“There’s some men wouldn’t look at a girl with a baby,” he said. “Not me, though.”
That was a bit condescending, but Ethel decided not to take offense. “Good-bye, Dai. It was very nice of you to ask me.”
He smiled ruefully. “You’re still the prettiest girl I’ve ever met.” He touched his cap and walked away.
Mam said indignantly: “What’s wrong with him? You need a husband, and he’s a catch!”
What was wrong with him? He was a bit short, but he made up for that with charm. He had good prospects and he was willing to take on another man’s child. Ethel wondered why she was so unhesitatingly sure that she did not want to go to the pictures with him. Did she still think, in her heart, that she was too good for Aberowen?
There was a row of chairs at the front for the elite. Fitz and Bea took their seats alongside Perceval Jones and Maldwyn Morgan, and the service began.
Ethel believed vaguely in the Christian religion. She supposed there must be a God, but she suspected He was more reasonable than her father imagined. Da’s ardent disagreements with the established churches had come down to Ethel merely as a mild dislike of statues, incense, and Latin. In London she occasionally went to the Calvary Gospel Hall on Sunday mornings, mainly because the pastor there was a passionate socialist who allowed his church to be used for Maud’s clinic and Labour Party meetings.
There was no organ at the Reck, of course, so the puritans did not have to suppress their objection to musical instruments. Ethel knew, from Da, that there had been trouble about who was to lead the singing-a role that, in this town, was more important than preaching the sermon. In the end the Aberowen Male Voice Choir was placed at the front and its conductor, who belonged to no particular church, was put in charge of the music.
They began with Handel’s “He Shall Feed His Flock Like a Shepherd,” a popular anthem with elaborate part singing that the congregation performed faultlessly. As hundreds of tenor voices soared across the park with the line “And gather the lambs with his arm,” Ethel realized that she missed this thrilling music when she was in London.
The Catholic priest recited Psalm 129, “De Profundis,” in Latin. He shouted as loud as he could, but those at the edge of the crowd could hardly hear. The Anglican rector read the Collect Order for the Burial of the Dead from the Book of Common Prayer. Dilys Jones, a young Methodist, sang “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” a hymn written by Charles Wesley. The Baptist pastor read I Corinthians 15 from verse 20 to the end.
One preacher had to represent the independent groups, and the choice had fallen on Da.
He began by reading a single verse from Romans 8: “If the spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.” Da had a big voice that carried strongly all across the park.
Ethel was proud of him. This honor acknowledged his status as one of the principal men of the town, a spiritual and political leader. He looked smart, too: Mam had bought him a new black tie, silk, from the Gwyn Evans department store in Merthyr.
He spoke about resurrection and the afterlife, and Ethel’s attention drifted: she had heard it all before. She assumed there was life after death, but she was not sure, and anyway she would find out soon enough.
A stirring in the crowd alerted her that Da might have diverted from the usual themes. She heard him say: “When this country decided to go to war, I hope that every member of Parliament searched his conscience, sincerely and prayerfully, and sought the Lord’s guidance. But who put those men in Parliament?”
He’s going to get political, Ethel thought. Good for you, Da. That will take the smug look off the rector’s face.
“Every man in this country is liable, in principle, for military service. But not every man is allowed a part in the decision to go to war.”
There were shouts of agreement from the crowd.
“The rules of the franchise exclude more than half the men in this country!”
Ethel said loudly: “And all the women!”
Mam said: “Hush, now! It’s your da that’s preaching, not you.”
“More than two hundred Aberowen men were killed on the first day of July, there on the banks of the Somme River. I have been told that the total of British casualties is over fifty thousand!”
There was a gasp of horror from the crowd. Not many people knew that figure. Da had got it from Ethel. Maud had been told by her friends in the War Office.
“Fifty thousand casualties, of which twenty thousand are dead,” Da went on. “And the battle goes on. Day after day, more young men are being massacred.” There were sounds of dissent from the crowd, but they were mostly drowned out by the shouts of agreement. Da held up his hand for quiet. “I do not say who is to blame. I say only this. Such slaughter cannot be right when men have been denied a part in the decision to go to war.”
The rector stepped forward, trying to interrupt Da, and Perceval Jones tried unsuccessfully to climb up onto the platform.
But Da was almost done. “If ever we are asked again to go to war, it shall not be done without the consent of all the people.”
“Women as well as men!” Ethel cried, but her voice was lost in the cheers of support from the miners.
Several men were now standing in front of Da, remonstrating with him, but his voice rang out over the commotion. “Never again will we wage war on the say-so of a minority!” he roared. “Never! Never! Never!”
He sat down, and the cheering was like thunder.
CHAPTER NINETEEN – July to October 1916
Kovel was a railway junction in the part of Russia that had once been in Poland, near the old border with Austria Hungary. The Russian army assembled twenty miles east of the city, on the banks of the river Stokhod. The entire area was a swamp, hundreds of square miles of bog interlaced with footpaths. Grigori found a patch of drier ground and ordered his platoon to make camp. They had no tents: Major Azov had sold them all three months ago to a dressmaking factory in Pinsk. He said the men did not need tents in the summer, and by winter they would all be dead.
By some miracle, Grigori was still alive. He was a sergeant and his friend Isaak a corporal. Those few left of the 1914 intake were now mostly NCOs, noncommissioned officers. Grigori’s battalion had been decimated, transferred, reinforced, and decimated again. They had been sent everywhere but home.
Grigori had killed many men in the last two years, with rifle, bayonet, or hand grenade, most of them close enough for him to see them die. Some of his comrades had nightmares about it, particularly the better-educated ones, but not Grigori. He had been born into the brutality of a peasant village and had survived as an orphan on the streets of St. Petersburg: violence did not give him bad dreams.
What had shocked him was the stupidity, callousness, and corruption of the officers. Living and fighting alongside the ruling class had made him a revolutionary.
He had to stay alive. There was no one else to take care of Katerina.
He wrote to her regularly, and received occasional letters, penned in a neat schoolgirl hand with many mistakes and crossings-out. He had kept every one, tied in a neat bundle in his kit bag, and when a long period went by with no letter he reread the old ones.
In the first she had told him she had given birth to a boy, Vladimir, now eighteen months old-Lev’s son. Grigori longed to see him. He vividly remembered his brother as a baby. Did Vladimir have Lev’s irresistible gummy smile? he wondered. But he must have teeth by now, and be walking, and speaking his first words. Grigori wanted the child to learn to say “Uncle Grishka.”
He often thought about the night Katerina had come to his bed. In his daydreams he sometimes changed the course of events so that, instead of throwing her out, he took her in his arms, kissed her generous mouth, and made love to her. But in real life he knew that her heart belonged to his brother.
Grigori had heard nothing from Lev, who had been gone more than two years. He feared that some catastrophe had befallen him in America. Lev’s weaknesses often got him into scrapes, although somehow he seemed always to slip out of trouble. The problem stemmed from the way he had been brought up, living from hand to mouth with no proper discipline and only Grigori as a poor substitute for a parent. Grigori wished he had done better, but he had been only a boy himself.
