Fall of Giants

They ate their supper and finished the beer. Ethel told them the story of Jayne McCulley, and how Lady Maud had been carried out of the charity office by a policeman. She made it sound like a comedy, but Billy was bursting with pride for his sister and the way she stood up for the rights of poor women. And she was the manager of a newspaper and the friend of Lady Maud! He was determined that one day he, too, would be a champion for ordinary people. It was what he admired about his father. Da was narrow-minded and stubborn, but all his life he had fought for the workingman.

Darkness fell and Ethel announced it was bedtime. She used cushions to improvise beds on the kitchen floor for Billy and Tommy. They all retired.

Billy lay awake, wondering what Mildred had meant by It ain’t tomorrow yet. Perhaps she was just promising to kiss him again in the morning, when he left to catch the train to Southampton. But she had seemed to imply more. Could it really be that she wanted to see him again tonight?

The thought of going to her room inflamed him so much that he could not sleep. She would be wearing a nightdress, and under the sheets her body would be warm to the touch, he thought. He imagined her face on the pillow, and envied the pillowcase because it was touching her cheek.

When Tommy’s breathing seemed regular, Billy slipped out of his sheets.

“Where are you going?” said Tommy, not as fast asleep as Billy had thought.

“Toilet,” Billy whispered. “All that beer.”

Tommy grunted and turned over.

In his underwear, Billy crept up the stairs. There were three doors off the landing. He hesitated. What if he had misinterpreted Mildred? She might scream at the sight of him. How embarrassing that would be.

No, he thought; she’s not the screaming type.

He opened the first door he came to. There was a faint light from the street, and he could see a narrow bed with the blond heads of two little girls on the pillow. He closed the door softly. He felt like a burglar.

He tried the next door. In this room, a candle was burning, and it took him a moment to adjust to its unsteady light. He saw a bigger bed, with one head on the pillow. Mildred’s face was toward him, but he could not see whether her eyes were open. He waited for her protest, but no sound came.

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

He whispered hesitantly: “Mildred?”

In a clear voice she said: “About bloody time, Billy. Get into bed, quick.”

He slipped between the sheets and put his arms around her. She was not wearing the nightdress he had expected. In fact, he realized with a thrilling shock, she was naked.

Suddenly he felt nervous. He said: “I’ve never… ”

“I know,” she said. “You’ll be my first virgin.”

{V}

In June of 1916, Major the Earl Fitzherbert was assigned to the Eighth Battalion of the Welsh Rifles and put in charge of B Company, one hundred twenty-eight men and four lieutenants. He had never commanded men in battle, and he was secretly racked with anxiety.

He was in France, but the battalion was still in Britain. They were recruits who had just finished their training. They would be stiffened with a sprinkling of veterans, the brigadier explained to Fitz. The professional army that had been sent to France in 1914 no longer existed-more than half of them were dead-and this was Kitchener’s New Army. Fitz’s lot were called the Aberowen Pals. “You’ll probably know most of them,” said the brigadier, who seemed not to realize how wide was the gulf that separated earls from coal miners.

Fitz got his orders at the same time as half a dozen other officers, and he bought a round of drinks in the mess to celebrate. The captain who had been given A Company raised his whisky glass and said: “Fitzherbert? You must be the coal owner. I’m Gwyn Evans, the shopkeeper. You probably buy all your sheets and towels from me.”

There were a lot of these cocky businessmen in the army now. It was typical of that type to speak as if he and Fitz were equals who just happened to be in different lines of business. But Fitz also knew that the organizational skills of commercial men were valued by the army. In calling himself a shopkeeper, the captain was indulging in a little false modesty. Gwyn Evans was the name over department stores in the larger towns of South Wales. There were many more people on his payroll than in A Company. Fitz himself had never organized anything more complicated than a cricket team, and the daunting complexity of the war machine made him vividly aware of his inexperience.

“This is the attack that was agreed upon in Chantilly, I presume,” Evans said.

Fitz knew what he meant. Back in December Sir John French had at last been fired and Sir Douglas Haig had taken over as commander in chief of the British army in France, and a few days later Fitz-still doing liaison work-had attended an Allied conference at Chantilly. The French had proposed a massive offensive on the western front during 1916, and the Russians had agreed to a similar push in the east.