The Crocus List

1

The Duke was dead. The old Duke, last of a generation of Royal Dukes, the one the press claimed was known as the Steel Duke (though they had made up the name themselves) because he had also been a Field Marshal and a real one. The news, coming late on a September Friday, sent a little ripple through the Army. In the Ministry of Defence it brought a few moments of silence: full generals put down their pens and cups and began recalling chance remarks the Old Man had thrown at them when they were mere subalterns, then winced when they realised they would have to put on Blues and remember how to adjust the stars and sashes of their knighthoods for the memorial service. In outer offices the silence was shorter. Brigadiers and colonels who had never known the Duke, and who would be no part of the service anyway, just said: "Yes, I suppose he _was_ still alive," and went back to writing applications for jobs in personnel management and fund-raising.

In the London barracks of the Household Division and the Cavalry, and among the Duke's own (now much amalgamated) old regiment on station in Osnabrück, the ripple became a wave of mingled apprehension and pride. They-selected echelons of them-would certainly be part of the service, the most visible part, and rehearsal time was short. The British Army prided itself on its parades even more than on its gallant defeats.

And in the military clubs and the Bishop's Bar at the House of Lords, the news brought a welcome change from silence and an ironclad excuse not to go home to their wives. Some, of nearly the Duke's own age, could remember his first wife-a minor European Royal-whom a few claimed to have known "very wellindeed" before her marriage. But she had died in a car crash in the wartime blackout, and been replaced by the daughter of a West Country Earl, herself widowed at Dunkirk. She too had died some time ago, and anybody who remembered her better than well properly kept quiet about it. But most of the reminiscences turned affectionately and regretfully on the Duke himself. He had earned his rank, not just played soldiers like some Royals, and there were those who knewfor a fact that he had been the real brains behind the D-Day landings. After a mission to Moscow he had made a proper study of the Soviet war machine and some said he was the first to realise that the Third World War began the day the Second ended. And his postwar proposals for reforming the regimental system had been remarkable, quite remarkable, although of course the Army had been absolutely right to reject them. The real pity was (they concluded) that the old boy had lived to see the country's defences in such a state, with a timid Prime Minister and coalition Cabinet encouraging the Peace Crusade and seeming to haver over these new Russian proposals for a demilitarised Berlin. Probably what had killed him off, if one did but know it. But he'd had a good innings, and they could show there were still a few who cared by making his memorial service a decent send-off. Provided, of course, that it was held in the proper place and not that bloody great barn over in the City. Still and all, you had to agree that things would never be the same again, and some believed that they hadn't been for some time.

Major Harry Maxim got the news from a chatty guard corporal as he drove out of camp to spend the weekend with his parents, who had looked after his son since his wife's death. It meant nothing to him at all.