Fall of Giants

by Follett, Ken

  Ethel became aware of a commotion at the bottom end of the street. Several voices were raised. Then she heard a scream.

  She and Mrs. Griffiths looked at one another, then Ethel picked up Lloyd and they hurried to find out what was happening on the far side of the toilets.

  The first thing Ethel saw was a small group of women clustered around Mrs. Pritchard, who was wailing at the top of her voice. The other women were trying to calm her. But she was not the only one. Stumpy Pugh, an ex-miner who had lost a leg in a roof collapse, sat in the middle of the road as if knocked down, with two neighbors either side of him. Across the street Mrs. John Jones the Shop stood in her doorway sobbing, holding a sheet of paper.

  Ethel saw Geraint the post office boy, white in the face and near to tears himself, cross the road and knock at another house.

  Mrs. Griffiths said: “Telegrams from the War Office—oh, God help us.”

  “The battle of the Somme,” said Ethel. “The Aberowen Pals must be in it.”

  “Alun Pritchard must be dead, and Clive Pugh, and Prophet Jones—he was a sergeant, his parents were so proud . . . ”

  “Poor Mrs. Jones Shop, her other son died in the explosion down the pit.”

  “Let my Tommy be all right, please, God,” Mrs. Griffiths prayed, even though her husband was a notorious atheist. “Oh, spare Tommy.”

  “And Billy,” said Ethel; and then, whispering in Lloyd’s tiny ear, she added: “And your daddy.”

  Geraint had a canvas sack slung across his shoulder. Ethel wondered fearfully how many more telegrams were in it. The boy crisscrossed the street, the angel of death in a post office cap.

  By the time he passed the toilets and came to the upper half of the street, everyone was on the pavement. The women had stopped whatever work they were doing and stood waiting. Ethel’s parents had come out—Da had not yet gone to work. They stood with Gramper, silent and afraid.

  Geraint approached Mrs. Llewellyn. Her son Arthur must be dead. He was known as Spotty, Ethel recalled. The poor boy did not need to worry about his complexion now.

  Mrs. Llewellyn held up her hands as if to ward Geraint off. “No!” she cried. “No, please!”

  He held out her telegram. “I can’t help it, Mrs. Llewellyn,” he said. He was only about seventeen. “It’s got your address on the front, see?”

  Still she would not take the envelope. “No!” she said, turning her back and burying her face in her hands.

  The boy’s lip trembled. “Please take it,” he said. “I got all these others to do. And there’s more in the office, hundreds! It’s ten o’clock now and I don’t know how I’m going to get them all done before tonight. Please.”

  Her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Parry Price, said: “I’ll take it for her. I haven’t got any sons.”

  “Thank you very much, Mrs. Price,” said Geraint, and he moved on.

  He took another telegram from his sack, looked at the address, and walked past the Griffithses’ house. “Oh, thank God,” said Mrs. Griffiths. “My Tommy’s all right, thank God.” She began to cry with relief. Ethel switched Lloyd to her other hip and put an arm around her.

  The boy approached Minnie Ponti. She did not scream, but tears ran down her face. “Which one?” she said in a cracked voice. “Joey or Johnny?”

  “I dunno, Mrs. Ponti,” said Geraint. “You’ll have to read what it says by here.”

  She ripped open the envelope. “I can’t see!” she cried. She rubbed her eyes, trying to clear her vision of tears, and looked again. “Giuseppe!” she said. “My Joey’s dead. Oh, my poor little boy!”

  Mrs. Ponti lived almost at the end of the street. Ethel waited, heart pounding, to see whether Geraint would go to the Williams house. Was Billy alive or dead?

  The boy turned away from the weeping Mrs. Ponti. He looked across the street and saw Da, Mam, and Gramper staring at him in dreadful anticipation. He looked in his sack, then glanced up.

  “No more for Wellington Row,” he said.

  Ethel almost collapsed. Billy was alive.

  She looked at her parents. Mam was crying. Gramper was trying to light his pipe, but his hands were shaking.

  Da was staring at her. She could not read the look on his face. He was in the grip of some emotion, but she could not tell what.

  He took a step toward her.

  It was not much, but it was enough. With Lloyd in her arms, she ran to Da.

  He put his arms around both of them. “Billy’s alive,” he said. “And so are you.”

  “Oh, Da,” she said. “I’m so sorry I let you down.”

  “Never mind that,” he said. “Never mind, now.” He patted her back as he had when she was a little girl and she fell down and scraped her knees. “There, there,” he said. “Better now.”

  { III }

  An interdenominational service was a rare event among Aberowen’s Christians, Ethel knew. To the Welsh, doctrinal differences were never minor. One group refused to celebrate Christmas, on the grounds that there was no biblical evidence of the date of Christ’s birth. Another banned voting in elections, because the Apostle Paul wrote: “Our citizenship is in heaven.” None of them liked to worship side by side with people who disagreed with them.

  However, after Telegram Wednesday such differences came, briefly, to seem trivial.

  The rector of Aberowen, the Reverend Thomas Ellis-Thomas, suggested a joint service of remembrance. When all the telegrams had been delivered there were two hundred and eleven dead and, as the battle was still going on, one or two more sad notifications arrived each day. Every street in town had lost someone, and in the close-packed rows of miners’ hovels there was a bereavement every few yards.

  The Methodists, the Baptists, and the Catholics agreed to the suggestion of the Anglican rector. The smaller groups might have preferred to remain aloof: the Full Gospel Baptists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Second Coming Evangelicals, and the Bethesda Chapel. Ethel saw her father wrestle with his conscience. But no one wanted to be left out of what promised to be the largest religious service in the town’s history, and in the end they all joined in. There was no synagogue in Aberowen, but young Jonathan Goldman was among the dead, and the town’s handful of practising Jews decided to attend, even though no concessions would be made to their religion.

  The service was held on Sunday afternoon at half past two in a municipal park known as the Reck, short for Recreation Ground. A temporary platform was built by the town council for the clergy to stand on. It was a fine, sunny day, and three thousand people turned up.

  Ethel scanned the crowd. Perceval Jones was there in a top hat. As well as being mayor of the town he was now its member of Parliament. He was also honorary commanding officer of the Aberowen Pals, and had led the recruiting drive. Several other directors of Celtic Minerals were with him—as if they had anything to do with the heroism of the dead, Ethel thought sourly. Maldwyn “Gone to Merthyr” Morgan showed up, with his wife, but they had a right, she thought, for their son Roland had died.

  Then she saw Fitz.

  At first she did not recognize him. She saw Princess Bea, in a black dress and hat, followed by a nurse carrying the young Viscount Aberowen, a boy the same age as Lloyd. With Bea was a man on crutches with his left leg in plaster and a bandage over one side of his head, covering his left eye. After a long moment Ethel realized it was Fitz, and she cried out in shock.

  “What is it?” said her mam.

  “Look at the earl!”

  “Is that him? Oh, my word, the poor man.”

  Ethel stared at him. She was not in love with him anymore—he had been too cruel. But she could not be indifferent. She had kissed the face under that bandage, and caressed the long, strong body that was so woefully maimed. He was a vain man—it was the most pardonable of his weaknesses—and she knew that his mortification at looking in the mirror would hurt him more than his wounds.

  “I wonder he didn’t stay at home,” Mam said. “People would have understood.”


  Ethel shook her head. “Too proud,” she said. “He led the men to their deaths. He had to come.”

  “You know him well,” Mam said, with a look that made Ethel wonder whether she suspected the truth. “But I expect he also wants people to see that the upper classes suffered too.”

  Ethel nodded. Mam was right. Fitz was arrogant and high-handed, but paradoxically he also craved the respect of ordinary people.

  Dai Chops, the butcher’s son, came up. “It’s very nice to see you back in Aberowen,” he said.

  He was a small man in a neat suit. “How are you, Dai?” she said.

  “Very well, thank you. There’s a new Charlie Chaplin film starting tomorrow. Do you like Chaplin?”

  “I haven’t got time to go to the pictures.”

  “Why don’t you leave the little boy with your mam tomorrow night and come with me?”

  Dai had put his hand up Ethel’s skirt in the Palace Cinema in Cardiff. It was five years ago, but she could tell from the look in his eye that he had not forgotten. “No, thank you, Dai,” she said firmly.

  He was not ready to give up yet. “I’m working down the pit now, but I’ll take over the shop when my da retires.”

  “You’ll do very well, I know.”

  “There’s some men wouldn’t look at a girl with a baby,” he said. “Not me, though.”

  That was a bit condescending, but Ethel decided not to take offense. “Good-bye, Dai. It was very nice of you to ask me.”

  He smiled ruefully. “You’re still the prettiest girl I’ve ever met.” He touched his cap and walked away.

  Mam said indignantly: “What’s wrong with him? You need a husband, and he’s a catch!”

  What was wrong with him? He was a bit short, but he made up for that with charm. He had good prospects and he was willing to take on another man’s child. Ethel wondered why she was so unhesitatingly sure that she did not want to go to the pictures with him. Did she still think, in her heart, that she was too good for Aberowen?

  There was a row of chairs at the front for the elite. Fitz and Bea took their seats alongside Perceval Jones and Maldwyn Morgan, and the service began.

  Ethel believed vaguely in the Christian religion. She supposed there must be a God, but she suspected He was more reasonable than her father imagined. Da’s ardent disagreements with the established churches had come down to Ethel merely as a mild dislike of statues, incense, and Latin. In London she occasionally went to the Calvary Gospel Hall on Sunday mornings, mainly because the pastor there was a passionate socialist who allowed his church to be used for Maud’s clinic and Labour Party meetings.

  There was no organ at the Reck, of course, so the puritans did not have to suppress their objection to musical instruments. Ethel knew, from Da, that there had been trouble about who was to lead the singing—a role that, in this town, was more important than preaching the sermon. In the end the Aberowen Male Voice Choir was placed at the front and its conductor, who belonged to no particular church, was put in charge of the music.

  They began with Handel’s “He Shall Feed His Flock Like a Shepherd,” a popular anthem with elaborate part singing that the congregation performed faultlessly. As hundreds of tenor voices soared across the park with the line “And gather the lambs with his arm,” Ethel realized that she missed this thrilling music when she was in London.

  The Catholic priest recited Psalm 129, “De Profundis,” in Latin. He shouted as loud as he could, but those at the edge of the crowd could hardly hear. The Anglican rector read the Collect Order for the Burial of the Dead from the Book of Common Prayer. Dilys Jones, a young Methodist, sang “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” a hymn written by Charles Wesley. The Baptist pastor read I Corinthians 15 from verse 20 to the end.

  One preacher had to represent the independent groups, and the choice had fallen on Da.

  He began by reading a single verse from Romans 8: “If the spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.” Da had a big voice that carried strongly all across the park.

  Ethel was proud of him. This honor acknowledged his status as one of the principal men of the town, a spiritual and political leader. He looked smart, too: Mam had bought him a new black tie, silk, from the Gwyn Evans department store in Merthyr.

  He spoke about resurrection and the afterlife, and Ethel’s attention drifted: she had heard it all before. She assumed there was life after death, but she was not sure, and anyway she would find out soon enough.

  A stirring in the crowd alerted her that Da might have diverted from the usual themes. She heard him say: “When this country decided to go to war, I hope that every member of Parliament searched his conscience, sincerely and prayerfully, and sought the Lord’s guidance. But who put those men in Parliament?”

  He’s going to get political, Ethel thought. Good for you, Da. That will take the smug look off the rector’s face.

  “Every man in this country is liable, in principle, for military service. But not every man is allowed a part in the decision to go to war.”

  There were shouts of agreement from the crowd.

  “The rules of the franchise exclude more than half the men in this country!”

  Ethel said loudly: “And all the women!”

  Mam said: “Hush, now! It’s your da that’s preaching, not you.”

  “More than two hundred Aberowen men were killed on the first day of July, there on the banks of the Somme River. I have been told that the total of British casualties is over fifty thousand!”

  There was a gasp of horror from the crowd. Not many people knew that figure. Da had got it from Ethel. Maud had been told by her friends in the War Office.

  “Fifty thousand casualties, of which twenty thousand are dead,” Da went on. “And the battle goes on. Day after day, more young men are being massacred.” There were sounds of dissent from the crowd, but they were mostly drowned out by the shouts of agreement. Da held up his hand for quiet. “I do not say who is to blame. I say only this. Such slaughter cannot be right when men have been denied a part in the decision to go to war.”

  The rector stepped forward, trying to interrupt Da, and Perceval Jones tried unsuccessfully to climb up onto the platform.

  But Da was almost done. “If ever we are asked again to go to war, it shall not be done without the consent of all the people.”

  “Women as well as men!” Ethel cried, but her voice was lost in the cheers of support from the miners.

  Several men were now standing in front of Da, remonstrating with him, but his voice rang out over the commotion. “Never again will we wage war on the say-so of a minority!” he roared. “Never! Never! Never!”

  He sat down, and the cheering was like thunder.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  July to October 1916

  Kovel was a railway junction in the part of Russia that had once been in Poland, near the old border with Austria Hungary. The Russian army assembled twenty miles east of the city, on the banks of the river Stokhod. The entire area was a swamp, hundreds of square miles of bog interlaced with footpaths. Grigori found a patch of drier ground and ordered his platoon to make camp. They had no tents: Major Azov had sold them all three months ago to a dressmaking factory in Pinsk. He said the men did not need tents in the summer, and by winter they would all be dead.

  By some miracle, Grigori was still alive. He was a sergeant and his friend Isaak a corporal. Those few left of the 1914 intake were now mostly NCOs, noncommissioned officers. Grigori’s battalion had been decimated, transferred, reinforced, and decimated again. They had been sent everywhere but home.

  Grigori had killed many men in the last two years, with rifle, bayonet, or hand grenade, most of them close enough for him to see them die. Some of his comrades had nightmares about it, particularly the better-educated ones, but not Grigori. He had been born into the brutality of a peasant village and had survived
as an orphan on the streets of St. Petersburg: violence did not give him bad dreams.

  What had shocked him was the stupidity, callousness, and corruption of the officers. Living and fighting alongside the ruling class had made him a revolutionary.

  He had to stay alive. There was no one else to take care of Katerina.

  He wrote to her regularly, and received occasional letters, penned in a neat schoolgirl hand with many mistakes and crossings-out. He had kept every one, tied in a neat bundle in his kit bag, and when a long period went by with no letter he reread the old ones.

  In the first she had told him she had given birth to a boy, Vladimir, now eighteen months old—Lev’s son. Grigori longed to see him. He vividly remembered his brother as a baby. Did Vladimir have Lev’s irresistible gummy smile? he wondered. But he must have teeth by now, and be walking, and speaking his first words. Grigori wanted the child to learn to say “Uncle Grishka.”

  He often thought about the night Katerina had come to his bed. In his daydreams he sometimes changed the course of events so that, instead of throwing her out, he took her in his arms, kissed her generous mouth, and made love to her. But in real life he knew that her heart belonged to his brother.

  Grigori had heard nothing from Lev, who had been gone more than two years. He feared that some catastrophe had befallen him in America. Lev’s weaknesses often got him into scrapes, although somehow he seemed always to slip out of trouble. The problem stemmed from the way he had been brought up, living from hand to mouth with no proper discipline and only Grigori as a poor substitute for a parent. Grigori wished he had done better, but he had been only a boy himself.

  The upshot was that Katerina had no one to look after her and her baby except Grigori. He was fiercely determined to keep himself alive, despite the chaotic inefficiency of the Russian army, so that he could one day return home to Katerina and Vladimir.

  The commander in the zone was General Brusilov, a professional soldier—unlike so many of the generals who were courtiers. Under Brusilov’s orders the Russians had made gains in June, driving the Austrians back in confusion. Grigori and his men fought hard when the orders made some kind of sense. Otherwise they devoted their energies to staying out of the line of fire. Grigori had become good at that, and in consequence had won the loyalty of his platoon.