The Passing Bells (66 page)

“I understand.”

“But seated here—or even further along, near the old wall—it's quite a different matter. Do you come here often?”

William lit his cigarette with a windproof lighter he had bought in New York.

“As often as I can.”

“I rather had the feeling that we had talked before. Perhaps not here exactly . . . but . . . somewhere.”

“Oh, we've talked together many times. Last time I was here we talked about Derbyshire.”

“Did we?”

“Buxton . . . the Peak District. It's a very lovely spot. Masses of hills and crags. We've owned a house there for years. A smallish place, but comfortable. There's a hill beyond the house, and from the terrace one can watch the patterns of light. A great many clouds sweep over and the shadow patches change constantly all during the day. Quite an interesting sight.”

“Ah, yes, I'm sure it must be.”

“Would you care to see it one day? Perhaps even stay there?”

Charles frowned and looked back at the hill, at the shadows of the wind-driven clouds as they dipped in and out of the hollows and raced across the slopes.

“I'm not sure I could. I really don't know about that. I must watch this hill, you see . . . watch it . . . in case the men come back.”

Observations and Reflections. There were touring buses parked beside the road near Beaumont-Hamel, the occupants—almost all of them with cameras slung over their shoulders—being led by a guide to see the old trenches. Quite a new industry. More touring buses north of the Somme at Arras. Middle-aged people for the most part, tramping gingerly over new duckboards laid down by the tour companies to keep their clients from being too discomfited. Near Cambrai, a few rusted tanks remain partially entombed in mud. Along Vimy Ridge the wire has turned orange with rust. At Messines, great flocks of ravens along the skyline wheeling above the stumps of bombarded trees.

Odd, how peaceful it is. No major stories to be gathered here. The storms have shifted. The Riffs cutting up French and Spanish legionnaires in Morocco. Turks and Greeks fighting to the death at Adrianople. The British pouring troops into Iraq, into Ireland, into northern India. And Russia—at war with the Poles, at war with itself. White Russians, Red Russians, Denikin, Semenov, Trotsky, the Czech legion. No lack of work for me among those whirlwinds. Jacob, too, in those winds, somewhere between here and Siberia. A special observer for an agency of the League of Nations, keeping an eye on political developments in the new nations carved from the old empires. “Watching the new hatreds grow,” as Jacob put it so sardonically when we sat in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin last year. New hatreds breeding to replace the old on this second anniversary of the end of the war-to-end-all-wars. I wonder if Wilson, lying half paralyzed in the White House, sees the joke in that, as he listens to the cheers for Harding and his “normalcy”?

All of us scattered. The beginning of the rootless age? Or is it just a new restlessness, the old horizons no longer as safe and comforting as they once were? Back and forth we go, like so many migrating birds—Petrograd, Berlin, Paris, London, New York. Back and forth. Trains to Milan, Belgrade, Warsaw. Back and forth across the oceans without giving travel a thought anymore.

Strange to think of Alexandra living in Canada and working in a clinic for war wounded with a doctor who may or may not be her husband. She seemed so much a part of the ambience of Abingdon Pryory and Park Lane. The belle of all the balls. An English society girl to her finger tips. All is changed. She wrote to Hanna that even Toronto is not far enough away. She and her doctor plan to keep moving west once the reservoir of the maimed is lowered, to get as far away as possible from where I now sit, Hazebrouck, the edge of the great Salient.

It's a good, new road from Hazebrouck over the Messines Ridge to Kemmel and Ypres, but the earth is sour on both sides of it. Mustard gas and lyddite permeating the soil. Still, grass is beginning to grow, inching over the lips of the shell holes, sprouting rawly along old parapets and amid sandbagged bunkers. Sandbags to Sandburg. Yes, Carl, the grass does cover all.

There is no one Golgotha for the British Army, but Ypres will do and it is the closest battleground to the coast. It is here—near the waste of stones that had once been a lace-making town—that the six unknown Tommies had lain side by side in a hut, waiting for one of them to be chosen for immortality, to symbolize the apotheosis of all the million dead. Those who remain here are not forgotten. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has spared no expense to lay out cemeteries. Low walls surround them, and trees and shrubbery soften the lines of stone. At Poperinghe the cemeteries are like English gardens and the caretakers dedicated and efficient men. It takes only minutes for them to locate any grave for visitors among the neat rows of white crosses, each with a name on it. On one of them, the name Ivy Thaxton Rilke. Beneath the name are the initials of the military nursing service and a date: 9 October, 1917.

There are at least a hundred thousand other graves from Passchendaele, not that that's any comfort. She lies in a special plot beside twenty of her patients who died with her when the shell hit. Alexandra saw to that. An earl's daughter getting her way.

A grave in Flanders. Far from the places she had hoped to see. Chicago, Illinois, on Lake Michigan. Railroads and stockyards.

No. I couldn't face going to London and witnessing the pomp at the Abbey, not with her on this side of the channel. A quiet spot. Just the wind and a blackbird swaying on a cypress tree, and then, at eleven, the distant tolling of a bell.

A
UTHOR
'
S
N
OTE

All the characters in this book, with the obvious exception of historical personages, are imaginary. The Royal Windsor Fusiliers will not appear on any list of regiments of the British Army, past or present, but all other regiments are real and fought in the actions mentioned.

I have tried to be faithful in the description of events, but this is not a work of history and if I have erred in places or taken license, may the historians forgive me.

No novel set against the background of the Great War could be accomplished without help from the works of other writers. I am especially grateful to the following:
Gallipoli
by John Masefield (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1918), for details of the landings from the
River Clyde
and the battalions involved;
The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties
by Ronald Blythe (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), for Mr. Blythe's chapter on the Unknown Warrior;
The Great War and Modern Memory
by Paul Fussell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), for countless details; Siegfried Sassoon's
Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man
(New York: Coward, McCann, 1929) and
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
(New York: Coward McCann, 1930);
Good-bye to All That
by Robert Graves (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), a tattered paperback bought long ago which inspired the writing of this book in the first place; and to Martin Middlebrook of Boston, Lincolnshire, for the superlative historical craftsmanship of his
First Day on the Somme
(W. W. Norton & Company, 1972).

And a special debt from the heart to all the poets who died too soon.

P.S.

About the author Phillip Rock About the book The Passing Bells Series Discussion Questions Read on “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by Wilfred Owen An Excerpt from Circles of Time

About the Author

Phillip Rock

B
ORN IN
H
OLLYWOOD
, C
ALIFORNIA
, in 1927, Phillip Rock was the son of Academy Award–winning silent film producer Joe Rock. Phillip moved to England with his family when he was seven, attending school there for six years until the blitz of 1940, when he returned to America and then served with the U.S. Navy toward the end of World War II. He spent most of his adult life in Los Angeles, and was the author of three previous novels before The Passing Bells series:
Flickers
,
The Dead in Guanajuato
, and
The Extraordinary Seaman
. He died in 2004.

Of
The Passing Bells
, Phillip Rock wrote, “The idea came to me when I was a boy and stood with my father in a London street at the hour of eleven on the eleventh day of November and first heard that awful minute of total silence as the entire nation stood with bowed heads remembering their dead. It took a long time to put it on paper.”

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About the Book

The Passing Bells Series

  

T
HE GUNS OF
A
UGUST
are rumbling throughout Europe in the summer of 1914, but war has not yet touched Abingdon Pryory. Here, at the grand summer home of the Greville family, the parties, dances, and romances play on. Alexandra Greville embarks on her debutante season, while brother Charles remains hopelessly in love with the beautiful, untitled Lydia Foxe, knowing his father, the Earl of Stanmore, will never approve of the match. Downstairs, the new servant Ivy struggles to adjust to the routines of the well-oiled household staff while shrugging off unwelcome attentions, and the arrival of American cousin Martin Rilke, a Chicago newspaperman, threatens to disrupt the daily routine.

But ultimately, the Great War will not be denied, shattering the social season and household tranquility, crumbling class barriers, and bringing its myriad horrors home—when what begins for the high-bred Grevilles as a glorious adventure soon begins unraveling the very fabric of British high society.