The First of July(84)

The Somme in Amiens ran in a businesslike way between wharves, warehouses, and quays, lined by a long row of barges. No doubt there had always been barges, Harry thought, but these all had red crosses on their roofs. A few French nurses and orderlies had been chatting by the moorings, and women came and went with armfuls of crumpled linen. Since last winter, the rumor was that the French losses at Verdun were running at seventy thousand casualties a month, and the fighting went on and on.

He had sat down on a bollard and started to draw: quick pencil lines. The barges, the swooping gulls, and the fluttering headscarves: he had wanted to catch a moment of movement, when things were alive. Two British officers rose from a café table and crossed the river, near his stakeout, nodded to him. Then a nurse had helped an injured French soldier down the short plank onto the shore. He was young, wan, and unsteady on his legs. But then he had looked up at the sky and across to the cathedral, and in a few minutes he let go of the nurse as if with every breath of river air he was drawing in strength. Harry had begun drawing the pair of them but then became conscious of the soldier’s gaze and, not wanting to be intrusive, he laid his pad down on his knee. The soldier started crossing the short distance between them, and just when Harry had thought there might be some sort of altercation coming, the young Frenchman had reached into a pocket. What he had brought out was a folded and slightly grubby piece of paper. Harry looked down, puzzled; the writing was quite neat: Colonel Marzine, Hôpital Militaire d’Amiens. The young man gabbled something, but too fast and in too strong an accent for Harry to pick up.

“Lentement, slowly,” he said.

The soldier had pointed at himself and then the barge. “Péniche,” he said, pointing. Harry did not know the word.

Then the soldier had mimed an injury to his side and said something about Germans; as the nurse hovered, he had slowed down and, curbing an evident urgency, asked Harry to pass on his message. He regretted that he was himself too weak to reach the colonel; but it was a most important letter.

Harry had considered whether the man was serious—he was still wondering much later in the day; so many soldiers were sent at least partly mad by fighting and injury—but the young man had steady gray eyes, and his agitation appeared to reflect intensity, not insanity.

Eventually Harry had put the message in his pocket just as the nurse reached forward trying to intercept it, and then, failing, turned to argue with her charge, hands on hips. The boy wasn’t listening to her but gazing, his face almost like stone, at a spot beyond her, and for a moment Harry had doubted his wisdom in becoming involved. How would he pass the message on?

Before letting himself be swept up by the evening and the bravado, or arrogance, of a school reunion   at the heart of war, he had continued his walk, taking a steep cobbled street up toward the basilica, past a small hotel and some fine medieval and eighteenth-century clergy houses, coming out into the Place de Notre Dame. He was staring up at the fine spire of the cathedral, which seemed to tip toward him out of the fast-moving sky, when a British Army messenger swept around the building on a bicycle and looked as surprised as he was by the near-collision. The corporal gave him something between a salute and a wave of apology. Harry put out a hand to stop him.

“Sorry, sir.” The soldier had dismounted and was having trouble holding his bicycle and saluting at the same time. “I didn’t see you exactly, sir.”

“No matter. I need you to deliver a message for me. Is that possible?”

“Yes, sir. I’m all finished here, sir.”

“Please take this to the French military hospital. It’s on the east road, I believe. Hand this message to an officer.”

The man nodded, putting the message into his bag. He had an intelligent face.

“Only to a French officer. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And your name?” he said, as the cyclist mounted again.

“Stanton, sir. Corporal Stanton, Hunts Cyclists.”

Two nuns walked away from the cathedral, their high coifs bobbing. A French officer had come up the steps behind him and was lighting a cigarette. Harry held back for a few minutes. He had taken out his pad and sketched a quick impression of the scene, not of the cathedral, which he could no doubt find in photographs, but of the square and the people in it. Recalling the fate of Ypres, he had simply wanted to capture it, right now, on this midsummer day.

It was only once the Frenchman had gone ahead into the building that Harry walked up the steps to the great door and stood there, looking outward. It had rained on and off for days, delaying the long-laid plans for the attack right along the line. But now that they had a time and a date, he felt an odd, strange relief, and the sun was out and the smell of damp stone and grass was wonderful. Long ago, in that school by the Thames, there had been a smell like this in summer. He felt the sun on his face and then, as if he hadn’t been lucky enough to have one sense indulged, there was another tiny miracle.