The First of July(85)

He had suddenly heard the organ, faltering at first and then being played with more confidence. For the five minutes or so while it continued, he had just stayed put. He had no wish to move from the pale sunlight into the darkness or see religious paintings of death and suffering, but out here there was both joy and sadness in the music.

After a few minutes the organ fell quiet again, and he’d moved on toward the mess, the evening, and whatever appalling jollity lay ahead.

Now, nearly twenty hours after the Old Etonian dinner, Harry still had a lingering pain between his eyes and a stiffness in the back of his neck. The photograph in his hand reminded him of his wife. The woman had fair hair, white skin, and a look of mischief, as if her stillness concealed possibilities. Her thighs were plumper than Marina’s, her nipples darker, as was her pubic hair, and there were holes in her stockings, her only item of clothing apart from a ribbon around her neck.

The photograph was French, found among the effects of an officer who had died of appendicitis in the hospital a few days earlier. The task of writing letters to the families of dead or wounded soldiers was a thankless one, and this was a man he didn’t even know. His nib caught on the rough paper and spat ink on the page as the words came out, stilted and inadequate and kind. Every soldier’s end was courageous or at least dutiful, all their deaths were instant, all the men were much liked by their fellows. It was harder when a man had died while inhaling chloroform so that his appendix could be removed. The man who had secretly owned this photograph and possibly enjoyed the woman, “Marie,” whose signature was on the back with a loving dedication in French, had, according to his brother officers, been an insistently devout Christian who had held back his men’s ration of rum before attacks. He had turned out to have a wife and child in Hove. Harry allowed himself to consider, very briefly, whether one day Marina might get a letter like this and what it might say.

This evening, there was just the one letter of condolence. Harry thought back over the strange, unrelated fragments of his twenty-four hours in Amiens and how much he had to tell Marina for once: of the brief exchange with the young French soldier, the organ playing in the cathedral, and then the ridiculous dinner. There was an almost impressive admirable folly in assembling Old Etonians for dinner just days before they all knew the big push was coming. You didn’t need to have the ear of High Command to know it; on the way to Amiens, the road had been clogged with wagons, guns, trucks, officers on horses, and company after company of soldiers. High above the road, aeroplanes kept watch for German spotters. The staff car that had picked him up in the morning—and he had an image of a Bairnsfather cartoon of this surprisingly shiny car scouring the lines to bring in recalcitrant Etonians—had to stop at times to let pass all the traffic coming the other way. There were a few sour looks and fewer grins from the marching men, as well as a few times when the driver, grumbling, had to pull off into the mud beside the road, to allow a heavy gun or a mobile canteen to pass.

Nearly a hundred and seventy of them had made it. “Floreat Etona,” one brigade major said under his breath as they climbed the stairs and were shown the seating plan. There were subalterns who had undoubtedly been on the famous playing fields last season and some gray-haired generals with straining mess dress, whose memories of their stripling selves must reach back far into the last century. There were a great many regular officers in addition to the men, like himself, who’d taken commissions in the New Army.

Among those present were a handful of chaps he’d known at school and was glad to see, although nobody he’d considered a really close friend. But there was a sense that they were all trying to avoid a roll call of the dead and if this drove them back to hazy school memories—cricket matches and pranks and the eccentric geeks who had taught them Greek or Latin, or rowing on the river or playing the wall game—well, it was just an evening on which the past seemed more compelling than the immediate future. The claret was good, and he wondered what Parisian hotel had been persuaded to surrender some of the treasures of its cellar. He sat next to a talkative RFC man to his left; across the table from a likeable regular, Reginald Bastard, who had fought in the Boer War and was now commanding the 2nd Lincolns.

General Rawlinson, “Old Rawly” the buffers called him, had given a rousing speech: without Eton the officer corps would be much depleted, not just in numbers but in spirit; it was the values of Eton that this war sought to uphold. At this point, Harry had looked around the sweating faces, the pink cheeks, the dazed young newcomers, and noticed, with no great surprise but a degree of amusement, that there were significantly more staff officers here than there were proportionately in the officer corps as a whole. Some excellent port and brandy fueled loud cheers. This encouraged Old Rawly to give an impromptu performance of a song from Carmen, but it all seemed to go down well. More cheers, applauding fists hammering on the table. From a small group of very drunken subalterns came the opening bars of “The Eton Boating Song,” but he was glad they were told to pipe down.