“It’s all right, Ben,” MacIver said quietly. “I’ve seen it.”
The anger had spent itself. The voice now quiet and tired. “You see, MacIver,” he said in patient explanation to an equal, “I got all my roads and pathways blocked. Things fall into ’em, you see, scrapings, like rust in a drain.”
“That’s how it must be, Ben. I’ll leave you to rest, and come back later.”
“That’s right, MacIver. You fuck off.”
In fact, it hadn’t been easy to get another appointment. The nursing home didn’t want visitors upsetting their patients. They only relented when Winterbourne himself kept asking for him. This time, MacIver promised the Sister and vowed to himself, he would concentrate on the war and its aftermath. Enough on the bloody boyhood.
BW had had one experience of poison gas, before his fatal encounter. The first time, his platoon was entrenched at Passchendaele; mustard gas had been released off to the northeast; they had news of it over the radio, and were told to put on gas masks, because the wind would carry it down towards them; then the wind veered and carried the gas farther east, and after a while the all clear was given. “But even the order to put on the masks produced a pretty fair panic; some blokes felt suffocated just wearing the awful things, and some of us would relieve our own fright by preyin’ on them, loomin’ up sudden with those monster insect faces, so they had fits. Of course, you couldn’t tell foe from friend wearin’ that fuckin’ mask. I can remember one poor bugger ripped his off, just so he could be free to scream. You should’ve seen his ’orrible contorted face.”
The next time was for real. BW’s section had been sent out as a wire party into no-man’s-land. Quiet summer night, big guns quiet, not really dark enough. Most of them hadn’t even taken their masks with them; they had enough to carry, what with tools and bales of the lethal barbed wire, without that “edgy, bouncing box” around their necks. They never heard the cough of the mortars that lobbed two canisters smack into the middle of the section as it was grouped around a large artillery crater. It seemed nobody moved for a full minute. “It was as though we was frozen starin’ at two huge snakes lying there hissin’ at us. Then someone screamed Gas! at the top of his voice—you could’ve heard it in Brighton—and most of them started running like hell back to our lines. That was the whole fuckin’ point of it of course. The machine guns were waiting. Jerry sent up a flare, to show him what he was doing, and mowed down most of my friends right there in the open, lucky sods.” They didn’t mow down Ben: he couldn’t run, because he couldn’t see. “I was crawlin’ in and out of craters like a fuckin’ mole with acid in its eyes.”
They moved on to the casualty station—the care was brisk but very good. Everything seemed to confirm MacIver’s thesis that the farther from the battlefield the patient got, the more offhand, the less professional, the attention became, and the more distant the event in time, the more dismissive, and the more shaded-to-denial the official attitude dealing with it. MacIver remembered the mustachioed brigadier from the medical corps who finally in 1932 granted him an interview after much badgering from a sympathetic MP MacIver had enlisted. The man would clearly not have made it to even the middle ranks of the medical profession, and he had decided to try his hand at a soldierly persona instead; it had paid off for him, so he had driven on to complete a parody of the most Blimpish soldier: “People die in war, goddammit, but there’s no reason why they shouldn’t die well turned out” had been MacIver’s favorite line (spoken about the medic’s view that slovenly dress in the trenches had led to serious indiscipline and demoralization).
The brigadier sat ramrod straight, uniformed and bemedaled, just enough grey in the black hair to make it steely and senior, rather flushed, whether from the presence of MacIver or high blood pressure he could not diagnose. Square hands with tidy nails, and black hair on the back of them; they rested on the table on their sides, with one curled around the back of the other, and moved in tandem with minimal gestures up and down, two inches the maximum liftoff allowed for emphasis. The only strategy in the conversation, it emerged, was to maintain the official double-line intact, whatever artillery MacIver brought against it. The two facts, which any decent, reasonable man would grant immediately, were that every conceivable care had been taken of the gas victims, and that the whole episode had been blown out of proportion: “No, professor,” he said with weary disdain, “I’m afraid there’s a lot of mythology about this gas business. Of course, everyone’s afraid of what they can’t see. But really the gas played a pretty insignificant role: of all the disabilities after the war, only 2 percent were gas related. More than 60 percent of those were cured within seven weeks of their incident, more than 80 percent released from hospital, if you push it up to nine weeks. There is not a single case of death later than the eighth week from gassing. So in my view all the public agitation and Geneva protocols have made a mountain out of a molehill. I blame that painter fellow Sargent for some of the mass hysteria. I can’t believe the Imperial War Museum actually displays his picture to the public. Goddamn dilettante Yankee painter drives out to the front, visits a casualty station after tea, and goes home to paint columns of young soldiers with bandaged eyes, all in a drab mustard color, all playing blindman’s bluff, as they’re led through countless droves of sprawling comrades, all similarly afflicted. Gives a totally inflated view. If I had my way, I’d have burnt the damn painting.”
“Yes, I’ve read the medical reports, too,” MacIver said shortly. “But I have also visited 137 veterans of the war in nursing homes of one kind or another, whose lives have been permanently blighted by an incident with gas at least fourteen years ago.”
“Almost certainly,” the brigadier replied, trying to claim some medical high ground against this Commie academic, “these are the effects of neurasthenia interacting with a previous bronchial or asthmatic condition.”
It had got uglier after that. MacIver put the memory aside, and thought more about his platoon. There would be no gas casualties with this lot—he had seen too many of those already. But on average, he supposed, every platoon was likely to contain a spunky little tyke like Ben Winterbourne, not particularly good or bad, but as they say in the official character reports, “easily led.” MacIver played with this phrase for some minutes before going to sleep; it usually wore a negative connotation, implying “following unhealthy influences to no good end,” which he supposed meant following the line of least resistance, “unchecked by any principles of his own.” But why should the phrase always wear this negative aspect? A man like Alston would be easily led, in the sense that he would stay with you, follow your mind, and when the situation called for some initiative on his own, he would see what had to be done, not necessarily like lightning but effectively, maybe better than you would, and do it in good order. In the very brief period of his own command, MacIver remembered, he had been blessed with a whole crew trained to such discipline; the moments that had called for precise, prompt action can have amounted in sum to only a handful of minutes, but MacIver had been so disappointed that it came to an end, he now realized, that he had never really acknowledged how lucky he had been.
CHAPTER 4
The Young Star-Captains
Health bulletin on Professor MacIver: the patient spent a restless but tolerable night without any of the disgusting manifestations of the previous one. Still, there was pain, but bearable, and a fever that seemed to rise and fall in the course of the night—he rode its swales up and down, near the higher crests feeling light-headed and fearing a return of his delusions, but he held on; night sweats aplenty, and after the worst of them it was hard to find a dry place in the pillows or sheets. However, he was up before dawn, forcing himself to eat the now standard bit of seven-grain toast, the swallowing eased again with warm water, which he again followed with the chaser of tea with honey and lemon. His St. John’s Ambulance first aid course had recommended “warm, sweet tea” as a treatment for shock (at least for British patients); MacIver was n
ot feeling particularly shocked, but those people had run an empire, so it couldn’t have hurt. And now he was ready for work.
Lieutenant Simon Dodds
PLATOON COMMANDER
Simon Dodds was a born subaltern; by class and by the precise average of his talents and bearing, he could not be stationed much lower, and by the same criteria he was not likely, in any normal set of circumstances, to rise much higher—which MacIver knew was a pity. Soft brown hair and soft brown eyes and a soft full mouth, with a good straight nose between them— the whole impression left was of a genial slack passivity, a friendly animal going about his humdrum life halfway up the food chain, certainly no predator and not much of a prey. The strange thing was that a swift impression offered a slight resemblance to his sergeant, Reggie Braddis. They could have come out of the same Norfolk gene pool, though Braddis’s life and inner demons had hardened him and prepared him for tougher games, forcing the bone closer to the skin, the mind into tighter knots of calculation.
There seemed nothing tough about Dodds. He was the son of a Church of England vicar in a poor East Anglian village, a forgotten church for an abstracted man, whose thoughts streamed as airy and unengaged as the Norfolk clouds passing overhead. His father viewed his son, his only child, with benign puzzlement and a sense that it would be an act of arrogance to expect much from him. The mother, a sweet woman, worked with nervous worry to anchor down some details in her husband’s simple life. The boy, by Vagueness out of Dither, turned out placid. He moved indistinctly, with hardly a bow wave, through the village school and on to a lesser public school. He was no trouble to anyone else, and seemed to trouble himself very little with whatever work was expected of him; he got by, but mastery was not within his horizon. He sent from school no signals of passion or curiosity out into the world, and so left his teachers with the impression that he was dull and self-contained.
Which was a true impression, unless you moved him to a different world—the world where boats are sailed on water. To see Simon Dodds at the tiller of his spanking fourteen-foot dinghy, the Windrush, beating up the Broads and catching the last breath of air to offset the turn of the tide, was to see a different animal altogether, a knowing, engaged citizen of the curling by-ways of the Flatlands. Here the gates of his senses were open and alert to every changing impression. His nose scented the precise degrees of mud and salt in the inchmeal gains of land and sea against each other. He saw the slices of shadow off the banks darkening the water and cutting off its corners, and heard the first breath of the evening breeze rattle the reeds, and the last call of the bittern going to bed. This world was his, the whole geography of the place, with its huge sky and grudging threads of water, and the strange abrupt landmarks thrown up apparently always out of place behind the sedge: the sawn-off church tower, the windmill sails bodiless, each one suggesting by its dislocation that you can’t get there from here. In such a world you learn patience and humility, you take what the even tug of sheet and tiller gives you; and when you know the channels as well as Simon Dodds, you accept that sooner or later, if you let it lead you, the river will tilt its way out of sight and become the main thoroughfare of a lost old village becalmed, where a little jetty is offered for your mooring, and you can stretch your legs on a narrow street, and open the door with its tinkle of welcome into a shop that will sell you eggs and sailcloth and everything in between.
MacIver knew that Dodds was a lot tougher than he looked, that he formed his own judgments on the things he cared about, that he could make sharp, accurate decisions when they were called for, and that he also maintained what he cared for with a passionate conscientiousness—the Windrush was always repaired with original materials. His assumed blandness of personality in school more likely reflected on the material he was taught and on some of the teachers who taught it, than on him. He did not find them or it interesting, though he would not be obnoxious about it. In his present situation he did not care much for the high command or their grandiose strategic plans—they seemed to him to have confined the largest qualified, willing fighting force ever assembled into the most static and fatal dead-end that could be devised. What he cared for now was the thirty-man platoon that had been entrusted to him; his role, as he saw it, was to keep his men safe and their morale high; there would be no suicidal heroics, but he and his platoon would perform bravely when under grave threat. He had swiftly discerned that he had only one significant worry—Braddis.
MacIver had no questions about Dodds’s power of leadership, but he did wonder why a man who cared so much about boats was not in the navy. He supposed the obverse question could be asked about him: why had someone who had spent a great many years studying the army and its behavior in World War I not pursued that interest in its sequel, but entered the navy instead? In his own case, MacIver knew there were many answers: 1) he had said some harsh things about the army, and was not sure how well he would be received there; 2) (related to above) much of what he knew about the army did not endear it to him; 3) perhaps he shared his father’s distaste for “coming down in the mud.” There could be many answers for Dodds, too: 1) what the navy did nowadays did not strike him as sailing at all—there was no tacking, no proper use of the wind etc.: the damn things just went where you pointed them; 2) he had already captained his own vessel, and the demotion to some humble and partial capacity, which might well not look at water at all, would certainly hurt; 3) his father, not as vague as he looked, had a parishioner who could secure a relatively quick commission for him with the Norfolks—there was nothing so promising on the navy front. MacIver thought number three was quite likely.
MacIver cooked his supper according to the Rules (tonight, humble scrambled eggs from powder, bacon, and peas) and made himself eat some of it; then he poured himself a small shot of Lagavulin and warmed it with an inch of water. The concert tonight was more Mozart, the Vespers De Confessore; he replayed the exquisite Laudate dominum three times, aching over and over at the soprano’s long “Amen,” the word expressing assent, and the music yearning for something more. Then he sat on sipping his scotch and retelling himself his only real war story.
Behold Lieutenant Commander MacIver on the bridge of his first and only command, the destroyer HMS Constant, bound from Weymouth to the French border town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the final fall of the war, September 1944. This made all his navy experience worthwhile—from basic training through dockyard clerk and on to the gunnery course, the post as second officer on a destroyer escorting convoys of merchant ships in the Atlantic (a post that set a high premium on staying awake), the dreary months doing secretarial duties at the Admiralty (editing the “flimsies,” the annual performance ratings on every officer), and finally to promotion and this plum, thanks to a grateful admiral, who liked his writing and his rugby. “Have fun with this,” Admiral Parkinson had said cheerfully. “The Constant’s a fine ship, though on her way to being a little dinosaur—no radar. But then your target hasn’t any either, so it will be a fair match!”
Their orders were to destroy one of the last German outposts on the French Atlantic coast, and particularly the large gun emplacements on the cliffs north of the town; it had seemingly been forgotten in the withdrawal of the Wehrmacht northwards after the Normandy landing. They would land a company of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, under a Major Lockeford, replacing the German garrison with an Allied one. Their duties would be to maintain a border patrol and intercept enemy stragglers, especially any important ones who might be making a break southwards for neutral Spain. After landing the soldiers and giving them three days to settle themselves, they would leave, sending cordial messages from international waters to the naval commandant as they swung past San Sebastian, and head south (more greetings to Lisbon); they were to have two days at Gibraltar, and then join the Allied fleet at Toulon.
On board the Constant morale was high, for all the crowding from Major Lockeford’s company. Leaving Weymouth at 0800 hours on a sunny morning, they had a
calm uninterrupted crossing through the following night. It was warmer as they closed on the target; MacIver fancied that the offshore breezes brought them authentic scents of late summer, of the last fruits ripening, the vintage readying.
“I know this town,” MacIver remarked to the major, as they sailed through the night; he had invited him to join him on the bridge. An older man, this, but footslogging solid, MacIver thought. Square face, warm brown eyes, watched your face as you talked, relaxed in response, but quicker with the leading question than to give anything away himself.
“From when?”
“1936—I was here on holiday with my girlfriend.”
“You had fun?”
“We did. It was late summer, as now—wonderful fruits and vegetables, tiny sweet melons, and artichokes as big as soccer balls.”
“What did you do?”
“Not a whole lot to do. We swam and ate and hiked along the cliffs and into the mountains. We watched pelota with the old men under the plane trees, and danced with the rest of the town in the square through the night after the big tuna fleet returned. Place was crawling at the time with journalists covering the Spanish civil war. Otherwise a sleepy town. Always has been, I think. Its role is to be just off to the side of the big events and personalities.”
“What do you see heading in there now?”
“I see a battery of willing, ready gunners, serving under a competent officer.”
He actually saw, or at least imagined, more than that. Coming down to zero hour in any competitive situation, MacIver had the habit of focusing on his opposite number, in this case the commander of the small detail left for the tail end of the Atlantic Wall. Clearly the German was no high flyer, not someone earmarked for swift promotion, but a careful, even interesting person. For your own good, you had to assume that, even at this late juncture, he and his men were still on their toes. In his mind’s eye, MacIver saw a benign older man, perhaps a faded aristocrat without influence, a mere Hauptmann to whom he gave the name of Von Massenbach, a maverick teacher in a Gymnasium, say, who still looked after his boys in this safe billet by the sea, but also taught them the discipline of gunnery, whose mathematics he had always enjoyed. He was able to translate angles and trajectories to the stretch of rock and water around them, when they still had surplus shells and could rig up decoy targets to train on. These people might have no radar directing their guns, but the schoolmaster did his best without it. MacIver could see him making practice interesting. His young battery had success with their decoy targets, and were confident they would have the same success with the real thing.
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 5
