by Julie Berry
Together they watched birds fly over the green valley and the winding river. When she turned to look at him again, he was gone.
She woke up sobbing.
Hazel heard the sound and hurried to Colette’s room and lay down beside her. “It’s all right,” her friend said soothingly. “It’s all right.”
But it wasn’t.
Let this soldier boy go, the Colette of yesterday told herself. He’ll soon be gone, but you’ll have Stéphane forever, and that’s enough. You don’t need the pain of another goodbye.
She lay there, remembering her evening with Aubrey. All the things she couldn’t believe she’d told him. All the other things she hadn’t yet shared.
I don’t need goodbyes, she realized, but I need Aubrey Edwards.After tonight, I can’t be a girl who doesn’t have the King of Ragtime to tell everything to. I can’t not be close to him. Not if he’s anywhere to be found.
ARES
Don’t Shoot the Dummy—January 30, 1918
“THERE. SEE THAT?” Private Pete Yawkey spoke in a whisper, lest the Germans hear.
James swiveled his scope half an inch. “I see it.”
Between a gap in the top two sandbags of the German lines, a helmet rose slightly.
James’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Were they about to kill that Jerry?
“Let’s see now,” Yawkey said softly, talking to his target. “Are you real, or not?”
“Real?” James whispered. “How do you mean?”
“What do you see, Alderidge?”
If this was a trick question, James would fail the test. “It’s a head.”
“Is it? Look closer.”
“A helmet,” said James.
“What’s under it? Quick, what’s there?”
He swallowed his impatience. “A face.”
“And what’s it doing?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s right.”
James had little patience for games. “It’s a face,” he said. “Brown-haired chap.”
“I don’t care about hair color,” said Yawkey. “Ever see a human being hold so still?”
James looked again. “He’s moving a little.”
“How?”
Count to ten. “Sort of bobbing up and down. Side to side a little.”
Yawkey nodded significantly. “What does that tell you?”
James looked again. “His face, itself, doesn’t move,” he said slowly. “He’s like a statue.”
“That’s because he is one,” Yawkey explained. “A dummy. A plaster head jammed onto the end of a bayonet with a helmet on top. They’re trying to lure us into taking a shot.”
James blinked and rubbed his eyes. “For spite, you mean?”
“To find us. To study the bullet angle. They’ll point their artillery right at us. Kaboom!”
Not so funny. But most seasoned soldiers he’d met were like this. Laughing at their own destruction, casual about carnage. Maybe laughing was the only way to survive it all.
Yawkey pressed the heels of both hands into his eyes. He was a lanky, bony bird with protruding ears and a large Adam’s apple. Every word of his training made James’s flesh crawl.
Pete Yawkey didn’t invent sniping. It wasn’t his fault that James hated his every word. Everyone had their job to do. Survival depended on doing it. And the only way to end this war was to win it.
“Only shoot when you’re sure,” Pete said. “Don’t shoot the dummy. A sniper has zero shots to waste. Every one’s got to hit its target. Because it tells the enemy where you are.”
He took up his rifle and peered through the scope. James watched the German lines.
At night, he and Pete were relieved by another sniper-and-spotter pair, and they got a decent amount of sleep, compared to what James had grown accustomed to. One perk, at any rate, to playing assassin.
He’d memorized each tangle of barbed wire, each crater in shell-blasted dirt, each clod and stone and bump. Each corpse. It was a colorless wasteland. Only scavenger birds moved. Yet at any moment, there could be an attack.
Their dugout was a marvel. Army tunneling engineers had dug from the fire trench into a slight rise of land. By night, a fatigue party crept into no-man’s-land, cut away the covering sod, and completed the nest. They replaced the sod over a wooden frame and carefully concealed the holes the snipers used for rifles and scopes. Next morning Jerry saw nothing different.
“Hsst,” Yawkey said. “See that? Three hundred yards back.”
James saw what might be a tree trunk, or a gray German uniform. An officer, probably.
“Lot of activity back there lately,” Pete said. “They’re getting shipments of heavy ammo. They must have something planned.” He flexed his fingers. “Should I take him?”
James’s stomach roiled. Don’t ask me. Don’t put this on me.
The man, the gray smudge—did he have a wife? A sweetheart? Sons, daughters? Whether the rest of their lives would be joyful, or tragic, suddenly rested in James’s choice.
Stall. “Can you make the shot from that far?” he asked.
“Sure.” Pete’s mouth hung open. He kept his open eye on the target. “Well, should I?”
Do not ask me. “That’s up to you,” James said. “You’ve got him in your crosshairs.”
“I sure do.” Yawkey pulled the trigger.
Of course James couldn’t see the bullet spiraling across the gulf between them. But it felt like he could. Of course the German officer couldn’t know that the crack ringing in James’s ears was his own death knell. The bullet would reach him before the sound.
“Did I get him, Alderidge?” asked Yawkey.
“Yes,” said James. “You did.”
APOLLO
Vampire Squad—February 3, 1918
THAT SUNDAY MORNING, with a pocket of free time on his hands, Aubrey decided to walk past Hut One to see if, perhaps, a certain young relief volunteer might be on her way somewhere. She wasn’t. So he circled around again, and a third time. At length even he admitted defeat and settled for a long walk into the village of Saint-Nazaire, off the base. Stretching his legs would do him good. And so would the illusion, however temporary, of freedom from others’ commands.
On his way back, at a crossroads, he saw an officer approach the intersection to the right from a distance. He saluted, just in case, and moved on.
“Edwards!” A voice pulled him back to the corner.
Uh-oh. “Good morning, Captain Fish.”
“At ease, Private,” said Captain Hamilton Fish III. “Walk with me?”
“Yes, sir.” This was unexpected.
“What were you up to this morning?”
“Just a walk, Captain, sir,” he said. “A little exercise.”
Captain Fish grunted. “I should think you got enough of that during the week.”
Aubrey conceded. He had a point.
“Edwards,” Captain Fish said, “next time you go off base, take a pal, all right?”
This hardly sounded like an order. “Sir?”
Captain Fish was slow to respond. “There have been . . . threats.”
Aubrey’s interest piqued. “Southern soldiers, sir?”
Fish nodded. “Well, yes. Though bigotry is hardly so simple as North versus South.” He shook his head. “I’ve spent enough time in the officers’ lounge to see that.”
Aubrey suppressed a sly smile. It was good of Fish to explain bigotry to him. White folks.
“There are some fine, unprejudiced men too,” Captain Fish added earnestly. “I’ve had many compliments on the discipline of our men, from officers from all over the country. I am certain that once this war is done, your courageous example will help redress that inequality.”
These rich, white Harvard types. Everything they said sounded
like a speech from a candidate for Congress. It was a nice thought, but if so many Americans were already angry at the sight of a black man in uniform, standing tall and proud with a gun in his hand, Aubrey doubted whether a chest full of medals would make a difference.
They’d reached the outskirts of the base.
“Still, Edwards,” Captain Fish said. “You will be careful, won’t you?”
“I will, but—”
“Yes, Private?”
Aubrey didn’t want to seem disrespectful. “It’s just, I hear you, but we’re from the city, you know, Captain? We can look out for ourselves.” His hand went to the Colt in his pocket.
Captain Fish clapped a hand on his shoulder. “All the same,” he said firmly, “take a pal with you. Some of these boys making the threats are—well, I don’t like saying it of any soldier of Uncle Sam, but—they’re the scum of the earth, and that’s God’s truth.”
There was no safe answer for Aubrey to make to this statement, so he made none.
“You’re a good soldier and a fine musician,” Fish said. “Don’t want to lose you.”
And a human being, Fish. “I’ll be careful, sir,” he said. “I promise.”
“Good day, soldier.” Captain Fish saluted.
Aubrey matched the salute. “Good day, Captain.”
Captain Fish strode off another way, and Aubrey finished the journey, sauntering extra slowly past Hut One. He made his way to Camp Lusitania and the Y hut for black soldiers. There was still some time to kill before duty called him anywhere, and since being in the mood for love didn’t matter one way or the other, he decided he was in the mood for ping-pong.
Joey Rice spotted him when he came in and pulled him aside into a corner.
“Did you hear?” Joey whispered. “Our boys. The ones taking revenge for the killed soldier. Calling themselves the Vampire Squad.” His grip on Aubrey’s elbow was tight. “They killed a marine last night.”
ARES
Rotating Out—February 8, 1918
THEY WEREN’T THE same lads when they emerged from the trenches. The morning after their thirty days were finished, they stumbled out, bone-tired. They spoke a new language. Understood survival as never before and cared about it less. They were used to cold and mud, to the sounds of shells and the sight of blood. They’d gone on raids, bombing several traverses of German trench. They hadn’t lost any men.
James hadn’t gone on the raids. He and Private Pete Yawkey had been rotated to overnight detail, so they stayed in the snipers’ nest. When, the next night, a company of Germans crept through a hole to enact revenge, James saw them. Shadows in the brief glow of a flare.
Perhaps it was because they were only shadows in the dark that James could do it. Perhaps it was because he knew they were on their way to murder his own best lads. Perhaps he could see, in his mind’s eye, bowlegged Mick Webber blown against a trench wall by a grenade, or Chad Browning’s singing throat slashed open by a serrated German bayonet.
He saw them, trained his scope on the shadows, and fired. Twice.
Yawkey, glued to his scope, gave him a thumbs-up. “I think you got ’em both.”
James already knew he had. Somehow he had felt each bullet find its German, as if it were still connected to him by a fishing line, and he could feel the tug of impact.
The Germans came no farther. They spent the night dragging back their fallen.
“I think one’s dead,” Yawkey said. “From the other one’s screams, I give him fifty-fifty.”
James wasn’t listening. He had backed away from the rifle toward the rear wall of their dugout. He knew he was breathing, but no air came in.
“I don’t blame you,” Yawkey said, “for not picking off the stretcher-bearers. It doesn’t feel cricket. God knows the first kill is the hardest. We’ve all been there.”
James didn’t answer. He stared at his shaking hands.
“Go on,” Pete said. “Find some food, and rest. Chew the fat with your mates. All right?”
“There’s supposed to be two of us,” said James.
Pete swatted the objection away. “Get lost. Not much for a spotter to do in the dark.”
It was a lie. James didn’t care. He collapsed into a dugout and slept. When he woke up, Sergeant McKendrick saluted him and shook his hand. His shooting had saved British lives. The shrewd eye to see Fritz in the dark, and the presence of mind to take out two of his raiders, halting the raid—these were the sterling qualities of a true British soldier, so proudly represented this morning by Private James Alderidge. A written commendation would be attached to his file.
So when James requested two days’ leave in Paris, then and there, it was granted, provided all remained quiet at the Front. Two Germans, two days. A curious calculus. They weren’t the last he’d kill before rotating out.
APHRODITE
Two Days’ Leave—February 8, 1918
February 8, 1918
My dearest Hazel,
My sergeant has given me his word. I can take two days’ leave to travel to Paris. I can arrive late in the afternoon of Wednesday, February 13. The trains could well be slow, but I think I could get to Gare du Nord by about four o’clock in the afternoon. Can you join me there? If you wait for me, I promise I will find you.
I hope you’ll come. I need to reassure myself that you aren’t a dream. I’ll find a place to wash the grime off me before I see you, so that I’ll be someone you won’t mind being with.
Please come. Prove that you exist, and allow me to prove how much you mean to me.
Yours affectionately,
James
* * *
Hazel’s answer was short. More telegram than letter.
Four o’clock, Wednesday the thirteenth, Gare du Nord, it read. I’ll be there.
APHRODITE
Concert Night—February 11, 1918
ON THE EVE of their departure for the tour that would lead them to Aix-les-Bains, the 15th New York Band threw a farewell concert for Saint-Nazaire. Everyone who could finagle a seat went.
Aubrey wasn’t going to Aix-les-Bains. Not after Colette had shared so much with him. He’d already told Lieutenant Europe. With Luckey Roberts at the piano, Europe could spare him. He’d rejoin the band later when their division reported to the Front. So there was no need for him to play that night’s show.
Someday, he told himself, I’ll headline any band I’m in.
He decided to go to the concert anyway, for kicks, and took the long way there, conveniently passing by Hut One on his way. If anyone in his Company had been counting how often Private Edwards took this detour, he’d have some explaining to do.
Hut One’s door opened. He ducked behind a Nissen hut to see who it was.
Shoot. It was the wrinkled bat who’d shooed him away and some other old biddy beside her. He smiled. There was Lady Hazel de la Windicott. The three women left without Colette.
But where was she? Why wasn’t she going to the concert? Time to find out.
“We’re closed,” Colette’s voice called through the door when he knocked.
“It’s me,” he called back.
The door flew open. Pink cheeks and sparkling eyes stood before him.
“Bonsoir, mademoiselle,” he said. He’d been practicing that for days.
Colette laughed. His pronunciation! It was too much. “Howdy, mister.”
“I want to show you something.” Aubrey held out a hand. “Mind if we go to the piano?”
She took his hand. So new, and yet so familiar. She wanted to explore it, study each line in the palm, and the shape of each fingernail.
What is the matter with you?
“Come on,” he teased. “To the piano.”
She’d been rooted to the floor. If Colette’s face were any more red, she’d be a tomato. They reached the bench.
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“I need my hand back,” he said.
She surrendered it unwillingly. He winked and began to play. A plaintive melody, sweet and slow, growing more melancholy until its mournful ending trailed away, leaving silence ringing through the hut.
She took a deep breath.
“I’m calling that one ‘Dinant,’” he told her.
She swallowed. She already knew that.
“Thank you,” she managed to say. “Was this something you’d written before?”
He shook his head. “I wrote it since I saw you last.”
She shook her head. “Formidable,” she whispered. “Would you play it for me again?”
So he did. And now that she knew, really knew, who it was for, and what it all meant, she could absorb it, slowly, phrase by phrase.
Yes. Dinant deserved a requiem like that.
* * *
“I’m going to Paris tomorrow,” she told him, after he’d played a while longer. “Hazel and I. To see her beau, Jacques. That is to say, James.”
“Really?” Aubrey’s face fell. “How long will you be gone?”
She pursed her lips, considering. “Four or five days, I imagine.” She forced a smile. “But you’re leaving tomorrow with the band, aren’t you? The soldiers have been complaining about your departure for days.”
He turned to face her. “I’m not going on the trip.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Oh, I’m sorry!”
He smiled ruefully. “Sorry I won’t be gone?”
“Of course not,” she said. “Sorry for you to miss out on the opportunity to perform.” She smiled. “You were born to perform.”