Heart of War (7 page)

The R.S.M. saluted and went out with a crash of nailed ammunition boots. Quentin opened the first letter, from his son: Guy now had a hundred hours in his logbook; a week ago he had almost crashed his aeroplane landing in a sudden snowstorm; he had bought a motor bike and was using it to drive round Salisbury Plain and Pewsey Vale; had his father ever seen Stonehenge?

Quentin smiled a little grimly, to himself. Where did the boy think the Regular Army used to train? He knew that part of the Plain between Tidworth and the Henge like the back of his hand. He continued reading. They were a ripping good crowd of fellows at Upavon; one had unfortunately already been killed; they'd all been sent up immediately afterward so that they wouldn't lose their nerve; Guy thought it would have been more sensible to spend some time telling them exactly what the poor chap had done wrong, so that they could avoid doing the same; he was really not very good at flying, but had so far come out first in all the machine-gun practices, both those on the ground and those fired from the air; it might be different with Boelcke or von Rackow firing back at him … Mummy wrote sometimes, and seemed well. Lots of love …

Mummy wrote sometimes
. Well, he was glad Fiona wrote to
someone, but she certainly did not write to him, her husband. His only news of her came through Guy. It was Guy who had told him, in a letter, that she had apparently changed her intention to leave them all. She'd told him – Guy – at Christmas, that she had long been in love with another man and was going away to live with him as soon as Guy joined the Royal Flying Corps; and in the New Year she'd gone to London … but had come back, saying nothing. Guy had suggested that she must have changed her mind about the other man, but Quentin found that hard to believe. He didn't know what to believe. Meanwhile, he felt unhappy, and had to be careful not to take it out on the eight hundred men whose lives were his responsibility.

He opened the other letter. His brother Tom's ship had been transferred from blockade duty to the Grand Fleet, and was with the main Battle Squadrons in Scapa Flow. It would be the best assignment in the Navy if the German High Seas Fleet ever came out to fight. In the meantime, it was the most boring imaginable: training, rehearsal, retraining, re-rehearsal, practice alerts, exercises, and always the grey skies, icy winds, and driving rain of the Orkneys. He wished Quentin luck, and advised him to take care of himself.

Quentin smiled again, again grimly. Take care of himself, as Commanding Officer of an infantry battalion on the Western Front? It could be done. Regrettably, it was being done, even by regular officers; but he, Quentin Rowland, could not do it. For twenty years and more he had had only one ambition in life – to command the 1st Battalion of the Weald Light Infantry, in action; and here he was, commanding it in the greatest war in history. He could not cheapen the fulfillment of his dream, however frightened he became and, good heavens, up there, only a madman would not be frightened, at times.

His nephew, Boy Rowland, came in, saluting, followed by a lieutenant of Royal Engineers, who announced that Corps Headquarters were sending him round all battalions in rest areas to run a short course in the care and management of Bangalore torpedoes. ‘Good, good!' Quentin said, standing up. He felt unaccountably jovial, and said, ‘Fix it up with my adjutant here … Are you mad, married, or Methodist, eh?' He always liked to put visiting
sappers and gunners at ease, just as much as he disliked to see red-tabbed staff officers. But the engineer drew himself up and said, ‘I'm a Wesleyan, sir, and married, but I don't see … '

‘Sorry,' Quentin mumbled, ‘just a joke we used to make about regular sapper officers.'

The lieutenant said coldly, ‘I am not a regular, sir. Before the war I was assistant chief sewage engineer of Cardiff.'

Outside, over the insistent moaning of the wind, they all heard the rapid thud of hoof beats. Boy turned as a soldier burst in through the door, pulled himself together, and saluted – ‘Message from Brigade, sir. Most Immediate.'

Quentin took it and read, while Boy scribbled his signature on the receipt form. The messenger saluted again and ran out. A moment later they heard the galloping hoof beats again, receding.

Quentin looked up – ‘G.H.Q. believe a heavy German attack against the French is imminent, probably round Verdun. They intend to mass troops in the Arras area, to take advantage of any weakening of the German positions there. The division is to move at once. Our leading companies to entrain at Armentières at twelve noon.'

Boy looked at his watch. ‘It's nine now, sir … and Armentières is six miles away.' He hurried out, and a moment later the Quarterguard bugler blew the battalion call, followed by Stand To, then Officers.

The writer meant skirted overalls, Christopher Cate said to himself; though some women were wearing the trousered sort. Shocking, at first, but the jobs they were doing really demanded them. They'd be indecent if they were climbing ladders, and painting high walls and cleaning windows, in skirts …

Weddings were exhausting. He yawned. Sunday morning, and in an hour he'd have to get ready for church. There was the Sunday paper on the desk … he'd never catch up at this rate … have to make a determined attack on it after lunch, instead of having a snooze … also make notes for tomorrow's meeting of the Mid-Scarrow War Problems Committee …

His son came in – ‘Daddy, I have to go back to school after lunch.'

‘I know, Laurence,' Cate said cheerfully, ‘I've warned Norton.'

‘Cyril the stable boy's joined up, hasn't he?'

Cate nodded. ‘Yes, and barely sixteen … gave a false age, of course. Plenty of spirit, that boy has, even if he did insist on wearing those garish ties. Well, I suppose that showed his spirit, too.'

Laurence said, ‘Wish I could go, too.' Cate looked up – ‘You wait till the end of the summer term, Laurence. Officers must have a little more maturity.'

Laurence changed the subject. ‘Can you give me five bob, Daddy? I saw a book called
Raptors of the World
, in the bookshop window in Godalming. I'd love to buy it.'

Cate fished in his pocket and gave his son two half crowns. ‘Here you are.' He found another half crown – ‘And while you're there, buy Ian Hay's new book,
The First Hundred Thousand
. It'll tell you a lot about the sort of men you'll be commanding. It's a citizen Army now.'

‘All right, Daddy,' Laurence said, pocketing the coins. Outside the door he heaved a deep, silent sigh and went to find Jack and Jill, the cocker spaniels, to take them for a short walk before it came time to go to church.

Bob Stratton sat in the kitchen where he always had his high tea, enjoying the sausage and mash that had been served with it today. He was sixty-seven, works foreman at the Rowland Motor Car Company factory. It was bright in there, the gas mantle hissing low over the table with its blue-and-white-checkered cloth. Steam rose from the kettle, and the aroma from the tea filled his nostrils. The two women, Jane, his wife, and Nellie, the servant girl, stood attentively behind him, watching to see what he wanted, Jane now and then murmuring an order to the girl in a low voice.

Without looking up Bob said, ‘Where's Ethel?'

‘Helping Anne with the children. She'll be back by seven … Mr Willibanks asked her to marry him again. Came round here special, at dinner time. She said no.'

‘Still hoping Fagioletti will come back to her?'

‘She is … but he won't.' There was a triumphant note in his wife's voice, and Bob looked up, ‘How do you know?'

“Cos he's going to get his call up notice!'

‘But they're not taking married men.'

‘That's just it! He divorced our Ethel so he could live with that dirty Italian woman he had … making Ethel sign that paper she'd gone with other men when she hadn't looked at one, the very idea! But he's not married! So I wrote to the Army people who ought to know that … Frank found out who I should write to, and I did, I gave them his name and address and told them he's British by naturalization, as he says, though he'll never be an Englishman if he lives to be a hundred, just a dago …'

Bob swallowed a piece of sausage. She was a peaceable enough woman most of the time, but threaten any of her children and she became a tigress … out for blood. But this time she was cutting off her nose to spite her face, if their daughter, Ethel, really still loved Fagioletti. A live waiter
might, some day, come back and make her happy: a dead soldier never could. They'd had two sons at the war, but now it was only one – Fred, the officer, with the Wealds somewhere out there. The other, Frank, was a sergeant with the Wealds when he'd been badly wounded just before Chrismas last year; he was in Lady Blackwell's Hospital here in Hedlington … and now one of the two sons-in-law was likely going out there …

He finished his cup of tea, nodded to the two women, went out of the room, down the passage, and out of the back door. He always went to his shed at the bottom of the garden after his high tea; there was no need to say anything.

Once inside the shed he lit the gas mantle, closed and bolted the door behind him, placed a certain picture, an advertisement for a motor car, in the window, facing outwards, drew the curtains, stood back, and stared hungrily, like a man gloating over a beautiful, waiting woman: only what he was looking at was a beauty of steel and chrome, the racing motor cycle he was building here for an attack on the world's speed record – Victoria. The handlebars were curved out and down, so that the rider would lie almost flat along the petrol tank, offering little resistance to the wind. The tyres were thin and hard, offering little resistance to the road. The engine had two big cylinders. There was no headlamp, nor place for one – no carrier, no mudguards … a naked, gleaming beauty, existing for only one purpose.

Bob ran his hand slowly over her, then sat down and stared … the vee-twin cylinder engine was a Blumfield … he had himself changed the valves from side to overhead, with the help of some high tensile steel that Guy Rowland had got for him from an aircraft company … ‘lightweight wheels … frame of steel tubing built by Bob himself following Cotton's theories … Sturmey Archer gearbox and chain drive for both primary and final drive. He'd started with chain primary and rubber vee-belt final drive, but the vee-belt just wasn't capable of transmitting the power output he was attaining … He'd got her up to 92 but he desperately wanted to be the first man to take a motor cycle over 100 miles an hour. What more could he do to Victoria to reach that goal?

Most of the new work was being done over in America. They were building engines with hemispherical combustion
chambers, and valve cutaways in the piston tops. And they were using alcohol fuel. He could try that. The engine ran cooler, he'd read – so he could cut off some of the cooling fins on the cylinders, reducing weight. Another way to reduce weight would be to plane down the fly wheel … another, to use still narrower tyres on the front wheel, and that, according to the technical papers, improved steering as well …

The tap at the window made him start violently, for he had forgotten he had put the picture there. He lowered the light and opened the door. The girl who slipped in was about four feet eleven inches tall, pale skinned, lank haired. She was wearing a dress a little below her knees, torn but carefully patched in half a dozen places. On her feet she wore a pair of men's boots, several sizes too large for her, with no stockings. As Bob closed and locked the door behind her, he felt a powerful stirring in his loins … there were breasts budding under the thin material of the dress, but they were not yet big enough to put him off. It was still a girl. He was fully erect and straining inside his trousers. It would be there, the slit, dark, mysterious, hairless, pouting from the bulge of flesh that curved down between the thin thighs. He reached out and lifted the dress. She was wearing no drawers, and as the dress rose, the girl saying nothing, her loins came into view. Bob stared, trembling, uncontrollable ecstasy flowing out from him as though from a gaping wound. Oh God, the slit was half hidden by hair, and there was a little patch of it on the mound above. His erection drooped and faded as he let the dress drop. ‘You've grown,' he said accusingly. He turned away in disgust and disappointment. This was a woman, not a girl.