Too Close to the Sun (19 page)

Hoskins now issued his plan for a May offensive. But on the third, without warning, the War Office dismissed him. “In view of the trying climate of the East African theater of operations,” read the telegram, “and the consequent strain of prolonged service in such conditions…You will return to England by the most convenient route.” It was the week after Denys turned thirty, and a bitter gift. Hoskins had taken over a spent force and renewed it; his three-month command had all been in the rainy season, and now he was denied the chance to see his carefully prepared plans in action, as his superiors far away judged that he had “lost grip of the operations and perhaps become tired.” The decision was met with outrage on the ground. “All the military folk are very disappointed and surprised at Hoskins being taken away,” Galbraith said. Denys certainly was. “If they had left Hoskins there,” he wrote later, “I firmly believe he would have finished off the show by the end of 1917 in spite of being handicapped with Sheppard.” As his aide-de-camp, Denys would automatically accompany Hoskins back to England and on to his next posting.

At noon on May 30, in Dar, Hoskins handed campaign command to General Jacobus “Jappie” van Deventer, a mountain man of a Boer. The rain had stopped. The deposed general and Denys returned briefly to Nairobi before sailing back to London to await orders. There was little time for Denys to do much except visit Berkeley, who was suffering so badly from dysentery that Galbraith, who had struggled down from Gilgil to nurse him, was convinced that he was going to die. “We are all depressed beyond words at the prospect of the change [of command],” Galbraith wrote. “Hoskins has done so much to make his men enthusiastic under the most trying circumstances and with his personality appears to have won the goodwill of everyone who came into contact with him. Things were I believe in a state bordering on chaos when he took over and he has made prodigious efforts to prepare for a final effort and now on the eve of his advance he is superseded.” Hoskins and Denys had a lugubrious passage home.

N
EWSPAPERS AT HOME WERE STILL GLOATING OVER A SMASHING VICTORY
near Messines, southwest of Ypres, on June 7. British miners had spent a year tunneling under enemy lines in order to lay a trail of explosives. When nineteen mines went up at once, ten thousand sleeping Germans were killed, and Lloyd George felt the tremors on Downing Street. But by the last week of July, gloom had again settled over England. Denys, still in full-time employment as Hoskins’s aide-de-camp, waited on home leave until another posting came through. They found everyone talking about food shortages, rising costs, and servant problems. The war had come to London when a bomb killed a hundred civilians, and as there were no air-raid sirens yet, fresh attacks were presaged by a bicycling policeman with a placard around his neck that urged TAKE COVER. The streetlights had acquired masks, and murky evenings contributed to a general sense of cheerlessness. It seemed, to Londoners, as if the war had always been there, and since the end of 1916 they had faced the possibility that it might go on forever. Each year they had less food than the year before, as well as less heat, less light, and less hope. So this, Denys reflected, was the “world grown old and cold and weary” that Rupert Brooke had suggested he would be glad to leave. He found some small consolation in the swirling cigarette smoke of the Café Royal or at a marble-topped table at the Four Hundred Club on Bond Street, where women in cloche hats danced the tango in the glow of colored lights. When he went to the theater, he found that the war had seeped in there, too: every performance was now parenthesized by the national anthem.

Among his friends, Iris Tree had married an American painter against her father’s wishes and settled in the United States. Philip Sassoon was working as private secretary to Field Marshal Douglas Haig (a Brasenose man), and had the testing job of putting a gloss on the Somme debacle. Alan and Viola Parsons, née Tree, had moved to Mulberry Walk in Chelsea. Their son, Denys, had that year acquired a sister, christened Virginia in honor of America’s entry into the war. Alan, who had joined the civil service, was medically unfit to serve, and worked his way through the war as private secretary first to the home secretary and then to the secretary of state for India. But most of Denys’s male friends had been killed. Diana Manners, who was nursing at Guy’s hospital, said that every young man she had ever danced with was dead. When Denys went up to Haverholme to join his parents, his reappearance was the first ray of light to illuminate those dark ground-floor rooms after years of waiting for news that, when it came, was usually bad. Sections of the park had been parceled out into allotments in the relentless quest for food, but the feathery bend of the Slea was untroubled, as were the electric-blue mayflies that somersaulted into the water in the setting sunlight. Toby was serving in France with the Royal East Kent Yeomanry, and the bereaved Topsy was living in Herstmonceux, in Sussex, with three-year-old Michael and two-year-old Anne. From her house near the rectory she could hear the artillery at night, reminding her over and over of what she had lost. Cousin Muriel had unexpectedly metamorphosed into a philanthropist. She had founded an Anglo-Russian hospital in Petrograd, and on the night of the first Bolshevik rising was dining with Prince Yusupov when his palace was attacked, though they continued the meal in the basement. (Yusupov was among the young men at Oxford with whom Denys had gambled all night at No. 117. He had since returned to his homeland and murdered Rasputin in the same basement.) That summer, Muriel traveled from Petrograd to her field hospital and found wounded men arriving in railway vans “stacked like straw” and mixed up with corpses. In August, more than three hundred Russian soldiers there shot off their left hands so they would not have to return to the front.

Back in Ewerby, Muriel’s mother, Edith, was also running a hospital: a small convalescent home for wounded soldiers, where she spent her days bossing a team of village nurses. On Sundays, Denys sat with her and his parents in their seignorial pew at St. Andrew’s, watching the gray walls stained crimson and purple by the light shining through the colored glass as the organ rolled through another rendition of Cowper’s “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” now practically an anthem on the home front. Talking to Ewerby boys on leave from France, and to Edith’s convalescents, Denys learned about another kind of war. They spoke of the pallor of German flares that illuminated undrainable villages through the brown fog of dawn; of the wet bulk of sandbags heaped up in reserve trenches; and of the shortened cough of antiaircraft guns coming down from the morning sky. They spoke, too, of the onions drying under eaves at Westoutre; of the unexpected glare of many-windowed châteaux; and of sullen columns of Kitchener’s army marching under the trees that canopied the road from Béthune to Neuve-Chapelle, calf-deep in mud. The gray French rain was unpredictable and unfeasibly damp, not like the African rain: it was so miserable, and confounding, that the Tommies said Fritz could make it rain when he wanted it to. But nobody knew anything of Denys’s war. Mock trenches had been constructed outside his old house in Kensington Square to show civilians what the western front was like, but there were no models of the razor grass around Kilimanjaro or the tsetse-infested forest that followed the banks of the Pangani. On November 12, 1914, a bereaved mother had written to
The Times:
“As one who has lost a dearly loved son in his country’s service in East Africa, I cannot forbear writing in approval of your article alluding to the complete absence of news from East Africa in particular. Day after day we scanned the papers…but all was silence. Then on Sunday last came the fateful telegram….”

All soldiers returning on leave spoke of their isolation, and of the wall that stood between them and those who had stayed at home—in some cases, a barrier that remained inviolate long into the Peace. But for Denys, who had fought on a minor front a long way off, the alienation was acute. His news from Africa was also dispiriting. The cattle he had led hundreds of miles through the desert had been decimated by rinderpest, an acute viral disease—so he had backed a loser even on that venture—and his inability to do anything about it made him feel alienated from that part of his life, too. On August 8, he wrote to Pussy from Haverholme, addressing the letter to his two-year-old godson, Denys. Pussy had forgotten to give him her new address. “Will you convey to her [your mother] as delicately as possible,” wrote Denys senior, “that it always makes it easier for her correspondent to answer her letters if she gives him her address? Your dear mother, Denys, is not altogether free from a hereditary weakness of her sex—namely of expecting a little more than it is possible to give. I have found it to be so in most countries I have visited including Africa, the great Keep-it-Dark continent. However, I have with my accustomed resource—your godfather has no modesty—already discovered a means of getting a letter to your mother in spite of her reticence as to her whereabouts….” He then went on to describe his ingenious method of making sure his letter was forwarded. “I have not complied,” he continued, “with your rather thoughtless invitation to send you a telegram. Economy Denys! Wartime economy! I am saving up all the money I normally spend on telegrams to buy you a tin mug as some sort of Godfathering present. I had meant to try for a handsomely chased, heavily embossed solid gold George III punch bowl….” And he explained that the loss of his cattler endered such extravagance impossible, labeling smudges on the pale gray Priory writing paper “tears.”

In reality, Denys was beginning to doubt the viability of a future in Kenya. So many of his investments had failed to yield a return, and now war had shattered the economy. In short, all was uncertainty, and the sunny days of August 1917 were a bleak time to be in England. The assault on Passchendaele to the northeast of Ypres began at the end of July and continued, like a slow amputation, for three and a half months. Heavy air bombardment and torrential rain wrecked the network of streams and dykes, turning the battlefield to mud, and soldiers dodged German bullets only to slip from a duckboard and be sucked to their death. It was, wrote Edmund Blunden, who was there, “murder, not only to the troops but to their singing faiths and hopes.” Denys was not sorry when a telegram arrived at Haverholme ordering him to London to join Hoskins and prepare for immediate departure. But their destination was not entirely a welcome one. It was Mesopotamia (now Iraq), a theater with a reputation so grisly that it intimidated even veterans of East Africa. When Edward Temple Harris, an English doctor serving in German East Africa, was faced with the prospect of his third “Christmas feed in this only-fit-for-the-lions country,” he told his brother that if the campaign came to an end he hoped to be posted to a hospital in France. “Our great dread is Mesopotamia if this is over first,” he wrote. “That would put the lid on it.”

Denys rushed around London, restocking his medical case with morphia at Savory & Moore, and his traveling humidor with cigars at Alfred Dunhill. The Trench Requisites section of the department stores offered periscopes, wire cutters with rubber-covered handles, and Mortleman’s Patent Sound Absorbers, further reminders that the war was different in Europe. Then, as August came to a close in a sad England, he and Hoskins journeyed by rail through France and down to the southern Italian port of Taranto. There they waited among dreary rows of tents and boardwalks, killing time until the
Saxon,
an old Union-Castle liner, arrived under the escort of two Japanese destroyers. From Taranto they traveled only after sunset, as enemy submarines were prowling the Adriatic. But it was one of the escorting destroyers that one night accidentally rammed them amidships. Although the breach was above the waterline, the destroyer was badly damaged, and the
Saxon
was obliged to lie up off the Albanian coast and wait for a replacement escort. For two days Denys swam and sailed in warm waters, and at night, under a spray of stars, he played cards on deck with the other officers. He had found a kindred spirit in an American captain traveling to Mesopotamia with the Middlesex Regiment. The pair quickly established the basis of a friendship that was to last through many years of separation.

The blond-haired Kermit Roosevelt was Teddy’s second son. Two years Denys’s junior, after graduating from Harvard he had worked for a railroad company in Brazil, but he lacked his father’s ambition and, unlike his elder brother, he was not a corporate man. Although slightly built, Kermit, like Denys, had immense physical stamina. He was by far the most literary of his six siblings and one half sister, and he and Denys exchanged books while marooned in the Adriatic, both eager to beef up their acquaintance with Babylonian history before arriving in Mesopotamia. Kermit had chosen to serve, at least initially, with the British Expeditionary Force. Apart from a penchant for gambling, he was a solitary figure. “Very few outsiders care for him,” his mother, Edith, once commented. “But if they like him at all they like him very much.” Introspective like her and adventurous like his father, Kermit was both a man of action and a sensitive, imaginative thinker. So was Denys, but he had the character to reconcile the two. Kermit, in the end, did not; it was his personal tragedy. There was alcoholism on both sides of the family, and in the 1920s and 1930s Kermit drank himself almost to death, eventually finishing the job by shooting himself while serving in Alaska in the Second World War. He was his mother’s favorite; among her children, she wrote, he was “the one with the white head and the black heart.”

When the escort arrived, they sailed south into the Ionian Sea, anchoring at Pylos Bay in the southwest of the Peloponnese, known historically as Navarino, where the little harbor was crowded with white hospital ships, small black cargo boats, and gaunt dreadnoughts. The
Saxon
had no fans or ventilating system, and when a batch of stokers deserted at Port Said in protest, the captain called for volunteers. “Finch Hatton and I felt that our years in the tropics should qualify us, and that the exercise would improve our dispositions,” Kermit said. “We got the exercise. Never have I felt anything as hot…the shovels and the handles of the wheelbarrows blistered our hands. We had a number of cases of heatstroke and the hospital facilities on a crowded transport can never be all that might be desired.” Many of the troops were ill. When someone died, the others stood with rifles reversed and heads bowed while the body, swathed in a Union Jack, was lowered into the Red Sea as a bugler sounded the last post.