The First of July (16 page)

Over the last weeks, the engineers had been building roads, wells, and railways, and soldiers of every regiment were, with bad grace, extending the trenches that might save their lives. The battalion drilled and went out on the hated patrols. It was hard to maintain discipline in these protracted periods of waiting. Men drank themselves into unconsciousness, went absent without leave, appeared daily before the M.O. with trivial complaints; they squabbled, fretted, stole, or became inert. To keep them battle-ready, whatever that meant (but it certainly didn’t mean fighting each other), companies were moved to the rear to practice storming German trenches. All this they did with enthusiasm, at least at first. They were undaunted, knowing that no one was actually going to shoot them. There were football matches, a concert. There were pep talks from visiting High Command; these, at least, seemed to bring amusement. But little could be done to hide the fact that machinery and soldiers were pouring into the area hourly and that the end of the waiting was going to demand everything these men could give.

Benedict felt it was his duty to spend all his time with them but, in truth, without Theo, Harmony Cottage had become a lonely place. Nevertheless, when his own leave came—just four days—he chose to return to Harmony Cottage, hoping that Theo was back.

The Theo who had returned was not the same Theo.

After surgery, Theo had gone home to rehabilitate, then taken leave, seen his father, was vague about his meeting with Agnes. He said nothing at all about Gloucester. He spoke of spending time in London with Novello, going to nightclubs and meeting his famous friends. Novello, he reported excitedly, had also joined up as a pilot.

If it had sometimes been hard to get through to the real Theo, now there was something more frenetic about him. The hand was misshapen, although more or less functional, but it was obvious that it caused him pain. Benedict tried not to look it.

Theo had a medicine case he’d brought with him when they joined up, at the recommendation of a cousin who was a regular. It was a beautiful thing—dark polished wood with a moiré silk lining. Each amber glass bottle stood in its allotted place, and powders were stored in a drawer. They had laughed at the names on the labels, speculating on what the various drugs were for: Mist Pot Cit; Mist Asp; Quinine; Cocaine; Chlor. Squills; Ammonia; Charcoal; Tincture of Benzoin. “For piles from sitting in a staff car for hours at a time,” Theo had suggested.

The only two Benedict could remember them using were iodine and syrup of figs. Now the powder wrappers were scattered about Theo’s bed and the silver hypodermic was missing. They had once laughed at tablets called “Forced March,” which, the label promised, “Prolong the Force of Endurance,” but it was hard to miss the empty bottles in the fireplace. Every time Benedict came back to the billet, Theo was drinking or restlessly asleep. He was flying longer hours than ever. His face was drawn with pain. Another of the RFC lads had told him Theo was only back on flying probation, but he never spoke of it himself.

Then in June he came in to find Theo shirtless and washing. Benedict saw for the first time that Theo’s right arm was withered and scarred way above the wrist.

“What are you staring at?” Theo looked at him as he might a stranger. “A freak show? All these weeks of you averting your fastidious eyes. Or are you some kind of nancy boy? Do you want to kiss it better?” He waved the damaged arm at him.

“I’m sorry.” He looked away, hurt and ashamed. He could smell the drink on Theo’s breath.

“You can be top boy in Gloucester now.”

“I don’t want—”

“You don’t want to fight a war. That’s it. You want to play hymns for old ladies until you smell of mice and mildew.”

He didn’t, couldn’t answer. Then he started, stupidly, he knew, to defend himself, say something about beauty and having something to believe you’d go back to.

“Just a game, Ben. It was all just another merry, merry jape.” Theo smiled, baring his teeth.

“What’s the matter?” It sounded plaintive—whining.

Theo threw his metal shaving bowl across the room, his razor still held in his better hand.

“What’s the matter?? For fuck’s sake, are you blind, or is it all one great tinkling rainbow for you?”

Suddenly Theo punched the strip of mirror. It shattered. A thin streak of blood ran down his stump and then he seemed to ignite. He spun around, lashed out: a sick devil sweeping things off the old range, smashing the already handleless jug, tearing the faded picture of the Virgin, which had been their lucky mascot since they first saw it hanging there. There was so little to destroy, yet he destroyed it.

“That was you, Ben. Not me. You wanted me to live the life
you
longed for—pretty colored tunes in a pretty church with a pretty house next door—well, now I’m free. Of it all.”

He leered at Benedict. Then he staggered away, reached under his bed, and pulled out a bundle of papers.

“Look! Agnes’s letters.”

He untied them, held them out, read a few anodyne sentences in a lisping falsetto voice, and then, and with pathetic difficulty, ripped them apart. There was gleeful savagery in his face, even as he winced with pain at each violent movement of his arm.

“And O, what do we have here? The cantata, the precious cantata.
Raise Me, Raise Me to the Stars.
You want it?” He tore the first sheet across, screwed it up, hurled it to the floor. “Why don’t you wipe your backside with it?”

Benedict reached out, tried to take the pages from him. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t, Theo.”

Theo wrenched them away. “Naughty Theo, don’t,” he repeated, mimicking, but then said “Fine, have it.”

Theo scattered more single sheets, attempted to rip a thick wad of them, then suddenly had Benedict against the wall and was trying to force the paper into his mouth. He was still strong.

“Consume it,” he said. “Become me.” Then he had dropped the music and was pushing at Benedict’s lips with his mutilated hand and one sheet of foolscap. “Take. Eat. This. Is. My. Body. Shed. For. Thee. Isn’t that what you’d like? What you’ve wanted? My body? That’s what Novello says.”

Benedict turned his head away, choking, as Theo tried to force his teeth apart. Then, as suddenly as he’d begun, Theo reeled back and sank to the bed, weeping hoarsely.

“Fuck off,” he said. “Find another billet. I’m sick of you. Stop looking at me with your great doggy, understanding eyes.”

Benedict snatched up his immediate possessions, which were few enough; and, as he dipped his head to go through the low door, he heard Theo shout: “You were always so completely second-rate.”

Jean-Baptiste, France, February 1916

J
EAN-BAPTISTE HAD COME TO EXPECT
death. Probably the next day. Early on, he’d thought death would take other soldiers who’d been there longer. Since then, he’d learned that death was no respecter of natural justice, but was in fact a great practical joker of the nastiest sort, like Lucien Laporte at school. A bullet in the forehead: that was fair. Being blown into a hundred glistening bits of meat: that was fair, though not so good for your comrades. Being bayoneted was fair; gas was vicious but war. But dying from a septic foot or drowning in a puddle or being kicked by a mule: where was the glory in that? You didn’t have to travel across France and sleep in a trash pile—death could have found you at home for that.

Everybody knew death was out there, and it seemed the higher-ups were currently making preparations to entice him in. They were flaunting themselves. There had been a visit by little General Joffre and even the president.

Usually, officers were little seen from day to day and, when they emerged from their billets, were men of few words and no conversation, except with each other, somehow both focused and indifferent. The ones who wanted to save their own skins, just as their men did, only more elegantly, were as dangerous as the ones who were all “They shall not pass.” Their own platoon commander, Aspirant Collinette, was scarcely more than a boy, a cadet. Some claimed to have seen him surreptitiously reading a book on how to fight wars.

The men around Jean-Baptiste put what remained of their trust in Sergeant Folz, a blocky, grizzled man who had fought the fuzzy-wuzzies and run two through at once on one of their own spears. He was a brute but a survivor, and his prestige came from bringing his men through. Captain Joubert, who was the section commander, wore wire-rimmed spectacles and reminded Jean-Baptiste of the schoolmaster back in Corbie. He was glad that, unlike the two previous captains, Joubert didn’t have a saber. An officer with a nineteenth-century saber seemed to betray a worrying level of misunderstanding. Rather than telling them what the hell was happening or reciting the virtues of the Republic that had sent them to be slaughtered, Joubert trotted out little mottoes when he briefed them. Yesterday’s was “Never overestimate your enemy.”

Some men said the Germans were using the time to dig a wide tunnel right under the French positions at Verdun and attack them from the rear. For a while Jean-Baptiste found it hard to sleep in the burrow he’d cut into the trench side, thinking of Germans moving noiselessly below and behind him. Some said the British were coming to reinforce them. “Ah, perfidious Albion,” said the captain when Folz asked him if it was true.

On February 11, they were ordered to prepare for battle. For months, Jean-Baptiste had kept a small piece of paper and a stub of pencil. Not for the first time, he looked at it for an hour, intending to write to his mother, but, finding there was too much to say, decided it was easier to say nothing. Most of the men around him were veterans; most had been wounded and patched up in earlier battles. In their last hours of being under shelter, three older men played piquet, with sous changing hands back and forth accompanied by grunts and occasional snarls. Another was making a ring for his girl out of a fuse cap. He even had a proper vise in his pack. He’d chucked out his cooking pan to lighten the weight. But most, like Jean-Baptiste, were silenced by the cold, the boredom, and the suffocating blanket of fear.

Two German deserters had turned up a couple of days earlier. They were Alsatians and narrowly escaped being killed as they approached, their hands up, shouting “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Friends! Don’t shoot!” They looked frightened. “Brothers,” cried one. Which was a mistake. They insisted they had been forced to be Germans and wear German uniforms but, like all good men of Alsace, were French at heart. They both spoke good French, so Sergeant Folz had punched the one who’d called them brothers and broken his nose as some sort of compromise of justice.

“French, my arse,” he’d said.

The other man had blathered that they’d only come to warn them that the Germans were about to launch their push and had a thousand guns trained on this sector. He clearly didn’t want to be around, on either side, to see it and seemed relieved when the two of them were sent back to the rear for interrogation.

“They’ll shoot them after,” said Folz.

Jean-Baptiste imagined that tomorrow’s death would be hot: fire or explosive, searing metal or the burst of warm blood. But instead, sometime in the night when he must, finally, have been sleeping, the snow came out of nowhere and with it came life. He woke up because he was even colder and wetter than usual. Thick flakes were falling, blown by gusts into strange shapes. Crests of ice formed on greatcoats like raised white seams, and every so often a soldier in an animal pelt shook himself like a dog. Even with their heads bowed down, snow fell on their cold cheeks and, melting, ran down inside the back of their collars.

Guinard came back from sentry duty and reported the disappearance of earth and sky as well as Germans. Nothing could be seen a meter from the trenches. The mood changed as it became obvious that there was going to be no attack in the next few hours.

Slowly men found their voices, stirred, shook off the small drifts on their uniforms. Joubert was nowhere in sight, but Aspirant Collinette was standing forlornly by Sergeant Folz, looking out into the whiteness. The slender officer cadet had his eyes screwed up and kept wiping his binoculars with his sleeve as the snow fell. Folz stood, legs apart, impervious to the conditions. In his shaggy sheepskin he looked half man, half beast. Jean-Baptiste imagined that any flakes that had the temerity to fall on Folz simply fizzled away. Somebody passed around some brandy. A few meters away, a soldier laughed. This tiny sliver of hope, the likelihood that it wasn’t today that was marked for their death, had reanimated these living corpses. He thought that they were like starving beggars being thrown a single crust and felt something like embarrassment: suddenly they were revealing to each other how much they all really wanted to live.

Death, though, had always played a long game. Death could outwait any living creature; while their brief euphoria subsided under the weight of cold and ignorance, death, quite at home in snow, stayed close at hand, waiting for them to starve if they wouldn’t fight.

Blizzards, fog, squalls, and gales attacked both sides for days. First one, then four, then twenty men got the runs; the latrines were running over, and only the cold saved the men from being made sick by the stink. The soldier in the hole next to him crawled out at all hours and sat outside, bent over, groaning and occasionally belching, his greatcoat open to reveal his filthy uniform, his fists thrust into his stomach. After a while, he’d stumble off and then, in another while, return to his place, holding his belly as if he’d been bayoneted and was trying to keep his innards from spilling out, his sparse wet whiskers creating black slashes in his white face.

It was odd that they had so much in their bowels to evacuate because, having stayed put longer than anyone expected, they had almost run out of food. Jean-Baptiste’s own stomach was griping—but with emptiness, not emptying. He was giddy and his head was full of strange images, half-dreams. Those men who weren’t ill drank to ease their hunger and their terrible hope.

For a week, the snow and the freezing fog camouflaged each side from the other, and still death waited. Perhaps he was hopping from one foot to the other, crossing his arms back and forth across his chest to keep warm, Jean-Baptiste thought. Or perhaps death wrapped the snow around himself, like the furs that comforted the ladies of the Faubourg St. Honoré; perhaps, like them, he gave a false little shiver and shrugged as he settled into luxury; perhaps he too wrinkled his nose rather sweetly with the contented warmth of being more fortunate than anyone else around. Death was not a bully, Jean-Baptiste thought. Not a cat-torturing, girl-pinching lout like Laporte, now Corporal Laporte, number one bully to the 165th. No, death was a smooth, clever performer, waiting, spying, like Dr. Vignon. Luring you into friendship. After the third night of standing to and after he’d had three glasses of
pinard
, Jean-Baptiste could imagine Vignon-Death whispering “Let’s get out of this, let’s go for one of our afternoon trips on the river. It’s not far away. You could walk home. Sleep in a proper bed. Don’t worry, I’ve got the very thing to keep the cold away.”

Just when they were all wondering if perhaps the weather had set in for real and they might not have to die until May, a priest arrived and gave them all absolution. Aspirant Collinette had his eyes closed, his lips moving in prayer all the way through and crossing himself as if God might look kindly on sheer quantity of genuflection.

“Always bad luck, a holy man,” Doré said, and belched. He was close enough for Jean-Baptiste to smell fish on his breath.

In the afternoon, perhaps for lack of anything to do, their guns had opened up from behind them, letting the Germans know they were ready. As night fell, Jean-Baptiste had not had so much
pinard
that he didn’t notice it was colder than ever but frighteningly clear; puddles froze and the moon shone on the motionless earthworks, transforming the naked beech and oak trees; the residual snow and the encroaching mud had a black-and-white beauty. There was a silence in their lines, and because of it the rumble of distant German trains could be heard, moving to their depot deep in the Spincourt Forest, undoubtedly loaded with ammunition. As he was dropping off to sleep, his tight grave of a hole spinning when he shut his eyes and acid rising from his stomach, Jean-Baptiste could even hear Germans singing, a lot closer than the trains.

The next day, Jean-Baptiste woke with a sick headache; and when what passed for daylight came, they could—as he had feared—see. It was still freezing at first, but the fog had gone, the wind had settled, and the sun came out. There was a bit of a ruckus as Giseaux had disappeared in the night. Aspirant Collinette didn’t seem bothered; he was nervous as hell, anyone could see that, and his guts were still playing up. He couldn’t even get to the officers’
cabinet
but had to use the men’s stinking latrine.

Sergeant Folz said “Giseaux’s dead if I find him. I’ll crucify him with my own hands.” He made a strangling motion. Then he crossed himself, at which a massive explosion shook the ground and debris fell on them. Another, nearer, followed. Explosion succeeded explosion and the trees came apart with a terrible cracking and crashing. The ground trembled, and the hole that had been a bed for Jean-Baptiste caved in. Other men were still in their burrows when they and their holes disappeared after the big guns—210-millimeter shells, Doré said, field mortars—started landing horribly accurate fire along the wood.

“Under cover, men,” said Collinette, almost politely.

“Move, you numbskulls!” Folz bellowed.

As they were running, bent double, to defend their broken defenses, they passed one of their own guns, torn camouflage fluttering from it, and a handful of artillery men fanned out around it almost in a circle, deader than dead.

A runner passed in a panic, delivering his message to anyone who’d listen: the sector to their left had taken a direct hit and they couldn’t count on support. Jean-Baptiste stumbled on. After the next close shell, Jean-Baptiste thought he was deaf; but then he could hear shrieks, quite plainly and not far away.

So death had been waiting even closer than Jean-Baptiste had imagined. The alarm was sounded: a tiny bugle, as a spotter saw large numbers of Germans moving toward their damaged positions. A second soldier, badly injured, came tumbling into their bay, warning them some Germans had entered the trench system and infiltrated their defenses.

“Fix bayonets,” Folz shouted and Jean-Baptiste fumbled, suddenly short of room. Despite the cold, his hands were slippery. Finally the bayonet slipped into place. He allowed himself to think of his mother as he crouched, certain that the discomfort of it all would soon be over. He chose to see her pulling up leeks by the canal with black earth speckling her apron and the clogs she still wore for tending her vegetables. She stood to see him and smiled, her eyes crinkling as she tried to make him out against the sun, and she mopped her face with her apron corner.

“Go! Go! Go!” Folz was shouting, waving them out to the left. He could see tiny gray figures moving in small groups toward them, rifles raised, and there was Aspirant Collinette, lying on his back, his head at the edge of the defile, broken twigs lying on him, his arms by his side as if he’d been laid out.

The trench here had been blown open. He ran, crouched low, directly behind another stooped figure. The ground was still residually frozen and uneven; he nearly fell into a fresh crater, but dodged to the side just in time. Simenon, level with him, had a grenade out and was pulling the pin. He wanted to tell him to watch out for the hole, but the noise made him mute; Simenon went head-first into the crater and blew up.

Jean-Baptiste jumped over a blue-uniformed back: somebody from the reserves who’d gotten ahold of the new uniform. Wasted. As he looked down, something massive hit him—blew all the breath out of his body. This was death, he thought. But it was the great weight of Sergeant Folz, thrown backward. They both lay on the ground, but Jean-Baptiste scrambled free, still fighting to breathe. Folz’s whole leg was gone. Jean-Baptiste thought for a minute that it was folded under him but no, it was visible a meter away. Or, at least, someone’s leg was.

Folz opened a remaining eye. “What are you staring at, you numbskull? Keep moving or you’ll be fucking killed.”

So he moved into the thin metallic thread of noise and the fatter, ground-shaking explosions, the surprised “oofs” of the falling, and sounds like seagulls and of pigs being slaughtered, and he could see some shapes ahead of him but were they French or Germans and the ground became more bodies than mud, and under his boots things cried out. Then there was a German, within touching distance; where the hell had he come from? Both of them paused but Jean-Baptiste’s bayonet got the soldier in one of Folz’s approved spots—into the neck. It sank in—not at all like into a sandbag—and ground against something solid. The man, old enough to be his father, gurgled and a hand came up and Jean-Baptiste pulled, then was frantic when the blade wouldn’t come away. “Lunge, forward, in, out,” Folz had shouted. “Easy! Clean!” The German soldier tried to grasp the blade and twisted on it, blood was everywhere, but then at last he fell back and off the bayonet.