By the time we got to the Aisne, our uniforms were stiff with dried mud, that pale, chalky Picardy mud that clings to everything and refuses to wash off. That mud was in everything we ate, everything we drank, everything we touched. We no longer jumped at barrages or flinched at the light from a star shell. Chaffre carried a pocket shrine, a little case with a lead statue of the Virgin Mary. These days he kept her right in his pocket, rubbing in each prayer until her face was worn smooth. I touched the ribbon at my wrist and said my prayers to Maman.
Chaffre’s face had lost some of its roundness, his cheeks some of their pinkness. All of us were weathered like the walls of the trenches, beaten by wind and rain and countless sleepless nights. Our uniforms were patched, stained, soaked through with the smell of war. We were tougher, too. Fear was replaced by weariness. It left Chaffre hard-eyed, me numb.
He took to watching my face more carefully, and I wondered if I’d aged more than he had. “What is it?” I finally asked one morning, as we slouched after a night raid. “Have I grown horns? Because I bayoneted a man who looked like my papa. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had horns.”
He quickly passed a hand over his face, wiped away whatever expression he’d let slip, and pushed out a grin. “Horns would be an improvement on that god-awful mug of yours.”
I ignored him and pillowed my pack beneath my head. Sitting up against a trench wall, I’d sleep if given a half-quiet ninety seconds.
Chaffre spoke once more, softly. “You just look all done with this, Crépet.”
Of course I was. I’d been done with this the moment the mobilization orders went up all over Paris. Without opening my eyes, I said, “Aren’t we all?”
Now we were here, for a few days’ rest in these caves beneath the battlefields. Poilus crouched around smoky fires along the ledges, warming tins of clumpy stew. The fires were more smoke than flame, but they bit the chill. The caves were dry and far enough beneath the ground that the sounds of war were muted. Instead we heard hushed voices, the snorts and nickers of the horses, the occasional echoed snatches of song. And, of course, the clank of hammer upon chisel and chisel upon stone. The cave was more than a barrack or a stable or a church. It was a refuge.
“Will you make one?” Chaffre asked as I stopped to run a hand over a picture of Marianne, Goddess of Liberty. It was carved straight into a stone pillar, tendrils of her hair wrapping around the plinth.
“Do you see how beautiful all this is?” I traced the edges of the carving with the side of my palm. “Not me.”
“You always talk about how you come from a long line of artists.”
And one of them a sculptor. Though Maman hadn’t carved in years, I still remembered the shards of stone beneath my feet, the magic of watching a face appear in solid stone beneath her chisel.
I wrote to Maman, dutifully. I reminisced, I complained about the food, I quoted bits from her favorite poems. The sort of letters we all sent home. She wrote back cheery notes of her own. This year her roses had lasted long into the fall. Marthe had a new recipe for galette that used very little butter. Oh, and did she tell me about the poor Belgian family she’d taken in?
But to Clare, I couldn’t dissemble like that. The last letter I sent, the day the war began, fear and uncertainty made me write things I’d only ever thought. I didn’t write to her again after that. I didn’t know what to say. These battles, they were changing me from the boy under the chestnut tree to a grim-faced soldier. What was there to write? How could I tell her that the world we thought was so beautiful was rotten to the core?
And so when I sat back in the caves during that week of rest, reading, watching the artists at work, trying not to look at the ceiling, and Chaffre asked, “Will you make one?” all I could say was no. The soldiers who spent one day killing and the next carving altars and figures and spreading trees, they were sorted. They could separate the human and the machine within all of us. I wasn’t there yet.
“Crépet, you think too much.” Chaffre passed me a pair of sardines on the tip of his knife. “It’s much simpler than that.”
I swallowed the oily little fish and washed them down with a swig of sour wine.
“You’ve heard of that Austrian fellow, right?”
“Was he that sniper?”
“Not here, in Vienna.” He waved his hand and narrowly missed impaling me. “The doctor who asks people about their dreams and their childhood and then discovers that the root of all their problems is that they’re in love with their own mothers.”
“I seem to have missed that at school.”
“These poor saps here, we don’t need to ask them their dreams. The chap who carved the regimental insignia, he’s hoping to be remembered a hero. The one who carved la belle Marianne, so noble and stately, well, he’s missing his mother. Note that the one over there”—he pointed to a soldier drawing the curves of a nude woman with lamp black—“misses an altogether different sort of woman.”
“And those who carved the altar?” That altar chipped out at the foot of the stairs, that crucifix carved above and a low kneeler beneath. On rainy days, when the stones of the caves seeped, Jesus wept.
“Those who’ve lost their faith,” Chaffre said softly. “And those who are trying to find it again.”
“Chaffre, what would you carve?” I finally asked.
“Hand me a chisel, and I’m as likely to gouge out my left eye as the stone wall.” He tapped his chin. “My dog, Macquart. Most loyal bastard you’ll ever meet. My mother said he’s been sleeping at the foot of my bed since I left.” He untied the canteen at his waist that held his daily ration of pinard. “Or maybe a decent glass of wine.”
“You wouldn’t know a decent glass of wine if it crawled in bed with you.”
His eyes twinkled above the rim of the canteen as he emptied it.
A lanky soldier, cap pulled low over his eyes, reached over and smacked the canteen from Chaffre’s hands as he walked past. I flinched. It rattled off down the tunnel.
He grit his teeth until the other poilu passed. “Or maybe Joyeuse.” Charlemagne’s legendary sword. “Would I be stronger?”
With bent head, I went to retrieve his canteen. You are, I wanted to say to him. Sometimes I think you’re stronger than me. But I passed it to him with a nudge to the shoulder. “The strongest person I ever knew was a girl. I don’t doubt that she could attack any man who looked at her sideways.”
He looked wistful. “Clare?”
My smile slipped.
“And you?” Candlelight flickered on his face. “What would you carve?”
“Summer,” I simply said. The one summer when the world was perfect. When I seemed right on the edge of the future. The one summer before things began slowly crumbling beneath my feet. “I’d carve summer.”
At first the post office told me that there were no letters. We’d been gone from Laghouat for almost two years. Surely something came in that time. Surely Luc had written. Oily black clouds were rolling in across the city and I begged Grandfather to ask again. To plead.
Finally the postal clerk, an elderly Algerian who probably wanted nothing more than to go home early and take a nap, sighed and shuffled back to wherever they stored years’ worth of uncollected mail. Grandfather patted me on the shoulder. “They’ll be there.” I watched the minutes tick by on my watch, a splendid man’s pocket watch bought from the junk market in Constantine that I wore on a chain around my neck. He patted me on the shoulder again. Outside, the sky rumbled. Grandfather began tapping his acacia walking stick. He didn’t like to be wet. I shook my watch to be sure it was working.