Phoenix and Ashes

Not a true sleep; it was too light for that. A kind of half-conscious doze, for he heard the servants moving about in this wing, going about their duties. Mrs. Dick was very strict with her girls; unless some task was so heavy it needed two, they were to keep to the schedule and stay strictly apart to avoid wasting time on gossip. But evidently, she wasn't so hard on them that they were unhappy; as a counterpart to his dozing he could hear the one working across the hall humming to herself.

Heavier footsteps in the hall; the girl said, "Right there, please," and there was a thud of logs, the rattle of a scuttle. One of the boys must have brought up coal and wood for the fire.

More humming; it was so unlike the sounds in the hospitals or the camps that it felt as if he was in another world entirely.

Well, he was, really. Though it wasn't the world he had left behind. Mind, he hadn't been home on leave for more than a year; instead, he had come over to London, roughly ever other time meeting his mother there instead of coming down to Longacre. It was easier that way; making a round of theater prevented any need to talk. She didn't want to hear about the war, and he didn't want to hear about the nice young ladies she wanted him to meet.

When he'd come over on his own, there had been other entertainment than theater. And his mother, no doubt, would have been shocked to learn that some of those same "nice young ladies" were dispensing their favors with freedom and enthusiasm at the parties given by William Waldorf, Viscount Astor, Lady Anson. Always it was the war, the war, the war, giving a feverish cast to these parties, with everyone grimly determined to have—if not enjoyment, then pure physical pleasure.

Here it seemed as if his mother had dedicated her life and all of her strength to trying to preserve life here at Longacre as it had been before the war. He had noted the last time he was on leave that she assiduously avoided any mention of the war and anything connected to it, and there had been a kind of brittleness about her.

He wondered what would have happened to her if he had died. Would she have dedicated the rest of her life to keeping things absolutely the same, frozen in time, like an Edwardian iteration of Miss Havisham?

He could easily see that. Poor mother.

It was a lost cause, of course. The juggernaut that this war had become had its own momentum. It was devouring everything in its path, and everything it could possibly touch. She didn't have a chance against it.

In the end, nothing and no one did.

He came down to dinner, to discover, to his horror, that he and his mother were not alone in the house. His grandfather on his mother's side was in residence. Unfortunately, the old man considered himself a military expert, having served in a tame regiment in India, that saw no more exciting action than polo games.

He kept a civil tongue in his head all through the rather strained dinner, while the old man held forth on the wisdom of the war Office, the grand strategies of Kitchener, and the superiority of "real army tactics" to the new weaponry of tanks and machine guns and, especially, aeroplanes.

"Damned useless, said it before, and I'll say it again," the old man fulminated, as Reggie shoved bits of rabbit cassoulet around on his plate. "Damned cowards are what's holdin' the victory up! Too damned cowardly to make the charges. One good push, over the top, that'd be all it'd take!"

Reggie closed his eyes, counted to ten, feeling a vein throbbing in his temple. He thought of all the times he'd looked down on the FBI in their "big pushes," how often he had watched them slaughtered by the machine guns. Thought of the men who had become his friends back on the ward, men who had been thrown into a meat-chopper by old fools who could not and would not understand that war had changed, changed in unrecognizable ways, and that the old tactics that had worked once did not work anymore.

He held his temper and his words all through dinner, and after, when what should have been a nice, quiet moment for a smoke in the sunset turned into another occasion for a rant from the old man, who seemed determined to confront him, for some reason. Finally, it was only when his mother retired, that her father came to the real point.

"Now that we're alone, boy," Grandfather said, with a particularly vicious look out of the corner of his eye at Reggie, "I want you to know I don't hold with this 'shellshock' nonsense. A bust-up leg, that's fair. But the other, that's just malingering." The old man gave him a particularly malicious glance. "I've got my eye on you."

Suddenly, a fury that Reggie had not realized he possessed welled up in him, and he actually began to shake. He clenched his fist around the handle of his cane to stop it from trembling, a bitter bile rose up in his throat.