“Not yet our official enemy. But you know as well as I do that they will be, of course. It’s been coming for years.”
The officer reached them. He was about the same age as Harry. “Do you think there’ll be war?” Mrs. Wilding asked, over-hastily. “I mean with us?”
The British officer looked surprised, though she could not have been the only person to ask him this.
“I think it is likely,” he said in a matter-of-fact way as he examined their papers. “We are bound to France by treaty.” He sounded businesslike, his opinion lacking the drama of every other speculative conversation Harry had heard. But then the man was presumably a regular; war was his profession.
“But we are much more like the Germans than any other nationality,” Mrs. Wilding said. “I mean, don’t you think?”
The officer only nodded as he eyed both the Wildings for a few seconds before walking on.
“My papers give my birthplace as Bremen,” Wilding said.
Later in the journey, Wilding and Harry had stood smoking on deck, watching as the cliffs of Dover seemed to grow a little closer. “It will be difficult for you,” Harry said. “You’ll have decisions ahead. And none of your choosing. I don’t envy you.”
“You too,” Wilding said. “You may live in America, but you are British. War will break out. Look around you.” He gestured out over the black waters. “The British could never let Germany conquer France, not least because they could then control the English Channel and that would cut Britain off. You might yet find yourself taking up arms.”
Harry started to laugh but was stopped by the expression on Wilding’s face.
“You have been too polite to ask me my business. What I make in my factories,” Wilding said. “How I became a wealthy man.”
“A British trait.” This time Harry did laugh. “In America they’ll have no such reticence. They’ll want to know how and how much.”
“I manufacture arms. It is strange, because I am very much a city man. I do not like shooting game or hunting. I abhor it, killing things, although in English society I keep that thought to myself. But arms were my father’s business, and now they are mine. What we are making now—the capacity for slaughtering men—is beyond even our generals’ imaginings.”
“Does our Navy have the edge on the Germans, do you think?” Harry said, conscious of having to make a decision as to whether Wilding was included in “our” or in “the Germans.”
“It won’t be a naval war. Whatever the British believe, or rather hope. Not dreadnoughts. Not cavalry with gleaming swords. This will be about the land, about earth. About infantry. Most of all, it will be about guns. New, powerful guns.” He looked grave. “Guns that can fire at invisible targets and men who will be killed by weapons they cannot see.
“America will keep itself out, I expect, unless its interests are seriously compromised. President Wilson will see to it. But you—and I—we can’t necessarily count on avoiding it all. Not because of our possibly ambiguous loyalties, nor where we choose to live.”
Harry thought he was wrong, but Wilding was in the business and he had no inclination to challenge him. Harry had made his choices: America, marriage, and Marina. Europe was making its choices, or being forced to, but he was no longer part of Europe. His loyalties lay across the Atlantic.
When they disembarked in Dover the customs officer told them, in some agitation, that Germany had declared war on France. The country whose great and beautiful capital Harry had strolled in just a day earlier, the country that lay so few miles to the south, that was visible across the Channel on a clear day, was under attack. He thought of the tense clerk at the hotel desk, the affable waiters who had served them in Nice, the carrier who had borne them to Calais, and the young workman, hardly more than a boy, who had told them of mobilization, and he wondered how quickly they would be scooped up into a war France could never win.
A chauffeur was waiting to take the Wildings to Hampshire, and Harry and Marina were proceeding to London by train. As it carried them north to Victoria, across the timeless chalky sweep of the downs, he was glad Marina was reading. He tried to process a confusion of thoughts. He was returning to England for the first time in a decade, and its very familiarity, and the lack of change in everything around him, suddenly compressed all those years. His chest was tight with emotions he thought he had mastered, and he was conscious of an odd intensity of recognition: of everything from the smell of the train to the landscape about him. Marina, who was his wife and had been so known, was suddenly and unnervingly foreign: she was a New Yorker, visiting the Old World; he was part of this world, and she was not.