Free The Brides of Solomon by Geoffrey Household

he led me across the road.
    We entered the crowd lining the corner of the Appel Quay and Franz Josef Street, and mingled with it. I began to bolt for home, but the procession was on us. The police car came first, then the
car containing the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife. I remember Count Harrach standing on the running board on the left-hand side of the car, shielding the Archduke with his body. It did not
occur to me that such was his motive. It just seemed a gallant and genuinely Ruritanian way to ride.
    The cars turned into Franz Josef Street. My kindly little friend leaned forward and fired twice. I was some distance from him and did not at first realise what he was doing. In 1914 we had not
yet been educated by war and movies. Nothing spectacular happened, except that the Archduke leaned back and Sophie put her head on his knees. Then the wave of the crowd curved over Gabriel Princip.
Above the bent heads and shoulders I could see Count Harrach put a handkerchief to the Archduke’s mouth. It turned suddenly red as in a conjuring trick.
    When I reached our door, the von Lechs and my parents came pouring out of it; they did not notice that I had joined them from the Quay, not from inside the house. I never told them. I never said
a word of my adventure at school. Guilt was already present, though it was many years before I admitted to myself that Gabriel Princip, seizing his opportunity, had used me to bluff his way through
police and crowd to Franz Josef Street. Without me, he would have had to fire from some point on the Appel Quay past or through the protecting body of Count Harrach—a shot so long and
hopeless that he would have drawn from his pocket only, perhaps, a cigarette.

 
     
     
     
The Idealist
     
     
     
     
    H E still used to finger his captain’s uniform and wonder how the devil he had got into it without a major interruption of his life. There had
been, of course, a sudden rush of unfamiliar incidents, but no break in the continuity of the self and the work which he knew, no chrysalis period of military training. At one moment he had been
manager of a fleet of barges on the gentle Severn; at the next he was an army captain running lighters in a Mediterranean aflame with war. A deputy Assistant Director of Transportation they called
him. It seemed a long title. He was used to being called the Young Boss. His father was the Old Boss.
    And here he was in Piraeus Harbour, emptying into his barges the holds of the freighters which raced up from Alexandria; unloading on the quay or—if the weather were kind—at little
ports on the other side of the Corinth Canal; storing and stacking; managing his Greek lightermen with the aid of a foreman who, sober, much resembled his old Severn-side foreman drunk; and
commanding his small detachment of military through a sergeant-major who was the recoil mechanism between himself and the Army. The sergeant-major took and distributed the shocks so that the Young
Boss—no, Captain Coulter, of course—could go on doing his job without disrupting the still unintelligible organisation of which he was a part.
    Sergeant-Major Wrist was in the eyes of Coulter a character straight out of Kipling—pliant, resourceful, with as neat and tough a body as if he had polished and brushed it along with his
equipment for twenty-five years of morning parades. He had managed to stay alive through one war already—not to speak of several expeditions which he described as picnics—and he freely
expressed his intention of staying alive through this one. Coulter liked that. It was a proper old-soldierly way to talk. He felt that Wrist was wasted on a non-combatant job in the docks, and was
sure that he must have pulled every possible regimental string to avoid it.
    Their life of mere hard work was not, however, likely to continue undisturbed. That morning, April 6, 1941, Hitler had declared war on Greece. It was the end of five uncannily peaceful months
while