“I know. But do you really think an uprising could succeed?”
“With German help—yes.”
“And they’ve agreed to provide it?”
“Not yet,” he said, turning his eyes to the passing fields. “They are interested, they see the possibilities that such a move would open up, but they are not yet convinced that we are serious enough or strong enough. They are pleased with my Irish Brigade, but they want to see more volunteers. And that is where you come in.”
“I don’t understand.”
His eyes lit up—he was one of those men who loved to explain. “These volunteers can only come from America. The Germans say to me the Irish-Americans have been talking a good fight against the English for over a hundred years, but what have they ever actually done? And, you know, the Germans are right. It is time they took up arms and joined us. And no one is better placed to put that case than you! As the correspondent of a big newspaper, you have a ready-made platform, and who could put the case for volunteering better than the sister of a young man who has already given his life for Ireland? Tell Irish-Americans about my brigade, tell them to join us!”
She knew that Colm would have lapped this up, and she felt more than a little depressed by the knowledge. Had he been that naïve? Was Casement? “How would they get here?” she asked. “Who would pay their passage?”
He waved that aside. “One man has come already, all the way from Chicago—I should have introduced you to him. I’m sure those interested will have the sense to contact Clan na Gael or the German embassy. But first they must want to come, must feel it is their duty. You see that, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“So you will do all you can? Write articles that have men queuing up to come?”
“I will,” she said, with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, mostly just to shut him up. He seemed more than a little deranged, and she wondered whether living alone in a foreign capital for so many months hadn’t proved just a bit too much. There was some sense in what he had said and in what he hoped she would do, but nowhere near enough. Did he really believe that a couple of articles in the American press would unleash a flood of willing recruits for his company-size brigade?
And even if it did, what would these men be fighting for? Nothing Casement had said suggested any advance on simple nationalism, and even Colm had gone further than that. There was no mention of class, let alone gender—he seemed as much in thrall to a flag as was any Englishman or German. The difference between him and them was that he had no seat of power on which to hoist his.
And yet, she told herself. She had met Irish rebels—Connolly for one—who would give even Kollontai a run for her money where awareness of class and gender issues were concerned. Whom exactly did Casement think he represented?
She asked him.
“The Volunteers, of course.”
Which told her nothing.
“Do you agree with Jim Larkin that an independent Ireland can only be a socialist Ireland?”
He was taken aback for only a moment. “An independent Ireland can be anything it damn well pleases.”
Half an hour later, after they’d dropped Casement off at his villa, she sat there staring at the passing streets, wondering whether to write what he’d asked for. Her dead brother would certainly want her to. Her father, too, most likely. Michael Killen would approve. It might help the cause, and how could it hurt?
Why did she feel so reluctant? If Kollontai had asked her to write something comparable—a feminist appeal of some sort—would she have felt the same? Was it writing for a cause she objected to or the cause itself?
She rehearsed what she might say. That an Irish Brigade had been formed in Germany to fight for Irish independence, that it needed recruits, that it was time for Irish-Americans to put their bodies where their mouths were. All true. That it was pathetically small, that its leader seemed more than slightly unstable, that people who answered his call would, at best, be wasting their time and, at worst, throwing their lives away. The way Colm had done, she thought. For the first time, she admitted to herself how angry she was with him.
That aside, the second version was equally true. If the first was calculated to win recruits for Casement, the second was guaranteed to discourage them. A nuanced version, which offered both sides of the story, would favor the status quo.
It was the same with the task that Colm had given her, the task she’d been putting off. Anything other than a whitewash was useless to the cause, a cause, moreover, that she had once taken for granted. Their Ireland needed supporters, not truth sayers. Propagandists rather than journalists.
It was midafternoon by the time the late-evening train from Berlin reached Trier, where a new interpreter was waiting to shepherd her aboard the much less imposing rake of cars that would take them both on to Metz. Franz was a good-looking young man with classic clean-cut German features, blond hair and mustache; his uniform looked like it had just been pressed. His English, he said, had been learned at Oxford, where he had studied philosophy before the war.
The railway followed the Moselle River, and the scenery was mostly gorgeous, if one could ignore the symptoms of war that covered it like a rash. Waiting trains seemed to be stabled in every available refuge, some full of bored-looking troops, others of weapons or other supplies. Sometimes their train was held to allow another to pass, and on one occasion a line of windowless vans rumbling by in the opposite direction caused two nearby passengers to hurriedly cross themselves. A funeral train was her guess, one that Franz reluctantly confirmed. It felt like forever before it was past.
She had done her best to research the current military situation before leaving Berlin, and as far as she could tell, there were no major battles under way on the Western Front. Was this the usual casualty rate when things were quiet? Suddenly the figure she and her fellow journalists had casually come to accept—that of five thousand dead each day—seemed appallingly real.
Night was falling by the time they reached Metz, and, stepping down from the train, she heard a rumbling in the distance. At first she thought it was thunder, but this kept rolling on and on. “How far are we are from the front?” she asked Franz.
“About thirty kilometers.”
The capital of Lothringen—or Lorraine, as the French had called it—seemed largely undamaged by the war, though Franz said that several months earlier the enemy had tried to bomb the steelworks. After losing several airplanes, he added smugly, they hadn’t tried again.
Their hotel for the night had probably been the town’s finest in peacetime but now seemed like a home away from home for officers on a break from the front. Several looked her over with the air of connoisseurs inspecting the new whore, and after dinner she made sure to place a chair under the handle of her door. Franz had told her to be ready at six for their morning departure, so she tried to get an early night, but it was only when the distant guns fell silent that she finally managed to sleep.
Next morning Franz was waiting in the lobby, having persuaded the kitchen to pack them both breakfast. The automobile outside looked modern enough underneath its coat of dust, and the driver—a corporal—gave her a welcoming smile. Soon they were out in the country and driving up through wooded hills onto what seemed a wide plateau. The sun was rising in a clear blue sky, promising another hot day.
After about half an hour, they crossed the prewar border. “We are now in France,” he said, pointing out the wreckage of an old frontier post. She noticed the first graves a few seconds later, and after that there was rarely a moment when there weren’t several crosses in view. They came in ones and twos and dozens; they came upright and leaning and facedown in the dirt. Few looked new, but none were really old.
“There was a lot of fighting here in the first few months,” Franz told her.
They passed through several abandoned villages, with many houses ruined. One
had a small cemetery that clearly predated the war; this was now a garden of chipped and broken gravestones, bordered by shredded trees.
The guns grew louder with each passing mile, and when they finally reached Martigny and the driver switched off his engine, it felt for a moment as if they were surrounded by drummers.
The hospital, a red-cross-emblazoned building that had probably been the hôtel de ville, filled one side of the square. A bizarre selection of ambulances, both motorized and horse drawn, were lined up outside.
“And now how far are we from the front?” she asked Franz, looking to the south. Was she imagining it, or was the skyline wreathed in smoke?
“Maybe five kilometers.”
There was a German unit drilling on the far side of the square, and several French children watched them. Martigny had not been abandoned—perhaps the Germans had caught it unawares—and the looks that Caitlin was getting from its native residents were anything but friendly. Noticing a German flyer pinned to a nearby lamppost, she asked Franz what it said.
He walked across to read it. “It’s the rules,” he told her.
“And what are they?” she asked.
He hesitated. “The curfew times, some other things.”
“Like what?” There was a familiar whiff in the air, but for a moment she couldn’t place it.
He shook his head. “We’re here to visit the hospital. Let’s go in.”
That was it, she thought. Blood.
“We have two hours in Martigny,” he said over his shoulder. “And if you want to eat, we should leave an hour for that.”
“We’ll eat back in Metz.”
He sighed his acceptance; he’d obviously been told to humor this woman as much as he could. As they passed into the lobby, the whiff became an acrid odor, overpowering but not quite masking the sweeter smell of disinfectant.
“Wait here while I find the man in charge,” Franz said. He returned a few minutes later. “He’s not here, but they say he’ll be back soon.”
“Well, let’s look around, then,” Caitlin said, heading for the nearest pair of doors.
“I don’t think . . .” he began, but she was already pushing through them.
A big room—a council chamber, perhaps—was crammed with beds of all shapes and sizes, from iron bedsteads to simple wooden pallets. There had to be around forty of them, and none were empty. Most of the occupants seemed to be asleep, but a few turned curious eyes in her direction. The older of two nurses was striding toward her, asking questions.
“Wer sind sie?”—Who are you?—was a phrase Caitlin recognized. The rest was probably a variation on “What the hell are you doing here?”
She let Franz answer and watched the woman’s expression turn from hostility to interest. “Ein Amerikaner,” she marveled, as if that were something weird and wonderful.
“Can she talk to me for a few minutes?” Caitlin asked Franz.
She could. The other nurse was shooed away, ostensibly to check a patient, and Caitlin was ushered into one of the rare empty spaces, by a window overlooking what had once been a formal garden. The nurse’s name was Dagmar; she was from Hamburg, where she’d worked in a large city hospital. Her husband had volunteered on the day that war broke out, and she had done the same. She’d been looking after brave boys ever since.
In answer to Caitlin’s questions, she insisted that they had all the medicines they needed and that the soldiers were given excellent treatment—so much so that many men had later sent letters expressing their gratitude. Would Caitlin like to see these? Without waiting for an answer, Dagmar scurried across to her desk.
On the other side of the room, the younger nurse was wearing a look of disdain, and Caitlin made a mental note to see her later.
The letters were presented, and Franz translated a couple.
“Wonderful,” Caitlin agreed. She asked if there were any woman doctors working at the front.
Dagmar looked scandalized. “Nein.”
“Do you ever go up to the front with the ambulances?”
She did not. “Now,” she said, ushering Caitlin and her guide toward the door, “you must leave us to do our work.”
Outside, the drilling soldiers had gone, but the dust they’d kicked up still hung in the air. A horse-drawn ambulance was pulling up and soon disgorged a man laid out on a stretcher. His clothes were soaked in blood, and each step of the bearers seemed to bring forth a cry of pain.
Caitlin turned to find that Dagmar had followed them out.
“There is an American doctor waiting here,” Franz translated for her. “A Dr. Hoffman. She suggests you talk to him.”
“Wonderful. Where can I find him?”
“In the operating theater. In the next building.”
“Do you know how far we are from the fighting?” Caitlin asked Franz as they walked across.
“Maybe six kilometers.”
In the building next door, another nurse informed them that the doctor was removing shrapnel from a soldier’s head and neck but would be finished in a few minutes. He emerged in two, a fresh-faced young man from Chicago who rather ruefully told her that he’d been one of the first German-Americans to heed the fatherland’s call. Over the next few minutes, he asked as many questions as Caitlin did and was disappointed to find that she hadn’t been home for a couple of years. He was particularly keen to know whether Americans in general had grown more sympathetic to the German cause and how the Cubs were doing.
When other casualties were brought in for surgery, he commandeered a nurse to take Caitlin through to the wards, where, with Franz’s help, she questioned a dozen or more patients. She asked them about letters and leave, about the food in the trenches and the enemy they fought.
Did they hate the French and the English as much as their songs suggested?
Not really.
Did they think the war would last into 1916?
More than likely.
There was no overt disaffection, no obvious bitterness, not even from those who’d been crippled or blinded. Franz might be censoring their replies or inducing self-censorship just by his presence, but she didn’t think so—the facial expression tallied too well with the words. There was, she decided, a quite astonishing level of acceptance. These boys had been taken from home—or had taken themselves in a fit of patriotic zeal—and put in a narrow trench for months on end, at the mercy of the elements, to live with the ever-present threat of death by bullet or shell or bomb. And here they were, wincing with each painful movement yet joking among themselves and smiling up at her as if she were doing them a favor just by being there. She found this both awe-inspiring and crazy, but everyone else seemed to find it normal.
Once they’d been through the last ward, Franz, still fretting at their failure to secure the hospital director’s permission to interview his staff and patients, disappeared in search of the missing man. “Please wait here,” he told Caitlin as a motorized ambulance pulled up in a cloud of dust and another two casualties were hurriedly carried inside.
Curious, Caitlin walked across to the untended vehicle and peered in through the open rear doors. There was no medical equipment inside, just a polished metal floor for sliding the stretchers in and out. Would the orderlies notice if the doors were closed when they came back out?
What did she have to lose?
She crawled inside and pulled them almost shut behind her.
Several minutes went by, during which it occurred to her that they’d probably be taking the empty stretchers back to the front. In which case they would find her.
But they weren’t, and they didn’t. Someone fastened the rear doors, two men climbed into the front seats, and away they went, rattling noisily down what had to be a dry mud track. Yes! Caitlin thought. I’m going to get there. I really am.
They drove on, the two Germans chatting away in the
front, the guns growing noticeably louder with each passing minute, and soon her sense of triumph was fraying at the edges. Had she been brave or merely reckless?
They’d been traveling about fifteen minutes when something—an enemy shell, presumably—exploded so close that the ambulance rocked wildly to and fro, like a boat caught up in a bigger boat’s wake. In the seats up front, one of the Germans said something that caused his companion to laugh out loud.
The noise outside now seemed more like a dull roar, but there were no more near misses. After another couple of minutes, the ambulance came to a stop, and a few seconds later the doors were flung open. She had a brief view of tents and a smoke-shrouded sky before one man started shouting and others appeared at his shoulders to see what he was shouting at.
She scrambled her way out of the vehicle with as much dignity as a feetfirst extrication would allow. “I’m a journalist,” she said in English.
The first man continued shouting at her in German. This was some sort of clearing station, she thought. She was still some way from the front.
There was a sudden ear-piercing shriek, and a shell exploded beyond the tents, sending up a plume of earth. No one else seemed to notice.
That was twice this morning she could have been killed.
Another man had arrived in front of her, a doctor by the look of his gore-spattered gown. There were four men bearing a couple of stretchers behind him, and he waved her angrily aside to allow them access to the rear of the ambulance. One man had a leg that was almost severed just below the knee; his eyes were open, but he made no sound. The other had a blood-soaked groin and was moaning almost constantly. Once the stretchers were aboard, Caitlin was grabbed by the arms and marched around to the front of the vehicle, where, amid much ribald hilarity, she was planted in the lap of a blushing young orderly. As the driver turned the ambulance, she caught one last glimpse of the doctor’s furious face.
The trip back seemed longer than the journey out. The boy whose lap she occupied kept his hands to himself, but the strength of the erection straining against her was hard to ignore. As was the constant wailing of the man in the back, who might never have another.
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