by Amanda Dykes
Little Matthieu wriggled against me where he was wrapped so close to my heart. A comfort, in this difficult day.
We were very close, now. It had been a difficult journey, Matthew’s sight only just beginning to emerge. He could see shadows and light, sometimes a little more, when close enough. Colors, the blurred outline of a person. But nothing more. “And you,” he’d told me. “I’ll always see you.”
He was seeing me now, understanding me as we stood at the edge of the woods. Or rather, what was left of the woods. It smelled of cinders and the air was heavy with the story of what had happened here, those weeks of the Meuse-Argonne offensive.
And now it was empty. Splintered remnants of trees sticking into the air, crisscrossing in grotesque fashion. As if a giant had stooped down to lay kindling for a great fire.
“We don’t have to go in,” Matthew said.
“No—it is alright,” I said, infusing my voice with lightness. “That is—unless you do not wish to?”
He was silent for a moment. Searching the horizon as if those blue eyes could see it clearly. Much weighed upon him, here, and I wished I could lift that burden.
“Let’s go,” he said at last.
As we walked, he told me of his first trips into the woods. How he had named the trees as landmarks—the arch tree, the chorus, and of course the Sentinel, which was etched upon my matchbox holder. I laughed, picturing them well, for I knew the trees he spoke of like old friends.
We neared my old clearing, and through a few still-standing trees, I saw it—three walls standing, one broken into bits. Looking wide-eyed and forlorn at me through windows whose glass had been blown in, as if it asked, What has happened to me?
“It will be alright,” I whispered to my little chalet. My heart ached. I knew something of what that felt like. “You will see.”
“Did you say something?” Matthew asked. What would he say to me talking to a house?
“It was nothing,” I said with a small laugh. “Only nonsense. Here,” I said, guiding him. “Here is the lantern tree. At least—I think it is. It is difficult to say, with so many of them gone.”
He reached out and felt the bark of it.
He knew what I wished to do here. I’d told him my hope one night, in the château, knowing it was perhaps silly. But he had only said, “It’s perfect.”
I reached into his haversack now, pulling out three items: a small lantern; a candle to set inside of it; and my brass matchbox, its lone wooden stick tumbling about inside, awaiting its moment to shine.
“It is time,” I reminded myself, feeling the ache in my chest begin to burn. I had not thought it would be this hard, after so long since Papa had disappeared.
“Mon papillon.” He had called me. “You keep the fire lit now, yes?”
I had promised . . . and so I was here. With the final match, ready to lay that hope to rest, ready to let him rest in peace, wherever in this war-torn land he had breathed his last.
My hand shook as I plucked up that last match. My heart rent to the sound of it scraping against its box, so worn from its journey, so safe in its brass cuff.
I would light the candle. We would linger and let it burn down. Speak of memories. Tell little Matthieu of his own grand-père, my papa. Let my Matthew know of him, too, this gift of a good and wonderful father, the sort of father I could already see in Matthew. Sadness choked my words at first, but soon the warmer thoughts came, and with them, it was easier to speak. Of Grand-père and Papa’s nightly battle over who would sleep upon the floor. Of Grand-père’s carvings, of Papa dancing with me in the clearing, of the way he stirred the coals of the hearth fire three times in a circle every time he took up the poker, like the habit was an old friend.
I watched the white candle accept the flame of the match, surging into life against the white winter sky. Its small trail of smoke twirled up to mingle with the puff of breath from little Matthieu, and I thought, How good. Light, and life.
Tears came. There was one thing yet to do.
I unwrapped Matthieu from his muslin sling and settled him into Matthew’s arms. “I will return very soon,” I said. He knew where I was going and sensed, I think, that I needed to do it alone.
It was hard to find green for the wreath. Most of the trees were obliterated or singed. But a few very old trees remained, and a few very new saplings, as well. It took long, for I had to travel farther out than I had thought. When I returned, my boys were gone, and the pleasant smell of chimney fire summoned me to the cottage as it had so many times in my youth.
I did not know if I wanted to step inside. It felt—too hard. And something felt strange in the air. Matthew had managed to build a fire somehow—it did not surprise me, for how clever and quick he was in learning to work around his limits. If he could do that, then surely I could find strength to enter my old home.
I approached my little chalet that had for so long been a place of magic and hope, dreams and good things. Even now, in its broken state, it offered curls of smoke from the chimney, and if I tried, I could imagine it was like old times. Coming home on Christmas Day with an armful of firewood, warming my hands around a bowl of soup, laughing and singing with my family.
But when I stepped inside, it was not laughing or singing that met my ears.
It was a long string of French, in a low but firm voice.
I froze, listening. Had gypsies or soldiers left behind taken up residence? Refugees, perhaps?
Matthew spoke, then. “Sir, I’m afraid I don’t understand your words, but—” The sound of the old fire poker, or perhaps a stick, raking agitatedly through the fire’s coals. Around and around and around.
I could not see who did the raking—it must be Matthew. The raking stopped, and so did his speaking. I knew that way of his. He stopped himself just so whenever a sudden idea took hold. I could hear his mind turning. “You know, I once was told of a man who told his daughter not to let on if she knew another language. English, for example.”
Me. He was speaking of me. What was he about?
“He told her it would give her great power, a secret like that.”
The man did not speak. I ventured a glance around the wall that blocked my view and saw a tall man, clothes plain and worn but clean. His back was toward me, and he held what was left of the old fire poker still.
He listened.
As if he understood every word that Matthew said.
And Matthew, my Matthew, still cradling the babe—he understood it too. I saw it in the way his mouth tried to smile, but he stopped it. His own masquerade, just to be sure.
My heart pounded in my chest.
If he was right . . .
“I wish I could meet that man,” Matthew said. “I have much to thank him for. And much to tell him. Such as . . .” He glanced my way, and his smile, warm and gentle, broke loose. “Such as where his daughter is.”
The man dropped the fire poker altogether, letting it clatter to the ground. Reaching out, as if to convince himself that what Matthew said was true, he laid a bony hand upon Matthew’s arm and uttered a single, husky word.
“Where.” Choked, nearly, in desperate need to know.
Matthew reached out a hand and pointed.
The man turned.
Our eyes met, mine brimming with hot tears. His, lined in memories he would never speak. Creased by war, brows lifting upward in desperate defiance to see the one thing he had traveled years for. Hope.
And I fell into the arms of my Papa.
Here in a room where I could introduce him to his grandson, to a son by marriage . . . and where we would talk long into the night, telling him a tale of hope in the darkest of nights.
Together, in the morning, we four left the little chalet. We walked past an empty lantern, where only a pool of spent wax testified that light had burned long into the night. We left the forest, arm in arm.
Out of the shadows . . . and into the reaching light.
Epilogue
Matthew
October 24, 1921
Chalons-sur-Marne, France
It was George who had cabled us. He addressed it to Henry and me, going on and on—on a cable, of all places—about the ceremony that was to take place back in France.
BLOKES COME. YOU MUST. OR ELSE. I WILL PAY. RICHEST SORRY PAUPER OF A CURATE WHO EVER LIVED, BEING INDEPENDENTLY WEALTHY IN MONEY AND ENTIRELY IMPOVERISHED IN SPIRITUAL MATTERS THAT I CONTINUE TO LEARN IN. ONE OF THEM IS: WE GATHER FOR IMPORTANT TIMES. I BROOK NO ARGUMENT. I AM PAYING. YOU ARE COMING. BRING WIVES AND IMPS TOO. SEVENTEENTH BAND!
They had taken soldiers from four unmarked battlefield graves and placed them with care in caskets. One would be chosen by a fellow soldier, transported with great solemnity and care, aboard the USS Olympia, back to Washington. He—the fallen, unknown soldier—would lie in state in the rotunda of our nation’s very capitol until the eleventh day of the eleventh month: Armistice Day. And then he would be entombed and honored, forever, in our national cemetery. Any could visit. Any could pay honor. Any mother, father, widow, child, brother, soldier, friend—and wonder, Is he mine? The question mark a gift to grieving hearts. A tribute to the thousands and thousands of lives given.
None of us spoke it. But we all thought it. Is it him? Jasper Truett had been laid to rest in a battlefield, alongside his men.
So we came. We gathered, as George the Unlikely Curate had said. We watched in somber respect as the rose bouquet was laid upon a casket, the soldier chosen. We would never, ever know the true identity—but just the possibility that it was him was enough. Just the knowledge that whomever it was . . . that life would continue to bring solace. Healing. Hope. And to be a symbol to receive a nation’s gratitude. Guarded, always. Protected, no matter what.
It was somber, weighty. I saw a thousand faces in my memory as we witnessed the ceremony, and so did every soldier there. We would never forget.
George took us to a café afterward that served olives, Welsh rarebit, and Brioche. By special arrangement, we later learned.
Mira chased the little ones—Matthieu and our son Franz, named for her Papa. They led her in a chase around a fountain in the village, and I recalled another fountain, the first on our journey. Before she had spoken a single word to us in English, looking haunted and alone.
How far she had come. How far each of us, how different from the men we had been.
Henry, writing volumes of books from his farmhouse after he finished long days of haying, urged on by his wife, a certain plucky nurse who was mother to my niece and nephew, home with them now.
And down the hill from Henry and Celia’s Virginia farm, a man whose sight had returned slowly, if imperfectly, found his way back to his beginnings and began a small horse farm. Mira and I walked in our field each evening as the sun slipped down and the moon rose. This homeland of ours, the night. Where our souls had met and mingled, where we had learned the gifts of the difficult places. We loved to watch our boys race their cousins in our humble arena and never once thought of raking over the tracks of such joy. Here, their grand-père gave chase, whenever he was not otherwise occupied with his own garden and woodworking, in his home that was built onto ours. He had seen years upon years of war. He and I—we were grateful, I think. To be understood without needing to speak of these things that would never leave us.
George happily served a small village chapel, St. Thomas’s in East Sussex, where he’d recently engaged himself to a farmer’s daughter by the name of Sally Rivers, whom he extolled incessantly as “the Princess of Pevensey Bay” and who adored him with a boundless affection that rivaled his own. He liked to say his most faithful congregants were the sheep of the fields, the caves in the cliffs, and a handful of friendly fisherman and farm folk. He had found his calling, he said, and was devoted to it with everything he had.
Chester Hasenpfeffer had arrived at the ripe old age of eighteen, at last. He currently served, to his family’s great pride, and thanks to a “good word” put in by a certain former employee, at Harvard University. He worked in the kitchens, cooking up stews and sitting in on classes, smelling of onions and carrots and peppering the professors with approximately two thousand questions per day. He was going places, according to the general consensus in the auspices of the faculty room, where “Hasenpfeffer stories” also provided happily humorous atmosphere whenever needed.
All of it—every bit—we could trace in some way to Captain Jasper Truett. To that dark night season and the way it, in all its awful brokenness, gave birth to a light so rare and precious we would never take it for granted.
After the ceremony, we ventured to the place it all began—the hush of the Argonne. Mira and I, we took the boys to the cottage, which was little more than an empty shanty now, bits of it broken by war and by time. I watched her for heartache but saw only magic spark in her eyes. She was seeing it as it had been . . . and seeing where it had led, for each of us.
And we three, the Seventeenth Band, we clipped pine boughs from young growth and twisted them up into two wreaths: one for the resting place of Grand-père, and one for the hollow tree that had been the site of the giving of life.
We would venture once more to Paris before returning home. Stop to see Sister Marion and the Château Fontinelle, which Mira and her papa and her great-aunt Sophia had given in trust to the Jour de Soleil Sisters and their good work. They reserved a single room for us, if ever we should want to come and stay. The library.
It swallowed me up, sometimes, the reality of it all. My hand still took to trembling at times. And Mira—who had been through it all right along with us—she spun that song of hers into the night, reminding me . . .
There was life, there in the dark.
Author’s Note
In the centennial anniversary year
of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
Perched on a hill overlooking our nation’s capital, a sentinel walks. Steady and sure, day and night, rain, shine or hurricane.
Twenty-one steps. Pause, twenty-one silent seconds. Measured turn. Twenty-one steps in the opposite direction. Repeat.
A constant patrol meant to echo, endlessly, the twenty-one-gun salute . . . the highest honor rendered in military tradition.
At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery, the tomb guards take meticulous care in preparing their uniforms: brushing, sanding, shining each element until it reaches perfection. Pleats pressed, medals measured meticulously. It can take up to twelve hours just to prepare for each shift.
And then, their watch begins. With each turn, the rifle is shifted to the outside shoulder, the guard always placing themself between the weapon and the soldiers, who have known enough of weapons.
I witnessed this richly symbolic ceremony in fall 2019. It was just me and the tomb and the guard, at first. And then, people began to filter in to witness the changing of the guard, the laying of the wreath. I had begun research for this book, and as I watched the utmost care play out before me in every painstaking detail, I couldn’t help thinking of the trenches. What the soldier of the Great War endured. Could he ever have imagined, in his darkest moments, such a resting place as this? Untouched by gunfire, mud, or gruesome things . . . a place marked by quiet, white-marbled peace? Sentinels who’ve sworn a creed to “walk my tour in humble reverence,” their very lives dedicated to honoring their brothers in arms? Were ever there two more opposite places than the death-laden trenches and this final resting place?
Echoes of that stark, beautiful contrast live in every part of his journey to Arlington: When he lay in state in the capitol rotunda, crowds lined up, four abreast for blocks, to have a chance to pay respects. When it came time for his procession from the capitol all the way to the cemetery, people lined Pennsylvania Avenue, “they flowed like a tide over the slopes about his burial place; they choked the bridges that lead across the river to the fields of the brave,” according to Kirke L. Simpson’s Pulitzer–Prize winning coverage from 1921. These s
ame crowds—people in the thousands—joined in reverent recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, a resounding-yet-hushed benediction over this “forgotten” man, then in the words of the faithful hymn:
“Rock of Ages . . .” They sang of a strong place, unshakable. Far from the mire of the trenches.
“Cleft for me . . .” A savior broken, laid down, for this one who knew sacrifice, too.
“Let me hide myself in thee . . .” Refuge. Safe and secure, eternal.
The hymn washed over all of Arlington that day in an air of still, hushed reverence.
Artillery. Cavalry. Marine band. Choir. The rare bestowing of a Congressional Medal of Honor and Distinguished Service Cross. A procession led by the President, General Pershing, Supreme Court Justices, and members of Congress. Dignitaries from England, France, Italy, and more bestowed their respective country’s high-honor medals. And perhaps the higher honor: flowers from war mothers who would not see their sons again.
When all the speeches were made, all the medals laid, all the songs sung and prayers prayed . . . he was laid at last to rest there in the place that had been prepared for him, upon a bit of soil brought from France, and within walls etched with these words:
Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.
As dark fell over the capital city . . . the lights began. Illumination of a jeweled arch ignited by search lights, the Washington Monument lighted to give the effect of strands of light from top to bottom, search lights from its top as well as from the Capitol building crisscrossing in the night sky.
All this light. Blanketing one who had known more darkness than we can imagine.
It strikes me so deeply. For the symbolism of it all, for the lives lived and lives lost and redemption so present in the honor shown. And, I think, for the way it echoes our own stories, too.
Places of dark, being pulled from the mire, being carried away to a place of safety and peace. Like the soldier. Like Mira, Matthew, Jasper, Henry, and George, each in their own way. Each coming to be known, and to be held. The shadows of the past never glossed over, but treated with such care, the scars allowed to tell stories, but cherished in a healing way, too.
