by Follett, Ken
Sir John’s advance on Sunday was embarrassingly cautious, Fitz felt, but to his relief it was enough to force von Kluck to meet the threat by sending troops he could not easily spare. Now the German was fighting on two fronts, west and south, every commander’s nightmare.
Fitz woke up on Monday morning, after a night on a blanket on the château floor, feeling optimistic. He had breakfast in the officers’ mess, then waited impatiently for the spotter planes to return from their morning sortie. War was either a mad dash or futile inactivity. In the grounds of the château was a church said to date from the year 1000, and he went to look at it, but he had never really understood what people saw in old churches.
The reconnaissance debriefing took place in the magnificent salon overlooking the park and the river. The officers sat on camp chairs at a cheap board table with lavish eighteenth-century decor all around them. Sir John had a jutting chin and a mouth that seemed, underneath the white walrus mustache, to be permanently twisted into an expression of injured pride.
The aviators reported that there was open country ahead of the British force, because the German columns were marching away north.
Fitz was elated. The Allied counterattack had been unexpected, and the Germans had been caught napping, it seemed. Of course they would regroup soon, but for now they seemed to be in trouble.
He waited for Sir John to order a rapid advance but, disappointingly, the commander simply confirmed the limited objectives set earlier.
Fitz wrote his report in French, then got into his car. He drove the twenty-five miles to Paris as fast as he could against the flow of trucks, cars, and horse-drawn vehicles leaving the city, crammed with people and piled high with luggage, heading south to escape the Germans.
In Paris he was delayed by a formation of dark-skinned Algerian troops marching across the city from one railway station to another. Their officers rode mules and wore bright red cloaks. As they passed, women gave them flowers and fruit, and café proprietors brought them cold drinks.
When they had passed, Fitz drove on to Les Invalides and took his report into the school.
Once again, the British reconnaissance confirmed the French reports. Some German forces were retreating. “We must press the attack!” said the old general. “Where are the British?”
Fitz went to the map and pointed to the British position and the marching objectives given by Sir John for the end of the day.
“It’s not enough!” said Galliéni angrily. “You must be more aggressive! We need you to attack, so that von Kluck will be too busy with you to reinforce his flank. When will you cross the river Marne?”
Fitz could not say. He felt ashamed. He agreed with every caustic word Galliéni uttered, but he could not admit it, so he merely said: “I will emphasize this to Sir John most strongly, General.”
But Galliéni was already figuring out how to compensate for British lassitude. “We will send the 7th Division of the 4 Corps to reinforce Manoury’s army on the Ourcq River this afternoon,” he said decisively.
Immediately his staff began to write out orders.
Then Colonel Dupuys said: “General, we don’t have enough trains to get them all there by this evening.”
“Then use cars,” said Galliéni.
“Cars?” Dupuys looked baffled. “Where would we get that many cars?”
“Hire taxis!”
Everyone in the room stared at him. Had the general gone off his head?
“Telephone the chief of police,” said Galliéni. “Tell him to order his men to stop every taxi in the city, kick out the passengers, and direct the drivers here. We will fill them with soldiers and send them to the battlefield.”
Fitz grinned when he realized Galliéni was serious. This was the kind of attitude he liked. Let’s do whatever it takes, just so long as we win.
Dupuys shrugged and picked up a telephone. “Please get the chief of police on the phone immediately,” he said.
Fitz thought: I have to see this.
He went outside and lit a cigar. He did not have long to wait. After a few minutes a red Renault taxi came across the Alexander III Bridge, drove around the large ornamental lawn, and parked in front of the main building. It was followed by two more, then a dozen, then a hundred.
In a couple of hours several hundred identical red taxis were parked at Les Invalides. Fitz had never seen anything like it.
The cabbies leaned against their cars, smoking pipes and talking animatedly, waiting for instructions. Every driver had a different theory as to why they were there.
Eventually Dupuys came out of the school and across the street with a loud-hailer in one hand and a sheaf of army requisition slips in the other. He climbed on the bonnet of a taxi, and the drivers fell quiet.
“The military commander of Paris requires five hundred taxis to go from here to Blagny,” he shouted through the megaphone.
The drivers stared at him in incredulous silence.
“There each car will pick up five soldiers and drive them to Nanteuil.”
Nanteuil was thirty miles east and very close to the front line. The drivers began to understand. They looked at one another, nodding and grinning. Fitz guessed they were pleased to be part of the war effort, especially in such an unusual way.
“Please take one of these forms before you leave and fill it out in order to claim payment on your return.”
There was a buzz of reaction. They were going to get paid! That clinched their support.
“When five hundred cars have left, I will give instructions for the next five hundred. Vive Paris! Vive la France!”
The drivers broke into wild cheering. They mobbed Dupuys for the forms. Fitz, delighted, helped distribute the papers.
Soon the little cars began to leave, turning around in front of the great building and heading across the bridge in the sunshine, sounding their horns in enthusiasm, a long bright red lifeline to the forces on the battlefront.
{ V }
The British took three days to march twenty-five miles. Fitz was mortified. Their advance had been largely unopposed: if they had moved faster, they might have struck a decisive blow.
However, on the morning of Wednesday, September 9, he found Galliéni’s men in an optimistic mood. Von Kluck was retreating. “The Germans are scared!” said Colonel Dupuys.
Fitz did not believe the Germans were scared, and the map offered a more plausible explanation. The British, slow and timid though they were, had marched into a gap that had appeared between the German First and Second armies, a gap made when von Kluck pulled his forces westward to face the attack from Paris. “We’ve found a weak point, and we’re driving a wedge into it,” Fitz said, and there was a tremor of hope in his voice.
He told himself to calm down. The Germans had won every battle so far. On the other hand, their supply lines were stretched, their men were exhausted, and their numbers had been reduced by the need to send reinforcements to East Prussia. By contrast the French in this zone had received heavy reinforcements and had virtually no supply lines to worry about, being on home ground.
Fitz’s hopes went into reverse when the British halted five miles north of the river Marne. What was Sir John stopping for? He had encountered hardly any opposition!
But the Germans seemed not to notice the timidity of the Brits, for they continued to retreat, and hopes rose again in the lycée.
As the shadows of the trees lengthened outside the school windows, and the last reports of the day came in, a sense of suppressed jubilation began to permeate Galliéni’s staff. By the end of the day the Germans were on the run.
Fitz could hardly believe it. The despair of a week ago had turned to hope. He sat on a chair that was too small for him and stared at the map on the wall. Seven days ago the German line had seemed like a springboard for the launch of their final attack; now it looked like a wall at which they had been turned back.
When the sun went down behind the Eiffel Tower, the Allies had not won a victory, exact
ly, but for the first time in weeks the German advance had ground to a halt.
Dupuys embraced Fitz, then kissed him on both cheeks; and for once Fitz did not mind at all.
“We have stopped them,” said Galliéni, and to Fitz’s surprise, tears gleamed behind the old general’s pince-nez. “We have stopped them.”
{ VI }
Soon after the Battle of the Marne, both sides began to dig trenches.
The heat of September turned into the cold, depressing rain of October. The stalemate at the eastern end of the line spread irresistibly west, like a paralysis creeping through the body of a dying man.
The decisive battle of the autumn was over the Belgian town of Ypres, at the westernmost end of the line, twenty miles from the sea. The Germans attacked fiercely in an all-out attempt to turn the flank of the British force. The fighting raged for four weeks. Unlike all previous battles this one was static, with both sides hiding in trenches from each other’s artillery and coming out only for suicidal sorties against the enemy’s machine guns. In the end the British were saved by reinforcements, including a corps of brown-faced Indians shivering in their tropical uniforms. When it was over, seventy-five thousand British soldiers had died, and the Expeditionary Force was broken; but the Allies had completed a defensive barricade from the Swiss border to the English Channel, and the invading Germans had been stopped.
On December 24 Fitz was at British headquarters in the town of St.-Omer, not far from Calais, in a gloomy frame of mind. He remembered how glibly he and others had told the men they would be home for Christmas. Now it looked as if the war could go on for a year or even more. The opposing armies sat in their trenches day after day, eating bad food, getting dysentery and trench foot and lice, and desultorily killing the rats that thrived on the dead bodies littering no-man’s-land. It had once seemed very clear to Fitz why Britain had to go to war, but he could no longer remember the reasons.
That day the rain stopped and the weather turned cold. Sir John sent a message to all units warning that the enemy was contemplating a Christmas attack. This was entirely imaginary, Fitz knew: there was no supporting intelligence. The truth was that Sir John did not want the men to relax their vigilance on Christmas Day.
Every soldier was to receive a gift from Princess Mary, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the king and queen. It was an embossed brass box containing tobacco and cigarettes, a picture of the princess, and a Christmas card from the king. There were different gifts for nonsmokers, Sikhs, and nurses, all of whom would get chocolate or candy instead of tobacco. Fitz helped distribute the boxes to the Welsh Rifles. At the end of the day, too late to return to the relative comfort of St.-Omer, he found himself at the headquarters of the Fourth Battalion, a damp dugout a quarter of a mile behind the front line, reading a Sherlock Holmes story and smoking the small, thin cigars he had taken to. They were not as good as his panatelas, but these days he hardly ever got time to smoke a big cigar. He was with Murray, who had been promoted to captain after Ypres. Fitz had not been promoted: Hervey was keeping his promise.
Soon after nightfall he was surprised to hear scattered rifle fire. It turned out that the men had seen lights and thought the enemy were trying a sneak attack. In fact the lights were colored lanterns with which the Germans were decorating their parapet.
Murray, who had been on the front line for a while, talked about the Indian troops defending the next sector. “Poor sods arrived in their summer uniforms, because someone told them the war would be over before the weather turned cold,” he said. “But I’ll tell you something, Fitz: your darkie soldier is an ingenious blighter. You know we’ve been asking the War Office to give us trench mortars like the ones the Germans have, that lob a grenade over the parapet? Well, the Indians have made their own out of odd pieces of cast-iron pipe. Looks like a bit of bodged plumbing in a pub toilet, but it works!”
In the morning there was a freezing fog and the ground underfoot was hard. Fitz and Murray gave out the princess’s gifts at first light. Some of the men were huddled around braziers, trying to get warm, but they said they were grateful for the frost, which was better than the mud, especially for those suffering from trench foot. Some spoke to one another in Welsh, Fitz noticed, although they always used English with officers.
The German line, four hundred yards away, was hidden by a morning mist the same color as the German uniforms, a faded silver-blue called field gray. Fitz heard faint music: the Germans were singing carols. Fitz was not very musical, but he thought he recognized “Silent Night.”
He returned to the dugout for a grim breakfast of stale bread and tinned ham with the other officers. Afterward he stepped outside to smoke. He had never been quite so miserable in all his life. He thought of the breakfast that was being served at that moment in Tŷ Gwyn: hot sausages, fresh eggs, deviled kidneys, smoky kippers, buttered toast, and fragrant coffee with cream in it. He longed for clean underwear, a crisply ironed shirt, and a soft wool suit. He wanted to sit by the blazing coal fire in the morning room with nothing better to do than read the stupid jokes in Punch magazine.
Murray followed him out of the dugout and said: “You’re wanted on the telephone, Major. It’s headquarters.”
Fitz was surprised. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to locate him. He hoped it was not on account of some quarrel that had flared up between the French and the British while he had been handing out Christmas presents. With a worried frown he ducked inside and picked up the field telephone. “Fitzherbert.”
“Good morning, Major,” said a voice he did not recognize. “Captain Davies here. You don’t know me, but I’ve been asked to pass you a message from home.”
From home? Fitz hoped it was not bad news. “Very kind of you, Captain,” he said. “What does the message say?”
“Your wife has given birth to a bouncing baby boy, sir. Mother and son are both doing fine.”
“Oh!” Fitz sat down suddenly on a box. The baby was not due yet—it must be a week or two early. Premature babies were vulnerable. But the message said he was in good health. And so was Bea.
Fitz had a son, and the earldom had an heir.
“Are you there, Major?” said Captain Davies.
“Yes, yes,” said Fitz. “Just a bit shocked. It’s early.”
“As it’s Christmas, sir, we thought the news might cheer you up.”
“It does, I can tell you!”
“May I be the first to offer my congratulations.”
“Most kind,” Fitz said. “Thank you.” But Captain Davies had already hung up.
After a moment Fitz realized the other officers in the dugout were staring at him in silence. Finally one of them said: “Good news or bad?”
“Good!” said Fitz. “Wonderful, in fact. I have become a father.”
They all shook his hand and slapped his back. Murray got out the whisky bottle, despite the early hour, and they drank the baby’s health. “What’ll he be called?” Murray asked.
“Viscount Aberowen, while I’m alive,” Fitz said, then he realized that Murray was not asking about the baby’s title, but his name. “George, for my father, and William for my grandfather. Bea’s father was Petr Nikolaevich, so perhaps we’ll add those as well.”
Murray seemed amused. “George William Peter Nicholas Fitzherbert, Viscount Aberowen,” he said. “Quite enough names to be going on with!”
Fitz nodded good-humoredly. “Especially as he probably weighs about seven pounds.”
He was bursting with pride and good cheer, and he felt an urge to share his news. “I might go along to the front line,” he said when they had finished their whisky. “Pass out a few cigars to the men.”
He left the dugout and walked along the communication trench. He felt euphoric. There was no gunfire, and the air tasted crisp and clean, except when he passed the latrine. He found himself thinking not about Bea but about Ethel. Had she had her baby yet? Was she happy in her house, having extorted the money from Fitz to buy it? Although he was t
aken aback by the tough way she had bargained with him, he could not help remembering that it was his child she was carrying. He hoped she would deliver her baby safely, as Bea had.
All such thoughts flew from his mind when he reached the front. As he turned the corner into the frontline trench, he got a shock.
There was no one there.
He walked along the trench, zigzagging around one traverse, then another, and saw no one. It was like a ghost story, or one of those ships found floating undamaged with not a soul aboard.
There had to be an explanation. Had there been an attack that somehow Fitz had not been told about?
It occurred to him to look over the parapet.
This was not to be done casually. Many men were killed on their first day at the front because they took a quick look over the top.
Fitz picked up one of the short-handled spades called entrenching tools. He pushed the blade gradually up over the edge of the parapet. Then he climbed onto the fire step and slowly raised his head until he was looking out through the narrow gap between the parapet and the blade.
What he saw astonished him.
The men were all in the cratered desert of no-man’s-land. But they were not fighting. They were standing around in groups, talking.
There was something odd about their appearance, and after a moment Fitz realized that some of the uniforms were khaki and others field gray.
The men were talking to the enemy.
Fitz dropped the entrenching tool, raised his head fully over the parapet, and stared. There were hundreds of soldiers in no-man’s-land, stretching as far as he could see to left and right, British and Germans intermingled.
What the hell was going on?
He found a trench ladder and scrambled up over the parapet. He marched across the churned earth. The men were showing photographs of their families and sweethearts, offering cigarettes, and trying to communicate, saying things like: “Me Robert, who you?”
He spotted two sergeants, one British and one German, deep in conversation. He tapped the Brit on the shoulder. “You!” he said. “What the devil are you doing?”
