Moonlight

by Fergus O'Connell

  As you can imagine, mobilisation was horrendously complex – particularly in the days before computers and spreadsheets and project management software. For instance, when it eventually happened, Germany would use eleven thousand trains for its mobilisation. France used seven thousand. The Von Schlieffen Plan had taken nine years to complete. The French plan – the so-called Plan XVII – evolved through a series of revisions between 1898 and 1913. The Russian plan was known as Mobilisation Schedule No. 19.

  Since these plans were so complicated, each country had only one of them. You can see why this would be so. Since the plans were so complex and had taken so long to prepare, the notion that there might be a subsidiary plan or a series of such plans to mobilise different sections of the army in different scenarios just proved to be too far beyond anybody’s ability.

  And therein lay the problem. There was only one tiny flaw in each of these plans, as Edmund Blackadder might have said. It wasn’t so much that they were bollocks – though you perhaps could have argued that. The problem was that the plans were all-or-nothing plans. Either an army mobilised completely or it couldn’t mobilise at all. There was no such thing as partial mobilisation.

  Anyway, how could you do a partial mobilisation? How could you mobilise part of your army? Which part? And how would you decide? By geography? That you would mobilise parts of your army to meet threats against certain parts of your borders or to attack particular parts of other people’s borders? By the magnitude of the threat? Some other way? No, that wasn’t going to work. And so the plans of all the contestants in the Group of Death remained all-or-nothing plans.

  And in the case of the German Army, it didn’t just mobilise men to a sort of battle station. No, the German plan caused war in that it delivered men and units into warfare – fighting. In other words, partway through the German mobilisation plan, men began firing guns at the enemy.

  Mobilisation as it would be practised by the contestants in the Group of Death was something that people would come to regret.

  Chapter 11

  Monday 29 June 1914

  The reason I told you about mobilisation at the end of the last chapter, my trusty reader, is that at number 2 Ballhausplatz on the morning of the 29th of June, Berchtold is the first of the managers in the Group of Death to run into this problem. He wants to just send some troops to Serbia – to teach the Serbs a lesson. Can’t we just have a small war, Berchtold asks.

  Not possible, explains Conrad, the Head of the Army. You can’t do partial mobilisation. If you do, then the whole mobilisation system gets thrown out. Reservists arrive at their depots and find no units to absorb them, train schedules get dislocated and so on. No, it has to be the full thing or nothing.

  I may have given the impression, dear reader, that Clara’s husband Henry is something of a boring old stick in the mud. If I have, I must apologise. I have done him something of a disservice because, whatever about at home, in work nothing could be further from the truth.

  In these pre-computer days, Henry’s insurance company runs on paper. And so the stationary over which Henry presides is quite literally the lifeblood of the organisation. That is why any interruption in its supply would have been so catastrophic for both the company and for Henry’s career. That is also why, even though now he has somebody who handles much of the administrative detail of ordering the paper, dealing with invoices and so on, Henry still likes to visit all the departments to get their requirements. In addition he will often sometimes hand deliver stationary to the particular department himself. In doing this he gets to chat to both those departments’ managers and their staff. He is very popular with the staff in particular, and this is how he came to meet Mary in New Policies.

  In looks Mary is not unlike Clara. She has the same blonde hair and willowy figure, but she is taller than Henry’s wife. Mary has a very pretty face and is also younger than Clara. At twenty-nine, she is the same age as Henry. Henry has noticed that some people just look bitter. You can tell without knowing them or speaking to them that they lead bitter lives. If that is one end of a spectrum, then Mary lies at the opposite end. Her face always looks like it is ready to break into a smile. For Henry, this just adds to her prettiness. When Henry visits a particular department, he finds himself drawn almost automatically to the prettiest girl. Indeed, if he was ever asked to, he could name the prettiest girl in each department. Mary is far and away the prettiest girl in New Policies and is probably amongst the top three lookers in the whole place.

  Mary was only a few days in New Policies when Henry found a reason to speak to her. He arrived there one day looking for Mr Partridge, the department head. Not seeing him in his glass-walled office, Henry headed in Mary’s direction and inquired as to his whereabouts. She smiled and told him, and from that moment on, Henry had to admit to himself that he was captivated. He began to walk by New Policies to catch a glimpse of her. He would chat with her if he met her in the corridor. This, in turn, quickly became compliments about her hair or what she was wearing. ‘You’re looking particularly nice today,’ Henry might say. So then it was only a matter of time before Henry contrived to be walking out the front entrance of the building when Mary was going for lunch. He invited her for a sandwich and she accepted.

  Sitting across the table from her, he had time to study her face. She really was quite beautiful. Her hair was a bit on the thin side but she had perfect skin and fine, white teeth. She reminded him a lot of Clara when they had first begun to go together. However, one of the things Henry liked about Mary was that she seemed to find everything he said interesting. She asked lots of questions about his job and his home life and his opinions about things. She seemed interested in the world – or at least, his part of it. Henry remembered that Clara has been like that once, but that was a long time ago.

  Mary seemed to enjoy being with him. She appeared to be particularly taken by the fact that he was a manager. Henry probably had to admit that she wasn’t as intelligent or as well read as Clara, but since she seemed happy to let him do most of the talking, that didn’t seem to be a problem.

  And Henry liked the fact that Mary turned heads. When he was with her he saw both men and women looking at her – and him. Yet she didn’t appear arrogant about her looks. Indeed she seemed to accept them as being the most natural thing in the world.

  The lunches became a regular thing. Henry limited them to a couple of times a week since he didn’t want people to start talking. And anyway, he couldn’t afford any more than that, since he was the one who paid for all the lunches. In fairness to her, she had offered to pay for every other one but Henry had said that he wouldn’t hear of it. What kind of gentleman would he be if he allowed the lady to pay? So after several more offers, Mary stopped asking. Which Henry started to feel slightly resentful about once it came time to pay. But then he told himself that he had just enjoyed the company of a beautiful girl who hung on his every word and that it would be churlish not to pay the small cost of a couple of cups of tea, some sandwiches and the occasional cake on Fridays.

  Henry found it easy to make Mary laugh. She says that this is one of the things she likes about him. But in fact, this is also one of the things he likes about her. She laughs at his jokes. She is a good audience.

  But there is one other thing about Mary. The more time Henry spends with her, the more he finds himself feeling very aroused in her presence. If she touches his arm, for instance, as she occasionally does when he tells a joke or says something funny, he feels himself stirring. He has only ever seen her hands, her neck and her face but he finds himself spending long periods of time – especially travelling to and from work – wondering what the rest of her is like. Her breasts are bigger than Clara’s – he can see that from the shape of her dress. He wonders what it would be like to hold her breasts, to cup them in his hands, to kiss them, to squeeze them, to tug at her nipples with his teeth.

  And then he pictures himself undressing her completely, as he once used to do with Clara. (Now
she does it herself.) He sees himself slipping Mary’s knickers down around her knees and her stepping out of them. He wonders about the colour and texture of her hair down there. What would it be like to touch it, to run the back of his fingers across it? And then he wonders what the sensation would be if he were to enter her. He believes her to be a virgin. She has told him that she was going to get married about five years ago but then the man threw her over.

  And so, one day over lunch, Henry makes his move.

  ‘I say, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but I think you’re very beautiful,’ is his opener.

  He had been hoping that she might reply with something similar from her side, but she merely thanks him for the compliment. He goes again.

  ‘I think if I weren’t married, I’d—’

  He leaves the sentence unfinished, hoping that she will either finish it for him or respond with something, but this time all she does is smile sweetly and wait for him to finish. When he doesn’t, she again doesn’t say anything. Instead she cocks her head to one side, her face forming the slightest of quizzical frowns. The silence expands. Henry realises he’s going to have to increase the stakes. He finds himself saying something he really hadn’t intended to say.

  ‘I say, I think I’m falling in love with you.’

  This time Mary does reply.

  ‘And I with you, Henry.’

  And then she adds, ‘What a pity that you’re married.’

  ‘But I feel so attracted to you,’ he blurts out.

  He regrets it immediately. He hadn’t meant to say the ‘but.’ It makes him sound plaintive, like he is pleading with her. Had he simply said, ‘I feel so attracted to you,’ it would have sounded commanding, manly. But he thinks he just sounded like a lovelorn schoolboy.

  If she notices this, she doesn’t say so. Instead, she makes his day.

  ‘What would you like to do?’ she asks simply.

  And so they arrange it. Henry will say that he has to stay up in town for a management meeting. He will also book a room in a hotel. The date is fixed for the day after tomorrow, Wednesday, the first of July.

  Chapter 12

  Tuesday 30 June 1914

  Next morning when Clara wakes, the feeling – or whatever it was – is gone. But she feels groggy – as though she has had too much wine.

  ‘So you remember what I said last evening?’ asks Henry at breakfast.

  ‘Last evening?’

  She remembers very little about last evening. She doesn’t want to remember. Henry is irritated. He begins to speak as though he were speaking to a child.

  ‘The management meeting. Once a month. On the first of the month. Because I’m a manager, I have to go now.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes. Sorry, sorry,’ she says hurriedly.

  There is suddenly a smell of burnt toast. Clara rushes to the grill and pulls out the tray. The toast is salvageable. Henry won’t eat it but she will. She puts on fresh for him and stands over the sink, scraping the blackened bread. While the toast drama was going on, Henry went silent, but now he resumes.

  ‘Yes. The meeting will be after work. It will last several hours and, after that, the partners take us managers to dinner. Apparently it’s tradition. So, rather than trying to come home at that late hour, I’m going to stay in the little hotel nearby. I told you all this last night.’

  ‘Yes, of course you did, dear. I’m sorry. That headache quite knocked me out. Is the hotel frightfully expensive?’ she asks and then instantly knows that she has said the wrong thing.

  Henry’s irritation flares.

  ‘I’ve found the cheapest one I could that isn’t a flea pit,’ he says. ‘I have to do these things, you know. It’s not like I’ll be enjoying myself. This is work, just as what I do during normal office hours is work. If I’m going to get ahead, I have to go to things like this.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Of course you do, dear,’ Clara replies, retrieving two slices of perfectly golden toast and putting them on Henry’s plate. That seems to mollify him. He snaps his paper back up and carries on reading.

  Because she doesn’t want that horrible feeling of yesterday to return, Clara keeps busy. She gets Ursula off to school. This is the last week of term so she’ll have her daughter at home from next week onwards. That’ll be nice. Clara has a long list of things she wants to get done in the house. She gives some jobs to Mrs Parsons and takes the rest herself. Virginia goes for her nap.

  As she works, Clara goes over, what is for her, familiar ground. It is where she tries to understand, tries to analyse yet again, when and why Henry changed. She has pretty much dismissed all of the usual reasons. When she was pregnant with Ursula? No. Unless she’s very much mistaken, he found her very attractive then. Her normally petite frame had become more ‘voluptuous,’ according to Henry. Her breasts had become much bigger and used to drive Henry wild. After Ursula was born? Not then either – her breasts had been swollen with milk and she remembers … no, she doesn’t want to think about him doing things like that now. When he got his promotion? She shakes her head. (She actually finds herself shaking her head.) It happened long before that.

  She concludes that there are two separate things. First, there is sex, and while he still wants it as much as ever, somewhere along the way the fun went out of it for her. He stopped caring about her, being as generous to her as she was to him. When did that happen? Was it when she was nursing the girls and sleep became her first priority? He would want sex, he would get his business done and she, who was already exhausted after the day and possibly previous night, just wanted to sleep. Soon it became a pattern and it is one that has continued. And while there was a time when they might have talked about this, the notion that they would discuss a subject so intimate now seems almost laughable.

  Because that is the other thing. She remembers how, while they were courting, he seemed to value her opinion, ask her for advice, discuss problems at work. That went almost immediately after they got married. Yes, it did. She has been over this ground before and of this she is almost certain. Now he sometimes speaks to her in a tone that one would never use with say, a tradesman or anybody, really.

  She sighs. Is this what happens? Is this where all marriages lead and end up?

  She suddenly thinks of the man from the Foreign Office. James. She never looked to see whether he had a wedding ring or not. She has a vague sense that he didn’t but she can’t be sure. But she has a strong conviction that he is married, that it was his wife who made those sandwiches.

  She starts to wonder what his marriage is like. Clara pictures a beautiful wife, adored by her husband. Beautiful children. Probably two – one of each, a boy and a girl. The perfect family. Clara imagines them at the dinner table talking about the murder of the Archduke and what it means. A few years ago, all of these things interested Clara. Somewhere along the way, since she had nobody to discuss them with, she stopped reading about them or caring.

  Which brings her to the place where she usually ends up – that all of this is actually a problem with herself and not with Henry at all. If she was that kind of wife – James from the Foreign Office’s wife – then Henry would be different too.

  She knows she should think more on this. She knows that what she should now do – really, if she really wanted to tackle this problem – would be to sit down with a cup of tea, some paper and make a list. A list of ways that she could be more that kind of wife. A James-in-the-Foreign-Office’s kind of wife. But she is busy. There’s lots to do.

  Now, she knows that this is just an excuse – an excuse that she is using to stop herself from facing some difficult realities and facts about her character. But as soon as this idea registers, as soon as she is washed ashore on this Island of Possible Self-Discovery, the tide lifts her again and carries her back out to the Sea of More Pleasant Things.

  Clara thinks back to the short conversation she had yesterday with James. (He has become ‘James’ now, rather than ‘the man from the Foreign Office.’) It was the one
bright spot in an otherwise dull and grey day. She wonders why this was. Was it because it was so unexpected? A surprise? Something out of the ordinary? Was that all this was in the end? Was it nothing more than that she found her life a little dull? Actually, she realises, her life must be very dull indeed if something as insignificant as this could affect her as it did yesterday.

  But if her life is dull she has to remind herself again how fortunate she is. There are people who are lucky to eat one meal of bad food a day, she knows that. But does this mean, then, that all of life is just a struggle – harder or not so – as circumstances dictate until eventually you die? Yes, there will be moments of happiness but they’ll be isolated and fleeting.

  Yesterday was such a moment – with James. Those few minutes she spent with him were funny and happy and joyful. But, she told herself, she’s had many moments like that – with the girls. Many moments when they would do or say something and she would know how blessed she was to have them in her life. But all her moments were to do with the children. There seemed to be none which were about Clara herself. But yesterday had been about her. Yesterday she had established some kind of link with another human being who wasn’t one of her children. It had felt so good.

  Later she goes out to shop for dinner, wondering if she can repeat the experience. She buys meat but the butcher is distracted by a conversation with his wife about an invoice and so only pays half attention to Clara. As she walks home through the leafy sunshine, she wonders if her problem is that she just thinks too much – spends too much time inside her own head instead of just getting on with things as Henry and most people seem to do. What was it James said yesterday? ‘Most people seem to be happy just to eat and sleep and get on with it.’ Couldn’t she just try to be like that?

  It suddenly occurs to her that she should find out what is happening about the business in Sarajevo. With a tiny smile she pictures James in the park with his sandwiches and newspaper. Usually she never buys a newspaper, instead waiting for Henry to bring home the Evening Standard. Now, though, on an impulse, she turns back and goes into the newsagents, buying a copy of the Times. It is something she never does. And whereas she is known by name in all of the other shops, the newsagent, while polite, doesn’t recognise her at all. She folds the paper and hides it in her shopping bag under the various parcels. She will read it after Mrs Parsons has gone home and before Henry comes in. Then she must hide it – she will bury it in the pile of papers that will be used to light fires when autumn comes.