by Julie Berry
Private James Alderidge had no secrets.
“Where’s Mason?” is all he would say. “Has anybody seen Mason?”
The officer tasked with luring him out was more humane than some. He coaxed the hiding man to hand out his identity discs, so they could find someone he knew. He complied. The discs, formerly strung about his neck, gave his name as Private J. Alderidge, Fifth Army, 7th Corps, 39th Division, D Company. With some hollering, they found another soldier who knew him: Private William Nutley.
Billy tried to talk in him into coming out. When coaxing wouldn’t work, Billy crawled in after him. He yielded up his guns to his comrade without resistance, and Billy scooped up James, all six feet of him, and carried him out of the dugout.
Clamped against Billy’s chest, James began to shake. Nighttime bombardment shot little bursts of orange light that were almost festive, like fireworks.
“It’s all right, Jim,” Billy told his comrade. “It’s all right.”
“Have you seen Mason?”
“I haven’t,” said Billy.
He almost added, “I’m sure he’s fine.” But I cautioned him against it. Lies are worse than no comfort at all. Especially to a mind already scorched by the truth.
Billy brought him to the Red Cross tent. James lay there, twitching, shivering under a thin sheet and blanket. When a nurse approached his cot, he sat up and took her by the arms and said, “Have you seen Frank Mason?”
“Sedative,” called the nurse. An orderly appeared. He plunged a steel syringe and needle into a bottle and drew up a dose of something. James felt a sharp pinch in his arm, and remembered no more.
ENTR’ACTE
APHRODITE
The Fates of Certain Letters
WHEN A LETTER arrived at YMCA Relief Hut One, addressed to Colette Fournier, sent from Aix-les-Bains, Mrs. Celestine Davies reasoned with herself. This letter could be from any American serviceman. But most likely, it came from one of the Negro soldiers in that traveling army band that had gone there to perform.
So instead of sending the letter to the address she kept on file for Miss Fournier—some female relative in Paris—she forwarded the letter, with a note of complaint, to a staff sergeant at the US Army HQ in Saint-Nazaire. Negro soldiers were behaving wantonly toward white YMCA volunteers. American army leadership needed to take responsibility for its Negro problem.
The staff sergeant, to his credit, opening the letter and, finding it contained nothing more provocative than a wordless snatch of music, rolled his eyes and tossed it into the trash.
A letter from a Private J. Alderidge, serving in the Fifth Army, north of Paris, arrived at Hut One addressed to Miss Hazel Windicott. Mrs. Davies’s patriotic heart bled for the poor young man. J. Alderidge, serving King and Country, deserved far better than to waste his affections on an object such as Hazel. She may be faintly pretty, and she may play piano in a nice sort of way (though Celestine had heard better), but she wasn’t worthy.
So Mrs. Davies returned his letter to him, care of the Fifth Army, and enclosed within it a note explaining that Miss Windicott had been dismissed in disgrace from the YMCA for entertaining men of ill repute after hours. She omitted mentioning that at least one had been a Negro, seeing no reason to wound Private Alderidge’s natural manly pride. She had left, Mrs. Davies said, no forwarding address.
One other breakdown of mail communication to note had nothing to do with Mrs. Celestine Davies.
As the sounds of shelling and dire news reports poured into Paris, Hazel sent letter after letter to James, letting him know where she could now be reached and begging him to write to let her know that he was safe. They were addressed to his attention, in care of the Fifth Army, but in their present state of chaos and retreat, and in light of events that followed, most of Hazel’s letters never reached James. Thousands of letters were mislaid at this time. When eventually the dust settled, and overlooked mail bags were distributed, there was no Private James Alderidge to give letters to.
ACT FOUR
ARES
Chocolate—March 24–April 5, 1918
WITHIN DAYS, PARIS newspapers were full of the horrible news. The British Fifth Army, stationed from Gouzeaucourt to the Oise River, had suffered a devastating defeat. Spring offensive hostilities, centered around Saint-Quentin, dubbed “Operation Michael” by the Germans, had all but annihilated the Fifth Army. The Germans had pushed the front line some sixty miles back.
Sixty miles lost! After years of virtual stalemate!
Worse than miles, tens of thousands of lives were lost on both sides, in just a few days’ fighting. The defeat was so bad, the Fifth Army was being disbanded.
Hazel, reading Paris papers with her sketchy schoolgirl French, went numb with shock. An entire army, dissolved due to failure and massive losses. Was James among them? She refused to believe it. Yet with an entire army disbanded, what else could she think?
Were the Germans actually going to win this war, after so much British bravery and sacrifice, and with the Americans lining up at the doorstep?
If any silver lining was to be found, it was this: The Allies had stopped the Germans eventually. The Jerrys had failed to take the city of Amiens, or reach the Channel ports. Britain’s vital command of the seas remained in force. That, the Allies felt, was more crucial. Paris was still as safe as it could be when the Germans had long-range guns pointed straight at it.
Costly and disheartening though it was to retreat sixty miles before the German onslaught, the land lost wasn’t of any particular strategic value to the Germans. Their storm troops and infantry pushed forward faster than supply routes could keep up. And the British line hadn’t moved everywhere. Soon the advancing Germans found themselves stranded, surrounded, and hungry.
Raiding through the supplies left behind in haste by the British, they found beef, chocolate, cigarettes, even champagne among their provisions. Fritz had been led to believe that the Allies were as poor and starving as they were. After four years of the war, here they were, enjoying the finer things of life, while Fritz’s family, back home, starved.
Whatever boost sixty captured miles might have brought to German morale was erased by the chocolate in the BEF’s packs.
War is morale. War is supply. War is chocolate.
Try as the German propaganda machine might to reassure Fritz that they were winning their glorious war, Fritz wasn’t fooled. If the British drank bubbly and ate chocolate, while the Germans drank ersatz coffee brewed from nutshells and coal tar, it was over. Nine months and four million more casualties from over, but over all the same.
HADES
Disappearing—March 22–25, 1918
THE SYRINGE APPEARED many more times in the days to come.
James would wake in searing daylight, or confusing dark, wondering where he was. Dreams crossed the threshold between sleep and waking: the blue-eyed German. The German with the flamethrower, engulfing James. No, engulfing Hazel.
Hazel. Where was she? Gone, gone. Here, standing before him, then, boom, gone.
No, that was Frank. Thank God, it wasn’t Hazel, but oh God, oh God, it was Frank.
Then, the ringing. His ears rang with a missile’s shrill, incoming whine. But it never hit, never landed. It kept coming for him. Ringing and ringing in his skull. He thrashed between sweaty sheets, but his wrists were tied to the bed. He was clad in a thin hospital gown, so thin, it would never stop the missiles. Where were his clothes?
He had to get away. He had to take cover. Anything could hit him here.
No, no. He was in a hospital. He was safe in a hospital.
Then there was an explosion. Doctors and nurses running, patients screaming.
Figures rushed to his bed, lifted it, and carried him, bed and all, to a truck. The truck rattled, and he cried out. Someone came with the silver syringe, and the pinch that burned, and his field of vision, already sh
allow and dark, blurred at the edges, and James disappeared.
HADES
Horse-Race Gambling—March–April 1918
MR. AND MRS. WINDICOTT of Grundy Street and Bygrove, Poplar, London, had thanked their stars, when the Great War broke out, that their only child would never face battle’s danger. She, a quiet girl devoted to piano, would pass through this ordeal unscathed.
Then she’d begun to act secretively, and suddenly she’d fallen in love with a soldier, dropped her piano lessons, and run off to France to volunteer at a huge base of American servicemen. The horrors that could befall her there kept Mrs. Windicott up at night.
Her letters were full of love for them, and anxiety for her poor soldier boy.
In time they began purchasing, from a bookseller, the Weekly Casualty List. (The London Times had stopped printing it with the daily paper. It had grown so long, there was no room for any other news.)
Others in Britain studied this list with hearts in more dread than the Windicotts’. But each week they pored over the list with a magnifying glass, searching for Alderidge, J. (Chelmsford). He was a name to them, but he mattered to Hazel. They came to love him for her sake.
Pick any name, and watch for it long enough, and send up a silent prayer of thanks when you don’t find it on a death list, and pretty soon, if what you feel isn’t love, what is it?
A horse-race gambler who follows with avid interest the winnings, times and injuries of Bachelor’s Button (1906 Ascot Gold Cup) or Apothecary (1915) knows what I mean. Those whose lot it was to raise the generation fed to this war were horse-race gamblers, one and all.
APOLLO
Émile—March 22–April 13, 1918
MAYBE, AUBREY FIGURED, a letter to Colette after so much silence, containing nothing more than music, was too confusing. So he wrote another. And still there was no answer.
Reaching the Front had been good for Aubrey, oddly enough. His French trainer, Émile Segal, was fun. He was a true poilu (“hairy one”), covered head to neck in thick, matted brown curls. And the faces he made! How he mimicked the Boche Germans, and the mannerisms of French officers. And the soldiers of the 369e (“Sammies,” to Émile, after Uncle Sam), who were knocked on their backs by the routine daily allotment of wine for French soldiers. Sammies couldn’t handle so much potent French wine.
Aubrey didn’t need to be tipsy for Émile to get him laughing.
That was a miracle, in its own way. Weeks went by, then months. The ache of Joey’s absence, and Aubrey’s terrible guilt, never faded. But after two months had passed, time, work, and friendship brought Aubrey to a place where it was possible to hurt, and to laugh, in the same day. He never would’ve guessed he could.
Aubrey and Émile quickly developed a language of their own, of parroted French and borrowed English phrases. They knew enough of the other’s language to be thoroughly confusing, such as when Aubrey misused the French for wind, vent, for the word for wine, vin, and told Émile he’d like some more wind after dinner, s’il vous plait. Émile obliged him with an award-winning fart. If they could’ve lit the fart, it would’ve made a Flammenwerfer.
Beans for dinner. Good times.
Émile taught Aubrey how to survive at the Front. How to tell shells apart, and explosives from gas. How to creep quietly, and discern vent sighing in the trees from a tiptoeing Boche raiding party. How to heat a tin can lid over a tiny flame and fling caught lice pinched from clothing down onto the red-hot tin till they sizzled and popped like popcorn.
In Maffrécourt, where they were billeted, Aubrey found a piano in a bombed-out tavern. It wasn’t in the best condition, but Aubrey gave Émile a show that brought others from K Company for an impromptu performance.
After that, Émile Segal trotted out his pianist comrade every chance he got, claiming all bragging rights. The way those poilus danced to the first jazz they’d ever heard made Aubrey want to shove his fist into his mouth to keep from cackling out loud. Aubrey taught them the fox-trot, lest they die and go before the pearly gates dancing like a pack of clowns with arthritis.
Until they entered the trenches in earnest on April 13, 1918, Aubrey performed every night. Émile should be a booking agent after the war, Aubrey thought. He sure knew how to draw a crowd. And Aubrey sure liked having one.
The Champagne sector was quiet, and they counted themselves lucky. They could hear the drums of war thundering along the line to the north. But here, not much was being shot besides wild boar. And the only pain in his heart, besides the loss of Joey, was the fact that day after day, no letter came from Colette.
APHRODITE
Any Work Will Do—March 29, 1918
AFTER A WEEK of roaming, silent, arm in arm, through the streets of Paris, mourning, Hazel and Colette managed to face mundane reality and find war work. Any kind. Just something.
It was hard. Everyone wanted to know what they were doing in Paris, a Belgian girl and a British girl. They must’ve been doing war work already, and what was it? How did it end? Were there letters of reference? Had there been any problems?
Colette was too mute with sorrow to talk their way into a position, and Hazel wasn’t prepared with smooth, confident, not-too-terribly-dishonest answers. Admissions boards saw right through her and declined her applications.
Finally they found an agency desperate enough to take any help they could get. It was low, menial labor, work few other volunteer enlistees would do. The sort of work that neither Hazel’s parents nor Tante Solange would approve of. But it was all they could find.
The work neither assisted victory efforts nor aided soldiers. Allied soldiers, that is.
They took employment working in kitchens, preparing and serving food with a Red Cross agency overseeing the concentration camps in France for German prisoners of war.
HADES
The Pink Room—April 12, 1918
IT WAS THE QUIET that first startled James. The quiet, and the clean.
The bedclothes were crisp and white. His light blue pajamas felt soft against his skin.
I’ve died, he thought. This is Heaven.
A hospital is Heaven?
The sunlit room was modern and spick-and-span. Its walls were pink. At his bedside stood a vase of daisies. There were no sounds of shelling. Only city traffic in the street below.
A nurse entered. She wore a gray dress, a white apron, and a short red cloak. A white armband displayed a large red cross, and a white veil held her hair off her face and neck.
“You’re awake,” she said. “Would you like some water?”
She poured him a glass, and he gulped it down. When the water hit his tongue, he realized how sandpaper-dry and foul it felt. He held out the empty glass, and she poured him more.
“What day is today?” he asked. His voice cracked. It sounded alien and young.
“It’s April twelfth,” she told him.
He shook his head. April twelfth. The battle . . . when had that been?
The battle landed on him an avalanche. No, no, no, no.
The nurse took his wrist between her cool fingertips. She smoothed hair off his forehead.
“It’s all right,” she told him. “You’re safe here. You’ll be back on your feet in no time.”
“Where am I?” he croaked.
“You’re at Maudsley Military Hospital,” she told him. “In Camberwell. South London.”
London. Back in Britain. Hazel. Pink walls reminded him of her.
The nurse gave him a plate with chicken and mashed potatoes in a cream sauce, and tinned peas rolling about the plate. After trench fare, it looked like a feast.
“Let’s come sit in this nice chair by the window, shall we?”
He let the nurse help him up.
“There we go. That’s right.” She situated a tray in his lap. “Let’s feed you up, and get your strength back. Then you can look out and see
the trees. That’ll do you good.”
The nurse left. He scraped up a dab of potato and placed it on his tongue. His mother made better food, but after bully beef, this was fit for a king. He gulped it down, then dove into the chicken, and chased the peas around with the edge of his knife. The knife barely cut the chicken at all. Then James realized. He must be in a mental ward. Can’t give sharp knives to the mental cases.
It explained all the kindness, too. Pink walls and a pretty nurse and jolly pleasantness. Because he needed to be treated gently, as one would a young child. His food soured on his tongue.
Elfin green and lacy blossoms peeped from buds on trees below.
The nurse returned. “Your parents have been by. They’ll be back this afternoon.”
Golden light on pink walls made James close his eyes and breathe slowly. Just like a day at the seashore, visiting his grandmother in the summertime.
His parents knew he was here in a mental hospital. So the damage was already done. But they would love him anyway. Even in the bruised and bleeding sanctum of his heart, he knew that, and he took comfort in it.
APHRODITE
Cabbage in Compiègne—April–May 1918
THERE’S A FRESH, clean smell to cabbages. Something satisfying about the crunching sound of chopping them up and dropping them with a splash into enormous vats of hard vegetable chunks.
Hazel’s job was to slice, daily, three wheelbarrows full of green cabbages. Around two hundred pounds of cabbage per day. Her hands grew red and raw from cabbage juice.
