by Bodie Thoene
The crew of the German craft spotted them at the same moment the Hurricanes formed their line, and the top turret machine gun opened up. A streak of tracers reached across the void toward Simpson’s plane, and his guns responded as if the two aircraft were trying to tie each other together with lines of deadly fire.
Simpson dove below the cone of defensive bullets, stitching the fuselage of the Dornier before flashing past. He broke abruptly left before his plane came within sights of the bottom turret gun.
As David watched, Hewitt repeated the maneuver, scoring hits on the left engine of the German plane. Then it was David’s turn.
Matching his craft’s position to that of the bomber, David also matched the German pilot move for move. The Dornier jostled from one side to the other, like an animal trying to shake off a predator that has landed on its back. At two hundred fifty yards, David watched as his sights slid along the body of the twisting Dornier, raking its length.
When the Hurricanes reformed, the Dornier’s left engine and midsection were in flames, and one of the rudders flapped raggedly. As the three RAF pilots closed again from astern, the Dornier made a lazy half roll and began a vertical spiral toward the ground.
“Shall we give ’im another go?” Hewitt inquired.
“No,” came Simpson’s rebuke. “He’s done for. Give them a chance to get out . . . poor sods.”
As red section circled overhead, one German appeared at the hatch of the doomed plane and launched himself out. In quick succession the white blossom of a parachute appeared and then, only an instant later, the German aircraft slammed into the countryside—a black, flaming meteor against the white hills.
Andre and Josie’s return journey from Luxembourg on Christmas Eve day followed the course of the Meuse River. Once again his military pass and rank gave them easy access through the barricades and checkpoints along the road. He spoke little, but his expression reminded Josie of her first impression of him on the night train to Paris. A sort of tragic figure, she had told Alma. What had happened when he went to see his child? He had not spoken about it, and she did not ask, but she was certain it had not gone well.
She had been angry with him last night and earlier this morning, but her anger had cooled when she had seen the pain in his eyes upon his return from delivering the doll. Now there was something else. It was as if he had a secret he wanted to share with her.
They passed through the tiny, empty village of Bras and then turned away from the river onto a road that was little more than a cart path. The trees were young, with slim trunks and unscarred bark. The contours of the hills and ridgelines were ragged and uneven, as though some giant spade had dipped down, turned the earth in great chunks, and dumped it in useless heaps. Josie could see beneath the undergrowth that there were lines of trenches and broken barbed wire mired in the mud.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked, even though she knew this was a battlefield.
The line of Andre’s mouth hardened at her question. He did not reply but turned off on a winding, rutted side road that climbed a hill crowned by slim beech trees. At the crest of the ridgeline, he stopped the car and sat staring through the windshield for a long moment. He gestured with his hand at the sign beside the road: Louvemont, village detruit.
“There was a village here when I was a very young child,” he said in an almost inaudible voice, as though he had entered a cathedral in the middle of Mass.
There was nothing beyond the sign—no houses or shops, no parish church or cobbled square—only the heaps of earth and scattered stones that might once have been a wall or a foundation.
“My mother was born here.” Andre cleared his throat. “My grandparents lived here.” He pointed toward the next ridge. “It was a beautiful place. They were good people. They left when the war began in 1914. My mother came back to see my father here near the front in Louvemont and so now, together, they are the dust of Louvemont.”
“You do not owe me an explanation.”
“You think I am a coward.”
“I do not! No, Andre! I just think . . .”
“You think!” he said fiercely. “But you cannot know what France was before. You ridicule Gamelin for saying that we will not be bled white again. But you cannot know whose blood watered this place! How can you know? There are too many to count. But I can see the faces of some just as clearly as I remember that the village of Louvemont was here. My mother and father died in one day at this place.” He shook his head.
“I am sorry, Andre. I had no intention of prying into your life.”
“It is not only my life, Josephine. There is more for you to see, if you will understand what this war must mean to France.”
He started the car again and drove on slowly through the emptiness, as though there was something to witness. On each side of the road signs were posted in short intervals: TERRAIN INTERDIT, “forbidden ground.”
“The woods and fields are still littered with unexploded shells and canisters of poison gas. A million acres and more, the land cannot be farmed or grazed. No couples can picnic or make love. These are fields of death for any who walk here even now.”
He glanced at her. She knew she must appear pale and unhappy as a result of his macabre revelations. “For eight months it was quiet here. The sons of France waited in their muddy trenches, praying that the Germans would wear down through the long winter. And all the time they were building up. Time was not on our side. The Germans were waiting for spring. As they wait now.”
There was no stopping him. It was as though he had to tell her, had to make her see the peace of these fields and know what ghosts still lingered here. “My father was a colonel. Mother came here to Louvemont often to be with him during that time. It was his birthday. They had a friend in the High Command who secured her a pass.” He swallowed hard. “She would not let Paul and me go with her. Maybe she sensed what was going to happen . . . just as I am certain that hell is coming again to France, Josephine.”
His knuckles were white as he gripped the steering wheel. “Look at it. On the day before the German offensive began in 1916, there was snow on the forests . . . on the fields and rooftops of the village. I have seen such days as a child . . . beautiful . . . peaceful. My parents must have awakened in an embrace and smiled at the sound of a lark outside the window. Who could imagine what would come? Just past dawn it began. The artillery shells fell like so many drops of rain. The church exploded. The houses exploded. Pits erupted across the fields like the craters of the moon. Trees and animals and barns and men . . . gone. The heat melted the snow everywhere. By noon, peaceful Louvemont had vanished.”
“And your mother? your father?”
“Gone. They were never found. There was not enough left to bury. A million people died here in this place. One man in love . . . like me. One woman, beautiful and passionate . . . like you. Here! Look around you, Josephine, and know what war is . . . what it means to France. My mother and father? They are only two who died on the first day. A million lives were swallowed up right here. Only 160,000 bodies of that million were ever identified.”
He fell silent again as the road wound up the slope of a long hill crowned with two granite monuments that stood at the empty crossroads and overlooked the killing fields. For a moment he stopped the car and waited, as if thinking whether to take her all the way to the center of his knowledge.
“Come,” he said, getting out and opening the car door for her.
The wind was biting as they stepped out and stood in the center of the road between the two facing monuments. One was a granite structure of blocks topped with the bronze helmet of a knight. On it was carved, AUX MORTS DES CHARS d’ASSAUT 1916.
The other was a simple stone crucifix inscribed with the words:
Ossements qu’animait un fier souffle naguere,
Membres epars, debris sans non, humain chaos,
Pêle-mêle sacré d’un reliquaire,
Dieu vous reconnaîtra, poussiere de heros!
She stood shivering before it. Around her the fields seemed to awaken with the ghosts of a million young men who had barely lived before they died. Who had disappeared into the maw of war without leaving even a trace of themselves to bury.
She began to read. Her voice was carried away on the wind and sounded to her ears as though it was some other voice.
“Heaps of bones once moved by the proud breath of life,
Scattered limbs, nameless debris, chaos of humanity,
Sacred jumble of a past reliquary,
Dust of heroes, God will know you!”
Silence. The wind. The distant memory of a day like Armageddon. The thunder of artillery mingled in her mind with the screams of dying men.
She turned to Andre, who searched her eyes and then held out his hand to her.
“Time levels all men. Good and evil alike. A century will pass in the blink of an eye, and who will sort the particles of dust? ‘God will know you!’ I look in the mirror each morning and say to myself, ‘Andre, one day everything you think you believe about yourself will be put to the test! Then there will be no more empty talk over the dinner table. Honor? Love? Faith? Courage? They will become suddenly tangible truths that stand before you and require you to make a choice. You will live out your Truth even to the death, or Truth will die inside you even if you survive.’ Do you see what I am saying?”
“Forgive me.” Josie did not look at him. Leafless branches reached up to touch the gray sky. She felt suddenly ashamed of her empty talk about principles and courage. In the face of reality, such talk was hypocrisy. She had seen the reality in Warsaw. Could she forget so soon? “I have made this into a philosophical debate, haven’t I?”
“Perhaps debate is the beginning of courage. There are no righteous wars. There is only, regrettably, sometimes the necessity to fight. I would negotiate with the devil to stop what I know will come. But there are no words left to stop him. So I will stand with France and fight the devil for the sake of my own soul. Now we wait. When the waiting ends this spring, I know what real war will mean. When it comes to this place . . . to France, to us . . . you and me.”
He pulled her against him. “I have already made so many wrong choices. Hurt so many. Thrown away so much. Everything important, wasted on my own selfishness. Now I may lose my life, when living is precious to me at last. But for the first time in a long time, I think I have found something—someone—to live for.”
David navigated the borrowed 1928 Citroën to the village nearest the snow-covered field where the Dornier had crashed. From there, an icy track led into the countryside. They stopped the car when they caught sight of a lone soldier standing guard beside an opening in a hedgerow. The trio of fliers piled out gratefully from the battered car’s single seat and stretched.
As the three approached the short-statured French poilu, he came away from the hedge, shook his fist, and waved the bayonet on the end of his rifle in their faces. “Easy, mate,” instructed Hewitt, pointing to the RAF badge on his cap. “We’re the ones who shot down the German.”
David looked past the guard, through the gap in the fence, toward the skeletal wreckage of the German bomber. What he saw chilled him worse than the wintry air. “Shut up, Hewitt,” he urged. “Look!”
Though the rolling hills were barren for miles around, the fallen Dornier had crashed on top of a farmhouse. The nose had struck the roof dead center and punched a hole into the structure. Then both plane and farmhouse had burned together. Only two stone walls remained upright around the gutted interior.
The French soldier’s head pivoted in the direction of the debris, and when he turned around, he was crying. “La famille entier,” he said. “Tous ensemble.”
“What’d he say?” whispered Hewitt.
“He said, ‘the whole family,’” Simpson muttered.
Outside the charred hulk of the house lay a row of bodies. They were all wrapped in tarps. Three of the bundles were very small indeed, only half the size of the others.
Hewitt was violently ill and had to be helped back to the road by David, who felt far from well himself. The three pilots packed into the Citroën again and drove away without speaking.
18
The Great Spiderweb
Jerome Jardin was desperate. He thought of the two American sisters, Madame Rose and Madame Betsy. He remembered the salami and the cabbage and imagined chicken boiling in a very large stewpot today.
Something would have to be done.
“I should throw you into the Seine and let the fish of Paris eat you!” Jerome gave Marie a threatening shake as he pulled her up the stone steps beneath the bridge that spanned the river. The rat balanced precariously on his shoulder. Compared to life with Jerome, surely Papillon’s life with Uncle Jambonneau had been dull.
“No! Jerome! Please do not kill me,” Marie wailed. She had been wailing all morning about her empty stomach, and Jerome was sick of it. She was picking up noisy habits from Madame Hilaire.
“I will use you for fish bait if you do not shut up! I will catch myself a big fish with your toes. And then I will only have myself to feed.”
“I die anyway with the hunger!”
“Ingrate!” He shook her again and came very near to carrying out his threat to throw her off the steps of Quai d’Conti. A man riding his bicycle across Pont Neuf frowned down from the bridge with disapproval, and Jerome controlled his anger.
Jerome had done the best he could with breakfast. It had been raining early this morning when he left the barge for the market. The vendors had not wheeled their pushcarts onto the sidewalk of Rue de Mazarine lest their baguettes grow soggy, their cabbages mold. The capitalists had remained inside their warm shops where bells tinkled a warning above doors whenever anyone entered or left. It was difficult to steal a croissant when all the bread was inside the pâtisserie and under guard.
This morning at the pâtisserie the little bell had dinged and the overstuffed wife of the baker had looked down her long nose to see that it was Jerome who entered the shop. She announced his arrival very loudly to a dozen customers. They had all turned at once to stare at him as if he were a cockroach swimming in a bowl of soup, even though Jerome had left the rat at the boat.
“Look here, Papa. Is this a stray cat dripping on the clean floor? What sad brown eyes! Soaked clear to the skin! I will bet it is hungry, too.”
“Look again, Madame. It is no cat but a scruffy river rat and the son of a rat. Madames and Monsieurs, hold tightly to your purses, if you please. Meet Jerome Jardin, unfortunate offspring of that drunken Communist clochard, who would rather sit on his filthy barge moored beneath Pont Neuf and read the works of Karl Marx than work an honest day. But of course! Little Jerome is here to rob us rotten capitalists again. You want to eat something, little rat? Go to the soup kitchens. We serve only honest citizens here. Out of my shop, if you please!”
On days when the street market was open Monsieur le Baker had no opportunity to humiliate Jerome. The boy was too quick for the fat man. It was easy enough to hide outside behind the baskets of the florist and wait until madame and monsieur were each busy with a customer and then . . . he would dash in, steal a baguette, and be gone. But it had been a long time since the days had been warm enough for that.
Now Madame Hilaire was gone again . . . somewhere. It was three days until Papa’s letter would arrive and Madame Hilaire would make The Dinner. Jerome was not worried about this . . . not much. But it had been three days since Marie had eaten anything but the stale crusts Jerome had gathered from the garbage bins behind the Ritz. She was getting on his nerves. She did not appreciate that he had to scramble even to get bread from the garbage. They were not the only hungry Parisians these days. Refugees had crowded into the city, making it more difficult to scrounge.
“Where are you taking me?” Marie shrilled as he led her toward Pont Neuf and Quai Augustins, which followed the Left Bank of the S
eine.
“We are going to eat,” he said firmly, fixing his eyes on the great statue of Henri IV that towered above the center of the bridge. The old king had been melted once during the Revolution and had become cannons for Napoleon. Later someone had melted down a statue of Napoleon and made a new King Henri. Now he was back on the bridge overlooking Ile de la Cité.
Last summer the old king had attracted tourists who posed for photographs on the parapets and were often careless with wallets and handbags. Jerome had been a better provider in those days. The head and shoulders of King Henri also served as a roost for pigeons. Pigeons were easier than fish for Jerome to catch. Being fed by tourists, pigeons had no concept that they could themselves be eaten. But today not even pigeons cooed on the head of Henri.
A crisp wind assailed the two children as they trudged beside the river. Marie’s spindly legs turned pale blue beneath her ragged coat, and her wail diminished to a whimper.
Jerome took Papillon from his shoulder and handed him to Marie. “Put him in your shirt. He is cold.” He said this not because the rat was bothered by the cold but because Papillon’s extra warmth against Marie’s belly might help her.
“He will be warm there.” She cradled the creature. “Thank you, Jerome. Where will we eat?”
“The soup kitchen,” he replied with the stern authority of a young man of ten. Just then, across the river, the towers of Notre Dame came into view beyond the buildings of the Prefecture of Police.
Marie balked. “No! Not the church, Jerome! Papa says they poison people there!”
“Poison in the head, Marie.” He tapped his finger against her temple and softened a bit at her terror. Papa had been arrested many times and taken to the fortress of buildings that flanked the cathedral. Sometimes Jerome thought that Marie did not know the difference between Notre Dame Cathedral and the police headquarters. Papa hated both places with equal fervor. He was always talking against the charity of the soup kitchens. Always he spoke about the priests as spiders waiting to pull the unsuspecting person into a web of religion by feeding empty bellies.
