In three weeks, I’d had my medical and received my initial instructions for the 7th Hunts (Cyclists) Battalion and could claim a train ticket for Hercules as well as myself, and so we set off to do our bit.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Harry, England,
August 1914–Winter 1915
TEDDY WAS FULL OF QUESTIONS about the war.
“I hope it goes on until I can join,” he’d said. “I’d like to fly an aeroplane and drop grenades on the Germans.”
“Well, I hope it doesn’t,” Isabelle said sharply. “It’s not a game. France has already seen its boys killed—they all have to fight. Not like here, where they can choose whether to join. My cousin’s boy will be a soldier now. She has nobody but him, but he’ll still have to go.”
Teddy had sat, half subdued, for a while; but then he said, with a glance at his mother, “Will you go, Harry? You’d look awfully good in uniform. You could use Papa’s sword—the one he killed Russians with. Wouldn’t you like to fly an aeroplane?”
“No, I’d be hopeless,” Harry said. “And no, I shan’t be joining up, whatever the allure of the uniform.” He smiled at Teddy. “I have Marina to look after, and our home isn’t here in England.”
“But you are English,” Teddy persisted. “I mean, Marina’s American, but you can’t change if you’re born something, can you? And why aren’t you coming back here to Abbotsgate for good, now that you’re Sir Henry? Cook says the estate needs a man’s hand. Anyway, you could be in charge and tell everybody what to do.”
“Teddy,” Isabelle had said, in mock outrage, “stop interrogating your brother, or he won’t come back at all.”
“I’m sure you can be in charge on my behalf,” Harry said, “with your mother’s help.”
He had already appointed a good land agent who would come to live on the estate, but a little bit of him hoped that, in time, the adult Teddy might take it on. He had promised Teddy that he could come out to see them in America next year.
“Your mother too,” he’d said. “When this war’s over.”
And so they had returned to New York, different people entering a different world. Marina had been dutiful and not at all unpleasant to him, but it was like living with a considerate stranger. At night she curled away from him and went to sleep, and although he drew some comfort from resting his hand on her hip and was glad she didn’t move to dislodge it, there was nothing more. Until she specifically told him otherwise, he could only hope that she still loved him.
The Atlantic journey had seemed endless. After four days of waiting in the Adelphi, they had eventually departed from Liverpool in a second-class cabin and on a ship teeming with extra passengers. Their steward, apologetic, told them the crew was short-staffed because so many of the men had been called up by the Naval Reserve. The women and older men they had taken on to replace them had never really had time to learn their duties, and service was haphazard.
They had passed a recruiting office on their way to the docks, where a queue of seemingly good-hearted, jostling lads and men stretched for a hundred yards. Some had brought children with them, and one man was playing a harmonica. They seemed a jolly crowd. On the dockside, soldiers were checking manifests, and at the far end a warship was docked with sailors drawn up on deck. He felt—and, in the old days, would have told Marina that he felt—irrelevant. There seemed to be so many men of his age in uniform, and those that were not were busy and serious. Having left their luggage in Paris, he had a choice only of summer clothes suitable for a wealthy man on a leisurely European honeymoon, or the formal dress he had worn for his father’s funeral.
As an RNR officer checked off his name on the passenger list, he gazed at the anchors on the man’s gleaming buttons and felt like a lightweight fool in his blazer and boater.
“You’re British, sir?” the officer asked. “Leaving for America?” and Harry had perceived it as a condemnation, but it also irritated him. That night, as Marina pretended to sleep, he made a compact with himself. He would not use his title, and if in time America joined the war, he would join the American Army. What better statement of his commitment to his new country? But he was troubled by a feeling that he was, yet again, running away.
The following months seemed unreal to him, and the distant war was always present. They spent a week in Nantucket, where the wind grazed the skin and whistled through the coarse grasses and the sea was dark and marbled. They returned to see newspaper photographs of the bombardment of the medieval city of Ypres. The city had been destroyed; human casualties were terrible on all sides. The grinning, skinny soldiers with bad teeth, whose pictures had accompanied headlines a few weeks ago, were now weary, knowing faces under muddy tarpaulins.