The Brides of Solomon

by Geoffrey Household

  But now that the Archduke had passed, we could see the missing fourth car drawn into the side of the road. A crowd, at a respectful distance, was round it. Another and more active crowd, led by police, was running up the dry bed of the river. We saw an indistinguishable limp puppet caught and arrested.

  Von Lech, allowing a decent interval for the stopped clock of civilisation to start again, leaned over the balcony and made enquiries. Yes, it had been a bomb; a colonel in the last car had been wounded; some Bosnian students were, it was believed, responsible. Von Lech and my father took this awkward hurdle in their stride. Secondary education, they admitted, was bound to have its teething troubles.

  I was silent with a new disappointment. One read of Bombs in the newspapers. Anarchists with Bombs occasionally blew themselves up (but no one else) in the Boys Own Paper. And now a bomb had been thrown practically in front of my eyes, and I hadn’t even seen it.

  The party returned inside for refreshments. The women were exclamatory. My father and von Lech discussed Bombs with philosophic detachment. Nobody paid any attention to me. I made myself a nuisance, and was told that I could go into the garden and look at the goldfish until the Archduke’s procession returned along the Quay, but that on no account was I to leave the house.

  In cold blood I should never have dared to engage myself in the streets of so very foreign a town; but curiosity about the Bomb overcame all else. I was as eager to get the horrid details for my school friends as any reporter for his editor. I quietly opened and closed the front door, and slunk along the Appel Quay, keeping close under the houses in case anyone should come out on the balcony and spot me. I crossed Franz Josef Street and then, with enough people between me and the balcony, went over to the river side of the Quay.

  There was nothing much to see at the car. The right back wheel and its mudguard looked as if they had been involved in a nasty smash—a sight far more familiar now than then. Imagination produced a few drops of blood on the road. Or perhaps they were really there.

  I wandered along the embankment with some vague idea of detecting traces of the would-be assassin in the river-bed. There were none, and I found myself a quarter of a mile from home with no satisfactory reason for being where I was. I became embarrassedly conscious of my outlandish appearance. In honour of the Archduke I had been compelled to put on my Eton suit—then worn by all small boys on Sundays and formal occasions. I don’t know whether Sarajevo had ever seen such an outfit before. No one assumed that I had escaped from a circus, so it cannot have been as startling as I supposed.

  While I fiddled around, no doubt taking refuge in day dreams, the two hedges of police and public opposite our balcony had grown up again. The Archduke was due to return. Worse still, there was a third hedge stretching across the Appel Quay where the procession was to turn right into Franz Josef Street. I was completely cut off from home.

  I disliked crossing the empty, wide road with everyone’s eyes upon me. However, I had to get back to the balcony before my absence was discovered. I pushed self-consciously through the line of people into the open, and was at once turned back by a policeman. His reaction, I think, must have been one of sheer surprise. He was understandably nervous.

  Turned back almost simultaneously was another spectator, a sharp-featured young man little taller than my over-grown self. He too was trying to cross the road and had left it too late. We exchanged glances. I remember his brilliant blue eyes in a yellowish face. He beckoned to me, and said in German (which I understood, though nothing would induce me to mumble it unless compelled):

  ‘Come with me! I will take you across.’

  Then he asked the policeman if he couldn’t see that I was a little well-born foreigner and harmless. His tone almost implied that he was my manservant or tutor. With an arm round my shoulders, taking away by his middle-class poverty the shame of my resplendent Eton suit, he led me across the road.

  We entered the crowd lining the corner of the Appel Quay and Franz Josef Street, and mingled with it. I began to bolt for home, but the procession was on us. The police car came first, then the car containing the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife. I remember Count Harrach standing on the running board on the left-hand side of the car, shielding the Archduke with his body. It did not occur to me that such was his motive. It just seemed a gallant and genuinely Ruritanian way to ride.

  The cars turned into Franz Josef Street. My kindly little friend leaned forward and fired twice. I was some distance from him and did not at first realise what he was doing. In 1914 we had not yet been educated by war and movies. Nothing spectacular happened, except that the Archduke leaned back and Sophie put her head on his knees. Then the wave of the crowd curved over Gabriel Princip. Above the bent heads and shoulders I could see Count Harrach put a handkerchief to the Archduke’s mouth. It turned suddenly red as in a conjuring trick.

  When I reached our door, the von Lechs and my parents came pouring out of it; they did not notice that I had joined them from the Quay, not from inside the house. I never told them. I never said a word of my adventure at school. Guilt was already present, though it was many years before I admitted to myself that Gabriel Princip, seizing his opportunity, had used me to bluff his way through police and crowd to Franz Josef Street. Without me, he would have had to fire from some point on the Appel Quay past or through the protecting body of Count Harrach—a shot so long and hopeless that he would have drawn from his pocket only, perhaps, a cigarette.

  The Idealist

  HE still used to finger his captain’s uniform and wonder how the devil he had got into it without a major interruption of his life. There had been, of course, a sudden rush of unfamiliar incidents, but no break in the continuity of the self and the work which he knew, no chrysalis period of military training. At one moment he had been manager of a fleet of barges on the gentle Severn; at the next he was an army captain running lighters in a Mediterranean aflame with war. A deputy Assistant Director of Transportation they called him. It seemed a long title. He was used to being called the Young Boss. His father was the Old Boss.

  And here he was in Piraeus Harbour, emptying into his barges the holds of the freighters which raced up from Alexandria; unloading on the quay or—if the weather were kind—at little ports on the other side of the Corinth Canal; storing and stacking; managing his Greek lightermen with the aid of a foreman who, sober, much resembled his old Severn-side foreman drunk; and commanding his small detachment of military through a sergeant-major who was the recoil mechanism between himself and the Army. The sergeant-major took and distributed the shocks so that the Young Boss—no, Captain Coulter, of course—could go on doing his job without disrupting the still unintelligible organisation of which he was a part.

  Sergeant-Major Wrist was in the eyes of Coulter a character straight out of Kipling—pliant, resourceful, with as neat and tough a body as if he had polished and brushed it along with his equipment for twenty-five years of morning parades. He had managed to stay alive through one war already—not to speak of several expeditions which he described as picnics—and he freely expressed his intention of staying alive through this one. Coulter liked that. It was a proper old-soldierly way to talk. He felt that Wrist was wasted on a non-combatant job in the docks, and was sure that he must have pulled every possible regimental string to avoid it.

  Their life of mere hard work was not, however, likely to continue undisturbed. That morning, April 6, 1941, Hitler had declared war on Greece. It was the end of five uncannily peaceful months while the Greeks fought only Italians, and the base had been free to pour in the seaborne supplies from Egypt. Coulter did not think the Germans were likely to bomb Athens. Their pedantic minds would conceive that, at least, as sheer barbarism. But they were bound to have a shot, instantly, at knocking out the Piraeus.

  He was still in his dockside office when the stroke came, alone with the sergeant-major who never objected—especially when they had first had an informal meal together and some drinks—to staying
at leisurely work up to any hour of night. There was very little warning. When the sirens screamed, Sergeant-Major Wrist at once enjoined his Captain to take refuge in the concrete shelter beneath the quay. Those, he said, were the Orders. A minute later, when they were at the door of the shelter, the raid began.

  Coulter let the sergeant-major pop into the burrow, and himself stayed above ground and watched. This then was war. Flame. Noise. Space geometry of searchlights and tracer. The upward flowering of explosions. The hammering and tinkling and whining of bits of metal. A mind quite arbitrarily prepared to lay long odds that its body stood in empty air between flying objects.

  He was fascinated both by the scene and by the fact that his curiosity seemed to be greater than his fear. He had been just too young for the first war, and all his life had been envious of that experience which had destroyed a fifth of his near contemporaries at school. At the age of seventeen he had been conditioned to the prospect of death. Three weeks was the average fighting life of a British infantry subaltern on the western front, and he had been disappointed that he was just too young to take the gamble.

  He knew all right that he had been a young fool—it had seemed to him in peace utterly incredible, this desire to immolate oneself for the sake of excitement—and yet, when a second war came along, it appeared that he was merely an older fool. He could perfectly well have been running barges in the unraided Severn instead of a port which—if there were anything in all the military theories he had read—was doomed to absolute destruction.

  So this was all. Well, but to endure it for three weeks needed, no doubt, such sustained courage that one might welcome the end foretold by the military actuaries. All the same, it was exhilarating to find—after twenty years of wondering about it—that one wasn’t particularly afraid. Coulter was annoyed at himself for this sudden vanity. What were a few bombs compared to forcing oneself to jump out of a trench into the steady, calculated fire of 1917. No. No, this wasn’t the real thing.

  It was over in ten minutes. A lucky string of bombs had erased the northern block of sheds and set the s.s. City of Syracuse on fire. Her crew—those few of them who were on board—had tumbled down the ship’s brow and bolted for the dock gates as soon as she was hit. It wasn’t surprising. In her holds were two hundred tons of explosives and ammunition. The ship’s officers of course would know it, though it was possible that the crew, up to the moment they were ordered to clear out, did not. For the sake of security and to avoid the risk of devastating sabotage in a port where there had been German agents at large till the previous night, her cargo was officially described as mere military stores.

  The City of Syracuse did not directly concern Coulter’s office since she was discharging into the railway trucks alongside, not into lighters; but he had heard of the nature of her cargo and assumed that all the British working in the port were equally well informed. Security seemed to him to limit discussion rather than knowledge.

  A naval launch was desperately trying to shift the ship into the outer harbour, but neither man nor rope could exist on her flaming bows, and the launch had not the power to tow her stern foremost. When the stern cable charred and broke, the Navy gave up. Very reasonably, too, thought Coulter.

  The sergeant-major took his time in the shelter—and why not, since the all-clear had never sounded?—and missed such excitement as there had been. He now appeared, unruffled, at Coulter’s elbow.

  ‘Gone to fetch a tug, I expect, sir,’ he said, watching the launch scatter red foam from her bows as she slid away from the City of Syracuse into outer darkness.

  ‘Perhaps,’ answered Coulter, giving the Navy the benefit of the doubt. ‘But the nearest tug is in the naval basin. It’ll take her a quarter of an hour to get here, and I think that’s just ten minutes too long.’

  ‘She does seem to be burning pretty fierce, sir,’ Wrist agreed coolly.

  Except for the occasional fountains of flame from the City of Syracuse, the docks were at peace under the moon. The tough central core of the northern sheds stood up sheer from a pile of rubble on which the dust was already settling. There were no troops about, for at that hour of night all of them, except the A.A. gunners, were back at their billets in the town. The duty clerks in the port offices were being marched away. The ambulances had cleared up the few wounded who could readily be found, and gone. The Greek fire brigades were presumably fully occupied in the town, for a glow over distant streets showed where another string of bombs had fallen.

  As Coulter and Wrist turned to go, a staff car raced up the quay and stopped opposite to them. In it were the Area Commander and his Adjutant, perfectly cool, perfectly dressed. God knew what they hoped to do there! If it came to that, thought Coulter, God knew why he was still there himself! Theirs presumably was a moral duty, but he hadn’t any duty whatever. Some of his barges were adrift in the harbour, but he could only let them stay there until the Navy brought a tug.

  ‘Good evening, Coulter,’ said the Area Commander. ‘Barging in again, I see.’

  It was a steady joke, which pleased the Commander very much. Somehow it pleased Coulter, too. It meant, after all, that the Commander recognised him, liked him, knew what he did and appreciated it. And that could stand repetition.

  ‘Anything we can do, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘If I were you,’ said the Area Commander, ‘I should get out of here pretty damn quick. There’s nothing any of us can do.’

  He left his car and passed a pleasant word with the sergeant-major, even exchanging a casual reminiscence as one old soldier to another. Then he walked off on a tour of the docks to assure himself that there was no man in need of help.

  ‘Well, he isn’t taking his own advice, sergeant-major, but we will,’ said Coulter, as if it were a foregone conclusion.

  He started towards his waiting truck. Wrist pointed to the sliced cube of the northern building, outlined against the burning City of Syracuse.

  ‘There was a gun up there, sir,’ he remarked. ‘I suppose they’re all right.’

  It seemed to Coulter exceedingly unlikely that the gun crew would have cleared out leaving any of their number alive on top of the building. Still, it was just possible that the whole lot had been hit and forgotten, and that there might be a survivor in no state to climb down.

  ‘Shall we go and see, sir?’

  What particularly annoyed Coulter was that he knew just where and when his sergeant-major was likely to be a bit of a fraud. Indeed he doubted if you could become a sergeant-major at all without a keen appreciation of the value of eyewash. He did not believe for a moment that Wrist would have made this intolerable and officious suggestion if it hadn’t been for the presence, somewhere in the docks, of the Area Commander.

  But there it was. That was the way an army fought. That was the value of leadership. Even if Wrist did take good care that there was someone to commend his act of gallantry, it only reflected tremendous credit on the Area Commander who had inspired him. Scamps, these old soldiers? Well, if you liked. But, by God, they made the rules of their own game and enough of them had died at it!

  The sergeant-major gave an indescribable hitch to his whole person, as if he were about to report to the Almighty that all, including his own well-polished soul, was present and correct. He then stepped out smartly towards the northern sheds. No, thought Coulter, of course he wouldn’t run. Running, even forwards, suggested a sense of urgency and panic. That was not the way of the majestically professional British Army.

  Captain Coulter found himself unconsciously lagging half a step behind. That wouldn’t do at all, and he drew up and paced stride for stride with Wrist. He cursed his lack of any military training, aware as never before that he had only been carried along by observing traditions of which he had heard and read, by listening to the sergeant-major, by a romantic enthusiasm for those unrealised three weeks of youth.

  What on earth was an officer expected to do in a case like this? Use his common sense, he supposed. The situation was
not, in essence, very different from a pay parade when you followed all the absurd little ceremonies because it was expected of you, because it was that way a soldier liked to work. Alternatively, it was doubtless in his power to order the sergeant-major to drop this folly. Or he could go to ground in any solid cover there might be, and charitably watch Wrist trying to win his D.C.M. There was nobody looking to see what he did himself.

  ‘Oh, blast!’ Coulter thought. ‘I am looking.’

  He found that he had grumbled the words half aloud, and was startled by his own voice as much as by his superb and unexpected arrogance.

  ‘Sir?’ asked the sergeant-major.

  ‘Nothing. What the hell of a lot of bricks there are in four walls!’

  They clambered over the rubble of the shed, keeping the mound so far as possible between themselves and the waves of heat from the City of Syracuse. To Coulter’s right was the line of railway trucks waiting for the cargo they were about—and instantaneously—to receive. For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful. Some of them had been loaded that afternoon. No stencilling on the boxes to indicate the contents. Security. Damned soldiers had learned that much if nothing else. At the tail end of the train, where there were neither building nor rubble between sidings and ship, the wood of the trucks was smouldering.

  The flames over the City of Syracuse had died down. The plates of her upper works were red and the paint was curling off like wood shavings. All of her above the main deck was spurting and glowing. A subsidence or a melting anywhere would drop the furnace into the holds.