The First of July(101)

His hearing was improving. A blood-smeared doctor told him he’d lost a great deal of blood. His right wrist had been shattered and would need setting, and a piece of shrapnel had taken a large swath of muscle from his upper arm. They would put a pressure bandage on but leave it unstitched to reduce the risk of infection. It looked clean, he said, but time would tell. A nurse strapped up the arm, biting her lower lip. Dark shadows shaped her white face, and ginger curls escaped from her crumpled veil.

“What’s your name?” Benedict said, just for something to say. She didn’t look up.

“Louise.”

An orderly gave Benedict two cups of strong tea, filled his water bottle, and told him to walk back to the rear.

“You won’t be doing any more gunnery for a while, sir. If ever. One for Blighty, I shouldn’t wonder.”

He was lucky and got a lift, squeezed on the tailgate of a lorry, where he held on with his good arm and tried not to be sick. He reported to an unfamiliar and distracted C.O., before going to an aid post. Again he asked for help for the cyclist, but the C.O. didn’t even seem to hear him. “Jesus Christ. What a bloody mess,” he kept saying.

At the casualty clearing station, there were more doctors but so many men waiting, so many almost-tidy rows of injured lying on the ground, as if abandoned, as gray as the blankets covering them, so many soldiers staring into space, that all he wanted to do was run. Pain, his and theirs, eddied around him, searing his flesh and crushing his joints. He heard himself groan. Then he turned away. He was going home, to Harmony Cottage. If Theo was there, well, they were now equal. He just wanted to be back at the filthy shack where he had once been as happy as he had ever known. The pad on his arm was getting wetter. He touched it and his fingers came away sticky. He wiped them on his breeches. It was hot, he was hot, the air smelled purple. He thought of the man in the field and hoped he was dead by now.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX


Jean-Baptiste, France,

July 1, 1916, Afternoon


BY 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.