The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  She said to Father Perrin, I understand he’s dead, Father. I just want to know. Was I too stupid? Was I too slow? Did he ever receive my letter?

  Let’s say, for the love of god, that her son, Martin, did receive her letter, that it arrived in the citadel, that he was shocked to hear the postman call his name, pleased beyond words to see his name on the envelope in handwriting he’d never seen but somehow recognized immediately. Let’s say he tucked the letter into his breast pocket when he went up to the line the next day.

  In July of that year, after pounding the French with artillery, the Germans overran their positions and forced their way into Fleury, driving the French back down the ridge toward Fort Souville. The next morning the French responded, shelling their old positions for hours before the counterattack.

  Let’s say Martin was among them, feeling—what? An emptiness? A terror? A terrible excitement? A ghost of a wall, a ruin of a barn, perhaps, still stood. The trenches were dug straight, hastily, without time to zig and zag. So, when the French went over the top, when they reached the German lines and half-jumped and half-stumbled into the trenches, those who got up in time with their rifles ready had a clear shot down the line for a hundred meters.

  Let’s say Martin staggered down a length of trench to where some bodies lay in German uniforms. Perhaps he bayoneted them, one by one. He bayoneted another German through the cheek, the man still alive but buried past his waist by shellfire. And then Martin fell to one knee, thinking only: my mouth is dry, my mouth is dry, my mouth is dry.

  Later, his lieutenant called roll; a quarter of the names went without answer. The counterattack began before he had reached the letter T. It was dark. The sky lit orange, glowing like a hearth. Martin had never thought of the sky so much before coming to the front. But that was his world for three years: mud, rats, the dead, the sky.

  The same sky even in 1921, now mopping at acres of cratered dirt. What else was left? Bones in boots, a rusted bucket, a shattered root. Gravel and wheels of motorcars; spokes and strips of rag. A solitary tree, black against the sky, like a finger pressed to the lips calling for silence. I would speak with Mrs. Hagen again in three hours.

  Around dawn the French—Martin among them—advance a hundred meters west, and are driven back, leaving the dead as they go. The artillery has inverted the world. The sky falls apart piece by piece, the ground hovers in black sprays of dust. The earth is no longer earth. The water—in flooded shell holes filled with the dead—is no longer water. The air—yellow with smoke—is no longer air. But fire is still fire.

  When the order comes that Fleury has been retaken, Martin sits pressed to crumbling walls in a roofless cellar. The counterattack begins just past dawn the following day. Green Cross shells this time. A gas attack. They half-expect it, and have the masks ready. The gas uncoils and sinks. There’s always the initial shock, even after many such attacks, but it passes. The masks work. They’re just underwater, that’s all this is.

  There was a lake in Jura so cold you could only swim it in August. The old boulders on the shore were known to aid fertility, and women walked miles to scrape off a bit of dust and drink it with water from the lake. As a boy, Martin would dive down for half a franc (his mother told us all of this!) to the very bottom to catch the most potent water. The lake was ten meters deep. He could have gone five meters down, three, no one would ever have known; he only half-believed in the superstition himself, but he always swam to the very bottom anyway.

  At the bottom of a shell hole I found leg bones beneath a few smashed bricks. I put them in my bag. Sometimes I kept count and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I felt a terrifying sadness, sometimes a strange elation, and sometimes—as was the case that day—I lost touch completely with what I felt and was aware only of what I thought I was supposed to feel. I decided I must tell Mrs. Hagen the truth. Not just that I had been mistaken, but that I had misrepresented myself. And if I could find some way to explain why, I would tell her that too.

  Nightfall. Fleury smolders. The cellars are gone. A few pieces of brick are all that remain, and Martin, along with the rest of the men in his battalion, trudges back into the darkness. For a moment the shelling stops. No one knows why. There is a buzz of oblivious flies. There is a dead horse in Martin’s path. An explosion lifts him into the air. And then?

  No. The skeleton I’d found couldn’t be this Martin. Anyway, not as I imagined him. Suddenly it was clear that he’d come to in mushy light, to someone speaking German, to hands pulling him to his feet, leading him toward a few mud-caked specters, French prisoners. He stumbles, and the hands stand him up and shove him in the back and stand him up again but gently this time, and then he hears a voice in broken French. If you keep walking, it says, it’s all right, you’re going to live.

  * * *

  By the time I arrived at the provisional ossuary, I had only a few minutes to wash in the drum behind the building. The groundwater still wasn’t trusted. I splashed my face to the rumble of a car engine and practiced the apology a final time. I meant only to help, but I realize my words have likely had the opposite effect. I was unprepared. I was foolish.

  The sky had emptied, but thunder still reported from a long ways off. I found Mrs. Hagen waiting in the road with her hand out to me. I offered her my arm. Even in midsummer the mud never really dried. Perhaps it was our slow pace along the duckboards that made me see the provisional ossuary through her eyes. A house with glassless windows on either side of a pine door, looking less like a monument than a dry goods store.

  Nevertheless, we’d done our best to make the inside feel like a sanctuary. There were candles on the windowsills, garlands and wreaths on every beam. Along the back wall stretched a banner with a wild-haired woman holding a torch aloft, reading “Et à la Sainte-Alliance.” Everywhere was the sweet, yeasty odor of the bones, like the smell of a sneeze.

  I waited for her eyes to adjust, for the names of the villages engraved on the boxes to emerge from the murk. Father Gaillard had commissioned a plaque for each stack, corresponding to its sector of the battlefield. Order is a sign of respect, he said. But the bones seldom fit, and, despite how we tried, the piles jutted in ghastly fractures.

  She dropped my arm and waded away, her hair falling to one side as she turned her head to read the inscriptions. The light was confusing. The flickering candles, the glaring panes of sun. I was unprepared. I was foolish.

  “You collected all of these?” she asked.

  “No, no. There used to be a lot of us.”

  “What happened to everyone else?”

  “They moved on.”

  In the beginning, twenty of us left the Episcopal palace six mornings a week in the bed of a Renault truck. Twenty of us walked into the hills, through the destroyed villages—mostly the orphans of those places. Verdun was still disputed territory then, filled with an almost Pentecostal spirit of nationalism. The cathedral pews were full on Sunday. The hallways were full of the strained voices of generals, politicians, and cardinals, all trying not to mix the pure water of national pride with the oil of self-interest. And yet it all seemed only a collage of disagreements about whose official letterhead certain notices went on, or how to respond to claims of war benefits, or where and how to bury the dead.

  Everyone did seem to agree, though, that such pettiness couldn’t continue. Verdun was a sacred space—at once the symbol of victory and loss, glory and horror—and, like all such spaces, it demanded austerity, even self-abnegation, from those entrusted to watch over it. That, I think, was why the military finally allowed Father Gaillard and the diocese to take the lead in the construction of the ossuary, in the administration of the cemeteries, in the counseling of the families. They simply didn’t trust themselves.

  Certainly, both Father Gaillard and Father Perrin—in speeches to the sacristans, the orphans, the kitchen staff, the gravediggers—had always been clear about the discipline our jobs demanded. There are many places in France, in Europe, they would say, where gri
ef had been used to selfish advantage. Verdun would not be one of them. Did we understand?

  “Would you like to light a candle, Mrs. Hagen?” I asked.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “But may I touch one of these?”

  She smiled, as if daring me to stop her. She reached into one of the boxes, marked Ornes, and lifted out a pelvic bone and held it up in the candlelight.

  “Would I know?” she asked.

  For a moment, I pretended not to understand her question. It was said that the ground was so infused with bacteria that wounds would fester in the zone rouge faster than anywhere else on earth. Sometimes I imagined that something else—some essence of the dead—might have remained in the ground as well. I imagined that, digging through the soil, I might suddenly know how to refit track in the Paris Métro, or navigate the streets of Hamburg by heart. That I might take a woman’s arm and immediately match her stride to my own.

  “You’d be the best judge,” I said. “But no, honestly, I don’t think you’d know.”

  I returned the pelvic bone to the box and when I turned to face her again she was crying.

  “That wasn’t him,” she said, once we were outside.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t,” I said.

  “I know it wasn’t him because he went missing in Italy, not here.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Well, you can guess why I didn’t tell you. Who would I have been handed off to if I’d said that?”

  She apologized immediately, but only with her eyes. Indeed, her eyes and mouth rarely seemed to agree. The effect was a vague and lonely face. The face of one who has given up on ever being understood. And, I thought, when was the last time someone tried?

  “Was he transferred after Caporetto?” I asked.

  “In late ’17, yes. And in the spring of 1918 he wandered off during a barrage. Near Gorizia.”

  “He wandered off?”

  “His CO’s word. He was kind at least, the CO. He reported Lee as missing, believed dead, not as a deserter. When I visited him after the war, I had to practically force him to tell me what really happened.”

  “That’s the hardest thing in the world,” I said.

  “No. If we’d had children, then it would be worse.”

  “Why come here, then? What did you want to see?”

  “I suppose I just need to try everything before . . .”

  She trailed off, and I didn’t ask what was to come after—I had no right to her future—but I did find myself bringing up my own past.

  “There were rumors our group would go to Italy too,” I said. “Most everyone wanted to.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “That’s partly why I left the service after the U.S. Army took it over.”

  “You wanted to stay here?”

  Usually I said that I stayed out of a sense of loyalty to Father Gaillard. Because I’d been in the Verdun sector for almost three years by then and felt I had a duty to see it through the war in whatever small way I could. Both statements were true, but there was another reason as well.

  “I was scared to go,” I said. “It sounds strange, I know, but I could tell you a hundred stranger things.”

  “No,” she said. “It sounds like you were the smart one. The car should be back soon. Will you wait with me? And will you do something else for me too?”

  “If I can.”

  “I plan to stay a few more days.”

  “I’d be happy to show you whatever else you’d like to see.”

  “Even in Bar-le-Duc? There’s something I very much want to see there. Would you go with me?”

  Santa Monica, 1950

  In the early thirties, when I was working at Paramount, Ernest Hemingway came onto the lot for a screening of A Farewell to Arms. He didn’t think much of the picture, and said so unequivocally—though, to be fair, not many did. Not even those like myself who had worked on it. The script had only come past my desk because Frank Borzage, the director, had heard I’d driven an ambulance like the protagonist, Frederic Henry—like Hemingway himself. Normally, any personal experience with a picture’s subject matter was enough to get you removed from a project, but Borzage admired Hemingway and thought he might be impressed by the touch of authenticity.

  But he wasn’t impressed. He could scarcely have been less interested in trading war stories with me. And by the time of the screening, I couldn’t have said what I’d contributed to the film and what I hadn’t, which was the case just as often as not.

  I do remember, however, that I tried and failed to save the novel’s famous lines about the meaninglessness—even perniciousness—of military rhetoric. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, he’d written. Finally, only the names of places had dignity, he’d written. The language was beautiful, the sentiment true enough, but I did wonder if Hemingway ever considered what it was like to live in a place with the dignity of Verdun. What it was like to walk along a river with the dignity of the Meuse.

  Part of what first seduced me about California was that the names of its streets and sites had almost no meaning, and certainly no dignity—not in the way Hemingway meant, anyway. Sea View Avenue. Briarcrest Road. Or Rockingham Drive, where Paul lived, and where I drove for lunch the Saturday following Dr. Kepler’s funeral.

  It was a tony address—north of Sunset, just down the street from Cole Porter. Visiting homes on this sort of street was a part of life in the pictures, even if I hadn’t been doing much of it lately. I’d reached a rather interesting moment in my career, where I no longer needed to attend tennis parties and Sunday drinking sessions in order to work. The arrangement suited me, I found, and I discovered a shyness in myself that I’d never had the chance to cultivate.

  Nevertheless, I was pleased to receive Paul’s invitation. The house was smaller than the others on the street, and, though it was built in the same Spanish style, a slight shabbiness set it apart.

  The man who answered the door looked marvelously healthy, however—all the more so now that he wasn’t dressed for a funeral. He wore a white linen shirt, open at the collar, and asked if I’d like to take my drink in the backyard, where three golden retrievers waited patiently on the lawn.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asked as he handed me a boomerang.

  “I believe so.”

  “The dogs love it. Care to throw?”

  I said I’d prefer to watch. He gave an order in German, and the dogs lined up at his heel. We stood like that for quite a while, chatting in the late afternoon sun, Paul throwing the boomerang, the dogs tearing out into the lawn and leaping in turn. There was something pleasant about watching them hurl themselves into the air with such abandon, then wait at our feet with such apparent calm. And their game made our conversation easier. Sometimes I regretted that I’d never had many of those talks that take place in backyards, two boys throwing a baseball. Paul and I were a bit old for that, however.

  “I didn’t train them,” he said. “If I had I would have used English, not German.”

  “Have you been back to Austria since the war?”

  “My wife discourages me—I’m sorry you won’t meet her today, by the way.”

  “Won’t I?”

  “She’s visiting family in the east before the weather changes. Her mother’s been ill for quite a long time, actually.”

  “My sympathies. And what about your family?”

  He said nothing, but he didn’t release the boomerang, his rhythm of throwing and retrieval briefly syncopated. “My father’s newspaper was quite outspoken on Anschluss. Once the Nazis came to power, I suppose it was only a matter of time. Quite funny—somehow, I assumed you already knew that, but of course there’s no way you could have.”

  We took a second round of drinks at a small table on the back patio, the dogs panting at our feet.

  “I’ve been meaning to say, I saw one of your pictures this week.�
�� Paul said the name.

  It wasn’t one of mine, and I told him so.

  He rubbed a hand over his face and laughed. “Dear god. I only went because I thought I recognized the name in the paper, I thought you mentioned it last week.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Did you like it?”

  “Yes. Well, are they all like that? So melodramatic?”

  “Some are much worse. Most of the ones I’ve worked on, in fact.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.” He paused, took a drink, and made a face. “I saw Robin Hood just this last year. A friend screened it. I didn’t know what it was until it was too late.”

  “With Douglas Fairbanks,” I said, slowly. “What did you think?”

  “He was very graceful, forceful. I couldn’t think of a worse sobriquet for that poor creature in Bologna. Could you?”

  I’d driven there knowing that we’d be obliged to talk about Bologna and the man there we’d referred to as Douglas Fairbanks, about Drummond Green and Dr. Bianchi, about Sarah and Lee Hagen. I knew, also, that it would do me no harm to discuss those things—but that didn’t mean the prospect was pleasant. The fact was, I didn’t know how revisiting that time—those places, those people—would feel. I did know that I felt very well at the moment, more content probably than was typical for me. The fizz of the gin and soda, the perfect weather, and especially the old friend before me. I didn’t answer. And when it was clear that I wasn’t going to, Paul nodded in a genial way that could have meant anything, though I took it to mean that he understood perfectly, and said, “Well, you probably met Douglas Fairbanks, the real one.”

  “No. I never did,” I said. “But I met Douglas Jr. Now there’s a poor creature.”