Give Us This Day (76 page)

Just beyond the plank verandah of The Hermitage was a buddleia and on hot days he would move out there to watch the butterflies skirmishing round every blossom. Red Admirals, Peacocks, Tortoiseshells, Commas, and his firm favourites, the local Chalkhill Blues, all making a Donnybrook Fair of the bush. He sometimes watched them for thirty minutes at a stretch. But the birds and the butterflies, with the single exception of Joe, the cheese connoisseur, took him very much for granted, whereas his warier tenants did not, regulating their comings and goings by the degree of solitude he enjoyed.

There was the old grey badger, whose set was inherited from a line of ancestors stretching back to a time when this part of the Weald formed the western margin of the Rhine estuary. He was a suspicious old codger and it took Adam months to win his confidence, but once this was achieved Old Blubb (his grizzled, flattish head and wary looks reminded Adam vividly of Blubb, the ex-coachee who managed the Kentish Triangle in the ‘sixties) took him very much on trust when he poked around looking for fresh bracken for his set. On the spur behind the house there were other familiars, an old dog fox that had learned the hunt never drew this near the house and rarely ventured off limits. Adam would watch him upwind, “loping along like a Pathan scout,” Adam observed, and wearing a self-satisfied grin on his return from a successful hunting foray. He thought, as he watched,
I’ll wager he’s led every local pack about here a dance or two in his day, but they’ll never catch him now. He’s like me, a born survivor.

Down on the banks of the stream that he had diverted from the river to keep his lily-ponds filled, he often saw otters, voles, herons, and the comical long-tailed field mice who seemed to live mainly on insects they found on the wild irises, although Adam knew their winter stores of food were treasure houses of berries, nuts, peas, and grain.

It was watching these tenants of his, over a period of months and years, that went some way towards adjusting his views about the world outside. He reasoned, They manage their affairs much better than we do. Stick to their ow
n patch and never kill, save for food. Whereas, look at us. We’ve been roaming and pillaging ever since we came out of the trees, and it’ll bring us down in the end.

And then, when the evenings grew shorter, he would take to going into the house, and paid visits to his inanimate friends. Here, too, he had his favourites, some of them under glass and never handled save by himself or a fellow connoisseur. There were many examples of the English and Irish glass blowers’ art, opaque glasses with twist stems, baluster stem glasses with a royal monogram, a pair of magnificent Jacobite goblets, engraved with the image of the two Pretenders, and a flagon showing the Stuart rose with six petals.

He was less zealous of his silver-ware, extending to Henrietta and Phoebe Fraser the privilege of keeping the pieces bright, but the maids were forbidden to handle his china after one dropped a Derby comport and made the mistake of trying to excuse herself by saying, “I was in that of a rare hurry, sir.” He was usually very tolerant with the servants, but Rachel, the culprit on this occasion, got a tonguelashing. “If the man who had made the comport had been in that of a hurry,” he roared, “you wouldn’t have had the privilege of laying your hands on a piece of craftsmanship made by people who took their work seriously! From now on
I’ll
do the china dusting in this house, and that’s an order!”

It was one of his very rare flashes of temper, for usually the mere contemplation of his treasures brought him serenity. He loved to ponder the moulded decoration in the form of mermaids and festoons on his George I salt cellars, the fan and chrysanthemum motifs on his early Worcester glazes, and his choice pieces of Nantgarw, Pinxton, Coalport, and Rockingham. But above he loved of his late eighteenth-century English furniture, pier tables, pole-screens, rosewood veneered tables inlaid with brass, japanned corner cabinets, the Torricellian barometer in the hall, and his magnificent breakfront bookcase, veneered with curled mahogany, measuring nine feet, two and a half inches by twelve feet five inches and holding nothing but calf-bound books, the earliest an atlas, dating from the sixteenthcentury, the latest a first edition of
Gulliver’s Travels.

He could tell how and when he had acquired each piece; by cajolery, by hard bargaining, and sometimes (for he was a shrewd and a not altogether scrupulous collector) by pretending to do a customer a favour by relieving him of something he regarded as inherited junk. There was very little in the house that was made outside Britain. “We’re the finest craftsmen in the world,” he would claim. Adding with a characteristic touch of cynicism, he said, “At least, we were, before chaps like George got it into their heads that everything had to be done at the double!” And when George reminded him that he, too, in his heyday, had advertised the speed of his deliveries in the press, he said, “So I did, but I had more sense than to treat a consignment of Worcester china as if I was hauling a load of turnips. Look at our insurance files if you want proof of it. No, no, I reckoned one claim a month was excessive and proof of bad bedding-down or sloppy offloading.”

If there was one part of his collection that afforded him more contemplative satisfaction than another, it was his picture gallery, where, he would claim, “There isn’t a canvas that won’t treble in value before you boys trundle me up to that churchyard yonder, some that haven’t done so already for that matter.”

If he was prejudiced in favour of English silversmiths, English and Irish glassblowers, and English cabinet makers, he was more catholic in his taste for paintings. Up here, along the wainscotted walls of the east and west galleries, or concentrated in the big drawing-room where there was a north light, he had several Dutch masters, including a Van Huysum, two Fragonards, a Claude, and a Granach, besides a selection of English landscape artists, among them a Constable that he had bought at an auction—“Held on a day when a timely blizzard kept everyone with a longer purse away from the auction mart!” He took great pleasure in his English landscapes, for they reminded him of his forays up and down the shires since his first prospecting trip on horseback in 1858. In addition to Constable, artists like Crome, Cotman, Richard Wilson, and Bonnington were well represented, reproducing the four seasons and most areas of the country, and when some of his more pernickety visitors expressed regret that he had never been able to get his hands on the work of one or more of the greats, a Leonardo, a Rembrandt or a Velasquez, he would protest, “But, damn it, I didn’t haul goods across Italy or Holland or Spain! I made my living right
there
, in
that
narrow country lane, dragging a ton of goods over
that
very hill, or fording
that
particular river and often in
that
kind of weather!”

It was a strange kind of conceit, but they left him to it. After all, he was a very old man and could be forgiven his eccentricities.

Nine

Upon St. Vitus’s Day

O
n the twenty-fifth of June 1914, a thick-set, middle-aged man wearing the uniform of a general of the Austro-Hungarian Army set out on the first engagement of a three-day assignment in the province of Bosnia, in southeast Europe.

Plumed, girdled, fiercely moustached and over-bemedalled, he accompanied his wife, Sophie, in a drive from the small spa of Ilidze into the capital, Sarajevo. His approach was greeted with respectful acclaim on the part of the mixed population of Serbs, Croats, and Turks, and the Serbo-Croat shout of
“Zivio!”
betokened his welcome. But that was no more than his due as heir apparent to the AustroHungarian throne.

In the local bazaar, where he and Sophie did a little shopping, the crowds were so thick that his entourage had to clear a path for the visitors, but one man, a narrowfaced, slightly-built nineteen-year-old, did not shout
“Zivio!”
He was too absorbed taking stock of the couple he was to shoot dead three days hence, on Saint Vitus’s Day, June 28, a Serbian national holiday.

The movements of these three people, the Archduke Ferdinand, his morganatic wife, Sophie, and their slayer, Gavrilo Princip, over the next seventy-two hours were to have a direct impact upon the lives of every man, woman, and child in Europe; to some extent, every man, woman, and child then living on the planet, and succeeding generations; to a time long after the hauling firm of Swann-on-Wheels had been forgotten. Because of them, because of their momentary impulses and trivial decisions within this short span of time, ten million Europeans were to die violent deaths within the next four years. Double that number were to live out their lives as chronic or partial invalids. Empires would dissolve, national frontiers would undergo drastic changes, and crowned monarchs would become hunted fugitives. Yet neither of these, two men, momentarily within touching distance of one another, were aware of more than a tiny fraction of those whose lives were cut short by their encounter. Their encounter that day, or their ultimate confrontation three days later.

* * *

The ensuing two days were spent by the Archduke witnessing the manoeuvres of twenty-two thousand troops in the mountain country near the capital; by Princip, the assassin, in brooding, conferring with fellow assassins and visiting, for the purpose of renewing an oath, the grave of a dead revolutionary called Zerajic, buried in that portion of the Sarajevo churchyard reserved for criminals and suicides.

At the conclusion of the army manoeuvres, the Archduke, well-pleased, wrote, “I had been convinced that I would find nothing but the best and my expectations were fully confirmed by the outstanding performances of all officers and men.” On the same day, Princip, together with two fellow conspirators, wrote a postcard to a common friend living in Switzerland, but what they wrote is not recorded.

* * *

Far away to the southeast, in Punjab mountain scenery more dramatic than the Bosnian crags, Alexander Swann’s occupations during these corresponding days of June had something in common with these men.

Seven thousand feet up in the foothills of the Himalayas, breathing an atmosphere rarefied not only by the mountain air but by the social graces and taboos of the British Raj, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Swann had occasion both to brood and to write, as he studied the reports of a batch of young officers undergoing a course of instruction in a climate that their fellow subalterns, sweating it out on the plains, would have envied. For Simla, the summer residence of the Viceroy, was, by European standards, the most civilised and salubrious town in the subcontinent of India at that time. A visiting artist had written of it, “Everything here is so English… one would fancy oneself in Margate.”

Unfortunately, however, Alex was too dedicated a man to enjoy the mountain air, or anything Simla had to offer in the way of social amusements. Never much of a mixer, he was currently engaged on work that distressed him, both as a highlyspecialised professional soldier and as a rationalist. For he, too, in a sense, had been engaged in reviewing and his conclusions were less euphoric than those of Franz Ferdinand in faraway Bosnia. The field work of the candidates, he decided, had been sloppy in the extreme, but if possible that sloppiness was exceeded by their written work. Putting them together he was hard put to it to find a single student eligible for a recommendation to a staff college.

This was bad enough, out of a course of twenty-four. What was worse was the underlying reason for the overall poor quality. The young men selected were either favourites, with some kind of backstairs influence, or regimental failures, the kind of men a busy colonel would not miss for a month or so, and one reason or the other accounted for their presence here. Otherwise it was very unlikely that they would have been detached for the course in the first place. In addition, nearly all the candidates were cavalrymen.

Take Willoughby-Nairn, for instance, typical of the kind of subaltern Alex had encountered all over the Empire during the last thirty years. Twenty-three, the younger son of a guardee, and an Admiral’s daughter; educated Eton; gazetted to a smart regiment on passing Sandhurst at his third attempt. Cherubic-looking, easy-mannered, a great favourite with the ladies, the winner of innumerable polo cups and pig-sticking trophies but running slightly to fat, despite so much outdoor exercise. A proven toper in the mess. Much given to skylarking. Supremely satisfied with his own modest attainments and his future. As a soldier in the field recklessly brave, no doubt; as a leader of men, worthless; as a trainer of soldiers, worse than useless.

His pen hovered over Lieutenant Willoughby-Nairn’s character summary at the foot of page three of his report, and he would have given a month’s pay to write a truthful assessment of this arrogant young puppy, who embodied all that he most detested in the service. But by now he knew his limitations, both as a small-arms fanatic and as the son of a tradesman. He wrote, “In my view this officer is not temperamentally suited for staff work,” and left it at that.

He said rather more in his daily letter to Lydia, for his wife was his emotional safety valve on all these occasions. Of the class in general, he wrote, “God help those led by these men in any scrape with a modernised army. Their sole hope of survival would be the elimination of their platoon commander in the first brush and his replacement by a time-serving N.C.O. I use the word ‘platoon’ rather than ‘squadron’ advisedly. What nobody here seems to realise is that, in a war with any disciplined force, every man jack among them would serve as an infantryman. I warned my class of that one day last week. Those who were awake looked at me as if I had uttered a blasphemy, as indeed I had in their view…”

An overbold monkey, one of the many he had heard thrumming on the iron roof over his head all the afternoon, made a quick grab through the open window at a bowl of fruit on the ledge and suffered for Lieutenant Willoughby-Nairn’s shortcomings. Seizing the first opportunity to release his inner tensions, Alexander Swann, square peg in a round hole, smashed his fist down on the intruder, clipping the end of his tail. The monkey fled, screaming with rage. Alex picked up his pen and resumed writing.

The incident afforded him no more than temporary relief. Soon, shuffling his reports, he rose and made his way through a labyrinth of corridors to the Mall outside, threading his way down the winding road towards the barracks. Past block after block of some of the ugliest administrative buildings in the world, monstrosities raised on girders held together with stanchions and roofed with corrugated iron. Architectural eyesores that had been described as “pyramids of disused tramcars.” Past the premises of military tailors, past estate agents, a bank, two provision merchants, a very English-looking church, Peliti’s Restaurant (where you could learn who was cuckolding whom), and as he went rubbing shoulders with Pathans, Sikhs, and Tibetans, with strolling Europeans, civil and military, and a string of panting rickshaw drivers. He had eyes for nothing and nobody. The accumulated weight of his misgivings bore on him like a heavy burden. A few high-ranking officers had been impressed by his reiterated pleas for increased fire-power. Had it been otherwise, he would not have been here, marking the test papers of the Willoughby-Nairns, but he knew, and they knew, that his sponsors, men of Haldane’s and Roberts’s calibre, would not be confronting the enemy if and when the challenge came. That would fall to the Willoughby-Nairns, mostly to men half his age, who thought of him, most of them, as a prig and a bore.

It was the price, he supposed, of having seen so many men needlessly sacrificed in a dozen campaigns; that, plus the misfortune of being born of a practical mother and an imaginative father and of having inherited their common sense, but not their humour.

He went on past the trim houses of the Little Tin Gods, with their Sikh guards and their regimented rows of lupins, on down the Mall in the general direction of the vice-regal palace. His steps led him instinctively towards the range, silent at this hour of the day when parades were over and Europeans took their ease.

The armoury was housed in a long shed, a hundred yards beyond the guardhouse. He acknowledged the salute of the sentries and passed inside, pausing to glance through the barred window of the building and seeing there something that mildly surprised him, at least enough to penetrate the gloom that had tormented him since he sat down to mark those test-papers. A shirt-sleeved lance-corporal was at the bench, coiling belts of heavy machine-gun ammunition, and something reverential in the youngster’s movements arrested him. The gun, dismantled, lay on the bench but the lance-corporal was wholly absorbed, coiling the belts like a bride-to-be winding ribbons. Alex went inside and the young soldier—Alex judged him to be no more than twenty at the most—sprang to attention, his arms held stiffly by his sides, thumbs in line with the seams of his breeches.

“Are you the armoury guard detail?”

“No,
sir
!”

“What are you doing here? Are you on duty in the guardhouse?”

“No,
sir
!”

“Did you strip that Vickers?”

“Yessir.”

“You were given authority?”

“Sergeant of the guard.
Sir.”

The young man seemed petrified in the presence of a lieutenant-colonel. He held himself poker straight, and when he spoke his lips moved like those of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“All right, lance-corporal. Stand at ease.”

The man relaxed, muscle by muscle. It was like watching someone thaw.

“You’re interested in the heavy machine-gun?”

“Yessir.”

“But not a qualified machine-gunner?”

“No, sir.”

“Then who taught you to strip a gun?”

“No one, sir… I… I watched… watched it being done during the course, sir.”

“Then you must recognise me as the instructor?”

“Yessir.”

“What are your duties on the range?”

“Setting up targets, sir.”

“But you have never actually handled a gun until now?”

“No, sir.”

“Could you reassemble it?”

“I believe so, sir.”

“Do it then.”

He took a seat on the end of the bench, watching the lance-corporal’s expression. His body was at ease, or nearly so, but his features were still frozen into a blankness bordering on that of an imbecile. Yet gradually, as his hands closed over the dismantled pieces of shining metal, the expression changed, the hard, staring look softening to one of dreamy absorption. The oil-stained fingers, long and supple, moving very rapidly but with infinite precision. The only sound in the hut was the soft click of metal as the gun took shape. Alex glanced down at his watch, then at the man’s hands, then at his watch again. The operation occupied one minute, fifteen seconds. He said, “What’s your name, lance-corporal?”

“Hunter, sir.”

“How long have you been out, Hunter?”

“Two months, sir.”

“Where do you live in England?”

“Kent, sir.”

“What part of Kent?”

“A place called Hildenborough, sir.”

“Then you probably know my father’s home, Tryst, near Twyforde?”

“Yessir.” There was a pause. “I used to deliver telegrams there, sir. Before I enlisted.”

It was an odd coincidence. He must sometimes have seen the boy, pushing his red bicycle up the steep drive from the old mill-house, for telegrams from the Tonbridge office were constantly arriving at Tryst, especially in the years before his father had installed a telephone.

He sat pondering a moment, Lance-Corporal Hunter having stepped back a pace and resumed his at-ease posture, head up, legs astride, hands clasped behind his back.

“Automatic weapons fascinate you, Hunter?”

“Yessir.”

“Since when? You never saw one during your recruits’ training.”

“Since I was a kid… a child, sir. I once watched a demonstration at a tattoo.”

“Where was that?”

“At Hythe, sir.”

“You have applied for transfer to a machine-gun section?”

“Yessir. But there’s a long waiting-list, sir.”

“Are you sure of that, Hunter?”

“So I was told, sir. Sergeant Topham, sir.”

“Strip that gun down again.”

The young soldier leaped forward, his hands seeming to tear the segments apart, but he laid each of them down on the bench with infinite care. The operation was completed in under the minute.

“I’ll recommend you personally, Hunter.”

The lance-corporal’s jaw dropped an inch, but then, his reflexes reminding him that this was disrespectful, it snapped shut again.

“Thank you,
sir
.”

“Where is your sergeant now?”

“In the guardhouse, sir.”

“Thank you, Hunter. Expect to begin training tomorrow after first parade. I shall be here. I’ll arrange your course of instruction myself. Now reassemble the gun.”

“Sir!”

He did not wait to see it done, but went out without a backward glance, his step appreciably lighter. The weight had lifted from his brow and he thought, making his way over the scrupulously-swept asphalt towards the guardhouse,
What the devil does it matter if the Willoughby-Nairns of this world go to their graves without learning the difference between a lance and a Vickers machine-gun? Providing, in places like there, here and on home stations, there are waiting-lists of Lance-Corporal Hunters?