William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

He began to feel dizzy as he sat there trying to conceptualize the massive scale of this industrial bureaucracy in the civilized world, all directed to the common end of providing for its warring armies. What gigantic effort, what millions of man-hours expended, day after day, week after week, month after month. As he tried to come to terms with it, to visualize in some way this prodigious daily struggle, he found himself perversely glad that he had actually been in the front line. Maybe that was why they employed wounded soldiers rather than civil servants or other professional functionaries. These temporary Captains and Majors in the Directorate of Movements at least knew the physical, intimate consequences of the ‘movement of stores’ that they ordered.

Lysander personalized it, grimly. When he had thrown that Mills № 5 bomb into the sap beneath the ruined tomb it was the final moment in the history of travel of that small piece of ordnance — a history that stretched back through space and time like a ghoulish, spreading wake. From ore mined in Canada, shipped to Britain, smelted, moulded, turned, filled and packed in a box, designated as ‘stores to be transported from the United Kingdom to France’. Perhaps new sidings had been built in a rural railway station in northern France to accommodate the train carrying these stores (and what was involved in constructing a siding, he wondered). And from there it would be transferred to a dump or depot by animal transport whose forage was supplied through Rouen and Havre, also. Then soldiers would carry the boxes of bombs up to the line through communication trenches dug by ‘labour from the Union of South Africa’. And then that Mills № 5 bomb eventually found itself in the kitbag of Lt. Lysander Rief, who threw it into a sap beneath a tomb in no man’s land and a man with a moustache and a fair-haired boy struggled to find it in the dark amongst the tumbled masonry, hoping and praying that some defect in its manufacture, or some malfunction caused by its long journey, would cause it not to detonate…No such luck.

Lysander found that he was sweating. Stop. That way madness lies. He thought of tips of icebergs or inverted pyramids but then an image came to him from nowhere that seemed to cohere with what he had been imagining more fittingly. A winter bonfire.

He remembered how, on very cold days in winter, when you lit a bonfire the smoke sometimes refused to rise. The slightest breeze would move it flatly across the land, a low enlarging horizontal plume of smoke that hugged the ground and never dispersed into the air as it did with a normal fire on a warmer day. He saw all the monstrous, gargantuan effort of the war as a winter bonfire — yes, but in reverse. As if the drifting, ground-hugging pall of smoke were converging — arrowing in — on one point, to feed the small, angry conflagration of the fire. All those miles of broad, dense, drifting smoke narrowing, focussing on the little crackling flickering flames burning vivid orange amongst the fallen leaves and the dead branches.

♦

Lysander left Room 205 and wandered the corridors of the Directorate, passing other officers and secretarial staff as he went. Nobody paid him any attention, the ringing of the phones and the dry clatter of the typewriter keys a constant aural backdrop. He peered into one room where the door was ajar and saw three officers sitting at their desks all speaking into their telephones. Two women typists faced each other typing, as if duelling, somehow. He walked down the stairs and saw the signs on the other floors –

MOVEMENTS, RAILWAYS AND ROADS

INLAND WATER TRANSPORT (FRANCE)

INSPECTOR-GENERAL (ALL THEATRES)

IRISH RAILWAYS

He stepped out, feeling exhausted and a little overwhelmed, on to the Embankment and took some deep breaths of dirty London air. He stretched, flexed his shoulder muscles, rolled his head around, easing his neck, feeling weak and almost tearful at the magnitude of the task he’d been set. Who the hell was Andromeda? And, when he found him, what would happen then?

“You know,” Hamo said over the noise of the engine, “I never feel nervous about anything in life but I feel strangely nervous today.”

They were in the Turner two-seater motoring towards Romney on Sunday morning, heading for Bonham Johnson’s lunch party.

“I know what you mean,” Lysander said, leaning towards him and cupping his hand around his mouth. “I felt exactly the same the other day when I went into the War Office. First day at school.” He looked around and saw a signpost flash by — Fairfield, 2 miles. “Let’s stop at a pub or a hotel and have a drink first. Dutch courage. Why’s it called Dutch courage? English courage is what we need.”

“Excellent idea,” Hamo said. He was wearing a flat leather cap, reversed, and driving goggles. They had the hood of the two-seater down as the day was fine, though breezy. They both wore greatcoats and Lysander had his Trilby tied securely on his head with his scarf.

They found a small pub in Fairfield and ordered whisky sodas at the bar.

Hamo said, “I’m just terrified that one of these literary types is going to ask me about Shakespeare or Milton.”

“No they won’t. You’re the one they want to see and meet. You wrote The Lost Lake . That’s what they’ll want to talk about — not Keats and Wordsworth.”

“I wish I had your confidence, my boy.”

“Hamo, you’ve won the Victoria Cross, for god’s sake. They’re just a bunch of idle writers.”

“Still…”

“No. Do what I do. If I don’t feel confident I act confident.”

“I’ll try. That’s exactly what your father would have said. D’you know, I think another whisky would help.”

“Go on, then. Me too.”

Lysander watched his uncle go up to the bar to order another round, feeling a kind of love for him. He looked slim and upright in his dark grey suit, the ceiling light shining off his bald paté like some incipient halo. Hamo’s halo. Nice thought.

Bonham Johnson’s house — Pondshill Place — was large and imposing — a Victorian farm of cut and moulded red brick and tall groups of chimney-stacks. At one end was a wide bow window looking over a terraced garden that fell gently to a reflecting pool surrounded by closely clipped obelisks of box trees. There was a barn and stable block to one side where the guests’ motor cars were to be parked. A farm labourer waved them into the courtyard where there were already a dozen cars in two neat rows.

“Oh good,” Hamo said. “Looks like a big crowd. I can hide myself.”

The main door to Pondshill Place was opened by a butler, who invited them to ‘go through to the saloon’. This was the drawing room with the big curved bay window and was already occupied by upward of twenty people — all very casually dressed, Lysander noticed, glad that he had decided on a suit of light Harris tweed. He saw some men without ties and women in brightly coloured print dresses. He whispered, “Relax!” to Hamo and they helped themselves to a glass of sherry from a tray held by an extremely pretty young maid, Lysander noticed.

Bonham Johnson was a very stout man with longish thinning hair and a grizzled pointed beard that made him look vaguely Jacobean, Lysander thought. He introduced himself and launched into a fluent and protracted hymn of praise to The Lost Lake of Africa — ‘Extraordinary, unparalleled.’ Even Hamo yielded in the face of this encomium and Lysander happily let Johnson lead him away across the room, hearing him ask, “Do you know Joseph Conrad? No? You’ll have a lot in common.”

Lysander headed back to the maid with the sherry and helped himself to another glass.