Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (23 page)

The birds of misery cautiously returned that afternoon of the armistice to the decimated forests. Tawny owls and marsh harriers had evaded the battlefields. Bohemian waxwings migrated around the poisoned forests. A wing of cranes circled the river, an uncertain flight of peace, and then flew south to a bird sanctuary. The weary citizens of the war emerged from the ruins and waved the tattered national colors of liberty, and saluted the future of the French Third Republic.

Three common ravens cawed at a great distance, a tease of presence, and then a haunting silence. Nature was hushed, and the shadows of the entire countryside were uncertain scenes of wicked rage, bloody, muddy and mutilated bodies stacked for collection at the side of the roads. Later the elation of the armistice was rightly overcome by the undeniable memories of slaughter, separation, and the inevitable sense of suspicion and vengeance.

The commune survivors craved an ordinary mention of mean suns and easy weather, evasive sounds of white storks, common scoters, the cluck of hens and crow of roosters in the morning, and wine with dinner, and the shy turns and smiles of children. More men were dead than women and the culture of
église de village
, church, families, and farms would never be the same.

The eternal rats tracked down the last dead soldiers and civilians on the armistice to scratch out an eye and chew a tender ear or cold hairy jowl. The native forests and fields would bear forever the blood, brain, and cracked bones in every season of the fruit trees and cultivated sugar beets.

The soldiers were honored, ceremonial graves were marked, and the
glorious national monuments were envisioned with godly stained glass and heroic stone sculptures. That poignant sound of military taps at the graves of honorable soldiers would be heard for more than a hundred years.

12 November 1918

Soldiers of the Allied Armies:
After having resolutely stopped the enemy you have for months
attacked him without respite, with an untiring faith and energy.
You have won the greatest battle of history and saved the most sacred
of causes: the liberty of the world.
Be proud.
You have covered your colors with immortal glory.
Posterity will hold you in grateful remembrance.

The Marshal of France
Commander in Chief of the Allied Armies
Ferdinand Foch

The First Pioneer Infantry and other military units marched into Luxembourg two weeks after the armistice, and a few weeks later entered Germany as the Army of Occupation. Allied soldiers had defeated the enemy, but the armistice was not an admission of defeat, or surrender, and not a peace agreement. The end of the war was actually a negotiated armistice, and we learned later that the French were prepared to continue the war if the Germans had not accepted the peace specified in the Treaty of Versailles.

The First Pioneer Infantry soldiers were quartered at the ancient Ehrenbreitstein Fortress on the eastern shore of the Rhine River overlooking the city of Koblenz. Finally, and for a few months, the division, scouts and trench survivors, were stationed in positions of comfort, cold custom, and royalty.

The kitchen trucks served regular meals at the fortress, but many soldiers could not resolve the obvious contradictions of peace, occupation, and moral conscience of the war because starvation was common in Germany. Mighty artillery, machine guns, and scouts were essential to defeat the enemy, but the routine provisions of food determined the actual outcome of the war, and civilians were starved to serve the soldiers.

Christmas Eve was a natural touch of remembrance, family, reservation, and country, the first lonesome celebration and tease of peace since we had been mustered for active military service. The tease was native, not monotheistic, and the music was a communal sentiment. Centuries of monotheism had been weakened by the demons of nationalism and empires. There were no godly reasons to justify the horror of that war. The desperation of the war lingered in every ordinary word, peace, love, angel, virtuous, forgive, miracle, genuflect, and signs of the cross. The Regimental Band played familiar carols that evening in an ancient fortress of the enemy, an ironic conclusion of the war.

Patch Zhimaaganish played military taps on a trumpet at the end of the carols. The emotive sound carried across the river and could be heard on the main streets of Koblenz. Naturally, we were moved by the concert and trumpet recital, and then our friend sang
La Marseillaise
, the national anthem of France. His baritone voice carried the most suitable, inspired, and memorable music of war and peace that night.

Allons enfants de la Patrie
Arise, children of the Fatherland
Le jour de gloire est arrivé
The day of glory has arrived
Contre nous, de la tyrannie
Against us stand tyranny
L'étendard sanglant est levé

The bloody flag is raised

Aloysius painted several enormous blue ravens over the dark fortress and over the bridges on the Rhine River. He had obtained a larger book of fine art paper with deckled edges, and the new raven scenes were magnificent. My brother once again painted with a sense of native presence, imagination, and visionary power. The military occupation billets in the royal fortress must have roused his new raven images of liberty.

Aloysius was inspired to paint as we traveled several times by steamboat down the Rhine River. His portrayals of blue ravens on the river, blue wake and shadows on the water, traces of rouge on the bridges, castles, and ancient houses were the most dramatic and abstract that he had ever painted. Yes, we had survived the war as scouts and brothers, a painter and a writer,
but were unnerved by the wounds and agonies of peace. My literary scenes were more fierce and poetic, and the images my brother created were more intense and visionary. No one would wisely endorse the experiences of war and peace as the just sources of artistic inspiration, and yet we would never resist the tease of chance, turn of trickster stories, or the natural outcome of native irony.

Soldiers were allowed a furlough for one week after four months of active service. We had served for six months, and, since scouts have no actual combat duty in a military occupation, we requested a leave for two weeks in Paris. The military encouraged furloughs when the war ended so our leave was approved for ten days in early January.

Sergeant Sorek advised us not to travel to major cities because there were no hotel rooms available, especially not in Paris. Aloysius assured the good sergeant that we would stay with a friend, the ambulance driver Harry Greene.

The Paris Peace Conference convened on January 18, 1919, a few days after we had returned from furlough. The onerous peace negotiations continued for five months. The Treaty of Versailles became a tortured tongue of grievous reparations and vengeance, and was finally endorsed on June 28, 1919, by representatives of the new government of Germany.

Aloysius was prepared to present his most recent blue ravens to the owner of the Galerie Crémieux in Paris. He carried two small art books of his war paintings in a backpack, and the recent book of fine art paper under his arm. I reminisced about our first train journey ten years earlier to Minneapolis, the hotels and theaters, the gracious librarian who served cookies, the friendly streetcar conductor, the nasty curator at the art gallery, and the great artist and teacher Yamada Baske, who had encouraged my brother to paint a trace of rouge in the blue raven portrayals.

Paris meant more to us than a luminous tourist destination of culture and liberation. The city had become our vision of art and literature, and a chance of recognition as native artists. We departed before dawn by truck to the train station in Koblenz. More than a hundred soldiers were on furlough that morning, but only a few were on their way to Paris.

The Central Station was new, massive, a spectacular ornate sandstone structure. Hungry civilians were huddled in every corner and cover of the station. The carriages were crowded with soldiers and downcast civilians
who were leaving the city with huge bundles. We changed trains four times. Luxembourg was the first transfer, and then at Metz, Nancy, and Vitry-le-François in France. The noisy train moved slowly through the mountains, and then into the bleak abandoned farms and shattered forest areas. The stations at Thionville and Épernay had been badly damaged in the war.

I read book six of
The Odyssey
as the train traveled through forests and farmland closer to Paris.
Thus did he pray, and Minerva heard his prayer, but she would not show herself to him openly, for she was afraid of her uncle Neptune, who was still furious in his endeavors to prevent Ulysses from getting home.

The train lurched and wobbled from one track to another through the steely industrial areas and arrived late the following morning in the smoky cavern of the Gare de l'Est in Paris. The Orient Express had departed from that very station, but not since the start of the war.

The city was cold and gray, but we hardly noticed the weather in the noise and crush of people, horses, wagons, and the noisy rush of new motor cars. Parisian taxicabs circled the station and lined the streets in every direction. The same clunky Renault taxicabs, more than a thousand, that had delivered infantry soldiers to the First Battle of the Marne to save Paris.

Aloysius sat on the steps of a hotel across the street from the station and painted several great blue ravens perched at the entrance to the Gare de l'Est. Three scruffy boys pointed at the portrayal and praised the blue ravens, and then held out their hands for food or money. We were dressed in combat uniforms, so there was no way to evade the hungry children near the station. American soldiers were the most generous, and the most popular, visitors to Paris.

We walked directly down the busy Boulevard de Strasbourg and Boulevard de Sébastopol toward the River Seine. Boulangeries, cafés, A. Simon corsets, and hundreds of other stores with window displays of clothes, shoes, and books, lined both sides of the street. The corset displays were similar to the regular advertisements in the
Tomahawk
. Les Halles, the incredible central marketplace, was on the right side of the boulevard, and on the left the Jewish community of Le Marais.

The Seine River was slow and solemn that morning as we crossed the Pont au Change and walked past the Paris Hall of Justice over the Pont Saint-Michel to the Place Saint-Michel in the Latin Quarter. The monuments
and statues were shrouded in the gray coat of the city. The cafés were more seductive, with bright red and blue canopies, than the gray and green metal generals mounted on fierce horses. We walked directly to a red canopy, the Café du Départ, on the corner and sat outside with a view of the River Seine and the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.

I was hungry and ordered a double omelet with herbs and a café au lait. Aloysius ordered a baguette with
jambon
and a café with chocolate. Then he moistened the woad and painted a blue raven with enormous wings extended over the Pont Saint-Michel, and a second blue raven with traces of rouge on the faint blue gargoyles of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame. The waiter was fascinated by the raven paintings and explained that the gargoyle waterspouts had once been painted in bright colors. How would my brother know about the color of the waterspouts? Aloysius had envisioned the gargoyles, and never knew that they had once been painted in bright
colors.

The waiter did not recognize the name Harry Greene, the novelist and ambulance driver for the American Field Service, but he gave us directions to his residence at L'Hôtel, 13 Rue des Beaux-Arts. We walked slowly along the River Seine past the
bouquinistes
, book dealers and artists, to the Pont des Arts. Aloysius leaned over the rail and watched the barges cruise on the dark river. Many artists have been roused and inspired to paint scenes of the River Seine. Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Camille Pissaro, and Eugène Isabey, mostly impressionist painters, might have created their river scenes on the Pont des Arts.

Aloysius painted an uneven row of three bright blue ravens on the Quai des Grands-Augustins near the Pont Neuf. The stone quay or wharf was crowded near the bridge with mattress makers, tinkers, and other discrete trades, crafts, and veterans of the war. An older woman was working over a framed mattress. She raised her head toward the bastion on the bridge, folded her arms, smiled, and then returned to the mattress. We walked down the stairs to the quay, and my brother showed the portrait to the woman. She laughed and turned away, surprised that the blue ravens were not humans.

Mattresses were precious possessions, and ancestral, and the workers repaired and cleaned the covers and horsehair cushions on the quay near the River Seine. Most of the people who worked on the quay were friends and
compatriots, and they looked after each other. When it rained everyone took cover under the bridge.

››› ‹‹‹

Two veterans sat on narrow benches near the riverbank. They wore military coats, smoked cigarettes, and fished for perch and white suckers. Three small perch, enough for dinner, writhed in a bucket. The eager expectation, we learned later, was to catch a stray salmon from the Atlantic.

The veterans wore black fedoras, and their faces were obscured in clouds of cigarette smoke. They jiggled fish lines, mumbled words with an unusual accent,
amorce
,
presque
,
oui
,
dîner de poissons
, and gestured with their elbows, hands, and fishing poles, but the veterans never once turned away from the River Seine.

Aloysius sat next to the two veterans on the riverbank and painted an enormous blue raven perched on a barge. The wings of the raven raised the barge above the waves. The veterans turned to see the portrait of abstract flight, and revealed the masks they wore to cover ghastly facial wounds.

The metal masks were painted to simulate the precious tones of distinctive skin, and the contour of cheeks and noses with no bruises or pockmarks. The masks covered monstrous shrapnel scars, the wounds of war. The painted faces were clear and precise, and yet peculiar, even grotesque with no expression. The smiles, frowns and ordinary gestures were resolved by style, the aesthetic disguises of war wounds. The masks were blank stares without motion, the meticulous contours, satiny hues, and decorative camouflage of war wounds and broken faces.