He Who Walks in Shadow (23 page)

“Then where?”

“An island, off the coast of Normandy. In a monastery of some sort.”

Laughter interrupted us. “You mean Mont Saint-Michel?” said the inspector.

“Yes, you know it then?” Carter asked.

“Of course, my friend. It is as famous as it is beautiful. But beauty can deceive. It is a fortress, an island surrounded by the sea at high tide and quicksand at low. If they possess what you seek, they will not give it of their own accord. Which means you will have to steal it. And that is impossible.”

“Alone perhaps. But not with your help.”

“Me?” he said. “My friend, I am an officer of the law, not a thief.”

“And a man who has served as long as you knows well that sometimes the only way to save the law is to break it. You won’t be able to stop Zann, not officially at least. You won’t catch him, and if you do, he’ll hide behind his diplomatic shield long enough to be our undoing. And he has ears everywhere. If we know that the staff has come to this place, then he will know it, too. We have the advantage of time, but it is one that is slipping away even as we speak.”

“You speak of this staff as if you think it is not only real, but has real power. And this cult as if you think they could actually accomplish their aims. We have been treating this as a case of madmen.”

“And that is why you haven’t found them. They are mad, but they are not blind. They see the world as it is, and as it will be—if they succeed.”

“What if you are wrong? What if you are just as deluded as they?”

“I pray every night that is the case, inspector. I am far more worried that I am right than that I am wrong. But either way, if you help us, you will find the men responsible for your murder. They are after the same thing we are.”

Villard weighed Carter’s words, and I could see the balance shifting in his mind. He stepped forward and picked up the picture of the woman, the girl really, and I knew that his eyes had fixed on her face, on the expression of unimaginable pain and terror that was etched upon it and would stay etched upon it until the conquering worm had eaten it away.

“I want to tell you something, something I have never shared with another. Something I thought I never would. I thought it was my own madness, my own personal insanity. But now, for the first time, I think I understand it.”

Carter looked from him to me, but he said nothing. Villard did not notice. He was somewhere else, altogether.

“When I was a younger man, I went into the field with my brothers to defend my country against the invader. I was with the XXX Corps on the banks of the Meuse, at a place they call Verdun. It was there that I learned that civilization is a lie, a mask that we wear to cover our own savageness. There I learned that men could do unspeakable evil to other men, that there was no limit to our callousness, to our hate. But I tell you this, and I tell it true, it was no mud-filled shell hole or tangled mass of barbed wire where I saw the true darkness that surrounds this world. As awful as the war, I learned then that there are things far worse.”

Letters from Lieutenant François le Villard to Mademoiselle Marguerite Deraismes (Translated), February 18 – March 21, 1916

My dearest Marguerite,

How I wish that I could see you again, if even for a moment. I know you are with me always, and when I close my eyes, it is your face I see. Sometimes I think that I catch a glimpse of you, walking amongst the fog and iridescent mist beyond the trenches, as if your spirit has traveled from Étretat to be with me as you sleep safely in your bed. But then the cannon fires and the earth quakes and my reverie is chased away.

The battlefield is no place for a dreamer.

There are those who would tell me that I should not so freely share with you the things that I have seen, the things that I have feared, the deaths I have almost died and may yet face. With the deepest respect, they are fools.

I know you worry for me. I know that it eats you away inside. Is it better to lie to you, to deny to you the truth? You have seen the death notices in the papers. You are no fool. And that is why I love you. So until that day comes when you tell me you wish not to hear of the things I see, I shall deliver them to you.

As clearly and truthfully as I can.

* * *

When I dream, I do not dream of war. I do not hear the cannonade. I do not see the arcs of fire. I do not feel their heat. Their crash does not shake me. I do not know where I go, precisely. Only that I am away. That I am absent. Without leave. Where there is no muck and mire. Where blood and stagnant water do not mix and mingle. Where the mud does not flow like a narrow sea, where death does not guard the shore.

That is my dream. Life is my nightmare.

* * *

There are rumors circulating among the men. I hear them, even though they speak only in hushed tones which drop to silence when I am nearby. There are times I wish I was an enlisted man. Soldiers may follow a lieutenant into fire and death, but they will never truly trust him. Still, I hear what I am not meant to.

They say that the Germans know they cannot win, that these endless lines of torn earth will never break. One might mistake this lack of confidence as a positive development, but such rumors seldom are. The men whisper of a new plan, to bleed us white. To deal death in such numbers that our will to fight is broken, even if our lines still hold. And they say that is why we have been sent here, to this place called Verdun.

To be bled.

* * *

The rain came down in torrents. The fog that rose up from the bog that lies between the lines was so thick that if the Germans had marched a division across the mud-sea we would not have known it until they were driving bayonets into our chests. But nothing moves out there. Nothing marches in the howling wind. Still, we wait and we stand guard. The rain pouring, soaking uniforms and men’s souls. The water pools at our feet, eating away at them. Rotting them from the inside, while the rats are forced from their holes, scurrying along the edge of the parapets, grown fat and slow from the flesh of the dead.

My eyes have become accustomed to the darkness. To move in daylight is to invite death, and we have become creatures of the night. The pacifists and the philosophers say that war turns men into animals. They are wrong. War makes monsters of us all.

* * *

The Germans hold the high ground. Our aerial reconnaissance reports that they have placed artillery upon those heights. From there they will rain down fire upon us. And we will try to take those hills to stop them. Against that insignificant mound, the flower of France shall dash itself until we wash it away in our blood.

* * *

They came for us at midnight, rising up out of the mist, fire like dragons’ eyes. We had been expecting them, and yet we were not ready for expectations to turn to that horror.

Every evening we had waited, eyes peering into the shrouded night, wondering much, seeing little. I had command of a three-man Hotchkiss crew, and all of us peered over the barrels of our machine gun, certain that what the mud slowed and the barbed wire stopped, we could kill.

That was the plan from command, at least. Let the Germans come. Let them weaken themselves. And then we would counter, break their lines, take the hill.

I wonder how many such flights of military fancy were formed in the bowels of command bunkers along the front. How often generals and colonels pushed imaginary units across imaginary lines to imaginary goals with a sureness that the real men they represented would somehow turn that fancy into fact. Would turn chalk symbols on a blackboard into gains on the ground. Would turn a pin pushed into a map into the end of the war.

The Germans had maps, too. And they were just as careless.

So we waited. Some might think that the waiting would dull the senses, that day after day and night after night of anticipation would lead to complacency. Not so, not there, not in the trenches. Every night, our nerves bristled, electric with the coming fight. We stared out over that endless dead plain and longed for daylight.

Tonight, though, should have been safe. The rains had fallen all day, and we doubted, in our hearts if not in spoken words, that the enemy would come. The fog was thick upon the field of battle. Nothing moved there in the swirling mists, at least, nothing we saw.

But they were there. Creeping along. Crawling, when they should have walked. Beneath the death-shroud gray fog.

Then they rose as one.

At first, we did not see them. We had stared so long into the darkness that our eyes were masked, as if covered in scales. Then we saw the light, and the scales fell away.

I’ll never know, of course, what the others saw in that moment. No doubt that vision was for each man’s eyes alone. All I know is this—in an instant, No Man’s Land erupted in fire.

There were several hundred of them, perhaps a thousand feet from the parapet, spread down the line as far as the eye could see in either direction. They stood like Prometheus, each with one arm above his head, fire in his hand. Or that is how I saw them, at least, as gods come to earth, to illuminate the night and cleanse the battlefield of the muck and the filth with which we had covered it.

Every man in the trenches stood dumbstruck by what we witnessed. But it was no angel, no god, no deliverer. It was death.

“You fools!” I shouted, as much at my own stupidity as at my men. “Kill them!”

But it was too late. From the hills above, German artillerymen had zeroed in their guns. The flares the soldiers held above their heads gave them the ultimate marker. I didn’t even get off a shot before the first shell fell. Instead, I grabbed my machine gunner and threw him to the ground.

The first shell exploded a hundred yards down the trench. Close enough that I saw men torn to pieces, close enough that I could hear the screams of the dying. But not so close as to put us in danger. That would come later. The first shell was the last one I really saw. There were too many that followed too quickly.

They crashed down like bolts from the thunder god, ripping apart our lines, bursting eardrums, shattering bone, shredding skin. A man cannot think in a moment of horror like that, and in my mind’s eye I saw a kaleidoscope of images, flashes of my past, both familiar and unfamiliar days. A field behind my family’s home on a summer eve. A girl at the Exposition Universelle, a flower in her hair. The sun half-obscured by clouds. A wooden stick, swirling in a whirlpool. Around and around and around. But never down. You, on the night of our wedding, your skin glistening in the moonlight, the half-smile on your face filled with love and lust in equal measure.

Thunder was our world, and in the maelstrom men screamed. Some called to their God, to their mothers, while others shouted words in tongues primeval, left-over languages long forgotten by the conscious mind.

How long did the shells fall? Was it minutes? Hours? Perhaps days, for if the sun had risen and fallen in that mind-shattering span I would not have known it, nor felt its warmth upon my face. You will never know, thank God, what it feels like to believe that every second could be your last and to expect that the next one will be.

But I did not die, and like a storm that rolls across the plain and into someone else’s future, the thunder ceased. Of the men who lived, some cowered in the trenches, unwilling to believe that it had really ended. Others pulled themselves up, their eyes void of all understanding. But most started to celebrate. They had survived, and their cries of joy might have reached all the way to Heaven.

Fools.

I grabbed my gunner up from the pit in which he lay. He shook in my hands, and I am ashamed to say that I struck him across the mouth to calm him. I could think of no other way, and that act of violence brought him back. “Man your weapon,” I said. Then I blew the whistle hanging from my neck. Even in their reveries, to that unmistakable signal they responded. Many turned to me, so conditioned were they to answer to that sound.

“Prepare for the attack!”

I saw it in their eyes, the recognition—the bombardment was only the beginning.

The racket of rifles clacking along the parapet filled the air. From the rear came reinforcements, men pressed into action as the generals realized what was coming. With them, the stretcher carriers, Charons of the battlefield, the bravest men I have ever known.

The trenches had become smoking pits. For as far as I could see the left line was shattered, and men were working to rebuild the walls in the precious few moments we had. The right was secure; the guns had overshot. It was a blessing, but I knew those further back in camp had suffered for our good fortune.

We gazed into the smoke and the haze and the darkness. The only sounds were of picks and shovels, of shouts of men to dig faster. In the end there would be no time. The roar of shouting erupted before their guns did.

Then it was chaos and sound and shooting and blood and death and fire and madness. A man in battle is no longer a man. He does not think as a man thinks. He does not fear as a man fears. He becomes a machine, an animal that acts on instinct and training, that kills without regret, that dies without knowledge or consideration.

The storm-driven sea of Germans crashed upon the rocks of our lines. My gunner fired without ceasing, as I fed him belt after belt of ammo and poured the contents of several canteens upon the barrel that glowed red-hot. I threw back grenades without thinking. I killed men at point-blank range. I faced death more times than I can recall or could ever have imagined. Hours became as minutes, and it was only when the sun broke above the plain of dead and dying that I knew how much time had passed. The attack was over.

* * *

I have heard the most remarkable story, and I must share it with you, even as I now question the wisdom of our agreed-upon candor.

As is custom, those of us who survived the attack were rotated off the front line for a few days of relative relaxation in the city of Verdun, if one can rest with the sound of the guns always in one’s ears. It is perhaps unsurprising that the only place where one might find a reprieve from the battlefield is the local tavern.