I thought not to draw Miss Begley’s attention to this crazy sight, but she had watched me, and she picked up the line of holes too. Once you saw them, they became obvious.
“Which side did it, do you think?” she said.
I answered, “Does it matter?”
We walked on. I’ve seen towns empty because everybody is at Mass, at a local fair, or at a show of some kind. This wasn’t that kind of emptiness. Though clothes hung on backyard washing lines here, this had the deadly, empty pain of evacuation.
In the teeth of that loud, unfriendly silence, the crackle of war called us forward like fools. I would like to say that we felt as staunch as adventurers, but I had begun to look for shelter. Yet—what kind of shelter? And for what reason? And for how long? The premises on both sides of the street looked closed to the world. What excuse should we give to a person whom we asked for hospitality? That there was a war up ahead? But that was why we had come here. And for how long will you be staying, sir? Until the war is over.
A shock of memory made me shudder. I recognized this desperate mood. For some years after Venetia disappeared I’d had this feeling almost every day—acute emotional isolation while living in, and surrounded by, “normal” conditions. Time after time I snapped myself out of it by allowing anger to invade me, and I could feel it rise now.
“Kate, I’m asking you again. Why are we here?”
She didn’t look at me, but she did reply.
“If you knew how tender this man is. If you knew his gifts of loving.”
“Well, I don’t and how could I?” I rapped back.
To this she said, without breaking step, “I’d be a fool not to come and look for him.”
I said, “He’s a soldier. Do you think he’ll come with us if you find him?”
“I’ll make him safe. I know how. And he knows that.”
“This is madness.”
“Ben, he can’t survive. He lives by the sword. You mightn’t believe it but a woman knows these things.”
“Are you sure,” I said, “that you have enough experience to judge?”
She continued to look straight ahead, her jaw as dogged as her steady footsteps. “I’m not the simple creature you think I am.”
My mind said, Stop. This debate has no future. You’ll not change her view of herself. So just be kind.
At that moment, I saw something so bizarre that it took up permanent residence in my mind.
I expect you have images that recur. I often see myself swinging like a monkey through the trees, and that leads to trapeze fantasies; I soar back and forth through the air, very high up, in a wonderful rhythm of freedom and blue sky. I also contemplate being a tumbler, an acrobat, turning a procession of cartwheels.
These are daydreams. I understand them. If alone at a table, I play the piano, even though I’ve never mastered an instrument. I play with both hands. My fingers describe arpeggios. I play powerful, cunning riffs.
Or I manage wild things that come at me. A bull charges, a great, black beast, with drool hanging from the red cave of his mouth; I grab his horns and wrestle him to the ground. Or a lion, all mane and open jaws, attacks. I run at him and he turns aside. Or a runaway horse tears down a street, and I grab the swinging reins and haul down his head.
This new sight, though, had never been in my mind’s gallery before. How could it, when I didn’t even know it existed?
It was a shell, an artillery shell, behind us, glinting in the air high, high above. Instinctively I knew that if I could see it as clearly as this, it must be coming to the end of its flying time. In seconds it will crash to earth and bring havoc.
My first thought was, What’s the point in flinging ourselves down if this thing’s going to hit the same ground?
I grabbed Miss Begley’s hand. “Drop your bag and run like hell.”
I led the way. Through a gap, into a field. The farms ran up to the backs of the houses. This field had a haystack. We call it a “pike,” a dome of packed hay about seven feet at its tallest. As we rounded the haystack, the shell hit the street. We heard the tearing, cracking sound. Twenty yards or so behind where we’d been. Then we heard the secondary explosion. The collateral damage. The gas tank of the feed store blew up. Then we heard the new silence. Different from the general, weird stillness. And then we heard the cries.
Miss Begley looked in no direction. She leaned back into the hay, exhaling and repeating, “Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!”
I watched her—for signs of collapse, distress, unhinging. Who could blame her if she caved? Instead, she merely sagged, pressing harder back on the hay.
“We’d better go and help,” she said.
“We won’t move. If there’s been one shell on that trajectory, there may be others.”
She closed her eyes.
We sat, recovering, yet I was dipping further into terror. A violent headache crashed across my forehead and died as quickly as it came—the effect of compressed air. She must have felt the same because she pressed her hands to her eyes.
The second shell came whining over. And the third. And the fourth and fifth and sixth. We saw them. We shuddered to them. We felt them in our bones. They all seemed to hit the same target, because the cries from the houses ended with no fading. As I began to understand that the gunners had overcalculated and thus overshot the town center, the words came rolling through my head, I am in the war, I am in the war, I am in the war.
When many minutes had passed in which no shells burst, we rose and looked out at the world again. A roof had folded. Some chimneys along the other houses had toppled sideways like little drunken people. I reckoned that the barrage had ended. Or at least had moved closer to the gunners’ targets. We might be safe for the time being.
In no hurry we moved out of the field, hay wisps festooning us. Two tiny people in a huge war. Our bags stood in the middle of the roadway where we’d left them. They seemed unharmed—until Miss Begley saw leakages from her valise. A bottle of toilet water had exploded—had, in fact, been atomized: Not a shard of glass could be found; the air compression had left only the cork.
Moving the bags off the road, we turned back to see whether help could be rendered. Two direct hits had landed on the feed store—in which people had been working, even though nobody had answered. Beyond a ripped-out wall, the bodies of a man and boy lay side by side on an open, almost pristine area of plank floor; both had leg injuries and severe head wounds. As we stood wondering what to do, I heard cracking noises and the remains of the roof began to fall in. We had to go.
On the street, it grew worse. Gunfire began spitting flashes like small lightnings into the rooflines of the houses. Diagonally across from us, up the street, I saw an open and empty garage. I grabbed her hand. We ran. That was all we could do. I know that I ducked my head. And I know that I felt more ridiculous than I’d ever felt. There’s another feeling that war promotes alongside fear—stupidity.
We got there.
“My bag,” she said.
“When things calm down,” I said.
I closed the garage door behind us. Stiff, it stuck; I had to slam it. A hail of bullets hit it; two dribbled through. Then a heavier torrent began to rip it apart. We squeezed into the farthest-away corner. The metal door held the bullets back far enough to stop them reaching us.
More shells exploded, some nearby. The garage shook and so did we. A new noise came in—an aircraft with a powerful droning sound. I heard the stuttering thuds everywhere, metal chings, glass breaking, and the earthbound gunfire too, and loud, wild shouts. All of a sudden the war had moved full force into the street on which we’d been walking. The nausea that hit me was unlike any other. Bullets now began to penetrate the door at will.
I lay on top of Miss Begley, covering her body completely. No recollection of having done so comes back to me—I have searched and searched my memory; it must have been instinctive. Beneath me, she vomited, her body convulsing with each retch.
They blew the garage to bits
. The walls, the roof, the stout metal door that had resisted so much—they shattered it. After the first grenade took the door off the hinges, they found us on the floor, deep in the farthest corner.
Silence. Boots rang on the concrete floor. Words. I didn’t know who or what they were. They came closer. Words in English. I flapped up a hand.
“We’re neutral. We’re neutral.”
“Neutral?” They turned the word over and over. “Neutral?” How they laughed!
Canadians, they were, “Canucks,” they said, en route to take Abbeville in the next week or so. One said that his mother came from Scotland and wasn’t that the same thing as being Irish? And Miss Begley said it was. They reached out their hands to steady us when we clambered to our feet.
Lowering their guns, they walked us out into the sunshine, and that’s when they turned back and finished off the garage with a couple of grenades. What the heck, they said; the government will provide a new one. They walked us up the street and calmed us down. To our surprise I saw our bags standing where we’d left them. But my legs didn’t work and a Canadian sergeant fetched the luggage.
Neutral? They kept shaking their heads and laughing.
That afternoon’s battle had been an encounter with a German rearguard pocket, who had fought, said the Canadians, like champions. A U.S. Air Force plane had finally taken them out. They had seen the garage door open and thought we were German soldiers looking for a hiding place. The war had now moved on from here, they said, and they handed us over to the Americans.
In the town’s biggest building, a church hall, an American sergeant, perhaps ten years younger than I, looked at us as though we’d lost our minds.
Miss Begley said, “We’re looking for Captain Charles Miller.”
He said, “There’s no Captain Miller in this post, ma’am.”
“Where would I find him?”
At first I thought that she had no grasp of the war’s magnitude, but she told me later that she knew exactly what she was doing. “An innocent question often takes you farther than you expect, Ben.”
“What’s his platoon, ma’am?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ma’am, what kind of soldier is he?”
“A very brave one, and he’s very important.”
The young sergeant looked at me, and, cowardly of me, I looked away.
“Ma’am, do you know how many troops came into France?”
And Miss Begley said, “A lot, I suppose.”
And he said, “One hundred thousand, ma’am, and probably many more than that.”
“Where should I ask?”
He, with infinite courtesy in the face of what he could fairly have called two idiots, said, “Let me make some inquiries. Where are you staying?”
She said, “I don’t know yet. Do you know a Frenchman called Hugo Barrive?”
The sergeant shook his head. “No, ma’am.” Smart as green paint, he then said to me, “Sir, this is a military post. We have to search you, I’m afraid.”
He beckoned me into a back room and whispered, “Sir?” with a squeak of agitation.
“He’s her husband,” I said. “He works in military intelligence, that’s all we know.”
“A Special Ops guy?” he asked. “Nobody will find him. If he’s still alive.”
“What’s Special Ops?” I asked.
He said, “They raid places, they work with the local underground, they kill high-ranking enemy one at a time.”
What had Miss Begley said in her journal? He kills people.
I said, “The French up the coast told us to come down here.”
The sergeant disappeared and I returned to join Miss Begley. When the sergeant came back, he said, “My inquiries will take some time. But we need you out of here.” He wanted to rid himself of the problem every soldier fears—an officer’s wife.
74
They put Miss Begley in the care of two women in uniform, who led her away, with her valise. I was given coffee, and then some food. Later they led us to a requisitioned house across the road where they had thrown sleeping bags everywhere. Before she lay down for the night I took Miss Begley in my arms, gave her a big, slow hug, and said, “It’ll all work out. You’ll see.”
“But, Ben, how do you know?” She shook from head to foot.
I said, “I’ve just heard the news. Paris has been liberated. Everybody’s celebrating.”
Let me recap, because the sequence of events has some importance. We had set out to make contact with the maquis, with whom Miller might or might not have been working at that time. First, Madame Larbaud dropped us from the van in the little town where she assumed him to be, but bomb damage prevented her from taking us further. Then we walked straight into the war, ran hotfoot from bursting shells, and hid from fusillades of bullets. Rescued, we retrieved our shattered minds in a temporary American base, where Miss Begley went to bed at nine o’clock in the evening. I sat on the floor by a camp bed and wrote a long entry in my journal that tells what you’ve just been reading.
That was my second taste of war. If by any chance you do not yet understand why I became a devout pacifist, you soon will.
That night, something happened that I can’t explain and can only describe. As I understood it, I had a dream in which, still on edge, I walked out of doors again, to listen to the night, to reassure myself that the war had left this town at least. The waning moon held lingering power, and I could see the street ahead, shadowy with the ribs of its shattered buildings.
I found a promising lane into the open fields behind the town and I wandered along, breathing easily for the first time in days. Not a sound to be heard, not a night bird, not an engine, not a gun.
The lane petered out and, ahead of me, the largest field ended at a dramatic outcrop of whitened rock. Generally bleak, some acres long and wide, it had hostile scrub and a handful of feeble pine trees. It seemed geographically out of true with the general neighborhood. I learned that it was born to a rogue seam of limestone, a geological erratic that shot straight as an arrow across the countryside for about ten miles.
The seam broke ground in this place alone. I stood on its edge, on a small plateau almost like a pavement, and looked up its sloping height. It reached a hundred feet or so, and I thought of Donegal and its mountainside faces of scree and bleached, blank stone, and County Clare’s moonscape, the white tundra of the Burren. The sparse thorny brush, the famous maquis whence the Resistance got their name—from guerrillamen who hid in this nationwide scrub—spread up to the hapless few pine trees tilting near the crown.
A calm night. Yes, the war had moved on. And I was beginning to feel that I was, at last, maturing into a fully grown man. A half-moon radiated white where it stroked the stone of the plateau.
As I stood there in a bright twilight, something moved behind the scrub. A creature emerged. It took some steps forward, halted, and stood looking at me, quite composed, unalarmed. I knew at once what it was—a wolf. Taller than a dog, grayer than I knew wolves could be—not that I’d ever seen one, except in photographs.
Fear arrived first. Am I to be devoured? And if I turn and run—can’t it outpace me? And is there a pack?
I did nothing. Through indecision, fear, and cowardice I made no move. Nor did the wolf. It sank onto its haunches and continued to look at me as though I were the curiosity here.
No wind, clear sky, no odors in the night—a welcome change after the day’s smell of death. No clouds either; the moon continued to hand down her cool, bathing light.
I have no weapon. If it attacks, what can I do? It can outrun me. What will I do if a pack appears?
The wolf stood up. It stretched, yawned, lowered its head, and sniffed the forward air. My blood turned to water, which began to run warm down my leg. The options roared through my brain like rockets. If I run—he’ll get the back of my neck. If I stand—he’ll get my throat. If I lie down—he’ll simply chew my flesh. The last rocket burned the brightest—I had only one
choice.
I attacked. Ran at the wolf. Shrieking at fever height. Arms flailing, fists pumping, I ran like a focused dervish.
The wolf looked surprised. The expression on its face, big, wide, and scarfed with fur, said, slightly pained, “Oh, well, if that’s how you feel.” It turned its back on me calmly and loped away, contemptuous in its relaxed speed.
By then I had reached halfway up the rocks, and from a vantage point I saw the wolf heading away through the open fields, out across the night. No trace of any kind did it leave, no smell, no spoor. I stopped agitating. My shoulders sagged. I know a great deal more about wolves now than I did then.
Next morning, the vision of the wolf dominated my mind. I rose from my sleeping bag, left the house, and followed my dream footsteps. I found that there was indeed a lane, and there was an outcrop of white rock several acres long and deep, and there was harsh scrub topped by exhausted pine trees with deep brush behind.
Even today, I have difficulty sometimes separating my dreams from my realities.
75
Here are two excerpts from Miss Begley’s private journals for those few days. They’re important as guides to what lay ahead. I believe she must have written them on pieces of paper that she then copied into her diary when she came back.
August 1944: We are in France, Ben and I. Nearer to my bridegroom Charles, whom I have come here to find. I have lost track of the date, but that is not important because I have been seized with a premonition too strong to resist, a feeling that Charles needs me as he has never needed anybody in his life. This is not me making myself important—this is me relying on feelings that in the past have been important and useful. They’re the same feelings I had all that Sunday when I was little, when they didn’t come back from the wedding. I don’t want that to happen in my life again, but if I want Charles to come back, I’ll have to find him for myself and bring him home. If he’s ill, meaning wounded, I’ll be allowed to bring him back home.