Jean-Baptiste, France,
July 1, 1916, Afternoon
B
Y LATE AFTERNOON, THE OVERHEAD
sun was hot, a blue-gray haze lying at lower levels to the east. Jean-Baptiste considered his situation, wondering if it would be safer to wait and travel across the kilometer or so of field by darkness; but on balance he thought he might be less likely to be shot by day than by night. Night patrols were always twitchy. On his first patrol, a man named Dubois had nearly gotten them killed when he shot at a rat—drawing German fire on them. The lieutenant had hit Dubois across the face.
He was barefoot on the sharp, dry grass, covered in mud and without food. The river reappeared; water swirled past, pieces of debris rotating slowly in the current. He had swum in it more times than he could remember; once he could work out exactly where he was, he could pick a relatively narrow spot where the current was in his favor. But then to his surprise, not far ahead, set back from the water by fifty meters or so, was a good-sized farmstead, or what remained of one, a ruin, but substantial nevertheless. He watched it for a while from behind a stump of blighted bushes, hoping no one was inside. Even so, as he finally stood up, he raised his hands in the air. He moved toward it slowly, stumbling across a wide strip of weeds, sorrel and bright-yellow groundsel, half expecting to hear the crack of a rifle. As he got closer, he saw broken paving stones sprouting buddleia, alive with butterflies—tiny Citron, Vulcain, and the patterned russet one the schoolmaster had called Robert-le-Diable. One misshapen apple tree survived in what he thought must once have been an orchard. It was as if he had stumbled into an oasis, the memory of how things used to be overwhelming the evidence of how it was now.
The farmyard was chaos: broken pallets, carts without wheels, a well with its handle missing. He guessed the Army had taken all the iron. If he could find a bucket and a length of rope, he could let it down for water. But when he threw a stone over the rim, it took several seconds to hit water. Too deep. He went up to a stone trough and peered at the flies and the decaying barn owl floating just below the surface. Finally, by the ruin of a wash-house, he found a pump that delivered a small amount of rusty water to fill his bottle.
He stood up. Better to approach the house openly, as if he had nothing to hide. The front door had been removed, and part of it lay on the ground. As he walked up to it, he hesitated, then halted. He looked upward above the splintered door frame. The collision of his old life and the one that had sucked him up hit him like a shockwave. The entwined initials of Godet’s nephew and his prize of a wife were still there. He turned around and, as he gazed across the yard in the direction he’d just come from, he recognized exactly where he was. He had stood on this doorstep before.
He entered the dark hall, avoiding clods of ceiling plaster and broken boards, and passed into what must once have been the kitchen. The range was full of debris: straw and mummified starlings and broken glass. There were empty tin cans on the floor and a stained horsehair mattress with a single battered metal bowl beside it. A solid-looking table top lay on its side by the low window. He was reassured by the dust that no one had been there recently. The shelves were empty, some shards of earthenware pots scattered on the flagstones. At some point, someone had lit a fire in the center of the room. He was not the first person who had sheltered here.
He went through into the back room. It was empty but for a truckle cot, a filthy blanket, and some rags. He decided that if he could find clean water, he would rest there. The stairs looked safe although damaged, and he climbed them, thinking that he might get a view of his surroundings, might even see Corbie from an upstairs window. When he reached the landing, he understood why the departed occupant had had a bed downstairs. Clearly the house had been hit by a stray shell that had taken off the upper rear of the building, or possibly it had been destroyed deliberately to act as a lookout post or a gun emplacement. He had seen cottages used that way on the Marne, the villagers weeping as their homes and their lives were torn apart. Perhaps a thousand meters away, there might be a road with vehicles and horses and gun carriages moving unevenly up to the front line and, shuffling the other way, wounded men.
Then he turned around. Scraps of floral wallpaper hung from the walls, and a prim iron fireplace was all that was left of a chimney, bar some sooty brickwork. There was a smashed washbowl on the floor, decorated with forget-me-nots. Extraordinarily, he could stand among these fragments of domesticity, remember the soft lips and the delicacy of young Madame Godet, and think that she had slept up here, once, right here, with her hair loose, sharing a bed with her pale, pompous husband. Yet just a few kilometers away, he could hear the unmistakable sounds of a continuing attack, and he shivered. He slid down the wall to the floor. Maybe he could stay here. Maybe he could wait out the war. A month, a year: however long it took. He could fish by night, catch eels and snare rabbits. He could eat sorrel and blueberries and apples. He could lie curled up in the corner, centimeters from where she had lain; he would watch the wallpaper roses by day, the stars by night, and go downstairs only when it rained.
He can see himself from above: a speck on a map. There he is; around him, like armor, is Godet’s house. This is in clear focus. Beside that, the river, then Corbie; to either side, the waterlands. He pulls back: there is Amiens. Around the edges of his map, the detail gets hazy: somewhere east, tiny figures fighting; somewhere west, lines of breakers rolling.
A single large explosion. This one was closer at hand: loud enough for him to put out a hand to brace himself instinctively against a wall, and for dust and plaster to float down from the broken brickwork. He could see the road that had been hit. A plume of smoke rose upward. All traffic in either direction had stopped. Tiny figures were spreading out into the fields, and a lone horse galloped wildly away from the damage. He walked into a smaller bedroom, keeping to the shelter of the wall. This room, although also roofless, was less damaged than the one he’d just left, and it faced south. The window frame was still in place, though missing all its glass, and he stood beside it, listening. He could hear the sound of an approaching barge, coming downstream. He saw the red cross on its roof and then the stretchers. It was low in the water, moving slowly, the foredeck crammed with wounded men. Some covered, some half naked, they made a dismal sight, as if the vessel’s freight were corpses.
He was so focused on the boat that, when it had passed, it was a shock to see that in midstream, to his left, was a long, thin island, some willows and long grass still growing upon it, and just visible on the far side another small farmstead and beyond it, unmistakably, the rooftops of Corbie. It overwhelmed him: he felt a tightness in his chest, and he squeezed shut his stinging eyes while the world around him reeled. For a second, he didn’t dare open them—was Corbie just ruins? Had his imagination seen what it once had known, not what was there now? But when he looked again, the stone mass of Corbie’s ancient abbey, and the gray and red roofs, were still there.
He walked down the stairs, keeping to the wall, then through the kitchen and on out into the yard. When he saw the man standing just a few meters away, leaning against the farther arch, he jumped back. The man was facing the river and seemed to be armed with something that Jean-Baptiste could not at first identify but feared was a flame-thrower; various bits of metalwork were visible on either side of him. From the back he looked like a strange sort of insect. He wore the uniform of a British corporal. Jean-Baptiste straightened his muddy cotton jacket. He called out, not wanting to surprise an armed serviceman, even one of France’s allies. He had heard of deserters shooting civilians on their own side.
But the man gave no sign that he’d heard him at all. Was he waiting for something on the river? Eventually Jean-Baptiste moved toward him; but even when he was only an arm’s length from the man, he did not turn around. Instinctively Jean-Baptiste moved to the right so that he could approach the soldier from the side, again seeking not to startle him, letting himself appear in his eyeline rather than tapping him on the shoulder.
He drew level and finally stood in front of him. The corporal looked like a dead man. He held his body like a monster in a children’s story, his face strangely immobile, his eyes unfocused, his pupils huge. His lips and nose were blistered with sunburn and he was covered in tiny cuts, dirt, and, farther down, dark blood. Jean-Baptiste put up a hand in greeting but withdrew it immediately, realizing that the apparatus he had taken for a weapon was, in fact, part of a damaged folding bicycle strapped on the corporal’s back. As he drew closer, he could also see that both of the man’s hands were behind him, clasping the sides of the cycle, taking its weight, and were covered in blood.
He approached him slowly. Talking, all the time. “Let’s get this off,” and “Don’t worry. I’m here now.”
Meanwhile his own heart missed a beat. Parts of the machine were embedded in the man’s flesh: he could see that now. People said that if you were stabbed, sometimes it was only the knife staying put that kept you from bleeding to death. But until the bicycle was off him, this man could not lie down. Sooner or later he would collapse and the metal be driven farther through him, and until then he was condemned to stay upright.
But how to part them? He uncurled his fists and undid the holding strap. The machine began to fall away with its own weight, and he could imagine it tearing at the man’s flesh. The soldier gave a terrible groan as if his entrails were coming out and sagged, heavily, into his arms. There was no return now. The machine crashed to the ground and the sight of clots of blood on the brake handle made him feel giddy for a second. The cyclist’s legs finally folded under him, and Jean-Baptiste caught him around the waist. He dragged the man across the yard, feeling a burning in his own damaged muscles. As he did so, he became aware of warm, wet blood and the smell of urine. He laid him on the mattress on the kitchen floor. The man was trembling but unconscious. Jean-Baptiste fetched the soldier’s pack from outside. He opened the man’s tunic and blood-sodden shirt, then took out his knife, cut through his vest, and looked down. The blood was coming from small puncture wounds: one, to the left, looked deep and had penetrated under his ribs. He turned him partly on to his side, though it evidently caused him pain. The edges of the wound caused by the bicycle had rolled inward and the cut was thin, slender enough for a bayonet.
He took the metal bowl out to the pump to get water to clean the injuries, and when he returned the soldier’s eyes were flickering. He set down the bowl, wiped the blood off the man’s mouth, and poured a little water into it. The man retched almost immediately, but Jean-Baptiste was relieved, and quite surprised, that there was no blood in it. The second time he lifted the bowl, the man actually drank a little. His eyes opened and then closed. He muttered something incomprehensible. Jean-Baptiste shook his head. Military cyclists usually had their machines strapped on their backs when they weren’t using them. But then what? A shell, he guessed. A massive blast, at that. Why hadn’t the shock killed him? How far had he walked in that condition, how much dirt was in his wounds? Émilie had told him it was the dirt, not the shell fragment or bullet, that made your leg go black and stink; that was what killed you. Dr. Vignon’s hands were raw from scrubbing.
He turned to the man’s pack, hoping it would contain a field dressing or something that he could use to cover the deeper wound, which continued to ooze black blood. Then he remembered Vignon’s lotion. The one he was to use if his own wounds opened up. It was, miraculously, still in his pocket and unbroken; but what he pulled out with it made his stomach lurch. Next to it were his papers. Sodden. He eased them out of the envelope. They were legible only in one corner. Vignon had written in ink, and Jean-Baptiste had fallen in the marshes. He stared down at them and realized that his sole officially justified reason for returning to Corbie had as good as been eradicated.
The soldier was watching him, he thought. His eyes were certainly open. Jean-Baptiste pulled the cork out with his teeth. The smell took him straight back to the hospital at Royaumont; it reached the back of his throat. He looked at the label:
Solution Carrel-Dakin
, it said.
For wound irrigation.
He poured a little into the deeper injury, which made the soldier start, and patted it on the other injuries until the bottle was empty. Then he gave the man a drink and was glad when he took a mouthful and swallowed.
Once he’d done all he could, he sat back on his heels. He was tired and his side ached; his feet were already cut and sore. It was all very well getting the injured man under cover, but he urgently needed help. If he set out to Corbie now, where the British were, if he could get across the river, he could fetch assistance. If the man lived that long. He looked at the soldier’s wrist for identification but, finding nothing, remembered his sergeant saying the British wore their names around their necks. Feeling slightly awkward, he felt for a plaque and found a cord, but nothing hung from it.
Jean-Baptiste slipped his hand into first one pocket of the corporal’s uniform and then the other, but all he found was a small notebook, its pages crammed with writing—handwriting, mostly in pencil and in English so it might as well have been written by a pharaoh. He turned to the pack. Empty water bottle, a waterproof cape, rolled-up bindings. In a side pocket there was, finally, an identification disc. Isaac Meyer, it said.
He touched the corporal, who appeared to be asleep, put the man’s own rain cape over him, then the grimy blanket, and left him. He walked back across the yard, remembering the last time he had left, with old Godet muttering under his breath following him to the cart. He thought of stolid old Mabelle, the chestnut who had pulled it. Long since eaten, he assumed.