The Passing Tribute

From Part I, Chapter II (Italy, November 1918)

‘And the tannin is in the cupboard next to the drawer. Because the tannin is always, always, where it ought to be.’ The cupboard being opened, Millie frowned. Her lips puckered in disapproval. ‘Except when it isn’t and it’s… somewhere else. Bother, bother, bother – botheroo. Now – now – where the devileroo are you? Ok – remember, Millie: close your eyes and count to five, the thing you seek shall come alive.’ She stood up, clasped her hands by her waist, closed her eyes and counted. Count concluded, her eyes opened and bounced around expectantly. ‘Five more, Millie,’ she said, and closed her eyes again. Upon their opening, her freckles darkened. She emitted a short whistle as a signal of steam being released. ‘No, I don’t want to count any more fives. No, fives there’ll be no more a-counting. No fives for meeeee –’ she twirled on her toes and opened the glass door of the cabinet over the counter ‘– cos all I want is to seeeee –’ her

eyes glimmering, she reached to the back of the cabinet ‘– is my honey beeeee.’ The elusive jar found, she upbraided it with a shake of her head. ‘Now that’s not where you belong, is it, Mr Jar?’

Nurse Millicent Fawley, assumed to have nothing to do one afternoon by Sister Billings, had been asked to tidy the dispensary. Finding the dispensary not just untidy, but arranged in a most haphazard and illogical fashion, Millie had therewith taken it upon herself to reorganise it from top to bottom. The overhaul had been concluded by the affixing of labels to indicate where the various medicines, balms, emetics, infusions and dressings were henceforth to be found.

Sister Billings had entered the dispensary a little more than halfway through the unexpected convulsion. She had immediately uttered a decidedly un-Sister-like oath. She had then listened in a fog of teapot rage as Millie had told her that such and such a medicine had been moved to such and such a place, that others had been moved to such another drawer or cupboard for such and such a reason, and that this and that bottle had been disposed of because… but there Sister Billings had had quite enough. ‘Nurse Fawley, you are quite the most mixed blessing the good Lord has yet inflicted on the world,’ she had said. Whereupon she had turned on her heels and thundered away, fulminating that she had no need of labels to tell her where things would go; they would go where they had always gone!

‘There was ham, ham, mixed up with the jam,

‘In the stores, in the stores…’ Millie sang as she whizzed open the lid of the jar.

‘Ham, ham, mixed up with the jam,

‘In the dispensing stores.’

She measured a spoonful of yellow powder from the jar and tapped it into the mug of brown liquid on the counter. A brisk stir being imparted, the alchemic concoction bubbled before settling to a colour of richly tanned leather.

‘And now we’ll put you back,’ she said, re-screwing the lid, ‘where your label says you’ll be.’

Mission accomplished, she picked up the mug, opened the dispensary door and bustled down the corridor with a busy-bee ‘bum – de – dum – dum – dum’ refrain on her lips. At the end of the corridor she turned down a broad marble staircase, and at the bottom took a left and then right.

‘Nurse Fawley!’

Millie came to a sharp stop in front of the steps leading down to the garden.

‘Yes, Sister.’

‘I’ve been looking for you, Millicent,’ said Sister Billings. Executing a ninety-degree turn, she marched up to Millie. Sister Billings was always looking for someone. Whenever she found them, she’d been looking for them – regardless of whether she had or not. And if she had actually been looking for them, they knew because she’d been looking all over for them. ‘You’re to go and – What’s that?’ She pointed at the mug.

‘Bovril – for Colonel Backhouse, Sister. He says it’s an absolute wonder for his…’

‘I’m sure he does, Nurse Fawley. The lieutenant colonel has no doubt led a very sheltered life.’ Her feline eyes arrowed in as Millie inclined her body (and thus the mug too) away from her. But if Sister Billings could spot the raising of a skirt hem by even one quarter of an inch from the distance of a full ward’s length – which she most certainly could – she could without question tell a doctored mug of Bovril when she saw one. She clicked her fingers. ‘Give it to me,’ she said. A flush of pique coloured Millie’s round cheeks as she handed the mug over. Sister Billings sniffed the concoction, instantly determined its components, and conferred on Millie her usual withered, superior look. ‘This is not Bovril, Nurse Fawley,’ she said plainly. ‘How have you got hold of this? Well, no – I know exactly how you have, and whose help you had in doing so.’

‘But Sister, Colonel Backhouse feels so much…’

‘Nurse Fawley! The lieutenant colonel is not here to feel – he is here to heal. And I don’t care if the war’s over, I’ll not have you speak back, is that clear?’ Noting a glistening of suppressed petulance forming in Millie’s eyes, she let out a puff of infinite exasperation, and no little despair. ‘Never, in all my good days, Millicent, have I ever encountered a more wilful, obtuse, disobedient, unmanageable –’

‘Sister Billings! Sister Billings! I need you in the ward – now!’

The interminable list of synonyms applicable to Millie’s character being cut short by the doctor’s summons, Sister Billings’ sun-dappled complexion turned winter pale. She gazed distantly at Millie.

‘They won’t let him go,’ she muttered sadly. Her focus quickly returning, her voice bore a hint of accusatory bitterness as she added, ‘They just bally well won’t.’ She spun away, stopped, and passed the mug back to Millie. ‘Throw it away, Millicent. I will speak to you and that wretched accomplice of yours later.’ She took a few purposeful steps, stopped again, and returned to Millie. ‘Now, Nurse Fawley!’

Mug in hand, Millie remained as still as a stick insect, watching as Sister Billings disappeared off to the ward. Then, when she had certainly gone, she skipped on down the steps.

‘Bum – de – dum – dum – dum.’

***

As Lieutenant Colonel Backhouse reached out to receive the mug he coughed so violently that Millie was forced to keep hold of it. When he had finally stopped coughing, she released it to his charge.

‘You, my little ginger snap, are a bloody marvel.’ He took an eager sip, and then coughed again – this time a prolonged, rasping cough that sounded as if his weakened lungs were being given their last garrotte. Catching Millie’s softened expression he threw her a reproachful look. A moment later the familiar brusque signal indicated there was no more coughing nonsense to come.

Millie explained peevishly, ‘Sister nabbed me on the stairs as I came out. She knows what’s in it now. It’s so stupid that she and the doctor won’t listen. I’m only doing what’s good for you.’

‘You are indeed. Everyone should be drinking it, if you ask me. I don’t know how the devil you came up with this, but it’s a bloody nectar.’

‘My mother came up with it. When me and my sisters were poorly she always mixed the medicine with other bits and bobs, to save money. She used to experiment with all sorts of things, telling us she’d come up with something extra-special to help us get better extra-quick. We were her little guinea-pigs.’

‘Then your mother’s a bloody marvel too!’

‘Yes,’ she said with a gush of filial pride. ‘Anyway, cos of what Sister now knows, it might be a bit tricky next time.’

Backhouse took another sip and winked at her. ‘A bottle of gin says it won’t be.’

Millie’s eyes lit up and she clapped her hands joyfully. ‘Yay!

‘Gin, gin, marvellous gin,

‘You know where you’ll find me – and that’s at the inn.’

Caught between sips by the couplet, Backhouse’s amusement spluttered into another cough.

Millie let out a coarse, gravelly laugh. ‘Oh God, don’t kill yourself with the Bovril!’

‘This girl has near as damned well saved my life, Wilson,’ said Backhouse once he had recovered. He turned to Edward standing beside him in the sun. ‘Forget all that quackery about steam inhalations, cupping, and cuts here, there and everywhere – this is what medicine’s about.’ He raised the mug to his health. ‘The right prescription for the affliction. Of course that damned fool doctor won’t hear a word of it. Not in his bloody manual. Had the nerve to give Millie here the most beastly ragging in front of the sister last week for helping herself in the dispensary – and then tried the same thing on me, can you believe? Said I ought to be ashamed of myself for encouraging her. Ashamed for wanting the only

thing that’s doing me any damned good – ridiculous man! Much did it good him though, eh, Millie?’

Backhouse’s violent strength of feeling brought on another coughing fit. Edward stuck out a hand to stop the contents of his mug from slopping. Backhouse would have none of the gesture though: he loathed any hint at being invalid. Shielding the mug, he withdrew it from reach. But all the exertion was too much. His legs started to quiver so that he was forced to lean heavily against the garden wall just to remain upright.

The effects of Spanish flu had transformed Lieutenant Colonel Backhouse. They had reduced him to a thinly fleshed skeleton of a man. His ruddy face had become ashen and gaunt, and where once it had been complemented perfectly by his thick moustache, it was now overwhelmed by it, like a cat that had been shaved and left only its whiskers. The sturdy torso and tree-trunk legs that had flanked noble steeds and powered effortlessly up the mountainside had atrophied too, becoming so wasted of muscle that they seemed barely able to straddle a goat.

The advance through the Val d’Assa had been debilitating. The sun, unable (or unwilling) to penetrate its deep fissures and forests, had shone for a solitary hour over the high peaks before retreating to leave them to plough on in dark, numbing misery. It was then that the imperial shadows of war had emerged in the gorge: shells of men trudged past in scattered groups in solemn, sullen silence, while gas-mask eyes were trampled underfoot, flat haversacks clung to face-down backs, carts lurched along the corkscrew tracks, and horses staggered before being thrashed, the litter of corpses, limbers and lorries all being swarmed upon by the million mouths of the million buzzing flies. When at last the invisible line was crossed, the sun had returned and they were bathed in white light. As one they had turned their heads to the sky like a field of greedy sunflowers. And then, as soon as they had, it was over. Whereupon they had about-turned and marched straight back through the gloom of the valley – just as Edward had known that they would. By this time, however, Backhouse’s headaches and fever had already begun. Although his convalescence had been long he had refused to leave Italy, remaining close to the battalion south of Vicenza.

‘Come on, you, back in your chair,’ said Millie.

Backhouse cast a malevolent eye at the wheeled contraption beside him. It had been out of the question he should meet Edward sitting in it – he had already told Millie this, so he had no idea why he should have to repeat it. As such, turning to Millie, his expression carried the same malevolence as his eye.

‘In a minute!’ he snapped. But even with the support of the wall Backhouse’s legs would not hold out. At any moment they would buckle and he would collapse in a heap on the ground. His powerlessness to prevent this was the cause of his rage. To take this out on Millie was the height of boorishness though. His disposition

therefore quickly softened, albeit more in thought than in tone. ‘Yes, yes. But I only do it for you, you know.’

‘Of course you do.’

He slowly lowered himself into the bath chair and planted his hands with distemper on the rests either side.

‘There – I’m going to have to converse with Lieutenant Wilson as if he were a bloody giraffe. Happy?’

‘Now there’s a giraffe in the hospital – quite. Well… I’ll leave you two alone for a few minutes. Do try and stay in the chair, won’t you?’

Backhouse made no reply. He merely watched on with a sort of wan, paternal devotion as Millie marched away across the lawn and joined Major Mallinson beneath the arbour, the latter’s pipe hanging lazily on his lips as he plucked the purple blossoms of the many sprinkled periwinkles.

‘That girl is of use,’ Backhouse stated, at length. ‘Most of them aren’t, but she is.’ He turned his head to the white winter sun in the cloudless sky and basked in its glow for a moment. His ruminations were concluded by an angry thump of the chair. ‘She’ll be damned well wasted in England, that’s for sure. Just like the rest of us. By Jove, who the devil wants to go back anyway? The country? It’s all gone. It’ll never be what it was… For heaven’s sake, Wilson, come and stand where I don’t have to twist my damned neck to see you.’ A peremptory jerk of his arm swished Edward in front of him. He gave him a cursory look before propping his gaze back on Millie; she was laughing with the major. ‘But you don’t care a fig for that. Never have, I’m sure. Nor should you. All that Shropshire Lad stuff’s nothing to you city types. Anyway, the whistle’s gone; the referee’s picked up the ball; time to get off the pitch. It’s been a damned bad game, but there you are. It’s done now.’ The lieutenant colonel’s strain of melancholy bluster was more a product of his present physical condition than any permanent psychological change. If it had indeed been a damned bad game that was only because in the last minute of the match he had been kicked in the shins when clean through on goal. There was nonetheless relief detectable in his voice as he added, ‘They’re packing me off south to Taranto next week. At least that’s Christmas sorted – thank God. What about you?’

‘About me what, sir?’

‘What are you going to do with yourself, that’s what.’

The shift of focus being unexpected, Edward had no idea what to say. ‘Well, I… erm…’

‘Just as I thought. Haven’t a clue. That’s what I told the War Office too. They’re going to start sending trains up to Vienna next month – some kind of relief mission. The usual thing: food, clothes and whatnot. I told them you’d be game

for that. Get you another pip on your shoulder, no doubt. You speak a bit of Kraut, don’t you?’

‘Well, I…’

‘I told them you did,’ Backhouse continued regardless, a negligent turn of his fingers indicating the question had been of the parenthetical sort. ‘You’ll be under Major B’s command. There’s no point you loafing around here doing nothing all winter, is there?’ This question was of the rhetorical sort. ‘Of course not. Nothing worse than an idle officer. You’d just drink yourself stupid. And you’d be about the last man in the batt to get your papers, you know – you’ll be here for a good while yet, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

That was not what Edward was thinking. He didn’t know what he was thinking. ‘I really was…’

Backhouse’s muscular eyebrows twitched in aggravation. He was not one for quibblers, not when his mind was made up. The boy clearly needed some guidance. He was thus acerbically blunt. ‘What’s your trade then, eh? Wool sorter, rag conditioner, oil presser? I didn’t think so. Back in England you’d be as useless as all the other officers come to the gentleman rank like yourself. Before you knew it you’d be just another orphan tramping round Piccadilly Circus and selling flowers on the steps of Eros. But you can do some good in Vienna. It’s a rum lot up there, so I hear. And we can’t have them starve, can we? Not now the war’s over.’ Beneath the heavy shades of his brow he looked squarely at Edward. ‘They need the sort of man there who’s not going to have a thought about whether to use his pistol when he draws it – whatever the circumstances. Someone who’s not going to expect someone else to do the dirty work for him, do you understand?’

Edward had no chance to reply. The moment Backhouse finished he started coughing again. Millie’s ears pricked to the sound. She presented her bouquet of periwinkles to the major and returned with her most purposeful gait. Her approach spotted by Backhouse, he tempered his manner to Edward.

‘You’ve got some leave coming shortly, I know, so you’d have to forgo that. If not, I’ll just have to get one of the other officers to do it instead. But seeing as I’ve already told the War Office and Major B you’re the best man for the job, it’d be a bit of a fish in a pan if you didn’t go now. You won’t be alone – far from it. There’ll be a company to guard the trains and help distribute the stuff once you’re there, and a medical detachment too. See?’ he said to Millie, like a schoolboy in search of a sweet. She was once more before him, the fine strands of her flaxen hair stippled in the sunlight beneath her white nurse’s hat. She beamed broadly.

‘Well done to Colonel Backhouse for sitting down.’

The lieutenant colonel returned her a lolly-sucking smile; he loved a dash of mockery in his women. He then addressed her in the straightforward terms of one who knew what was best for her too. ‘Now, I’ve just been saying to

Lieutenant Wilson here that there’s no point in a fine chap like him wasting his talents back in England. None at all. Farewell, sad isle, indeed. Nor you either, Nurse Fawley. The lieutenant’s going to be heading off with a relief mission to Vienna shortly. A practical, knees-dirty job. There’ll be a medical detachment going too. I’ve just told him that that’s exactly your kind of caper. Isn’t that right, Edward?’

‘Well – I – yes, there was some…’

‘Vienna?’ said Millie.

‘Exactly.’

‘But how would I…’

Backhouse batted away any ‘buts’.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to the papers. So what do you say?’

There was a short silence. She looked at Edward, her eyes sparkling bright as the sun.

‘Sure, why not?’ she said.

From Part III, Chapter XXIII (Austro-Czech border; January 1919)

‘How do you find the cutlets, Colonel Linton?’

They were vegetable. That was the pretence of meat at dinner. Linton sucked the turnip from his teeth and turned to the empress. ‘Excellent,’ he said.

‘My husband told me you spotted a wild boar this afternoon.’

‘We did.’

‘He said you very nearly managed to catch it.’

‘Very nearly.’

‘What a pity you didn’t. Although I’ve understood they’re surprisingly quick when they run.’

‘They possess the speed of all good game,’ he replied with restraint. ‘It’s no surprise once you’ve seen it, I assure you.’

‘Well then I very much ought to see one at least once, don’t you think, Colonel? An empress should not be surprised by anything served at her table, should she?’

‘Indeed not,’ he said, continuing in his manner of military thrift.

‘Although perhaps if I did see it, I might not then care to see it shot. One thinks a good deal more of an animal when it is in flight than when it is nothing more than a head or cutlets presented on one’s plate, doesn’t one?’

‘That’s why a man should always eat what he hunts, Your Majesty. It teaches him respect for the animal.’

‘And a lady?’

‘A lady?’

‘Should a lady always hunt what she eats too, Colonel Linton? Not just a man.’

Her dark brown eyes settled on Linton and flashed with a lively, scherzando air. Their tints of playfulness were not matched by her countenance. Beneath a chignoned mass of curling black hair overhanging a narrow, hemispherical forehead, the delicate lines of her square chin and straight lips showed not the least deviation to signal emotion.

‘One’s respect for one’s fellow creatures should always be mutual,’ he said.

‘I doubt it could be mutual, Colonel Linton, surely? Unless, that is, you would on occasions contrive to have the quarry in pursuit of the hunter. If that were the case I might fear that such an animal would show as little pity for my plight as one of Mr Lenin’s Bolsheviks.’

Linton drew his finger across his moustache to veil the twitch of pleasure at her spirit. ‘I said fellow creatures, Your Majesty. I would not dishonour the noble boar by attributing to him the savagery of the Bolshevik.’

‘Well, that is a thing, Colonel Linton. I confess I had never before thought of myself in fellowship with a –’

A flicker of lights interrupted her. The lights then went off, came back on for a moment, flickered briefly, before at last the current ran out. Plunged into darkness, the dim light from the fireplace at the far end of the room shadowed the hurried movements of the footman across the ceiling and walls, and bestowed a penumbral mystery on the features at the table. The emperor, heretofore engaged with the Countess of X and the officer, gave the table a furious thump.

‘Gott im Himmel! I cannot even eat without this wretched machine breaking!’ The violence of his outburst brought forth his cough, which then punctuated his ensuing, spluttered words. ‘It is – so – infuriating. Infuriating – Zita!’

‘There is not enough fuel, that is the problem, Herr Colonel,’ the major explained to Linton. ‘I have tried many times to –’

‘There is not enough anything!’ the emperor cried, thumping the table again. ‘That is the problem. There is nothing but – but – but trees and snow, and – dead animals.’

Linton instinctively glanced at the empress. But to look at her was to look at a countenance unmoved, a visage flawless and serene. After a duly respectful silence in which to allow the emperor’s emotion to diffuse and abate, the countess turned to Linton, her large sapphire eyes like stars in the night.

‘You will get us some fuel, won’t you, colonel?’ she said, her look appealing, her tone expectant. ‘We’re in darkness day and night here. One is very nearly forced to guess which bed one is to find oneself sleeping in in the morning, you know.’

‘I will be happy to ensure the countess finds the right one,’ the major averred with the stolid rigour of his class.

The countess returned a lofty eye, and replied in an even loftier tone, ‘I’m quite certain you would lead me to the wrong one.’

‘Certainly not. My honour would not allow that to happen.’

‘Your honour has allowed very little to happen.’

‘Nothing at all. You have my word.’

‘I’m sure your word is the very best that you’ve given.’

‘Indeed,’ the officer declared proudly.

The countess could be scarcely bothered to sigh.

‘Now – enough, Claudia. Don’t tease the major,’ the emperor said with weary reproach as two precious candles were lit on the table by the footman’s taper.

‘Sometimes, Your Majesty,’ the countess returned keenly, ‘the only way a woman is permitted to tell the truth is to do so by teasing. The skin of a great many men is more easily breached by that than a bullet. Of course, I’m certain that does not apply to you, does it, Colonel Linton?’ She redressed her attentions to the so-named forthwith; her eyes appealed now brighter than before. Set in a noble, aquiline face crowned with its head of still-lustrous blonde hair, theirs was a look of rich, haughty allure, a look of that particular superiority possessed by a woman who has bought a husband of ancient lineage out of penury, and done so on a whim. That, of course, was all her attraction: she had tried to seduce Linton before.

It had been at the Esterhazy ball in Vienna. Once introduced, she had not been coy in her advances, and so they had danced, laughed, and flirted with abandon. Had she not repeatedly talked of her husband Linton might have succumbed to much more. But in the way her tongue had licked the count’s name from her lips and flung it about his ears with a sort of malicious ecstasy whenever her fingers had brushed his lapels, he had suspected her of thrilling more at her husband’s cuckoldry than at his own being. That the count had since been killed in the war mattered little to Linton now: he had long since spied his reflection in his cuirass. But it was this flirtation that had set the seal on his amorous disenchantment.

He had returned to England in 1911 having served at both ends of the African continent and quickly fallen in love with the Lady Sarah. Her spry, caustic independence was like an island citadel whose only access was a path of sweetness as slender as the bridge of As-Sirat. It was a lengthy pursuit over hard terrain, concluded at the last by a fall from his mount. And what, when he had picked himself up from the ground and wiped the muck from his face, after twelve months of letters, invitations, entreaties and sighs had he discovered that the exasperating Lady Sarah wanted? To receive letters, invitations, entreaties and sighs: that was what. ‘What more could a lady wish for?’ he had wondered while he chased; ‘What was her motive?’ he had puzzled long after he fell. Having thus found himself to be repeating these questions (however fleetingly) in the countess’s company, he had resolved to ask them no more.

Linton looked at the countess coldly. ‘It was a highly effective weapon in Flanders, certainly,’ he said.

The countess laughed. Rebuffed thus, she dismissed him with a peacock turn of her cheek.

‘I remember saying to Herr Köstler during the war – you know Herr Köstler, don’t you?’ she asked the emperor.

‘Of course.’

‘Well, I asked him if it had been the case that the Austrians had written such a short note to the Serbians in those sunny August days, was it not then the fault of the composer that she had been forced to sit through such a long and dreadful German opera? “My noble countess,” he replied to me, quite out of temper, “it is no fault of the composer if the musician cannot play.” There, Your Majesty, at least one person has got some truth out of that man by a little teasing: it was not the music that was to blame – it was how it was played.’

A crackle of electricity saw the lights return, and the major note to Linton with the worldly-wise sagacity of his class, ‘Ah, you see, Herr Colonel, I tell the footman it is not always the fault of the fuel. Sometimes the machine becomes too cold, that is all.’

After a short hush, Linton emitted a low, sardonic laugh. ‘Ha, ha. To think, Your Majesty – before I arrived I read in the press stories of how the imperial family was living in all kinds of luxury, with lorries full of goods arriving daily!’ He laughed again with a forked cutlet on display. ‘The luxury of the rabbit and the bat – one of Aesop’s tales, no doubt!’

A general descent into mirth was abruptly cut short.

‘How can they write that, Colonel Linton? How can they say such lies? Is this luxury?’

Linton turned back to the empress. Her features appeared suddenly stark in the returned electrical glare. For a moment he thought it barely conceivable that the pale face and waif-like form, attired in a simple black dress with a collar of pearls no more ostentatious than had they been beads, belonged to the woman to whom he had shortly before been conversing, and not to some common Tuscan signorina.

‘It is not,’ he replied in stiff, respectful tones. ‘It is the gleanings of the gutter press. They are the same the world over: they scrabble in the mud.’

‘But they are lies, Colonel Linton. They are printing lies. How can they do such a thing? There is no luxury here,’ she continued, her lips hardly moving despite the force of her words. ‘And yet we are still here, Colonel Linton. Our telephones lines are tapped, we are watched day and night, we have only a handful of men and a handful of bullets – and yet we are still here. We have not abandoned our people. We have not run away like the Kaiser and Junkers: they have retired as if nothing had happened, as if the war had nothing to do with them. Now we hear the

German people believe they have been lied to as well, that they have been cheated and deceived. Deceived? By whom? It is my husband who has been lied to, cheated and deceived – by them. He and my brother tried to finish the war – but they did not want to. They wanted to continue bombing ships with their submarines until we were destroyed. Until we were destroyed, Colonel Linton – us – because they cared nothing for Austria and the empire. They were happy to sacrifice us for Germany.

‘Now the war is over there is no one in Austria who takes the blame either. It is a land full of musicians; there are no composers. They are happy to be all like Herr Adler. Do you know he told my husband last year that as he did not start the war, it was not his responsibility to end it? It was not my husband who started the war either – but Herr Adler, Herr Bauer and their friends want to make him the only person who is responsible for the millions that have been killed. They want to pretend that they did not volunteer to fight at the beginning too, that they have won the elections for Austria – and not for themselves. You see, Colonel Linton, they are the same as the Germans; they want to sacrifice us for them. But we will not let that happen. We will not abandon our people. My husband has not abdicated – he will never abdicate. Never, Colonel Linton.’

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