The Death Instinct

by Jed Rubenfeld

  'Where did you get all this?' she said in wonder.

  'Will you allow me, Mademoiselle?'

  'With pleasure.'

  She laid a blanket on the grass and arranged the articles he had brought. The night was warm. He threw his leather jacket to the ground, put his cap and pistol belt on top of it, and began corkscrewing the wine — but stopped when blood drizzled down his fingers onto the bottle. 'Do you sew by any chance?' he asked.

  She lifted his sleeve and gasped at the deep laceration in his forearm. 'Wait here,' she said. When she came back a moment later with suturing thread and a disinfectant alcohol, she added, 'I don't have any anaesthetic.'

  'For this?' he replied.

  She poured the clear alcohol onto his wound, where it hissed and effervesced, ran a needle through one piece of his bubbling, bleeding skin and then through another, pulling the thread tight thereafter. 'How can you bear it?' she asked.

  'I don't feel it,' he said.

  'Of course you do,' she replied, continuing to suture.

  'I'm indifferent to it.' 'A man who doesn't feel pain can feel no pleasure.'

  'I'm indifferent to pleasure too.'

  'That's not what the nurses say.'

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'How long since you've slept?' she asked.

  'There's something about you I don't follow, Miss Rousseau. Specifically, your leaving Paris to live in a truck. And don't tell me it was your duty to France.'

  'Why not?' she asked, piercing the last lip of open skin. 'Hold still.'

  'Because women don't act out of duty to country. There's always a man in it somewhere.'

  'You're unforgivable.' She cut the thread, tied it off. 'Done.'

  He flexed his hand, nodded, opened the wine, poured her a glass, and offered a toast to womankind. She returned it with a toast to France. They settled down to their meal; she served him. 'You were following a boy, obviously,' Younger resumed. 'He was called to the front, and this was the only way you could go with him. The only question is whether you lost him or he lost you.'

  'I wasn't following a boy.'

  'My apologies — a man.'

  'Not a man either.'

  'A girl?'

  She threw a cracker at him.

  'Sorry, but it doesn't add up,' he said. 'You left the Sorbonne, which must have been the most important thing in your life. You know they won't reenroll you after the war. There will be too many men whose education was interrupted.'

  'Yes.' She swept crumbs from the blanket, barely betraying her deep disappointment: 'Even Madame warned me she wouldn't be able to get me back in.'

  'Then why did you leave?' asked Younger.

  'I couldn't stand the charity any longer.'

  He was unable to read the expression in her eyes.

  'There are people,' she went on, 'willing to house those of us who have lost our families, willing to feed us. But charity comes at a price. Out here we have a roof over our heads, and I don't have to ask: anyone for bread.'

  'What was the price?' asked Younger.

  'Dependence.'

  'We're all dependent when young. On family, if no one else.'

  'To be dependent on your family is a joy,' she said. 'To be dependent on someone else is — different.'

  Again she wore her indecipherable expression, but this time Younger deciphered it.

  'So,' he said. 'You weren't lying, but I was still right.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'You weren't following a man when you left Paris. You were escaping one. A man who wanted a return on his charitable investments.'

  She looked at him over the rim of her glass.

  'You had a — an intimate relationship with him,' said Younger. 'No one can blame you.'

  'You are very curious about my relationships.'

  'Any girl would have done the same in your place.'

  'Maybe an American girl would have. I didn't. You will believe me when I tell you who it was: Monsieur Langevin.'

  Paul Langevin was the great French physicist notoriously coupled with Marie Curie in newspaper reports all over the world several years earlier.

  'I should have known,' declared Younger. 'You said his name to once before, with more venom than any word I've heard you speak except "German." What did the rascal do?'

  'He tried to undress me in the laboratory.'

  'Scoundrel. Where should he have done it?'

  'You think it's funny? This is the man Madame loved. The man she lost everything for. And he makes love to me almost under her nose.'

  'At least he has good taste.'

  'I think you are trying to provoke me,' she said. 'It was dreadful. He had put Luc and me up in his house. I thought he was being kind. But then came the laboratory, and then there was more, at night, in his house.'

  'By force?'

  'No — when I resisted, he would let me go. But he would make me push him away. It was unbearable. If I had left his home without leaving Paris, Madame would have understood everything immediately, no matter what I told her. It would have been agony for her. And she would have hated me.'

  'So you learned to drive this truck,' said Younger. 'I couldn't think of any other way. I had to leave the university. He was always finding ways to be near me. Madame would have seen how it was, sooner or later.'

  Younger paused to take it in. 'You gave up the Sorbonne to spare her.'

  There was a longer silence. 'There are three things I'm going to do in my life,' she said. 'The first is to make Luc better. The second is to graduate from the Sorbonne, for my father. If they don't take me back right after the war, I'll apply and apply again until they do.'

  'And the third?'

  She smoothed her skirt. Then she studied him. 'Of course it's different for you. You're a man — you've had many girls, and you are applauded for it.'

  'Me? I'm as celibate as a Capuchin.'

  She laughed mockingly.

  'If you're listening to the nurses again,' said Younger, 'they're just jealous because I spend all my time with you.'

  'You never married?' she asked.

  'I don't believe in marriage.'

  'Let me guess why not,' she said. 'Because you think it's against man's nature to be monogamous.

  'Marriage looks to the future. Not practical, when you're at war.'

  'I have another explanation.' She put her glass down and picked up Younger's leather jacket and military cap. 'It's because you're American.'

  'Well?'

  'Well, if you were a Frenchman and you got married, you could have as many affairs as you liked. You would consider it your right. But as an American, you would have to be faithful.'

  'Would I?'

  'American married men are much more faithful. That's what Monsieur de Tocqueville says.' She stood up, trying on the jacket and cap. 'How do I look?'

  He didn't answer.

  'You don't like me to wear your uniform? All right.' She took the cap from her head and set it on his, tilting it to her liking. 'It suits you better anyway.'

  As she adjusted the cap on his head, bent at the waist before him, the lapels of his leather jacket, oversized on her, fell open at her neck, allowing a small silver and mother-of-pearl locket to hang down from her white blouse. He took her wrists and slowly lowered her to the grass.

  'What are you doing?' she asked.

  He undid the top button of her blouse.

  'Don't,' she said.

  He kissed her neck.

  'No,' she whispered.

  He stopped, looked at her. Her fiercely green eyes stared up at him, breathtakingly. The locket rose and fell with her chest. He reached for her shirt. She scrambled away like an animal. When she sat up, on her knees, his pistol was in her hands. But it was also in its holster, which she couldn't shake loose. She flapped the gun furiously, making the gun belt wag like a dog's tail. Finally she thrashed the pistol free and pointed it at him.

  'Don't move,' she said.

  He raised an eyebrow. 'For the reco
rd,' he said, 'I was about to rebutton you.'

  'I don't need your help buttoning,' she answered, standing and making good on that claim. He began to get up as well. 'I said don't move.'

  He rose, ignoring her command.

  'Just get in your car and go,' she said, wriggling out of his leather jacket and throwing it at his feet. 'If you take one step toward me, I'll shoot.'

  'Go ahead.' He stepped forward to pick up the jacket. 'Better to die at your hands than in a number of other ways I can think of.'

  She never had a chance to reply. The motor of a military vehicle roared nearby, and an open two-seater swung its headlights directly onto them. The vehicle pulled up not ten feet away. Younger's orderly hopped out, leaving the engine running; in the glare of the headlights, Colette was still pointing a pistol at Younger.

  'Sorry, sir,' said the orderly. 'Everything all right, sir?'

  'What is it, Franklin?'

  "They want you back, sir. On the double.'

  'Why?' asked Younger.

  "Two Jerry runners got captured up near Reems,' said Franklin, referring to the city of Rheims. 'They found messages on them. The attack's coming tonight, sir. The big one.'

  'Forgive me, Mademoiselle, but my country requires me,' said Younger, picking up his gun belt from the grass and strapping it on.

  She frowned. 'Will they send you to the front?'

  He smiled. 'I've never heard such solicitude from someone aiming a deadly weapon at me.' He extended his palm for the pistol. She gave it to him.

  'Sir?' asked the private anxiously.

  'I'm coming, Franklin,' said Younger. He gazed ruefully at the unfinished repast. 'Maybe the boy can have the rest of this tomorrow. Not the wine.'

  Al 11:45 p.m. that night, as American and French generals in Paris enjoyed a dress-uniform dinner at the former home of Baron Charles

  Rothschild, the Allied forces at Chateau-Thierry opened fire with everything they had on the invisible German divisions believed to be assembling on the north bank of the Marne. For four hours the Germans took the bombardment, unmoved and unmoving. At 3.30 in the morning, their attack began.

  Under cover of a furious counter-barrage — 17,500 rounds of gas shells; thirty-five tons of explosives — unseen German hands began filling the Marne with pontoon bridges. Over these bridges came the storm troopers, in wave after wave. The French 125th was instantly overpowered and fell back pell-mell. By contrast, the naive American forward companies held their ground and were soon wiped out to a man.

  The German advance was steady, irresistible, overrunning everything in its path. After two miles, the Germans were funneled between the two ridges rising up on either side of the Surmelin valley. This was an eventuality for which the Americans had prepared. Defying orders from French commanders who refused to acknowledge the possibility of a wholesale Allied retreat, the American Third Division had installed heavy artillery, well fortified, on the Bois d'Aigremont on one side of the valley and the Moulin Ruine on the other, in the rear of the Allied positions. Now these guns rained down on the exposed German infantry. On and on came the German regiments through the enfilade; they died in such great number the soil went red to a depth of six inches.

  Younger's dressing station was deluged with casualties. Wagons, both motorized and horse-drawn, shuttled in and out, carrying the wounded, the dead, the dying. In the dark, early hours of July 16, a German officer with shattered ribs was brought in, but Younger, who had barely slept in seventy-two hours, refused to give the officer priority over wounded Allied infantrymen.

  'American savages,' the officer remarked, in German.

  'Let me think,' replied Younger in the same language as he withdrew a surprisingly long stretch of barbed wire, dripping, from a man's leg. 'Who was it that torpedoed a British hospital ship two weeks ago, then killed the surviving nurses by firing on them in the water? Oh yes, that's right — the Germans.'

  The officer spat blood into a handkerchief. 'You Americans are firing on fallen men out there. You are not giving us a chance to surrender. You are killing everybody.'

  'Good,' said Younger.

  Although the fighting went on for another twenty-four hours, it was clear by the morning of the sixteenth that the German offensive had tailed. On the eighteenth, the Allies launched a stunning counterattack, bolstered by an American fighting force now a million strong. Suddenly the Germans, who only days before had Paris in their sights, were reeling, backpedaling, desperately trying to regroup north of the Marne to avoid a complete rout.

  The next dawn, Younger's medical corps was redeployed to Soissons. The encampments of Chateau-Thierry were deserted now. All that remained was rubble, a blown-out church, and the burnt wreckage of a shot-down German Friedrichshafen bomber. The only sounds were those of military transport and the booming of ordnance in the north.

  As his company rolled out, Younger looked back at the dirt road on which, for several days, he and Colette had driven, with the silent hoy in the rear of the truck. Then he put the thought from his mind. If a man doesn't look ahead, neither should he look back.

  He didn't see her for the remainder of the war.

  By August, the Germans were beaten. They knew it; everyone knew it. Yet the war churned on. In early November, Younger was in a bombed-out barracks near Verdun, stooped over an English gunner who had been pinned under a half-ton cannon. The gunner's leg was broken; Younger was trying to reset the fibula. Despite his pain, the man kept looking at his watch.

  'Begging your pardon, sir,' said the wounded man at last, 'but will you be much longer?'

  'I could just chop it off,' answered Younger. 'That would be faster.'

  'The Boches, sir,' whispered the man. 'They're going to shell here in ten minutes.'

  'How would you know that, soldier?' asked Younger.

  The wounded man glanced about to ensure they were alone. 'It's a — a sort of arrangement, sir.'

  'Is it?' Younger looked at the man's eyes to see if he was raving. He did not appear to be.

  'They bomb us here for forty minutes, and then we got a spot where we bomb them for forty minutes. Same time, same place, every day. That way nobody's the worse for it.'

  Younger stopped what he was doing: 'Your officers consent to this?'

  'They don't know,' said the soldier. 'We gunners worked it out amongst ourselves, so to speak. You won't tell, will you, sir?'

  Younger considered it: 'No, I won't.'

  Two days later, at 5.45 a.m., radiomen scattered throughout France picked up an all-channels signal broadcasting from the Eiffel Tower. It was a message from Marshal Foch, the supreme Allied commander, announcing the war's end. An armistice had been signed. All hostilities were to cease at eleven hundred hours, French time.

  By nine that morning, the cease-fire order had been formally transmitted to Allied commanders and communicated to the men in the trenches. Paradoxically, the soldiers with the most to gain from the news were the ones made most anxious by it. Men who had learned to throw themselves month after month headlong into machine-gun fire, numb to personal risk, suddenly feared they might die in the last two hours of the war.

  At 10.30, the regiment with which Younger was serving began ferociously shelling German positions across no-man's-land. In an officer's dugout, Younger shouted to a second lieutenant he knew, asking what on earth was happening.

  'We're attacking,' said the second lieutenant.

  'What?' yelled Younger, refusing to believe he had heard correctly. Then he saw infantrymen filing through the network of intersecting trenches, faces taut, armed and packed for assault. From the direction of the front, he heard commands shouted and machine guns firing — from the German side, meaning that Allied soldiers were already scrambling out over the top.

  'This is madness,' said Younger.

  The lieutenant shrugged: 'Orders,' he replied.

  At 10.56, the command went out to halt the Allied attack. It took approximately two minutes for that order to disseminate from field
headquarters to radio command posts to captains in the field. At 10.58, the last Allied guns fell silent. At 10.59, the rain of German artillery let up. An ethereal, fragile silence hung in the air.

  Twelve seconds later, Younger heard the whistle of one last incoming shell — by the sound of it, a volley from a long-range 75-millimeter gun. The shot hit close by; the ground shook beneath him, and plugs of dirt fell from the walls. Possibly the shell had found a dugout, perhaps even an inhabited one. All waited with suspended breath. Then they heard the eruption of three Allied howitzers, presumably aimed. it the German gun that had launched the last shell.

  'No,' whispered Younger.

  Naturally the Germans reciprocated. Soon the air was screaming and shaking again with a full-scale bombardment. The onslaught went on uninhibited for hours. It even featured the explosion of signal flares in the sky, pointless in daytime and harmless in effect. Neither side appeared to have an objective, unless it was to expend every last piece of ammunition in its arsenal.

  Eleven thousand men were killed or wounded on November 11, 1918, in fighting that took place after all their commanding officers knew the war was over.

  Younger was attached after the armistice to the Allied army of occupation. The border crossing into Germany was a revelation: in enemy country, there were green fields well tended, roofs and chimneys undamaged, cattle fat with sweet grass, farmers' wives round with plentiful harvests. The Allied soldiers — the French especially, but not only they — looked on in disgust, after the ruination of France.

  In Bitburg, Younger had hospital duty. He didn't like it. The work was too regular and, if he had to be frank, too safe. One lunchtime in January of the new year, Younger was taken by surprise when an orderly tapped him on the shoulder, told him he had a visitor, and gestured to the refectory doorway, where he saw Colette in her usual wool sweater and long skirt.

  He wiped his mouth, went to her. They neither shook hands nor embraced. Soldiers pushed by Younger to enter the huge, raucous mess hall.

  'You're alive,' she said.