Jerome was kind to me from the outset. Our conversations late into the night and our walks in the orchard showed that we shared many of the same thoughts. He had fought also, in the Franco-Prussian War, and I found myself opening up to him. He was a good listener and, what I was soon to learn, a kinder man than most. Because he understood, I could describe to him some of the horrors I’d seen, and he would rarely comment but tilt his head in my direction. It wasn’t the polite nod of someone humoring me but someone who felt my pain and knew that death and soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder on the battlefield. That it was simply luck that sent you off on a stretcher, whether you walked yourself, whether you remained behind in the mud, or whether you became just a memory for the people who loved you.
Jerome cared for me, but the fact that he understood my position, even knew my thoughts at times, was the reason he felt torn about me pursuing Helene. He was protective of her, concerned that she could be hurt, either forced to endure the personal changes I might go through as a result of my experiences or scarred by my death as the relationship’s possible conclusion.
Mariette was talkative and fun, and I enjoyed her company. She broke any awkward silences with her “discoveries,” as I called them. Every day she had something new to tell us, about someone in the town, another story, information about another secret love affair that only she seemed to have access to. And I loved the way she would mimic people, hobble or dance or limp or stoop. She was entertaining, and clearly Helene was proud of her. Mariette thought she was more worldly than she was, something that frustrated Helene, though not enough to drive distance between them. More that Helene wanted to protect her from doing something impulsive or foolish. Mariette had captivated many men in my unit. Wild, beautiful, quick-witted, and what I would also come to see, incredibly loyal to those she loved.
Though I admired Mariette, it was Helene I sought to hold, who replaced my nightmares on the battlefields with dreams of her in my arms. I thought she could also be my cure. Often I would seek her out in the orchard to help her with her tasks, to feel the sunshine on my back, without the weight of a pack and rifle. It was exactly the prescription I needed for the ailment they were yet to medically name. Soldier’s Heart had been talked about and terms like “shell shock,” but the term “malingerer” had also been passed around, and I walked in its giant accusatory shadow.
Sometimes at night I would listen to the sounds of gunfire, and I would cover my ears and think of Helene. The townspeople had grown as used to the distant sounds of war as they were to the sound of bees or the rattle of wind in the trees. It was constant.
Helene avoided alone time with me at first. She did not trust herself, she admitted some time later. She did not trust a future with any man. She had watched men from an early age and learned that it was better to be out of a relationship than in one. Women get hurt, and get left to carry the fallout from any damage. I promised her I was not like other men, and I would not let her down. But I did, and I am ashamed for it. I became like the men she had known in her early childhood: a distant but ever-present void. And if I could have foreseen my weakness, I would have walked away from her without a backward glance before I broke her heart. Sweet Helene deserved the very best of people, which I was not. My mind was fragile, and one such as me cannot hold a relationship with any guarantees. Only with hindsight can I see that now.
I was shipped away to fight further battles, and my nightmares began again. Whether it was Helene who had temporarily healed me, I can’t say, but I lasted the several months suffering only hypothermia, burns from mustard gas—though not as bad as Roger—a minor tremble to my hands, and a gash in my side that required extra time off. I was counting the days until I might return to the orchard.
By the time I came back to them, my French family, my trembling was still there but not as visible. In Helene’s arms, the unexplainable crashing noises in my head lessened to some degree. I had read Helene my poems, and she had cried. She had loved me even knowing my fears, knowing that I wasn’t brave. Though our togetherness did not mask all my fears. In my dreams I saw the finiteness of our time together. I saw a broken, barren future. I saw more death.
Helene began to trust me more. We would spend whole days together. In her free time we would walk the hills behind the town and sit amongst the wild and wilting irises and talk for hours. I told her things about my family. She never said how much she wanted to meet them. Helene would never say anything so presumptuous. But I wanted to take her home, present her like a prize, and show her the very best parts of me.
And one day she fell for the words I meant. I loved her. I kissed her, and she kissed me back, and it was a whole new world that had opened up to me. I had only ever expected a civil partnership in England, another landowner’s daughter with whom I had already begun an affection. I was not one like Laurence to chase a girl; rather if it happened, then that would be the case, and for the sake of England and our name, I would endeavor to make a marriage work and a wife content.
Helene was like a warm sunrise, and she grew brighter and more colorful with each new minute I spent with her. I did not make any physical advances toward her beyond the first kiss, not at first. She was something rare and precious that I would wait an eternity for if it came to it. I recognized that she took much to heart and felt too deeply. In a little under a week, I suggested we marry and she should come with me to a town closer to my regiment once I was shipped out.
She was not so sure of course. The idea sounded grand, she said, but she could not leave Jerome. And knowing the man and what he did for these girls, I understood. So I said that after the war, I would live there. I would build a house on the land if Jerome allowed. Rudy could have Lakeland and run it indefinitely, to do with as he wished. It was impulsive, but at the time, I meant it. Perhaps being so close to death, one promises things they shouldn’t. I wasn’t the first, and that knowledge doesn’t make me feel any better. When I heard from others boasting about their French conquests all in the name of their “last rites,” I felt in some way that I was no different.
But I loved her in a way I hadn’t loved any girl before. I had given all of me to the relationship at the time. Helene came to me one evening, and we spent the night together in the little room, and she left before the light tore open the truth. And I in that night had forgotten the war temporarily, forgotten even who I was, until I received a message several days later to say that it was my time to ship out.
The separation from all of them was unbearable. I had become family to each of them in a very short time, and their home was a place where I could be myself. Jerome never once looked at me as anything but an honorable man, even when he was counseling me over my relationship with Helene, telling me to not rush into anything. And then there was Mariette and her vivid, dark eyes. The disappointment in them was obvious when she realized I was in love with Helene, but then on my return our friendship grew stronger perhaps because of it. She no longer paraded herself in front of me like a debutante but spent time as a male friend would. We laughed, and she threw a bucket of water at me one day, and I would pull her hair when she wasn’t looking. Little familiar things that told me I belonged. And we rode horses in the hours that Helene was otherwise occupied. Like a good friend, I loved her like the sister-in-law I hoped she would become.
She said that she would hate me, though, if I broke Helene’s heart, and I naively assured her that I would not.
One night Helene lay under the window. She was clear in the dark, perhaps because I had already memorized every detail of her.
“You are changed from the last time,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You are a little more distant, and you are thinner, and I can feel your heart beat rapidly. Your hands are unsteady. I think you need to speak to a doctor, perhaps spend some time at the hospital.”
“I have never felt better,” I said. I kissed her hard then, my hand reaching for her, a life raft, and a way to silence the tru
th of our situation. Our goodbye this time was long, and no longer timid: no more “I have enjoyed our time together” but an unquestioning “I love you.” Though our thoughts of separation weren’t totally without question.
“Will you promise me you’ll come back?” she asked under the night-shine through the window, and I could hear the fear in her voice, seeing something ahead perhaps that I couldn’t in that moment. It was a question I had hoped to avoid. There was no answer to it, and she knew this, too. One could not promise something decided by fate.
As I was preparing to leave the following day, Mariette hugged me tightly, frantically, which was her nature. Jerome could see the changes, too. I had spent but a total of two and a half weeks in their company, but it was like I was leaving my true family, the one in England now someone else’s past. Not that I didn’t love them; on the contrary Rudy was often on my mind; just that I was someone they might not recognize, someone who may no longer fit into their world.
As I headed off to the battlefields, it was as if I were suddenly torn from the womb, so secure I had felt in that brief time. Thrust into hellfire and the threat of death. But I was fighting then for different reasons. My battles were personal. I fought for Helene.
I felt guilty in a way that I had not written to my family in England, and I had no plans to go home. Some had returned to England for leave throughout the war, but I had chosen other places. Unintentionally cruel perhaps to Mother and Rudy, but I felt I couldn’t face them. As if the killings would be read across my face. And I was afraid of questions that I might feel compelled to answer. And answers that would reveal I was afraid. Here at Jerome’s orchard was where I found an existence that suited me. There were none of the expectations that I’d had before.
Our battles in Flanders felt like suicide as comrades vanished into dust beside me. Tanks firing relentlessly, ears numb, I ran over the sea of bodies, and I fell in the mud as shellfire hit the ground nearby to burst my eardrums.
But the most heartfelt loss was Willy, who was just a boy who reminded me of Rudy. A boy who lied about his age and then, when it all got to be too much, ran. He was considered a traitor to his country. In war perhaps. In civilian life, he was not, just a boy who wished only to return to his parents and his sisters, who had not foreseen the war as deadly but as an exotic adventure.
Wilbur was his name, and we called him Willy. He was fresh faced to start with like we all were. His smile was infectious. I could see he would have been all the time at home in trouble with his dear, frustrated mother. But he ran. That is all he will be remembered for in the years to come. When they took him away for execution, it felt as if it were my own. I think of all the things that brought me unstuck, and there were many; the one I think about, the one that comes up every time I close my eyes and ears, is the sound of him begging to go home as the soldiers led him away. I was the one to lead the others to the barn where he had fallen asleep after several days of mud and blood and smoke and noise.
I had tried to put young Wilbur out of my mind for months, but he loitered in my thoughts, ready to come again when I was at my weakest. And the thoughts and memories, the guilt and hurt, came to collect me finally at the next battle when we fell again. I was carried out of there and sent to a clearing hospital, wheeled into a hut for the ones they have no medical cause for, and then to a hospital away from the noise, the doctors said. I was in a giant bubble, unable to respond in a normal way to the world around me but intensely aware of the people near me, what they said to one another and the sounds. Noises made me cringe. Scraping noises, people calling out in pain. One night when I woke screeching, I was wheeled into a room of my own briefly.
They said they would write to my family. I begged them not to. How to explain what I was suffering from? I had scratches, bloodied knees, a bandage around my wrists, which was never explained to me, but that was all. There was nothing to show the internal damage. I looked whole, human, but my mind wasn’t so at times, and the uncontrollable shaking could not be stemmed.
I could not let Helene see me like this. Her letters found me, and I had them sent back. I dreaded that she would come to visit.
Then came Mariette, and I don’t remember the conversation, but I remember the face. She was my judge, and my sentence had been set before she left. A shunning that I deserved. I was then transferred to a place of respite while they decided what to do with me, where the shaking and the nightmares finally stopped. These weeks I have no clear memories of.
One day one of my superior officers came to speak with me. They were desperate. The war could be won with more men. They said I was needed back.
“Are you up to it?” he asked.
I paused. Of course I wasn’t up to it, but I had been trained to respond differently.
“Some of those men in the hospital have lost legs, arms, half their faces. Be grateful that you are whole.”
So I told myself I was whole, and I told myself to be grateful. Though I wasn’t whole at all.
I was sent back out in the field, and my thoughts were then of my sweet family near Bailleul.
One of my colleagues grabbed me by the arm.
“Are you sure you can do this?” On the one hand he was concerned for my safety, but on the other he was concerned for his. He needed someone capable to watch his back, and although I had never let anyone down, I might.
I ran over the top of a slippery, trodden ridge, and we fought with weapons and rage, and I thought of my Helene. I had to do this for her. I tripped on the head of one of our soldiers dead and submerged in the mud, and I stayed where I fell, believing that this was where I should die. I could not fight another day. Exhausted, I fell asleep and woke to a strange calm. Under a cloud of smoke and darkening skies, I ran and hid like the coward that I am, stealing clothes, foraging in forests like some creature wild. I was a deserter.
In the chaos of shelling, I found Jerome with my son. The words he used, I can’t remember, but I felt no connection with the child, not at that point. As if I were still crouched in potholed trenches, drenched and dreaming.
It was Jerome who woke me, who made me feel worthy, who stirred up feelings of who I was before. He passed Samuel into my arms as if to reward me. Jerome told me what had happened, and I felt the emotions as I once felt them as a whole man before: sad, thoughtful, curious, and angry.
But the look on Mariette’s face when she saw me threw me once again into self-doubt. I had caused them all pain, and I could offer no reasons for it. I did not leave to find Helene to prove my worth; rather the urge was more instinctive. Something took over, perhaps the soldier deep within me, the carer, the son who shouldered high expectations. And I would not believe she was gone until I saw her for myself. I had found the woman I would spend my life with, and I knew, selfishly, the only one who could save my soul was Helene.
When Mariette repeated what the German captain had told her, I went carefully through the streets unnoticed. I had learned to keep my head down to watch for the enemy, and as I walked up toward the hospital, one of the sisters was rushing toward me. She paused when she saw me. She recognized my face and told me it was dangerous to be here.
I asked her about the hospital, if there was anyone still there. She said that some had got out before the bombs. If Helene had survived, she would have been taken elsewhere.
“And if not?”
She bowed her head and touched my hand. “Then she is still at the hospital.” Behind her I could see the mutilated remains of the building. She then led me to a house that had been turned into a makeshift hospital, filled with the injured. Downstairs people lay bleeding and begging to be helped.
“Are you a doctor?” said someone attending to them as I entered, and I shook my head. Their hopeful expressions receded as they hurried back to their hopeless tasks.
I found Helene upstairs on a bed alone. At first I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me, because until that time I had imagined her caught beneath rubble, an image that clawed its way
back each time I had tried to erase it.
I stepped toward the bed. Her head was turned sideways, her eyes closed, and I scanned the length of her. Her nightgown was bloodied, and I was yet to learn that it was not from fallen bricks but the after bleeding from the birth of our child.
She opened her eyes and saw me, and I caved then, tears falling.
She gripped my hand, and I knelt beside her while she stroked my hair.
“I knew you would come. I dreamed this.”
I swallowed my remorse and tears that would in time unleash. We were caught between armies, and Germans walked beneath the window with guns, but we were together again and in love, and I vowed to her then that no one would draw us apart.
“I am taking you to a doctor in one of the Allied towns. Jerome and Mariette are leaving shortly.”
She nodded, eyes half-closed. She was gravely ill, though her first thought had been for me. Did she know? I wondered since. Had she been told of my illness, or had she seen it in my eyes? I picked up early that Helene could read a person and understand things better than anyone.
I lifted her up gingerly, her head against my shoulder, then briskly walked down the narrow stairs to the streets. A German soldier saw Helene in my arms and said nothing. These were strange times that I was walking freely with the enemy. The soldier perhaps was too tired to question me, too aware that defeat was the difference between here and a mile away.
Mariette’s face when she saw us was one of disbelief and then of wonder. We were all together, the four of us again—now five—and we made our way to a village, where Mariette left to find someone to help us.
In a Field of Blue Page 31
