Circles of Time (34 page)

Martin raised a protesting hand. “Please, Jacob, don't try out your editorials on me.” He removed his eyeglasses and polished them with a handkerchief. “You seem to be in fine jingo voice tonight.”

“I happen to be a person who abhors war—as do the readers of the
Post.
We made a survey—one of those man-in-the-street things—”

“I read it,” Martin said dryly.

“And your conclusions?”

“That everyone wants the abolition of war—but that they want Britannia to rule the waves.”

Jacob laughed and flicked cigarette ash on the carpeting. “Quite so. And rule the land and air as well. They don't, of course, want to pay for the honor with increased taxes. Thus the appeal of the budding Royal Air Force. Trenchard has sold his service very well. Why have vast, expensive armies—armies led by Boer War fossils—when one can achieve the same purpose with a few dashing lads in flying machines? The RAF is being sold like biscuits or bootblacking. Everything is young—daring—new. Trenchard points to the fact that it's the RAF who are holding the lid down in Iraq, keeping Faisal on the throne, and protecting the flow of oil from Abadan, not to mention the drilling at Mosul. And doing it all for the cost of a few bombs dropped on Arab villages.”

“Stuff and nonsense. A false illusion. The only thing an airplane will ever conquer is another airplane. Read Fenton's report in rebuttal to the RAF wing commander's complaint. It's damned interesting. I intend to have a dozen copies made of it.”

“I'll read it when I get home. I'm getting slightly sick.”

“It was that final drink, old lad. I warned you about mixing gin and champagne. Stop off at my place and read it. I'll have Dunsford fix you a stomach settler.”

H
OME TO
J
ACOB
was now a four-story house in Berkeley Square, with large offices, a conference room, Teletype machines, and batteries of telephones on the ground floor. It had been his father's London residence and was still filled with Lord Crewe's furnishings and artworks. Jacob had simply moved in and hung up his clothes. The Teletype machines had not missed a beat. The news did not pause in mourning.

“Feeling better?”

Martin had downed the fizzy concoction prepared by Jacob's butler and belched in response to the question.

“Excuse me—and thanks.”

“You know what the cockneys call gin, don't you?” Jacob said. “Blue ruin—because the face turns blue if one drinks enough of it. You're almost cerulean with your damned martinis.”

They were seated in the billiard room on the third floor, a solid room of mahogany, leather, and green baize.

“May I ask a question, Jacob—before I read this?”

“Fire away.”

“You've become obsessive about Fenton's problems during the past eight or nine months. Why?”

Jacob's expression was blank. “He's a friend of mine.”

“He's my friend as well, but he's not a child in the clutches of wicked guardians. He isn't even being singled out for special treatment, just handed a particularly rotten post. He has two choices. He can turn in his commission and come back to Civvy Street, or he can have Winifred and the kids move to Baghdad where he can see them at least occasionally.”

“Quite true, Martin. But in the first case, he will never hand in his commission—you know that as well as I do. And as for the second, there's a special cemetery in Baghdad for Europeans—mostly filled with women and children. Cholera and typhus are as common there as chilblains in an English winter. No, Martin. Fenton would never allow Winnie to go there. And neither would I.”

“I see.” Martin took out his glasses and settled back in his chair to read the report.

“Your utterance of
I see
had a peculiar tone to it,” Jacob said as he stepped to the liquor cabinet and reached for a decanter. “I don't think you see anything at all.”

“No. Nothing. I was given the Pulitzer because I'm stupid.”

Jacob poured some whiskey into a glass and downed it neat. “You see what, exactly?”

“A man in love with a married woman.”

“Is it that apparent?”

“It is to me. I also see a man in an agony of determination not to play David to a certain warrior's Uriah. You should have stuck to chorus girls—or lusty Russian Amazons—and not tangled yourself up in triangles.”

“I'm not ‘tangled up,' as you put it. Winnie and I have been having an affair—a love affair, at least from my point of view. Rather more of a
comfort
affair from hers. There's only one man she'll ever truly love, and it isn't me.” He poured another whiskey. “I thought on the day this whole thing started it would be the only day. I was wrong. We see each other whenever she gets down to London. There are only two ways it can end: if Fenton comes back to England, or if he dies in Iraq. In either case I lose. Give her up if he comes back, or, if he should be killed out there, I'll be faced with a pall of guilt so impenetrable that all the love in the world couldn't sweep it away. Bit of a do, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Martin said. “Bit of a do. How does whiskey mix with Bromo-Seltzer?”

“Quite well, actually.” He reached for decanter and glass. “I'll give you a dollop of good Highland malt and then,
please
, read that bloody report.”

The report was long and detailed. It was dated October 17, 1922, from F. Wood-Lacy, Lt. Col., 12 Batt., Bani el Abbas, to Officer Commanding 65th Brigade, Baghdad. Written in stiff, soldierly prose, it was an explanation of events that had occurred during an expedition against marauding Jangalis tribesmen between the 9th and the 23rd of September. Fenton's force had consisted of one troop of Indian cavalry, four Rolls-Royce armored cars, and two companies of soldiers, half on foot and the rest in Ford trucks. What had irritated the RAF command in Baghdad was the fact that Fenton had somehow—“in a devious manner,” the RAF referred to it—talked the RAF squadron commander at Tikrit out of a strictly punitive bombing of Jangalis villages in the Jebel Hamrin and into joining the army expedition. Two Bristol fighters had been modified—“severely altered without official sanction”—to hold radiotelegraph transmitters and receivers. Another radiotelegraph transmitter-receiver was installed in one of the Ford trucks, and a combined operation, controlled by Fenton on the ground, was then undertaken which succeeded in rounding up the tribesmen and disarming them with only a few casualties on either side. It was the “coordination of forces” that had infuriated RAF Baghdad.

“Seems damned clever to me,” Martin said, rubbing his eyes and putting his glasses in their case.

“Ah, yes. But too clever by half. You see, Martin, the RAF is the RAF and not the bloody army. They see themselves as the sole instrument for pacifying Iraq—that was Trenchard's promise to Whitehall: a few, relatively cheap squadrons of fighter-bombers to patrol the country and punish any tribes who revolt against King Faisal's quite unpopular regime. They consider the army to be mere guards along the railway pipelines and roads. The result being that the RAF punishes from the air by dropping bombs on villages and machine-gunning goat herds and camel herds and bedouin tents, but they're not achieving any permanent results. They're punishing, all right, but not pacifying. It takes troops to do that, and intelligent troop commanders who can sit down with the tribal leaders and work out truces and peace pacts.

“I think what Fenton did—and if I know Fenton, is still doing—warrants press exposure. It's novel—exciting—modern. I know that your boss would go for it—like a ton of bricks, as you Yanks say. Think of it, Martin. Radiotelegraphy—crude by current equipment, but still
radio
, old boy. Your man Kingsford's obsession. Bloody good publicity.”

Martin nodded and sipped his whiskey. “How will this help Fenton?”

“Well, I see it this way. Could backfire, of course, but that's the risk. Supposing INA—a totally objective news source—released a long article about a certain British colonel's novel methods in Iraq—dashing, yet sound; bold, innovative, up-to-the-minute, and, above all, successful. The
Daily Post
would print the article along with photographs and an editorial pleading for increased unity between the services, and for experimentation and freshness in military thinking. We would say that men on the order of Colonel Wood-Lacy could better serve their country by working on new ideas at the staff college, so that if, God forbid, we should ever have another war, our future generals wouldn't fight it like the last one.”

Jacob took a hefty drink and refilled his glass. “I think it might work. The timing is perfect. The government needs all the help it can get. I've had old Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin on the phone several times in the past few weeks asking me to please go soft on this or play down that or boost the other thing. They need me on their side. The article, the editorial, and a little quiet nudging from me will get a few telephones ringing in the War Office and Fenton will get new orders—in appreciation for a job well done. You'll see.”

“I hope you're right. Now all I have to do is convince Scott Kingsford that sending a reporter to Iraq is worth the expense.”

“Oh,” Jacob said airily, “I already cabled him and got an affirmative answer. I'll supply the transport and Kingsford will provide his best man—
you
, old chap.”

T
HE TWIN-ENGINE
F
ELIXSTOWE
F.5 flying boat, its graceful hull painted yellow, its nose adorned with discreet lettering—
London Daily Post
—cut the dark gray waters of the Medway, bounced gently, and then soared to the somber skies and headed for the English Channel. There were five passengers, half the maximum number, and the uniformed cabin attendant had no problem keeping everyone supplied with food and drink. Two of the passengers, a
Daily Post
reporter and a photographer, would disembark at the plane's first stop, Geneva. The rest would go on, with landings at Taranto and Crete for rest and refueling, then on to the Nile and Cairo.

Martin fell asleep on take-off and only awoke when the large plane touched down on the icy waters of Lake Geneva. When the flight resumed in the morning he still felt tired and realized, as he looked down at the snow-covered Alps, what a blessing this trip was for him. He had not argued against Jacob's rather crazy scheme—had not volunteered to tell him that if he wanted seven or eight thousand words praising Fenton to the skies he could write them without bothering to leave his office in Fleet Street.

An inner voice—a tired, played-out voice—had urged him to go. He was worn down by the day-to-day routine of running the bureau. Of days filled with hiring and firing, of slashing a blue pencil across miles of typewritten copy. Tired to the bone of sending off reams of trivia to the world's newspapers—fashion news from Paris; travel bargains in England, France, Spain, and Italy; gushing accounts of the activities of theatrical, motion-picture, and literary figures, sporting events; heartwarming tales of human interest and titillating crimes of passion. His vision of the world had been reduced to what came over the teleprinters, and was being molded and directed by the vision of Scott Kingsford. As he gazed down at the blue-green Adriatic and the Italian coastline, he knew that he had reached a point of decision. When the plane landed in the Gulf of Taranto and taxied slowly toward the seaplane base at Cape San Vito, he had made up his mind. This was his last job for the International News Agency.

The air service to Iraq was controlled by the British. There were two flights a month from Cairo to Baghdad via Amman in Trans-Jordania, a seven-and-a-half-hour flight in a converted Vickers Vimy bomber, lumbering and noisy. None of Martin's fellow passengers, mostly high-ranking army officers or civil servants, seemed overjoyed when Baghdad appeared out of the wastes of the desert below. A mud-brown city straddling the yellow flood of the Tigris. A frieze of date palms and the peacock hues of mosques and minarets provided the only dots of brightness in the dun-colored landscape.

“You're fortunate not to be arriving in June or July,” a man seated next to Martin remarked. He had something to do with the operation of the Baghdad-to-Basra railway, but Martin had forgotten his name.

“Oh, my, yes,” the man continued. “One simply cannot comprehend the heat unless one has spent a summer here. One hundred twelve degrees is not uncommon in the middle of the night. And I've seen it reach one hundred twenty-five degrees in New Street at two o'clock in the afternoon when a simoon was blowing. My poor wife spent only one summer here, spending her days deep in the
serdah
beneath the house and her nights on the roof being eaten alive by mosquitoes. And then our youngest died—from drinking unboiled milk. Cholera, you see. And so I sent them all packing back to Egypt. Alexandria is such a pleasant place.”

The builders of empire, Martin was thinking as he was being driven through the streets of the city after crossing the Maude Bridge. Making the railways run and drilling for oil in the sands. Young army and RAF officers with pink cheeks strolled through the streets on their way to their clubs, as cool and well dressed as though they were strolling along Piccadilly, barely glancing at the hordes of Kurds, Parsees, turbaned Moslems and Turks, Negro slaves, Armenians, Hebrew women covered from head to toe in silken robes, Chaldeans and Persians. The whole polyglot stew of the Middle East. The red-black-white-and-green flag of the kingdom of Iraq flew over the palace by the river, but the Union Jack hanging limply above the British Residency was the only flag that mattered.