“A minor legend now,” Allen admitted. “I didn’t answer the phone when he called, just before he boarded the train for Petrograd. He wanted a deal, I guess. Fortunately, no one else answered the phone either, not the French, not the British.” He was looking at the tablecloth, not moving, the darkness he’d always hid edging over him. But then he looked up, and smiled that loose smile again. “We should get our bill. The cabs dry up in Bern after ten.”
The proprietor waved them goodbye from his tiny portico in the September drizzle. There were no cabs, so they walked under Allen’s umbrella. They walked for a very long time without saying anything; Eleanor figured Allen was more drunk than he appeared. By the time they reached her tiny one-star ladies’ hotel, Eleanor’s shoulders were soaked and her feet squishing in her sodden shoes.
“Foster thinks you should come and work with him at Sullivan once the war’s over,” she said, looking up at him under the umbrella. He was indeed aging, thickening everywhere. He could pass for Foster’s age already. “He says there’s real money to be made, especially if you know the ropes at the State Department. More fitting for a Dulles of your wants and needs, he says.”
“Does he? He’s already asked,” Allen said. “I turned him down, Ellie. Just not done, a career State person carrying Sullivan’s water. Not even for Foster.”
“He said you’d say that.” She looked at Allen, who looked back at her, expressionless. He seemed slumped, diminished. She reached into her purse. “He gave me this to give you. I’m on the five o’clock Paris train tomorrow morning. Take care. And stick to Scotch, big brother. Wine makes you blue.” Allen’s gaze rose to meet hers. “I’ll write, Allie,” Eleanor promised. “But God knows how long a letter will take to reach you.” She handed him Foster’s letter; she could feel the dollar bills slithering inside. She offered Allen her cheek.
Allen took the envelope and bent to kiss his sister: theater, as much as anything else he’d done that day.
V
FRANCE
OCTOBER 1917
The newspapers on the train spoke of two things. The first was Russia: with the collapse of the Imperial Army, the Germans were shipping divisions west as fast as the trains could carry them. Even on her layover in Paris, Eleanor registered that many in the cafés and along the avenues thought this might mean the end of the war, the end of France. The second topic was far more immediate: the enormous German railway guns, which could reach central Paris easily. The shells roared over, regular as buses, one an hour, great things the size of an icebox.
She felt a tap on her shoulder. “Mademoiselle,” the Indochinese porter said in his bitten-off French, “we are here.” He was five feet tall, his oversize beret barely reaching Eleanor’s bosom. Two days after saying goodbye to Allen in Bern, she sat staring out the filthy window of the French army carriage through a wall of mist and steam-engine smoke. Welcome to Épernay, west of Verdun, focus of the German effort that autumn and the most relentless meat grinder of the war.
Eleanor was the only civilian aboard to come this far; her sole traveling companions were a battalion of freshly imported Algerians in their Zouave uniforms, baggy blue pants and red fezzes. They ignored her, preferring to sleep huddled together, or sipping their mint tea and pointing in awe at the white man’s strange buildings along the tracks.
The train’s destination was a tiny place with a grand name: Ste-Thérèse-de-Montluc-Valois. It was only a temporary rail station, little more than a shell of a platform and a copse of army tents, black with rain.
All around, the landscape was gray, flat, studded with trees burnt or halved by shell fire, milk-white with fog. The army train screeched to a stop; the Algerians stood aside to let Eleanor pass. As she stepped down, an iron-wheeled lorry scrambled over the rough ground near the shattered platform and backed up to the train. The Algerians began lobbing their bags out the windows of the carriage onto the lorry’s flat bed as Eleanor stood uncertainly, searching the shapes in the mist. A few yards ahead the line ended abruptly in a shell hole that would easily have swallowed a locomotive. At its edge, a team of haggard French engineers were building a wye spur line, to reverse the trains, a hive of industry in an otherwise lifeless place.
Somewhere a man’s broken voice cried “Jeanne-Marie,” over and over again, in anguish. Eleanor saw Grace before Grace saw her. There were two men waiting with her, one slim with an eye patch, the other bent-backed and shuffling, the three of them waiting beneath the shelled depot’s portico. Eleanor tried to focus. The short fellow had one shoulder higher than the other; the lame were suddenly valuable with so few young men left. Then Grace was waving. Another truck hove through the mist, another Indochinese driving, his head barely above the arc of the wheel, his glasses shining behind the windshield. He slewed to a stop just in time, scant feet from the train, and Eleanor saw the big red cross. There were more shouts and then she was in Grace’s soft embrace.
“The Red Cross’s made a mess of things, Ellie,” Grace bawled over the din of the bouncing truck. “Our little Bryn Mawr committee’s to be shut down. There’s no money coming in or going out.” The lorry jostled them together amid the crates and sacks of flour and rice for the Indochinese. “It’s awful for the families we’re trying to help.”
“So what’s to become of us?” Eleanor shouted back.
“The Quakers will take us on.” Grace seemed pleased. “We eat little, sleep less, work outrageous hours, get to Paris once a month for a good cry. It’s hell on the bad days, wonderful when we actually accomplish something.” She was trying to light a Gitane. Her friend with the eye patch, a French doctor it turned out, had only one arm, but he deftly struck a match one-handed to light her cigarette.
Eleanor looked around at her fellow passengers. The hunchback had immediately slumped down and gone to sleep, exhausted, his small hands upturned like teacups on his thighs. Except for the Algerians, the men around her were a catalog of missing limbs and eyes, of handicaps large and small, human debris, fragments of living people. She’d heard of a hospital in Paris full of men with no faces.
Through a tear in the lorry’s canvas side, Eleanor saw they were passing through an abandoned village, cratered by shell fire, the houses smoke-stained rubble. Of the church, only the altar remained, a bright white marble tooth in the gray. In the church’s side yard, a peasant attacked the church’s big front door with an ax, after an evening’s firewood. A child watched him, wrapped in a blanket, from beneath the eaves of the priest’s house. A sign above the door read Ste-Thérèse d, but the rest had been shot away. The lorry driver honked his horn. The child didn’t wave.
On the horizon a biplane appeared, flying perilously low, then disappeared into the mist. Ahead of Eleanor’s truck, a column of ambulances picked its way through the potholes, carefully, almost tenderly. Eleanor caught a glimpse of the cots fitted to racks inside the last ambulance as it passed, awaiting cargo. At twenty-four cots to the lorry, fifteen lorries—and she knew the drivers did six, sometimes eight trips to Paris a day, round the clock. That was over two thousand wounded a day. This was but one sector of a thousand-mile front. She shivered at the arithmetic.
There was a squeal of metal brakes and Eleanor tumbled against a crate of tinned meat.
“Minefield,” Grace called, offering Eleanor a drink from another of her silver flasks. “Santé, Ellie.”
“If you please, the drivers do this every day, mademoiselles,” the doctor next to Grace said in perfect English, doffing his kepi. “It’s not so dramatic.” He smiled thinly. “For them.”
“Your English is very good,” Eleanor said politely.
“I studied for a year in Cincinnati. I am a surgeon. I was a surgeon.” He tapped his shoulder with a fingertip. “Now I perform triage for the surgeons at the field hospital here.” He turned his cap in his hand. “I am not one for declarations, mademoiselle, but I tell you, France is grateful your country stands with us. We have lost a generation. We need the energy of the New World to put an end to this.” H
is eyes glistened as he replaced his cap.
Eleanor simply nodded. In Paris she’d heard such sentiments at every bus stop.
In ten more minutes the lorry and its bouncing passengers were within sight of the last line of supply trenches between the Germans and Paris; two more lines of trenches doglegged to the horizon, and beyond them lay real estate so scarred and trackless only the bullets’ whine told you which way you faced. Grace and the doctor alighted first. Eleanor hopped down into the muck behind them. Grace’s hunchback guide was still sleeping as the lorry trundled off, wanted elsewhere. A nervous quiet settled, a held breath. They walked the short distance to a shattered farm ringed by abandoned artillery emplacements.
“There was a terrific battle here last month,” the doctor said. “Les boches almost broke through. A barrage of mortar shells landed just as a German regiment attacked across this field. The bodies, mon Dieu. You could walk from here to there”—he pointed to the one farmhouse still standing—“without touching the ground. A boulevard of the dead.”
A signalers team laid telephone cable in the pools between the dugouts; far in the distance, a courier’s motorcycle threw up a fan of mud as it bucked and yawed toward its destination. There were no birds, not a sound beyond the whistling of the incoming shells. Eleanor, seeking a Jerusalem for her own small crusade, had found a country on the moon.
She slept that night in a drafty hayloft, wrapped in two green woolen hospital blankets from Canada. It was the only shelter for miles around. When she walked to the farmyard for breakfast, she found almost a hundred men had gathered to be fed bread and lentils and coffee and a tot of army-issue brandy. They were all peasants, young boys and elderly farmhands, paid in food. A lorry arrived and caused a sensation: for the first time in weeks there were shovels and buckets, even three pickaxes. For days now, a toothless farmer told Eleanor, offering his lacerated palms, they had been working with their bare hands and whatever tools they could salvage from the wreckage of their farms. He had learnt his bizarre English from British army programs on the only radio in the village, he said, and had absorbed the slow diction of the newsreader. “The sun is discriminating and sharp this morning, is it not, madame?”
The coffee was superb, the lentils a green slurry, and the bread stale, but a thoroughly chilled Eleanor was grateful for the way the brandy burnt in her belly. A semicircle of tents stood under a single arthritic tree at the end of a plank walkway. Several men, stripped to the waist, shaved at a trestle table. Eleanor’s feeble eyes caught a flash of red hair among them.
She asked the toothless farmer in her halting French who the men were. He was lifting a forty-kilo crate of precious olive oil tins onto a wheelbarrow. He must have been seventy; the muscles on his smooth, hairless forearms stood out like ropes, leathery and networked with blue veins. “Objecteurs de conscience,” he replied with a Gallic shrug. She could see now that Grace was serving the men coffee in an improbable outfit of debutante’s overcoat and white cotton nurse’s wrap. Eleanor shivered and sipped the last of her brandy. There was a terrible smell, a mingled stench of open sewers and something darker, and she realized it was the sharp rankness of death. We’re that close, she realized.
The men Grace served were gathering at one end of the trestle table, their heads bowed. “They are religious?” Eleanor asked the old farmer.
He searched his inadequate vocabulary. “Les Huguenots américains,” he replied, then wandered off with his wheelbarrow, the Marne mud sucking at his big pine clogs.
There was no sun. Without shadow, walking among the shell holes demanded sharper eyes than Eleanor’s. The doctor had warned them the night before: as many wounded drowned in the deep shell holes as died of their injuries. Sometimes the shells exploded so deep that small caves lurked beneath the wounded earth. Biblical, the doctor explained: the earth simply swallowed its victims whole. Everyone leaving the duckboard walkways went in pairs, armed with walking sticks. Skull-and-crossbones paper pennants marked the minefields. As if, Eleanor thought, anywhere’s safe.
Eleanor crossed the planking to Grace’s post, carrying a pot of fresh coffee and a round loaf of bread. All except one of the Quakers’ charges gathered around for breakfast. He stood, the biggest of them by a head, half shaven, his razor in midair, across the table from Grace in conversation. Eleanor put the coffee down and began to break the bread, listening. He spoke earnestly of the army; he wasn’t impressed with the Christian possibilities, he was saying. Grace had never had a spare minute for Christianity. She was smoking, a kerchief in her hair; the pockets of her white orderly’s cotton coat were jammed with papers, her body curved, in Eleanor’s estimation, rather close to the man across the trestle table.
“Grace, there’s a note for you from the schoolteacher. He needs money for firewood.”
“Eleanor, meet Jacob,” Grace said, waving Eleanor closer. “He’s helping build the schoolroom.”
The man lowered his razor into a tin dish frothy with soap. “Jacob Roth,” he said, stepping close and offering his hand. “Lancaster, Pennsylvania.” He had mahogany-colored hair with a spring in it; he hardly needed to shave, so slight was his stubble.
“I’ve been telling him about Bryn Mawr,” Grace said.
“Where the rich girls go,” Jacob said quietly, engulfing Eleanor’s hand in his.
“And some poor ones,” Eleanor replied, coloring. She was suddenly very conscious of her unkempt fingernails and the difference in their heights. Jacob was far bigger even than Foster; his baritone seemed to go right through her.
“You may let go of his hand, Ellie,” Grace said, laughing. “He can stand by himself.”
“Ja, I can,” he said, laughing too.
Eleanor was thoroughly mortified. Behind her, the Quakers’ Mennonite crewmen began praying in what sounded like Dutch. Jacob put a finger to his lips and lowered his head until they were finished. Eleanor watched him, fascinated.
“The schoolmaster’s an old woman, Ellie,” Grace said. “If I can pry a laugh from him, he’ll get his schoolroom. If not, he can wait another week! Terrible, aren’t I, Jacob?” She laughed again. “Plus, he has halitosis! Tell her, Jacob.”
Jacob shook his head somberly. “The teacher is a good man, Miss Dulles.”
Grace made a face. “Jacob here was the first farm boy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to volunteer for the army, except he volunteered as a conscientious objector. That’s how the Quakers found him—he’s Amish and they don’t fight, over anything, apparently. The army gave him a week in the stockade until some senator got him out. Jacob and his father built something or other for the senator, I guess. He’s quite a carpenter. The others are Mennonites from the Ohio valley. They don’t even speak English. They work like mules and never complain. I’ve taken a shine to Jacob here.” She showed her teeth sardonically; Eleanor felt a spike of jealousy. “He says he can build us a schoolhouse with his Mennonites in no time if we get ’em the tools and the timber.”
Jacob nodded slowly. He did everything slowly, his hands moving in careful arcs. “There are no trees. If there are trees, we mill our own timber. My father and I are known for this in our county. Good post-and-beam, good wood, a good schoolhouse.”
“Let’s round up that truck and find them a stand of timber, then,” Eleanor said. “What about nails?”
“They don’t need nails, Ellie,” Grace was saying as she watched the big carpenter finish shaving. “That’s the thing. Post-and-beam.” She glanced at Eleanor. “Isn’t he wonderful?”
Routine followed, days of delivering the work crews the coffee and dried milk and tinned meat, and the ashy gray bread the aid kitchens produced. In Eleanor’s neighborhood, the Germans, preoccupied with the British to the south, contented themselves with the occasional halfhearted shelling. Eleanor watched one shelling, under a blood-red harvest moon. The explosions, columns of light and dark, preceded terrifying thuds that burnt the ears. Debris floated in midair, bubbles in water.
The nights were othe
rwise quiet; exhaustion saw to that. Jacob and his Mennonites departed suddenly one October morning to build a bridge with the French sappers, miles away. Grace consoled herself with overwork. She and Eleanor trucked to the nearby depot at Ste-Gabrielle, to sort the clothes trained in from the city, carloads of them, working well past dusk by the light of two pressure lanterns in the yard. There were more coats than Eleanor had ever seen in one place at one time; her job was to assign the American sizes French equivalents. They had to work fast: the shipment, raised in Philadelphia in a matter of days, was slated for Belgium and had to be in Brussels yesterday, because an orphanage or hospital—no one was sure which—had burnt down. Hundreds of children with no family had lost everything, and were now lacking the prospect even of a decent winter coat.
Kleinmann’s, Carver and Sons, Barnes—all Philadelphia tailors; she thought of the names of the station stops along the Main Line. Devon Stratford Wayne St. Davids Radnor Villanova Rosemont Bryn. The woolly musk of the coats made her recall the cedary closets of her parents’ house. For a moment she might have been in one of the backyard trees, watching the stars, cold in the blue-black heaven, the treetops iced with moonlight.
“Penny for your thoughts, Ellie,” Grace offered, across from Eleanor at the sorting table.
“I was thinking about my parents’ house, about how they fed and clothed us all. Grace, I think I want to have children.”
Grace laughed her big laugh. “Ellie, darling, you haven’t a maternal bone in your body! I can’t picture you with a brat in your arms any more than me. Come on!” Grace hauled another bale onto the trestle table and used a rusty bayonet to cut the twine. “I need a smoke, Ellie, keep my eyes open.”
Eleanor gave Grace her Gitanes. “You owe me four.”
“That advice was worth four of these gaspers.” She looked into the darkness. “Another six bales, then we’ve done it.” In the glow of the gas lamp Eleanor saw how tired Grace was; her fair skin bruised beneath her eyes. She’d lost at least fifteen pounds, her hands had grown almost transparent—France and the war conspiring to wear her away. “We had too much money, too much history,” Grace said. “I had too many beaux, too much in my head for a girl from a tidewater Virginia town outside D.C. No, ma’am, I’ll leave my mothering to the next life. Want some brandy?”
The Witness Tree Page 5