Henry Fitzwilliam's War

by Don Jacobson

  Her closeness in his darkness rattled him. More than words passed between them. There was a charge. Although she never touched him, Henry felt a surge as if a bolt had jumped between two nodes of an arc light. There was a comfort in her aura that unsettled him to his core.

  He felt her move away, and as she did so, his soul pulled toward her like unsettled iron filings aligning themselves with a lodestone.

  She called, loudly now, “Doctor…Doctor Campbell…come here.

  “Tell me about this young man’s situation”

  The tag left on Henry’s chest was grabbed once again. After scanning it quickly the doctor addressed his inquisitor.

  “Well, he was gassed four days ago in Loos. The fact that he is still with us tells me that he inhaled only a little. If anything, the mucous membranes around his eyes were more affected than his lungs. Seems he also has some flash burns on top of the effects of the chlorine.

  “He either will recover or he won’t. My money is on a return to health. I cannot say to what level his lungs and eyes will be affected over the long run, but I imagine that, with proper care, he should be on the mend quickly enough so we can send him home.

  “And, I am sorry Leftenant, but your war is over. You will heal, but not enough to avoid being invalided out.”

  Henry sagged at these words. One big battle…and then only minutes of it. All that to be sent home a cripple?

  Henry bitterly replied, “Really…doctor? There is no chance…I…can return…to my…men?”

  The Voice soothingly said, “But imagine your mother’s relief to have her son back. You may not be able to fight, but I am certain the War Office will put you to work.”

  Staccato footsteps once again approached. The younger female voice stated emphatically, “I couldn’t find any more pillows, ma’am. I did discover this large sack of rice in the commissary. I think we could slide it under his shoulders and do the job.”

  There was a thump. Though he could not see, Henry could imagine an elegant gloved fist driving into the burlap. He smiled under his gauze.

  “Hmmmpf. An inventive solution, my dear. You may have a future yet. All right, the doctor and I will gently lift the Leftenant a bit higher. Mr. Williams, relax your arms once we raise you. Sister, you will push the bag long ways between his shoulders and part way down his back. Then place his pillow between the bag and his head. We will then lower him onto it.”

  As he listened to her detailed instructions, Henry could only imagine her at the top end of a giant map table as she and other generals plotted the fate of armies. She was used to command and to have people listen to her.

  Within moments, the maneuver was completed. Henry felt the rice shift under his weight, conforming to his body as his weight settled onto the bag. His muscles relaxed once the strain was lifted from his arms. Breathing came easier, quicker.

  Then he made the mistake of trying to take a deep breath. His body instantly rebelled with a huge spasm and a bout of racking coughs that expelled foulness into the mask. The stink gagged him, and, struggling, he pulled the dripping mass away from his mouth.

  He was engulfed in roses and cut grass again. Gentle arms encircled him and turned his body. He felt cool metal against his cheek. Supported by her arms and leaning onto her, he felt that same electricity as before, but also a deep sense of security.

  “Spit it out into the basin, Leftenant. Your body wants to be rid of it, so cough it up. I will hold you until you are finished.

  “Doctor, what would be the best therapy for Mr. Williams?”

  A pause as the man thought and then, “I would like to get him out of this dusty environment filled with men still wearing the battlefield and bringing god-knows-what corruption through the doors.

  “Williams needs to be without a mask. It keeps the dirt out, but also prevents him from ejecting the effluvia his body has produced to protect his airways. He needs to bathe those injured lung tissues with clean air. I would imagine we might treat him like a tubercular, with plenty of fresh air in a quiet environment away from everything else.

  “As for his eyes, I would like to keep them under wraps until we get him back home. Change the bandages and medication…but only in a darkened room. I fear the strain would be too much.”

  After that the cabal surrounding him was quiet for nearly a minute. Henry strained against the silence, trying to discern the emotions being exchanged a foot above his heaving chest.

  The Voice then commanded, “There is nothing for it. He must come to my House by the beach.”

  Chapter Four

  La maison de plage à Deauville, October 4, 1915

  With the Voice watching them, the orderlies handled Henry with kid gloves, bringing him up the front stairs headfirst. They carried him down a hall and depositing him, when directed, onto a large sofa in the Master and Mistresses’ shared rooms, an affectation scoffed at by many aristocrats as it implied a shared marriage bed. However, the young spinster, Miss Darcy, had requested this layout when she designed the House back in the late Regency period. Perhaps she had been thinking of her brother and his wife. In any event, the soldier was installed in the suite of honor.

  The Voice instantly took command. “Now, men, the maid has pulled a tub of warm water in the bathroom beyond that door over there. You will assist the Leftenant in undressing. You need to guide him to the bath and then scrub him before putting him to bed. Carefully wash his hair and do not drench those bandages! The last thing we want to do now is to track down a nurse to rewrap his eyes.

  “I have left some of my husband’s pajamas on the bed. They are of a size, so I am certain that he will wear them comfortably. Please help him dress and then, once he is in bed and covered, you may leave. Am I understood?

  “Mr. Williams. These men will help you. I am certain that you wish to move about on your own, but you have endured a very traumatic experience. I would be annoyed if you decided to prance about like you were taking the air in Hyde Park. Will you promise me that you will remain abed?

  “Otherwise, I can have Monsieur Jacques sit with you. You would be amazed at his strength. He is a short-tempered Alsatian. Seems the Huns turned his family into refugees the last time they invaded in 1870.[vii] And, in spite of being just a young boy at the time, he has nurtured a deep hatred for all things Teutonic for nearly 45 years. Even though I have been his mistress for since the ‘90s, I have yet to get him to understand that the English and the Germans are not the same race.”

  Direct. To the point. Never gainsaid. This is a woman used to leading. I doubt if she would ever be willing to meekly stand in anybody’s shadow. She’s been obeyed for quite a while. Sounds older. And this Jacques…best not to cross him.

  “Ma’am…I will...do...as you and the…. doctors command. Bath…then bed,” he haltingly replied.

  “Fair enough, Mr. Williams. I shall leave you to your handlers. I must work with my maid to move my things next door to my son’s room. Even in this depopulated town, there would be talk if Letty had to run in here every time I needed a shawl or stockings.

  “Then, I shall see to some food. I imagine you have had little in your belly since you went over the top,” the Lady said.

  Henry sensed her departure as her scent diminished and the door closed, the latch softly clicking home as her hand gently left the knob.

  

  He had barely finished his broth when he began to nod in utter fatigue. He thanked her with hand gestures and a few whispered words, but begged to be allowed to rest. Could they speak later?

  He settled back into the downy pillows and, as she watched, drifted quickly off to sleep.

  She mused that he was so young, this man lying in front of her, breathing softly with the ragged sound of his injured lungs subdued now. Only old Jacques—there are no young men left in civilian France, she thought wryly—and Letty, her maid, knew that this was the bed she and her husband shared. Madame Brouillard, the cook, lived with her husband in town and had rarely been above
stairs. Everybody else in her life was away. Her son was also fighting, but in East Africa. Her daughter had been sent safely to school in Switzerland.

  And her husband…how she missed him…

  He insisted that he needed to be part of the war. He had pulled his colonel’s uniform out of the closet that steamy day last August when Mr. Asquith delivered his war message, and young men marched the streets to the sounds of people screaming their joy that British manhood would be tested and proven in the fires of glorious battle.

  What foolish insanity. Those beautiful boys striding into their doom, their names only to be seen in final War Office telegrams delivered to front doors women refused to open…if only to have one last second of their old lives Before…

  Her poor man: he almost ran to the War Office only to be told that if not too old, he was too infirm to join in the fight. Then they sent him straight to Whitehall where he and the Frenchman Monnet[viii] put their heads together to try and bring some sense to the competing efforts to supply their armies. So, he hung up the uniform and pulled out his cut-away coat and striped pants to play the diplomat and lead the legions of pasty-faced grey men whose trench was the office, supplying bullets and boots, tapping a widening flood of ships steaming from the New World to the Old. He spent more time in Washington dealing with the Americans than anywhere else.

  Since he took up his post a year ago, sleep had been difficult for her. With only a few exceptions, he had not shared her bed for more than two consecutive nights. If it was not the call of one Parliamentary committee or another that kept him occupied to the small hours of the morning, it was the duty of a commander to lead not follow. His front was not to be found lined with sandbags above a trench in northwestern France but rather in thousands of factories and farms from Pittsburgh to Minneapolis.

  Now, the bed was too light without his solid weight against the springs. His hand on her hip was missing. Unlike most of their class, they never had kept separate bedrooms in more than 20 years of marriage. Throughout, even when they were not intimate, his wide back was that secure wall under which she burrowed for warmth and comfort. She was alone and felt it keenly. The hustle and bustle of London without him only reminded her of just how out-of-place she could feel even after all these years.

  The Beach House at Deauville was the only place that she cherished more than her home near the Peaks. If they could not get to Provence, Britain’s aristocrats haunted the streets and cottages of Deauville. The open airy feeling of the town’s northwest facing beaches gave the illusion of peace even in the most turbulent times. The hiss of the wind across the sandy expanse soothed her worries.

  She closed up the London townhouse in late April. Her husband could bunk in at his club with the other single men if he was in Town. She sent a wire to Monsieur Jacques and letters to her son and daughter. The short hop on the Dover-Calais steamer, made longer by incessant zigzagging to avoid U-boats, brought her closer to surcease. Jacques’ son, Maxim, days away from his own call-up, drove her old Renault AG[ix] to the quay. He loaded her bags atop the cabriolet and swathed her in a duster, cap and goggles. The juddering trip from the port to the beach took several hours on rutted paths that threatened to break spokes a dozen times.

  But, at the end of the rattling and bouncing passage was Home. Behind a half-wall of rose bush covered mortared fieldstone, creamy yellow walls were set off by blue trim beneath a grey slate roof. Except on the rainiest of windswept days, windows throughout the house were thrown open to allow the salt air into every corner. Gentle joy washed over her soul as she walked up the flagstones leading to the broad rear porch. Here, come most mornings, Letty would discover her sound asleep on one of the chaises longue facing the beach.

  And so she spent the past months. Days idly walking the beach were punctuated by the cultivation of her favorite rose varieties along the wall. Those flowers, particularly the golden Lady Annes and Lizzy’s Own Red Bourbons, lifted her spirits, reminding her of her sister’s home gleaming pinkly in the late afternoon sun in the valley shadowed by the Peaks. What must it have been like there when she, her husband and their two children were in residence? She wished she could have been there to share the family’s joy and to relieve her own aching loss at not having been by her side that last awful day when her sister’s hands fitfully picked at the covers, quieting eventually, with the glimmer in those fine eyes extinguished.

  Reflecting on the past was bad business if all it brought was pain. Her sister would have reminded her of that, to be sure, impertinent as she was.

  So, best remain in the present. Those strolls on the beach were filled with the reading of sporadic letters from her children, terse telegrams from her husband and clippings from British papers mailed to her by her sister-in-law. At night, when Jacques would fire up the generator in the old shed next to the garage, she would dive into the books lining the walls of the smallish library.

  Snuggled under a rich navy-blue cashmere afghan she had crocheted during her first pregnancy, she read of Mr. Verne’s travels and Mr. Welles time machine[x]. Heart of Darkness depressed her when she realized that Conrad was writing about the corrosive nature of Europe’s actions in Africa and Asia; nationalistic imperialism was a large part of the cancer that had been eating away at Europe’s soul for decades. And that disease had now blasted its way into total malignancy with the present war.

  Deep thoughts. Suitable for Mary or maybe Lizzy. What would Papa think if he knew that one of “the silliest girls in all of England” had turned into a bluestocking?

  The sky outside the windows overlooking the beach began to turn orange as “golden time” started to take hold with the October sun making its daily dip in the Channel. The room was tinted with gold. The tone swept across the sleeping boy’s face above the white sheets and quilt. She fixed her eyes on his firm mouth and strong aquiline nose, the only features not swathed in gauze. Tufts of brown hair, fresh and cleaned by Canthrox shampoo, tumbled onto the starched white pillowcase.

  Even wounded, he was beautiful, fully a man with broad shoulders and a well-hewn chest and abdomen. She had peeked when the orderlies had begun stripping his clothes away—oh, please, I may be an old woman of six-and-forty with two well-weaned children, but I am not dead yet! Even now, she could see the man he was to become, capable of command from position and authority, but able to love with great tenderness. But that was decades in his future.

  He was younger than he knew.

  And younger than she would ever know him.

  Chapter Five

  For the first time in days he dreamed. Nothing terrible. In fact, the misty lands were bright and colorful. Who said you dreamt in black and white? There was no war. Only the soft, swooshing sounds that hung from cerulean skies like gentle draperies, everywhere, but nowhere and invisible. And the aroma. At times it was cut grass. At others, roses were dominant. Yet, through every part of his vision, there was this great calmness, never in the center, but off to the side, not controlling, but rather moderating. No, not God, but rather an eternal femaleness: Woman.

  Was she Ariadne or Venus? He felt sensuality but not eroticism. There was love; deep abiding love. A love that would lave the wounds scoured across your heart, healing injuries laid there by others, less caring of you than of themselves. This love came from the deepest reaches of the human core. Eve it was! The All-Mother, the perfect complement to his soul.

  And he knew that the moment he awoke, he would lose Her.

  The rhythmic sound gradually became louder. With each crescendo, his closeness to the Peace was diminished, the depths of aloneness nearer. The sound’s pull dragged him away from his dreams. He clawed and fought, but he could not stay.

  He jerked as darkness slammed shut the doorway to the dreamtime. His conscious mind tried to grasp the lack of vision, coming so swiftly on the heels of his vivid fantasies. He involuntarily gasped and inhaled suddenly…which led to a series of chest-wracking coughs.

  The he felt her hand on his shoulder. And t
hen he heard her voice explaining.

  “Hold still. Calmly now. You are safe here in the House. You have been sleeping for several hours. Your eyes are bandaged and you cannot see at the moment. That will be, the doctors assure me, temporary.

  “Try to take regular breaths, shallow ones if that feels better. Do you require anything at the moment? Do you need to relieve yourself?” she asked.

  Henry turned his head on the crisp coolness of the pillowcase toward the sound of her voice and smiled—or at least he hoped he smiled.

  Odd how, when blind, you wonder if your expressions are correct. Yet, without a mirror, you can never see yourself smile.

  Seeking to fashion a somewhat witty, if halting, reply, he japed, “It has been months…since I enjoyed the comfort…of cool porcelain. More often than…not, the necessaries at the front…leave you wishing you had held out. In one case you…cannot breathe without gagging. In the other…you are picking splinters out of…”

  He broke off, suddenly embarrassed, realizing that this was a cultured, civilized woman, not a fellow Tommie.

  “Oh, my Lady, I am…so sorry. I apparently left…all of my gentle manners…in that shell hole in Loos…I repay your kindness… with rudeness. Please, I beg of you, forgive me,” he said, totally abject.

  She waited a full minute before replying. The punishment of her silence was enough. Her smiling words brought him back.

  “Mr. Williams, thank you for having the sensibility to be abashed. And thank you for elevating me in your estimation. Perhaps when we know each other better, you may alter your opinion.