The First of July(67)

“Fix bayonets,” Folz shouted and Jean-Baptiste fumbled, suddenly short of room. Despite the cold, his hands were slippery. Finally the bayonet slipped into place. He allowed himself to think of his mother as he crouched, certain that the discomfort of it all would soon be over. He chose to see her pulling up leeks by the canal with black earth speckling her apron and the clogs she still wore for tending her vegetables. She stood to see him and smiled, her eyes crinkling as she tried to make him out against the sun, and she mopped her face with her apron corner.

“Go! Go! Go!” Folz was shouting, waving them out to the left. He could see tiny gray figures moving in small groups toward them, rifles raised, and there was Aspirant Collinette, lying on his back, his head at the edge of the defile, broken twigs lying on him, his arms by his side as if he’d been laid out.

The trench here had been blown open. He ran, crouched low, directly behind another stooped figure. The ground was still residually frozen and uneven; he nearly fell into a fresh crater, but dodged to the side just in time. Simenon, level with him, had a grenade out and was pulling the pin. He wanted to tell him to watch out for the hole, but the noise made him mute; Simenon went head-first into the crater and blew up.

Jean-Baptiste jumped over a blue-uniformed back: somebody from the reserves who’d gotten ahold of the new uniform. Wasted. As he looked down, something massive hit him—blew all the breath out of his body. This was death, he thought. But it was the great weight of Sergeant Folz, thrown backward. They both lay on the ground, but Jean-Baptiste scrambled free, still fighting to breathe. Folz’s whole leg was gone. Jean-Baptiste thought for a minute that it was folded under him but no, it was visible a meter away. Or, at least, someone’s leg was.

Folz opened a remaining eye. “What are you staring at, you numbskull? Keep moving or you’ll be fucking killed.”

So he moved into the thin metallic thread of noise and the fatter, ground-shaking explosions, the surprised “oofs” of the falling, and sounds like seagulls and of pigs being slaughtered, and he could see some shapes ahead of him but were they French or Germans and the ground became more bodies than mud, and under his boots things cried out. Then there was a German, within touching distance; where the hell had he come from? Both of them paused but Jean-Baptiste’s bayonet got the soldier in one of Folz’s approved spots—into the neck. It sank in—not at all like into a sandbag—and ground against something solid. The man, old enough to be his father, gurgled and a hand came up and Jean-Baptiste pulled, then was frantic when the blade wouldn’t come away. “Lunge, forward, in, out,” Folz had shouted. “Easy! Clean!” The German soldier tried to grasp the blade and twisted on it, blood was everywhere, but then at last he fell back and off the bayonet.

To his far left Jean-Baptiste saw a small group of Germans, stationary, with some equipment. With a roar that he could hear, even over the exchanges of fire, a great spout of flame belched out and he watched it search for a target, suddenly remembering Lucien Laporte busy burning ants. The flame engulfed two Frenchmen, but he was too far away to see if the writhing, blackening soldiers had been his comrades.

And then, finally, it happened: he heard nothing, saw nothing, but he was on the ground too, a little shocked, not with a sharp pain but as if a great gust of wind had hurled him down. His ears were ringing and he felt that he was gasping like a landed fish. There was only a very little room for each breath. He tried not to panic, to take tiny sips of air. Either the sky or his eyesight was blurred, and he had a fancy that he was looking down on himself and that he had been blown right into the earth, planted into the mud. He blinked several times; his crotch was warm and his shoulder hurt but he reached down, gingerly, with tentative fingertips toward the fiery center of what he now was and found naked skin and the thick wetness he feared, and his fingers went into a sodden space that was horribly unfamiliar, then he looked to his side and there, next to him, was Doré, looking at him through slitted eyes, his mouth in a small “O” but no more exhalation of fish, and death had swept both of them to him in one loving embrace.





CHAPTER TWENTY


Frank, France,

March 1916


ONE THING YOU LEARN ABOUT war is that, like most sports, it is more or less seasonal. Summer is the time for the big events. Winter is the slow season, mostly spent fighting the weather, and everyone gets back in training in spring. But this March was bitter. The French were dying in all kinds of hell to the southeast, but we Empire boys were, in a manner of speaking, waiting. It was exercises by day when we weren’t digging, patrols by night. Fritz must have heard us crunching through the puddles of ice, but he obviously couldn’t be bothered to come out of his cozy nook and shoot us. You could smell his sausages cooking.