I have been looking for artists who pay great attention to life detail and who have the compassion to work amongst disfigured soldiers. I have seen your pencil drawings in La Galerie Porte d’Or and, Miss Ross, I believe you have both qualities.
I will be in London next Tuesday. Would you do me the honor of meeting with me? I would like to speak to you more about the opportunity to assist me in my work. Helping these soldiers is such a small thing for us to do, but for them, it is anything but small.
Sincerely, etc.
These days it was hard to feel like art mattered. When men were giving themselves, giving their youth, giving their life, when women were waiting and praying, I was painting. I was sculpting and drawing and creating, as though there wasn’t a war, as though my creation could counter all of that destruction. None of what I was doing signified outside of the art school. Anna Coleman Ladd was doing something that did.
I remembered the soldier I used to see waiting in the hospital, self-conscious with his ill-fitting rubber nose. If he’d had the chance to instead wear a work of art, would it change things for him? Would his world seem a fraction less dim?
“You’re meant to do this, Clare,” Finlay said. “You’re more than an artist. You’re a warrior.”
“You’re the one who’s been to battle,” I pointed out.
“And you’re the one who’s saved me.” He kissed me on the forehead. “Now, go. Go bring another man back to himself.”
The soldier stood in the threshold of the Studio for Portrait Masks. The room was bright, but he kept to the shadows.
Mrs. Ladd tried to keep the soldiers at ease and the studio cheerful. The phonograph in the corner, the sun-streaked windows and skylights, the little vases of peonies tucked here and there, warmed the room. Posters and flags were tacked between the windows—a large American flag, for her, and smaller British and French flags, for the rest of us working in the studio. It was a bright spot in an otherwise somber city. Three months after the war ended, Paris was still recovering.
Usually, the soldiers sat in little groups, laughing, smoking, playing checkers and drinking wine. Some were waiting for appointments. Others had nowhere else to go. Since being demobilized, too many lived on the streets. They begged for food, drink, a place to warm up. Here, at least for part of the day, they had all three. But, more than that, here they found people who understood. They found other soldiers just as broken.
This new one, though, he came alone, lurking in the shadows of the hall, not quite stepping into the room. They all did on their first visit. Once fearless in the face of a trench wall, they were now afraid to even step in the light. Light revealed what had become of their dreams of glory.
“May I help you?” I asked in French. Not Parisian French, but the French I’d learned in Africa, tinged with the warm, open sounds of Arabic.
He didn’t answer. The way he kept tugging on the brim of his calot, keeping a hand near his face, the way he kept his head down—he was a man used to shadows.
I couldn’t see his face, but it had to be shattered. Here, they all were. These soldiers who came to the studio, they were missing ears, eyes, parts of their faces. More than that, they were missing parts of their souls.
“Are you here for a mask?” Behind me, sculptors bustled about with plasticine and brushes and tins of enamel paint. A soldier lay back with his head resting on a table as Mrs. Ladd carefully coated his face with white plaster. Another stood in front of the mirror, looking, for the first time, at the copper mask covering the ruined half of his face. “Let me show you our work.” The phonograph played “La Madelon.”
He shook his head. One hand still hovered near his face, but the other, pressed against his leg, had relaxed. In the room behind me, someone had begun singing.
Through the shadows, nothing but horizon blue and the pale oval of a face. So many of the soldiers who came in had worn their injuries for so long they had the old uniforms, those dark blue tunics and bright garance red trousers. France was still trying to live down that mistake. After losing hundreds of thousands of troops in the first months of the war, they thankfully replaced the garance with horizon blue. This soldier, though, he wasn’t in red. He’d been in the war longer than many.
On his left arm, three chevrons bore that up, indicating three years’ service, and on his right, another for each occasion he was wounded. Only one on that arm. Three years faithfully served and then, in return, one injury for him to carry the rest of his days.
“You don’t have to stay, but won’t you please come in? At least for a few moments?” I tightened my shawl, dark and swirling like smoke. I’d traded it for a still-damp watercolor in Algiers. “Warm up with a cup of tea. I can show you my sketches of the other guests we’ve had.”
He cleared his throat. “You sketch?” His eyes shone in the dimness. “Ah, there’s charcoal on your fingertips.”
Something in his voice washed over me, warm like summer. “Spoken like an artist.”
His hand lowered from his face and went behind his back. I wished I could see his fingertips.
“I have an extra drawing pad.” I took a step back. “Stay, please. Stay and sit with me awhile.”
He hesitated for just a moment more. Then he stepped out of the shadows.
He was in a bad way, that was clear. A fragmented shell, maybe. They tore like bread knives. Or a bayonet, swung too near. I was learning to identify what caused each injury. Long scars ran from the side of his jaw upwards. More than scars, though; they sank deep, like the trenches running across the Western Front. The right side of his face was unmarred, but the left, that whole side was a battlefield. I kept my gaze firmly on it, forced myself to look at every ridge, every crater, every shell hole. The map a soldier brought home.
He stood tall, shoulders back, as though daring me to recoil.
But I didn’t. I knew his face was a private hell for him, but I had seen worse cases in the studio. Men missing noses, men without chins, men whose faces sank in on themselves like deflated balloons. One of those poor men sat over at the checkers table right now, waiting for a few final dabs of enamel paint on his false nose. Then he was planning to go home to see his mother for the first time since he was wounded. Though the soldier standing so defiantly in the doorway had it bad, I had seen plenty worse.
So I made sure to look him square in the eye. I made sure to modulate my breathing so he wouldn’t hear an extra hitch in my throat. I made sure he knew that no matter what reactions he met walking down the streets of Paris, he would not find them here. Instead I asked, “How do you take your tea?”
I settled him in at a table and filled a chipped cup. Mrs. Ladd was American and assumed the French thought as much of tea as she did. The few British artists in the studio certainly didn’t mind. While I busied myself with unwrapping my charcoals, sharpening my pencils, squaring up my sketch pad, he took a polite sip. I passed him a pad of his own and then the tea grew cold.
At first he didn’t do much, just stared down at the paper as though he didn’t know what to do with it. I wondered if I was wrong. But then he picked up a pencil and rolled it between his fingers. “These are the pencils my father always used to prefer.”
“They’ve always been my favorites.” I took one of my own.
He started drawing.
I began with the outline of his face. “How long have you been in Paris?” In my few months here, I’d learned how to ask questions carefully. A direct “How long ago were you wounded?” would cause that familiar look of anguish to flash through their eyes.