by Jack Fuller
“The warmth,” Karl said. “You are very kind.”
“It is not often that I have a visit from an American who has been entrusted with France’s glorious dead,” said the curé.
Karl was surprised at the sarcasm.
“You do not see glory in their sacrifice?” he asked.
The curé ladled some steaming water into a cup, into which he then spilled a quantity of tea leaves. When he had stirred them under, he handed Karl the cup.
“Theirs is only sacrifice,” he said. “The glory belongs, as all glory does, to France.”
“Had she any choice but to defend herself?” said Karl.
The curé repeated the process with a second cup, sipping it before he answered.
“Did you have a choice in coming here?” he asked.
“I could have just left the bodies somewhere,” Karl said. His eyes slipped to the floor. “I actually thought about it.”
“I mean coming to France,” said the curé.
“I felt a powerful need,” Karl said.
“And now?” said the curé.
“I’m not sure anymore what good I do,” Karl said. “They die with or without me.”
“You were drawn to the suffering,” said the curé. “You flew toward the flame and have been touched by it. We will put your friends in the catacombs. Perhaps we will find something on their persons that will tell us whom to notify so that their kin will know where they have found peace. Now, finish your tea and we will begin.”
The curé insisted on following him to the wagon, despite the difficulty he had walking. Karl threw the first corpse onto his shoulder.
“The least we can do is to show the way with the cross,” the curé said, carrying it high on the end of a staff.
Methodically, they moved all six bodies to the antechamber of the catacombs. The curé lit torches that angled upward from its stone walls.
“Well, now,” he said. “Let us see the Germans’ work.”
He took a small knife and slit the crude stitching that held together the winding sheets. A wave of stench hit them as the canvas fell away. The curé did not recoil. It was as if he breathed different air.
He pulled open the cloth slowly, revealing a sight to which Karl had become all too accustomed. Half the man’s head was a pulp.
“French pride and German surgery,” said the curé.
He pulled the cloth open farther until he could slide his hand in to reach the pockets of the dead soldier’s tunic. From one he withdrew a letter, which he opened and moved closer to one of the torches.
“It is from this man’s wife,” he said.
He returned to the body and put the canvas back in place. Then he took one of the torches down and led the way into the catacombs.
“These were here long before the church,” he said as the light of the flame flickered across cobwebbed piles of bones, occasionally illuminating a skull. “We do not know who all of these people were. We presume they were Christians, though the worms feast on such distinctions.”
Karl carried the soldier’s dead weight across his arms. At times he had to move sideways. The corridors came together at such odd and unpredictable angles that soon he was lost.
“Here,” the curé said. “This shall be our chamber of the Great War. It shall memorialize the coming of a new century. I am pretty sure this husband and the others will not be the last soldiers to be buried here.”
Karl laid the body on an open shelf, then slid it in as far as he could.
“Yes,” said the curé. “We must conserve space, for France is very, very proud.”
They repeated the process six times. Karl suggested after the second that they bring the rest and do the rite for all of them together. The curé would not hear of it.
“Let each become an individual again,” he said, “as he was seen by his loved ones and as he is now being seen by God.”
When the last man had found his bed of stone, they returned with the fire and the cross to the room with the woodstove.
“I must leave, Father,” he said, then paused. “But first I would like you to hear my confession.”
“How long has it been?” said the curé.
“I am a Protestant,” Karl said. “I do not even know the proper way.”
“Come with me.”
In one corner of the nave stood several wooden cabinets.
“I will enter first,” said the curé. “This will preserve your anonymity.”
He disappeared. Karl paused, then opened the second door. It was as dark inside as it had been in the catacombs. For some reason he suddenly felt very cold.
Something moved, wood sliding against wood.
“You may begin now,” the curé said softly. “Do not worry about form, my son. Only think of cleansing your soul.”
“I am German, Father,” Karl said in his best French.
KARL FOLLOWED THE RIVER back through town and past the useless cemetery. The rain had abated. The guns on the far side of the ridge-line spoke intermittently.
Instead of turning right where the road forked back to the front, Karl kept close to the river on a much less rutted path that led into a stand of trees. Some of the branches hung low enough to scrape the top of the wagon, making a hollow sound.
The river ran thunderously high. Karl moved the wagon close to the spate, which was so loud it even covered the sound of the guns. For a moment he could imagine No-Man’s-Land washed clean, renewing itself, life coming back. Maybe that was genius of the story of Christ, uniting mortal humanity with nature’s recurrence. Winters end. Wars end. Prosperity follows panic, rise after fall.
“You are guilty of nothing, son,” the curé had said through the confessional screen. “We were all born something. French. German. American. Not one of us had any say. Go home. Be with your lovely wife and your new child. And as to your fear, remember that God’s grace is nothing you need to repay, nor is punishment the proof of sin. This is the first great mystery, my son, and it is only made bearable by the second, which is love.
“You see,” the cure said, “fortune is not the outcome of a test. Good or bad, it is the test.”
WHEN KARL REACHED the ambulance corps headquarters, the colonel was waiting for him.
“Did you stop at a bordello?” he asked.
Karl recounted the lengths he had gone to in order to give the French soldiers a proper burial, the refusal of the corporal at the cemetery, the decency of the curé.
“Are you sure the men were all Roman Catholics?” asked the colonel. Always a question. Just like his father. Karl could have pulled one hundred men back alive from No-Man’s-Land under fire and the colonel would have asked him whether he had remembered to stow the stretchers properly.
“The curé will contact the next of kin,” Karl said. “It will be taken care of, no thanks to the Army of France.”
“Very unorthodox,” said the colonel.
He was as fastidious as a man could be in a world of mud. A thick brown belt cinched his olive jacket at the shoulder and waist. From his lapel hung a chain and on the end of it a pince-nez.
“I am resigning from the corps,” Karl said.
“Well,” said the colonel, “I’m afraid you will have to be a coward later. At the moment your services are immediately required.”
Karl made his way through the narrow maze of communications trenches toward the point in the front line where a scouting party had gone over the top and not returned. He found two others from the ambulance corps, and together they located one more.
“We’d better get started,” said Karl.
The clouds were breaking in the west, the afternoon sun turning them into great, billowing fires. At some point, this splendid show would make a perfect silhouette of anyone crossing the parapet, but for now the sun was too high for that.
“You are Pietre,” said the oldest of his companions.
“I used to be,” Karl said.
The older man accepted that. No one who came to this
place remained who he had been.
The other two were younger. One, he recalled being told, had been a fugitive in the United States.
“I have forgotten your name,” Karl said.
“It’s just as well,” said the fugitive. “A name is just something you drag along behind you in the mud.”
Karl paired up with him. One person could pull a stretcher forward, but two was the rule for carrying a man back.
“Here we go,” said Karl.
They heaved up a stretcher and see-sawed it on the parapet. Then they pulled themselves over the top.
No gunfire met them. This might have meant they had lucked into a position with a little bit of cover. Or it might only have meant that the German riflemen at the strongpoint across No-Man’s-Land had been dreaming of the fräuleins and had missed the shot. Karl crawled madly until he got to the bottom of a crater deep enough that he could not be seen from the German lines.
He would have been willing to stay there for a while, but the fugitive quickly made his way up and over the far wall. When Karl caught up with him in the next crater, the fugitive had positioned himself on the slope closest to the German guns. He had removed his helmet and was leaning his head sharply to the side to try to sneak a look over the lip of the hole with a single eye.
“Do you see him?” Karl whispered.
The sound of his voice touched off a loud wail from somewhere near them.
“Quiet, man!” Karl barked. “Pretend you are already dead so the Boche will lose interest in you.”
Soon the cries softened to a moan. Eventually even the moaning stopped.
“Do you think he is dead?” Karl whispered.
“I think you told him to act as if he was,” said the fugitive. “We can’t very well leave him to die because he did what he was told.”
“Most who have died,” said Karl, “died for that reason.”
The fugitive pulled himself a little higher up the crater wall and looked over the edge again.
“You go to that side. I’ll go to this,” he said. “Whoever reaches our man first will drag him back here to the stretcher.”
Just as Karl and the fugitive rose, a big gun fired. The sound of it communicated through the earth. Then the whistle of the shell filled the sky. The explosion was off to their left. The next shell came before they had recovered from the shock wave. It hit on the right, and both of them knew what that meant. The gunner had them bracketed, and the next one would come in right on top of them. They scrambled madly up the bank. Karl had just made it out when he looked back and saw the fugitive lose his footing. The gun fired. There was no whistle. The world erupted in light. Then everything went black.
The first thing he saw when he came to was the dying sun. He did not know whether he had been unconscious for a few minutes or a few days. His head ached, but when he managed to get his arm out from under him and ran his hand over his face and through his hair, there was no blood. He did not move until the sun went behind the hills and the shadows crawled over him.
At the bottom of the crater lay the twisted, decapitated body of the fugitive. Karl put the remains on the stretcher. The enemy trenches were perhaps seventy-five yards away, dark and silent. He could barely make out the contour of the land, but he dug in with his elbow and heel to move himself and his burden in the other direction. Four yards. Five yards. He felt the earth sloping slightly upward, making his progress more difficult. His breath became labored, but soon he felt the verge of a hole. With one thrust, he was in it.
When he recovered his breath, he realized that this crater was too shallow to permit him to stand. He squinted into the shadows, felt the ground with his fingers. Mud and roots. Pieces of spent shrapnel. A rat, which skittered away. Karl soon found what it had been eating. The cloth under his fingers was heavy, the kind they used for greatcoats. He pulled his hand away.
He tried to visualize the path to the friendly trench line, then to the rear, then to the troop train, then finally to Cristina’s warm, enveloping arms that would never let him go again. There would be more children. If it was God’s will, they would populate Abbeville and consecrate it against all the evils of the world.
“Halt!” The word in German stopped Karl. He heard the voice of his father. “You! Frenchman! Put down your rifle and come here or I will kill you!”
The shadow of a helmet rose at the perimeter of the crater. Though he could not see it, Karl knew there would also be the muzzle of a rifle. His whole body shook and his voice cracked as he spoke the perfect truth.
“I am German,” he said in his father’s tongue.
12
THE TRAIN THEY PUT KARL IN PULLED nothing but boxcars used for hauling horses and men. He made his way stiffly to a far corner and lay down. Every time he moved, he disturbed the soldiers around him. As the train began to roll, a draft sent a chill through him like a fever, but it was not enough to blow away the smell of men who had just emerged from the mud.
Morning came. The sun cut through the slats. He saw two church spires rising into the perfect blue sky. One was closer than the other. At first they appeared stationary: two graceful fingers pointed toward heaven. But as the train continued to move, they began to converge, like the sights on a rifle. Beneath him the rails beat a steady tick-tick, tick-tick.
“YOU!” THE VOICE from the lip of the crater had shouted. “Come forward! Now!”
Then came the sound of a rifle bolt: tick-tick.
Karl did not move.
“I surrender,” he whispered in German.
A rifle barked. In the flash he saw the eyes of the German soldier. Then he heard the sound of the man’s helmet tumbling down the slope and splashing at the bottom of the pit.
A voice in French said, “Can you move?”
“Everyone is dead,” Karl said.
“Stay where you are,” said the voice. “We will come back for you.”
Karl dreaded being alone again in the darkness. Machine-gun fire stuttered far off to the right. Then a long, eerie silence into which crept some kind of muffled rhythm from the direction of the dead German. Karl tried to disregard it. A flare went up, hissing. When it fell back to earth, the mud snuffed it out. Then in the silence the sound came back.
It could not have been the German’s heart still beating. To hear Cristina’s heart, Karl had to put his head directly onto her chest. In the light of the flare the German’s body lay splayed out, rifle in hand, as inert as the earth. And yet the sound still came. Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Karl rubbed his ears. They distorted everything now, even his own breathing, which caught in his chest. Tick-tick.
When he reached the German, another flare swung above him, lighting the man’s contorted face. Karl reached out his hand and touched the man’s chest. Tick-tick. He pushed his hand inside the coat, where his fingers encountered metal.
As another flare came up, he extracted his hand. The eerie light glowed off the polished gold of a watchcase engraved with a pattern of hills and sun rays and sheaves of wheat. With his fingernail he flicked it open. The second hand steadily moved ahead.
“Time to go,” said a voice in French. “Don’t worry about your friend. Someone will drag him back.”
Karl crawled up out of the hole and followed the Frenchman. Whenever flares came, the two of them halted, face down, trying to merge with the mud. Eventually they were able to roll over the parapet of the forward trench line.
Karl did not pause even to clean himself. He immediately made his way through the communicating trenches to the Ambulance Corps headquarters, where he wrote out his resignation papers. From there he hitched a ride by lorry to the train station in Verdun. Fortune provided a troop train that was just boarding. The officers did not stand on ceremony when he proved with his papers and his English that he was not a deserter.
IN THE DISTANCE a farmhouse slowly fell behind the train until it was out of sight. In its place a pair of plain American steeples slid into view. The cross of the closer church appeared to reach hi
gher into the perfect autumn sky. Karl leaned back in the plush seat and thought of the curé, the damp chill in the crypt, the fugitive, all the dead. They inhabited a different world than this vast Central Illinois landscape, which was protected from history by an ocean and hundreds of miles of farmland and forests. He watched the towers glide along beside the train, directing eye and heart to God.
He put his hand into his pocket and took out the watch, running his finger over the gold pattern, then snapping it open with his thumbnail. The inscription inside was in the kind of old-fashioned German cursive that generations of Schumpeters had used on the frontispieces of family Bibles. It simply said, “For Johann on his birthday, April 20, 1915.” The dead German had been hardly more than a boy. Had his father given him the watch? Had it been from his new wife?
The watch said 4:35. Unless the C&EI timetable had changed, this meant that they were only twenty-four minutes from Abbeville, and some of that was for a stop in Kankakee. It had been a long time since he could say exactly when something was going to happen. He slipped the gold disk back into his vest pocket.
In its day perhaps the timepiece had predicted trains in Germany. Or perhaps Johann had grown up on the coast and used it to figure the tides. Maybe he was a baker, timing his loaves, or a brewer minding the yeast. Or even a farmer, bound by sunrise and sunset, the steady tilt and spin of the earth. Tick-tick. The rails clicked beneath Karl, the watch in his pocket, guiding him out of the past.
He had telegraphed from Uncle John’s office the time he would arrive in Abbeville, and in response he had learned that he was the father of a baby girl. As the click of the rails slowed, his heart raced. From the shelf above the seat he pulled down the single, half-empty canvas bag with gifts from Paris. In the swaying vestibule he peered through a small window in the door. The intervals between fence posts lengthened. The church came into view, then his house. It was incredible that nothing had changed.