The First of July(83)

“The priest said we might have ruined this venerable old instrument by our sudden violation. That it isn’t being maintained these days. So I explained that you were the chief organist of the famous St. Paul’s Cathedral and I your pupil until I was injured in battle. That you had played for the King before departing for France and that in a break in hostilities we had hurried here to see the wondrous instrument of which so many great men had spoken.”

Now the older man spoke directly to Benedict.

“He wants to know if you found it as you hoped,” Theo said. The priest added another apparently earnest statement.

“Say something, for God’s sake,” said Theo.

Benedict’s mind was blank. “Say the organ was beautiful, then,” he finally managed to say. “Apologize. Thank you. I mean, thank him.”

Theo spoke and then translated. “I’ve told him that you will return to the battlefield strengthened in fortitude and vigor to assist in the liberation of the great heritage of France. The priest is going to pray for us, although he very much regrets that we are not Roman Catholics.”

The four men stood awkwardly and then, with a slight bowing of heads, the two Frenchmen walked away.

They moved to follow them, with Benedict saying “Why on earth did you—?” when another figure rose from his seat in the side chapel. As he eased himself between the pews and moved in and out of a shaft of light, Benedict could see that it was a French officer who had obviously been listening to the exchanges.

The officer put out a hand.

“Vignon,” the Frenchman said. “Captain Vignon, military surgeon. How do you do?”

Now the officer held Benedict’s hand with both of his, almost as if pleading.

“Thank you,” the Frenchman said in English. He cleared his throat and then again, “Thank you,” still holding Benedict’s hand. “An Wasserflüssen… .” For a split second Benedict’s mind struggled to grasp why he was being spoken to in German, and then he realized that it was simply the name of the piece he had been playing: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept.”

The officer released Benedict’s hand to shake Theo’s, spoke briefly in French, then fell silent; but his gaze strayed back to Benedict.

“He’s a surgeon,” Theo said. “He works on one of the hospital barges out there. They are moving today, making space for more barges with expected casualties. He says he first heard the piece as a boy, when he sang in a cathedral choir, and finds it very moving.”

Benedict wished either his French or the doctor’s English were better.

The man spoke again.

“He has to return to his duties,” Theo said, and then, with very un-Theolike seriousness, he added, “He says, whatever lies ahead, he will treasure the single moment of comfort—I think that’s what he said—and perfection, of hearing that music. Of light in the darkness. Of you playing the organ, Benedict.”

The Frenchman gave a half-salute, put on his cap as he stood in the doorway, and walked away.

“Me too,” Theo said. “I felt it too. Here we all are in a strange land, all weeping by the bloody river.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE


Harry, Amiens,

June 1916


IT HAD BEEN THAT RARE thing, a happy day, Harry thought at the end of it. He had gotten up early and packed his things, knowing that tomorrow a new man would have his job behind the lines. Tomorrow he would move forward to rejoin his regiment and take over a company that was already at the front. A driver had dropped him in Amiens before midday, and he had only to deliver some papers and pick up a book for his colonel before the Eton dinner at 7 P.M. He had loitered, knowing what lay ahead in the next few days. The empty hours seemed a great luxury, for now he could walk and sketch and breathe fresh air.

The happiness was more precious because he knew it was finite. The evening before, he had gone to the last big meeting at H.Q. The attack was set. They had pored over the maps: confident lines curving, sweeping around rising ground or following rivers. If you looked at it one way, it seemed a triumph of surveying and of control; another way, and it looked like the scrawlings of a maniac. He had realized early on that he needed glasses: was he getting old? But he focused on the portion of map nearest to him, the northern sector—there was the French landscape and there were the ancient and evocative names: Foncquevillers, Le Breyelle, Beauregard, Sailly-au-Bois, Chateau de la Haie; and there the superimposed new British geography, so homely and so deadly: four small copses: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; Watling Street, Rose Cottage, Waterloo Bridge, Blackfriars Bridge. Running north to south down all the maps, the serpentine broken blue line, which meandered like a river but which marked the British front-line trench. “The Styx,” he’d once said, early on, and was met with looks of determined incomprehension. Each inch of blue a temporary home, a last home perhaps, to hundreds of men. Behind them were other trenches, thousands more men; three waves; hundreds of thousands of soldiers waiting to turn the plan they were so busy refining on paper into flesh and bullets.