Lovely War(81)

Costly and disheartening though it was to retreat sixty miles before the German onslaught, the land lost wasn’t of any particular strategic value to the Germans. Their storm troops and infantry pushed forward faster than supply routes could keep up. And the British line hadn’t moved everywhere. Soon the advancing Germans found themselves stranded, surrounded, and hungry.

Raiding through the supplies left behind in haste by the British, they found beef, chocolate, cigarettes, even champagne among their provisions. Fritz had been led to believe that the Allies were as poor and starving as they were. After four years of the war, here they were, enjoying the finer things of life, while Fritz’s family, back home, starved.

Whatever boost sixty captured miles might have brought to German morale was erased by the chocolate in the BEF’s packs.

War is morale. War is supply. War is chocolate.

Try as the German propaganda machine might to reassure Fritz that they were winning their glorious war, Fritz wasn’t fooled. If the British drank bubbly and ate chocolate, while the Germans drank ersatz coffee brewed from nutshells and coal tar, it was over. Nine months and four million more casualties from over, but over all the same.





HADES


     Disappearing—March 22–25, 1918





THE SYRINGE APPEARED many more times in the days to come.

James would wake in searing daylight, or confusing dark, wondering where he was. Dreams crossed the threshold between sleep and waking: the blue-eyed German. The German with the flamethrower, engulfing James. No, engulfing Hazel.

Hazel. Where was she? Gone, gone. Here, standing before him, then, boom, gone.

No, that was Frank. Thank God, it wasn’t Hazel, but oh God, oh God, it was Frank.

Then, the ringing. His ears rang with a missile’s shrill, incoming whine. But it never hit, never landed. It kept coming for him. Ringing and ringing in his skull. He thrashed between sweaty sheets, but his wrists were tied to the bed. He was clad in a thin hospital gown, so thin, it would never stop the missiles. Where were his clothes?

He had to get away. He had to take cover. Anything could hit him here.

No, no. He was in a hospital. He was safe in a hospital.

Then there was an explosion. Doctors and nurses running, patients screaming.

Figures rushed to his bed, lifted it, and carried him, bed and all, to a truck. The truck rattled, and he cried out. Someone came with the silver syringe, and the pinch that burned, and his field of vision, already shallow and dark, blurred at the edges, and James disappeared.





HADES


     Horse-Race Gambling—March–April 1918





MR. AND MRS. WINDICOTT of Grundy Street and Bygrove, Poplar, London, had thanked their stars, when the Great War broke out, that their only child would never face battle’s danger. She, a quiet girl devoted to piano, would pass through this ordeal unscathed.

Then she’d begun to act secretively, and suddenly she’d fallen in love with a soldier, dropped her piano lessons, and run off to France to volunteer at a huge base of American servicemen. The horrors that could befall her there kept Mrs. Windicott up at night.

Her letters were full of love for them, and anxiety for her poor soldier boy.

In time they began purchasing, from a bookseller, the Weekly Casualty List. (The London Times had stopped printing it with the daily paper. It had grown so long, there was no room for any other news.) Others in Britain studied this list with hearts in more dread than the Windicotts’. But each week they pored over the list with a magnifying glass, searching for Alderidge, J. (Chelmsford). He was a name to them, but he mattered to Hazel. They came to love him for her sake.

Pick any name, and watch for it long enough, and send up a silent prayer of thanks when you don’t find it on a death list, and pretty soon, if what you feel isn’t love, what is it?

A horse-race gambler who follows with avid interest the winnings, times and injuries of Bachelor’s Button (1906 Ascot Gold Cup) or Apothecary (1915) knows what I mean. Those whose lot it was to raise the generation fed to this war were horse-race gamblers, one and all.





APOLLO


     émile—March 22–April 13, 1918





MAYBE, AUBREY FIGURED, a letter to Colette after so much silence, containing nothing more than music, was too confusing. So he wrote another. And still there was no answer.

Reaching the Front had been good for Aubrey, oddly enough. His French trainer, émile Segal, was fun. He was a true poilu (“hairy one”), covered head to neck in thick, matted brown curls. And the faces he made! How he mimicked the Boche Germans, and the mannerisms of French officers. And the soldiers of the 369e (“Sammies,” to émile, after Uncle Sam), who were knocked on their backs by the routine daily allotment of wine for French soldiers. Sammies couldn’t handle so much potent French wine.

Aubrey didn’t need to be tipsy for émile to get him laughing.

That was a miracle, in its own way. Weeks went by, then months. The ache of Joey’s absence, and Aubrey’s terrible guilt, never faded. But after two months had passed, time, work, and friendship brought Aubrey to a place where it was possible to hurt, and to laugh, in the same day. He never would’ve guessed he could.