Mata Hari's Last Dance(54)

“Then welcome to the French Secret Service, Mata Hari.”

*

I show my papers from Commandant Ladoux to the soldier at the H?tel de Ville in Vittel. I smile at him so he thinks that I’m at ease, but the sounds of dying men from beyond the lobby are making me feel very uncomfortable. While the uniform continues to check over my papers, every few moments the doors swing open and men carry wounded soldiers in on stretchers. Some of them are covered in blood. Others are so pale I wonder if they’re already dead. The entire hotel has been turned into an American military hospital with very few rooms still reserved for guests. There’s nothing of the resort town Vadime wrote to me about. It’s all military tents and army cars now.

“If you’ll wait here,” the soldier behind the desk says, “I’ll find someone to escort you back.”

I try to make myself comfortable in the lobby, but I don’t know where to look and the sounds of men crying out for their mothers is heartbreaking. Is Vadime’s voice among them? What will I find when they take me back there? My stomach begins to tie itself in knots.

I search the lobby for something to read—anything—and discover several old copies of the New York Tribune. I wonder who left them and why they’re here. I read the date of the paper on top. August 31, 1914. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to keep such old news. There’s an article by Richard Harding Davis. I skim it, not wanting to face anything more horrible than the wails around me, but my hands grow cold as I read.

London, August 30—I left Brussels on Thursday afternoon and have just arrived in London. For two hours on Thursday night I was in what for six hundred years has been the city of Louvain. The Germans were burning it, and to hide their work kept us locked in the railway carriages. But the story was written against the sky, was told to us by German soldiers incoherent with excesses; and we could read it in the faces of women and children being led to concentration camps and of citizens on their way to be shot.

On their way to be shot. Is this what would have happened to Va--dime if he’d been captured? If the Germans are shooting civilians, what are they doing to soldiers?

“Mata Hari?” someone calls, but I can’t respond. I’m transfixed by the story.

In the darkness the gray uniforms filled the station with an army of ghosts. You distinguished men only when pipes hanging from their teeth glowed red or their bayonets flashed.

Outside the station in the public square the people of Louvain passed in an unending procession, women bareheaded, weeping, men carrying the children asleep on their shoulders, all hemmed in by the shadowy army of gray wolves. Once they were halted, and among them marched a line of men. They well knew their fellow townsmen. These were on their way to be shot. And better to point the moral an officer halted both processions and, climbing to a cart, explained why the men were going to die. He warned others not to bring down upon themselves a like vengeance.

As those being led to spend the night in the fields looked across to those marked for death they saw old friends, neighbors of long standing, men of their own household. The officer bellowing at them from the cart was illuminated by the headlights of an automobile. He looked like an actor held in a spotlight on a darkened stage. It was all like a scene upon the stage, so unreal, so inhuman, you felt that it could not be true, that the curtain of fire, purring and crackling and sending up hot sparks to meet the kind, calm stars, was only a painted backdrop; that the reports of rifles from the dark rooms came from blank cartridges, and that these trembling shopkeepers and peasants ringed in bayonets would not in a few minutes really die, but that they themselves and their homes would be restored to their wives and children. You felt it was only a nightmare, cruel and uncivilized. And then you remembered that the German Emperor has told us what it is. It is his Holy War.

Holy War.

“Mata Hari?”

I look up and realize that I’m crying. The author of the piece has such a way with words that for several minutes it was as if I was standing right there with him. I could see the German officers as he saw them. I could hear their boots crunch against the gravel as they moved in unison to destroy people’s homes. I stand and wipe the tears from my eyes.

“We ask that our visitors remain composed,” the man says. “If you don’t feel you can see wounded men on their deathbeds without being overcome, I ask that you reconsider.”

“No. I can do it.”

He stares at me as if he’s unsure. Then he nods and leads the way. The hotel carpets are stained with blood. I do not allow myself to wonder who bled their last here and what happened to them. Did they die here alone? Did their mothers come for them? Perhaps, like Vadime, this isn’t even their country. The man takes me through a series of halls to a second lobby that has been transformed into a makeshift hospital room. Two dozen beds line the walls, and nurses in white uniforms rush from patient to patient. In the farthest corner of the room, I see him. It takes all of my reserve not to run.

We walk across the lobby and the men who are able sit up straighter in their beds to watch me. When we arrive at Vadime, he gapes at me, as if he thinks I am not real.

“Vadime! Oh my God, Vadime.” I want to smother him with kisses. I want to wrap him in my arms. His one eye is covered by a thick black patch, but he’s alive. I sit on the side of his bed and try my best not to be overcome. He takes my hands in his and squeezes tightly.