I was all over the place with messages that last day; Isaac too. I could even see the shells whizzing over Nora and me to Jerry’s lines, and I could get a smell of the coming battle. I was whacked by the time it got dark. The major thanked me. He was good like that and the men liked him, despite his little ways.
He said, in his reciting voice:
his state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.
I must have looked a bit puzzled because he added: “They also serve who only sit and cycle—what?”
I could see I was expected to smile, so I did. We were all going a bit barmy.
The Day
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Benedict, France,
July 1, 1916, Morning
BENEDICT LOOKED AT HIS WATCH: 0728 hours. Two minutes to go. Instinctively he looked out toward the invisible wire: the barbed swags and webs and coils of it.
The gun fired again, rolled back. The air shook.
“Do you think they’ll give us a a pension later for being bloody deaf, sir? ’scuse my French,” Smith shouted now.
Then, as if Smith had created it, an explosion of silence, and in the silence an immensity of fear.
The wire.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Jean-Baptiste, France,
July 1, 1916, Morning
HE HAD SLEPT IN THE ruin of an old stable. At dawn, he was rested but stiff and bitten all over by insects and more nervous than the day before, when his mind had been full of escape. It was warm and gray, and he was thirsty and knew he had very little water left. He moved off slowly, a little giddy when he first stood up.
North to the British, Vignon had said, south to the French, east to the Germans, but he could hardly stumble upon them without crossing the British lines first, or at least not if the line was continuous. But who knew whether he might run into an early-morning German patrol probing into enemy lines? He ducked down twice as he heard voices from the towpath. He sat down again after an hour or so, with his back to an old oak, already weary. The sun had come out and, astonishingly, there were butterflies on a small patch of dandelions. He put his head back, shut his eyes.
And then, suddenly, there was an explosion, an eruption that sent tremors through the earth beneath him, and he found himself curled up on the ground, his hands over his ears, back in the hours of terror that had been his last memories of Verdun. Two other vast explosions followed; to the northeast and also some distance away, but so violent that he almost expected to see cracks run along the ground. Leaves and half-grown acorns fell from the tree. He sat, clasping his knees tightly to his chest, and retched. He mustn’t succumb to fear now. He looked down and saw fine chalk dust on his sleeve; it was falling like powdery snow. Two aeroplanes crossed the sky, humming, almost innocently, and then there was—nothing.
A great hole of nothingness. A great silence.
Yet just as he had started to absorb the silence, the almost reassuring noise of shelling returned and the machine guns opened up. Something big was happening, an attack: from what Vignon had said, a British attack across the Ancre. Assuming that it had some success, it should push east away from him. He moved behind the tree, half camouflaged by brambles, and there he stayed for a while, until his breathing steadied, listening to war but hidden within it.
He began to calculate: he thought he was about halfway along the fourteen kilometers from Amiens to Corbie. If he followed the river, soon it would make a great loop north before returning to his home town. But he would reduce the distance if he made his way south, crossing over the river and then the lagoons and fens that spread south of Corbie. It was going against Vignon’s advice, but Vignon was not—as he’d so often said, and Jean-Baptiste felt a small knot in his chest thinking of it—web-footed. Jean-Baptiste had been born to this landscape; he knew the hidden throughways, could weave his way through the shortcuts, could tell solid land that looked sodden from apparently dry land in which a man could sink and be lost.
An hour or so later, he had crossed the canal along the one remaining plank of the half-demolished Fouilloy footbridge. Now he was on the south side, the side Vignon had told him to avoid, walking into the waterlands toward the fighting, on the far side from Corbie and nearer the French positions.
The reeds and mud of the southern river bank stretched as far as the eye could see, and patches of water shone between misshapen willows. The path ran through pockets of yellow grass and sedge, and the turf was soft under his feet. He stooped to loosen his boots. A lake loomed ahead, a finger of land projecting into it but not, apparently, reaching the far side. He picked his way along this spit, hardly glancing at the opaque green depths to either side, except to notice that the placid surface he remembered was now bristling with lance-like rushes. He hoped the water at the far end was as shallow as he remembered it. It was, and he arrived on the opposite bank, momentarily triumphant, with almost-dry boots. Two other small lagoons, connected by deep ditches, lay ahead. He took a slight detour to avoid the marsh between them, though it seemed smaller than he remembered; a rotting fishing hut, now abandoned, stood several meters from the water’s edge. A large duck rose up shrieking from behind it and he stumbled back, his heart hammering in his chest.