Not looking my way, staying focused on her brisk lead, she said, “The engine of a train we expected last night from Compiègne broke down in the forest of Ermenonville. Sometime this morning they got running and we only just learned. It’s due within the hour at La Chapelle. We have beds.”
“Thanks for getting me,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” she said, and after that she led on in silence until we emerged from the administrative wing into the cobbled courtyard.
Across the way and farther along, a dozen Model T ambulances sat closely side by side, some with hoods folded open, the drivers busying about, all of them khaki-clad with puttees and riding breeches. Louise stopped us abruptly. She laid a hand lightly on my forearm.
“I’ll leave you to them.”
“Thank you,” I said.
But she tightened her hand on my arm to keep me from moving off. She had more to say, though she hesitated, dropped her face briefly, then lifted it firmly and looked me in the eyes. “You spoke of perhaps having a drink,” she said. “I will be at the New York Bar tonight. I can arrange for the time to be private.”
Something snagged in my chest and squirmed there briefly. How much better that prospect seemed than what faced me. Her hand was still on my arm. But there was the matter of Staub. It was bad enough I wasn’t keeping an eye on the cellar bar right now, ready to follow him.
“I may be tied up tonight,” I said. “I’m not sure.”
“There’s no obligation,” she said.
“It’s not about that,” I said. “I want to. It’s just that I’m working on other stories as well.”
“I’ll be there nonetheless,” she said.
“I’ll make every effort.”
She nodded and slipped away.
I headed off across the courtyard, trying to put her out of my mind.
John Barrington Lacey’s face made that more difficult. He was staring at me, even as he stood by the front fender of his ambulance. He’d been staring at the both of us before that, I would’ve wagered. Though I’d come to the conviction last night that there was nothing between him and Louise. Indeed, seeing him now, I figured what I’d picked up on at the bar were his longings for her that were going unrequited.
As I neared, he nodded. I nodded in return. At the next Ford down, his back toward me, a driver was rising from a headlong session inside his engine compartment. He closed the hood and turned. Cyrus Parsons.
I stopped a step or two past Harvard, splitting the distance between the two men.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” I said.
John Lacey said, “Cobb.”
Cyrus Parsons said, “Morning, Kit.”
“I’m cleared to ride,” I said.
“We’re both off to La Chapelle,” Lacey said.
“That’s fine for me,” I said.
We all three just stared at each other until I said, “So which one of you?”
Lacey turned his face to Parsons, who turned his face to Lacey, and they exchanged something more than a glance. I had the distinct feeling they’d already discussed this and the decision had not been a simple one.
“Why don’t you go along with Cyrus,” Lacey said.
Cyrus turned, and the smile he gave me bore the headline “Farm Boy Beats Harvard Varsity Debate Team.”
And from the front gate a pea-whistle shrilled and all the drivers snapped to motley attention.
“I’ll get the crank,” I said to Cyrus.
He grunted assent and made for the driver’s seat.
Then he was set and the battery began to chatter and I bent to the starting crank. He retarded the spark and advanced the gas and I gave the crank a firm tug.
The Ford started up and I was beside Cyrus in the front seat.
The dozen Fords pulled forward and turned, one at a time. Convoyed up, we rolled out of the hospital grounds and onto the Boulevard d’Inkermann.
I slipped my notebook and pencil discreetly from my pocket and kept them close, in the folds of my coat. I sensed it best with Cyrus Parsons to just let him speak as naturally as possible. I had a pretty good memory for the patterns and phrasing of news-source talk. I figured I’d rely on that as much as I could, to take the measure of this young man.
Led by a staff car to manhandle our way through intersections, we would make our cautious but steady way through mid-morning Paris, though our route would take us along the less busy northern edge of the city, eventually following the Right Bank belt railway.
Straight out of the front gates of the Lycée Pasteur, Cyrus said, “They don’t go for this, the French powers that be. Us parading through the streets in broad daylight, showing what they’ve got going with their young men. They usually make sure the blown-up bodies arrive in Paris in the dark.”
My note-taking hands twitched.
Cyrus somehow picked up on it. “Go ahead,” he said. “I don’t mind. You’re a reporter. Report.”
I’d simply been watching since he started in on the powers that be. He had good peripheral vision. Or he knew the impact of this statement and just assumed I wanted to write it down exactly. He must have glanced and caught me withdrawing the notebook and trying to keep it inconspicuous.
I flipped open the cover and lifted it a little to show him I was complying. I was happy to comply. But I didn’t remark on it. I still wanted to recede from his active awareness, though that was my practiced instinct employed with the usual news sources and he already didn’t seem usual.
He turned his face toward me. “If they don’t like what I say, what are they going to do? Fire me?”
I smiled a soundless chuckle at him.
He looked ahead again. “Damn right they won’t. They ain’t paying me a dime in wages to do this. I’m the perfect workingman.”
I’d talked to plenty of politicians who had one basic attribute in common with this farm boy: their strong opinions expected strong agreement. “Damn right,” I declared.
I wrote down his words.
“And it’s rough work,” he said. “You’re about to see.”
“You were born and reared to hard work, weren’t you?” I said.
“Sure.”
He let that sit for a moment, and another.
“Farmwork,” I said. A lame prompt for more.
“Farmwork,” he said. “Harder for my father. He took it on when the sweat got a farmer nowhere. Late eighties and through the nineties. I was born in the middle of that, when farmers wore the yoke of the railroad barons and the elevator owners and the bankers. The Grange got pretty strong, and the Populist Party had a few good years. By the time I was old enough to walk a plow and shovel grain and clear stumps, they’d made things better. Not that it’ll last. To throw off one set of villains, we cozied up to another.”
His words had gotten heated, and he stopped abruptly. Like a farmer taking a break from the plow and wiping his forehead.
He glanced at me and then back to his driving.
He let the silence run on. Like he’d said enough. Or like he had more to say and wasn’t sure how I’d take it.
“I get it,” I said.
He shot me one more look.
“Politicians,” I said. The villains the farmers had cozied up to. It was easy to guess Cyrus Parsons’ present enmity.
This time he was the one giving out the soundless chuckle, though he kept his eyes on the street ahead. He said, “They all put us into this war, didn’t they?”
“So you think Wilson’s right keeping us out?”
“It runs way deeper.” With this, Cyrus went clench-jawed grim for a time and I let it rest.
We drove in silence as we passed through the Porte de Champerret and turned north onto Boulevard Berthier. Now the convoy began to run faster, just inside the last defensive wall of the capital, circling the city proper. The road would soon bend eastward, heading for La Chapelle.
I did not look at Cyrus, wanting him to relax back into his easy talk. But I did gaze across his field of vis
ion at the earthwork embankment of the Thiers Wall, from 1844, as it ran with us along the northern edge of Paris.
Eventually Cyrus said, “Do you know what’s on the other side?”
He’d watched me watching.
I could see an occasional rooftop or a distant smokestack, but not much else. “I know they call it The Zone.” I knew more, but I waited to hear his take.
“Paris is two cities,” he said. “The Paris of the wealthy and the powerful. They’re on this side. Out there is the Paris of the poor, the beaten up. The gypsies and the carnival performers. The foreigners and the ragpickers. The laborers. The simple workingman. The forgotten and the thrown away.”
“You’ve been out there?”
“I have.”
“American Hospital work?”
“No. Not work. Just to answer the question.”
“Of what’s on the other side.”
“That one.”
I found myself rather liking Cyrus. I wanted to ask him his politics, but I figured I shouldn’t use the word. Mention of the practitioners clenched his jaw the last time. But I found myself engaged by his intense talk about politics and power, about the rich and the poor, engaged, too, by his hands on the wheel of this ambulance and by whatever lay ahead of us at La Chapelle. I said, “You’re a man in search of principles, it sounds like.”
It wasn’t good journalism. I needed to ask him a basic who-what-when-where-why, not give him the words I wanted to hear. But I was trying to think like him and I gave voice to that.
To my surprise he understood what I wanted. He said, “Shall I say that for your story?”
“I don’t mean to put words into your mouth.”
“Well, Mr. Cobb,” he said, “you can quote me. I’m here in Paris driving to a railroad siding at La Chapelle because I’m searching for principles. I figure I might find some among all the blood and putrefaction coming in on these trains from the front.”
He sounded sincere.
At least as I heard it.
He was keeping his eyes on the back of the ambulance in front of him. He wasn’t looking for my reaction. Wasn’t giving me a wink or a sneering smile. I’d seen those things with other sources in a moment like this and it was the tip-off they were just saying things I wanted to hear. Cyrus showed none of that.
Still, I pressed him on the matter. “Do you mean it?” I asked.
Now he glanced at me.
His mouth was set comfortably in a tiny, lopsided smile. He said, “Close enough.”
What had I expected from a presumed rube fresh off a farm down a remote Illinois country road? Not what I’d been hearing.
Maybe I’d just been in cities too long. Or among other rubes in other wars who I never got to talk to in a situation like this.
So at least just to stir his pot, break up his self-assurance a little, get a rise, I said, “Are you really from a farm?” I asked it firmly, torquing the question to let him hear I would take no lie, no accommodation, no close-enough.
“I sure am. Exactly like I’ve said.” He was sufficiently quick and matter-of-fact in his answer that I believed him.
But I still heard something. “The farm by way of what?”
“You never meet a smart farm boy before?”
“I probably have.”
“You didn’t grow up among them.”
“No.”
“Well you’re right. They’re a bunch of dumb shits. As tractable as cows to slaughter.”
“Tractable,” I said, stretching the word to let him know I was quoting it back to him. An example of why I asked the question to begin with.
“Books,” he said.
“Books?”
“By way of books. My father wasn’t always a farmer.”
“What was he?”
“It was a long time ago.”
Cyrus hesitated, as if with second thoughts about bringing it up.
“So what did your father do?”
He’d been watching his driving all this time, but he turned my way now to answer me.
“He was a newspaperman,” he said.
It surprised me, of course.
Then I made the connection with his interview savvy. “Now I get it,” I said. “Working out a quote for me.”
“About that quote,” he said. “You can keep it if it helps, but the truth is I have principles. I’m just figuring out where and how to live by them.”
“I prefer that quote,” I said.
He looked my way. “Do you?” he said.
“Yes.”
He returned his attention to the road ahead.
My mind was still adjusting to Cyrus being both a farm boy and the son of a newsman. I went back to the night I met him. He’d said that his father was born in Texas but his family brought him north. That the man used to be someone else, then he became an Illinois farmer.
“Your father the newsman,” I said. “Was that also Illinois?”
But as I asked this question we entered the shadow of a train-line overpass. Cyrus said, “We’re almost there.”
That tension I’d seen come upon him earlier returned now. Not just in jaw but in hands and back and in focused silence. Cyrus was suddenly, fully, an ambulance driver. I wanted to learn more about his father. Simply from personal curiosity. My own newsman self had a different focus now, so I didn’t press this question.
The convoy slowed and crept as the vehicles made a sharp right turn, one after the other, into the Rue de la Chapelle and then almost immediately another right turn into an acreage of warehouses and train sidings, which pulled track from both north and east.
We drove a cobbled street toward the southern end of the warehouse park. Ahead was the last, vast warehouse, which had been turned into a receiving station. A canopied platform stretched along its trackside, leading to a row of stuccoed pavilions and then a separate cluster of cottages. But as we neared its northern end, we crossed the tracks and drove up a wooden incline and straight into the warehouse.
Entering the great main floor I expected dimness but was bedazzled by sunlight from a vaulted glass ceiling. The ambulances pulled in, noses to the side wall, and we got out to wait. Accustomed to it now as I’d become, the light was less dazzling and more diffuse, as the air was filled with dust climbing the morning sun toward the ceiling, as if the ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust of the battle-dead were mounting toward heaven in this train-yard terminus.
We waited for the delayed train from Compiègne, along with the French ambulances and drivers of other Paris hospitals. There was low talk and ropey French cigarettes and an undercurrent of nerve-gathering that felt like the pre-attack rituals of the soldiers I’d been with in the Balkans and in Nicaragua.
Cyrus kept his distance from me for a while. He fiddled under the hood of his ambulance—to no real mechanical point, by my covert observation—and then he walked off and had a cigarette down the way, speaking briefly to Lacey but mostly wandering and fidgeting on his own.
He strolled back to me on his third Gauloise, arriving with a minute nod of the head. He threw his cigarette to the floor with half a dozen good drags left in it, and he ground the butt with his foot.
When he was done, he looked at me and said, “We go into the train cars and take out the wounded. We work in twos.”
“I’ll work with you,” I said.
He gave me a small, you-don’t-know-what-you’re-getting-into smile. “You sure?”
“I am.”
“There are orderlies.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Good,” he said. “We take the men to the complex at the south end.”
“I saw it coming in,” I said.
He nodded and paused, as if to figure out how to put what was next. He decided on a tone of ironically measured matter-of-factness. “Not everybody gets to a hospital right away. There are always patients here. The holding pavilions are for the enlisted men, conscripted sons of the poor. Warehouse walls and pillars. The cottages are reserved fo
r the officers. Their walls are painted buff and they have fucking potted plants.”
He didn’t seem to expect a response from me. I wouldn’t have known what to say, exactly. He turned away and lit another cigarette. Before he could take a second puff, a pea-whistle trilled at the south end of the warehouse.
The train was coming in.
And we all worked a shift in hell. The cars were filled with air made stinkingly palpable by the flush of inner things from the bodies of wrecked men, their blood and their sweat and their piss and their ordure—things always with them but unmanageable now—and by things new to their bodies, things foul and ravaging and smelling even stronger. The sepsis, the gangrene. Smells those of us from the ambulances took into our own bodies through our lungs and through our skin.
And the men in their wreckage lay all around. One at a time we lifted them onto stretchers. Necessarily. But in doing so we enflamed their broken parts, aroused their pain, and though these men sometimes moaned, sometimes let out a stifled cry, sometimes spoke a beseeching Mère de Dieu, for the most part these men kept a rigorous, valorous silence until, as they were about to be carried away to the doctors, they whispered Merci to us, to us who had wracked them with pain.
Hours passed filled with these men.
I had enough for this part of my story long before I was brought back from that deep circle of hell and set free again in the passenger seat of Cyrus Parsons’s ambulance. We went slow over the cobbles and through the turns and along the road to the hospital, twilight now, the defensive wall of Paris running along outside my window, a worthless thing in this twentieth century, in this modern war. We ran slowly and as softly as possible for the sake of the three shattered men on stretchers riding in the compartment behind us.
I knew not to speak to Cyrus. Entering this hell over and over was the life he’d chosen to lead. The men who populated this hell were legion. This part of the story I would write was as much about bravery as about suffering.
Paris in the Dark Page 7