The First of July(31)

He expected Pierre Duval to be cross with him, but Pierre went on working until he’d finished what he was doing. Therzon and young Pierre had disappeared. Pierre red-beard had walked a short way down the river and was leaning back against the embankment wall, smoking and talking to two bargees. Marcel was propped against a tree, smoking his stinking pipe. Jean-Baptiste found himself sitting alone.

Pierre Duval reached the top of the steps and picked up the discarded newspaper.

“Therzon’s an idiot,” he said without malice. “Today’s paper only has yesterday’s news. He heard it in a bar when he should have been at work.”

“Will we be called up, do you think?”

“Go home,” said Pierre, much more insistently than he had on the evening the deputy had been murdered. “You’ll be a soldier in weeks. It’s a hard, filthy life. At least fight with the men you know, your friends, the boys you grew up with. Fight for your own and with your own. They’re the only ones worth risking your life for.”

A week later he was in a long, long queue with red-beard Pierre, Marcel, Marcel’s brother, a great ape of a man, and young Pierre. Therzon was nowhere to be seen. Pierre Duval had said gruffly that the authorities could come and find him; he wasn’t queuing in the sun for the Army’s convenience. Nor was he leaving a job uncompleted. He and Loiret, who was back at work though lame now, worked at the bridge the same as ever, and for a week so they all did, but Duval rarely spoke to them. Even with red-beard Pierre, who had always seemed his closest ally, he was merely polite. But when he found out young Pierre was going with them to enlist, he had lost his temper for the first and last time in the many weeks Jean-Baptiste had known him.

“You’re under age,” he said. “You’re a child. You’re not even fully grown—one of us always has to cover for you with the heavy work.”

Young Pierre looked hurt. He bit his lip and his chin trembled slightly.

“You’re no good to the Army and they’re no good for you,” Pierre Duval snapped. “If you want to be killed, then I’m sure you’ll find plenty of opportunities locally.” Then he said “Get out of my sight. I’m sick of all of you.”



The next time Jean-Baptiste saw him was at Douaumont eighteen months later. He was Sergeant Duval of the Grenadiers by then, an old man with a long, ridged scar across his face. Jean-Baptiste didn’t speak to him. He had heard weeks ago that Duval’s son was dead and he didn’t know what to say.





CHAPTER TEN


Frank, London,

August 1914


WAR!

The Reverend Mr. Williams was a prophet, but then it was not hard to see what was coming.

We were all a bit mad with it—excited, frightened; entertained, even. Take your pick.

Isaac didn’t hang around waiting for it to be official. He left his books and the Institute and the piecework in the sweatshop, had a blowup with his brother about it, or so I heard, and went to join up. He was a skinny chap, but with the hours he worked he had to be stronger than he looked. I asked him how he felt about killing Germans, given that we were both in the Young Men’s International League. He didn’t look happy.

“They’ve gone against the spirit of it, that’s the thing,” he said. “I expect there are good working men there who don’t like it any more than I do: German internationalists. I expect there are plenty of them.” He seemed anxious. “Men and women fighting for workers’ justice. Mr. Marx himself was a German.”

He was shaking his head in disbelief, but whether at his hero Mr. Marx being, in the end, a German, or at the Germans betraying their greatest son, I couldn’t tell.

“But then what about poor little Belgium, Frank? Terrible things are happening. I can’t turn my back, although I am thinking that I shall act more in the spirit of defense than attack.”

But he didn’t look very convinced. “And my family—the Army’s good pay and regular. Anyway, we weren’t the ones who started it.” Now he was staring down at his toecap as he rubbed it on the back of his trousers.

Perhaps I’d offended him, because he didn’t come to the Institute again, but I missed his company even though I’d never known him well.

At Debenhams, they gathered us together after work for Mr. Richmond to give us another speech.

“As the great Lord Nelson said” (said Mr. R), “‘England expects every man to do his duty,’ and so do I.” His face was lit with fierce joy. “That is the code of Debenhams. God save the King!”

“God save the King,” we said, a bit awkwardly. When Mr. R had gone, Mr. Hardy told us all to calm down because for the time being we were still taking the Board’s shilling, not the King’s.