Ian Slater: Rage of Battle

The bell rang at 3:30 for the end of class, but no one could leave the shelter because a salvo of intermediate-range rockets launched from Hamburg batteries had penetrated the AA screen along the Channel, and the “all clear” had not yet sounded. Most of the students used the time to start their homework, but the new boy, Wilkins, who had guffawed at the other boy’s comment on Lear and who was also the manic class clown, began his repertoire of rude noises. It took all Rosemary’s effort to check him, a task that not only a week before she had felt herself more than equal to. Now she simply wished a bomb would fall on him.

Her anxiety about Robert, about everything, had grown much worse after their engagement had been officially announced a few days before he left. Till then, she had never believed herself to be superstitious, but now that their plan to marry was officially proclaimed, she found herself performing small ceremonies of obeisance to some higher order — God, whomever, whatever — as apprehensive, she realized, as those students she’d seen exhibiting obsessive behavior whenever exams were in the offing, their ceremonies of repetition insurance against malevolent forces.

While she and Robert had been together, she hardly knew the war existed, but with him gone to sea, and people congratulating her on the engagement, she suddenly felt more vulnerable, as if both of them, having publicly declared their love, were tempting fate. Then again, she wasn’t sure it was that at all which had driven her into her present and, for her, strange mood of melancholy. Perhaps, she thought, it had more to do with the death of her younger brother, William. After the convoy he was in had been attacked by acoustically detonated mines in the mid-Atlantic, William had been taken to Newfoundland, where the Brentwood connection had first been made with Robert’s sister, Lana, and where, despite an initial healthy prognosis, William died from complications.

“Complications.” In Rosemary’s lexicon, it was simply another word for the inexplicable. Her parents and her sister, Georgina, now a student at LSE, had all been so hopeful that young William would come home. The suddenness of his death had affected them in markedly different ways, but it colored everything they did. For Rosemary, the tragic passages of Shakespeare she had to teach offered no catharsis but rather intensified her awareness of the arbitrariness of one’s life, the dark hand of chance made at once more tangible and terrible during Robert Brentwood’s first visit. He had brought them William’s few trinkets, ID tags, the wrist-watch their father had given him, together with a long, touching letter from Lana Brentwood, William’s nurse. It was a letter so devoid of maudlin sentiment yet so uninhibitedly personal, so typical of Americans, Robert excepted, that the Spence family felt that Lana Brentwood had known William as well as any of them. It was Shakespeare again, Rosemary thought, for had it not been for the man-made Tempest that had destroyed most of the convoy on which William had sailed, she would probably not have met Robert Brentwood. A stranger who, with two weeks leave while the submarine he commanded was rearmed and her hull repainted in Holy Loch, had taken it upon himself — in a moment of boredom more than anything else, as he later confessed to Rosemary— to personally deliver Lana’s letter and William’s few remaining effects.

He had meant to stay only overnight, caught out by the disrupted train schedule, but had stayed in Surrey with the Spences for the remainder of his leave. Rosemary’s father had been taken aback by the rapidity of the romance, but her mother, who Rosemary knew would voice any parental objection if any were to be made, had surprised everyone by instantly accepting the situation. Though grief-stricken by her son’s death, Anne Spence encouraged them both, taking it upon herself, in another act that took her husband, Richard, and two daughters by surprise, to make all the arrangements for the wedding, which would take place during Robert’s next leave. It was, in fact, Anne Spence’s salvation. There was so much to do, so much initiative called for to overcome the scarcities of wartime rationing — a lack of everything from sugar for a wedding cake to paper — that the attention she had to give to all the details for the wedding filled her hours and kept a nervous breakdown at bay.

Richard retired now and then to his study, with the little available brandy he could afford, to calm himself after seeing what she was doing to their savings account. At one point he had seriously considered writing a letter to the local manager of Barclay’s Bank, in Oxshott, to cancel their credit card. But as fall ended, the NATO forces still reeling from the juggernaut and sheer brute strength of the Soviet forces, Richard Spence let his wife spend. It was quite possible that within a year or two they would all be dead. Besides, after William’s death, nothing was the same anymore. Even Rosemary, whom Richard had thought the steadiest and most sensible of them all, had confided to him that she, too, felt adrift; all her own beliefs — her once steady vision of the universe, of cause and effect — no longer held. For her the mere thought that she and Robert — that all of them — were no more than flotsam on the wild sea of the world was terrifying. Her once powerful sense of optimism seemed to have been swept away forever. She was lost, and only in Robert’s arms had she felt safe. She wondered whether she’d agreed to marry him too hastily, more from the fear of a loveless world than the hope of a loving one.

The “all clear” began its wail, as mournful as the earlier air raid warning had been, and as she waited for the students to file out of the shelter, she thought again of how easily she and her class — the entire school, for that matter — could become entombed at any time. It would take only one of the high-explosive iron bombs — as deadly to a shelter as a depth charge to a submarine. She said a prayer — but was anyone listening?

She heard a tearing noise — and laughter. Wilkins, his eyes bright with mischief, was making farting sounds. She was sure that if the school received a direct hit, everyone would die save Wilkins. What she couldn’t stand was his stupid, bovine optimism. She doubted he even knew where most of Europe was, let alone the fact that, except for western France and Spain, it had been all but overrun by the Soviet armies. At the beginning of the war, before Wilkins had shown up, she had encouraged her pupils to keep an up-to-date situation map on the shelter wall. But as the enemy armies smashed through NATO’s central front around Fulda Gap and to the south along the Danube while simultaneously wheeling with thousands more tanks across the North German Plain to Hamburg and Bremen on the way to secure the NATO ports, the students had finally given up on the map.

To make it even more discouraging, the media coverage of the battles was confusing. Unlike the two previous world wars, when newspapers could broadly indicate the ebb and flow of battle, now the battles within the larger battlefields were impossible to follow at times. In the course of a morning, a NATO counterattack with A-10 Thunderbolts — the tank-killing American aircraft — seemed to have the better of it. Then, by midafternoon, the dust was so thick that friend and foe were indistinguishable in satellite photos. In one place it was a raging war of movement. In other zones, with combatants more quickly exhausted in the strain of high-tech combat than in previous, conventional wars, whole companies, especially those of NATO, were reported digging in, either in an effort to catch their breath in the frenzy of retreat or to play for time against the attacking echelons. Here, parts of the crooked front crisscrossed with barbed concertina wire resembled the moonscapes of World War I, which the experts had predicted could never happen, as beleaguered NATO troops anxiously waited for urgently needed refit for then-savaged armored divisions and infantry reinforcements, which, despite being mobile, had to renegotiate overextended supply lines under constant air attack.