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The Third Son of a Duke

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There will be an epilogue and a reunion of the original Oroma passengers, all back in England more by coincidence than by design.

That part of the story that involves my grandmother, she went back to England in 1954, the year after I was born.  I speculate who it might be that she visited. I suspect my brother, who went back to England many times to talk to those relatives of ours that we know about, and to the near relatives of my grandmother, who have some idea of who she talked to out in Australia.

My grandfather, who labelled himself a salesman on his record, both leaving Australia and returning, made me instantly think of him as one of those snake oil salesmen.  My grandmother put her profession as home duties.

She was much more than that, and I hope she rose above that mundanity, because she was once an adventuress. 

It is a fascinating meeting between them, after all those years.

Life for all of them has presented challenges, and it will highlight some of them.

At least when they returned home, women had finally been given the vote, but to a certain extent, nothing had really changed.  In the fifties, women were still expected to have children and run houses and look after husbands.  I suspect for a few, those husbands, if any, were in for a very bad shock.

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2850 words, for a total of 50000 words.

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The Third Son of a Duke

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This is where the war becomes real.

And the whole thing is replayed in his mind, to the point where…

Yes, and no.

He wakes in a hospital tent, a shadowy figure that is one of the nurses.

It’s odd, but I had written the basis of this part of the story right after he and Louise had their parting kiss on the Orama in Melbourne.  She has to disembark, he has to go to Queensland, and when either of them could have made excuses, neither did.

It was quite simple, sometime in the future, they would find each other if they were meant to be together.

After those last few days before departing for Egypt with Margaret, he knows who is the one for him, and although he doesn’t find her, curiously, he is always two steps behind, chasing a shadow; it is that belief that keeps him going, that last parting kiss that tells him he has to survive.

The shadow, a familiar face.

But you will have to read the story to find out who…

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1880 words, for a total of 47150 words.

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The Third Son of a Duke

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By now, the idea of finding Louise is but a distant memory.

A week in the second and third lines, after coordinating with the Air Corps and going on several observation runs, taking photos, ironically with a German camera, and getting shot at from the ground by the enemy, a meeting with the artillery group and a plan hatched, one that could not be guaranteed to work, everything is set in place.

It is close to Christmas of 1916, and in the two years since he parted with Penelope, his life had changed so much that he had become a totally different person.  Would that have happened if he had stayed home?  No.

Would that have happened if he had not met Rose, or Louise, or Margaret, to name a few, on the ship?  No.

Had there not been a war, well, he would still be rotting away in those musty chambers with the cobweb-covered cadavers called senior partners.

Hunched into a corner of a trench with several others, waiting for the inevitable whistle, listening to the artillery fire going over their heads, and the odd returning fire exploding nearby, it was remarkable how quickly one became accustomed to what was business as usual.

A stalemate.

Waiting for the moment when a theory would be tested.

And cheat death.

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2155 words, for a total of 45270 words.

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The Third Son of a Duke

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Back on the ship, a different ship, smaller but no less fast, our protagonist is going to Egypt, and joining the war via the Mena Camp, the place where many Australian soldiers passed through on their way to Gallipoli, and back again in injured, there or elsewhere in Egypt.

There were special operations of a sort, not on the same scale as in WW2, but the offices of which were in a hotel in Cairo, which to me seems about right.  If you’re going to do something, it should be done in style.

I have invented this mission, borne out of the plane ride our protagonist took from Winton to Brisbane, one that I’m sure the British already were doing in part, the aerial observation of the German lines and mapping the various sites for their guns to lay down a barrage.

His idea is to create, among what would seem to the Germans as a pre-eminent attack on their trenches, before the soldiers went over the top to attack.

That, of course, was a cause of many deaths, the machine guns waiting.

His idea was if anything novel and he was going to put it into practice.  After he undergoes more training, earns a commission, and gets attached to a squad of returning men, after rests in Egypt.  There are few left of the original group, and now bolstered with replacements, they battle hardened veterans are a battle-hardened group with stories to tell.

To be honest, after reading firsthand accounts, I don’t know how they survived, ot remained sane after the war ended.

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1870 words, for a total of 43115 words.

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The Third Son of a Duke

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In all the investigation of Melbourne of 1915, the more I realised that if we never go looking, we will never find out what history is, what was good, what was bad, what were the prevailing attitudes of the time.

IT gives credence to a few odd sayings I’ve heard over time, ones that are viewed with a great deal of distaste these days, but fifty, seventy, eighty years ago, they were part of what we grew up with.

The thing is, women had it very tough.  That saying you hear a lot, even these days, is ‘it’s a man’s world’, and to a certain degree it is.  Back when I was looking, women could only work until they were married, when it was expected they would stay home, and, dare I say it, attend to the man’s needs.

I have a schoolbook of my mother’s, which she used in 1942, and the back pages are filled with notes on how she was supposed to attend to her husband’s needs.

I showed it to my granddaughters, and they were totally gobsmacked.

This is the thing about the past, and it can be a problem for writers who, if they do not know about the past, can make some fatal flaws in their writing, assuming today’s standards applied back then.

Also, back then, society was very judgmental about a woman’s virtue, and there was very little she could do without society frowning on her or turning her into a pariah.  This was much the same until the sixties, when a lot of that went out the window.

Back in 1915, wow, straight laces and very well behaved. 

However, I suspect, what went on behind closed doors was a different story.

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The Third Son of a Duke

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Of course, writing letters and making extravagant claims has to have some impact, and the way he worded it, it got the desired response.

Someone wanted to give it a go.

So, off to the powers that be, a longer talk and a look at some maps, then off to camp for some soldier training, and then back for some officer training, stuff to improve that he learned at Sandhurst, and at the end of it, a commission, and a mission.

At least he got to see the pyramids and stand under the sphinx.

He also tried to find Louise, tracing her movements from disembarkation in Alexandria to the camp and then, in the general spirit of missing her by a week, finds she has been sent to a casualty clearing centre, destination, not quite sure

His destination, somewhere on the western front in France.

Now it’s time to face the horrors of war.

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The Third Son of a Duke

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Not getting off at Port Said, but going on to Alexandria to disembark with the other people involved in the war.

He is to be met on the wharf, and after disembarkation, that person could be any one of hundreds swarming towards the trains, officers barking orders and people going in all directions.

Confusion and chaos.

Then a voice comes out of the chaos.  A Staff Sergeant with a booming voice.

Orders.

Handed over, get on the train to Cairo, on your way, son….

He was just another soldier.

He goes to Cairo, reading the contents of a letter that’s marked read this first…

From his father

Then, read this second

Instructions on where to go in Cairo.

Cloak and dagger, seemingly, but he suspected it was anything but.

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2230 words, for a total of 37175 words.

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The Third Son of a Duke

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Finally, our protagonist is travelling first class back to England.  He thinks to himself that if the ship is torpedoed, he might have a better chance at survival, but there is that thing about women and children first, so it’s a moot point.

A casualty of war seems his inevitable lot.

There are doctors and nurses on board, and he mentions he travelled out with a particular young lady and asks if they know her.  Only too well, and well, he does wish in the end that he didn’t ask.

It is not surprising, though, because Louise is a kind, gentle, but apparently fun-loving soul given the right circumstances, and he is, in a way, glad that she survived the voyage and found a way to be useful. And fortunately, perhaps, not married or in a serious relationship with a young doctor.

He would never be able to compete with that.

It’s a fascinating run, from Fremantle to Colombo, all the while wondering if there is a German ship out there waiting for them.

There is not.

Coaling in Aden, and then through the Red Sea, familiar territory, and heat, which he is almost accustomed to through his first stint on the way out, and then a year in outback Queensland.

No one believes him when he tells them he was cattle mustering.

They do, however, take his title seriously, and no one will call him David.

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1915 words, for a total of 34945 words.

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The Third Son of a Duke

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I’ve been researching the Melbourne of March 1915, and I was basically gobsmacked.

How can you live in a city for almost half your life and know absolutely nothing about it?

Why wasn’t any of this taught to us in school?  The joke of that is that I know every king and queen of England from William the Conqueror.  I could tell you more than three Australian prime ministers, or state premiers, from when Australia was born, which, by a miracle, I do know, 1901.

As for Victoria, no idea when it became a state, no idea how it was populated beyond a gold rush in the mid-1800s, and barely anything about the Ballarat goldfields and the revolt by the miners.

My great-great-great-grandfather emigrated from England to a place called Harrow in Victoria, a place I’ve never heard of until I started tracing my ancestors, said to be the first town in Victoria.

Since my grandmother features in this story, it is around the time she meets my great-grandfather and her husband-to-be in 1914/1915 in a place called Bairnsdale, a place my father used to mention but not with the fondness a child who was born and brought up there would.

What in hell’s name happened there?

Not our problem in this story, it is just the periphery, or what I think might have happened that interests us, but only as outsiders looking in.

We have a ship to catch. And hi ho hi ho it’s off to war we go!

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The Third Son of a Duke

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A day of research…

So the first thing that was on my mind:  could the children of the rich or titled aristocracy still purchase a commission in the army or navy?

That, it seems, was taken away in the late 1800s, and they had to go to Sandhurst and join the rest of the hopefuls to get a commission or spend the time at the naval academy to become an officer.

So, our protagonist and his brothers had to go to Sandhurst after their exclusive boarding school.

More study is required to make sure I’ve got their backgrounds correct.

The duke is attached to the Admiralty, but he cannot and would not advance his son unless the boy had done the hard yards.  Sailing on the Mediterranean in a private yacht doesn’t quite reach the standards required of a naval officer.

So, once we’ve established his eligibility for a commission, if not, at what rank and where he might fit will be determined

Then there’s Egypt, the camp, the training, and the assignment to a theatre of war.  His preference would be in France, where his brother had been.

He also has no interest in not being at the front, but we will look at who was, and who was not, and why.  Certainly, Generals rarely came to the front-line trenches.

I’ve been looking at the manning of the trenches, learning there were three, and the men rotated, the second for resting, the third for supplies.

We need to know about how the artillery worked in aiding the front-line men.

We need to know the frequency of thrusts, inside and outside the larger-scale attacks, and when.

We need to know where the German lines were, the nature and size of no man’s land and the difficulties of getting across it.

It’s not the physical descriptions we will be relating, but the feelings of those participating, what they see, what happens to them, and how they recover when they are still alive at the end of just another day at the office.  What they think, especially if they will see their loved ones or family again.

I want to sit in that trench waiting for the whistle, I want to go over the top, hear the bullets whizzing past, the thwack when it finds a target, the machine gun fire, and whether it’s exhilaration running towards the enemy, or utter despair at the futility of it.

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2315 words, for a total of 33280 words.