The enemy strategy left us with hand-to-hand combat as our only solution, since no artillery bombardment of ours could pinpoint such a widely scattered and deeply concealed array of machine-gun nests. When the German gunners opened up, our men fell as wheat before the reaper. I saw them drop.
That vision, and the piles of garbage to which those human beings were reduced, and the prevalence of blood— that is how I shall ever remember war. My sadness, my incurable grief, will always be that I never did enough for my comrades.
Robert finished reading the last page and handed it to Ellie. She read it and laid it facedown on the stack of papers. He looked directly at her, his eyes wide. Neither spoke a word as they held eye contact. In time each sat back and looked away, their bodies aching from the tension that had held them taut as bowstrings.
“That was how I remember it too,” she said. “The truth tells itself, even when it's understated.”
“What was your role?” he said.
“To take the pressure off you.”
“Tell me,” he said.
She had been posted from the larger base at Bouresches to the field hospital at Lucy-le-Bocage, the place to which Captain Shannon returned at night. With the unquestionable strength of all natural alliances, she became more or less his receiving nurse, as he brought men in from the field of battle. She never even paused to marvel at his efforts. Her job, she told him, was to be there and take care of the wounded as reliably “as the hands travel round the face of the clock.”
Robert said, “Do you know, I have never known how many men survived— I mean, of the ones that I found.”
“You brought in over a hundred men. Day and night, mostly night. Most of them lived.”
Robert nodded, taking in this information.
She told him that within a couple of days she had drawn attention to the number of men being rescued by the chaplain. That was when she had decided to take care of Captain Shannon himself. As this dreadful failing operation continued, long before the first whiff of victory, long before the crazy bravery that finally silenced the enemy machine guns, she would lecture the chaplain. If he wished to take care of others, she told him, he must begin to take care of himself. It was a moral matter.
She showed him how. Pulling yards of strings, she arranged a series of fresh uniforms so that every morning he had clean fabrics to wear. And every night, no matter what time he finally came in, exhausted and covered in the blood of others, she made him virtually a patient— that is to say, she cared for him as for a patient, this man of whom the entire camp had begun to talk. She laid him down in his exhaustion, she bathed him discreetly, she checked him for wounds, and she organized his food.
“Everybody watched me doing this,” she said, “and nobody stopped me.” No jealousies arose, nor did anybody issue countermanding orders. They understood that the chaplain needed physical backup for his extraordinary scheme. “And in any case,” she said, “they saw that for the rest of the time I worked harder than anybody else.”
It seemed as though she meant to match the chaplain's stamina pound for pound, and as long as he kept bringing men in, she kept attending to them. She even joked with him: “Captain, you find ‘em, I'll fix ‘em.” The overworked medical teams themselves scarcely had the time to venture into the field— and given the nature of the battle, they were denied permission.
So night after night, as he went back out again, she made the assessments, allowing doctors to sleep. And while the chaplain was in the field, she closed the eyes of those who didn't live. Only now and then, an hour at a time, did she snatch any sleep.
Nurse Kennedy was also the one who retained objectivity. She soon began to consider the chaplain's efforts too great. It would only be a question of time before the priest himself succumbed to injury or exhaustion.
And indeed he did succumb. When his mind blew, they subdued him physically. In the tent to which he had carried so many others, he himself now received morphine.
The colonel came in next day to check on the chaplain's condition. When a young doctor said, “He's carrying no life-threatening wounds,” the colonel went back to his own tent and began the paperwork that saved Robert Shannon's life by shipping him out of Belleau Wood.
So Ellie Kennedy said as she told her side of it, on a sunny day in her own house, long after the war.
But neither Ellie nor Robert told the whole story. The battle of Belleau Wood became famous. Those who wrote the history of that June and July in the beautiful Marne valley dwelt— quite appropriately— on the military significance of what had happened. A crack German force, well equipped, under an excellent general, and with huge terrain advantage, failed to hold out against men who charged them bare-chested and often bare-handed, who not only took out their nests but then turned their own machine guns on the young men in the enemy ranks. It stopped the German advance and, in the opinion of many, it turned the tide of the war.
After several minutes of sitting there, privately reflecting on what they had read and reliving as far as they dared the days of Belleau Wood, Ellie and Robert reached a hand to each other at the same time. Not in the nights by the fire, he reading, she pretending to, not in the awkward mornings when she went into his room, awakened him, and helped him start the bad days, not in the sweetest of times walking by the river or simply sitting on the bank looking at the water— not once had they reached out simultaneously like this. She rose and led him by the hand into the garden.
Robert had astounded himself— over the days and weeks— by what he wrote. And then he astounded himself anew by reading it. As he did so, he reflected upon his own reach, upon his capacity to have recovered enough to put such recollections in words. Is this how to find my soul?
Out-of-doors with Ellie that day he saw a garden greener than a garden ever was, felt a breeze blow warmer than a breeze ever blew, heard a bird sing sweeter than a bird ever sang. The senses of both people were heightened; everything felt brighter, clearer, swifter.
Ellie leaned back against the door, and if she had to swear to anything at that moment she would have sworn that she could feel every piece of her entire skin, postage-stamp square by square, under her clothes. She did not want to move.
But she moved first. With a careful nonchalance she turned and walked indoors. Both would have made a guess at what might take place between them but, if pressed, would admit that Life, even at that moment— especially at that moment— has no certainties. Yet, in the optimism of the regard that decent people have for love and affection, they climbed the stairs, one after the other.
Those stairs creaked as never before. Or did she just hear them louder now, each creak like a shot?
When they reached the top, Ellie took Robert's hand and stepped ahead of him to the door of her room. As she opened it, the scent of the meadow flowers ballooned around them, and there in the distance, through the window, shone the river in the evening sun.
Whether she had known or could have articulated the reason, she had spent many vivid moments of the previous weeks, more or less since the evening of Robert's arrival, rearranging her bedroom. If, with pen and notebook, anybody had tracked what she had done, they could have told her she was preparing like a bride.
Always a pretty room, with the dormer window alcove looking out to the garden and the water beyond, she had lightened the somber tones imposed by the dark furniture. Unlike previous years when she hadn't bothered, she had replaced her winter curtains of dark red velvet with her summer curtains of white muslin. The heavy bedspread of deep winter gray had made way for a snow-white sunny Jacquard with crocheted edges; and the pillowcases, of glistening white, had been made and lace-trimmed by her great-grandmother.
Books imported from her father's study lined the shelves. She had likewise taken from the china cupboards in the back corridors downstairs a selection of objets d'art that made her feel good: a shepherdess in cream and green; two china spaniels looking quizzical; a Belleek vase, almost transparent and fragile as an
eggshell in its cream-yellow wash. Everywhere, all around the bedroom, something pleased the eye, and she had achieved what she wanted: a place of simple beauty and welcoming peace.
Inside the room, she halted, reached up, and put her arms around his neck, recalling with a stab to the stomach the last time she had done this with a man— in a hotel by a park in a small French town. Robert felt her shiver and rested his lips on the top of her head.
“I don't know anything,” he said, “about anything.”
And she said, “We'll just lie down.”
She led him by the hand to the bed and took off his shoes so he could lie on the side she always thought of as the man's side— nearer the door, to repel invaders.
Walking around the bed, she kicked off her own shoes and lay down. For many minutes they lay there on the white Jacquard spread, holding hands, their heads on linen more than a century old. Still as marble, almost holding their breaths, they resembled the memorial statues of knight and lady lying side by side on a marble slab.
After a time she said, “Let's face each other.”
They turned on their sides and she hauled her body up along the bed so her eyes were level with his.
Over the weeks— and, in her unconscious mind, over the years since Normandy— she had been envisaging a moment such as this. Now that it had come, it played out differently from anything she had imagined or expected. She found that she could force nothing, create no direction; all she could do was live in the moment and see what happened. And all that happened was that Nurse Kennedy said to Captain Shannon, “Well done. You honored us all.”
They both began to weep. They cried like children recovering from an injustice too terrible to tell. They sobbed like friends who had shared something terrible— as indeed they had. Neither moved; neither sought to wipe away their own or the other's tears. Their glances never wavering, they watched each other's faces as the tears flowed and flowed and flowed.
Robert, even at the height of his prewar life, had never expected to lie on a bed with a young woman in a situation of clear and passionate affection. Ellie, on the other hand, had known such a moment and had relived it many times— not just with the handsome blond Michael Joyce but, in her imagination, with the man now beside her. Yet she reached for none of the scenes that she had played in her daydreams. And he reached for none of the actions that had once fueled his own erotic imagination, to which he had, like every other priest in the world, owned up in Confession.
Their tears continued for many minutes. Never peaking, never dimming, they just wept, simply and sincerely. When the tear ducts had run dry, they smiled— and Robert fell asleep.
She stayed with him; she lay looking at him and his long eyelashes; she never let go of his hand. She was prepared to stay like that all night if necessary. She had already become wise to his sleeping habits; she knew that he retreated into sleep when under pressure, and the length of his subsequent absence from the world often reflected the severity of the stress he must have been feeling.
Robert awoke in half an hour. This is like watching a baby wake up; he even knuckles his face, she thought.
He registered where he was, saw her, and smiled; she could have sworn she saw his mind working, his memory awakening. With the instinct that made her such a good nurse, she stroked his face and said, “Come on. Time to feed you.”
Mr. Vincent and his now nervy sidekick with the painful nose left Castleconnell fast. From the pub they rode past the house of the dead Michael the Lion and along a deserted road toward Killaloe. When eventually they spoke again, the big man asked Squirt where a traveler might stay along this route. Squirt gave the opinion that any sensible traveler would naturally gravitate to the towns.
Mr. Vincent calculated the time it would have taken his prey to walk from Limerick to Killaloe. He reasoned that a weary hiker would stop at the first bed-and-breakfast place, as he and Squirt now did.
They checked in at Killaloe, where his room and the general appointments fell far below his high requirements. The landlady said no lone American had stayed there, not since last year. The information, or lack of it, gave the big man pause. He lay on his bed in a foul mood, trying to think his way forward: What if this isn't the right journey? What if he didn't come this far? What if he found his ancestors’ birthplace early and simply took a boat back? Or started at the other end of the river? But the idiot they called the Lion had clearly known something, met somebody.
The landlady didn't serve evening food. She recommended a Killaloe hotel at which they ate, in Mr. Vincent's opinion, a disgusting meal. And nobody in the hotel— not the receptionist, not the barman, not the waiter— had seen a single American, traveling on his own, come through in the last six months. Mr. Vincent wondered if he could believe any of them. Is this entire country going to conspire against me?
The nights bothered Vincent Patrick Ryan, and that night in particular tormented him. He understood fully the reason for his increased agitation— he lay within miles of his own home county. The accents here contained sounds from his childhood; he had been hearing such echoes since he came down from Dublin. And he had no tactics here by which he could easily control his bleak thoughts.
In his Boston life, Vincent prepared every phase of his life meticulously. He dined as though his table had been prepared by servants; he laid out his clothes the night before as though he had a valet; he counted the strokes of his razor when shaving.
All these ritual acts served one purpose: the warding off of pain. When his table set for one person glowed in the candlelight, he said aloud to his empty apartment, “Look at this. This isn't useless.” Going out to work, he checked his appearance in the long mirror inside the door and admired what he saw: “That's not ugly”
But he had to take these steps every day. He had to reassure himself all the time. The assailing voices rarely dimmed— in fact, only the great sounds of the guns in Europe had drowned the torturing words.
Now, in a place so reminiscent of neighborhoods he hadn't seen since he was nine, within earshot of accents that sounded like Ballinagore, and with little ritual to perform by way of distraction, he suffered more than he had expected. The noise in his mind could best be described as whimpering and the attitude of his heart could best be described as cowering This big man, whom the world saw as handsome, confident, and smart, had nobody to whom he could turn and no place in which he could hide.
The viciousness of the circle intensified. He grew disgusted with himself and then, in the next phase of torture, told himself that the voices of his childhood had got it right: He was indeed useless.
So Mr. Vincent didn't sleep that night. And he barely kept himself from weeping, something to which he had not succumbed since before his mother's death. He shook Squirt out of bed at half past five in the morning, and before a sleeping eye in the town was open they left Killaloe. Mr. Vincent had forced himself back into action.
Not that he would admit it to himself, but he had begun to find this task more difficult than his usual assignment. Here he had no quick discovery and completion, no interception of a man as he left his home, office, or bar, no fast garrote or burial in a building site. He had hoped for, at worst, a quiet ambush on a riverside path, a sudden overwhelming, and then the holding of a head beneath water and a gentle pushing of the body away from shore.
No sign of its happening yet. He didn't know where to look for his quarry. He didn't even know where his prey had been or where he was going. But as the Accountant said to himself, This young fellow is different from all other thugs for-rent. He's smart, he has brains, he has learned how to think.
A mile past Killaloe, Mr. Vincent stopped in sudden thought and asked Squirt for the map. He studied it and tried to put together a journey as he might have done were he indeed an American of Irish descent trying to trace his ancestry— but also trying to see the countryside. From now on, he told himself, he'd also consider the places of interest.
After the encounters in Limerick, the
big man and his little companion saw nothing more of the civil war. From the newspapers they read at night and from the gossip they heard where they stayed, they learned that the main fighting remained in Dublin and in the hills of the south and southwest. When they left Killaloe they worked hard on their pedals, up hill and down dale. Once or twice they halted, for Mr. Vincent to make one of his pleasant inquiries at a house or from men in a field.
The next stop, Mr. Vincent had decided, would be the town of Banagher. Squirt, bouncing back from the nose incident, began to repeat over and over a meaningless old Irish saying: “Well, that bangs Banagher, and Banagher bangs all.”
They found a place to stay, a tall hotel with small rooms. Mr. Vincent selected the place for its seeming anonymity. He wanted no nosiness, no scrutiny. Food was taken and the big man read a book at the table, suddenly at peace with his little companion's prattle. They retired early— at least Mr. Vincent did; Squirt repaired to the bar, assuring the big man,
“Boss, I'll be up in time. That'll be my finger you'll see poking through the crack of dawn.”
Next morning, before the town of Banagher awoke, they cycled slowly from the Georgian square. Mr. Vincent had his notebook in his pocket with his landmark places listed ahead: Shannon Harbor to Shannonbridge, and not long thereafter to Clonmacnoise and Athlone. Somebody somewhere this summer, must surely have seen a tall walking American, looking a bit lost in this empty countryside.
North of Shannon Harbor, the river bends northwest. The road on which they bicycled failed to go with the bend. This irritated Mr. Vincent— he still held the hope that one day he might simply meet this walking target, identify him, do the job, and be free to go home. He intended— although he hadn't said so to the Accountant— to tell this fellow, this target, that nobody must harm His Eminence the cardinal. Much better that people should know why they die.