Losing Julia (40 page)

DANIEL’S BODY
remained in the wire for three days until it disappeared during a bombardment. We took the German line that afternoon and I looked for Daniel but all I could find were pieces of clothing and leather and belt buckles and helmets and boots and metal and paper and bone all blended together in utter filthy anonymity.

Your letters Daniel, what about your letters? I don’t even know Julia’s last name.

A KID FROM
New Hampshire died the cleanest death I ever saw. Just after a barrage we found him curled up near the latrine like he was sound asleep. We yelled his name and shook him and rolled him over looking for wounds but there was nothing, not a scratch. So we checked his breathing and his pulse and opened his mouth and ripped off his shirt looking for what was wrong and he was already going cold.

“What the hell happened to him?”

“Damn heart attack?”

“Beats me.”

“You sure he’s dead?”

“Can’t be gas.”

“Stroke?”

“That’s no damn heart attack that’s a shell concussion.”

“Shell concussion?”

“Yeah, just from the blast. Seen it at Château-Thierry.”

“The air knocks you dead?”

“Sucks the air right out of you.”

“Shit.”

“Never seen nothing like it.”

“Here, you take his legs.”

THE WHISTLE
shrieks. I’m up and over the top running. So much noise and fear. Then a sudden blow to my leg. I look down. Blood’s coming fast from my thigh. A bullet? Shrapnel? I step once, then stumble. I rise and step again, then fall to the ground. Again I struggle to my feet, but they give way. My pants are soaked. I turn my head sideways and see figures running past. I push up to my hands and knees, crawl forward, then collapse again. So tired. Something knocks my helmet off. Then a sharp pain in my right arm. I’m up again, on my knees. Which way? To the right? Too much confusion. A figure runs past, knocking me over. I try to rise again but cannot.

THE GUNS SHOOK
my hospital bed that morning right up until eleven a.m. on November 11, 1918, when the Western Front finally went completely mute, as though someone had ripped the vocal cords from an angry beast. A doctor stood in the center of the room and called out the minutes. We laid in our beds and listened, knowing that somehow the world was about to change. Next to me a badly wounded young blond boy with the letters
GP
(German Prisoner) painted with silver nitrate across his cheek mumbled and struggled to raise his head.

I’m not sure that any of us lying there really believed that the guns would actually cease. Can four years of violent momentum be stopped cold? I couldn’t believe that war was so containable, that you could blow a whistle and stop the whole thing like a football game. Was bravery at 10:59 a.m. really just common murder at 11:01 a.m.?

My thigh throbbed with pain but it wasn’t that bad, not as bad as for the ones hidden behind the white curtain on the far side of the room, which is where men were placed to die. I was certain that the man on my right was next. His lungs were destroyed by gas and all they could do was put zinc ointment on his blisters and castor oil on his eyes and tell him lies. I tried to talk to him but he couldn’t hear; everything was drowned out by his own fight for air. I felt particularly sad for those who couldn’t hear well through their pain and bandages and fevers, because the change from war to peace was certain to be such an audible thing.

At 10:45 a.m. the guns increased, escalating toward a cataclysmic grand finale. They were our guns mostly, and I wondered whose idea it was to lob a few more shells before time was called. Or was the point to contrast the noise of the barrage with the sudden, breathtaking silence of peace when the larks finally reasserted themselves? But how long would it take the farthest shells to land? Technically, wouldn’t a shell fired at eleven a.m. shatter the peace?

But most of all I wondered how many men died that morning, and I thought how much worse that would be than dying at any other time during the previous four years, especially if you were lying behind the white curtain when everything went still.

I WISH YOU
could hear this, Daniel. The silence is so enormous.

On the Fourth Army front, at two minutes to eleven, a machine gun, about 200 yards from the leading British troops, fired off a complete belt without a pause. A single machine-gunner was then seen to stand up beside his weapon, take off his helmet, bow, and turning about walk slowly to the rear.

—Herbert Essame, British Army.

GOOD-BYE, DANIEL.

S
IX WEEKS AFTER
I returned from France I took a train to San Francisco to find Julia. The train was full of soldiers and I listened carefully to the stories they told their girlfriends and mothers and fathers. The ones who hadn’t fought told tremendous tales of battle while the ones who had were at a loss for words. I kept to myself and alternated between gazing at the landscapes rolling by and reading one of several books I had packed.

I got off in Oakland and took a boat across the bay to San Francisco, disembarking right at the wharves where Julia grew up. It wasn’t San Francisco to me but Julia and Daniel’s town and I looked at every street and store wondering how often they had passed by that very spot. I wanted to scan all the faces of the pedestrians until I found Julia but instead went straight to the library to look up the address of Daniel’s parents. Three hours later I arrived in front of a slightly run-down light gray two-story house in time to see an elderly looking man pull up in a small wagon drawn by a tired-looking horse. “MacGuire & Sons” was painted on the sides in bright red.

“Mr. MacGuire?” I said, removing my hat.

He turned and looked at me, rather more warily than I expected.

“You must be Mr. MacGuire?”

“I am indeed,” he said, in a deep brogue.

“Sorry to disturb you. My name is Delaney, Patrick Delaney.” I paused, searching for the right words. “I was a friend of Daniel’s.”

“Oh Lord, come right in.” He jumped down off his wagon, shook my hand vigorously and gestured toward the front door. “Mrs. MacGuire is at her sister’s. Won’t be back for a few hours still. Here, let me get you a beer.”

We sat down on the front stoop.

“Been to San Francisco before?”

“No, never.”

“Ah, lovely city. A pity what burned, but still lovely to look at, especially in the fall.”

“Yes, I look forward to a little sight-seeing.”

He quickly drained his beer and opened another. His hands were extraordinarily thick and callused and he made a habit of slowly opening and closing a fist, as though testing for soreness.

Finally, he said, “So you were with Daniel.”

“Yes. Yes I was.”

He placed his bottle of beer down beside him and then looked straight ahead. “My poor boy.” He shook his head slowly and then mumbled something, a prayer maybe. Should I say something?

“He was very brave. We all respected him a great deal.”

Mr. MacGuire nodded, his head slung low between his knees and his hands clasped out in front of him.

“When he enlisted the first thing his mother said was, ‘Daniel is much too brave to be a soldier.’ She was right.”