The Passing Bells (33 page)

“Brilliant in concept . . . just what one would expect from young Mr. Churchill's fertile mind. My own mind is not made up about it. Should the enterprise fail, the political repercussions could be disastrous.”

“You don't strike me as a man who would be afraid of risk.”

There was a sound in his throat, like muffled laughter or the purring of a cat. His hand brushed her arm, gentle as silk.

“Some games are always worth the candle and some are not. Don't you think that's true, Lydia Foxe?”

She ignored his touch, her eyes fixed on the cold glass windowpanes.

“I'm not certain, Mr. Langham. It's not candles I care about in games, only prizes.”

11

Martin Rilke sat in Regent's Park tossing pellets of bread to a flotilla of ducks. It had been a long, hard winter, and the ducks were celebrating the approach of spring by eating everything that was cast upon the waters. Martin sprinkled what remained of four slices of bread among the reeds and then stood up and walked slowly along a broad gravel path toward Clarence Gate. His hands were in the pockets of his overcoat, one hand curled around a crumpled letter from Chicago. The letter had arrived in the morning post and had contained a check from the
Express
for eighty-five dollars and some words of advice from Harrington Comstock Briggs.

Dear Rilke:

The enclosed check does not reflect your worth but does measure pretty accurately the extent of your usefulness to us at this time. The good folk in the Midwest are getting a bit irritated at old Europe and her wars. Sympathy along the lake-front from Milwaukee to Gary is pretty evenly divided. Many German-Americans are becoming vocal in their condemnation of England, France, and Russia—especially England—for conducting what they feel is a crush-German-trade war. The British naval blockade is certainly playing havoc with the grain merchants and the iron-ore shippers. Folks in these parts can't understand why they should be prevented from selling to the Central Powers. Even Washington is irked at the blockade, so you can well imagine how feelings run in certain sections of Chicago and everywhere in Milwaukee.

Your Belgium sketches were good and fair, but your current things on wartime Britain are becoming too overtly Anglophilic to suit our readers. Never lose sight of the fact that the redcoats burned the White House—although I can think of a Republican or two who would gladly burn it down today as long as Mr. Wilson was inside. No, Rilke, I can't think of any good reason for you to stay in London any longer. Joe Finley had one bottle of rye too many, so there is now an opening on the police beat. The job is yours if you'll send me a cable. A simple yes or no will suffice. If you're short of the fare, say so.

P.S. I have to go with the Phillies this year for the pennant. Cliff Cravath and Grover Cleveland Alexander—too tough a combination to beat.

He removed the letter from his pocket, wadded it into a tight ball, and sent a hard fast one curving out and away from Cliff Cravath's knees. The paper hit the water and brought a flurry of ducks to the scene.

Jacob Golden was stretched out on the living room couch, staring at the ceiling. It was a position he had been in, almost without interruption, since returning from Serbia in January. He had said little and written less about his experiences there with General Putnik's armies. Some rift had developed between Jacob and his father, but until now Martin had not tried to nose out the cause of it.

“Enjoy the April sunshine?” Jacob drawled as Martin hung up his coat in the tiny hall.

“Yes . . . went up to the park and fed the ducks.”

“Reach any firm decision?”

Martin shrugged and slumped into a chair. “Go back to Chicago, I guess.”

“Turning your back on the war, eh?”

“It's being turned for me.”

Jacob yawned and sat up. He had lost a good deal of weight and looked skeletal; the skin stretched across his face like parchment over a bone frame.

“Why don't you join the
Daily Post
? The guv'nor likes your writing, and he's sending me to Egypt to cover the Dardanelles expedition. You could take my spot. I plan to quit the old paper.”

Martin mulled that information over for a few seconds. There was a clatter of dishes from the restaurant below. The Hungarians were gone, innocent victims of the war, replaced by a large Italian family, verbose and operatic.

“When did you decide that?”

“Been considering it for months.”

“What happened in Serbia, Jacob?”

Golden ran his hands through his hair. “Christ! Nothing that I hadn't expected to happen. I told you that there was an unholy amount of hate in that part of the world. The war gave it an impetus and an outlet. Rape, torture, and butchery are simply words until one has seen the victims. I saw what the Austrians did to Serbian villagers, and I saw what Serbians did to Austrians after Putnik counterattacked across the Sava River. My dispatches detailed the atrocities on both sides, but only the Austrian outrages were printed.”

“That shouldn't have come as a surprise.”

“No, of course it didn't. I hardly expected gallant little Serbia to be vilified in the press.” He smiled sardonically. “War and truth do not blend very well. I suppose I have an obligation as a journalist to bear witness to events even if the new censorship regulations prevent me from publishing all the facts, but I can't do it. There's something hideously wrong about this war. It's going to be a mindless, pointless, chaotic slaughter, and I don't wish to be involved in it.”

“It's going to be difficult not to be involved, isn't it? Where will you go?”

“Why, into the army, of course. Best place in the world to avoid emotional involvements of any kind. Chap I knew at Oxford is in the Royal Corps of Signals. Gave him a ring the other day and he offered me a commission. Back-room job in Whitehall . . . thinking up codes and ciphers. Cryptography has always been a passion of mine since I was six years old. How do you think I'll look in a uniform?”

“Gaunt.”

He winced and ran a hand across his jaw. “Quite right. A bit on the lean and hungry side. I miss all that sour cream and paprika from downstairs. I suppose I'd better develop a taste for pasta and put some flesh on my bones.”

“You seem to be a bit more cheerful all of a sudden.”

“It's getting it off my chest, old boy. You're a marvelous chap, Martin. You let people speak without clucking your tongue or acting pontifically. I truly think you'd have lent a sympathetic ear to Attila the Hun.”

“I suppose that's a compliment,” Martin said with a dubious air, “but I'm not without some strong views.”

“Of course you're not. It's just that you're far more objective about things than I am . . . and more truly tolerant of mankind's insanities than I could ever hope to be. This war is going to need a few unbiased witnesses, and you should definitely be one of them. Would you like to go to the Dardanelles?”

“If I can . . . sure.”

“Right! I'll get on the blower and fix it up. Pop a cork of bubbly while I mend a fence or two with the guv'nor.”

Jacob was on the telephone to his father when Martin came back from the kitchen with a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

“It just seemed the decent thing to do,” Jacob was saying, his tone unctuously patriotic. “No reasonably healthy Englishman should be out of uniform, and so . . . Yes, Royal Corps of Signals . . . a full lieutenancy . . . their need for me is rather desperate . . . codes, ciphers, decoding—that sort of thing. Yes . . . posted here in London . . . top-hole sort of job in Whitehall . . . Yes, should make Mother happy. . . . Quite right . . . they don't use code experts in the trenches. Glad you understand, Father . . . that's why I've been so moody and out of sorts lately . . . trying to make up my mind as to the best thing to do. . . . Thank you, Father . . . I appreciate your saying that. . . . Now then, as for this Mediterranean business, I can't think of anyone more suited to take my place than Martin Rilke. . . .”

An outsider, he stayed apart from the other newspaper correspondents. He was
“that American chap,”
tolerated but resented. The number of press representatives allowed to join the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force was limited to a scant half-dozen. Kitchener would have preferred none, but General Sir Ian Hamilton, commanding the expedition, had permitted a few select men to come along as observers. Most of them were elderly men who had covered military affairs since the Boer War and even before. They were on a first-name basis with all the staff officers and fitted neatly into the social order of the mess. They could, in fact, have been colonels or majors in mufti, so complete was their grasp of military procedures and ethics. Martin's very presence had been subject to doubt almost up to the hour of sailing from Southampton. The advisability of a neutral coming along had been questioned by the War Office, but Lord Crewe's arguments had prevailed in the end. It was his contention that Martin Rilke should be allowed to accompany the expedition precisely
because
he was a neutral. America, he had stated in a strongly worded note to the War Office, must be made aware of the scope and grandeur of the British adventure to the east. American sentiment about the British war effort was at a low ebb, and British newspaper accounts of it were looked on as biased reporting. “Let the truth come out in American papers, documented by an American whose sympathy and understanding for the English people in this war is beyond question,” Lord Crewe had said.

And so he was part of the host gathering in Egypt for an assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula, a lone American strolling the gritty, crowded streets of Alexandria in an open-necked shirt, Kodak slung over one shoulder, notebook and pencil in hand. Little of what he wrote was passed uncensored by GHQ, and none of his photographs had been stamped with the censor's seal. It seemed curious to Martin that the British would be so touchy about what could or could not be sent back to London. The smallest, most ragged Egyptian shoeshine boy knew that the English were preparing to sail for Gallipoli by the last week in April. Fishing boats from Greece drifted with impunity through the vast armada of ships anchored in the roadstead. It was common knowledge that at least half of the Greek fishermen were either Turkish sympathizers or Turkish spies, and yet the censors sliced out the most innocuous comments from the newsmen's copy, as though a remark such as “The Australian and New Zealand soldiers appear to be very much at home amid the rock-strewn desolation of the Egyptian desert” were of prime military importance.

“Oh, can't have that, sir. Might tip off to the enemy where the troops are to be sent. Gallipoli is desolate and rock strewn, you know.”

Martin wondered whether Jacob, in the brilliance of his mind, had not foreseen all this official fantasia and therefore had neatly euchred him into taking his place. He could imagine him laughing himself silly as he lolled about the flat in his silk pajamas, drinking champagne and renewing his friendships with Shaftesbury Avenue chorus girls. Still, he didn't care. It was Jacob's loss. London was fine, but it was only a city, not unlike Chicago or New York. Alexandria was the threshold of the East. Alexandria was time caught in mellow limestone. The city of Alexander. Al-Iskandarîyah. A city that was ancient when Euclid studied in its library. A city where Cleopatra dozed in the arms of Antony. He strolled along the broad avenue flanking the crescent-shaped bay, the Mediterranean blue-green to the west, yellowish brown to the east, stained by the soil of Africa in the Nile flood. There was a café near the docks which officers of the Royal Navy and the French Armée de Mer had taken as their own, hooting away any khaki-clad officer who dared to enter but tolerating the unobtrusive presence of a solitary newspaperman from Chicago, who took the furthest table on the terrace and spent his time over a beer or two writing in a journal and not bothering a soul.

Alexandria, April 10, 1915

Observations and Reflections. It is curious here. An air of almost unbearable excitement permeates every aspect of the expedition, as though nothing but laurel leaves and great honors wait over the horizon for every man bound to go there. What the Turks are thinking at this moment no one can say, but I doubt if they are filled with the same euphoria. I have tried without success to find out more about this peninsula where the armada is soon to head. It is waterless and desolate, I know that much, a spit of land dividing Europe from Asia, rock-strewn, mountainous, scrub-covered, bleak and inhospitable. Are there many beaches? No one seems to know or, rather, to say. Maps of the place are impossible to find. What few existed here in Alexandria and in Cairo have been bought up by the British and are securely in the hands of the top brass. Will it be heavily defended by the Turks? A month or so ago, marines and sailors from the fleet walked among the ruins of Turkish forts and gun emplacements after Admiral Carden bombarded the place. The British and French fleets attempted to force a passage through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara, sail to Constantinople, and knock Turkey out of the war. A bold stroke. The Turks are uneasy about casting their lot with Germany and Austria. The sight of battleships like the
Queen Elizabeth
with her fifteen-inch guns steaming through the Golden Horn would no doubt have been the final straw to break their nerve. But the battleships never reached the Sea of Marmara. Admiral Carden—or so the rumor goes—suffered a mental and physical collapse. Admiral de Robeck, who replaced him, tried to force the Narrows, lost three or four battleships in one day, and gave up the attempt. It was decided that the navy would not try again until the peninsula was in British hands so that the Turks could no longer enfilade the warships from batteries onshore or float mines out against them. I know nothing of military strategy, but that seems to make sense. I had a few drinks with an English colonel and a colonel in the French contingent, the commander of a regiment in la Légion Etrangère. They were both of them quite glum. We sat on the balcony of a fine French restaurant in El Fuwa overlooking the Nile, and they explained their anxiety by pointing out that the Turks and their German military advisers have had a month of uninterrupted time for fortifying every possible landing site. Barbed wire on the beaches and machine guns on the bluffs will play hell with soldiers trying to wade ashore. They don't like one thing about this upcoming operation—a feeling not shared by the rank and file.