The First of July (17 page)

To his far left Jean-Baptiste saw a small group of Germans, stationary, with some equipment. With a roar that he could hear, even over the exchanges of fire, a great spout of flame belched out and he watched it search for a target, suddenly remembering Lucien Laporte busy burning ants. The flame engulfed two Frenchmen, but he was too far away to see if the writhing, blackening soldiers had been his comrades.

And then, finally, it happened: he heard nothing, saw nothing, but he was on the ground too, a little shocked, not with a sharp pain but as if a great gust of wind had hurled him down. His ears were ringing and he felt that he was gasping like a landed fish. There was only a very little room for each breath. He tried not to panic, to take tiny sips of air. Either the sky or his eyesight was blurred, and he had a fancy that he was looking down on himself and that he had been blown right into the earth, planted into the mud. He blinked several times; his crotch was warm and his shoulder hurt but he reached down, gingerly, with tentative fingertips toward the fiery center of what he now was and found naked skin and the thick wetness he feared, and his fingers went into a sodden space that was horribly unfamiliar, then he looked to his side and there, next to him, was Doré, looking at him through slitted eyes, his mouth in a small “O” but no more exhalation of fish, and death had swept both of them to him in one loving embrace.

Frank, France,
March 1916

O
NE THING YOU LEARN ABOUT
war is that, like most sports, it is more or less seasonal. Summer is the time for the big events. Winter is the slow season, mostly spent fighting the weather, and everyone gets back in training in spring. But this March was bitter. The French were dying in all kinds of hell to the southeast, but we Empire boys were, in a manner of speaking, waiting. It was exercises by day when we weren’t digging, patrols by night. Fritz must have heard us crunching through the puddles of ice, but he obviously couldn’t be bothered to come out of his cozy nook and shoot us. You could smell his sausages cooking.

They said that much of the war around the Ancre and the Somme was about mining under the enemy and blowing him up. And Fritz doing the same to us. Sometimes they ran into each other, scuttling around down there in the dark.
Überraschung!
Which is German for surprise.

But at its center, it was all about messages. The sappers had their underground army and its wires, set to create hell (a message of a sort, and just as likely to get an answer sooner or later), and we had ours, an army of signalers and messengers, passing info to and fro.

After a while, you’d notice that the moles were pale like city men who worked in shops, and the messengers were weathered like farm boys. But if you passed messages, you knew stuff and knew it first. Some liked to keep their expressions like stone: “You won’t read any military secrets in
my
face.” Others liked to give just a bit away. Others liked to give a lot away as they hurtled past, gabbing, on Army business.

The order of signaling usefulness went like this:

1. Linesmen. They mostly ran, squatted, or crawled through the mud, rolling their drums before them, and they were top of the heap because they
   were
   modern warfare and had to know how to fasten the wires up to field telephones at each end.
   
2. Signalers had lanterns and had to know Morse and liked to practice it with each other for a laugh: “Your girl’s off with a sailor” and “I’ve pissed in Spook’s water bottle.” Very funny they thought they were.
   
3. The flag men stood on a hill and waved their flags. But the signals were read one way by our boys: “Range too short,” and another by Fritz: “Shoot me now.”
   
4. The rocket men suffered because Fritz and us had the same rockets—so when a flare went up it, could be ours, could be theirs. Could mean anything.
   
5. The runners were the backup boys—when everything else had failed. Like being a cyclist, it sounded easier than it was—and like with us cyclists, it was the terrain that b
   *****
   d them up: there was no running through trenches and wire.
   
6. Dogs. They just upset people. They were impatiently enthusiastic, but nobody liked to see ours hurt and nobody wanted to shoot Fritz’s. One corporal was killed trying to put an injured dog out of its misery. For a while, we had one dog of Fritz’s we’d captured—well, he changed sides basically. Big chap; he’d lost his message, useless dog, though he had his service number on his collar. He came from Westphalia, but he was anybody’s for a bit of corned beef and a stroke. We called him Kaiser Bill.
   
7. Pigeons. Sometimes they flew, sometimes they hid, especially if the weather was bad. Sometimes they were turned into stew. If pigeons weren’t clearly on our side, I thought, who could blame them, given their treatment back home?
   
8. Us cyclists. Not many of us went to France, and who knows what they were thinking of who sent us. A few were switched to stretcher-bearing, but I thought of the others I’d known in training, still guarding the eastern defenses of England on long flat roads that roared like the sea as the tires covered the miles, the only enemy the wind.
   

Here? In the mud? Cyclists? Pointless. So I’m putting us last, after the pigeons even.

Back in Debenhams, Mr. Richmond liked to feed pigeons and see them cluster at his window, just as he was taking his tea. He’d crumble up Madeira cake and chat to them, claimed they knew their own names. “Look at their colors,” he’d say; “who could ever say the London pigeon is gray?”

Meanwhile, Bert, the store handyman, hated them, said they spread filth and germs and were destroying the façade of his building. “Blinking vermin,” he’d shout out the window, which would have startled the ladies if he wasn’t five floors up at the time.

Mind you, he was cut of Isaac’s political cloth and probably thought the customers were vermin too. Working men were his gods, and in his den in the basement he would show anyone who came by the plans he’d bought for making bombs. He couldn’t actually make them, because the instructions were in German. Was he out here too somewhere, I wondered, finally blowing something up? I know for a fact Bert put poison out for the pigeons. He disguised it in crumbs. So the pigeons wouldn’t know whether their next meal would fatten them up or kill them dead.

But sometimes I thought it was odd that cyclists and lantern-men and poor old flag-wavers were all reckoned equal now with a bird you could put in a pie. And sometimes I thought they were dead right. Every day out in France was like a pigeon’s dinner: would it be Madeira cake or arsenic?

It snowed so hard that they canceled formations and the officers laid on a picture show and concert in the evening. Hundreds of us turned up, maybe just for the warmth. There was wine and women in town if you had a mind to it, but it was a freezing-cold walk back home. After the evening, we were in good spirits. Some lads were taking bets on the next day’s rugby match: 1st Middlesex vs. the Liverpool lads.

“I want to bet they can’t even find the field,” I said. But they wouldn’t take it.

The Middlesexes won 42-0. Thought we would never hear the last of it.

We still had on our winter sheepskins at night and scarves or balaclavas knitted by sweethearts or Red Cross ladies. Sweethearts tended to knit in a single color, very neat, sometimes with initials worked in. Red Cross scarves were like something biblical: scarves of many colors, made of oddments. So, plain says someone loves you, stripes says someone likes the idea of you. But after an hour cutting trenches or latrines, you’d be down to shirt and suspenders, loved or not.

Horrible work. I had lumbago from the start.

I wondered about Isaac. How would he manage? But I smiled to remember how in training he’d shown me a great dark fur hat that had belonged to his granddad, back in Russia, and that he now planned to take to the war. Great flaps you could tie under the chin and a furry peak to catch the snow. He put it on once and looked like a theatre bear; and then he took it off fast, feeling faint from heat and the weight of it. But now, Isaac should be smiling.

“Excellent,” says Sergeant Oughtibridge, stamping on the ground with his boot that morning. “Like a racetrack. Off you go.” More like a skating rink, I thought.

“Good show,” says Captain Bolitho when I got there; “you’ll be of some use for once.”

Cheeky blighter—but I liked him. He was a cheery sort on top and serious underneath. He didn’t just give orders, the lads said, but often explained what they were doing, like they could learn something. Some liked that, some didn’t. When he saw me, he’d always say “Ah, here comes Hermes.” I don’t know why he called me that. Some of the other lads thought he’d called me Hermann, and I never heard the last of it.

The captain even spoke German and was quite happy to tell us he’d been in Vienna and Berlin before the war and what fine cities they were, in a way that didn’t make anyone think he was soft on the enemy. One day a while back, I’d taken a message up to him where the sappers were digging wells. Suddenly some corporal tells us to shush and get down. We could hear singing—German singing. A fine voice and a marching tune. And then a whole troop marched by, above us but only yards away, singing cheerfully as they went off to kill our boys. We’d ducked down but they only had to look to their right to see us, yet Bolitho had a little smile on his face the whole time, and his head was moving like he was enjoying it.

“What’s he singing?” says one lad as a second voice joined in, and the others gave him nasty looks for speaking too loud, though they’d passed well down the track by then.

“It’s a traditional song about the Rhine,” says the captain very quietly. Then he adds, “That’s a river in Germany.”

“Shall we take them out, sir?” whispers the corporal.

The captain shook his head. When the German and his pals had sung themselves off back to their lair, he said it was because it would simply alert Fritz to our position, which was far closer than we’d been told, but I think he liked the voice.

When things were quieter I asked “What was that German song, sir?” Most officers would have told me to bug off with my stupid questions. But he told me, and he wrote it down in German and English and I tucked it in my pack.
“Fest steht und treu die Wacht, die Wacht am Rhein.”
“That means: one thing is certain and true—the watch on the Rhine,” he said. Which seemed like something an Englishman might sing about the Thames.

L’Abbaye de Royaumont, April 1916

Je donnerais Versailles,

Paris et Saint-Denis,

Le royaune de mon père,

Celni de ma mère aussi… .

O
NE SOLDIER SINGING DOESN’T DISGUISE
the fact that it is another bloody morning in the Abbaye de Royaumont. The ascetic shades of medieval monks have fled before the Scottish ladies who have turned the abbey into a military hospital. The stern lady doctors, the prim and pretty lady nurses, the orderlies, cooks, drivers, managers of supplies, cleaners. All females. All from Scotland. The patients, most of whom are French, think this is part of their delirium. They wake from what they thought or hoped was death to find themselves in an ancient holy place with women toiling over their vulnerable and altered bodies. Some cross themselves. Some weep.

Auprès de ma blonde,

Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon… .

Fucking hell. By the Holy Virgin and all the saints. Fuckfuckfuck my fucking leg.

Fix bayonets.

Of your mercy… .

Maman. Mama. Aide-moi.

I’ll show you murdering bastards.

My friend. Where is my friend?

Tu est un petit poisson …

sous un petit bateau… .

The smell. The smell. The bellies of dead fish are around like stepping stones, and the eels are fat with meat.

“Don’t worry, Jean, when the river returns to its proper place, it will have left a gift of black earth and we shall have the fattest onions you’ve ever seen.
Tarte à l’oignons.
”

Oignons, rognons.

Comme ça comme ça.

Don’t worry, little Jean.

For some, silence.

“He’s mute,” the lady doctor said to Vignon. “Fusilier. Casualty from Verdun. Came to us in February. Flesh wounds to the legs, shrapnel to the chest. Right-side pneumothorax. Bladder tear, one kidney ruptured. Has done surprisingly well, given how ill he was when he arrived. But mute. We thought at first he simply couldn’t understand us, but most of us speak passable French and the other invalids manage.”

Her accent was, Captain Vignon thought, truly extraordinary.

“He’s not deaf,” the lady doctor said. “Indeed, he’s very easily startled, but he certainly can’t—or won’t, poor man—speak. Not a word.”

She pushed her wire glasses up her nose. A thin strip of dressing gauze knotted their two arms around the back of her head. On the right woman it might, just, have looked attractive, bohemian. She was not the right woman.

She was perhaps only forty, but her chin was downy; her thick sandy hair, streaked with gray, was lifeless, her body under its stained white coat shapeless. As a doctor Vignon could imagine it, but as a man he preferred not to try. These women who took on men’s jobs must throw away their chances of ever knowing a man’s loving vigor, he thought, although it was impossible to feel sorry for them: there was a kind of magnificence in their masculine inflexibility.

“Will he return to his regiment?” Vignon asked as they moved on to see three other cases, but in his heart was a sliver of fear.

“The fusilier? Perhaps. I don’t know. He shouldn’t. I doubt he’d survive another injury. But he probably will. You medical officers come and check the casualties, always convinced that as women we have soft female hearts and might hold on to them once they’re relatively fit.” She shrugged. “As if we had room for even half-fit men. And one case of typhoid can destroy all our work.”

“But he’s mute, you said?” and was ashamed at his need to confirm it. “Are you treating him?”

“We don’t have mind doctors here,” she said.

He wondered whether her feminine heart heard the pain and madness echoing around her any more. All military hospitals smelled and sounded the same, but here the cries ricocheted off arches and vaults that had once amplified the voices of monks praising God. If God was still listening, Vignon hoped he shared the capacity to suffer that he’d bestowed so freely on his children.

Captain Vignon, Surgeon-Militaire, had volunteered to come to the hospital at Royaumont to consider cases for transfer so felt himself implicated in the brutality with which sick men were returned to service. No doubt she intended it to be so.

He looked across at the iron bed. He had not been sure at first; the face had changed, but as the boy opened his eyes there was no doubt. Vignon’s heart beat a little faster.

Vignon had been curious to see this hospital run entirely by women. It seemed entirely unnatural; but despite himself, he had to admit that they had made a good showing in this ancient and unsuitable building. Some patients were being nursed in the cloisters, most of them oblivious to the fresh summer air. Unlike the lady doctor, some of the nurses, he observed, were not unaware of a handsome French officer in uniform. Nor were their crumpled and straining aprons unappealing, and he had always liked to see a curl escaping from a woman’s pinned hair. Were they Scotswomen too? He had never met a person from Scotland before, and he feared for their menfolk.

“I’ll leave you with our administrator to look at the patients,” she said. “Do you speak English? Miss McAdam’s French is not yet fully honed.”

He was shaking his head. “Small,” he said in her own language. “A very small English.”

“Ah well,” she said and for some reason looked amused; “where there’s a will.”

What did she mean? It meant nothing. Where was there a will?

His gaze was shifting back to the bed a few yards away, set in the shade of a stone arch, when she turned round again, hands thrust in her pockets.

“You don’t speak German, do you?”

He was already saying that he regretted that he did not, when she said, “We have this young soldier, no more than fifteen or sixteen, we’ve no idea of his name. We get them from time to time—prisoners. Occasionally one of the ladies can speak German, and I suspect one or two of your soldiers do, but of course they hate the Germans so can’t be trusted, although we had a French surgeon visit, much traveled, and he was quite proficient. But currently—not a soul speaks more than an
Auf wiedersehen.
Which hardly seems appropriate here.”

She turned away again and with some relief he watched her start to walk away.

“A shame,” she said, half turning. “He’s dying. The German boy. Very agitated for a while, but quiet now. He’s had the priest—unfortunately Father Clément is a very patriotic Catholic, and for all we know the child’s a Lutheran—but—” She made a small face of regret. “It would have been nice for him to have heard someone speak in his own language.”

“I could try,” he said, after a few seconds, and felt deep unease.

The administrator took him to the German boy. He was in a tiny side room, on his own but under no kind of guard, but then he wasn’t going anywhere except to the angels. His head was bandaged, and his pallor and grayish lips gave him the look of a corpse, so much so that, not seeing any movement of his chest, Vignon reached out and felt for a pulse in his neck. The boy’s eyelashes were long and black and his eyes sunk in deep purple bruises. As he felt the thready pulse under his fingers still just keeping the boy in the world of the living, his sticky lips moved. Vignon reached over to a bowl of water, took a square of lint that lay beside it, and dripped a little moisture on to them. He thought the boy might be trying to speak, and he said
“Wie heisst du?”

The lips kept moving, but the response might well have been the last spasms of a failing system. There was a stool by the bed. Vignon sat down on it and took the boy’s hand in his; it was very soft and young, hairless, almost a woman’s hand. He looked behind him, but the doorway was empty. He could hear pigeons on the cloister roof. He rotated his shoulders in an attempt to ease his aching neck, but kept his eyes on the boy all the time.

“Vater unser im Himmel,”
he began.
“Geheiligt werde dein Name, Dein Reich komme. Dein Wille geschehe… .”

He was whispering, the words taking him back to his own childhood, kneeling next to his mother.

The boy, the child, whose hand he held appeared to hear nothing, gazing at Vignon. How could one believe in a God any longer?

“Ihre Mutter soll sein …”
he said.
“Ihre Mutti …”
Then as he started to form the word
stolz
, proud, he felt anger rising: his mother would be proud? No. His mother would be heartbroken. With her child dead—his mother would be finished.

And then he leaned forward, his fingers and thumb slowly massaging the boy’s knuckles, as he sang, very low,
“Schlaf, mein Kindlein, schlaf… .”

And the next time he felt for the pulse, it and the boy had left him.

Just for a minute he sank his head into his hands, abominably weary, abominably old. But he had work to do. He pushed himself up, using the metal bed as a support, and turned as he heard a noise. To his dismay, a nurse stood in the doorway. He thought she had tears in her eyes.

“I came to take over,” she said hesitantly.

“Death has taken over, mademoiselle.”

“Oh,” she said, her glance moving to the dead boy. “I’ll tell Sister.” Her voice was uneven and she looked genuinely sad. “He was ever so young. Even if he was the enemy.”

He bowed slightly as he left the room, but as he passed her she said “Where did you learn German so well?” And then as he felt a quickening sense of alarm she added, like an eager schoolgirl, “I know some words, but I can’t put them together.”

He was formulating an answer when she said, quite simply, “It was beautiful.”

He returned to the ward, taking half a dozen files with their skimpy notes. Although he was unable to translate some of the words, the diagrams of injuries and procedures were as clear in English as they were in French. He selected the injured soldiers who would be loaded onto the French hospital barge to transfer them to Abbeville. One further patient clearly had consumption and Vignon added him to the list, but for transfer to the sanatorium in Paris. As he signed the administrator’s forms, she smiled at him for the first time.

“That was a great kindness, with our German boy,” she said. “I’d quite misunderstood; I gather you have excellent German. Nurse Campbell said you were a great comfort.”

He refrained from saying that the shattered soldier had been far beyond comfort.

Then he went back to the cloisters. He thought of the German mother who didn’t know yet that she had no son. He wanted a long look at the French soldier. He stood at the foot of the bed and, this time, without an onlooker to scrutinize his reactions.

“Jean-Baptiste,” he said and, unlike the dying German, the soldier’s eyes flicked open immediately, although he looked blankly at the man standing nearby. Vignon moved to one side, so that he was more than just a silhouette against the light.

Jean-Baptiste’s rudimentary beard made him look older than his years and had been the cause of the doctor’s initial confusion.

“It is I, Vignon,” he said. “Captain Vignon.” Then, with a sense that he was hiding behind his rank and their changed circumstances, he went on, “
Doctor
Vignon. We used to go on the river in
Sans Souci
. My little boat.” He paused, waiting for a reaction. He had almost said “I was a friend of your mother,” but clearly that was territory best avoided.

Jean-Baptiste was staring at him. Was that recognition he saw in his eyes, or simply bewilderment?

“At Corbie. We used to have happy afternoons on the river.”

Jean-Baptiste turned his head away in what seemed like a deliberate snub.

“Have it your own way,” said Vignon. “I want to help you.” But the young man just closed his eyes tightly.

Vignon walked off, signaled an orderly with less than his usual peremptoriness. It was, he thought, very peculiar to have women where he was used to seeing men.

“This man,” he pointed to Jean-Baptiste. “I shall take him with me. We can speed up his treatment, and then he can join his brothers back in his regiment.”

He could have sworn the woman looked at him with contempt. Her carriage was entirely ladylike, her green eyes, on a level with his, claiming them as equals.

“He’s not strong,” she said, her accent perfect.

“Nevertheless… .”

She shrugged in a way that any Frenchwoman would have been proud of.

As he waited for the men to be loaded, Vignon’s pulse was beating hard. His head ached. The nurse who had interrupted him with the German boy went by, carrying carbolic and bandages.

“Auf wiedersehen,”
she mouthed at him with what he assumed was meant to be a conspiratorial smile.

The pulmonary case was being taken in a separate vehicle; one of the remaining men was well-nigh unconscious or drugged. A very pretty nurse, if a little freckled for Vignon’s taste, was leaning over an alert young soldier with fine moustaches and a well-healed scar from scalp to chin, holding his hand. He whispered something and she blushed. A chasseur was muttering to himself, but one patient grasped at Vignon’s hand as his stretcher was steadied, ready to be positioned.

“Doctor! Sir! Thank you. Thank you. Long live France!”

Clearly the soldier had misunderstood the purpose of Vignon’s visit. Two weeks was the desired turnaround. Two weeks, and the man would be back with his section.