The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [342]
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