November 2001. The years since Lola left have been like no other time in Max’s life. He keeps trying to understand what’s happened, trying to get his head around his life. On the walls of his workroom are pinned up photographs of Lola in London and on Mai Dun, words of hers that he’s written down, maps of London and Dorset, thoughts about her that he’s scribbled on bits of paper. It’s like what detectives do in the movies when they’re trying to get a fix on a murderer. After a time Max thinks no, that isn’t it. It’s what Philip Nolan did in The Man without a Country, by Edward Everett Hale. This story was written in 1863 to inspire patriotism in the Union during the Civil War. It was fiction, but so credible that many readers thought it to be fact.
Philip Nolan, a lieutenant in the western division of the army, was a disciple of Aaron Burr, and as such he was court-martialled in 1807 for his adherence to the man who was plotting to overthrow the government. ‘When the president of the court asked him at the close, whether he wished to say anything to show that he had always been faithful to the United States, he cried out, in a fit of frenzy. “D---n the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!”’ The government took him at his word. He was sentenced to spend the rest of his life on ships of the Navy where he would never set foot on the country he had disowned and never hear it mentioned. Transferred from one ship to another, he grew old in his exile. In his one chance at restoring his lost honour he took over the captaincy of a gun crew in a frigate battle with the English and so distinguished himself that the Commodore thanked him and gave him his own sword of ceremony to put on.
But the sentence was never rescinded, and Nolan died at sea on board the US Corvelette Levant. In his cabin were seen his pitiful efforts to reclaim what he had lost. There was a map he had drawn from memory of the United States as he knew it in 1807. There was a hand-drawn portrait of Washington draped with the stars and stripes. There was an eagle with lightning blazing from his beak and his foot clasping the globe. Nolan left a note that said:
Bury me in the sea, it has been my home and I love it.
But will not someone set up a stone for my memory at
Fort Adams or at Orleans, that my disgrace may not be
more than I ought to bear? Say on it:
‘In memory of
PHILIP NOLAN,
Lieutenant in the Army of the United States
HE LOVED HIS COUNTRY AS NO OTHER
MAN HAS LOVED HER; BUT NO MAN
DESERVED LESS AT HER HANDS.’
Max searches for and finds the story on the Internet and prints it out. He reads it with tears running down his face. ‘That’s how it is with me,’ he says. ‘Lola was my country and I am a man without a country.’