Till We Meet Again (15 page)

Captain Paul de Lancel suffered a serious arm wound on the last day of the offensive. As he lay in the hospital he thought not of himself, but of all the death he had witnessed in the last twelve months. His men, the men of the First Army, had been among the first to die. His wife had not survived the birth of their son, Bruno, who was in the care of Laure’s parents in Paris. Paul had been able to see the baby only once, during the brief leave he had been given to attend Laure’s funeral, and the thought that he had a nine-month-old son made him neither sad nor happy. He felt only indifference. He knew that his own chances of surviving the war were so remote that they weren’t worth a minute’s consideration by a realistic man, and he found he minded not for himself, but only—and that was an intellectual, not an emotional feeling—for the mite who was certain to grow up an orphan. Paul de Lancel regarded himself as a dead man as much as any prisoner in a jail who is sentenced to be shot at dawn. He would live until he was well enough to lead other men to death. The prospect of death left him indifferent. He cared only for the men he commanded, men simple enough still to hope, men lucky enough still to love, men ignorant enough still to imagine that there was a future.

As soon as his arm had healed, Paul de Lancel rejoined his company, almost all of them replacements, who had been regrouped in the trenches just before the town of Festubert, midway on the Flanders front between Ypres and Arras.

Festubert was one of the towns over which the opposing armies fought during a year of unbroken stalemate. It was now late fall, and the spring would bring new and more
savage warfare, but for the moment the soldiers of both sides found themselves in one of those comparative lulls that occur in even the most bitter battles: time in which to bury their dead, delouse their shirts, and even, on this cold autumn night in northeastern France, to group together in an improvised theater to roar at Lucien Gilly and his ancient jokes, to hum along to the tune of the accordionist, to applaud the six girls who danced with the six soldiers who volunteered to be their partners, and finally to listen to Maddy sing, Maddy who had already become a legend of the
Théâtre aux Armées
, in her brave red dress and her bright red shoes and her hair like the sunshine they all remembered from summer days, no matter where in France they had once been young.

Eve was growing worried. When she had left the lodging in Saint-Omer, now well behind the front, to be driven to Festubert, there had been adequate daylight. The others in Gilly’s troupe had gone on just before her, in the series of soldier-driven military vehicles allocated to them. She had been delayed by the delicate but essential needlework necessary to repair a major rip in the bias-cut hem of her dress.

Now she and her soldier-chauffeur, a boy so young that she was astonished that he was of military age, had been driving for far too long, according to what Gilly had told her to expect, and Festubert was not in sight.

“Are you certain this is the right way?” Eve asked anxiously.

“It’s the road my corporal told me to take, if you can call it a road,” he answered. Indeed, the unpaved route seemed to be getting worse instead of better with each minute of approaching darkness.

“Why don’t we stop and look at the map?” Eve suggested.

“Haven’t got one. Generals have maps. And if I did, it wouldn’t mean a thing, would it, without signposts?”

“Stop at the first farmhouse you see, and ask directions,” Eve told him sharply. She had sung many times within sight and sound of enemy fire, and not trembled, but this lonely road, this desolate, almost treeless countryside, this empty, unpeopled, destroyed land through which they were driving, unnerved her. If only she hadn’t bothered about her hem, she thought fretfully, and tried to pull her heavy coat even more tightly around her.

“Look, there’s a farmhouse down the road!” Eve cried.

“Bombed out, by the look of it,” the soldier replied, and
indeed there was no sign of life, no light, no smoke, no sound of animals or people. “Germans got it last year, I guess,” the boy continued indifferently. As he spoke, there was a burst of flame in the field on their right, and a rending of the air as a mortar shell exploded.

“Jesus!” he screamed, and in the shuddering air a second shell exploded, fragments landing close to the car. The young soldier almost lost control of the wheel, but managed to stay on the road, and with as much speed as the vehicle possessed, he raced toward the farmhouse, screeching to a stop in a pool of water in the farmyard itself.

“Get down!” he shouted, but Eve was already out of the car and running, crouched low, toward the open door. They reached it together and dove inside on their hands and knees, looking for any object that might provide shelter. With a strange sharpening of all her senses, Eve saw in a split second that the room was empty except for bits of wood and pieces of crockery on the floor. It had obviously been heavily shelled; although the roof was almost intact, the stones of the walls had gaping holes everywhere. It could no longer be called a farmhouse, Eve thought, or any other kind of house. Outside they heard another mortar shell whistle pitilessly before it landed, but it was impossible to tell if it had fallen nearer to them than the others. For lack of any better place to put themselves, they huddled beside the empty fireplace. If it had been bigger, they would have hurled themselves inside the hearth.

“We’ll never get there,” Eve said, as calmly as she could. “You took the wrong road.”

“Don’t see how it happened,” the driver protested in a pathetic voice.

“There isn’t supposed to be any fighting on the road, for God’s sake, or they would never have told us to come this way.”

“Maybe,” he said sullenly, “but just when it gets quiet, see, there’re Germans waiting for you. And then they get you. That’s what my corporal told me.”

“I wish he were here now. I’d tell him what I think!” It was plain, she realized, that at best they would have to wait here until daylight and rescue. There was no point in considering the worst. She wrapped the skirt of her coat firmly around her ankles and eased herself down so that she was sitting on the stones of the hearth. In spite of her fear and her
anger at this idiot
poilu
, she couldn’t continue to ignore the fact that her feet, in her new pair of red shoes, undeniably hurt. If she was going to be killed by a shell, she might just as well be sitting down in comfort, comparatively speaking, than standing up in shoes meant for a
tour de chant
and nothing else.

“You got a cigarette?” the boy asked.

“I don’t smoke. Here,” she answered, handing him the packet she always carried for any soldier who wanted one.

“PUT OUT THAT MATCH!”

Eve screamed and jumped up. A group of soldiers rushed into the farmhouse. They had crept up so quietly that neither she nor the driver had heard them approach. Petrified by shock, she stood with her back to the wall, expecting to die with a bayonet through her heart, until she came to her senses and realized that if she could understand the command, it must be in French.

“Thank God, thank God, how did you know we were here? Oh, thank God you came to save us,” she whispered.

“Save
you? Who the hell are you? What the devil is a woman doing here?”

“I was going to Festubert … to perform …”

“You must be mad.
Mad!
What a damn fool woman! It’s in the other direction. You’re almost on top of the front, opposite Lens.”

“Lens? Where’s that?”

“Lens is on the German side of the front, last I heard,” Paul de Lancel said brusquely, as he turned away from her and began to give orders to the men under his command. They had been thrown back by a surprise attack coming from one of the many fortified machine-gun nests that protected the German’s artillery.

Four men were wounded, three too gravely to walk. The remaining three were unharmed. The situation was more serious than he had first realized, Paul discovered, as he moved among them, asking quiet questions. He judged that with the full moon that had already risen and the clear visibility that was expected, there was no chance of trying to transport the wounded men back to the trenches and medical help. In the first dim and confusing light of dawn he could send someone back with the news that they were trapped here. Meanwhile, he could only wait and do his best to help them live through the night.

“Can I help?” Eve asked, walking with caution between the men on the floor and coming close to the captain, before she spoke.

“Not unless you’re a nurse.” His voice was proccupied, dismissive.

Eve retreated to the cold fireplace. She hadn’t taken any of the Red Cross classes in which so many women were engaged. She had been too busy singing at various outposts along the front and, between trips, working at any theater that offered her a job for a few weeks, just in order to pay her rent.

In silence she listened to the few words that the men grunted, words so abbreviated and so weary that they might almost have been in a foreign language. Soon, whatever could be done for the wounded had been done by the able-bodied, and all eight men, including their captain, sat or lay on what, Eve mused, had once been a scrubbed and spotless farmhouse floor, its cleanliness some woman’s pride.

There would have been a fine log fire, she imagined, to fight the darkness of this cold October night, and certainly children gathered cozily around, doing the homework they had been given in the village school. A thick soup would have been cooking, hams and sausages would have hung from the ceiling, and outside, the farmer would almost have finished his inspection of his animals, eager for the moment when he would come inside to the scene of comfort he knew so well. His harvest would have been in for weeks, and his relatively lazy winter would lie ahead, night after night of warmth and enough to eat, his wife’s companionship and the joys of watching his children grow.

Once such a simple, ordinary life would have been all but unimaginable to her, or if she had been interested enough to attempt to visualize it, she would have disdained it as being brutish. A peasant’s life, a life without possibilities of change, a life that could be written down, from birth to death, in three short sentences. No chance to dare in that life; no chance to meet the sky halfway in a big red balloon; no chance to run away to Paris with the first man she had ever kissed; no chance to walk along the Grands Boulevards to the rhythm of a maxixe; no chance to star at the Olympia.
To dare and to win
.

How lucky she had been! And she hadn’t really known it, not known it fully, as she did now, just as the farmer and his
wife didn’t know how lucky they had been until the mortar shells of two great nations destroyed their farmhouse and laid waste to their fields.

As time passed and the moon shone more brilliantly into the pile of stones that sheltered them, Eve was able to see the soldiers more clearly than she had been earlier. None of them was asleep. The wounded were in too much pain to allow their comrades to close their eyes for so much as a minute. Their groans were muted, and came at intervals, but even without knowing the time, Eve was aware that it was still many hours until morning.

There must be something she could do, even if she knew nothing about nursing, she told herself angrily. She just couldn’t sit here and watch them suffer without at least trying to take their minds off their pain. That unpleasant officer had said she couldn’t help. Just because she didn’t know how to roll a bandage didn’t mean that she was worthless. After all, Vincent Scotto had just written the enormously popular song
Le Cri du Poilu
, with its rousing refrain, “Our soldiers at the front, what do they want, a woman! a woman!”

Simpleminded, perhaps, but clear and direct enough, Eve told herself, and without asking permission, she began to sing in her softest possible voice, in her voice of spring lightning that could be heard in the last seat of the third balcony, had she wished it, but which, tonight, only carried across the small space that separated her from the soldiers. She sang the first song that came to her lips, her good-luck song, her audition song,
Parlez-moi d’Amour
. At the sound of her voice the officer muttered an oath of surprise, but Eve ignored him and continued, following with
Mon Homme
, for good measure. “When he touches me, I’m finished, for I’m only a woman and I have him under my skin.”

“Requests, gentlemen?” she asked as soon as she had finished with Mistinguett’s immortal hymn to the helplessness of a woman in love and the irresistible power of a man over her. And seven men answered her, some in voices so faint that she could hardly hear them, others eagerly, but each had a song he wanted to hear.

Eve sat on the hearth, and that whole night through she sang and sang, blessing the memory of all the melodies and lyrics she had heard once and never forgotten as she walked back and forth to her lessons through the streets of Dijon, for almost all the requests were for songs that went back to her
girlhood. She could see the men only where the moonlight shone through the holes in the walls. Their faces were almost hidden, but those who weren’t strong enough to speak up whispered their requests to their comrades. She even sang for the soldier whose hapless driving had brought her to this place.

Paul de Lancel, his officer’s cap pulled down over his eyes, sat quietly, cradling in his arms a man whose legs were utterly useless. With every song this woman sang, he realized, some inner wound was slowly beginning to heal in him. Her voice expanded his heart, giving him back a glimpse, an intimation, of a place where love and laughter could be found. The elemental, caressing timbre of her voice, the rich humanity of it, that deeply feminine sound, a visceral warmth that existed nowhere on the front, that had nothing to do with the war, brought back the memory of so much he had forgotten. An impermanent vision? Unquestionably, but each of her songs, and their often banal words of ordinary human needs and hopes, of the deceptions of love, the joys of love, days and nights of love, began to restore the beginning of a belief in his own continued existence, a belief he had lost long ago. Would these hours be remembered? Would the long-dormant emotions she awakened, as he was enveloped in the magical world of her voice, endure in any form beyond this night? Probably not, he thought, but oh, how good were these moments of simple forgotten contentment, of tenderness.