The Gathering Storm (12 page)

Burying Judith beneath me, I shut my eyes as bullets pocked the roadway and sliced through the Fiat. The warplane flashed overhead, seemingly close enough to touch. It continued down the highway, lancing the massed humanity and draining out its life.

Then its guns fell silent.

I raised up cautiously.

The Belgian captain stood, still holding Gina in his good arm. "Out
of ammo," he said of the plane, and then about Gina, "she's fine."

Judith and Susan were likewise unharmed.

The Fiat continued idling forward down the center of the highway.

Papa! Jessica!

Setting Judith atop a suitcase, I ran toward the car, breathing a
sigh of relief when I heard Jessica crying in the backseat. She, at least,
was alive.

Flinging wide the door, I stomped on the brake pedal and stopped
the auto.

"Are you—?"

I’m fine," Jessica returned. "Terrified, but fine. The girls?"

"Safe." I shook my father's shoulder. "Papa?"

He roused himself and yawned. "My turn to drive?"

I stared at him in disbelief. "You didn't know? Bullets just missed
the car."

"No," Jessica corrected, pointing upward.

In the fabric of the Fiat's cloth top two thumb-sized holes had appeared. The rips matched another set of gouges in the upholstery—one in the driver's seat where I had been and the other in the rear seat, where Judith and her sister had been.

The Fiat's engine continued ticking normally, in faithful unconcern.

When I returned to the ditch to retrieve the children, Judith remained atop the stack of luggage. As I reported that no one had been hurt and even the car was almost unscathed, a shy smile spread across the nine-year-old's face. The angels had been on duty, exactly as required.

By the next morning the stream of refugees swelled like tributaries dumping into one great river. Individuals melded into one mighty
teeming mass—bundles tied on weary backs; in rickety carts; employ
ing bicycles and rusty jalopies that were in much worse shape than the old Fiat. Black smoke bubbled from the tailpipe of the vehicle, and the engine emitted an ominous knocking.

Ahead, a military motorcycle corps cut through the crowd. Shouting for civilians to get out of the way, they led a thundering herd of army trucks, like elephants in camouflage. These were followed by rows of small-caliber artillery, mounted on tractors.

Papa pulled to the side of the road. Refugees scattered in the fields to either side.

Papa said, "Scots Guards and the Queen's Own Westminsters." He grimaced. "You can tell where the Germans are by the direction the Allies are traveling."

Jessica, ashen-faced, asked, "But isn't that the same road we were—"

I grasped the situation at once. "The Germans are between us and Paris, then?"

Papa nodded. "So we'll go north. If they're between us and Paris, we'll go around the battle. Ghent. Flanders and then..." He frowned as he glanced at Jessica.

"Where?" I breathed the question on the minds of thousands.
Where?

Papa reached past me and grasped a small red volume of the guidebook
Baedeker's Belgium.

Opening a map, he studied it as yet another fleet of military lor
ries rumbled past in a cloud of choking dust. "The BEF and the French are also between us and Paris. Here." His finger stabbed the page. "As
long as we stay behind British lines, we're safe."

"Ghent? Flanders?" I peered over Papa's shoulder and traced the threading highway northwest on the map. "There are so many hotels there. Remember when we stayed at the Victoria? Jessica could rest, Papa. Ghent. A doctor if the baby—"

"They're bombing Ghent. And the Victoria. We'll go around."

"Go
where?"

Papa flipped to the index. "Here. Page 50. Only about thirty-five
miles beyond Ghent. The village of Passendale. And look, Tyne Cott."

"The military cemetery?"

"The Wehrmacht won't be interested in bombing people who are already dead."

It made sense. What sort of military target would a vast field of dead men make? I asked Jessica, "What do you think?"

Jessica nodded and stroked the unborn child. "He's kicking. He wants out, Lora. I think I'll need a place to rest soon. Someplace out of the crowd."

Papa refolded the map and passed the red book to me. "It's settled, then. Tyne Cott cemetery. I know the caretaker. A veteran of the Great War. He'll shelter us."

I agreed, never imagining that my father's decision to take us to Tyne Cott, and his friend, Judah Blood, would place us directly in the paths of two armies.

^{PART FOUR}

A time to plant, And a time to pluck up that which is planted.

ECCLESIASTES 3:2B

The once bright poppies were withering.

Warm January days and early February rains, so pleasant across Belgium and northern France that winter of 1940, had encouraged a profusion of wild blooms. A continuous drought since March caused that time of exuberant growth to be no more than a two-month-old memory. The grassy fields around Passendale and Ypres yellowed with unseasonable heat. The poppies' drooping heads were bowed with thirst. The once vibrant banks of color had faded to mere streaks, like threadbare, blood-stained carpet.

Judah Blood straightened up and stretched his aching back and reflected on the weather. There were fewer weeds to pluck this year from around the headstones of Tyne Cott cemetery and none of the stone monuments were in danger of being engulfed in vines. Just the opposite was true: at this rate the entire hillside, where close to twelve thousand Allied soldiers had slept since the Great War, would be nothing but dust before midsummer.

The sun beating down on the tin roof of the shed Judah called his shop was not unbearable, but it was still too hot for this early in the year. Hooking both thumbs under the painted facemask, he pried it away from his cheekbones for an instant to let air flow beneath.

He took a sip of lukewarm water from a flask and studied the workbench. Beneath Judah's skilled fingers, the figure of

Saint George and the Dragon he was fashioning in leaded glass was taking shape nicely. It was destined for a memorial chapel in Brussels before the chapel's dedication in July.

The rumble of trucks passing on the highway distracted him from his work yet again. It was another British convoy heading east; young men heading into yet another war. For eight months, since the Nazis invaded Poland last September, an uneasy quiet had persisted along the western front. When Allies and Nazis glared at each other across fortified positions, but no new hostilities erupted, some had taken to calling this "The Phony War."

But now those eager, fearless young British men passing in lorries on the roads were prepared to plunge into battle. Would English dead from new battlefields be brought here to lie beside their fathers and uncles, or would new hillsides be sown with bodies awaiting the blossoming of Resurrection morn?

Judah returned to his work, pondering its ultimate fate. If the Germans captured Brussels, they would have little interest in a depiction of an English saint honoring English heroes. What would happen to it then?

The saint's hands, gripping the shaft of the spear about to be plunged into the dragon's heart, were particularly tricky to render believably Judah closed his eyes and concentrated. Almost against his will, he recalled a bayonet charge from more than twenty years earlier. A terrified young infantryman hefted his rifle just so before stabbing downward into the body of a foe across a barbed wire barricade. The scene of desperate combat, illuminated by a shell burst, was etched in Judah's vision. In indelible memory the soldier's knuckles were clenched white, veins standing out in hands and forearms. The motion was the same as a spear thrust, the very grasp Judah needed to depict.

"'Scuse me, Cap'n Blood, sir." The diffident tone of Sergeant Mickey Walker disrupted Judah's image.

Judah shook his head to clear it. He was not sorry for the intrusion. "What is it, Sergeant?"

The remaining members of the Tin Noses Brigade still addressed each other by their ranks from the Great War. The fatigues worn by Sergeant Walker, late of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, had been innocent of rank or other designation for many years. However, at Tyne Cott cemetery the Irishman remained the ranking non-comm, just as Judah was commanding officer.

"Sorry to interrupt, sir," Walker repeated, "but me and the lieutenant has been having a discussion, like." The Irishman paused to wipe a line of sweat from his forehead before it crept beneath his fake nose.

"What about?" Judah inquired.

"We was scrubbing the markers near the Cross of Sacrifice... .the captain knows the ones I mean; them as is for the boys who fell during the fight."

The additional description of the location was not needed. During the Battle of Passendale, which some called the Third Battle of Ypres, the British had used a captured German pillbox as an aid station. Those who did not survive their wounds were summarily buried next to the field hospital.

Later, after the war, the pillbox was surmounted by a giant stone memorial cross. The surrounding slopes displayed rank on orderly rank of headstones, but these first, haphazardly placed graves were left in their original locations. It was a tribute to the heroism of those men, and a reminder this hillside was a battlefield before it was a memorial.

"Is there a problem?" Judah asked.

"The lieutenant, sir, sees as how some of them stones is leanin' after last winter's rains. He think we should shift 'em; straighten 'em up, like."

"And you disagree?"

Walker adjusted the earpieces of the eyeglass frame that
supported his artificial nose and plucked at the patch over his missing left eye. "I don't like to contradict an officer, sir, but he suggested I put it to you, like. I thinks them leanin' stones is part of the way they was left, a'purpose."

"But we can't have them falling down, can we?" Judah chided.

"None of them is in danger of that, sir," Walker returned. "'Specially with the ground gettin' so rock hard, an' all."

"I'll walk over before supper and have a look," Judah said.

"Thank you, sir," Walker said, saluting. He turned on his heel and exited the shed as if departing from an office in a proper headquarters.

That's the way he had always been, Judah reflected. Back in the twenties, just after the last war, when the Tin Noses Brigade was much bigger, Sergeant Walker had always been a stickler for military tradition. The men whose terribly disfigured faces barred them from home and sweethearts and society found peace and acceptance among similarly injured comrades. Without an actual plan, they had coalesced around the Belgian cemetery like raindrops sliding down and collecting at the bottom of a windowpane.

They found meaning in their lives as outcasts by serving their fallen comrades—maintaining the memorials and acting as guides for grieving family members.

In those early days Sergeant Walker had been the only master stonecutter in the troop. Over the years he had trained a dozen others to chisel names into granite and marble with precision and economy of motion.

Now the combined, long-term effects of poison gas, shrapnel, and depression had taken their toll. After two decades of failing lungs, septic wounds, and suicides, Walker was once again the only trained mason left in the brigade.

Judah watched Sergeant Walker rejoin his lieutenant. The latter was Frank Howard. In 1917 he had been a pink-cheeked
junior officer. His first taste of combat had been at Polygon Wood, not far from this very spot. There, as the young and inexperienced Howard raised up on his toes to peer across no-man's-land, a burst from a German machine gun had sliced off his nose and one of his pink cheeks.

Sergeant Walker had been wounded in almost the same manner while rescuing his lieutenant. Both were scarred forever. Both received treatment at the Tin Noses Shop in Paris. The two men had been inseparable ever since.

As far as Prank Howard's family knew, he died at Passen-dale in 1917.

Such confusion was neither rare nor surprising: a million men killed from just the forces of the British Empire alone. Some scholars said as many as ten million soldiers died. The sum was nearly incomprehensible.

In Lieutenant Howard's case it was his purpose to keep his family in ignorance of his true fate. The bullet that had struck him had shattered more than his face. It had shattered his life. Even with the prosthesis hiding the gaping horror of his features, he would have ended his own existence if Sergeant Walker had not rescued him a second time by returning him here to Passendale.

Offspring of a noble house, and well-educated, Howard was the architect and engineer for the troop. There was nothing he could not design and few things he could not repair. Judah's workshop and the stone cottages that housed the brigade had been of Howard's conception.