From the back of a truck, Louis readjusted the scarf Therèse had knitted him and reread the last letter he’d received from Marius. His brother Fernand has been killed in a gas attack. Jean was missing, believed captured. Louis knew he should feel something, but he’d been here too long. The only way he could cope with the shells and the rats and the mud, and the swollen bodies used to reinforce the trench walls, was simply to not feel. He read on.
Therèse, Marius had written, was well, but very thin. She appeared to be a tower of strength, and would be the first in the fields each day. She would sow and harvest and get the ground ready for the next crop, pulling the plough with the help of the boys, because all their horses had been commandeered by the army. But Marius was worried. Twice a week Therèse would make the trip into Ampère, to sit in a darkened theatre and watch the newsreels over and over again, in the hope of catching a glimpse of Louis. And when she came back, she would often lock herself in her bedroom until the next morning, refusing to see or talk to anyone.
Louis looked out at the desolation, at the road choked with traffic. The noise was deafening – the grinding, raucous sound of engines straining, the men in the trucks singing or fighting, staff cars rushing to the front. On either side of the road, fences of loosely woven burlap, originally put there to camouflage the road from German observation posts, but now in tatters. The remains flapped in the wind like captured ghosts watched over by an army of burnt out stumps that had once been a forest. The air smelt of petrol and decay and smoke. Occasionally he would see ammunition stacked at the side of the road – some marked with green and yellow crosses to indicate they contained gas, others only empty brass shell casings waiting to be returned to the rear, to be reused again and again.
And everywhere by the side of the road, in the mud and ice, refugees fleeing the bombed out villages. Old men, women, children, carrying their belongings in sacs, or piled high on baby carriages. An old woman carried her cat in a birdcage, the animal peering out with panicked eyes, its tail hanging out between two bars, twitching.
The truck turned a bend in the road. Over the horizon the sky smouldered. There was Verdun.
They passed a castle partially in ruins – now a hospital – and the smell of ether and iodoform mingled with that of petrol. At a junction in the road ambulance drivers were resting and smoking. One of the soldiers in the truck leaned out and shouted Hey, you there. You’re not getting me today, and the ambulance driver answered That’s all right, I can wait till tomorrow. The men in the truck laughed and the trucks veered off towards a ruined village, now occupied by soldiers and a few old civilians who’d refused to leave their homes.
They stopped in what had once been the village square. Here the air smelt of coal tar and burning celluloid, indicating the presence of high explosives and incendiary shells. An old man in a uniform dating back to the Franco-Prussian War, a row of medals pinned to his chest, shuffled towards the trucks and snapped to a salute. Louis jumped out and saluted the old man who, satisfied, turned and slowly walked back into the ruins. He watched him for a while, and was about to join his platoon when he heard his name called. He turned. Coming towards him, covered in mud, was Imez.
Louis had not seen Imez since the beginning of the war. They had tried to enlist together, but Arabs and Berbers were not allowed to join French units. Yet these native Algerians fought for France’s freedom as if France was their own country. Louis knew; he’d seen the 45th Division – Algerians all – fight like demons alongside the French at Marne to turn back the German drive to Paris.
Huddled around a fire the two men talked. Imez had been at Verdun for just over four weeks, and was so thin the skin on his face appeared transparent.
‘It’s the waiting that sends you mad,’ he said. ‘You wait for your trench to cave in and bury you alive, and you wait for food to be brought up at night or when its foggy, knowing full well it won’t be because it’s just too dangerous. And you wait for night so that you can bury your friends in ground, except that the ground’s already so full of corpses that as you dig, your spade punctures decomposing bodies.’ He picked up a twig beside him, broke it in half and threw it into the fire. ‘But you know what the worst waiting of all is?’
Louis shook his head and Imez stared into the flames for a moment before continuing.
‘The worst waiting is waiting for revulsion to set in, then realising that it won’t, because nothing seems macabre anymore. That, and waiting for the screaming to stop…’
Well into the night they talked, about the war and the food and the mud – mud so deep, and the ground so pock-marked, Imez explained, that it took sixteen of them to carry one wounded to the aid station, so great was the exertion. And though they talked almost till dawn, neither mentioned home – to do so would have been too hard to bear.
#
Louis listened to the whistling of the shell and crunched his whole body into a tight ball. Four seconds. That’s how long it took for a mortar shell to reach him and explode. He knew. He’d been counting the seconds for some months now.
The ground shook like jelly, rocks hammered his back and his mouth filled with mud. Blood rushed to his head and he felt as if he would vomit. He peered over the edge of the shell hole in which he’d sheltered. Saw a human torch running towards him, screaming. The soldier fell into the hole and the slimy water at the bottom extinguishing the flames but still the soldier screamed and Louis wished him dead. The shelling intensified. Louis slid down the hole again and the soldier beside him screamed louder and grabbed his arm. Louis reached for his gun, his bayonet, anything to stop the soldier’s screams, but the soldier spoke in the voice of a small boy and told his mother about the tadpoles he had caught that day, and would they really turn into frogs, and Louis wrenched his arm from the soldier’s grip and struggled out of the hole.
Around him the ground was engorged with blood and wounded men lay amongst the bodies of dead abandoned animals. The soldier in the shell hole called to his mother once more then was silent. Louis pulled against the mud, that living thing that was as much the enemy as the Boches, sucking men down, suffocating them.
The terrible roar of shells flashing deafened the stutter of machinegun fire. Men fell but the gaps in the lines were soon filled with more men, surging ever forward, fighting with grenades, bayonets, hand to hand. Louis’ actions were mechanised – hellish reflexes aroused by the nightmare of noise, the smell of blood, the need to survive. The ground beneath him liquefied.
He fell through the air backwards. Everything was silent though he could still see the men around him, smell the smoke and the fires, see the shells exploding. His body hit the ground and a searing blade of pain scorched through him as the men around him melted into the smoke and the air darkened in the shadow of the Keres’ wings.
#
Through a morphine haze he saw her eyes – large, dark, beautiful. A wisp of black hair escaped the white veil around her hair.
‘Therèse? Therèse, I didn’t want to—’
‘Shhh! Don’t talk.’
‘No, Therèse, I have to tell you—’
‘I’m not Therèse. My name is Sister Renouard. You’re in hospital. Now hush.’
He felt the prick of the hypodermic. The room faded. He heard the rolling thunder of the guns. Imez’s face hovered above him. The stretcher dropped in the mud and he heard Imez swear. His teeth chattered. He was cold – so cold. Therèse was running towards him, her white muslin dress floating above the lush spring grass. She smiled, spread her arms wide and spun in the sunshine. Maggots crawled from the belly of the burnt soldier at her feet. The soldier looked at his belly and laughed, and handed Louis a jar of tadpoles. Louis fixed his bayonet and plunged it in Therèse’s breast. She pulled it out and continued to feed little Theódore. A plane swooped, machine gun spewing fire and Theódore pulled from his mother’s breast to watch it, gurgling with pleasure. Imez poured Mercurochrome over Louis, and the liquid burst into flames as it hit his flesh and he scr
eamed. Therèse laughed.
#
He could hear a bird chirp – such an improbable sound. He opened his eyes. In the bed next to him, a man with an arm missing was reading a newspaper. He noticed Louis.
‘Salut,’ he said, then called to the end of the ward. ‘Hey, Mam’zelle, he’s awake.’
A young woman in the uniform of a nurse approached Louis’ bed. She smiled and straightened the pillows surrounding him, cocooning him in a semi-reclined position.
‘Now don’t move, or we’ll have to start the morphine again,’ she said. She took a glass of water from the locker beside his bed and put the straw to his lip. ‘Just small sips, now.’
Louis sipped and the water tasted sweet and fresh. He sipped some more but the nurse pulled the glass away.
‘Not too much at first or you’ll be sick,’ she explained. ‘I’ll go get a basin and give you a wash. It’ll make you feel better.’
He watched her go and closed his eyes. He felt so incredibly tired, so weak. He could feel the warmth around him, hear the sounds of quiet activity. The air smelt clean, antiseptic, with just a hint of lavender. The bird chirped again. He’d forgotten how sweet a bird’s chirp sounded. He tried to draw a deep appreciative breath but a sharp pain gripped his chest and he realised it was bandaged. He was too tired even to react.
A warm cloth wipe his face and he made an effort to open his eyes. The nurse smiled at him and went on with her work.
‘How bad am I?’ he whispered.
‘Oh, not as bad as some. They pulled a piece of shrapnel out of one of your ribs, and it’s cracked, but you’re lucky it didn’t go into your lungs. But you kept fighting everyone, so we had to keep you quiet with morphine or you’d have done yourself more damage.’ She rinsed the facecloth in a basin of steaming water by his bed and wrung it tightly. ‘Your leg’s injured as well, but we’re keeping an eye on that.’
‘What’s wrong with my leg?’ he said, noticing the cradle over it for the first time, and at the end, some sort of windlass. He glanced at empty pyjama sleeve of the man in the next bed.
The nurse smoothed the already smooth blankets of his bed and tucked them in around him. ‘You had piece of shell in it. Broke the bone. We’ve put a splint on it, but we’ve got to keep the wound open for now, so it’ll take a bit longer to heal, that’s all. But it’ll come good. Try and sleep – best healer, sleep.’ She picked up the basin and face cloth, smiled once more and moved on to her next patient.
‘Pretty, isn’t she?’ the man in the next bed said. ‘She was the first thing I saw when they brought me here. I thought I’d gone to heaven and she was one of the angels. The name’s Joseph, by the way.’
Louis smiled weakly. ‘Louis. How long have I been here?’
‘Few days. They weren’t sure you were going to make it at first, but you did okay once they drugged you up. How’re you feeling now?’
‘Tired.’
‘Well, that’s to be expected. When I first came here I was sure…’
But Louis had already fallen asleep.
#
When they stopped the morphine Louis thought he would die. Cold one minute and hot the next, his nose ran and his stomach cramped, and he couldn’t control the twitching of his legs. He vomited constantly, but worst of all was the constant liquid diarrhoea over which he had no control – never had he felt so ashamed as when the nurses changed him. Days blended into nights and separated again, until one morning he found he could eat a little and keep that down. His stomach no longer cramped and the diarrhoea stopped, but still Louis’ leg wouldn’t heal and he was sure they would amputate. The doctor reassured him but Louis had seen men who’d lost one or both legs, and he would watch the face of nurses who debrided his leg each day, looking for a change of expression, a sign that his leg too had become gangrenous.
One day a nurse brought him a cup of coffee and a letter from Therèse. He leaned back against his pillows and unfolded the sheets of paper – fields left fallow from lack of men … influenza epidemic … our four youngest, our beautiful babies, struck down. Marius also … Gilbert and Antoine, staying with Bernadette, escaped infection … Francois and Marius recovered but very weak … little Theódore and Etienne, and their baby brother Pierre, were buried beside each other by the chestnut trees … Louis’ hand shook. He knew he should react, cry, but it was as if all his tears had been sucked out of his body to form the mud of Verdun. His hand shook harder and drops of coffee split over the edge of the cup onto his hand, gathered down to his wrist where they clung for an instant, then dropped onto the letter, smearing the ink into the tears he was unable to shed.
#
Imez received four day’s furlough and came to see him, and Louis was shocked to hear his friend was still at the Front. Imez had lost his eldest son and little daughter in the influenza epidemic, and this time the two men were able to talk about that.
One day, they brought in a man and his dog. That a man had taken his dog to war caused a stir in the ward, but when Louis heard the whole story, he could only marvel. The man was from Algeria, and had had no intention of taking his dog with him to the front, but when the ship took his master from him, the dog had jumped into the sea and swum to follow him. They’d hauled the dog on board, and he’d followed his master to the trenches. When a German shell buried the man in mud the dog had dug him out, then run for help, so that now no one could possibly think of separating the two companions. The dog lived in the hospital kitchen, and the nurses took him for a walk each day, bringing him to his master for a visit every afternoon.
At night, when the lights were out and the only sounds that could be heard were the moans of men fighting demons, and the coughing fits of gas victims, Louis thought of Imez pulling him through the icy mud, saving his life, even though many said an Algerian would rather stab a Frenchman in the back than help him. And he remembered Merzoug teaching a young boy to read the land. And because he no longer believed in prayer, he wished instead, and what he wished most was that this war really be la der des ders – the last of the last.
Then one day the doctors decided he was strong enough to be moved to a hospital in Paris. There, they explained, he would need an operation on his leg. They explained that they believed he had a cul-de-sac wound, common in those times when a piece of shell or shrapnel would take with it a minute piece of filth-soaked uniform, which would become dislodged during the arduous trip to the aid station, or the bumping of ambulances on shell-holed roads. While they’d removed the piece of shell, they now suspected there may be a tiny piece of cloth wedged in the broken bone, which prevented his leg from healing. It had formed a track of pus around the bone, putting pressure on the break. To save his leg, they’d have to re-break the bone and removed a section of it, and the Paris hospital was better equipped to do this.
#
When Louis came out of the anaesthetic he felt for his leg. It was still there. The wound had been drained and cleaned, and would heal, but the bone was now shorter – he would walk with a limp. But that didn’t bother him, for he felt reborn. That night, for the first time in many months, he slept without dreaming.
He took interest in the goings on of the ward, and read the newspapers, becoming more and more appalled with the propaganda written there. When he read in the Petit Journal that some of the ‘accommodation at Verdun was fairly comfortable’, and included central heating and electricity, he threw down the paper in disgust and cursed all journalists. He waited for the day they would remove the splint and he could get up and walk again.
When that morning finally arrived, it turned into an unimpressive event. He put his good leg to the floor, and with the help of a cane rose from the edge of the bed. Took a step forward. The room spun. Darkened. He fainted.
He tried again that afternoon, and everyday walked a little further. He had a pronounced limp, and couldn’t manage without a cane, but at least he still had both his legs. More worrying to him was the constant shortness of breath brought on by the s
lightest exertion, but the doctors weren’t worried – after all, he’d been lying in bed for months so it was to be expected, and would improve in time. Meanwhile, his soldiering days were over – after two years of fighting, he was finally going home.
#
On the 11th of November of the next year Therèse gave birth to a long awaited daughter, and Louis fluctuated between elation and despair. At last a girl had been born to the family, a child that to Louis personified all that was good and pure and innocent, but the world was still at war. Men were still crawling through blood-soaked mud and finding security beneath the decomposing corpses of their brothers, and that Louis could not forget. He would gently touch his finger to the little clenched fist of this daughter they had named Odette, and when she grasped his finger in return, he would promise her that he would always protect her.
As the months passed, he spoiled her more and more, unashamedly. He was still too weak to do more than the simplest jobs around the farm, and so would often look after Odette while Therèse, Marius and the boys went out at dawn to return, exhausted, at sunset.
Marius understood that Odette’s innocence was a balm to Louis’ demons, and so in his eyes the child was a blessing. Therèse fluctuated between worrying that Louis was spoiling the child too much, and being thankful Odette was helping Louis forget the war. Gilbert, Antoine and Francois, now young boys of twelve, nine and eight respectively, saw their new sister as a doll to be played with at the end of long back-breaking days. Odette would smile and gurgle any time one of her brothers entered the room, so that each believed himself to be her very favourite.
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