The Last Summer of the World

by Emily Mitchell

  Then there were the men who came in not wounded, but sick. Fevers spread quickly down the line because in the trenches they lived so close together, used each other’s bodies for warmth in the winter. Pyrexia of Unknown Origin: the men would be sweating and sneezing, shrieking about shooting pains in their legs. There were bouts of cholera, dysentery; she had seen malaria in a few troops that had come north from the fronts in Greece and Italy. And then in the spring they began to see cases of something they had never encountered before. It looked like trench fever at first, the same symptoms, pain and fever, but all the patients suffered from a hacking, persistent cough, which deepened as the disease progressed. After a few days they began to have trouble breathing, their lungs and throats were so full of catarrh. Some of them found blood in their mouths when they coughed. By the end of the week, the nurse who had tended the cases, and the doctors who had made the initial diagnosis, were all sick. One of the nurses on the ward where Marion was working had dropped the tray of medicine she was carrying and reached for a wall to steady herself. I’m sorry, she said. I’m so dizzy. Then she collapsed onto the floor. Two days later, Marion woke herself up with coughing. She went and knocked on the matron’s bedroom door and asked to be quarantined with the others.

  It became known up and down the front as “the Spanish disease” because it was supposed to have come from Spanish soldiers who’d been fighting in Morocco. It gave you a couple of days of fever, and then it broke or it killed you. Marion had survived it; but often people in the prime of life did not recover. It took them, along with the old and the very young, those weakened by injuries or fatigue, and it sucked them down so rapidly that for almost a month after the outbreak she still looked for Nora, the nurse who’d dropped the medicine tray, expecting to find her in the cafeteria at mealtimes, or reading a novel out under the trees in the hospital grounds between shifts. For the hospital as a whole, though, they seemed to have caught it in time. Once the first cases were quarantined, they saw only a handful after that. Then it died away almost as suddenly as it had appeared, and when it was gone, no one spoke of it much, as if they didn’t want to summon it back by uttering its name. They all hoped they had seen the last of it.

  But the wounds and the sickness, these would have been less appalling if the men themselves hadn’t been so filthy. Amid all this suffering and sickness, what revolted her most was the other creatures that were living on the bodies of the men. She and the other nurses undressed the new arrivals, cutting away the torn material of their uniforms and pealing back the layers of fabric, shirts and undergarments so stained with months of sweat and dirt that it was impossible to tell that they had once been white. Underneath, they found the men’s skin alive with infestations, gray bulbous creatures, some the size of a the pad of her thumb that bustled away into the armpits and groins to hide from the light. The amputees she had tended, for all the alien horror of their half-gone bodies, never made her recoil and break her required calm—always be polite and obliging, the nurses’ handbook told them; always be patient and ready to help—as she had when she first arrived in Châlons and found her first patient’s stomach bristling with lice.

  BUT THESE MEN were not like that. Their uniforms had been recently laundered; they didn’t stink. She looked down again at the chart. Air Service. These were airmen. And something jumped in her mind, name recognition, the bolt of fear echoing through her, this time immediate, belonging to her in particular.

  “Where are they from?” she asked the orderlies, her voice sounding abrupt and panicked to her own ears. “Where did they arrive from, these men?”

  “Airfield near Épernay,” one of them called over his shoulder as he went out to bring the last stretcher in from the ambulance.

  WHAT SHE HAD felt when she met Edward on the night of the fire wasn’t simple. Through the haze of lost sleep, a weariness that seemed to have seeped into her bones, she had thought for a moment that she was dreaming him. In the hospital, the concoctions of the mind intermingled so freely with the solid objects of waking life that she was never sure how real anything was until she touched it, tested it, to see if her hand could pass through. Among the rows of beds, the charts, syringes and bandages, men would talk at length to people they imagined to be in the room. They would try to use limbs that they no longer possessed. In the midst of all this, how could she be sure he wasn’t a figment of her imagination?

  He’d walked out of the shadow of the corridor and into the ward, looking as he had four years earlier, perhaps he was a little thinner, a little aged, but there, walking toward her as if his coming had been inevitable, only a matter of time, and that final summer, the very last summer of the world it seemed now, came back to her in a rush that was so fierce that she had to put her hand over her mouth to prevent herself from crying out. She had turned away from him to tend her patients because she needed to collect herself. She could not come unraveled here, and not in front of him. She felt at once a tremendous rush of gladness and also anger and perplexity: all the things she had felt when she was last with him. An orderly demeanor, she thought, reflexively. When she spoke, she held her voice steady. She told him to go because she had work to do, which was, at least, not an outright lie.

  Now she watched him carried in covered by the gray army-issue blankets, and laid on one of the empty beds. She walked slowly toward him, the complications tumbling away from her, so she thought that she might well turn and find the floor cluttered with a trail of them. She took his chart from the orderly and began to read: Steichen, Edward J. Head injury, concussion. Fever, probable result of aspiration while unconscious.

  VOICES AND THE clack of footsteps, too loud and somehow solid so each sound dug into him like the toe of a boot kicking, making the sick feeling in his stomach swell and flood through his body until the sickness shaded into an ache that ran through his joints when he tried to move, so he cried out and that made the voices come back louder, they came and went, came and went from beside him. He felt a hand on his forehead, cool and steady, but then quickly too warm and dry, it was a hand with skin made of paper.

  If he lay quite still, the moiling inside him settled and he could think a little more clearly. They had been falling through the sky, and then he remembered someone shining a light into his face, feeling his pulse. He remembered he had felt all right apart from pain in his head, and he had slept, but then he had woken up retching with this terrible sick feeling crouched inside him. They were being driven somewhere. There were others with him, he could remember that much but not who they were.

  Now there was a face to go with one of the voices and the cool paper hand, a woman’s face, fringed with dark hair and for a minute he thought it was Clara, and he felt a rush of gratitude that overcame everything else, that after all this time she was here. This was all I wanted, he thought, for there to be peace between us, forgiveness. But then he realized that the jaw was too square, and Clara never had freckles like that; it was only a nurse, a stranger who happened to have the same colors as his wife. Again he felt the sickness well up from inside him, and he closed his eyes to make the whole complicated business go away.

  Later someone was sitting beside him. There was a light, and then it dimmed, and there was someone in the chair near his head, not speaking or moving, just watching over him while he slept. Later still, someone had fallen asleep with her head drooped onto the blankets of his bed and was being woken by one of the nurses. They were speaking together in low tones and he couldn’t hear their words, but he could see their figures, clad in white so they were visible against the darkness. He watched as they slipped quietly away. He was in a room full of beds. It was night. He lay breathing. The world beyond his eyelids had ceased to buzz, and when he looked at it, the room stayed in place. The sickness, he realized, was draining away.

  “YOU ASKED ME to come and get you when he started to wake up.”

  “Yes. Thank you. How’s his temperature this morning?”

  “It’s better.”


  The voices were down by his feet. Edward blinked and opened his eyes. Daylight. He looked around him and found he was still in the same room—a hospital ward. There were men in the beds on either side of him. He could hear coughing, some voices speaking low and further off across the room, and then these two people together at the foot of his bed. He tried to raise himself up to a sitting position, but the world tilted sickeningly away from him. He lay back down. The light hurt so he closed his eyes again.

  “Lie still,” said one of the voices. “Your fever has broken, but it still isn’t entirely gone. You’ll feel dizzy if you try to sit up too fast.”

  “Where are the others who came in with me?”

  “Thomas Cundall is here.” The voice was a woman’s and suddenly, brilliantly familiar.

  “Marion?”

  “Yes, it’s me.” She came to the side of the bed where he could see her. He twisted around, this time without lifting his head from the pillow. And there she was.

  “You hit your head,” she said. “You will feel weak for a while.”

  “You were here,” he said. “At night. You were sitting here.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked as she had the night the storeroom had been shelled, weary but composed, but now she remained standing where she was, close beside him, without averting her eyes or turning away as she had then. Instead, she gazed at him, not smiling, just taking in his presence, quietly, steadily.

  “I wrote to you,” he said. “But I never sent any of the letters. I thought you wouldn’t want to hear from me.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I probably would have torn the letter up and thrown it away without reading it and been annoyed at you for ignoring my request not to write. Or at least, that is what I would have intended to do.” Now she did blink and look away.

  “It’s all right. You had good reasons to tell me to go.”

  “Not good enough. You might have … I might never have seen you again. This”—she gestured to the ward, its rows of occupied beds—“should put things into perspective, and remind you to cherish your friends whenever you find them.”

  She pulled forward the chair and sat down. He stared at her, taking her presence in, her face that was so familiar and so strange in the context of the place.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Me neither. I think I have too many things to say, and they all want to come out at once.”

  “Well, I’ll start with something immediate, then. How long have I been here?”

  “This is your fourth day. You were barely conscious when you were brought in. What do you remember?”

  “I think I was being looked at by the doctor—that must have been at the infirmary at Épernay. I was being carried into an ambulance, we were driving. I don’t remember very much else.”

  “You had developed a bad fever. It peaked and it’s dying down now. You will be fine, but you must rest. I know resting has never been something you were very good at.”

  “How nice it is to be recognized, even for my faults. But there were others, too? Brought in with me.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly. “There were two others. Thomas Cundall is in the next ward.”

  “Cundall is here?” She nodded. “Is he going to be all right?”

  “It will be a while before he can fly again, but he is recovering.”

  “And what about the other one?” She was silent just long enough for him to understand. “He’s not all right, is he? Who was it?”

  “He was French. And his legs …”

  “Gilles Marchand.”

  “He was taken up to surgery as soon as he came in, but he’d lost a lot of blood already.”

  Edward turned and buried his face in his pillow.

  Her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry.”

  “He was very young,” he said. “He couldn’t walk. He wanted to fly. I had them bend the rules so he could be in one of our sections.” Damn Cundall with his lip and his bravado. Got himself injured and someone else killed to no purpose whatsoever.

  “Edward,” Marion said. “I have to go.”

  “Please. Sit here a little longer.”

  “I can’t. I’m in the middle of a shift. There are men who need their medicine. But I’ll come back as soon as I’m done.”

  “All right.”

  “You had a visitor, too,” she said. “A man from the airfield.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Lutz. He said when you were awake to send for him.” She stood up, then quickly leaned forward and put her face next to his so they were touching. Even though it was tucked away under her cap, he could smell her hair. It smelled like chamomile. Quietly, in a rush, she said, “I am so glad you are all right.”

  —

  THE DUTY NURSE, a woman named Helen (it was she he had mistaken in his fever for Clara) showed Lutz in and directed him to Edward’s bed.

  “Hello, sir. You look …”

  “Be honest,” Edward warned.

  “OK. You look terrible. That greenish-gray complexion: it’s not your most flattering color.” Edward laughed. Lutz sat down on a chair next to his bed, and Edward saw that he had brought with him a file of photographs.

  “I was sorry,” Lutz said, “to hear about Marchand.” He looked down at his knees. He opened his mouth and then shut it again, as though he wanted to speak but didn’t know what to say. Edward thought, It is the same as when Daniels died, this having no words, this overwhelming silence. What could be said, after all, that would be adequate? They sat facing each other trapped by things they did not know how to express.

  Eventually, Lutz put the file of photographs he was holding down on the mattress beside Edward. “These are Marchand’s,” he said. “Or more accurately, these are the photographs his camera took. That De Ram thing kept going. We got a full set of exposures. Even though he probably stopped taking pictures midway through the run. Have a look.”

  Edward picked up the file, opened it and began to look through the prints inside. There were the initial exposures, taken from 10,000 feet, showing the southern part of the Aisne salient. In them, he could see the river, houses, some troops, nothing unusual. But then he reached the obliques taken when Cundall swooped in on the work detail, the dive that had gotten both him and Marchand shot. And from these he could see, at last, what those men had been doing.

  Their reaction unfolded for him in a series of discrete instants. First, they were working, oblivious to the eyes watching them from above. Then one of the officers was pointing upward, straight toward the camera. Then the men were running, scattering. Some hurled themselves toward the nearby trees; some fell down where they were and covered their heads with their arms while around them the ground spit dust as the bullets went into it. Then finally more running figures, fire shooting upward from the trees, some of the men who had fallen still lying facedown on the ground.

  After that the perspective began to pull away, and Edward realized that this was the point when the camera must have begun operating on its own. The rest of the sequence showed a broadening view of the scene. He could see the building the men had been working on. It was an old barn, with wooden walls and roof. Half the roof and one wall of the barn had been removed, leaving nothing but a line of bare ground. Next to it there were wagons filled almost to capacity with the long bundles of wood. On the road he could see wheel tracks: these were not the first carts the men had filled.

  “This is where those imprints come from,” Lutz said. “They are taking apart wooden buildings near the front. We checked on some older photographs of the area: these were all barns, dairies, storehouses, things like that. Why are they doing it? What are they going to use all that lumber for?”

  Edward shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  He peered again at the first shot in the series. Here was an instant excised from time, and already where this had been taken, things had changed; time had moved on. He thought quite suddenly of something Rodin had said to him, on t
he very first occasion he had gone to visit Meudon alone, about photographs not telling the truth because they stop time; the answer to Lutz’s question was not in this photograph, but in the hours and days before and after it was taken. He flipped to the last picture. In this, taken from a greater altitude, the river wound through low hills, little towns hugging its banks. The front was visible to the north. Beyond that was the Aisne River, and he could make out the places where it had been forded …

  “They are going to use the wood to build pontoon bridges,” he said. “They don’t have the railway junction at Reims that they tried to get in May. So they are scavenging for the material rather than bringing it up from the rear.”

  “That would mean,” Lutz said, “that they are going to come across a river. They are going to come south, over the Marne.”

  “Yes. They are going to try to take Paris.” Edward handed the photographs back to Lutz. “Go and tell the colonel what this looks like. See what he says.”

  “Yes. Right.” Lutz was looking through the photographs again, nodding to himself. He closed the file and stood up, ready to leave. “It’s good to see you, sir,” he said. “I’m glad you’re recovering. Do you know yet when you will be released from here?”

  “They haven’t given me a day yet, but it shouldn’t be too long now.”

  “Well, the fellows all send their best,” Lutz said. “They all said to tell you to get well soon.”

  “That’s good of them. But you are coping all right without me, right?”

  “Oh yes, sir,” Lutz said. “We’re doing just fine.”

  “Well, that is good to hear. Goodbye, Lutz.”

  “Goodbye, sir.”

  It wasn’t until he had watched Lutz maneuver his stout figure through the rows of beds, lift his palm to say goodbye again and vanish into the hall, that Edward realized he’d been hoping that they were not managing all right without him.

  He’d hoped to learn that he was needed.