The First of July(46)
Benedict wrote to his father and had a far easier interview with Dr. Brewer than he’d expected. “Ah, yes,” said Brewer. “You and Theodore, I gather.”
Benedict must have looked surprised, because Brewer went on: “In here not half an hour ago with the news. Well, hard for the cathedral but good for the country. We all have to make sacrifices. Some of us are too old to fight, but ‘O that I had wings like a dove, for then would I fly away,’ eh?”
Benedict could hardly wait to get back to Theo and share Brewer’s rare lapse into sentimentality, but Theo was nowhere to be seen. When he eventually showed back up at their lodgings in the Close, he smelled of alcohol.
“Been down the docks celebrating with Captain Ahab,” he said, lying prone on his narrow bed.
“I thought you were stuck at home.”
“Didn’t want to tell you the splendid news until I was certain.”
“Your father let you have the ring for Agnes?”
“Good God, no!” Theo raised his head and looked almost shocked. “Of course not.” He seemed to lose his train of thought for a minute. “No. I’ve been accepted. For a commission.”
Benedict found himself beaming, and a certain nagging worry slipped away. “Why, that’s marvelous. When do you start? Do you know? I don’t yet. Perhaps we’ll go to Salisbury together, brother gunners—Ubique and all that.”
“I saw a very good friend of my father. He fixed it. I’m going to be a pilot—well, once they’ve trained me, but I went up and showed aptitude, they said—probably from years at the organ.”
His head was sunk into the pillows, but his hand came up in a snappy salute. “Meet Second Lieutenant Theodore Dawes-Holt, Royal Flying Corps. War is here and I am ready.”
It would always be the same, Benedict thought. To be Theo’s friend was to be alone.
1915
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Frank, London,
1915
FROM BAD TO WORSE.
Poor François Faber the outsider, the furniture mover from Luxembourg. I expect he thought that his triumph in the Tour de France six years ago had been as hard as it would ever get: cycling 3,500 miles in snow and gales, digging out his bicycle, getting blown to the ground, being kicked by a horse, wading through potholes, sometimes all alone as others around him fell. He ran the last stretch to the finish, carrying his cycle with its broken chain. The next day he went fishing. If I could have been any man, I would have been François Faber, the Giant of Colombes.
I read in May that poor Faber had joined the French Foreign Legion and been mown down by the German guns. I could understand how he would have felt that France, which he’d conquered with his Peugeot-Wolber, was a land to fight for; but I was so angry and upset, I couldn’t even speak of it. I devised a new system for storing gloves until I was calmer.
It was becoming impossible. At the Institute, I went to classes once on the Greeks. The speaker looked like a dry old stick, like he might have lived in ancient times himself. He had been a professor at the university up in Bloomsbury and he had this way of making it all come alive, and for a while we were in a world of monsters and pagan gods who were up to all sorts of things. So my situation, I thought now, was like Odysseus choosing between Scylla and Charybdis. On one side a monster, on the other a whirlpool. The professor had said, and you could tell he liked this bit: “So, which would you choose if you were Odysseus, captain of the ship?” No one answered, though I thought I’d choose the whirlpool, seeing as how I had learned to swim in the Dart as a lad, so stood a chance, and I didn’t like the thought of being dinner for some octopus; but it turned out that Odysseus chose the monster and risked losing a few men, rather than the whirlpool and risk losing the ship. Later on, I realized that he had been what they called “officer material,” whereas I was a typical soldier in seeking only advantage for myself.
It seemed that Mr. Frederick Richmond was Charybdis and Connie was Scylla. As Mr. Richmond’s long arms were picking off the men and sending them to their fate, Connie was all seething passion for the Cause. Mr. Richmond expected every able-bodied man to join the colors. Connie demanded that every man of conscience turn away from war. For Mr. Richmond it was all King and Country, for Connie it was Thou Shalt Not Kill.
In time, two things came to change my view. First, one of the senior hands volunteered. Dick Wilson was in the luggage department and in the way of being a friend of mine. He had a Hercules bicycle that was his pride and joy, and he had sometimes let me ride it around St. James’s Park. We planned trips we might make when I had bought my own machine. Our first was to be a place called Box Hill in Surrey; but we hoped, one day, to follow the Thames from Henley to the source. This was, of course, a dream, but the hours we had spent on it! We had a map and had worked out timings on trial runs around the Serpentine.