The First of July (27 page)

He headed toward the river bank, looked carefully upstream and downstream, then walked to a spot a hundred meters south where the waters divided briefly to pass on either side of the small island he’d spotted from the window. The island where Vignon, poor Vignon, had spent a few stolen hours sinking into Madame de Potiers’s welcoming white flesh. Jean-Baptiste remembered returning to the island to see the flattened greenery after the couple had left; it was an impressively large area and showed the passion of the doctor’s lovemaking. He had been excited and angry and ashamed at the thought of the power that had crushed the long blades of grass.

Now the island would provide a place of rest, dividing his swim into two parts. He sat on the bank, his bruised and scratched feet cooled by the water for a few moments, then he fixed his eyes on the island and slipped into the water. He was nearly home.

Marina, New York,
July 1, 1916, 9
a.m.

M
ARINA SYDENHAM SETS OUT FROM
home just to buy flowers. She has had a restless night and woken with a slight headache and a stiff neck, but it is a beautiful day: the first of July, the doorman of her apartment reminds her. She thinks of Harry, his day coming to an end on another continent, just as hers begins. It is just nine o’clock and another fine, hot morning, and she stops momentarily at the shock of it, absorbing the early warmth and enjoying the sight of Central Park, where the trees have yet to take on the darker shades of high summer. Here she is at the start of a summer’s day and there, more than three thousand miles away, Harry’s day moves toward mid-afternoon. He is, she thinks, not so very far away in hours.

It is unusually quiet; so many have left the city for the beach in fear of the poliomyelitis epidemic. She had promised her father that she would go away, but she knew that Harry’s letters would come first to New York and she didn’t want to worry him with the city’s hysterical response to the epidemic. He could not run away, so she would not. So many restaurants and theaters are shut, invitations are few, and she has found that she likes a less social city: prefers it when most of her friends intrude only by letter. She thinks Harry would love it too. She is painting a lot. Not now of imagined wilderness, but of scenes around her: places she learned to see properly through the eyes of a stranger in love with the city.

Ornamental lakes have been drained: some say, loudly, that water is the danger in the epidemic. But she often walks to Battery Park, mostly because it is where Harry first took her and where they had stood looking out across the Hudson, to Ellis Island.

“In different circumstances it could have been me. Herded toward the sheds and the baths and the doctors,” Harry had said. “Petitioning or easing in. Rich or poor, English, Irish, Italian, German: we’re all immigrants to a country vast enough to absorb us.”

Despite war and epidemics, she feels happy today. She thinks she will buy a bunch of delphiniums as blue as the sky, and she turns left toward the small flower stand. She knows that the flower-seller is too poor to close up or to leave the city, despite poor trade; and anyway probably the safest place the woman can be is away from the disease-ridden tenements and out in the fresh air.

She walks slowly because of the heat and because the whole day is hers. The early newsstands no longer show headlines and grimy pictures of faraway battles, but of rows of polio-stricken children in high-sided hospital cots right here in New York. But she has, anyway, long since stopped reading of every advance and setback in France. The stories are mostly distorted: exaggerated for pathos, or lightened so as not to lower morale among those with European connections on either side. Beautiful, ancient Europe. It was hard to imagine it: the little countries, civilized countries, that had centuries of literature and music and ideas, and, yes, cruelty and violence and poverty in their history too, as Harry insists on reminding her, now all tearing each other apart. Their sons gone, their unimaginably old monuments and churches pounded to rubble. She never wants to return, even if it becomes possible, to see those places brought so low.

She shivers slightly as she moves into the heavy shade of the trees as she rounds the corner. She is chilly despite the heat of the day. It occurs to her that in some ways she is better off than her friends. In time, she thinks, America will be sucked into this European war. It’s inevitable, or so she hears from friends whose husbands are close to the President’s circle. It will not take much. One more
Lusitania
. One more secret channel exposing German hostility to American interests. A few months. A year. So married girls and mothers with handsome sons were anxious now, seeing their men differently: not as absolutely theirs but, already, on a different path. The men themselves behaving in subtly changing ways, excited, apprehensive. It was almost like suspecting your husband had a lover, her friend Nancy had said. Wondering if he’d be with you next summer, wondering what he was thinking about.

They might petition highly placed friends, but their menfolk would be plucked from them eventually, just as they had been last winter in Britain. Conscription. American women live with that fear. Whereas her Harry has chosen to go, and the two of them have been through it all, and yet here they still are: her a married woman, waiting, and him her husband and a soldier. It is an old, old story, and it is behind her, the sick anticipation and the leaving and the first selfish loneliness.

Harry’s letters, sketches, his roughly drawn caricatures, his anecdotes and regrets, his dark moments often followed swiftly by an apology and reassurances, are all she needs. Sometimes she thinks that she and Harry have become closer, now that they communicate through letters, than they had been when their every day had been spent together and either they had been too wrapped up in each other, or unable to talk of war and fear and weakness because it all seemed too fragile. She is stronger, more independent now. Around her the city turns, but she thinks of Harry and the unfinished letter on her desk. She feels, very suddenly, an overwhelming pride in her husband and, equally suddenly, she understands. He had not chosen a cause he didn’t believe in over a marriage that he didn’t quite believe in either. She had known instantly, on that first visit to Abbotsgate, that he had once loved his stepmother, which was why he’d arrived in New York and in her life. She had come to realize only much later that he no longer felt as once he had.

She is glad her husband is fighting, that he believed he should because other men he’d known a long time ago were fighting for the country where he had grown up. A small lump rises in her throat and tightness radiates across her shoulder blades. Harry, she thinks. I do love you so frighteningly much.

The sweet smell of the blossoms reaches her before she turns the corner to where the old Italian lady stands behind her flowers like a woodland creature hiding in exotic shrubbery. Marina decides that she will press one perfect bloom and send it to Harry to explain all the thoughts of her summer day.

Harry, France,
July 1, 1916, Early Evening

M
Y BROTHER,
H
ARRY IS STILL
thinking. He tries to retrieve that earlier summer’s day, when his father died, war began, and he first saw Teddy standing in the hall, in mourning, yet looking at him curiously. Teddy was always just my brother, he thinks. But he cannot hold on to any thought for long.

He had looked up at blue skies a few hours earlier, astonished by the birds, faltering in their song but still there. Now he lies back, his face to the sun, his eyes closed. He imagines it is any other July day in his thirty-four years when he might have thrown himself carelessly to the ground. A picnic. The end of a hard set of tennis. Being lifted off his father’s shoulders. He tries to ignore the fact that his legs no longer respond to his will. Just for a short time he is out of this foxhole of seven men, one minus his head and one with his intestines leaking out of him and with it the stink of feces. He tries to remember grass and laughter and lemonade, and just for a second he has them.

He struggles to make sense of what has happened since he led a much larger number of men into action. They got through the wire, but the Germans were more than ready for them. It is only the fact that the surviving soldiers seem as numb as he feels that allows him time to try to work out where they are now and to decide what to do next. He knows they will have to wait until dark to move back. He is gripped with thirst; but when he feels for a water bottle, he finds it missing. Corporal Jones appears beside him, his face bright and shining red with blood. He sits with his back against the raw earth, with one great sigh but without saying a word, and hands Harry his own. As Harry drinks, his uninjured leg keeps trembling and he tries to still it with his hand.

The ragged edges of this small world seemed blurred and insubstantial like the shimmer of any hot day. Time, too, seems to be playing tricks. He closes his eyes against the sun that is hurting them and wakes to find that it has almost disappeared from his view and he is now lying in shadow, the lower rays just skimming the broken chalk at the crater’s lip. He is shivering with cold and nausea. He thinks of his men—boys, many of them, scarcely more than half his age—who had also believed what he told them. Then he reaches for Marina, but pain and shock make memories too hard to assemble.

Eventually he feels strong enough to crawl to the edge of the crater, dragging his useless, disobedient limb. He looks for a spot that provides cover, pulls out his binoculars, and scans the disturbed ground around him as quickly as he can. The day is ending. Within a foot or two of the crater is Pickard, staring at him like a gorgon, eyes and mouth open, flies at his lips, hair corkscrewing outward. He forces himself to shift his gaze away. Turns his head slightly, although every movement grates, to see over the corpse. Beyond him is a landscape of sleeping figures, some graceful, some ugly. His vision is hazy. He screws his eyes up and releases them a few times, then moves the binoculars as fast as possible from side to side. He can’t risk holding a position for more than a few seconds in case some lucky German sniper gets his head in their sights. But something catches his eye, and he turns again to identify the movement. It is a first-aider, virtually on his stomach, the red cross visible on his sleeve, dragging a pack as he crawls from one man to another, apparently feeling for signs of life and not finding any. A couple of puffs of chalk rise to either side of him, but he crawls on, unhit.

“Bloody lunatic,” says Jones, who has appeared next to him.

Harry sees Jones put two fingers in his mouth and whistle. The first-aider goes flat, then raises his head and eventually changes his direction. They duck down. Waiting. There is nothing except distant machine-gun fire, much more sporadic now. Perhaps all sides are finally glutted. Eventually Harry thinks he can hear a dragging noise: it might be hope, or it could be something worse; his revolver is in his hand. A few more small explosions of earth along the crater edge and the crack of rifle shots. Then the man is over the rim and rolling in to join them, his bag coming to lie a foot or so away from his body.

But then he moves, blows his lips out and says “Champion.” And Harry almost laughs, except that it hurts. The man lies winded for a few seconds but then sits up and retrieves his first-aid kit, brushing it down carefully.

“I am the first-aider. How many alive and injured?” He scans the crater.

“Four,” says Harry. “Hutton”—he points to Private Hutton, who lies with his head in his brother’s lap, legs straight, feet pointing outward, bleeding from nose and mouth; then to young Pierce, who is not one of them, who has a name only because Jones looked at his identification disc and who, in truth, he is not sure about.

“Lieutenant Pierce. Jones here. He’s in bad shape. And my leg’s been hit.”

“It’s nothing,” says Jones, touching the long cut down his head and neck. “Cuts on the head; everyone knows they’re buggers.”

The first-aider stoops to get to Private Hutton, shakes his head. Hutton’s brother continues to stroke his brother’s hair. Harry can’t remember which brother is which. Is it Albert or Stanley who’s dead?

“What’s your name?” Harry says to the newcomer.

“Higgs, sir. Gordon Higgs. I’m a searcher. I am a first-aider,” he says, unnecessarily. “I search and bring aid. That is my job. Wherever God takes me, which is always unexpected. For instance, I saw a man today who had been attacked by his own bicycle.”

Jones exchanges a glance with Harry, a glance that says: that explains it, the man is actually mad. They are stuck in a crater with dead men, parts of dead men, injured men, and now a madman.

Higgs moves, shakes his head too at Lieutenant Pierce, who ends the day as he began it, eyes open, gazing upward.

Harry lies back as Higgs touches his leg, preparing himself for pain, but Higgs’s hands are strangely gentle, almost anesthetic as they pass over his immobile limb. He simply says “Right, we’ll keep this boot on, sir. Boots make good splints. I’ve run out of morphine, I’m afraid.”

“I’ve got a mint, sir,” says Jones and brings out a crushed paper bag of grubby sweets. “We stay put and wait for stretcher-bearers, I reckon,” he says, wincing as Higgs probes his scalp for more than the flesh wound Jones admits to.

Despite Jones’s protestations, Harry pulls himself up to the ridge on the edge of the crater. It is dusk, becoming safer; the explosions are dying away. What takes his eye is the little church steeple across the fields. Was that their objective? Was that where they were supposed to be? Just there?

Jones is pulling, hard, on the hem of his tunic, like a bored child. “Too long, sir. Too long. Get down.”

Six hundred meters away, Gefreiter Werner Franck, armed with a Mauser Gower 98, fitted with an optical sight, has been waiting for the officer’s head to reappear. He nearly had him last time. He waits and he waits. He is tired and thirsty, and soon it will be dark and too late. He traces the words on his belt buckle with his fingers—he does that every time, for luck.
Gott Mit Uns.

The first star comes out like a sign, because then the British officer’s head rises up right in the middle of his field of vision. Franck curses when just as he fires the officer jerks his head and his binoculars to one side, so the clean head shot doesn’t find its target, but the man falls back silently.

The bullet hits the binoculars. Harry feels the blow ricochet down his hand, followed by the shock of finding himself down and fluid filling his throat, choking him. He puts up a hand and there’s a terrible lack of contour in his jaw, everything wet and sharp. Between him and the greenish sky, dark heads now loom like gargoyles, and black specks—birds? missiles?—whirl around above them.

“Fuck,” says a stranger.

“Dressing pack—get a bloody pack.” It’s Jones, sounding more Welsh than ever in his panic. “Oh, bloody hell, his face.”

“Keep calm,” another voice shouts, unsteadily. A hand is exploring his neck and chin. “His jaw’s smashed.”

Harry’s mouth is full of blood and fragments. “Turn him on his side,” he hears a voice say. “Keep the pressure on. Keep the pressure
on
!”

Am I fainting?, he wonders; am I dying? He wants to scream as they rotate him onto his broken leg. He can hear gargling and coughing, right there. His ears are ringing, the dark lines spread inward, and he’s bitterly cold. His legs and arms are dancing, he thinks.

“Sir.”

The movements make him feel sick. He heaves, vomits. Can’t clear his throat of blood and debris. Jones seems to be pressing down on him, preventing him from breathing. His legs are shuddering, something has trapped his arm, and he has, in the end, only a brief moment of panic before the roaring darkness, while Gordon Higgs tries to maneuver a dressing pack on the devastation of Harry’s lower face, muttering “I am a first-aider, I bring aid. I am a first-aider. God is with me.”

Harry is not thinking, in the approved style, of Marina, or Abbotsgate, of Teddy or his father, nor even of his regiment, his country, or of an all-encompassing regret; those are the fancies of dying men with time on their hands.

The animals in the winter zoo are restless; they squeal and gibber in this secret place; clouds of frost obscure the trees.