Lovely War(30)

The kids had that first kiss in July of 1914. In the weeks following, Colette and Stéphane were too drunk on love to pay attention to the talk of war that began to fill the newspapers.

Until, on August 4, ignoring it was impossible. German armies invaded neutral Belgium and conquered Liège. Rumors flew of civilians mown down, and towns razed to the ground.

On August 15, a German division captured the citadel. French armies met them there in battle and recaptured the citadel a few hours later. (Incidentally, one of the French fighters injured there that day was Charles de Gaulle, today the leader of the underground French Resistance against the Nazi occupation of France. War, you see, gives birth to heroes.)

On the night of April 21 to the 22, carloads of German soldiers rolled into Dinant. They set some twenty houses on fire and killed thirty civilians. They reported later that the civilians had opened fire on them. All survivors denied that this was so.

On August 23, the Germans returned in force. They set fire to hundreds of homes. They blamed the civilians for all German losses thus far in Dinant, and pulled men from workplaces and homes and hiding places, and executed them in the streets. Women, children, and babies were executed too. As old as eighty-eight. As young as three weeks. Nearly seven hundred in total.

Dinant’s flames raged for days. Only smoking rubble remained. The old church, Notre Dame de Dinant, caught fire. The carillon in the bell tower burned, silencing the town.



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HADES


Among the dead were Colette’s papa; her uncles Paul and Charles; her cousin, Gabriel; and her brother, Alexandre. The carpentry workshop where the Fournier men built wooden furniture was one of the workplaces raided. Colette and her mother lost everyone.

When shots first rang out, Stéphane ran through the streets, searching for Colette. The Germans caught him and shot him too.

The slaughtered died in excruciating fear, less for themselves than for those they left behind in the grip of German soldiers. It’s the most pitiable state in which to enter my realm.

Stéphane entered my realm, bleeding from his very soul, for all the dreamed-of weeks and years of love ripped away from him by the firing line. He paced the citadel for years afterward, searching for what could not be found.

Colette took shelter in the abbey, le Couvent de Bethléem, across the river from the Germans, when the first shouts and cries began. She crouched in a dark cell, rocking and praying, begging her god to spare those she loved.

She emerged to a town on fire, to learn she’d lost everyone she loved except her mother.

Her mother died a few days later. Technically, a stroke, but it was grief that killed her.



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Colette the child died that day.

The Dinant she loved was gone. She spent weeks trying to help the survivors clean up the rubble. She held motherless infants and tried to shush their wailing. She took fatherless children into the fields to pick flowers so their mothers could drink and sob.

She pictured, over and over, Alexandre crumpling to the ground. Papa doubling over. Oncle Paul and Oncle Charles, clutching vainly at their shattered chests.

She could not bring herself to picture Stéphane.

She worked to offer comfort, but it tormented her that she’d had no way to comfort those she loved best, who needed comfort most at the gates of death.

So one moonless, cloud-covered night in early fall, she wrapped her few remaining belongings in a rag, stole a boat, and rowed all night against the Meuse’s slow current, making her way south into France, and hiking across the countryside until she reached Paris and her aunt, Solange. She made her way to the YMCA headquarters, lied about her age, and volunteered.

She couldn’t face the Red Cross and the dying and the blood. But she could try to help where she could, to listen to somebody else’s Alexandre, and somebody else’s Stéphane, as if she were listening to the conversations she’d never be allowed to have with her own dear ones.

For the next four years she grew into young womanhood surrounded by soldiers and weapons and war. She politely deflected declarations of love and poured thousands of cups of coffee. She worked tirelessly to provide comfort to others who would face the German guns.

She believed if she could comfort them, then she might one day receive comfort, too.





APHRODITE


     Entertaining the Yanks—January 4, 1918





AFTER SUPPER, SOLDIERS began filtering into the vast YMCA relief hut, bound for games tables, a library, the chapel, and a coffee station where Hazel waited to make cheerful conversation.

There were so many of them. They were so very male.

Hazel, in her freshly brushed Y uniform, poured hot drinks and dreaded talking to young men. But the Yanks, with their harsh Rs and their wide smiles, soon won her over.

“Howdy, ma’am! You ready for us to wallop those Germans?”

“Ain’t you two a sight for sore eyes!”

Then Ellen let it slip that Hazel played piano, and a general uproar demanded that she perform. Here it was. Playing was what she’d come to do. But she didn’t know their music.

“Play ‘For Me and My Gal’!”

“Got any Irving Berlin?”

“How about ‘Cleopatra Had a Jazz Band’? Do you know that?”