One Man's Flag

by David Downing

  “No, he didn’t. I asked him a couple of times in my letters, but he never gave me a real answer. Was it something to do with your brother?”

  “That was part of it.” His failure to offer condolences was, she supposed, fair enough—he and Mac might have been on the train that Colm had tried to blow up. “You knew who Jack was working for? When we were all on the Manchuria, I mean.”

  “We had a vague idea he was doing work for the government, but he only actually told us in New York. I take it he didn’t tell you.”

  “No,” she said. And that was what had truly done for them, before Colm even entered the picture. The man who’d said he loved her hadn’t even dared to tell her what his work was. How could she ever trust him after that?

  “And he had a hand in arresting your brother?” Jed half asked, half guessed.

  “Yes.” She managed a wry smile. “Though he did try to let him go.”

  Jed smiled back. “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised about that.”

  “I was.”

  “You shouldn’t have been. He was crazy about you.”

  And I about him, she thought. But maybe crazy was exactly the word for what they’d had. Crazy never worked for long. “It seems a lifetime ago,” she said, hoping to close the subject.

  “Doesn’t it,” Jed said. “Well, at least Mac and I saw the world before we ended up here.”

  She couldn’t help asking. “Where is Jack? Do you know?”

  “In India, last I heard.”

  “Keeping the empire safe,” she murmured. Her political influence over men was obviously less than she’d hoped. She didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed that he was so far away.

  “Aren’t we all,” Jed said wryly. “I don’t suppose you’re going back to England in the near future?”

  “Yes. I was only waiting to see you.”

  “I hope it was worth it.”

  “It was. And give my regards to Mac.”

  “I will. But the reason I asked—could you take a letter for my mother and post it once you get to London? It would be nice not to worry about the censors for once and write something natural. I could write it here if you don’t mind waiting.”

  “Of course not.”

  He borrowed her pen, begged some paper from the hotel, and sat there scribbling for fifteen minutes. Watching him write to his mother, she could see the boy she remembered from eighteen months before, sharing a joke with Mac or out on the promenade deck with the missionary’s golden-haired daughter.

  Feeling tears well up in her eyes, she wondered whom they were for. For Jed? For all the soldiers out there with such an uncertain future? For the loss of all she thought she had known and felt on that ship?

  It was in Dieppe that Caitlin noticed she was being followed once more. The young Englishman sitting on the other side of the half-empty restaurant kept giving her sidelong glances and then looking away when she stared at him. He might just be sex-starved, she supposed, but he made no attempt to engage her, and the fact that he wasn’t wearing a uniform made her suspicious. Her hotel was only a hundred yards away, and a quick look back on reaching the entrance found him thirty yards behind her. There was no prospective suitor’s knock on her door that evening, but he was there in the lobby next morning when she left for the boat.

  She had grown accustomed to the presence of an official shadow in the days following Colm’s arrest, when the British authorities were presumably still wondering whether she’d been involved, and again a month or so later when Michael Killen had first made contact on behalf of the Irish Citizen Army. The latter surveillance had lasted quite a while and ended for no apparent reason just after Christmas. Had the British finally realized she posed no threat, or had they, as Michael believed, simply run out of man power?

  She didn’t see her new shadow in the boarding hall at Dieppe, but the place was so busy that that wasn’t surprising. She wondered what she’d done to warrant him. Had the British somehow gotten wind of her meeting with Roger Casement?

  It had been an interesting two months, she thought as she stood on deck watching the French coastline recede. Kollontai, Berlin with all its contradictions, Casement and his sad bunch of soldiers, Zimmerwald’s club of revolutionaries. The staffs and patients of the two field hospitals, who really differed only in the languages they spoke. All of them fighting their different wars.

  She hadn’t written the article that Casement had asked for. Such a piece would probably fall on deaf ears, but if by some miracle it didn’t and numerous young Irish-Americans did hasten across the ocean to die for the cause, she didn’t want to feel responsible. Knowing how bitterly Colm would have argued the point was upsetting, but not enough to change her mind. Hadn’t the two of them always argued?

  As for what she had promised her brother . . . well, what had she learned from Frau Suhr? Nothing, really. Colm and his comrades had not cut a deal with the Germans; they had hoped to prove that they would make an effective ally and had, in the end, shown little more than a willingness to die. An honest account would spread the blame widely. His father for never loving him, his acting stepmother for favoring his sisters, the British for mistreating Ireland, the Irish for romanticizing the struggle to evict them. Herself for not even noticing how far her brother had ventured down a path of no return. And, of course, Colm himself. He had sacrificed his life for a possible footnote in a history of glorious Irish failures. An honest account would leave nothing out, and one day she might try to write one. What she couldn’t do was provide what Colm had asked for—a tale of righteous heroism, written in hope of inspiring more of the same. “I’m sorry,” she told him and the rolling sea. “I think you were wrong.”

  She thought about Jed McColl, who a year ago had seemed so much younger than Colm, just a boy in thrall to the world he was slowly discovering, and who now seemed so much older than Colm would ever be. Which brought her back to Jack. He’d been crazy about her, according to Jed. She’d thought so, too, until that day—that moment that still made her blood run cold—when she’d realized the full extent of his treachery. And maybe he had been—Jed hadn’t any reason to lie. It made no difference—there was no doubting the fact he’d betrayed her. And he was half a world away.

  It was beginning to rain, and she reluctantly went back inside for the final half hour of the crossing. At Newhaven there seemed little in the way of inspection until her turn arrived and the official who’d blithely waved everyone else through insisted on searching her suitcase and demanded to see her passport. Removing the latter from the cardboard tube in which she carried it, he spread the document out on his table and subjected it to the minutest examination, fingering the seal to make sure it was the right kind of wax and requesting her signature for the sake of comparison. As she offered an apologetic glance to those queuing behind her, she noticed her shadow from the previous evening.

  He was there again at Victoria, already out on the platform as she stepped down from the ladies-only compartment. Looking back from her cab as it drove across Chelsea Bridge, she could see several others behind them, but all had disappeared by the time they reached her Clapham lodgings. Of course the British police already knew where she lived.

  The only obvious change to her room was a blanket coating of dust—if anyone had searched it, they had done so a long time ago. She shook off the coverlet, lay down on the bed, and asked herself whether a permanent shadow would get in the way of her doing her job. She couldn’t see how. It was slightly unnerving—and probably intended as such—but since she was doing nothing illegal, she really had nothing to fear. Let them wear out their boots!

  She felt a little less sanguine next morning. How would Sylvia Pankhurst and the London branch of Cumann na mBan, both of whom she planned to visit that day, feel about her bringing the police to their respective doors? In the event, she didn’t have to find out. The Germans had finally execute
d Edith Cavell, the British nurse in Belgium whom they’d held for over two months, and given every journalist in Europe his or her story for the rest of the week.

  Cavell, as Caitlin learned that morning at a Whitehall briefing for the neutral press, had died a martyr’s death. This woman of forty-nine, who had nursed countless wounded men—English, French, and German—back to health, had been condemned for helping to hide just a few Allied soldiers, and the global campaign to save her had been coldly rebuffed. More proof, her hosts proclaimed, that the Hun was beyond redemption.

  Her death was a godsend to the Allies, and Caitlin could hardly believe that the Germans had been so stupid.

  It wasn’t as if the Allies had much of a case. The American ambassador in London had been in frequent contact with his counterpart in Brussels, and the tale the latter told, which Caitlin heard from an embassy friend, was much less clear-cut than the British version. As far as she could tell, Edith Cavell had let her patriotic impulses take her way beyond the realm of nursing, to the point where she had actually helped to smuggle Allied soldiers across the Dutch frontier. This was in breach of occupation law and of the Geneva Convention. The Germans had every right to execute the woman but would have been so much wiser not to.

  This wasn’t a popular angle in Britain, and probably not in America either. She wrote a piece that largely ignored the Germans and painted Edith Cavell in simple colors, as someone who had chosen to die for her country, like the thousands of men who were perishing out on the battlefield. Like Colm, she thought, and found herself sourly wondering whether Cavell’s vision of England had been any more real than her brother’s of Ireland.

  It took over a week for the furor to subside, and during those days her shadow mysteriously disappeared. Had his bosses decided that she was harmless? She could only hope.

  Feeling liberated, she took the bus out to Poplar. Keir Hardie had finally died a month ago, and Caitlin was prepared to find her friend in mourning, but Sylvia, though red-eyed from tears or lack of sleep, was as busy as ever. With the war now into its second year, she was receiving hundreds of letters from soldiers bemoaning conditions at the front and almost as many visits from the families of those already disabled or killed. Sylvia gave what practical help she could and published the most heartrending accounts in The Women’s Dreadnought. Reading through a recent copy of the magazine, Caitlin came across the obituary that Sylvia had written for her former lover, a man with the “heart of a child near to God.”

  The famous playwright George Bernard Shaw, in a short, bitter valediction, said he could “not see what Hardie could do but die.” How could anyone expect him to “sit there among the poor slaves who imagined themselves Socialists until the touchstone of war found them out and exposed them for what they are?”

  Seven-Inch Hems

  The Marmora was not one of Peninsular & Oriental’s more modern vessels. It was comfortable enough in an old-worldly sort of way, but as the ship sailed westward across the Arabian Sea, the captain seemed disinclined to push its speed much beyond ten knots, and even this caused the engine to clank alarmingly. After complaints from high-ranking passengers that their beauty sleep was being interrupted, an even slower pace was set at night.

  McColl’s fellow passengers were a mixed bunch—Indian Civil Service retirees returning to their homeland, businessmen and government employees, young men who had finally decided, for who knew what reason, that it was time to join the colors. There were a few wives, but the only single women McColl noticed were a couple of nurses intent on pursuing their vocation much closer to the front. The company as a whole seemed almost equally divided between those determined to uphold prewar standards of dress, decorum, and social precedence and those who saw the war as the perfect excuse to leave all that nonsense behind. When a crew member dared to dance with a passenger, some threw their hands up in disgust, others in jubilation.

  McColl found himself angry with all of them, angrier than seemed sensible. He was also having trouble getting to sleep, though not on account of the engines—his mind was either racing or seething, and the cabin seemed claustrophobically small. After a week’s worth of nights spent pacing the deck, he found that even the moon was making him angry, and he consulted the ship’s doctor. “Something that’ll put me to sleep,” he urged the young Anglo-Indian.

  The doctor was not so biddable. Before dispensing pills, he was keen to learn some personal history and, after listening to an edited account of McColl’s recent experiences, asked him if he’d had a major shock.

  “No . . . well, yes, I suppose so,” McColl admitted. “Someone aimed a gun at me and pulled the trigger, but it didn’t go off. I suppose that was a shock.” Sitting there, he could feel a coldness spreading through his chest.

  “Two, perhaps,” the doctor said. “The first that you were about to die, the second that you weren’t. This is delayed shock that you’re suffering from. You’re probably in a constant rage.”

  “Well . . .”

  “I’ve seen it before,” the doctor told him. “My sister was attacked in the street. Quite badly, but it looked for all the world as if she’d put the whole business behind her. Except she hadn’t—she’d just buried it. These things have to be dealt with. And if your conscious brain doesn’t do it, then your unconscious will find some way to punish you.”

  Which made some sort of sense. McColl decided not to complicate matters by telling the doctor how angry he’d often felt before the incident outside Cuthbertson & Harper’s. “So what do I do?”

  “Think about what happened. Feel it, relive it. There won’t be a blinding flash, but if you stop repressing the feelings, they’ll lose their power over you. In the meantime I’ll give you some valerian to help you sleep.”

  “Thank you.”

  The doctor handed over a small bottle, with instructions already printed on the label. “Imagine how many men are experiencing this sort of shock in the trenches,” he remarked. “Imagine how much anger they’ll be left with.”

  McColl didn’t find that a comforting thought. Would several million men be busily reliving the horrors of war for years to come? Over the next couple of days, he did make a conscious effort to reexperience those moments outside Cuthbertson & Harper’s, and he found that immersion did indeed bring him out in a cold sweat. Whether it was that or the valerian, he began to sleep a little better and dislike his fellow passengers a little less fiercely. Score one for Freud.

  After two weeks at sea, they reached Aden, and with the whole day needed for coaling, he took himself off for some sightseeing, first walking round Steamer Point and then hiring a covered horse-drawn carriage to carry him round the crater-set town. The loincloth-clad young boy who did the driving rarely stopped conversing with his horse, but as Arabic wasn’t one of McColl’s languages, the subjects under discussion remained a mystery. The town itself seemed sunk in torpor, with only a few graceful minarets to alleviate the overall impression of squalor and neglect.

  After taking almost a week to traverse the Red Sea, the Marmora reached the southern end of the Suez Canal. Earlier that year Turkish forces had reached the western bank—some had spent a few heady days on the African side—and though a general retreat into Sinai had followed, occasional raiding parties still emerged from the desert and fired a few shots at passing ships. The possibility of witnessing such excitement proved too much for the Marmora’s bored passengers, who crowded the starboard rail for the passage of the canal, staring hopefully out at the sandy wastes. Judging by scraps of overheard conversation, McColl gathered that the general expectation was of men in baggy silk trousers, scimitars glinting in the sun. He forbore from pointing out that the modern Turks had much the same dress and weaponry as everyone else and that the sighting of a Turkish field gun might not bode well for their ship.

  He was more than happy to reach Port Said, where the coaling took place by night, hundreds of Arab boys carrying it aboard in bas
kets filled from adjacent barges. Several of his fellow passengers seemed entranced by the performance—“like ants building a nest,” as one man put it. Several stood beside the rail long into the evening, handkerchiefs shielding their nostrils and mouths from the irritating dust.

  Next morning they entered the Mediterranean. It was late October by this time, and for several days the skies were overcast. No warships were sighted, but that was hardly surprising, since the Allied ships in the neighborhood were all engaged in blocking their enemies’ egress from the Adriatic and the Dardanelles. The only threat to the Marmora’s safety was the clutch of German U-boats based at the Austrian port of Pola, which had so far shown no inclination to attack civilian ships. Still, it paid to take precautions, and several lifeboat drills were held.

  During these gray days in the eastern Mediterranean, McColl was surprised to find himself daydreaming of India—the awful climate and predatory insects were consigned to harmless anecdote, the vibrancy of light and color so conspicuous by their absence. And then, as the ship drew closer to its destination, he began wondering where Cumming might send him next. Out on a limb these past twelve months, McColl had little idea what the Service had been doing since he left England. Back then a turf war had been brewing with the War Office over who should take the leading role in neutral Holland and occupied Belgium, and the Service itself had been putting down roots in Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. By this time Cumming had probably planted agents all across the Middle East, and maybe even in South America. Anyplace the Germans might meddle.

  For all McColl knew, the Service had undercover agents in Germany itself. Several German spies had been captured in Britain, but not, as far as he knew, his old adversary Rainer von Schön. Where in the world was he at work?