The Champagne War

by Fiona McIntosh

‘We could, but it would be a waste of time, Madame Delancré. I know you like to save every poor unfortunate this sort of surgery.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘Madame, we have walked this path before, no? Remember the young man from Marseille?’

  ‘I do. His leg couldn’t be saved, you were right,’ she said, deciding to flatter him. He nodded. ‘But I don’t regret us being sure.’

  ‘This man’s hand is a mess.’

  ‘Please, Jules,’ she said, deliberately breaking protocol. They had become good friends over the course of the war, and he’d enjoyed plenty of her champagne . . . at no cost. She was going to lean on that friendship now and leverage her generosity. ‘Please, let’s try. I know your expertise has always been with the small bones; wield your magic now if it can save his hand.’

  He looked exasperated, but Jules was one of the people who really did appreciate how hard she worked for everyone in and around Reims. And it was no hollow compliment: the man was a wizard when it came to repairing bones. Plus, he owed her. He shrugged. ‘What’s a little more blood loss to this poor fellow?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She held on to hope and it was rewarded. The British soldier returned from surgery with a small welcoming party around him.

  ‘We’ve tried, Sophie,’ Langevin said wearily. ‘I did my best, and while I am not holding out hope for its use, he has a hand at least.’

  ‘Keeping him looking whole can make a difference. Thank you, Doctor.’ She stood and kissed his cheek, whispering, ‘Thank you, Jules.’

  But now the man deserved to be cleaned properly. She felt a duty to bathe the soldiers as best she could, so they felt free of the battlefield. As she tended to him, she kept up a constant gentle chatter. It was in French so she wasn’t sure how much he understood. It didn’t matter; Sophie knew that words spoken in kindness sound the same in any language.

  His uniform was gone to be washed and patched; he was now dressed in a nightshirt.

  She wondered about his life before the war. Was that hand essential for his work? He was of an age, she guessed, to still have young children if he was a family man, and he would not be able to pick up those youngsters easily without the use of that hand. He might never play a sport again. He would certainly never pick up a rifle again, so his war was over, thank the stars, but his life was now on a different path . . . unless that hand could heal itself. But then this was how Sophie’s thoughts always flowed with each new injured soldier, and she comforted herself that his life had shifted its direction since the day he joined this wretched war. Maybe it was his luck to be injured so badly he could leave it? Others, after all, were leaving their lives behind on the battlefield.

  And still Sophie couldn’t help herself. The English soldier, presently lost to the morphine, was a novelty. She studied him, enjoyed watching him. He was slim and hard-bodied – they all were in the trenches, but she guessed he’d never been strapping – and his reasonable height had probably distracted from his trim frame. While she had helped the orderly to remove the uniform from the limp soldier and get him into a nightshirt, she noted he was muscled but rangy. His features in repose gave nothing away. Even forced into relaxation by the drug, he gave the impression of a man who held his thoughts close. The set of his square jaw looked like it preferred the clamped position of someone refusing to speak. There was no fresh blood blooming at his face as she cleaned it to reveal a straight nose and plump yet well-defined lips, the bottom one almost cherubic. Kissable.

  Sophie’s breath caught in her throat as that thought passed through her mind. What was wrong with her? Clean him up and move on to the next man. There were bruises all over his slim body and there had been collective mutterings about broken ribs, but mercifully no one had seen any obvious signs of internal bleeding.

  The mild warm and soapy water had begun to reveal the man beneath the filth of the trenches and the battlefield. She put a towel beneath his head and began to soak off the blood and mud matted in his hair, and around a couple of small wounds that had scabbed over on their own. She observed an old head wound that had been stitched . . . extremely neatly, she noticed. The hair was still trying to grow over it, though, and his hair wasn’t entirely sure what colour it was, being neither dark but certainly not fair, sitting somewhere in between. From a distance it appeared earth-brown but this close up she could see thin glints of a dark gold, as if someone had dripped amber toffee through it. That brighter colour began to peep through as she dabbed away the soap with a damp towel. He could use a shave, but she wouldn’t attempt that now. His heavy brows gave him a serious expression and that lovely mouth was still pinched as he dreamed; she wondered what horror roamed through his sleeping thoughts to make him frown like this.

  Because he had not shared a word on the ward, no one knew what his voice sounded like; it had not occurred to her before now that the tone of someone’s voice was important. A voice was vital, now that she pondered it. Jerome had possessed a rich voice; he liked to use it to sing and to make people laugh, letting it boom out around a large room. It drew people to him. Gaston’s voice was attractive for the opposite reason: it was intimate, cultured and seductive. He used it softly to woo, and she was sure just as softly to intimidate and to make people pay more attention to him. She helplessly thought of Louis; his had an affected sound, as though he’d rehearsed it. There was a vaguely effeminate way he lingered on certain syllables. ‘How do you sound, Captain, I wonder?’ she murmured as she tended to him.

  And if she allowed herself a moment of honesty, she would have to admit that the cast of his face was attractive in a way that men as much as women could appreciate. He had the looks of someone that film producers would chase. The camera would love him, she thought. There were worry lines embedded in his expression that didn’t leave, even though to all intents his body was relaxed. She liked them; she dismissed the nightmares of war and instead convinced herself it was endearing, that even in sleep he was fretting . . . perhaps thinking about his wife, his family, the men he was responsible for. Gaston had told her he was a captain, having recognised the insignia on his uniform, and that he belonged to a regiment from northern England, but that was meaningless to her. She had only visited London, so to know any difference between north or south, east or west was impossible for her. It was such a small island, how could there be much difference anyway? she wondered, smoothing back the twist of hair that had fallen across his forehead. He needed a proper bath, that was certain. Despite her ministrations, his hair beneath her fingers was greasy, still clumped with mud and heaven knew what else.

  Instinctively, believing affection was what was needed, she held his unbandaged hand. It’s not as though she had any other work to do this night. A new shift would be coming on in an hour, so why not try to send some silent comfort to a stranger who was lost, hurt, trying to find his way back to consciousness and a new life when the British army transferred him home. The Red Cross would soon get busy making enquiries on his behalf. Everyone had drifted away. She and he were alone in a corner of one of the tunnels attached to the hospital.

  He was emerging from the morphine. Eyes gently fluttering their wakefulness but refusing to show awareness. It was a false awakening and wouldn’t last, she was sure. She kept murmuring.

  ‘Well, as you’re not in a talkative mood, I shall do the talking. What shall we discuss? How about I tell you about my private passion. I don’t tell anyone about this because few here understand. But I don’t mind sharing my secret of how much I love opera.’

  His eyes flickered open fully. Sophie held her breath as he turned his head; he was moving of his own volition for the first time since he’d arrived. She didn’t want to burst whatever bubble she’d managed to put them in, so she continued. ‘Why do I love opera? Because it mirrors my love of champagne.’

  His eyes found focus and his gaze rested lightly on her; it seemed to swim almost immediately. He was struggling to concentrate – normal.

  ‘Hello,’ sh
e said, in English now. It was rusty but she was thrilled to use the education her parents had insisted upon. ‘Don’t be scared. You’re in Reims, in the champagne cellars.’ She couldn’t be sure he was taking the information in. His expression had a vacancy about it, probably due to the morphine.

  ‘I always wanted to visit Reims.’ He said this in English. Relieved to hear him speak at all, she thanked her stars that her father had insisted on her learning this language for business.

  ‘Visit Reims? Why?’

  ‘I like cathedrals.’ He had moved into French effortlessly.

  She chose not to tell him about the ruins of the cathedral above them.

  ‘And I do like champagne,’ he added.

  At this she smiled. ‘I am Sophie.’

  ‘Sophie,’ he tried to repeat but half of her name got lost in his throat. He was drifting in and out of his drugged sleep.

  ‘Sophie Delancré.’

  ‘Like the champagne,’ he mumbled, back in English. ‘I heard men talking Arabic. I might have begun speaking in very poor German because I thought they could be Turkish. The kind French commandant set me straight.’

  ‘His name is Gaston de Saint Just. We all admire him,’ she said. ‘If you remember Gaston, you will surely remember your name?’

  ‘Captain Charles Nash of the Leicesters.’ It was slurred but there. His mouth lifted at the corner in an attempt at a smile but failed. ‘Everyone calls me Charlie.’

  ‘Sharlie,’ she repeated. ‘Why are you amused?’ she enquired at the lift of his eyebrows.

  ‘You sound like Fay when you say my name . . .’ His voice trailed off as he slipped away from her again into his dreams.

  Fay. She must be his wife or sweetheart. At least she’d drawn some words from him. Everyone would be relieved to know he could speak and make sense, even sedated, and that offered some hope for his recovery. Plus, she’d heard his voice. It wasn’t particularly deep or light. It didn’t have a musical quality like Jerome’s or the alluring quality of Gaston’s, but she heard something potentially idealistic in it. She liked that and its mellow pitch.

  14

  Charlie hadn’t been struck dumb from shock, he didn’t believe, but he couldn’t think of a single word he needed to say. The horror of what he’d lived through had to be somehow worked through in his mind, and no one could be more surprised than he that he’d survived. Some kindly Arabic unit had fished him from the water when he was doing his best to drown in the shallows. Now even kinder French nurses attended to him, checked his dressings, spoke gently to him. Someone especially beautiful had just washed his face and spoken of opera. So much kindness after so much terror.

  His left arm was in a large bandage so he couldn’t tell anything of his injury, or even if he still had an intact arm; a new fear erupted that he might now be an amputee. It would be tricky to explain to a team of people working tirelessly to keep him safe that he really would rather die. There was nothing and no one waiting for him back home; this war had taken everything that mattered and now it may have taken a part of him that meant any sort of life would now be seriously compromised. He didn’t want that life. He didn’t want sympathetic glances for the war veteran, now an invalid. Who knew how long the war would continue, but he knew as he emerged from his fretful sleep that he would be sent back to England to see out the war. Pensioned off. Useless. He’d be one of those men who walked around with a shirtsleeve pinned up or a jacket draped on the shoulder with the sleeve empty. He knew this was heinous self-pity but he indulged in it all the same, because if life had looked bleak on the battlefield, at least it had felt like honest endeavour. Going back to England as a failed soldier, and a pathetically injured one at that, seemed a lot worse.

  It was the presence of the opera lover, the woman whose name sounded like champagne, that brought him back. He was sure he was in a dark trench walking around looking for his hand, which had been sheared off by a flying mortar. He followed the sound of that voice, as airy as the bubbles in the champagne she spoke of. It had an alluring huskiness that resulted in a softly spoken way and he followed it gladly, out of the trench and back into consciousness and the underground hospital.

  He sensed she was making an effort to use his native language. ‘Hello, Charlie. We are making all the right enquiries to get you back to your people.’ She shook her head. ‘But I cannot say when that might happen. The fighting is ongoing.’

  He could hear the dull thud of guns, now that she mentioned it.

  ‘Charlie, they need this bed. There are more wounded coming in each day.’

  He nodded and tried to clear this throat. His voice came out as a croak. ‘I’ll leave.’

  ‘You have nowhere to go just now until we can find someone to claim you.’ He loved her gritty voice. It sounded as though her breath carried it over fine grains of sand before it was allowed to sound. She smiled. ‘I have a better idea. Until you heal, would you agree to come back to Épernay with me?’

  He looked back at her quizzically, shrugging and opening his palm. It felt as though he were opening both his hands but on checking it was only his right. He hated that he could still feel his numb limb, but it wouldn’t work for him. ‘With you? Why?’

  He enjoyed her smile when it came, more restorative than the shot of the cognac he now recalled sharing with Davies just before the world blew up.

  ‘Because I think you will heal faster in Épernay and you have nowhere else to go until we can get you repatriated to the British. We will have to leave immediately.’

  It didn’t require much pondering. Charlie nodded. ‘Is it safe? I mean, for you?’

  She grinned. ‘Safer than here. Besides, my vineyards need me.’

  So, she was connected with the champagne house. ‘Then let’s go,’ he said.

  She laughed and explained her plan to the senior nurse who had hovered into view.

  ‘But you surely have no room in your formal house, Madame Delancré?’

  ‘Always room for one more,’ she said gently.

  ‘How will you get him there? There are no ambulances,’ the nurse reminded her.

  ‘He is sitting up in bed,’ Sophie observed, her voice even. ‘So he can surely sit up in a cart, can’t you, Captain?’

  She didn’t sound in the slightest defensive. Charlie nodded. ‘Of course. Another soldier needs this bed.’

  The senior nurse sniffed. ‘Whatever you say, madame.’

  Sophie glanced at Charlie, her gaze sparkling with triumph. He wanted to wink to congratulate her, but nothing seemed to work very well for him right now.

  Sophie Delancré’s arrival in his life was like something bright and shiny in an otherwise dull, metal-grey world; it gave him a curious sense of hope that was trilling deep inside. He suddenly felt like a champagne bottle, its potential effervescence within. Could he find joy again after what had felt like the Somme repeating itself? Now, looking at that conspiratorial grin from the woman of Épernay, even returning to Britain for a new life as a disabled soldier suddenly felt possible. His emotions were all over the place.

  ‘We need to get you dressed, Captain Nash,’ the nurse was saying to him. ‘We can see to it, madame.’

  ‘Let me know when the captain is ready to be collected.’

  ‘As you wish,’ the nurse replied, even more lemon-lipped, Charlie decided. Clearly Sophie had some sway around here; not just a wealthy volunteer doing her bit, then. She became more intriguing.

  It took them half an hour to ready him before a lad was sent running to find Madame Delancré. She re-emerged looking like a new doll, out of the overall-type uniform she wore around the ward and now outfitted in a grey pinstriped frock that, though utilitarian, could not hide her trim waist or long neck. Its three-quarter sleeves and V-neck revealed skin that struck Charlie as being the colour of light honey. He imagined her in her vineyards. A straw bonnet, modestly trimmed with a single pale ribbon, would hide the dark blonde hair scooped up beneath it.

  You’re a picture,
he thought, glad his voice couldn’t betray that notion to the women gathered there.

  ‘He’s all yours,’ one of the younger nurses said, and then blushed furiously after a frowning glare from her superior. ‘Forgive me, Madame Delancré,’ she said, all but curtseying. ‘I meant —’

  ‘Suzette, I know what you meant, and yes, Captain Nash is now my responsibility. I will continue the relevant enquiries for his repatriation to the British. Thank you, everyone.’

  ‘Suzette and young Paul will aid you to the surface, madame.’

  The pair immediately offered themselves for him to lean against. It was awkward, with his second arm flung almost uselessly around Suzette. What help a sling would be. He would suggest it.

  He wanted to tell them he could probably walk for himself, but the truth was he did feel light-headed, having been prone for a couple of days, and he suspected he would never make it to the surface. It was amazing enough that this underground hospital existed. He continued with the awkward gait as he shuffled between his two aides, highly aware of the presence that followed them.

  They loaded him into a wagon and Sophie climbed up alongside him. He tried to convey his horror and sadness at seeing the great city of Reims levelled.

  ‘I know, Charlie,’ she assured him. ‘Even we don’t have words.’ She changed the subject. ‘I would normally transport you more comfortably in a car, but I’ve given my Reims car over as an ambulance.’

  He waved his good hand as though this was of no importance.

  ‘Comfy enough?’

  He could feel the length of her thigh next to his; the novelty made him dizzy. ‘I feel like I’m off for a picnic.’

  ‘Drive on,’ she said with a chuckle to the man in front.

  Vineyards sprawled along the bumpy ride to Épernay, and he enjoyed that soft scratch in her voice as she kept up a steady flow of conversation about the champagne makers of the region.

  He turned his gaze back to her. ‘So you are a Delancré of the champagne house?’

  She nodded. ‘The current generation.’ It looked to him as though a sorrow ripped through her. ‘The last one, I fear. It ends with me. How about you – anyone at home?’