The First of July(86)

They had been returned to base late in the evening. It was still just light. The driver decided to take the side roads, but they were met by an extraordinary sight, something that in the violet semi-darkness might have been a scene from a medieval tapestry: there, avoiding the endless trail of troops and guns on the main road, were the cavalry, their tall lances upright, bobbing up and down as they rode between the fields, a slender new moon above them, and the only sound the horses’ hooves and the jangling of bridles.

Their car went slowly past them: the Dragoons, the Lancers, the Hussars, the Royal Horse, and the Life Guards, even the Indian Cavalry—for a while they were caught in the middle of dark-skinned turbaned troopers from the Deccan Horse, and he thought he identified a small group of mounted Canadians. The sight had moved and disturbed him where all the modern machinery of war he had seen earlier—the great guns, the wagons carrying rolls of barbed wire, the canteens and field ambulances; the parade of metal and men heading inexorably to the front—had failed.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX


Jean-Baptiste, Amiens,

June 1916


HE WAS WOKEN BY A hand shaking his shoulder. Vignon was standing over him. He struggled to sit up, his heart racing.

“It’s too late,” he said. “I’ve told them who you are. You’re finished.”

Vignon sat down, squeezing himself with difficulty between Jean-Baptiste’s feet and the foot of the bed, his head bowed.

“And who am I?”

“You’re a German. A spy. A poisoner.”

A smile flickered across Vignon’s face and was extinguished.

“A German? Yes. My father was a German. I was born in Germany. But my mother was from Alsace. When the Germans were handed Alsace in 1870, they were handed my mother’s family.”

“You never said anything about a German father.” Jean-Baptiste suddenly felt defensive.

“I don’t think I actually mentioned my father at all. Any more than you told me about your father’s violence.” Vignon looked angry but then held out his hand. “I am sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Let us agree that we both had difficult fathers?”

Jean-Baptiste nodded, very slowly, uncomfortable that Vignon had always known how things were at home in his childhood, either through his mother or village gossip.

“My mother,” Vignon continued, “was a very young, naïve woman when she met my father; he was a military doctor.” He put his hand up as Jean-Baptiste tried to interrupt. “Yes, a German military doctor. Charming, I’m told. He took her to Berlin. Once married, he was rather less charming. His family loathed this wife with French roots; she tried to be more German but was very unhappy. She had only one child, me. My father sent me to medical school, then he died quite suddenly and my mother returned to Alsace. Once I finished my training, I too returned to Alsace. I was a Frenchman by nature, with German nationality and a love of both cultures. My mother resumed her maiden name, as did I. I didn’t want anything to do with my father’s family, who had rejected her.”

“You lied about where you came from.”

“I don’t think I did,” Vignon said. “I think if you’re scrupulous in examining the evidence, you’ll find I was rather . . . vague.”

“Why?”

“Vengeance. That foolish, meaningless word. Revenge against the Germans for a war forty years old that the French started and then lost; it was in their blood. Even decent men like Godet. German-haters—long before the war. Them and their goddamn ‘Vengeance.’ It was easier to believe myself French.

“So, no, I am not a spy. I am a victim of revenge, of arbitrary borders, of long-ago struggles. I wanted to do everything I could to help my motherland. It’s what my own mother would have wanted.”

Then, perhaps steering away from the sensitive topic of mothers, he added, “But yes, I am a poisoner.”

Jean-Baptiste had felt the first stirrings of anxiety as Vignon pleaded his innocence, but now, strangely, he felt reassured rather than vindicated.

The doctor was silent for a while. He’d taken out a cigar but he didn’t light it, just turned it between his fingers.

“Do you know how army medicine works?” he whispered. “Very simple. Three categories. One: hopeless; two: might survive in some shape or form but not as a soldier and scarcely as a man; three: could be patched up and returned to combat—‘conservation of effectives’ is the official designation.”

He leaned so close that Jean-Baptiste could feel his breath on his cheek and opened Jean-Baptiste’s shirt. Took Jean-Baptiste’s own hand and guided it down the wide, lumpy scar under his ribs.