by Max Hennessy
The following week Josh set off for Germany.
The country he remembered from visits before the war as plump, prosperous and well-ordered was in a sorry state. After a century of fighting, France and Germany were still doing each other irreparable harm. Because they couldn’t obtain the ruinous war reparations they had insisted on, the French had marched into the Ruhr to take over its industries and the Germans had refused to co-operate so that the whole industrial system had come to a halt. The value of the deutschmark had disappeared, prices had soared even as customers waited to be served, and thousands of people had lost their savings. The Hartmann family were better off than most because the old Graf had sunk his money in Switzerland before the war and it had wisely been left there.
Josh’s aunt greeted him with wet eyes. Despite the bitterness that had existed during the war, she was glad to see him, glad to know her family hadn’t forgotten her. His Cousin Konstantin, who’d inherited the title of Graf after his father’s death, received him more warily, finding it hard to forget that his father, Josh’s uncle, had been killed by a British shell.
‘Germany wasn’t really beaten, you know,’ he insisted. ‘She was stabbed in the back by the people at home.’
‘Do you really believe that, Konni?’ Josh asked.
‘It’s what they say. Especially this new party, the National Socialists. They say it was the Jews and the Communists.’
‘Konni,’ Josh said earnestly, ‘Germany was beaten because she lost the fighting. The blockade beat her. You must know that. You went hungry enough.’
‘You’ve read your history,’ Konstantin admitted bitterly. ‘But it’s British history.’
‘Perhaps it is,’ Josh agreed. ‘But I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll send you a British history of the war if you’ll send me a German one. Then you can read the English and I can read the German so we can make up our own minds instead of having them made up for us by politicians and newspapermen. Anyway, who runs these National Socialists?’
Konstantin shrugged. ‘Chap called Hitler. I think he’d like to feel he’s as clever as Mussolini but he’s really only an Austrian agitator who ended up in jail. They’ve just released him under an amnesty, but he’s finished now. Nobody will ever take any notice of him or his party again.’
On his return from Germany, Josh found himself on the Mauretania heading for Virginia and the home of his American cousins. His grandmother had insisted on the visit, arguing that it would do him good, and he landed in New York where he was able to make enquiries and find Louise Peabody’s address. Three days later, after wandering round the chasm-like streets, he took the train to Washington, which was as different from New York as chalk was from cheese.
Louise’s family lived in Arlington and he took a taxi to the door. She greeted him warmly, both of them startled at the change they saw. To Louise Josh seemed enormous and tremendously masculine. To Josh Louise seemed no longer a child but a lively young American girl, not particularly beautiful with her too-large mouth and a nose that wasn’t quite right but with perfect teeth and jetty hair. She was shapely and full of life, her eyes seemed to have grown larger, and she had developed an endearing twisted smile that tugged unexpectedly at his heart.
The family had a country house in northern Virginia, and on his way to his cousins in the southern half of the state, he was invited to stay as long as he wished. The house was on the high slopes of the mountains, overlooking the valley of the Shenandoah, and Josh was offered the use of a spare car. He had just learned to drive and they drove to Williamsburg and Richmond and to the beach or into the mountains. In the heat of a Virginia summer they swam in a nearby lake and went to a country theatre and dances together. Louise was vital, noisy and bursting with energy, yet she said nothing unnecessary and was intelligent enough for what she said to be worth hearing. It was as though Josh had known her and been close to her for years.
Nothing in the world could have stopped them falling a little in love. Louise was warm, happy and satisfying and eager to be with Josh, so that he was delighted with himself and with her and even began to think of putting off his visit to his relations for the sake of staying with her. Being with her was like looking at life through a telescope so that everything that had previously been vague became sharp and clear and emotionally satisfying. For the first time in his life Josh felt alive.
Even their holding hands became a caress and he was aware of the reality of her sex in a way that no other girl had ever affected him before. He was aware of the danger but he still told her he loved her. She laughed quickly but her laughter died almost at once and she became serious and large-eyed and thoughtful. From then on things changed. They were able to walk together without bothering to talk, wrapped in a companionable silence, content merely to be together, each aware of the other and trying hard not to be, their minds full of things that had never occurred to them before, each of them electrified when their hands or their bodies touched.
On the last day he drove her back to Charlottesville. She took him to Jefferson’s home at Monticello and, feeling terribly adult, they ate a meal in the town because her parents had to go to a dinner at the university. As they drove home, the evening was stiflingly hot and as they arrived outside the house a storm started with an unexpected clap of thunder and the rain fell as if the skies had opened. They were drenched before they could reach shelter.
Inside, saturated to the skin, they leaned on each other and laughed. Then Louise started to pull off her wet dress so that she stood in her slip, her slim young body outlined by the clinging satin. His shirt in his hands, his wet hair in his eyes, Josh was aware, with a sudden hot feeling of being a voyeur, of the shape of her body, how her hips filled out the slip and the shape of her breasts. She was looking at him, large-eyed and anxious, then, as their hands touched, their fingers grasped and for a moment they clung to each other, kissing, before Josh hurriedly pushed her away.
‘How come, Josh?’ She was staring at him, hurt and bewildered. ‘There was no harm. A little kissing doesn’t matter.’
‘You might have been kissing,’ Josh said sharply in a thick voice, unable to explain to her that had they continued he would have been after more than merely kissing.
She stared at him, worried and concerned. ‘But, Josh–!’
‘Lou, you’re not old enough.’
‘I’m sixteen.’
‘Fifteen.’
‘Okay, fifteen. But your grandmother was only fifteen when she fell in love with your grandfather. She told me.’
‘She didn’t marry him at fifteen. And we’re not in love.’
He was lying, trying to keep her at a distance for his own and her own sake, and she stared at him with tragic eyes. ‘I am,’ she said.
‘Lou, you can’t be. You’re not old enough.’
‘How damned old do you have to be?’
Leaving him speechless, she disappeared to her room. When he ventured downstairs again she had changed into dry clothes and was listening to the radio. Without a word, Josh sat at the opposite end of the settee. They hardly spoke a word all evening.
When Josh left the following day Louise saw him off from the front steps. As the taxi disappeared down the drive, she stared after it, her eyes moist.
‘Did something happen between you two?’ her mother asked.
‘Nope.’
‘You seemed to be getting on so well, and Josh’s a nice boy.’
‘Yep. Sure is.’
‘Well, what?’
Louise blinked back the tears. ‘Well, nothing,’ she said. ‘That’s all. Nothing. After all, Momma, he’s only eighteen.’
Five
Sandhurst was a new experience for Josh. He had been there before, in 1917 as a privileged spectator with his grandfather, but to be greeted on arrival in 1925 by an elongated figure made of teak wearing a Guards cap and w
ith a high-pitched falsetto scream that made his hair stand on end was a very different matter.
As they were formed up, scared stiff by the precision marching going on about them, the figure with the Guards cap addressed them. ‘Now gentlemen,’ he said. ‘While you’re ’ere, I’m “sir” to you, sir, and you’re “sir” to me, sir. Do you understand, all of you? Even if I address you as “sir”, you will also address me as “sir.” Got it?’
His bark was worse than his bite while his parade-ground patter, learned from generations of instructors, was worth putting in a book. ‘Idle’ covered everything from an untidy appearance to an improperly laced boot. ‘Idle on parade’. ‘Idle boot laces’. Even the bugler, suffering from a sore on his lip, had his name taken for blowing an ‘idle horn’.
In some ways it was a bit like joining a penal battalion. The cadets wore pink and white striped blazers with pill-box hats, a form of headgear that hadn’t been in use in the army since the turn of the century, and on parade the senior under-officers wore as much braid on their sleeves as Hungarian hussars. Though the instructors never missed a thing, they were also full of an underlying sense of humour and mutual loyalty that sprang from years in the army. Training was hard because the cadets had to learn everything that was likely to be needed by an army officer. ‘You’ve got to do it proper,’ they were told by the instructor. ‘And, since you ain’t been away from your mothers for long, you got to rely on me.’
There were a lot of familiar names on the doors of the long blank corridors of the old building – Maxse, de Salis, Lowe, Vandeleur, Luard, Paget – some even that Josh had heard his grandfather mention from as far back as the Crimea. Tradition and duty had brought them there. Josh had already read parts of Clausewitz and followed the campaigns of Stonewall Jackson, Lee, Napoleon, Wellington and Marlborough, poring over maps with his grandfather as he did so. Noticeably, few leaders from the recent war were mentioned, save his father’s old commander, Allenby, though there was a lot of talk about a man called Fuller – a serving soldier, no less – who was preaching blasphemy in the Royal United Services Institute Journal where he was claiming that, although cavalry was still needed, it was only of any use in tanks.
Once more, the drill came easily and he was eyed askance by the sergeant instructor. They spent weeks on general infantry training before moving on to more sophisticated instruction under a major of the 17th Lancers who’d been severely wounded in France. He had one eye, one hand and walked with a limp. Caught by a shell as a subaltern in 1914, when told he was unlikely ever to be fit enough to fight again, he had found a civilian surgeon who had patched him up and, despite his disability, had gone back to France in time to take part in the holocaust on the first day of the Somme. By the end of the war he was commanding a battalion of infantry but, after the Armistice, had dropped back to the rank of major and been given an instructor’s job at Sandhurst. Nobody seemed in the least surprised and, as the sergeant instructor said, ‘’Course he didn’t get no medals, sir. It was what he was trained for.’
Somehow, at Sandhurst, it made sense.
Josh was sorry when the course finished. It taught him a lot and for the first time in his life he began to see what soldiering was all about and that there might be some sense in all the relentless drilling. After passing out, he was kitted out by the regimental tailor, who remembered his father and his grandfather, but his return to the Regiment was very different from his enlistment. Instead of being cleverer than everybody else, now he was considered the lowest form of animal life in the mess.
A few of the older officers eyed him sideways, wondering what they’d picked up – an officer who preferred to start in the ranks against all precedents and need – and a few were inclined to bear down heavily on him, in case he thought he might be one up on them. A few, however, were forthrightly welcoming.
‘Can’t think how you imagined you could get away with it,’ Ellesmere said. ‘You’d have been spotted earlier if I hadn’t been on attachment to the RASC learning about lorries.’
The Colonel’s advice was sound. ‘You’re going to find some of the other ranks will try to take advantage of the fact that they ate, slept and drank alongside you,’ he said. ‘On the whole, though, they’re a pretty sensible lot who’ll appreciate things are different now. But–’ the Colonel leaned forward ‘–make sure you stay your side of the fence and they stay theirs. Have no nonsense about familiarity. You’re an officer now and you’ve got to behave like one. And you have quite a name to keep up. Personally, I think you’ll have little trouble and, in any case, we’re all going to have our hands full before long. They want to take away our horses and give us armoured cars.’
It turned out to be easier than Josh expected. No one tried to be familiar. One or two of the old soldiers eyed him askance and since he was not returned to Morby-Smith’s squadron but placed in Ellesmere’s, whose commanding officer was Leduc, there were few difficult moments. The NCOs were distant and respectful and his old friends welcoming. Syd Dodgin greeted him with a broad smile.
‘Good Heavens, sir,’ he said, stiffening to give him a tremendous salute. ‘Just look ’oo’s turned up.’
Eddie Orne was more wary and when Josh saw him waiting for a bus into the town and offered him a lift in the old bull-nosed Morris he’d bought, he sat for a long time in stiff silence.
‘Come on, Ed,’ Josh said at last. ‘Spit it out. You’re dying to say something, I know.’
There was a change of atmosphere at once and Orne visibly relaxed.
‘Yes–’ Orne stopped then went on with a rush ‘–sir! I nearly called you “Josh”, sir.’
‘Under the circumstances, I don’t think a lot of harm would have been done. I see you’ve got your skater.’
‘Yes, sir. They gave me yours.’
There was another long silence then Orne spoke again. ‘You’ll have no trouble from me, sir,’ he said earnestly. ‘You’re an officer now and good luck to you. I reckon, coming from where you do, it’s best – not only for you, but for us.’
‘How’s that, Ed?’
Orne smiled. ‘It comes out, sir. The best officers are always them whose families have been in the army for generations. Lord Ellesmere, sir. Mr Morby-Smith. I’ve seen their names on the roll of honour. One or two of them are bastards – if you’ll excuse the expression, sir, because it’s meant with no disrespect – but they know what they’re about and they know their responsibilities. The worst ones, sir, are the ones who just fancy themselves as officers because it’s smart.’
‘I think I know what you mean, Ed.’
‘I’m sure you do, sir. And, one of these days, when we’ve all got used to each other again, I’d consider it an honour, sir, if you could get me into your troop.’
The following week, Josh found himself talking to a new batch of recruits who had arrived in Leduc’s squadron.
‘You’d better do it,’ Ellesmere said. ‘I’m sure you know it by heart.’
‘First of all,’ Josh found himself saying, ‘consider yourselves lucky. We’re a good regiment and the only cavalry regiment in the British army to wear green…’
It seemed the first duty of a junior subaltern was to be seen and not heard. In addition to not speaking to his seniors, it seemed also that he was expected by tacit agreement to do a great deal of their work. It was also his task on Balaclava Day – when the Regiment celebrated its appearance in that auspicious disaster by offering its men free beer, its sergeants free spirits, and its officers a slap-up dinner – to give, after the King and the Regiment, the Plague Toast, a toast that had fallen to the youngest officer since 1763 when one Jeremiah Harkness, a total newcomer, had been the only man on his feet after cholera had decimated the regiment. There were squadron, regimental and guard-mounting parades and duty officer came round with depressing frequency. Only the imminent arrival of Toby Reeves cheered him with the thought t
hat Reeves, once his senior but now his junior in the Army list, would soon be relieving him of some of his burdens.
The rumours that they were to have their horses taken away came to nothing, but it was always hanging in the air over their heads like the sword of Damocles. Despite those officers who claimed that Balaclava proved that cavalry moving at speed could overwhelm guns, there were the others who pointed to Mars-la-Tour, the charge of the Chasseurs d’Afrique at Floing, and the disasters to the cavalry in France between 1914 and 1918.
Ellesmere, who was a tank advocate, made his views felt very clearly. ‘It was proved over and over again that tanks were the answer to the machine gun,’ he said.
Morby-Smith was less convinced. ‘Horses are essential for shock action,’ he said. ‘And tanks are slow. Charging cavalry has a demoralising effect on infantry.’
‘It didn’t have at High Wood. We lost half the regiment there.’
‘All the same, élan and dash, and perfection in manoeuvres are of inestimable value.’
‘Why can’t we have élan and dash in tanks?’
‘At five miles an hour?’
Leduc came down firmly on the side of armour. ‘I went through the last lot,’ he observed, ‘and the fact that we failed in France was borne out by the number of dead horses one saw. Even the junior char at the War Office could hardly fail to come up with the same conclusions.’
‘But, sir,’ Morby-Smith argued, ‘aren’t the traditionally rural origins of military families the very best thing for the army?’
Leduc gestured with his mangled right hand. ‘The horse is a noble but uncomprehending factor in military stupidity,’ he said, ‘ and it’s too much in evidence. Still, it pulls things, you can ride it, it raises egos, takes the weight off the feet and allows you to go to war sitting down. When it’s cold, you borrow its warmth and when it’s dead you can even eat it. But it has no place on a battlefield. Nevertheless, judging by the observations of some of the half-wits in power, it will still, like the poor, be with us when we next go into battle. Some people will never understand tanks until they can be made to eat hay and shit, and no new tank brigade will ever be assembled while the ranks of the petrified, the ossified and the stupefied remain unthinned.’
