Of Irish Blood (44 page)

Madame Simone, Georgette, and I insist on seeing Louis off. We walk down to the waiting taxi. The driver says that they are first going to Les Invalides, the assembly point.

“Would you like to drive with us and see the great cavalcade?” the driver asks. “Every taxi in Paris has been summoned.”

As we approach the imposing building, it seems to stretch for half a mile. I took those of my ladies who wanted to see Napoleon’s tomb here. One of them was surprised to see an elderly soldier wandering the hallways. “Built for them,” I said. “The ‘invalids’—get it?” Nice of the French, I’d thought, to let their old soldiers live right in military headquarters.

“Look, look,” the driver says.

We are close enough now to see hundreds of taxis lined up in ranks, bumper-to-bumper, all with their headlights on. Amazing.

Six hundred Paris taxis will transport six thousand soldiers to the Battle of the Marne before dawn, the driver says.

He hurries us out of his taxi. It’s a military vehicle now.

Madame Simone, Georgette, and I wave like fools at Louis, who salutes us as his taxi pulls into the line. The drivers start their engines at the same time and pull out in a slow, steady procession. Some have passengers already, some will meet troop trains, but all will bring the reinforcements needed by the French troops who have turned to face the Germans, an old man whose son is going tells us.

I go home with Madame Simone. Georgette joins us. Not a night to be alone.

“La Gloire,”
Madame says just before she falls asleep.

So. The French with some help from the British do stop the German advance. The Boche do not march into Paris, but it’s a close thing. The Allies haven’t won the war. They’ve just kept the Germans from victory.

“A long war now,” Father Kevin says to me the next week at the Irish College.

“I guess we’d better head to the American hospital,” he says. “Hope they need a chaplain.”

“I’m sure they need a cleaner,” I say.

Weeks before we know what’s being called the “Miracle at the Marne” cost in lives. No official numbers are released, but one of the doctors at the hospital tells Father Kevin there were 250,000 Allied and 220,000 German casualties during the battle. Eighty thousand French soldiers dead. Louis is one of them. Not really a soldier … an artist, a boulevardier. No notion of what he’d be facing. But who of those boys marching to the slaughter did? The taxi cavalcade is the last moment of élan. The awful grinding butchery begins.

17

CHRISTMAS EVE 1914

“I want my Mam,” the young soldier cries out. Two o’clock in the morning. I am the only one on this ward. Thank God Margaret Kirk’s close enough to hear me holler if one of these fellows takes a bad turn. She’s always so cool. Not a talker. Intimidating.

Part of the bunch that came over on the U.S.S.
Red Cross.
Doctors, too. Glad Dr. Gros has some help. Though I’m proud enough of what we Americans in Paris did to get the hospital up and running during those first months of war. So many wounded flooding in then. Father Kevin giving the Last Rites to poor fellows dying on stretchers in the hallways. Much better organized now. Even have our own ambulance service thanks to Mrs. Vanderbilt. I do wonder sometimes about the drivers. Boys from the States, lots of them some only eighteen years old. But then the soldiers themselves are not much older.

This lad, John Feeney, nineteen, is in the Dublin Fusiliers. Fought at the Marne, then the Aisne River, wounded at Armentières. Casualties beyond counting in those battles. John’s chart says wounded while “advancing against the enemy.” Sounds so neat and military. But John told me his squad had been forced to stumble through mud and barbed wire into enemy machine-gun fire. All to gain a few yards of ground the Germans retook the next day. Insane.

John’s tall, with long legs, both in plaster held up in traction.

I bend over, take his hand.

“Mam?” he says, and opens his eyes.

“It’s me, Nora,” I say.

“I was dreaming I was home,” he says, “in Galway.”

“My family comes from Galway,” I say.

“What townland?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t? How can you forget where you’re from?” he asks.

“My people left a long time ago,” I say.

“In Ireland a long time ago’s never very far away,” he says. “So where is your home?”

“I’m an American from Chicago but have lived in Paris for three years.” Sounds simple but then something makes me add, “My husband is from Connemara.”

“Husband?” he says, settling back on his pillows. “Didn’t figure you for a husband. He in the war?”

“He’s in Ireland.”

“Well, if your husband is there and your people are Irish, I’d say Ireland is your home place,” he says.

Now, I haven’t confided in Margaret Kirk or told Maud about my secret marriage to Peter Keeley but here in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve I’m glad to tell this Irish boy.

“Do you have children?” he asks.

“We don’t.”

“Is it Christmas yet?” John Feeney asks.

“It is,” I say.

“War shouldn’t be allowed at Christmas,” he says.

“Pope Benedict tried to get the governments to agree to a Christmas truce. He said ‘At least the guns should fall silent on the night the angels sing.’”

“Angels,” he says, and leans closer to me. “I saw a band of angels on the battlefield.” He takes my hand. “Not with wings and halos. These angels were my pals, six fellows from my own unit. We all got hit with a blast of artillery after our damn fool lieutenant ordered us forward into no-man’s-land.
Amadán!
The seven of us were facedown in the mud when I saw Pat and Jimmy Mac stand up and then float right over the battlefield. The others, Dennis, Danny, and Kevin rose up too. All of them smiling at me, protecting me until the medical fellows got there. Angels. They didn’t sing but they saved my life.”

He lets go of my hand, leans back on the pillows, closes his eyes.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” he says. “The nurse at the field hospital didn’t either. Said I was shell-shocked. Hallucinating. A big word for making it up. Is that what you think?”

“I think our minds can create…”

He opens his eyes. “You’re the same as her. I was hoping you might be a Catholic.”

“Of course I’m a Catholic.”

“Then you should understand. My mam’s got a devotion to St. Bernadette. Wants me to send her water from Lourdes. As if I could take off across the country without a by-your-leave. My mam believes Bernadette had a vision of Our Lady. Why can’t you believe I saw my pals become angels?”

“Why not indeed?” I say.

“I want to go back to the front line,” he says. “Have to. The boys are waiting for me. They’ll make sure no bullets can touch me.”

“Shut your gob, Feeney!” This from the fellow in the next bed, Paul O’Toole, a big fair-haired man. No wound but a bad case of pneumonia. Delighted to be here. Showed me the note he carried in his pocket that said, “If wounded take me to the American hospital Neuilly, Paris, France.” An operator is Paul.

“If it was possible for a man to give himself pneumonia, I’d say Paul O’Toole managed it,” Dr. Gros told me. Paul coughs up a storm when ever Dr. Gros comes around.

“My father had a weak chest and his father before him,” he’ll tell the doctor, “chronic,” and wheeze away. Clear as a bell his voice is now. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph give it a rest or I’ll send you up to see the angels myself.”

“Quiet down, Paul,” I say to him.

“And a happy Christmas to you too, Nora. And why wasn’t I told about this mysterious husband of yours? An Irishman from Connemara? Did you meet him in Paris?”

Someday I’ll learn to keep my mouth shut. Someday.

“You’re dreaming, Paul,” I say. “Must be your fevered state.”

Ná habair tada.

“When are you going to take my photograph?” Paul asks.

I’d been bringing my Seneca to the ward, snapping pictures of the men and making prints for them to send home. Reassuring for their families to actually see them. I concentrate on their faces.

“Just take my good bits,” one fellow said, turning his head in profile. Shrapnel had shattered the left side of his face.

“Paul,” I say now. “I’ve given you ten prints.”

“I need more, for my Mariannes in Armentières,” he says. “A very friendly town that.”

“Go to sleep, Paul. You too, Johnny,” I say.

“You know what, Nora?” Paul says. “This boy wants to go back to the front line so they’ll say he’s crazy and send him home. Me, I want out, so they’ll decide I’m sane and dump me back into the madness. Bonkers the whole setup.”

I see Margaret walking toward me.

“It’s almost dawn. Try to get a few hours of sleep,” I say to them.

Margaret’s shaking her head as she walks through the ward. “You can’t let them pull you in like that, Nora,” she says to me. “Especially that O’Toole. He’d talk the hind leg off of a donkey.”

I laugh. “My granny used to say that,” I say.

“So did mine,” Margaret says.

Good to be with my own again, I think.

Katie McMahon and Sally Blaine take our places while Margaret and I go to the nurses’ dormitory for a few hours’ sleep.

Have to remember to be careful around Paul O’Toole. Father Kevin’s found out he’s an informer passing information about the men to the British colonel who sometimes visits the ward. All I need is for him to mention my name to Henry Wilson. Do colonels know generals?

We bring the men to one ward for Christmas Mass that afternoon. A comfort in being together and hearing Father Kevin’s lovely brogue read the Christmas Gospel.

“Peace on earth, goodwill to men,” he begins his sermon. “I’m sure no one wants peace more than you men who’d been in combat.”

Heads nod.

“I’d like to begin with a report from the Western front.”

No, Father Kevin, I think. No war news please, not today.

“It’s not me who will be speaking to you,” Father Kevin says. “Tony has something to tell you.”

Tony Hulman, an ambulance driver, only seventeen, stands next to Father Kevin. Margaret and I have made a bit of a pet of this boy from Indiana. “Terre Haute,” he told me. “‘Terry Hut’ we say, but they pronounce it different over here.”

I’d said I’d heard of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods. He told me he’d often visited the college and the motherhouse, which were just a few miles from town.

“The Sisters of Providence,” he’d said.

I know about the place because the same order of nuns taught Mame and Rose at St. Agnes in Brighton Park. Mame’s favorite, Sister Bernice, had been in the side pew at Mame’s wedding.

A good lad Tony, but shy. Not the type to give a Christmas sermon. But Father Kevin gestures him forward. “Tell them, Tony,” Father Kevin says. Tony clears his throat a few times and then says, “I was on the line near Flanders. I’d heard there were some Americans in one of the French Foreign Legion units nearby and went to see them. There was a guy from Chicago with them called Phil Rader. They even had a colored cook from Alabama. Pretty miserable they were. Water slushing around in the bottom of the trenches. Days of rain. Not much real fighting though. But the Germans were only fifty yards away and each side would shoot at the other the odd time. God help you if you stuck your head too far up. Then yesterday morning it got very cold. The mud in no-man’s-land froze. Phil Rader was afraid some bonehead general would order them to charge the German trenches.”

He stops, looks at the men.

“Didn’t mean to insult your generals, but…”

“We know them, lad,” Paul O’Toole says. “Bonehead’s a compliment.”

“Go on, Tony,” Father Kevin says.

“Anyway, I decided to stay with them for the night. I had a bottle of brandy and…” He stops again.

“That’s all right, Tony, go on,” Father Kevin says.

“Anyway,” Tony says. “The moon came up early. And then snow started falling, covering no-man’s-land, filling in the shell holes and piling up on the barbed wires. One of the fellows yelled that there were lights in the German trenches. Flares? What were they up to, we wondered. Phil had binoculars. ‘Jesus’ he said. ‘Those are Christmas trees.’

“Sure enough the Germans had set up three pine trees on top of their trenches and were decorating them with candles, right out in the open. Perfect targets and one of the fellows raised his rifle. ‘Merry Christmas, you Hun bastard,’ he said. But Phil pushed the gun down. Yelled to the sergeant, who said, ‘Hold your fire, men.’ Loads of Germans came out, stood on top of the trenches singing ‘Silent Night’ in German. Well, our boys answered with ‘The First Noël’ in French, of course. Then Phil started singing ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ in Latin. Which the Providence nuns had taught me. ‘Adeste Fideles,’ we sang. The Germans joined in and we were all singing together. Then a few Germans started walking toward us so our fellows climbed out of the trench. Now the French government had sent these Christmas tins to every soldier. One of the boys near me gave his tin to a German. I was right in the middle of the bunch and saw some Germans get the tins their government had sent and swap them with the French. All of us standing around, talking and the snow falling through the moonlight. Some French soldiers pulled buttons off their uniforms and exchanged them for German buttons. The Negro cook took out a mouth organ and played ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot.’ Both sides seemed to know the tune and they hummed along. Then he played ‘Watch on the Rhine.’ The Germans really bellowed that out, but then afterwards we all started singing ‘La Marseillaise.’ Quite a singsong. One of their officers came out. Shouted that he wanted to meet with one of our officers. Well, the officers decided there would be no more fighting for the next few days. One of the Germans shouted out in English, ‘Any Americans there?’ Phil said, ‘Over here.’ Turns out this guy was born in Milwaukee. Moved back to Berlin when he was a kid. Got drafted. ‘This is crazy,’ he said. ‘This war is not our fault. We’re all of us husbands and fathers, sons and brothers. Why are we killing each other?’ I drove twelve hours straight so I could tell you what happened.”

I look around at the men. Smiling most of them.