True Patriot Love by Michael Ignatieff

Author:Michael Ignatieff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780670069729
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)

When Maude received this letter, she might have thought William would recover quickly. It was only a riding accident, after all. As letter followed letter, first in the handwriting of the chaplain, then in the disjointed scribbles of William himself, she realized that he had suffered serious injuries. His head and chest were in bandages. The horse had been shot out from under him, and had rolled over him, crushing his upper body. He had broken his ribs and there was fluid in his lungs, and for some time both his heart and his liver gave the doctors concern. In the letters the chaplain continued to write on his behalf, William confessed that he was in pain, alone at night in a field hospital with the groans and cries of the wounded around him. He was to remain in the field hospital for two weeks until he was strong enough to be moved to a rear field hospital on the French coast. There George Parkin, using his connections, managed to visit him and reassure his daughter that her husband, though thin as a wraith, was going to pull through.

He was repatriated to Goring to recuperate. Through the autumn of 1916, he was at home with his wife and the little girls, Margaret, Charity and baby Alison. He was soon well enough to derive pleasure from the sight of Alison crawling rapidly and then, with the comic concentration of the very small, pulling herself up and standing at his knee. The doctors told him his lungs would not come right inside of three months, but by Christmas he was well enough to go up to London alone and to stay the night. He went up to see his publisher William Heinemann, who tempted him with heady visions of the profits to be made from a history of the empire. Grant turned him down. Indeed, he was never to write another book. Chapters, speeches, articles continued to come from his pen, but the war brought his scholarly writing career to a close.

On his unsteady first visit to London he went to Harrods, a superior department store, walking around dazed in the bright lights until a female floorwalker took pity on him—“Poor country cousin! Wounded hero if you prefer”—and piloted him to what he was looking for, the racks of military trench coats. By then, the first Zeppelin raids were terrifying London and the city was in blackout. He left the store and stumbled along the Brompton Road in darkness, bumping into strangers, feeling, as he said, “weird and eerie.” In the darkened streets, he felt bloodlust rise within him. If he had to endure a month in the blackout, he told Maude, he would “revert to the ape man or the cave-dweller and suddenly club some inoffensive person over the head for sheer lust of lawlessness and desire of blood.” The tone is jaunty, but the feeling is taut and strained. It was to take him much longer to recover than he imagined.

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