She turned away again and with some relief he watched her start to walk away.
“A shame,” she said, half turning. “He’s dying. The German boy. Very agitated for a while, but quiet now. He’s had the priest—unfortunately Father Clément is a very patriotic Catholic, and for all we know the child’s a Lutheran—but—” She made a small face of regret. “It would have been nice for him to have heard someone speak in his own language.”
“I could try,” he said, after a few seconds, and felt deep unease.
The administrator took him to the German boy. He was in a tiny side room, on his own but under no kind of guard, but then he wasn’t going anywhere except to the angels. His head was bandaged, and his pallor and grayish lips gave him the look of a corpse, so much so that, not seeing any movement of his chest, Vignon reached out and felt for a pulse in his neck. The boy’s eyelashes were long and black and his eyes sunk in deep purple bruises. As he felt the thready pulse under his fingers still just keeping the boy in the world of the living, his sticky lips moved. Vignon reached over to a bowl of water, took a square of lint that lay beside it, and dripped a little moisture on to them. He thought the boy might be trying to speak, and he said “Wie heisst du?”
The lips kept moving, but the response might well have been the last spasms of a failing system. There was a stool by the bed. Vignon sat down on it and took the boy’s hand in his; it was very soft and young, hairless, almost a woman’s hand. He looked behind him, but the doorway was empty. He could hear pigeons on the cloister roof. He rotated his shoulders in an attempt to ease his aching neck, but kept his eyes on the boy all the time.
“Vater unser im Himmel,” he began. “Geheiligt werde dein Name, Dein Reich komme. Dein Wille geschehe… .”
He was whispering, the words taking him back to his own childhood, kneeling next to his mother.
The boy, the child, whose hand he held appeared to hear nothing, gazing at Vignon. How could one believe in a God any longer?
“Ihre Mutter soll sein …” he said. “Ihre Mutti …” Then as he started to form the word stolz, proud, he felt anger rising: his mother would be proud? No. His mother would be heartbroken. With her child dead—his mother would be finished.
And then he leaned forward, his fingers and thumb slowly massaging the boy’s knuckles, as he sang, very low, “Schlaf, mein Kindlein, schlaf… .”
And the next time he felt for the pulse, it and the boy had left him.
Just for a minute he sank his head into his hands, abominably weary, abominably old. But he had work to do. He pushed himself up, using the metal bed as a support, and turned as he heard a noise. To his dismay, a nurse stood in the doorway. He thought she had tears in her eyes.
“I came to take over,” she said hesitantly.
“Death has taken over, mademoiselle.”
“Oh,” she said, her glance moving to the dead boy. “I’ll tell Sister.” Her voice was uneven and she looked genuinely sad. “He was ever so young. Even if he was the enemy.”
He bowed slightly as he left the room, but as he passed her she said “Where did you learn German so well?” And then as he felt a quickening sense of alarm she added, like an eager schoolgirl, “I know some words, but I can’t put them together.”
He was formulating an answer when she said, quite simply, “It was beautiful.”
He returned to the ward, taking half a dozen files with their skimpy notes. Although he was unable to translate some of the words, the diagrams of injuries and procedures were as clear in English as they were in French. He selected the injured soldiers who would be loaded onto the French hospital barge to transfer them to Abbeville. One further patient clearly had consumption and Vignon added him to the list, but for transfer to the sanatorium in Paris. As he signed the administrator’s forms, she smiled at him for the first time.
“That was a great kindness, with our German boy,” she said. “I’d quite misunderstood; I gather you have excellent German. Nurse Campbell said you were a great comfort.”
He refrained from saying that the shattered soldier had been far beyond comfort.
Then he went back to the cloisters. He thought of the German mother who didn’t know yet that she had no son. He wanted a long look at the French soldier. He stood at the foot of the bed and, this time, without an onlooker to scrutinize his reactions.
“Jean-Baptiste,” he said and, unlike the dying German, the soldier’s eyes flicked open immediately, although he looked blankly at the man standing nearby. Vignon moved to one side, so that he was more than just a silhouette against the light.