Past Caring - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  For all my political awareness, I was as ignorant as the rawest volunteer of what lay in wait for those of us who blithely set off for France in that summer of 1914. The regiment was in good heart, convinced that our cause was just and that our abilities, honed so relatively recently in South Africa, were more than a match for the Germans. The sense of unity and purpose was infectious, though I remained cynically immune. Nevertheless, I believed what the strategists told us – that we had the beating of the enemy in short order – because I supposed that they knew their business. Had not Sir Edward Grey, my esteemed former colleague, said in Parliament that the consequences of war were scarcely worse than the consequences of peace?

  The truth did not take long to confront me. The Battle of Mons in late August – into which the regiment flung itself with conviction and enthusiasm – was the beginning and end of the war we all expected. Casualties were heavy, but they could have been borne had there been some profit in the engagement. In truth, it merely marked the grinding to a halt of the German advance on Paris and the firm entrenchment of both sides along a line through north-eastern France, which was also a demarcation of the war we were due to wage.

  Once trench warfare had begun, our cavalry expertise gleaned from South Africa became redundant and our generals’ strategic thinking was bankrupted. I had been attached to the staff of Sir John French – Commander-in-Chief – during the Mons engagement, but thereafter found myself given a captaincy and a platoon to command at the front. From such a vantage point, I could examine at first hand French’s methods of overcoming heavily defended trenches. These amounted to throwing infantry against wire and artillery in the hope of breaking through to an extent that might be exploited by the cavalry. Occasionally, this happened and a salient was created in the German trench line. Yet a salient, being exposed on three sides, was impossible to defend and, however far-advanced, was always bound to be constricted and ultimately strangled.

  The persistence in such a strategy – in the absence of any other – was worse than futile, it was criminal. The pride of the regular army was sacrificed in one bid after another to make the breakthrough that would count and which never came. French made way for Haig, who was no better, indeed somewhat worse. For whereas French had fatuously hoped to convert trench warfare into the type of war he could win, Haig saw the trenches as means of wearing down the Germans by attritional methods until they no longer had the manpower to fight.

  The reality this represented for the fighting man was almost certain death for the sake of a distant, weary victory. Yet most of them did not realize this. By the close of 1914, most of my regiment had been killed or invalided and replaced by eager young recruits who found themselves marching to a muddy grave for no clear reason.

  I led, myself, a seemingly charmed existence. I rapidly sickened of leading suicidal advances over the top, but continued to do so because refusal required a moral courage I did not possess. I would have been accused of cowardice – and probably been shot for it – and would have felt guilty of treachery towards my fellow suffering men at arms. So I persisted in an intensifying mood of indifference to my own fate. Perhaps that was my salvation, for that indifference saved me from either impetuosity or panic, both fatal conditions. I won no medals but a reputation for leading survivors, who thanked me with their loyalty for still being alive each roll call. We fought for each other, not for the generals – whom we rightly distrusted for plotting our every gadarene rush upon the guns whilst sipping claret in safely distant châteaux – or for the public at home, who knew and understood nothing. I, especially, did not fight for the politicians, who were quite capable of fighting amongst themselves. As I later learned, the making and breaking of wartime coalitions at Westminster became merely an extension of the struggle for power between Asquith and Lloyd George, with Lloyd George the ultimate victor. More than with any of these, we hapless soldiers felt fellowship with our opponents. The sanest thing we did was lay down our guns and celebrate Christmas with the Germans between the lines at the end of that first year of war, only for that to be taken from us. Strict orders were issued warning that men would be shot for any form of fraternization. It was deemed to be bad for morale, as if killing and being killed for no purpose was not. Amidst all the madness and mutilation, I learned a lesson I never had as a politician: that we cannot properly lead those with whom we have not shared suffering.

  The year 1915 came and went and, with it, a second Christmas by which the war was still not over. We who were not dead were deadened by the horror of it all. We no longer expected it ever to end. For me, an end of a kind came with that crowning insanity: the Battle of the Somme, which stretched from July to November, 1916. I picked up several bad doses of mustard gas and then, one pointless day in early September, took a shrapnel hit in the leg and my Somme at least was over. I spent the autumn laid up in a convalescent home near Brighton, my mother a constant visitor.

  Just before Christmas, a relative stranger came to see me: Winston Churchill, whom I had encountered earlier in the year whilst passing through Armentières. He had then been serving as a colonel in the Royal Scots Fusiliers, having come out to France in disgrace following the failure of his brainchild: the Dardanelles expedition. Now he was home again, trying to recover his political reputation, but, whether in the trenches or in Cabinet, he was always possessed of a cherubic irresponsibility. We had first met on the boat to South Africa sixteen years before and, since he was the only one of my former Cabinet colleagues likely to seek me out, I was pleased to see him. He sat by my bed, beaming and ruminating upon the ways of the world – and of war.

  “After we met in France, I wondered what had become of you,” he said. “Then I heard you were laid up here, so thought I’d look in.”

  “It’s kind of you to have called, Winston. The leg’s not too bad. They tell me I should be up and about in the New Year with just a limp to show for it. What are you up to now?”

  He leant forward confidentially. “I’m back at Westminster. The wind seems to be blowing my way again now that L.G.’s at number 10.”

  “I read about that: Asquith out at last.”

  “Yes – and good riddance. He never had the heart for a war – and that’s a sure way to lose one. L.G. won’t let anything stand in his path. I have high hopes.”

  “Of him – or for a post?”

  He grinned. “Both, actually.”

  I wished him well, without hypocrisy. A man who could sustain such zest for life deserved well of it. The war had blown away my bitterness, though not my sadness. And it was that last commodity that prompted me to beg a favour of him before he went. Favours were his stock in trade, so I had no compunction.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, Edwin?”

  “Perhaps there is. Just before the war broke out, I commissioned some work of which I’ve subsequently heard nothing. You might be able to find out how matters now stand.”

  “What sort of work?”

  “Some minor confidential enquiries. I used Palfrey – you’ll remember him. He never reported back, which was unlike him. I wrote to him last month but have had no reply – he may have changed his address. I wondered if you could ask around to see what’s become of him.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Edwin – have a word with people I still know at the Home Office. I’ll let you know if Palfrey’s still around.”

  “I’d be much obliged.”

  And I was obliged to Churchill, though not for news of Palfrey, for he never gave me any. I went back to France in March 1917, forgot my passing recollection of that unfinished business and found myself promoted to the rank of major but consigned because of suspect leg and lungs to tedious administrative duties at regimental field headquarters. Then, in May, I heard that Churchill had received the reward he had looked for from Lloyd George: the post of Minister of Munitions. Within a few weeks, I was reassigned to oversee, with the rank of colonel, armaments distribution in our sector of the front. Churchill sent me a congratul
atory note leaving me in no doubt that my appointment had been at his behest. Strangely, he made no mention of Palfrey. He may well have had more important things to think about. Certainly, I was kept busy at his bidding, taking some grim satisfaction from endeavouring to ensure that, if men had to continue fighting, they could at least do so adequately armed.

  In that way I passed the remaining eighteen months of the Great War. In November 1918, it finally ground to an armistice: a mutual acknowledgement of the absolute futility of further slaughter. We who had been lucky enough to survive felt no exhilaration at victory, only relief. What we celebrated was a resumption of life. In most cases this meant the secure normalities of home and family. What I had forgotten in my own case, but remembered as soon as I was demobilized, was how little there was for me to return to.

  They tried, I cannot say otherwise. Barrowteign in the late autumn of 1918 welcomed home its flawed if favoured son. My mother was overjoyed that I had survived and content with that. And so, for a while, was I. Sitting in my home, walking in the village of my birth, escorting my mother to church – these quiet, domestic pleasures were balm to my shaken spirit. So long as I was engaged upon a process of recuperation, they sufficed.

  Poor little Ambrose had contracted the virulent strain of influenza that carried off so many war-weakened souls that winter. I sought to hasten his recovery and occupy my mind and hands by constructing for him an elaborate model castle for Christmas. It was an intricate task in which I could lose myself and gain a degree of tranquillity. And I was gratified to see how happy it made Ambrose when presented to him under the Christmas tree. Having spent many hours in designing and building it, I was obliged to spend many more instructing him in its ways – how to operate the drawbridge, where the secret doors were, how a toy soldier might enter the keep. All this spared me the necessity of indulging his interest in my wartime adventures, which I wished only to forget.

  That Christmas, playing with Ambrose, Mother beaming at us from the hearth, I was a man restored, but restored to what? I picked up some of the pieces of my life, but knew that others had all along been missing. I began to think again – though less intensely – of Elizabeth and recalled to mind the unfinished business of Palfrey’s enquiries on my behalf. I might have decided that they should be left undisturbed, but, in truth, I had little to distract me from morbid reflection and that was translated into something more active by the New Year’s honours list of 1919. I scanned The Times resumé for names I knew and there one sentence struck home with a force undimmed by the passage of time: “Among industrialists honoured, Gerald Couchman, the munitions manufacturer, receives a knighthood in recognition of the outstanding production record of his company over the past four years and its contribution to the war effort during that time.”

  So Gerald Couchman, coward of Colenso, had spent four lucrative years manufacturing the weapons of destruction, married to the woman I still loved, whilst I had gritted my way through four years of sustained misery in the Flanders trenches, serving a cause in which I had no faith and gaining no reward beyond an accidental exemption from death. This was too much to bear.

  I said nothing to my mother, gave her no hint of what I felt, merely announced calmly that I would, the following day, be going to London for a few days to attend to some matters of business. She had not noticed the news of Couch’s knighthood by the time I left.

  On the first morning of 1919, I stood in my greatcoat on a chill, deserted Dewford railway station – my runabout motor having been ransomed to the post-war fuel shortage – waiting for the train that would connect at Exeter with the London express, questioning in my mind the wisdom of another stirring of my past, knowing in my heart that too much of my loss was unexplained for me to leave unasked the questions that still gnawed at me: Why did you reject me, Elizabeth? Why did you marry Gerald Couchman? Wherein did I offend?

  The train carried me away from Dewford, over the very crossing where my brother had perished eight years before. At least, I reflected, his death had been an accident. My disgrace seemed a more malevolent working of fate which did not even deign to show its motive. In London, I hoped to smoke it out.

  Upon arrival, I made my way to Palfrey’s office in Rotherhithe, dingily unchanged in its housing beneath an arch of a railway viaduct on the fringes of dockland. There was nobody in, so I waited, as the trains rattled overhead and the sleet fell about me. It was a grey, dank place, cold as death that New Year’s afternoon. But it was, for good or ill, where the trail lay. And, sure enough, Palfrey eventually returned to his haunt. I laid an arm on his shoulder as he turned a key in the door.

  “Mr. Palfrey, do you remember me?”

  “I don’t rightly think so.”

  He admitted me to his office, one place made more tolerable by the chill. Perhaps he would not have done so had he recognised me at first, for he turned a paler shade of grey when I identified myself and mentioned our unfinished business.

  “Lord sir, that was before the war.”

  “What of it?”

  “I never thought to see you again, sir. So much ’as changed since then.”

  “Not my interest in Sir Gerald and Lady Couchman.”

  “Sir Gerald?”

  “Didn’t you know of his knighthood?”

  “No sir, but it don’t surprise me.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s a well-connected gentleman – like yourself.”

  “My connections are sundered. What about yours? Does the Home Office still look after you?”

  “We do business when there’s need – as in your day, sir.”

  “Then what of our business, Mr. Palfrey? I paid you to obtain information, no matter that it was four and a half years ago.”

  “I’ve nothing to report, sir. Naturally, you can ’ave your advance back.”

  “Why nothing to report?”

  “My enquiries was not fruitful.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sir, it was business, as you say. So I’ll repay the money” – he pawed at a cashbox – “and that’ll conclude our business.”

  “Before it’s even begun?”

  “As you say, sir” – and here he risked a meaningful look – “before it’s even begun.”

  He had thrust some grubby notes into my hand. They were clammy with his sweat, for all that it was bitterly cold. Palfrey was a frightened man. Nothing could be more graphic than his return of money on a lapsed debt. I despaired of extracting anything from him and turned to go.

  “One thing, Mr. Palfrey,” I said as an afterthought. “You must know Mr. Churchill, one of my successors.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Did he – or anyone else – approach you about your enquiries on my behalf?”

  “No sir.”

  “This would have been about two years ago.”

  “Not then – not ever, sir.”

  He was lying – I felt certain of it. But there was nothing to be gained by pressing him further. I let the money fall from my hand and left him to stoop after it. As I walked away from his office, the-conviction grew on me that his enquiries had not stopped but been stopped. Strangely, I exulted at this conviction, for it proved for the first time that there was something behind my disgrace beyond a whim of fate: some human, calculating force working against me. To a soldier, it was some kind of consolation – especially after the war I had just fought – to know that the enemy existed.

  I booked into a hotel near Leicester Square for the night to plan my strategy. The loss of Palfrey’s reconnaissance struck me as no great problem. The telephone directory yielded the information I most needed: the address of the Couchman works in Woolwich, the home address of G.V. Couchman in Hampstead. But I did not propose to beard Couch in either lair without first exploring the strange question of the silencing of Palfrey. My recollection of Winston Churchill’s solicitous call upon me during my wartime convalescence was newly suspicious in this light. I had asked him to chivvy Palfrey on my behalf but al
l I had received was an arduous new posting at his instigation.

  Accordingly, the following morning, I telephoned Churchill’s new ministry – the War Office – and, after repeating my name several times, was put through to him. Parliament being in recess and his duties at a low ebb, he was delighted at the prospect of meeting me for luncheon. As a matter of fact, I had never known him refuse an invitation to luncheon however busy he was at the time. His appetite and ambition alike knew no bounds. To be fair, nor did his humanity and it was on this last quality that I was banking.

  Gaspard’s Restaurant in the Strand was better suited to the gourmand than the gourmet and I was neither. But Churchill set to with a will, leaving me to insinuate leading questions between courses.

  “We’re both lucky, Winston, to have survived that summer of 1916.”

  “That’s true, Edwin. But I’m especially glad to see you again. You had to go through another two years of the beastly business.”

  “It was nearer eighteen months actually and they were spent in an interesting post that was safer than most. I thought you might have had something to do with that.”

  “Perhaps, dear boy, perhaps.” He grinned as he spoke, then grew serious. “But don’t misunderstand. Munitions movements were vital at that stage of the war. We needed calm, reliable people – such as yourself.”

  “It’s kind of you to say so.”

  “Not at all – it’s accurate. The public are quick to forget that my ministry and the people who helped it shortened the war.”