Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  Unfortunately, however, Alex was too dedicated a man to enjoy the mountain air, or anything Simla had to offer in the way of social amusements. Never much of a mixer, he was currently engaged on work that distressed him, both as a highlyspecialised professional soldier and as a rationalist. For he, too, in a sense, had been engaged in reviewing and his conclusions were less euphoric than those of Franz Ferdinand in faraway Bosnia. The field work of the candidates, he decided, had been sloppy in the extreme, but if possible that sloppiness was exceeded by their written work. Putting them together he was hard put to it to find a single student eligible for a recommendation to a staff college.

  This was bad enough, out of a course of twenty-four. What was worse was the underlying reason for the overall poor quality. The young men selected were either favourites, with some kind of backstairs influence, or regimental failures, the kind of men a busy colonel would not miss for a month or so, and one reason or the other accounted for their presence here. Otherwise it was very unlikely that they would have been detached for the course in the first place. In addition, nearly all the candidates were cavalrymen.

  Take Willoughby-Nairn, for instance, typical of the kind of subaltern Alex had encountered all over the Empire during the last thirty years. Twenty-three, the younger son of a guardee, and an Admiral's daughter; educated Eton; gazetted to a smart regiment on passing Sandhurst at his third attempt. Cherubic-looking, easy-mannered, a great favourite with the ladies, the winner of innumerable polo cups and pig-sticking trophies but running slightly to fat, despite so much outdoor exercise. A proven toper in the mess. Much given to skylarking. Supremely satisfied with his own modest attainments and his future. As a soldier in the field recklessly brave, no doubt; as a leader of men, worthless; as a trainer of soldiers, worse than useless.

  His pen hovered over Lieutenant Willoughby-Nairn's character summary at the foot of page three of his report, and he would have given a month's pay to write a truthful assessment of this arrogant young puppy, who embodied all that he most detested in the service. But by now he knew his limitations, both as a small-arms fanatic and as the son of a tradesman. He wrote, "In my view this officer is not temperamentally suited for staff work," and left it at that.

  He said rather more in his daily letter to Lydia, for his wife was his emotional safety valve on all these occasions. Of the class in general, he wrote, "God help those led by these men in any scrape with a modernised army. Their sole hope of survival would be the elimination of their platoon commander in the first brush and his replacement by a time-serving N.C.O. I use the word 'platoon' rather than 'squadron' advisedly. What nobody here seems to realise is that, in a war with any disciplined force, every man jack among them would serve as an infantryman. I warned my class of that one day last week. Those who were awake looked at me as if I had uttered a blasphemy, as indeed I had in their view…"

  An overbold monkey, one of the many he had heard thrumming on the iron roof over his head all the afternoon, made a quick grab through the open window at a bowl of fruit on the ledge and suffered for Lieutenant Willoughby-Nairn's shortcomings. Seizing the first opportunity to release his inner tensions, Alexander Swann, square peg in a round hole, smashed his fist down on the intruder, clipping the end of his tail. The monkey fled, screaming with rage. Alex picked up his pen and resumed writing.

  The incident afforded him no more than temporary relief. Soon, shuffling his reports, he rose and made his way through a labyrinth of corridors to the Mall outside, threading his way down the winding road towards the barracks. Past block after block of some of the ugliest administrative buildings in the world, monstrosities raised on girders held together with stanchions and roofed with corrugated iron. Architectural eyesores that had been described as "pyramids of disused tramcars." Past the premises of military tailors, past estate agents, a bank, two provision merchants, a very English-looking church, Peliti's Restaurant (where you could learn who was cuckolding whom), and as he went rubbing shoulders with Pathans, Sikhs, and Tibetans, with strolling Europeans, civil and military, and a string of panting rickshaw drivers. He had eyes for nothing and nobody. The accumulated weight of his misgivings bore on him like a heavy burden. A few high-ranking officers had been impressed by his reiterated pleas for increased fire-power. Had it been otherwise, he would not have been here, marking the test papers of the Willoughby-Nairns, but he knew, and they knew, that his sponsors, men of Haldane's and Roberts's calibre, would not be confronting the enemy if and when the challenge came. That would fall to the Willoughby-Nairns, mostly to men half his age, who thought of him, most of them, as a prig and a bore.

  It was the price, he supposed, of having seen so many men needlessly sacrificed in a dozen campaigns; that, plus the misfortune of being born of a practical mother and an imaginative father and of having inherited their common sense, but not their humour.

  He went on past the trim houses of the Little Tin Gods, with their Sikh guards and their regimented rows of lupins, on down the Mall in the general direction of the vice-regal palace. His steps led him instinctively towards the range, silent at this hour of the day when parades were over and Europeans took their ease.

  The armoury was housed in a long shed, a hundred yards beyond the guardhouse. He acknowledged the salute of the sentries and passed inside, pausing to glance through the barred window of the building and seeing there something that mildly surprised him, at least enough to penetrate the gloom that had tormented him since he sat down to mark those test-papers. A shirt-sleeved lance-corporal was at the bench, coiling belts of heavy machine-gun ammunition, and something reverential in the youngster's movements arrested him. The gun, dismantled, lay on the bench but the lance-corporal was wholly absorbed, coiling the belts like a bride-to-be winding ribbons. Alex went inside and the young soldier—Alex judged him to be no more than twenty at the most—sprang to attention, his arms held stiffly by his sides, thumbs in line with the seams of his breeches.

  "Are you the armoury guard detail?"

  "No, sir!"

  "What are you doing here? Are you on duty in the guardhouse?"

  "No, sir!"

  "Did you strip that Vickers?"

  "Yessir."

  "You were given authority?"

  "Sergeant of the guard. Sir."

  The young man seemed petrified in the presence of a lieutenant-colonel. He held himself poker straight, and when he spoke his lips moved like those of a ventriloquist's dummy.

  "All right, lance-corporal. Stand at ease."

  The man relaxed, muscle by muscle. It was like watching someone thaw.

  "You're interested in the heavy machine-gun?"

  "Yessir."

  "But not a qualified machine-gunner?"

  "No, sir."

  "Then who taught you to strip a gun?"

  "No one, sir… I… I watched… watched it being done during the course, sir."

  "Then you must recognise me as the instructor?"

  "Yessir."

  "What are your duties on the range?"

  "Setting up targets, sir."

  "But you have never actually handled a gun until now?"

  "No, sir."

  "Could you reassemble it?"

  "I believe so, sir."

  "Do it then."

  He took a seat on the end of the bench, watching the lance-corporal's expression. His body was at ease, or nearly so, but his features were still frozen into a blankness bordering on that of an imbecile. Yet gradually, as his hands closed over the dismantled pieces of shining metal, the expression changed, the hard, staring look softening to one of dreamy absorption. The oil-stained fingers, long and supple, moving very rapidly but with infinite precision. The only sound in the hut was the soft click of metal as the gun took shape. Alex glanced down at his watch, then at the man's hands, then at his watch again. The operation occupied one minute, fifteen seconds. He said, "What's your name, lance-corporal?"

  "Hunter, sir."

  "How long have you been out, Hunter?" />
  "Two months, sir."

  "Where do you live in England?"

  "Kent, sir."

  "What part of Kent?"

  "A place called Hildenborough, sir."

  "Then you probably know my father's home, Tryst, near Twyforde?"

  "Yessir." There was a pause. "I used to deliver telegrams there, sir. Before I enlisted."

  It was an odd coincidence. He must sometimes have seen the boy, pushing his red bicycle up the steep drive from the old mill-house, for telegrams from the Tonbridge office were constantly arriving at Tryst, especially in the years before his father had installed a telephone.

  He sat pondering a moment, Lance-Corporal Hunter having stepped back a pace and resumed his at-ease posture, head up, legs astride, hands clasped behind his back.

  "Automatic weapons fascinate you, Hunter?"

  "Yessir."

  "Since when? You never saw one during your recruits' training."

  "Since I was a kid… a child, sir. I once watched a demonstration at a tattoo."

  "Where was that?"

  "At Hythe, sir."

  "You have applied for transfer to a machine-gun section?"

  "Yessir. But there's a long waiting-list, sir."

  "Are you sure of that, Hunter?"

  "So I was told, sir. Sergeant Topham, sir."

  "Strip that gun down again."

  The young soldier leaped forward, his hands seeming to tear the segments apart, but he laid each of them down on the bench with infinite care. The operation was completed in under the minute.

  "I'll recommend you personally, Hunter."

  The lance-corporal's jaw dropped an inch, but then, his reflexes reminding him that this was disrespectful, it snapped shut again.

  "Thank you, sir."

  "Where is your sergeant now?"

  "In the guardhouse, sir."

  "Thank you, Hunter. Expect to begin training tomorrow after first parade. I shall be here. I'll arrange your course of instruction myself. Now reassemble the gun."

  "Sir!"

  He did not wait to see it done, but went out without a backward glance, his step appreciably lighter. The weight had lifted from his brow and he thought, making his way over the scrupulously-swept asphalt towards the guardhouse, What the devil does it matter if the Willoughby-Nairns of this world go to their graves without learning the difference between a lance and a Vickers machine-gun? Providing, in places like there, here and on home stations, there are waiting-lists of Lance-Corporal Hunters?

  * * *

  On Saturday, June 27, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife, Sophie, presided over a formal banquet served in the dining-room of the hotel at Ilidze.

  The night was warm. Windows were thrown open. Outside on the lawn the band of the Sarajevo garrison played Schumann's "Träumerei," a phantasy on "La Bohème," a Lehár medley and the obligatory "Blue Danube." The guests ate souffle, lamb, fillet of beef, roast goose, and fruit. They drank French wines, the local Mostar and Hungarian Tokay. Towards midnight, Franz Ferdinand remarked he was glad his Bosnian visit was almost over, and someone suggested that the brief visit to the capital scheduled for the following day should be cancelled and the archducal couple should make an immediate return home. Then, being persuaded that Sarajevo dignitaries would be hurt and disappointed by the cancellation, a decision was reached to adhere to the original schedule. The hands of the dining-room clock moved up to midnight. The day of St. Vitus had begun.

  2

  That same night, at round about the same hour as the Archduke's dinner guests were doing justice to their roast goose, Edward Swann was eating a less exotic but appetising home-cooked meal in the dining-room of his mother-in-law, Edith Wickstead, near Peterborough, Northamptonshire. He had company but it was not Edith's, and although unaware of it at the time, Edward, too, had a surprise immediately ahead of him. For he, too, in a very small way, was the target of a conspiracy.

  Although outwardly himself again, encouraging his brother George's colourful comment that "He's blown his nose, dusted himself off, and emerged the same good old go-steady-think-twice Edward again," he had been changed inwardly by his wife's desertion and in a way that even George, his mentor over many years, was unqualified to judge. The real trouble with Edward was that he had absorbed, one could say, a quadruple dose of ancestral practicality. From his French grandmother, Monique d'Auberon, daughter of a Gascon pastrycook, he had inherited the same strain of hard common sense that ran so richly in the veins of his father and mother and had been present, in full measure, in the blood of his maternal grandparents, one a Lancastrian millhand who had made two fortunes, the other an Irish peasant, whose common sense told her she should seek her pot of gold in Liverpool rather than County Kerry.

  The same strain, to a degree, ran in all the Swanns but with nothing like the same urgency, and whereas it stood him in very good stead as an engineer, and a man of business, it made it almost impossible for the same man to rationalise his wife's dream of becoming a celluloid goddess.

  For a brief spell, after watching, openmouthed, Gilda's eye-rolling and cavorting on the flickering screen of that little picture-house in Birmingham, he had been comforted by the acknowledgment that he had made the biggest mistake of his life by falling in love with her. He was not in love with her any longer.

  This was how things stood with him when Betsy Battersby was unleashed upon him, for Betsy, it could be said, was the price Edith Wickstead paid to get her conscience out of pawn, a brawny, cheerful, uncomplicated Yorkshire lass, her favourite among a tribe of nieces and great-nieces left behind in the North Riding when she moved south to take over the old Crescent territory in the 'sixties. Edith, missing her own family when the boys grew up and Gilda went abroad, grew to like Betsy's undemanding company, particularly when Tom was out about his business. After Tom's death, she became a frequent visitor, giving her great-aunt a hand with the house chores so that Edward, also a frequent visitor, came to think of her as a family hanger-on, midway between a domestic help and a house guest. While under the spell of Gilda, however, he never saw her for what she was, a well set-up girl in her mid-twenties, that is to say, some ten years his junior. She had flaming red hair, light blue eyes that always looked pleasurably surprised, regular if slightly heavy features, a generous mouth, much given to laughter, and an excellent figure that Edith always thought of in Adam's terms as "promising," recalling that neither he nor Tom had cared for wraiths, much in vogue during their courting years. Tom, she remembered, had always admitted that he liked plenty to catch hold of, and Betsy Battersby certainly came into this category of women.

  The idea of deploying her against Edward, however, as a kind of consolation prize for the manner in which a real slut, her own daughter, had served the poor boy, did not occur to Edith until she had had an opportunity to make a full assessment of the harm Gilda had inflicted on him, and this she was only able to assess by instinct, after Edward's response to the first letter from America.

  It arrived out of the blue, about two years after Gilda's flight to France, telling a tale that the truant might have borrowed from the Arabian Nights. Her films, it seems, had been seen in America and an agent had negotiated a contract enabling her to travel all the way to California to make a costume film about the French Revolution. This, so Gilda reported, had led to other films and a better contract, so that she was now in receipt of the equivalent of a hundred English pounds a month, with the promise of much more to come. She had changed her name again and was now known as Gilda de la Rey.

  Reflecting that there was surely substance in the adage that the wicked prospered like the green bay tree, and remembering also that she had always been inclined to doubt the validity of that contradictory saw about virtue being its own reward, Edith read the final page. It scouted a proposition that, as they were unlikely to meet again, Edward should supply grounds for a divorce, and was set down, Edith thought, as though this was the bestowal of a royal and gracious favour upon an unwort
hy subject.

  She took the only course open to her, telegraphing Edward to visit her and discuss the matter and was not surprised when he growled, after scanning the relevant page, "Let her whistle for her divorce. I'm over it now and I'm damned if I'll make it public. Just don't answer the letter, Edith."

  She said, gently, "That's precisely how I felt about it at first, but then it occurred to me you might be cutting off your nose to spite your face. Divorces, nowadays, aren't the end of the world, as they were in my day, and this would be undefended and wouldn't create much stir. Anyway, look at it from another standpoint. You might want to get married again some time."

  "When that happens you can certify me," he said. "Don't answer it, Edith. Hasn't she caused both of us enough grief?"

  She said, carefully, "I know you're over it, Edward. I know also that you must ask yourself sometimes why and how you came to fall in love with a girl as heartless and self-centred as that. I'm glad Tom didn't live to see the way she turned out. However, be honest with yourself. You've got red blood in your veins and you're only in your mid-thirties. What do you propose to do about women for the rest of your life?"