The Children's Book (97 page)

Florian and Robin Wellwood and Robin Oakeshott all joined the Royal Sussex Regiment. Florian was sent to France fairly quickly. The two Robins found themselves in the same platoon. They sat together amongst their gear in a shared tent. They had been together, or almost, at things like the drama camp when they were boys. They had the same red hair and the same smile. They did not know, being well brought-up, how to broach the subject of whether they were brothers.

Robin Wellwood thought it would be insulting and hurtful to Robin Oakeshott to suggest that his Oakeshott father was a fiction. Robin Oakeshott thought he might embarrass Robin Wellwood by claiming the relationship which was never mentioned. Both of them shied away in their minds from the role Humphry Wellwood must have played in their origins. No one likes to think of their parents and sex, even in quite normal situations. But they stuck together, and did things the same way, and came to rely on each other.

Wolfgang Stern was already on the battlefield, in the German Sixth Army, under Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. He was on the left of the Schlieffen scythe, retreating deliberately towards Germany to draw the French army outwards, away from Paris. The French soldiers wore a uniform from the past, with red trousers, a long great-coat, broadcloth tunic, flannel shirt and long underpants, winter and summer. Their boots were known as
brodequins
, which was the name of an instrument of torture. They carried a rifle, a kit weighing sixty-six pounds and a regulation bundle of kindling wood.

The French officers believed in attack, and then attack, and then again attack. They believed they had been defeated in 1870 because of a lack of firmness and
élan
. They charged, heavily, drums beating, bugles sounding, their long bayonets held in their guns before them. They were very brave, and the German machine-gunners, including Wolfgang, mowed them like fields of grass. Wolfgang felt alien to himself, in his grey tunic and forage cap. But then, he had always been an actor. Now, he was acting a very competent machine-gunner. He was well fed and his commanders planned intelligently. The war would not last long. The Plan was working to perfection.

Charles/Karl, the ex-anarchist, the socialist, the academic student of herd behaviour in war and peace, found that his intuition when faced with anarchist “deeds” of assassination, that he himself could not kill a man, was just. He went to tell his father that he was joining up. Basil Wellwood said he was glad, and sorry of course, and would give any help he could. Charles/Karl said he was not joining the armed forces: he was joining a Quaker enterprise called the Anglo-Belgian Ambulance
Unit. These people provided stretcher-bearers to bring in the wounded and ambulances to take them to the hospital trains to bring them home. He said “It isn’t a lack of courage, Papa. And I do feel that I must
do something
in all this. And the ambulance units help everyone, they don’t discriminate …”

Basil answered the unspoken thing.

“Some of your mother’s friends are refusing invitations. They don’t call on her. Many of them don’t.”

“That would be better if I was a patriotic soldier. But I can’t, you do see?”

“I try to see. You don’t lack courage. You have my blessing.”

Charles/Karl gave him an envelope, marked “To be opened in the event of my death.”

“I’m not being dramatic, I’m being practical. And you must promise not to open it before …”

“Very well. I hope to hand it back to you very soon. All this should not last very long. Go safely.”

Dorothy too had managed to join a new kind of unit, the Women’s Hospital Corps. This was the work of two resourceful women doctors, Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray. Unlike the Scottish women doctors who had been told to go “home,” they had quickly worked out that the War Office would simply turn them away. Both were suffragists and both had had long contentious dealings with the Home Office. So they approached the French Embassy, and the French Red Cross, and offered their skills, and medical supplies which would be paid for by their supporters. Money poured in, from suffragists and women’s colleges. A uniform was devised, for doctors, nurses, orderlies and managers. It was greenish-grey, short-skirted, with a neat loose long tunic, buttoned high. There were small cloth hats, with veils and overcoats. The women looked smart and purposeful. They had learnt that women must do everything more competently, more carefully, with more unrelenting discipline than men. In September 1914 they went from Victoria and Dieppe to Paris, which was full of wounded men. “An excitable British Red Cross lady,” said Flora Murray, “explained that nothing was any good here. The red tape was awful—all the arrangements had broken down. The
sepsis was appalling. The town was full of Germans whose legs and arms had been cut off and who were being sent to Havre next day like that!!”

Griselda Wellwood was with them. Newnham College was supporting the doctors. Griselda—after a brief training as a VAD in Cambridge—went with them as a kind of liaison officer provided by the College, someone who spoke fluent French and German, and could help out with patients and authorities. Nurses with next to no French were asking wounded soldiers
“Monsieur, avec-vous de pain in l’estomac?”
Griselda helped both patients and nurses.

A hospital was set up in Claridge’s Hotel, in Paris, allotted by the French. Rooms were cleared, wards were set up, sterilising equipment and an operating theatre were installed and wounded men came in, steadily, French, British, German, to be nursed, to be operated on, to be protected, by severe Sisters, from curious flocks of visiting elegant ladies. To die. There was a quiet mortuary, in the basement. The surgeons amongst them had previously operated almost exclusively on women. They learned quickly.

Dorothy became skilled at amputations. Griselda made herself useful when, at Christmas, there were parties, and entertainments. The men put up a Union Jack with the legend: “The Flag of Freedom.” The suffragists were not amused. The men became aware of this and the flag was changed. “Freedom” became “England” and the doctors were told that the men were “all for Votes for Women.”

They put on plays. Wounded, shell-shocked, bandaged, tremulous, they put on plays. Some were farces and some were not.
The Deserter
was a precise representation of the court martial of a deserter, with bullying sergeant-major, bounding lieutenant, relentless judge-advocate. The accused was the hero, and died courageously, on stage, in front of the firing-squad.

The wounded men applauded, from beds and wheelchairs. Dorothy touched Griselda’s arm.

“Are you all right? You don’t look well.”

“It’s the execution. I have a horror of executions. They did it so
matter-of-fact
. But their sympathy was with—with him.”

Dorothy said, quietly and grimly, that if what they had seen, and what they had been told, was a true description of events out at the Front, most men would be driven to desert. She said “They said it
would be over by Christmas. It isn’t. They don’t know now how or when it will end. I’m glad you’re here.”

Griselda said “What do you think made them put it on? Does play-acting help them look it in the face? Or cut it down to size? It is
gruesome.”

“We can’t afford to think about what is gruesome. You take a temporary bandage off a wound, and what is under it is gruesome and there is nothing you can do. They mostly know, not always. You know, Grisel, I am simply not the same person I was last year. She doesn’t exist.”

“I’m glad we are with the women. They are so intent on—on managing perfectly—that they just go on. Most of us, most of the time.”

“It’s early days,” said Dorothy.

Philip Warren was still in Purchase House. The gardener and the handyman had gone to the war, and there were weeds in the drive and the grass was wild in the orchard. Seraphita sat in semi-darkness, semiconscious, and waited for the day to end, coming briefly to life in the early evening, when safe sleep was on the horizon. Pomona had surprised both of them by going into Rye and volunteering to become a nurse. She was in a hospital in Hythe, changing dressings, emptying bedpans, smoothing sheets, which she did well. She turned out to be good at calming the dying, answering what they said, nonsense, rage, fear, calls for mothers, with a grave, gentle respect that was mostly helpful. She was good also with the bereaved, or about-to-be bereaved. She slipped dreamily around and yet made things temporarily clean and wholesome. She said to Philip, when she came home for a day, and lay, physically exhausted, in the orchard wilderness, that she felt useful, and needed, for the first time in her life.

“It’s unbelievably disgusting and when you can
do
it you feel—oh, I expect, like nuns used to feel, when they deliberately did horrible things. I’ve got good at knowing which muscles to lift things with.”

She hesitated.

“You know, Philip—this house—my funny family—they feel like a dream and I’ve woken up. No, they feel like two dreams—one full of beautiful things—pots and paintings and tapestries and embroideries, and flowers and apples in the orchard—you know—and one full of interminable boredom and waste, and—things that were
not right
but were all that happened—I know you know. I’ve stopped asking you to marry me. I’ve woken up.”

Philip thought that among her wounded men she might find someone to love her. Because she made his bed more comfortable, and cleaned his body.

It was not because of Pomona that Philip decided to volunteer for the army. He thought about it. He looked at his work, at his drawings, at his jars and vessels, shining quietly. He had, over time, found many of Benedict Fludd’s secret caches of receipts for glazes, in holes in the wall,
interleaved in books, Palissy’s memoir, Ruskin’s
Modern Painters
. He had mixed them, tried them, varied them, adjusted them. It was long, and slow, work, it was patient and sometimes frustrating, but he was a man who knew something, a man with a craft, a man who had wanted something single-mindedly and had got it. There were not so many men in the world who could say that.

He was thirty-five. He was not an eager boy. He came from a class which was cautious. He knew there was a good chance of his dying, and the pots dying with him.

He went, he thought, because the world had become a world in which his work was no longer possible. This thing had to be shared and sorted out and
finished
. It was something he appeared to have no real choice about being part of. He did not—after all his reflections and searchings—really know why. That was how it was.

He went to see Elsie and Ann.

“I thought you would,” said Elsie, when he told her. “You might go and see Mrs. Fludd, now and then.”

“She doesn’t know who’s there and who isn’t. But I will.”

Philip’s medical was satisfactory. He went to training camp in Lydd, and in the autumn of 1915, went out to Belgium and the battlefield.

In the autumn of 1915 the two Robins were in trenches on what had become a static front line around the Ypres salient. Ypres was shattered; its houses burning, its ancient Cloth Hall in ruins. The grand attempts to advance on the enemy had given way to a life in dugouts and foxholes. Shells came over, woolly bears and black crumps made craters and changed the earth from minute to minute. Fighting was mostly raids on the enemy trenches, from which many men did not return. They crept and flitted across No Man’s Land, and were spotted by machine-guns and picked off. At night in No Man’s Land, stretcher-bearers, including Charles/Karl, looked for the living in the sweet stink of the dead, and stumbled amongst severed hands, legs, heads and bloody innards. The living often begged to be put out of their pain, and Charles/Karl for the first time considered killing, and once, as a head with no face screamed weakly at him, did shoot.

The Robins were nimble at raiding and had a good company commander
whom they trusted. They sat in the door of the dugout and ate Maconochies, a mixture of tinned meat and vegetables. They scratched; they were infested with lice; everyone was infested with lice. There was a smell of old exploded shells, and a smell of death, and a smell of the unwashed, and a sweet smell of dispersed lethal gas, British gas which had floated back to its source when the wind changed. The Robins opened letters from home, from Marian Oakeshott, and Phyllis, and from Humphry, who sent gossip about Lloyd George and best wishes to Robin Oakeshott, if they were still together. Robin Oakeshott said casually

“He visited us a lot, in Puxty. He used to laugh and laugh with Mother.”

Robin Wellwood said “He’s a good man, in his way.” He added casually “Randy, though.”

“I think he was—that is, I think he is—my father,” said Robin Oakeshott.

“So do I.”

They considered each other, with mutual relief and embarrassment. Robin Wellwood went into the shelter, to fetch cigarettes. There was a singing howl, and a shell exploded in the trench. A splinter of it took off most of Robin Oakeshott’s head. Robin Wellwood took one look, and vomited. Men came running, stretcher-bearers, men with a blanket to cover up what they could, men with buckets and mops to cleanse the dugout. Robin Wellwood sat and shook. And shook.

He developed a permanent tremor down the right side of his face, in his neck, along his arm. His hand shook as he cleaned his gun. The commanding officer considered sending him back behind the line, to recover. Robin said tersely, in an unrecognisable voice, out of a constricted throat, that he was fine, thank you.

Two days later he stood up, in his new-fangled tin hat, which like most of the men he wore at odd angles, on the back of his head, like a halo. He was not the first, or the last, to be killed by the very skilful German sniper behind the stump of a ruined tree.

Later in the war, it was decided that brothers should not serve together, just as all the men of one village should not serve together.

Marian Oakeshott came again—by train and fly, this time—to see Olive Wellwood. Olive made tea. Tea for survivors who were not surviving
well. Both of them thought, but neither of them could say, that grief felt different when it had to be shared not only with each other, but with mothers all over Britain. Marian Oakeshott had gone to see Frank Mallett, with the telegram in her hand. “The English don’t howl,” she said to Frank Mallett. “Maybe they should,” said Frank Mallett. So Marian Oakeshott cried out, at the top of her voice “My son, my son, my son,” and the church echoed it. Then, a little rigid, she went back to being a kindly schoolmistress. She went to visit Olive, but hoped to see Humphry. Humphry was shut in his study. Olive said “My letter says he was killed instantly.”