At first they couldn’t even find the bank. And when they did at last, the beech tree had vanished: no mark, nothing remained to orient by. ‘It was here, Sister!’ the older sister cried, but Marthe didn’t answer, running strongly on, they following until they too saw what she had apparently seen — the splinters and fragments, whole limbs still intact with leaves, scattered for a hundred metres; when they overtook her, she was holding in her hand a shard of the pale new unpainted wood which had been the coffin; she spoke to the husband by name, quite gently:
‘You’ll have to go back and get the shovel.’
But before he could turn, the girl had already passed him, running, frantic yet unerring, deer-light among the craters and what remained of the weeds and the quenchless poppies, getting smaller and smaller yet still running, back toward the house. That was Sunday. When the girl returned with the shovel, still running, they took turns with it, all that day until it was too dark to see. They found a few more shards and fragments of the coffin, but the body itself was gone.
Tomorrow
ONCE MORE THERE were twelve of them though this time they were led by a sergeant. The carriage was a special one though it was still third class; the seats had been removed from the forward compartment and on the floor of it rested a new empty military coffin. The thirteen of them had left Paris at midnight and by the time they reached St Mihiel they were already fairly drunk.
Because the job, mission, was going to be an unpleasant one, now that peace and victory had really come to western Europe in November (six months after the false armistice in May, that curious week’s holiday which the war had taken which had been so false that they remembered it only as phenomena) and a man, even though still in uniform, might have thought himself free, at least until they started the next one, of yesterday’s cadavers. So they had been issued an extra wine and brandy ration to compensate for this, in charge of the sergeant who was to have doled it out to them at need.
But the sergeant, who had not wanted the assignment either, was a dour introvert who had secluded himself in an empty compartment forward with a pornographic magazine as soon as the train left Paris. But, alert for the opportunity, when the sergeant quitted his compartment at Chalons (they didn’t know why nor bother: perhaps to find a urinal; possibly it was merely official) two of them (one had been a fairly successful picklock in civilian life before 1914 and planned to resume that vocation as soon as he was permitted to doff his uniform) entered the compartment and opened the sergeant’s valise and extracted two bottles of brandy from it.
So when the Bar-le-Duc express dropped their carriage at St Mihiel, where the local for Verdun would engage it, they (except the sergeant) were a shade better than fairly drunk; and when, shortly after daylight, the local set the carriage on a repaired siding in the rubble of Verdun, they were even another shade better than that; by that time also the sergeant had discovered the ravishing of his valise and counted the remaining bottles and, what with the consequent uproar of his outraged and angry denunciation, plus their own condition, they did not even notice the old woman at first; only then to remark that there had been something almost like a committee waiting for them, as though word of the time of their arrival and their purpose too had preceded them — a clump, a huddle, a small group, all men save one, of laborers from the town and peasants from the adjacent countryside, watching them quietly while the sergeant (carrying the valise) snarled and cursed at them, out of which that one, the old woman, had darted at once and was now tugging at the sergeant’s sleeve — a peasant woman older in appearance than in years when seen close, with a worn lined face which looked as though she too had not slept much lately, but which was now tense and even alight with a sort of frantic eagerness and hope.
‘Eh?’ the sergeant said at last. ‘What? What is it you want?’
‘You are going out to the forts,’ she said. ‘We know why. Take me with you.’
‘You?’ the sergeant said; now they were all listening. ‘What for?’
‘It’s Theodule,’ she said. ‘My son. They told me he was killed there in 1916 but they didn’t send him back home and they wont let me go out there and find him.’
‘Find him?’ the sergeant said. ‘After three years?’
‘I will know him,’ she said. ‘Only let me go and look. I will know him. You have a mother; think how she would grieve for you if you had died and they had not sent you home. Take me with you. I will know him, I tell you. I will know him at once. Come now.’ She was clinging to his arm now while he tried to shake her loose.
‘Let go!’ he said. ‘I cant take you out there without an order, even if I would. We’ve got a job to do; you would be in the way. Let go!’
But she still clung to the sergeant’s arm, looking about at the other faces watching her, her own face eager and unconvinced. ‘Boys — children,’ she said. ‘You have mothers too — some of you — —’
‘Let go!’ the sergeant said, swapping the valise to the other hand and jerking himself free this time. ‘Gwan! Beat it:’ taking her by the shoulders, the valise pressed against her back, and turning her and propelling her across the platform toward the quiet group which had been watching too. ‘There aint nothing out there anymore by now but rotten meat; you couldn’t find him even if you went.’
‘I can,’ she said. ‘I know I can. I sold the farm, I tell you. I have money. I can pay you — —’
‘Not me,’ the sergeant said. ‘Not but that if I had my way, you could go out there and find yours and bring another one back for us, and we would wait for you here. But you aint going.’ He released her, speaking almost gently. ‘You go on back home and forget about this. Is your husband with you?’
‘He is dead too. We lived in the Morbihan. When the war was over, I sold the farm and came here to find Theodule.’
‘Then go on back to wherever it is you are living now. Because you cant go with us.’
But she went no further than the group she had emerged from, to turn and stand again, watching, the worn sleepless face still eager, unconvinced, indomitable, while the sergeant turned back to his squad and stopped and gave them another scathing and introverted look. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘All of you that aint seeing double, let’s go. Because I dont want to mess around out there long enough to get one stinking carcass, let alone two.’
‘How about a drink first?’ one said.
‘Try and get it.’
‘Want me to carry your grip, Sarge?’ another said. The sergeant’s answer was simple, brief and obscene. He turned, they followed raggedly. A lorry, a closed van, was waiting for them, with a driver and a corporal. They drew the empty coffin from its compartment and carried it to the van and slid it inside and got in themselves.
There was straw for them to sit on; the sergeant himself sat on the coffin, the valise in his lap and one hand still gripping the handle as if he expected one or maybe all of them to try to snatch it from him. The lorry moved.
‘Dont we get any breakfast?’ one said.
‘You drank yours,’ the sergeant said. ‘After you stole it first.’ But there was breakfast: bread and coffee at a zinc bar in a tiny bistro for some inscrutable reason untouched by the shelling except that it had a new American-made sheet-iron roof, which stuck upward from the tumbled masses of collapsed walls surrounding and enclosing it. That was arranged too; the meal was already paid for from Paris.
‘Christ,’ one said. ‘The army sure wants this corpse bad if they have started buying grub from civilians.’ The sergeant ate with the valise on the bar before him, between his arms. Then they were in the lorry again, the sergeant gripping the valise on his lap; now, through the open rear door of the lorry as it crept between the piles of rubble and the old craters, they were able to see something of the ruined city — the mountains and hills of shattered masonry which men were already at work clearing away and out of which there rose already an astonishing number of the American-made iron roofs to glint like silver in the morning sun; maybe the Americans had not fought all the war but at least they were paying for the restoration of its devastation.
That is, the sergeant could have seen it because almost at once his men had entered a state resembling coma, even before they had crossed the Meuse bridge and reached the corner, where in time the five heroic-sized figures would stare steadily and indomitably eastward in bas-relief from the symbolical section of stone bastion
