Death of a Century

by Daniel Robinson

  During one of their late-night talks when neither could find rest, they had exchanged stories of the trenches. With whiskey in one hand and brier in the other, Gresham had told Joe that he had been part of a reconnaissance unit at Champagne. He had joined the English army soon after hostilities broke out with Germany. His mother was English, lower nobility but still nobility, and he had been in London visiting cousins when he became caught up in the fervor—that old lie, Dulce et decorum est. Because of his family’s name, he joined as an officer. Since the oncoming battle in the Champagne was to be a joint affair between the British and the French, the recon unit was also joint. They went out every night to scout the advance, mapping the wires and trails to the German trenches. They worked in pairs and every morning would compare notes. The evening of the attack, they were told to remain in the trench and go out the next morning to watch and record the event. “That was the day,” Gresham had said, “when we all went to hell.”

  Joe studied the photograph, the manner of their bodies, their faces and their uniforms. The three Frenchmen and two Englishmen between Gresham and the camera sat or knelt against the side of the trench, their feet braced on the trench’s wooden duck walk. One Englishman held a spoon to his mouth and smiled wearily at the camera. Two Frenchmen next to him appeared to be smiling as well, looking at something across from them in the trench, a rat that had slipped in the mud maybe. They had narrow faces and the same slant to their smiles and could have been brothers and maybe were the two Marcels. Joe drew a quick sketch of the scene with stick figures representing each man. He drew lines from the two stick-figured men who looked like brothers and wrote Marcels and a line from the standing stick figure and wrote Gresham. That left three others to identify.

  Next to the brothers Marcel was an Englishman, as though hovering truncated and silhouetted, fully shaded with only the dark outline of his head visible under his English helmet, his shoulders rounded, his back slightly hunched like that of any man who had spent even a single day below the surface. Another Frenchman looked with stern eyes directly at the camera as though daring this to be his last image of life. He stood closest to the camera. His mouth was opened slightly to show an irregular line of white teeth between full lips.

  Joe knew their names but not which face belonged to every name. At least one of them was a traitor. At least three of them were dead. He tried to figure the traitor from the images, what he could conjure behind the two-dimensional faces, but he could not. He studied the list of names and the marks Gresham had put next to each name. Check’s behind Wilde and Jean Marcel and a dash following Paul Dillard’s name, whom Joe had first thought was English but then decided must be the third Frenchman and probably alive and probably the one who had told Huntington about Gresham and the manuscript. Nothing was noted after the names of Rene Marcel and Gadwa.

  Wilde and Jean Marcel had checks behind their names and were both dead and were thus linked. Dillard was alive and had a dash behind his name and was alone. Gadwa and Rene Marcel had no marks and in Joe’s mind were thus linked together. He had no reason why that might be nor any reason to believe that they were linked. But somehow they were.

  “Goddamn nothing,” Joe said louder than he expected, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes.

  He leaned forward again to look at the photograph, conjuring the image in his mind, bringing it alive as through the divinations of a necromantic shaman, bringing it forth from what he witnessed in his months spent in the trenches of eastern France. What came into view for him were not the images of the photograph but his own memories laid bare as an open wound. One man still snoring as the last of the bombardment sounded with the false dawn rising and then that man fully awake to the increasing sound of nothing. A quiet so dense that Joe remembered believing he could hear the earth move. The collected breath of thousands of young men about to become too old to live any longer. A wren lit in the sunlight and perched along the withy at the top of the trench. A man vomited violently and then another. Someone cursed. Another man whispered softly as though praying his own prophetic supplication, “I’m dead, I’m dead,” and answered by another man who cussed an imprecation of damnation upon the man. Slowly Joe had made out the music of a gramophone floating softly from the German lines. He had listened carefully. The song had been in English. Several men near Joe began to hum; some sang along to the music. “Sing me love’s lullaby. Sing me the song of dreams—Dearie, where you and I wander in love-land, where love-light beams. So hold me.” Then it began. A whistle and a yell. A confusion of feet and bodies climbing and falling. A swirled haze of smoke and dust and fog. The first man over the top and already to the lane in the wire, a lieutenant from Yale shot through the neck and arrested in his fall to the ground by the wire and left moving spastically from the bullets continuing to thrum his dead body. Then Joe was more afraid than he had ever been. Too afraid not to follow the others as they climbed the trench ladders and ran through the lanes in the wire. He had run blindly into the morning fog and toward other young men who were equally afraid but still wanting to kill him.

  VI

  “BERENGARIA PROPELLER DAMAGED BY WRECKAGE

  Big Cunard Liner Delayed in Reaching Cherbourg, but All on Board Are Well.

  The great former German liner Berengaria, the largest of the Cunard Company’s transatlantic ships, struck part of a submerged wreckage. . . . She was due at Southampton yesterday, but will not reach Cherbourg, her first port of call, until some time today.”

  —The New York Times

  A SERIES OF KNOCKS ON THE CABIN DOOR STARTLED JOE FROM HIS restless sleep. His own memories had whipped his dreams and his heart raced with the sudden interruption. He sat on the side of his bed, head in hands, his mind still half a decade away. He looked quickly around the room before again remembering where he was and who he was or who he was supposed to be. The sudden, nervous sweat cooled on his brow. His heart slowed, but he did not reach to answer the door. He gathered the notes and photograph that covered the table in front of him and with no time to properly hide them, slid them inside the pages of his copy of Scribner’s magazine. Hidden in plain sight.

  Above the chest of drawers, the portal window showed darkness.

  Once again, he had fallen asleep with his clothes on. He felt as though he were apprenticing for bumdom and tucked in his shirt and straightened his pants. He held the pistol in his right hand, covering his arm with an overcoat.

  Another series of knocks measured his door, sounding more like a fight on the wood than friendly raps.

  He called out, “Just a moment,” breathed deeply and opened the door.

  Facing him in a semicircle at the door were five ship’s officers, their uniforms pressed to the point of death and as rigid as their postures. At the front of the cluster stood a man of girth carrying a chest full of ribbons above his large stomach. The Captain, Joe decided, looking into the gray eyes of an Englishman who approved of his own of glory, probably earned in the comfort of a state room.

  He could see each of the men as they immediately measured him, taking stock of his disheveled state, his day-old beard, his irregular hair, the probable redness of his eyes. He knew that he must have appeared like a stumbled drunk. Whatever they were there for, he was not making a good first impression.

  Even with that, however, Joe felt no panic. He had been discovered. He could not run. There was no place to run to on a ship at sea even if he could fight his way out of the room. He loosened his grip on the pistol, allowing his index finger to break from the trigger.

  “Yes?” Joe asked, blinking and wiping his mouth with the back of his free hand.

  “May we enter?” the Captain asked in response. It was not a question at all, just a polite demand, not even meant to be answered.

  Joe stepped aside and waved them in. The Captain nodded and entered, followed by the others. Together, the six of them took up almost the entire floor space of the room.

  “Can I help you?” Joe asked, turning his
body to hide the movements of his hand as he slid the pistol into a pocket of his overcoat, placing the coat on his bed.

  “We are here about August Huntington,” the Captain said.

  “Huntington?” Having expected them to arrest him, or at the very least to question him about being Wynton Gresham, he felt a certain release along with his confusion. That they had asked about Huntington might have meant that he had dodged another bullet. Had he been superstitious, he might have begun to taste invulnerability, but he was more experienced, if not smarter, than that.

  “Colonel Huntington, yes” the Captain said, his voice a deep baritone. Fitting, Joe thought, for a captain of the ship.

  “What about him?”

  “He is dead.”

  “What?” At that moment, had he been superstitious, he would have wondered whether he was a curse. That pendulum of fortune that he had been swinging on for the past week, swung with swift speed.

  “He was murdered in the hallway outside of his cabin,” said one of the other officers, a thin man with a thin voice.

  Joe sat on the bed next to his coat, hands on his knees and feet even on the floor in front of him.

  He watched the other ship’s officers as they coldly fingered through the things in his cabin. At least they were more careful than the last sets of inquiring eyes. They also had the time and sanction to search more closely and slowly. Joe didn’t know what they were looking for but could guess that it was something to incriminate him. He had read that script before.

  The Captain continued, “A passenger found him last night and reported to our steward. He was dead before our medical officer even arrived.”

  He nodded to his underlings and they began their search, opening drawers and patting the pockets of hangered suits and fingering inside shoes. The Captain, watching as his men looked for anything of use, picked up Joe’s loaded copy of Scribner’s, and Joe questioned the wisdom of his hiding place.

  In plain sight, he silently chided himself.

  The captain began leafing through it as he talked. “After we attended to him, we searched his room for any indication of who might have killed him.”

  “And that’s why you’re here?” Joe could hear the Captain’s assumptions hum through the room and thought with a flatness that too many people assumed too much about too many things.

  The Captain looked at Joe, returned the magazine to the side table, pulled from his pocket Joe’s written request to meet with Huntington. He opened it and held it out for Joe to read. “From you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you wish to meet with him?”

  “We were in a battle during the war. Same time, same place.” He felt himself slide once again into the spiraling necessity of lies.

  “You knew him from the war?”

  “No” Joe said, shaking his head and keeping his lie simple. “We didn’t know each other. We just happened to discover during dinner the other night that we had fought in the same battle.”

  “And which battle was that, may I ask?”

  “The Champagne.”

  The Captain measured Joe with leveled eyes. “That was a bad day,” he said with solemnity. Joe could see the man practicing his visage in front of a mirror, memorizing the proper look for the proper occasion for the man had to perform throughout the sea-voyage.

  “In more ways than one,” Joe said. In more ways than you could ever know, he thought but did not say.

  “A black spot on the integrity of the Crown,” said the Captain, puffing his chest with self-righteous patriotism.

  Chicken-shitting bastard, flashed through Joe’s mind.

  He gritted his teeth. He wanted to say that the integrity of the Crown during that war had been blackened well before the Battle of the Champagne, that it had been blackened by bastard officers carrying chests filled with medals who never saw the mud and rats of a trench, whose exposure to mustard gas was limited to what they read in the pages of the London Times. Those men, old and rich men who sent the young and poor to war, turned Joe’s stomach, like the former president and his Western vice-president whose jingoistic ballyhooing had killed thousands of Joe’s generation. Joe referred to them as “Chicken-hawks,” too cowardly to fight when they were young but more than eager to damn another generation. At other moments, even less-forgiving moments, he called them “Chicken-shitting bastards.”

  To the Captain, however, did not say anything.

  One of the underlings leaned across between Joe and the Captain, taking the magazine from its table and let it flip open to Joe’s insertions. He held them for the Captain to see and Joe watched as the Captain studied the photograph.

  “Are you or Huntington in this photograph?” the Captain asked, looking from the photograph to Joe.

  “No,” Joe said, then began to mill his story with counterfeit truths: “I took the photograph. Those are others who were there. I’m going to France to visit some of them.” At least that last part was not a lie. He felt his body and mind clear to regain a sense of solid particularity, the sloughing off of another death in a world in which life had become cheap. He pushed thoughts of Huntington to the background and again concentrated on his own survival.

  “And you had the photograph out for . . . ?”

  “I thought Huntington might know some of them.” Joe was becoming accustomed to lying. He had become pretty good at it, easily slipping between truths and lies like a serpent in tall grass.

  Another officer, pointing to the list of names, leaned close and whispered something in the Captain’s ear. While the man was whispering, the Captain raised his thick eyebrows and turned his eyes toward Joe. Joe had the falling feeling of having suddenly been placed under a microscope, once again pinned beneath the fixed stare of a focused eye.

  The Captain looked at Joe but spoke to the officer next to him. “Go and see,” he ordered. “Let me know as soon as you know something. And take Montgomery with you.” He nodded his head toward a lower-grade officer standing near the door but never allowed his eyes to waver from Joe sitting on the bed.

  After the two officers left the room, the Captain said to Joe, “Interesting coincidences.”

  “What are?” Joe had begun to hate the word in the way a child hates the slap of a strap against an open palm.

  The Captain paused before answering. He pulled a chair from the round table and sat with a long and audible sigh, as though relieving himself of a physical burden. With his hands on his knees and facing Joe straight on, he said, “Just that you would meet a man who had been with you during such a disastrous battle, a debacle and treason really, or so the stories say, and then you arrange for a meeting and he is murdered outside his cabin door the same night as your meeting.” He sighed again and sat back, thrumming the fingers of one hand on the table. “Interesting coincidences.”

  “You already said that,” Joe said quietly, shaking his head and wishing he had a whiskey.

  “Yes, I did,” said the Captain, his eyes not smiling at all. “Wouldn’t you agree, though?”

  Joe’s mind flashed on the series of coincidences that had originally interwoven him in the web he felt caught in, a moth having wandered in flight onto the blue leaf of a columbine only to touch to the viscid gossamer of the spider’s web. His life had become fixed within that web of contradictions and lies and false assumptions. He wondered how long before he was mummified in silken threads or killed. He answered flatly, “I’m not such a fancier of coincidences.”

  “Neither am I, sir,” answered the Captain.

  Joe shrugged. He would have guessed as much, could have said the line for the Captain had he been asked.

  The Captain stood, folded his arms across the extent of his barrel chest and pursed his lips. He said, “You do not seem overly concerned about Colonel Huntington’s death.”

  “We weren’t friends,” Joe said. “We just met. On the ship. We were little more than acquaintances.” It wasn’t really a lie, but it was also far from the truth. H
e had liked Huntington, and in the few days that he had known the Brit had come to feel trust for the man. They shared membership in a select group: They had fought and survived the Western Front. He disliked having dismissed Huntington with such an off-handed remark, and he notched another event that would need redemption.

  He had once read about the Viking belief in Valhalla, where warriors would meet in the afterlife. He didn’t believe in that, but he thought that there must be a special club in heaven for those who served with honor. He hoped that if he made it past St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, that Huntington would welcome him and forgive his callous remark and the two could sit over a pint or ten and share war stories.

  “Yes.” The Captain nodded and paused as though scripted and practiced in front of a mirror. “We will arrive in Cherbourg late this afternoon and proceed to Southampton in the morning. The police may wish to speak with you, so my first mate will accompany you ashore in Southampton when we arrive there.” He paused as for effect and leaned toward Joe. “You will not disembark today. Your trunk is in the hallway. Apologies for the broken hasp, it was not preventable. I have asked for a steward to return later this morning to retrieve the trunk for transport tomorrow.” He waited a moment and added, “Do not attempt to disembark in Cherbourg.”