the barracks' doorway, they all grinned at him.

“You chaps all right?”

“Right as bloody rain, sir!” a gangly young man said, warming his backside by the potbelly stove. “Are we downhearted?”

The platoon answered with fervor, “NOOOO!”

So much for that. First Platoon, D Company, Second Battalion of the Royal Windsor Fusiliers was right as rain. Charles walked on to the mess, hurrying in anticipation of a whiskey and hot water—a double whiskey, come to think of it.

The mess was crowded, the barman hard pressed to keep up with the demand. The Royal Windsors shared the mess with a new battalion of the London Rifles. “Quite unthinkable before the war,” the Royal Windsors' adjutant had remarked sourly when the London's officers had first entered the mess. The breaking of tradition didn't faze the younger officers of either regiment. They were all civilians in uniform, a few short months removed from Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, the Inns of Court, or budding business careers. Sharing the mess gave them the opportunity to share their uncertainties at what they were doing—or trying to do. They were all candidly aware of their shortcomings.

“I wish to hell I had just one NCO who knew the ropes,” a London Rifles lieutenant remarked moodily. “I feel such a bloody fool drilling the men with a book in my hand.”

Second Lieutenant Roger Wood-Lacy, the Royal Windors, took a sip of his ginger beer.

“The men don't mind. I told my chaps straight out that I didn't know the first thing about drilling, and we muddled through together. I must say, in all modesty, that we're first rate now.”

“When are they going to instruct us on trenches?” a downy-cheeked subaltern asked.

“When we get to France,” Charles said as he joined the group at the bar. “I understand they're building a training base at Harfleur, and they'll run us through it for a week or two before sending us up to the line.”

“With half our lads in macks, bowlers, and brollies,” Roger scoffed. “Fritz'll die from laughing.”

“All of the men will be in uniform by the middle of next week . . . and they'll have Lee-Enfields and bayonets by then, too. Colonel told me this morning. That goes for the Londons as well.”

“I hope you're right,” a London Rifles officer said. “The lads find it difficult to feel like soldiers when they don't look like soldiers. I marched my platoon over to Datchet Common the other day, and some horrid chap standing outside a public house wanted to know where I was going with ‘a mob of bleedin' navvies'! If there'd been a man among us with a working rifle, I'd have ordered the blighter shot.”

“He'd only have missed,” Roger said. “I doubt if there are ten men in your battalion or ours who know which end of the rifle does what.”

Charles smiled sardonically and ordered his hot whiskey. He recalled Fenton telling him that the Guards never talked shop in the mess. That might well have been a tradition in the Royal Windsor Fusiliers too, but before the war, before the First Battalion, the regulars, had been destroyed at Ypres. New traditions were being formed at the depot in the shadow of Windsor Castle that were no doubt shocking to those who had known the regiment in peacetime. It was said that Queen Victoria used to watch the men drill from her sitting room window. She would have been dismayed if she had watched them now. But there was no point in reflecting on the past. There wasn't an enlistee in his platoon who could have told him what the regiment had done at Blenheim, Oudinarde, Badajoz, Vittoria, Quatre Bras, Inkerman, or Tel-el-Kebir. Those battles meant nothing to them—mere faded lettering on the regimental colors, half-remembered names from dimly recalled school lessons. They were eager to make their own history, singing “Tipperary” as they marched in the rain in their wretched clothes.

“What are you up to this afternoon?” Roger asked.

Charles looked at his wristwatch. “Meeting Lydia at Charing Cross—if I don't miss the train. I've got noon to midnight off.”

“Lucky devil! Where are you taking her?”

“Lunch at the Piccadilly . . . perhaps the theater. I don't much care what we do. Lounging around on a sofa with a brandy and soda would suit me fine.”

“Typical thinking of the active-service officer.” Roger scowled at the bubbles in his glass. “I suppose you heard the news about poor Winnie's brother.”

“Yes. Bad luck. Barely knew the chap . . . yet . . . well, it's rotten. I'll send her a letter.”

“Got a note from Fenton this morning. They upped him to major.”

“Still on staff?”

“No, back with the Guards. In trenches near Béthune. He says they're quite snug and enjoying the winter sports. Only a hangman would appreciate Fenton's humor.”

“Well,” he said lamely, glancing at his watch again, “you know your brother.”

Did Roger? He wondered, seated in the train as it skirted the freezing Thames, if they would ever know Fenton again. Not the old Fenton, surely. “In trenches.” Those two words separated Fenton from the majority of mankind as completely as though he were on the far side of the moon. Being “in trenches” was an experience that only those who had been in them could possibly imagine. Those few survivors of the First Battalion who had drifted back to the Fusiliers depot at Windsor never talked about their experiences at Wytschaete in November. Never in fact even talked to each other, although they all shared the same memories of that hellish place. They kept what they had seen and done on White Sheet Ridge to themselves. There was a veil drawn about each man that was totally impenetrable. They had glimpsed purgatory and were not whispering its secrets to Dante or anyone else. Fenton would be the same, withdrawing behind his gift for sardonic understatement to blot out the horrors. The official communiqués from France told of heavy artillery exchanges from Aubers Ridge to the La Bassée canal. Fenton would be somewhere in that area, “quite snug and enjoying the winter sports.” He tried to imagine what it must be like to huddle in an icy trench while shells slammed into iron-hard ground. He could not bring any vision into focus. It was a mystery that must await his own initiation.

“How grand you look,” Lydia said as he pushed his way through the crowded station to meet her.

“You look rather grand yourself,” he said with a grin of pure joy. She looked so beautiful in a Russian sable coat that he felt like sweeping her into his arms and kissing her right there in front of a thousand people—not that anyone would have cared or even noticed. There were soldiers kissing girls everywhere one looked among the battalion waiting to board a train for Folkestone, their packs and rifles stacked in momentarily neglected rows down the platform, and yet he pecked at her cheek almost furtively.

“How demonstrative you are, Charles.” Her smile was cryptic. “Have you missed me terribly?”

He took hold of her gloved hands. “You know I have.”

“I would never know by your letters.”

“Sorry.” He squeezed her hands as though to prove his sincerity. “It was almost impossible to write. We've been on the go eighteen hours a day trying to learn soldiering and teach it to the men. It's been the blind leading the blind, but we're starting to form into shape now and I'll be able to come up to London more often.” He was about to add, “Before they ship us to France,” but thought better of it. There was no point in putting an immediate damper on the afternoon.

She kissed him squarely on the mouth. “There! That's a proper welcome. Kindly make a note of it, Lieutenant Greville.” He hugged her to him, but it was awkward—so much fur and wool khaki between them. Her perfume made him giddy. How exquisitely marvelous was the smell of woman! He thought of the dankly rancid odor of his platoon in the tar-paper and wood barracks, the haze from sodden cloth as they ringed the stove.

“It's so marvelous to be with you again,” he murmured, brushing his lips against her neck. “It seems like an age.”

It seemed that way to her, too. This tall, uniformed, lean-faced man seemed almost a stranger in some ways. Not that he had changed that much in a physical sense—a bit thinner perhaps—but so much else had changed. The span of time between October 1914 and February 1915 could not be measured in months. It seemed like the gap between one century and another. She clung tightly to his arm as they walked out of the station. Ambulances were drawn up along the Strand for blocks, waiting for the hospital train from Southampton. They hurried past them in silence into Buckingham Street, where she had parked her car.

“I thought we might have lunch at the Piccadilly grill,” he said as she handed him the car keys.

“It's terribly dull there. Nothing but grim-faced matrons and retired brigadiers. I took the liberty of reserving a table at the Cafe Royal . . . far from the orchestra, so we can talk, talk, talk.”

Talking was out of the question except at a level near shouting that Charles found irritating. The Cafe Royal was jammed with men in uniform (most of them with the red tabs of staff officers on their lapels), businessmen, high government officials, and droves of elegant women (most of them considerably younger than their escorts). An orchestra played ragtime, and the dance floor was so densely crowded that couples could barely go through the gyrations of the “Grizzly Bear” or the “Temptation Rag.” The menu was extensive and the prices outrageous. It was not a place where second lieutenants took their girls on a second lieutenant's pay. But he had left those modest trappings back at Windsor along with his muddy boots. In the Cafe Royal, he was the Right Honorable Charles Greville, heir to an earldom, and to hell with expense.

The food was ambrosial after regimental boiled beef and greens, the Pouilly-Fumé pure nectar, but the orchestral thumpings and wailings, the squeal of the female dancers doing the maxixe, became too much to bear. He smiled ruefully and raised his voice above the din.

“Rather difficult to talk here.”

“Yes,” Lydia agreed. “Shall we go?”

“Please.”