by Amanda Dykes
“They have.” George stabbed his fork into my can of beans, spearing the last lone legume. “They hit the edge of the forest and poof—” he circled his fork in the air. “The footprints disappear.” He made his fork disappear back into his grubby mess kit, for emphasis. “By George, what I wouldn’t give for a full English breakfast right now. Sizzling egg, crisp bacon, sausage, the whole lot.”
Hank gawked at him. “How’d you even end up in this battalion?” he said. “Shouldn’t you be with the Tommies?”
George waved him off. “I missed my chance to fight alongside my countrymen when I dodged it all to come to America. So? You lucky blokes get me instead.”
My stomach rumbled and my mind protested as the conversation moved on. I wanted to hang on to that image of the Angel of the Argonne. But George prattled on with endless breakfast foods of toast and tomatoes, tea and coffee.
“That’s right, you heard me, tea and coffee, both. Maybe together. Mix it all up and spoon it down, I’ll take it all. Marmalade, mmm . . .”
He was soon asleep, doubtless dreaming happily of rivers of golden butter and honey. And I . . . I tried with all my might to etch that song onto my memory.
My hand shook, and my eyesight blurred for want of sleep. But I knew it wouldn’t come, not more than a few minutes. Sleep had become an act of tiptoeing until my subconscious stumbled over trip wire and clashed against the sounds very real around me, jerking me out before I could go into that dream realm. I feared it. I knew where it would take me, and I refused to go there.
I rummaged around my kit for something—anything—to set my hands to. What I wouldn’t give for a book, or a radio, or even a sheet of paper to write Celia.
The tops of my fingers, in their jittering cadence, brushed over something cold. I pulled it out—Chester Hasenpfeffer’s empty artillery shell. His trophy, hollow as could be.
I’d seen men in the trenches make things of them before—etching designs upon them, engraving the names of salients and other battle places they’d been. They’d take them home to give to sweethearts as vases, or perhaps use them to stow pens or some such—a souvenir of this “grand adventure.” Maybe they, too, knew how to push the nightmares away.
I turned the brass in my hands, that song weaving through my mind. I’d give anything to keep the notes, the melody, forever. To trap up inside this shell the swelling peace both mournful and hope-filled and cap it, bury it somewhere safe. Not that I had any use for a vase. I had no wife, no sweetheart, nobody to even wonder about a future with.
I had only a song. I pulled out my pocketknife and began, slowly, to carve. It was clumsy work—I was no artist. But it was something, and with every chink in the metal, that song burrowed deeper into my soul.
And so it went, for the next many days. The three of us fell into a rhythm. The sun fell and rose. I chiseled and engraved during the day when the others slept. Darkness came and we felt our way into the woods. We’d fell trees, sometimes together and sometimes apart. Three times I ventured back to that place that had felt so otherworldly that first night . . . but it felt empty, each time.The spell of it had fallen away.
None of us heard the Angel of Argonne.
I listened hard from the trenches the rest of the time. For her, but also for the shells, as always. Straining in the silences for that approach from nowhere. Knowing I had mere seconds, if that, to determine the direction of the incoming whistle before it splintered land and exploded upward into a volcano of dust and fire. It had become my job, once Captain Truett had figured out about my ears, the way they picked up on things quicker than others. So I would listen, and bark out a warning, hoping to save a life.
Captain Truett clapped me on the head once when I dared to suggest that I might not be doing much good in that way. “Get some sense in you, son,” he’d said. “And let your ears do their work. Like it or not, you’re making a difference.” Truett rarely offered a compliment, and when he did, it almost always snuck past, unrecognized in the cloak of an insult. But still, it lit a fire in his men to press on.
But behind and beyond and in between and above that—I listened for her, always.
As did every man. One night, when all was quiet, I spotted George sticking his head up over the top of the trench—in the wrong direction. I tossed a pebble at his helmet.
“Get down,” I hissed.
“Ow! What’s all that for?”
“Better me with a pebble than a Jerry with a bullet,” I said. We caught on quick at the front to the terms used. Not “Germans,” but “Jerries” or “the Boche.” Not Brits, but “Tommies.” And us Americans were the doughboys, named so for the way our buttons resembled doughnuts. Cruel and unusual punishment, this constant reminder of food. Edible food. Real food.
I felt in my pocket and pulled out a hard biscuit. Chiseling a chunk off, I tossed it at George and whistled in time for him to look up and catch it.
“Thanks,” he said.
“What were you doing up there?”
He tore a bite out of the biscuit and shrugged. “Listening for my lady love,” he said. The three of us had heard something out there—but if hundreds or more lonely, forlorn soldiers heard the same, I didn’t want to even begin to imagine the riot that might ensue if they learned we’d been close to her. Every man would be clamoring for lumber duty.
A soldier raised his head from where he’d been resting his chin on his chest, legs stretched out on one of the driest pieces of trench. “You and every other guy down here,” he said.
I shoved the rest of the biscuit back in my pocket. “You heard her?” I tried to sound disinterested.
“You didn’t? You coulda heard a pin drop, right out here in the muck. We all thought we’d gone crazy. Shell shock, all of us at once. But when two hundred guys hear the same song at the same time, you know you ain’t the crazy one.”
I nodded. And knew then that I was the crazy one. Me, thinking that song was intended, somehow, for my ears. I knew enough of sound and distance to know that these men and I must have heard different parts of the song . . . and part of me argued that maybe at least that small part, deep in the woods, was just for me.
But such thoughts would do none of us any good.
It was this I carried with me that night into the woods. I determined to stay with Henry and George, to remind myself I was no different from the rest. But when they kept shooting me looks that told me I was in the way, I set off on my own. I pointed my feet in the opposite direction of the otherworld, that quiet place. Venturing instead away and closer to where the Germans were rumored to have been spotted some weeks before. I took extra care, knowing I could trigger trip wire or entangle myself in barbed wire at any moment.
And then it happened. Not the voice, but the heated whistle of a shell approaching. It impacted a hundred yards away, just outside the edge of the wood. I hit the ground, pulse slamming. Another one followed, this one closer.
They were aiming for the woods.
Before I could think, I was up and running. Hollering to Henry and George to get down as I neared them. They did—and then they made for the trenches. I followed—but twisted to a halt in the mud as a third shell impacted deeper into the woods. Into the land where the branches had been snapped off for wreath-making.
And I followed it.
My breaths coming short and urgent, I ran beneath the arch tree, past the swing tree, beyond the great yawning tower tree.
A breeze came, and light flickered beyond a screen of branches before me. Was that—a lantern? Shoving the branches away, unheeding of their scratching ways, I confirmed it was. Yes. Golden and glowing, out here in the middle of nowhere, a lantern hung from a tree.
Where was she?
The shelling stopped.
I froze.
In the silence, I listened hard for sound of her, or sound of shells, and heard neither. Before me stood the stand of trees that I’d thought so resembled a choir, with their straight postures and wide-mouthed knots. Only toni
ght, their open mouths looked shocked and fearful.
“Where is she?” I spoke it low and told myself I wasn’t actually speaking to trees. I hadn’t lost my senses quite that much, yet. We all go mad.
Mad enough to chase after a phantom, fancying myself some sort of guardian. But the choir trees answered me anyway, with their blank unknowing stares.
And then came that sound of metal. Rhythmic but slow, the ring of a shovel. I followed it, chest pounding in tune to the slide-and-lift of the metal. I traveled on as the sound grew louder, the frequency less. And when it stopped—so did I.
I will never forget that moment, my hand pressed to the rough bark of a pine, seeing—for the first time—the Angel of Argonne.
She stood beneath a tree so large and wide it looked to have tapped into the stores of ancient time, somewhere down under, with its roots. I willed my breath to come quiet, every muscle frozen at the picture before me. White moonlight crowned the girl so that her hair, wild as the wind and dark as the earth she now stood upon, shone like a tangled halo. Unlike any angel the lore of the trenches could have produced. She was breathtaking. And, wonder of wonders, the legends had got one thing right: she wore her feet bare, white against the dark soil.
She was a question mark, there in the dark. An air of rugged innocence that bespoke childhood, but the figure of a young woman, willowy yet strong. She began to speak. Words soft, but certain, mangled with the choke of sorrow. My feet—clumsy things with a mind of their own—took a step, recognizing the voice that had stopped them in their tracks on that first night.
She whirled, hearing the sound of that footfall. Eyes ablaze and shovel held out like a bayonet ready to spear. She had seen me. She had to have, for the way she trained that shovel handle in my direction, unflinching. And yet her gaze did not focus on me. Perhaps she had only heard, and I had a chance of remaining hidden.
I didn’t move.
Not an inch.
The breeze tumbled through the clearing, sending the branches above her clattering, setting her shoulders at ease once more. And with a wary glance around the clearing, she lowered her shovel again.
She knelt, uttering a prayer in all the rolls and rises of French. Though I did not know the words, I knew the voice: grief.
This was a grave. And she, the one who laid wreaths upon countless graves of soldiers unknown to her, was now the gravedigger. The thought tore at me. There were none, perhaps, but me, who knew the source of the wreaths. It tied me to her, drew up a sense of duty to honor that fact.
I watched as she laid down on the earth beside it, drew her knees up in a hug. Her shoulders rose and fell ever so slightly, again and again, peppered with shuddering trills intermittently—the aftermath of those tears. At last her grief-laden breathing fell into a rhythmic repetition of sleep. The voiceless sounds struck me. Even in sorrowful slumber, she sang.
I watched too long, I knew. I had wood to cut, and this was not my story to take part in. Yet I felt that to leave would be to betray that story, somehow. And so those feet carried me right into the middle of it.
I was an intruder. I felt it the closer I drew to the scene before me. I gazed upon it, taking it all in, tucking each memory into a keeping place. In all the world, there should be some soul who helped her keep it. Even if she never knew.
As I turned to go, I paused and beheld the face of the sleeping woman. She was young—eighteen, twenty maybe. Face smudged, streaked where tears had mapped a course through her grief. Who was it, I wondered, buried there beside her? A husband? Sweetheart? Sister? Father? Mother? Whomever it had been, they had meant much to her, and her fingernails were crusted with the earth she had dug with her own two hands to bury them.
And how—how, in all the world—was she here? Her presence beside the bloody front of the war that had torn through the entire world and gouged this land into one gigantic, roping scar made no sense.
There was something otherworldly about her. In my short time in France, I had marched through many villages, passed many farms, seen the dress of those who worked the land. Her clothing, though simple, held a different air. Not fancy—and certainly very worn—but also not like the garb of the people. Her dress seemed of an era decades past, and pooled at her feet. Those feet looked cold, and I glanced away. My eyes fell on the sight of old boots, caked with mud and set with care beside the tree.
Her sleep was one of sorrow, dark brows pressed where there was no relief. The sight of that familiar place of grief planted a longing to give her something. Anything. I had no blanket to cover her form with, though the night was cold and the place where her sleeve revealed the skin above her wrist, gooseflesh standing at attention. I took off my jacket and made to spread its warmth above her—but could not. It was tainted with too much seen, and evidenced that in its smells and smudges. Not fitting for a garment meant to comfort. It offered only loss into loss.
Looking again at the mound of fresh earth, I knew of only one thing I might give. I silently skirted the clearing to gather up supplies, using my knife to clip what I needed. Then, making clumsy work of it, and pulling up all of my stealth training from Plattsburg to steal in, I left my meager offering.
First light was near—I could feel it. There was a crispness to the air before it began, before even the few straggling birds awoke to sing the sun up, if they dared amidst this battle-torn air. And I had no lumber to show for the night’s work. The girl stirred, and everything in me told me I should go now. I obeyed, marking the tree in my mind. It had character to it, that tree. Aged but strong, hovered over the two bodies lying beneath it like a protector. Sentinel, I thought. This was the Sentinel tree.
And the girl . . . I wished I knew her name. It seemed right, to know the name of the woman whose grief I would hold the rest of my life, when no other was there to share it this night. I lingered, staring, willing that name to somehow present itself before me.
The Angel of Argonne—she was human, after all.
I stooped to straighten my misshapen wreath where it lay at the base of the tree, and turned to go, silent as the dark.
“Oy!”
No.
No, no, no.
It was George, tromping through the underbrush with all the restraint of a pig nuzzling for truffles. I waved my arms, motioning for him to be quiet.
“You’ve been holding out on us, bloke!” He pointed at me with his saw, his lopsided grin making to speak again. “This here is the mother of all trees. Or grandfather, rather. Patriarch, monarch, oligarch, and every other sort of arch, I’d wager.”
“We know you would,” Jones said drolly. George’s penchant for gambling had landed him here and we all knew it.
“Shhh!” I pumped my palms toward the forest floor as if the motion could squash their banter. I looked at the girl’s sleeping form. Every bone in her body had to be wrung out, to be sleeping through the chaos of George.
“What?” George hissed in a whisper. “Are there Jerries about?”
I shook my head.
“Wildebeests, then? Wolves? Other fiends of the wildwood?”
My eyeballs nearly bulged out of my head with the silent command I gave him to shut up.
George placed his saw at the base of the Sentinel tree, sizing it up. “That’ll do nicely,” he said. “It’ll take a lot of others to get it back, but we can ask Sarge if—”
I leapt across the clearing, placing myself between him and the tree.
“No one is taking this tree,” I whispered with all the force I could muster. They still hadn’t spotted her.
“He’s right,” Henry said, lowering his voice though he didn’t know why. Good man. “It’s not what we need. We need pliable but strong. And it’s time to get back, anyway, or—”
A frantic rustling sounded, followed by a noise that needed no translation.
The click of a rifle engaging.
I turned slowly and looked into eyes red-rimmed and blue, piercing from her mud-streaked face. And between her and me, like the
dark eyes of a hungry snake sizing me up, were the gaping barrels of an aged weapon.
11
Mira
Sleep lifted from me at first light. I did not wish to wake, nor to face this day. My first, alone. Never again would I slumber beneath the same roof as Grand-père. Never again would I hear him say my name—Mira—he, the only one who called me so. Never again, I was coming to realize, would I see my own father, vanished long away. Loss begat loss.
Parched until my mouth burned, I finally opened my eyes. There, beside me, was Grand-père’s resting place. I knew he was not there, not truly. Only his body. And yet to leave this place felt impossible. Hot tears came, and there was no blistered hand to wipe them away.
So I did. I stood. I wiped my face, my hands smudging with tears and dirt. And then I saw it.
The boughs of pines twined into a circle. Or perhaps more akin to a lopsided oval . . . but there was no mistaking it. A wreath.
Heart racing, I spun, spearing the trees for any sign of life. Who had done this? When none but a passing deer showed themselves, I lifted my own palms, studying them. Was it I? Had I done it in my sleep? It certainly had the appearance of being made by one in a slumber, twigs poking this way and that. Had I departed from my senses, truly? Enough that I could not recollect?
I lifted my palms and smelled them. They did not smell of pine or sap. They were rough and red from the digging, the using of new places not calloused by the wreath twining.
So who . . . ? Who was there to know of Grand-père, to mark his passing?
The old fear came rushing up my bones, my joints, my breathing.
But no. It could not be.
Pressing my eyes closed to dispel from my imaginings the face of the man I thought of, I spoke those words aloud. “Ce ne peut pas être. ” It cannot be. It must not be.
It would not be.
I heard voices—and trained every sense on them. English. Papa told me, when I was young, “Be wary of strangers, Mireilles.” He always used my long name and made it sound like it was full of air and might float away. I made a rhyme of it when he taught me English: My name is Mireilles, and I float away! Papa caught me as I twirled away and smiled beneath his dark moustache.
