That Devil's Madness (18 page)

The train pulled into a station where, on the platform, a hodgepodge of soldiers swarmed. Long files of those starting their furloughs, the mud of the trenches still clinging to the bottom of their coats. New recruits yet to see action, trying to look like men but not quite succeeding, their helmets smooth and shining in an aching contrast to those of the men going on leave. Babies all. And pushing their way through the crowds, two young women in the uniform and blue cape of the Red Cross, shaking donation tins and pinning little aluminium medals attached to tri-coloured bows on the chests of those who donated.
For the wounded
, they called as they raised their tins to those still in the train,
for the wounded if you please
. He dropped a coin into one of the tins and followed his platoon out of the station, for the long march into the capital.

#

Louis walked along the quay, where a sense of security and purposeful activity filled the air. The frivolity he had been led to expect of Paris was missing – like a beautiful coquette who will not hesitate, when alone, to slither out of her fineries and wrap herself in a comfortable housecoat that revealed her plebeian origins, so Paris, deprived of its tourists, had exchanged its artificiality for Gallic practicality. Over the Seine to the Left Bank, he headed west past an old knife grinder, bent and gnarled, hawking his trade. Paris had become a city of children, women and old men, and Louis wondered what Therèse would think of this Paris; she'd been here with her parents when still a young girl, and had so loved this city.

He walked on towards his billet, past a
pissoir
whose iron walls were embossed with a pattern of fleur-de-lis, past a menagerie of signs above shops and doorways. Dominating the skyline was the Eiffel Tower, that controversial ‘solitary suppository' whose demolition had only been halted when it was found to provide the best aerial for the new scientific wireless telegraphy, and whose reprieve had become absolute when its station picked up plans of a German attack on Paris.

The sky darkened, the air became colder. By nine o'clock the whole city would be asleep, all except for the searchlight on the Tower that would slash the sky like a silver sword, in search of German nighthawks. Louis stopped at a kiosk selling newspapers. It had a shoebox filled with postcards on the counter, and he bought a handful to send to Gustave. If he hurried he would have time to write to Marius before dinner, and maybe even to Imez, now a
brancardier –
or stretcher-bearer – somewhere on the Front. Then after dinner he'd write a long letter to Therèse. His platoon was leaving in the morning, and he wanted to make sure there was a letter on its way to her before then.

#

They were moving out. Phillip Petin, the newly promoted commander-in chief of the Verdun front, had ordered his lines to be defended at all costs. The sudden, massive bombardment of the area had allowed the Germans to advance further into France; Petin's job was to stop this advance, and under his command there would be no more withdrawals. The convoys of trucks on the great road from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun rolled on, like ants on an anthill. Rising, falling, crawling through bleak storm-swept moors. Day and night, never stopping. A slow procession feeding the inferno that was Verdun.

From the back of a truck, Louis readjusted the scarf Therèse had knitted him and reread the last letter he'd received from Marius. His brother Fernand has been killed in a gas attack. Jean was missing, believed captured. Louis knew he should feel something, but he'd been here too long. The only way he could cope with the shells and the rats and the mud, and the swollen bodies used to reinforce the trench walls, was simply to not feel. He read on.

Therèse, Marius had written, was well, but very thin. She appeared to be a tower of strength, and would be the first in the fields each day. She would sow and harvest and get the ground ready for the next crop, pulling the plough with the help of the boys, because all their horses had been commandeered by the army. But Marius was worried. Twice a week Therèse would make the trip into Ampère, to sit in a darkened theatre and watch the newsreels over and over again, in the hope of catching a glimpse of Louis. And when she came back, she would often lock herself in her bedroom until the next morning, refusing to see or talk to anyone.

Louis looked out at the desolation, at the road choked with traffic. The noise was deafening – the grinding, raucous sound of engines straining, the men in the trucks singing or fighting, staff cars rushing to the front. On either side of the road, fences of loosely woven burlap, originally put there to camouflage the road from German observation posts, but now in tatters. The remains flapped in the wind like captured ghosts watched over by an army of burnt out stumps that had once been a forest. The air smelt of petrol and decay and smoke. Occasionally he would see ammunition stacked at the side of the road – some marked with green and yellow crosses to indicate they contained gas, others only empty brass shell casings waiting to be returned to the rear, to be reused again and again.

And everywhere by the side of the road, in the mud and ice, refugees fleeing the bombed out villages. Old men, women, children, carrying their belongings in sacs, or piled high on baby carriages. An old woman carried her cat in a birdcage, the animal peering out with panicked eyes, its tail hanging out between two bars, twitching.

The truck turned a bend in the road. Over the horizon the sky smouldered. There was Verdun.

They passed a castle partially in ruins – now a hospital – and the smell of ether and iodoform mingled with that of petrol. At a junction in the road ambulance drivers were resting and smoking. One of the soldiers in the truck leaned out and shouted
Hey, you there. You're not getting me today,
and the ambulance driver answered
That's all right, I can wait till tomorrow.
The men in the truck laughed and the trucks veered off towards a ruined village, now occupied by soldiers and a few old civilians who'd refused to leave their homes.

They stopped in what had once been the village square. Here the air smelt of coal tar and burning celluloid, indicating the presence of high explosives and incendiary shells. An old man in a uniform dating back to the Franco-Prussian War, a row of medals pinned to his chest, shuffled towards the trucks and snapped to a salute. Louis jumped out and saluted the old man who, satisfied, turned and slowly walked back into the ruins. He watched him for a while, and was about to join his platoon when he heard his name called. He turned. Coming towards him, covered in mud, was Imez.

Louis had not seen Imez since the beginning of the war. They had tried to enlist together, but Arabs and Berbers were not allowed to join French units. Yet these native Algerians fought for France's freedom as if France was their own country. Louis knew; he'd seen the 45
^th
Division – Algerians all – fight like demons alongside the French at Marne to turn back the German drive to Paris.

Huddled around a fire the two men talked. Imez had been at Verdun for just over four weeks, and was so thin the skin on his face appeared transparent.

‘It's the waiting that sends you mad,' he said. ‘You wait for your trench to cave in and bury you alive, and you wait for food to be brought up at night or when its foggy, knowing full well it won't be because it's just too dangerous. And you wait for night so that you can bury your friends in ground, except that the ground's already so full of corpses that as you dig, your spade punctures decomposing bodies.' He picked up a twig beside him, broke it in half and threw it into the fire. ‘But you know what the worst waiting of all is?'

Louis shook his head and Imez stared into the flames for a moment before continuing.

‘The worst waiting is waiting for revulsion to set in, then realising that it won't, because nothing seems macabre anymore. That, and waiting for the screaming to stop…'

Well into the night they talked, about the war and the food and the mud – mud so deep, and the ground so pock-marked, Imez explained, that it took sixteen of them to carry one wounded to the aid station, so great was the exertion. And though they talked almost till dawn, neither mentioned home – to do so would have been too hard to bear.

#

Louis listened to the whistling of the shell and crunched his whole body into a tight ball. Four seconds. That's how long it took for a mortar shell to reach him and explode. He knew. He'd been counting the seconds for some months now.

The ground shook like jelly, rocks hammered his back and his mouth filled with mud. Blood rushed to his head and he felt as if he would vomit. He peered over the edge of the shell hole in which he'd sheltered. Saw a human torch running towards him, screaming. The soldier fell into the hole and the slimy water at the bottom extinguishing the flames but still the soldier screamed and Louis wished him dead. The shelling intensified. Louis slid down the hole again and the soldier beside him screamed louder and grabbed his arm. Louis reached for his gun, his bayonet, anything to stop the soldier's screams, but the soldier spoke in the voice of a small boy and told his mother about the tadpoles he had caught that day, and would they really turn into frogs, and Louis wrenched his arm from the soldier's grip and struggled out of the hole.

Around him the ground was engorged with blood and wounded men lay amongst the bodies of dead abandoned animals. The soldier in the shell hole called to his mother once more then was silent. Louis pulled against the mud, that living thing that was as much the enemy as the
Boches
, sucking men down, suffocating them.

The terrible roar of shells flashing deafened the stutter of machinegun fire. Men fell but the gaps in the lines were soon filled with more men, surging ever forward, fighting with grenades, bayonets, hand to hand. Louis' actions were mechanised – hellish reflexes aroused by the nightmare of noise, the smell of blood, the need to survive. The ground beneath him liquefied.

He fell through the air backwards. Everything was silent though he could still see the men around him, smell the smoke and the fires, see the shells exploding. His body hit the ground and a searing blade of pain scorched through him as the men around him melted into the smoke and the air darkened in the shadow of the Keres' wings.

#

Through a morphine haze he saw her eyes – large, dark, beautiful. A wisp of black hair escaped the white veil around her hair.

‘Therèse? Therèse, I didn't want to—'

‘Shhh! Don't talk.'

‘No, Therèse, I have to tell you—'

‘I'm not Therèse. My name is Sister Renouard. You're in hospital. Now hush.'

He felt the prick of the hypodermic. The room faded. He heard the rolling thunder of the guns. Imez's face hovered above him. The stretcher dropped in the mud and he heard Imez swear. His teeth chattered. He was cold – so cold. Therèse was running towards him, her white muslin dress floating above the lush spring grass. She smiled, spread her arms wide and spun in the sunshine. Maggots crawled from the belly of the burnt soldier at her feet. The soldier looked at his belly and laughed, and handed Louis a jar of tadpoles. Louis fixed his bayonet and plunged it in Therèse's breast. She pulled it out and continued to feed little Theódore. A plane swooped, machine gun spewing fire and Theódore pulled from his mother's breast to watch it, gurgling with pleasure. Imez poured Mercurochrome over Louis, and the liquid burst into flames as it hit his flesh and he screamed. Therèse laughed.

#

He could hear a bird chirp – such an improbable sound. He opened his eyes. In the bed next to him, a man with an arm missing was reading a newspaper. He noticed Louis.

‘
Salut,
' he said, then called to the end of the ward. ‘Hey,
Mam'zelle
, he's awake.'

A young woman in the uniform of a nurse approached Louis' bed. She smiled and straightened the pillows surrounding him, cocooning him in a semi-reclined position.

‘Now don't move, or we'll have to start the morphine again,' she said. She took a glass of water from the locker beside his bed and put the straw to his lip. ‘Just small sips, now.'

Louis sipped and the water tasted sweet and fresh. He sipped some more but the nurse pulled the glass away.

‘Not too much at first or you'll be sick,' she explained. ‘I'll go get a basin and give you a wash. It'll make you feel better.'

He watched her go and closed his eyes. He felt so incredibly tired, so weak. He could feel the warmth around him, hear the sounds of quiet activity. The air smelt clean, antiseptic, with just a hint of lavender. The bird chirped again. He'd forgotten how sweet a bird's chirp sounded. He tried to draw a deep appreciative breath but a sharp pain gripped his chest and he realised it was bandaged. He was too tired even to react.

A warm cloth wipe his face and he made an effort to open his eyes. The nurse smiled at him and went on with her work.

‘How bad am I?' he whispered.

‘Oh, not as bad as some. They pulled a piece of shrapnel out of one of your ribs, and it's cracked, but you're lucky it didn't go into your lungs. But you kept fighting everyone, so we had to keep you quiet with morphine or you'd have done yourself more damage.' She rinsed the facecloth in a basin of steaming water by his bed and wrung it tightly. ‘Your leg's injured as well, but we're keeping an eye on that.'

‘What's wrong with my leg?' he said, noticing the cradle over it for the first time, and at the end, some sort of windlass. He glanced at empty pyjama sleeve of the man in the next bed.

The nurse smoothed the already smooth blankets of his bed and tucked them in around him. ‘You had piece of shell in it. Broke the bone. We've put a splint on it, but we've got to keep the wound open for now, so it'll take a bit longer to heal, that's all. But it'll come good. Try and sleep – best healer, sleep.' She picked up the basin and face cloth, smiled once more and moved on to her next patient.