Lovely War(53)

APHRODITE


     Stéphane—January 26, 1918





THAT NIGHT, COLETTE dreamed of Stéphane.

It was a simple dream. Just Stéphane, walking along with her in the grasses beside the citadel. He didn’t say anything. Just smiled and held her hand, and looked at her with eyes filled with love. All that she felt in his presence—he’s alive! All those horrors were only a terrible dream!—filled her limbs with joy and light. She knew it was real. As real as she herself.

Together they watched birds fly over the green valley and the winding river. When she turned to look at him again, he was gone.

She woke up sobbing.

Hazel heard the sound and hurried to Colette’s room and lay down beside her. “It’s all right,” her friend said soothingly. “It’s all right.”

But it wasn’t.

Let this soldier boy go, the Colette of yesterday told herself. He’ll soon be gone, but you’ll have Stéphane forever, and that’s enough. You don’t need the pain of another goodbye.

She lay there, remembering her evening with Aubrey. All the things she couldn’t believe she’d told him. All the other things she hadn’t yet shared.

I don’t need goodbyes, she realized, but I need Aubrey Edwards.After tonight, I can’t be a girl who doesn’t have the King of Ragtime to tell everything to. I can’t not be close to him. Not if he’s anywhere to be found.





ARES


     Don’t Shoot the Dummy—January 30, 1918





“THERE. SEE THAT?” Private Pete Yawkey spoke in a whisper, lest the Germans hear.

James swiveled his scope half an inch. “I see it.”

Between a gap in the top two sandbags of the German lines, a helmet rose slightly.

James’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Were they about to kill that Jerry?

“Let’s see now,” Yawkey said softly, talking to his target. “Are you real, or not?”

“Real?” James whispered. “How do you mean?”

“What do you see, Alderidge?”

If this was a trick question, James would fail the test. “It’s a head.”

“Is it? Look closer.”

“A helmet,” said James.

“What’s under it? Quick, what’s there?”

He swallowed his impatience. “A face.”

“And what’s it doing?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s right.”

James had little patience for games. “It’s a face,” he said. “Brown-haired chap.”

“I don’t care about hair color,” said Yawkey. “Ever see a human being hold so still?”

James looked again. “He’s moving a little.”

“How?”

Count to ten. “Sort of bobbing up and down. Side to side a little.”

Yawkey nodded significantly. “What does that tell you?”

James looked again. “His face, itself, doesn’t move,” he said slowly. “He’s like a statue.”

“That’s because he is one,” Yawkey explained. “A dummy. A plaster head jammed onto the end of a bayonet with a helmet on top. They’re trying to lure us into taking a shot.”

James blinked and rubbed his eyes. “For spite, you mean?”

“To find us. To study the bullet angle. They’ll point their artillery right at us. Kaboom!”

Not so funny. But most seasoned soldiers he’d met were like this. Laughing at their own destruction, casual about carnage. Maybe laughing was the only way to survive it all.

Yawkey pressed the heels of both hands into his eyes. He was a lanky, bony bird with protruding ears and a large Adam’s apple. Every word of his training made James’s flesh crawl.

Pete Yawkey didn’t invent sniping. It wasn’t his fault that James hated his every word. Everyone had their job to do. Survival depended on doing it. And the only way to end this war was to win it.

“Only shoot when you’re sure,” Pete said. “Don’t shoot the dummy. A sniper has zero shots to waste. Every one’s got to hit its target. Because it tells the enemy where you are.”

He took up his rifle and peered through the scope. James watched the German lines.

At night, he and Pete were relieved by another sniper-and-spotter pair, and they got a decent amount of sleep, compared to what James had grown accustomed to. One perk, at any rate, to playing assassin.

He’d memorized each tangle of barbed wire, each crater in shell-blasted dirt, each clod and stone and bump. Each corpse. It was a colorless wasteland. Only scavenger birds moved. Yet at any moment, there could be an attack.

Their dugout was a marvel. Army tunneling engineers had dug from the fire trench into a slight rise of land. By night, a fatigue party crept into no-man’s-land, cut away the covering sod, and completed the nest. They replaced the sod over a wooden frame and carefully concealed the holes the snipers used for rifles and scopes. Next morning Jerry saw nothing different.

“Hsst,” Yawkey said. “See that? Three hundred yards back.”

James saw what might be a tree trunk, or a gray German uniform. An officer, probably.