“Here’s the boy I had in mind for you!” said Captain Brower. He introduced Will to the photographer, who was called Carnot, but Will privately dubbed him Frenchy.
“I know him,” said M. Carnot. “I know his goggling eyes.” He barked a few questions at Will in French. The Captain said Will knew French — was this true? Could he read? Was he a disciplined worker? Were his hands steady? Was he a Catholic boy?
Will answered slowly, once in French, and then again in English. He knew his French from a distant neighbor lady back in Onondaga County, to whom his mother had sent him for lessons because she was sure it would civilize him, though his father said it would sissify him. Of course he could read; he liked to think he was as disciplined as anybody; his hands were steady and he was not clumsy. “I am not a Catholic,” he added belatedly.
“Excellent,” said M. Carnot. “I am through with superstitious idolaters. You’ll do.”
Captain Brower clapped Will on the back.
“Pardon me, sir,” said Will. “Has some business been transacted?”
Some had. Will had just changed hands. M. Frenchy needed a new assistant, his last one having been bayoneted on the previous day by a wounded Reb when he approached, hesitantly, to rearrange the seemingly dead boy’s limbs into a more dramatic pose. Will would make an ideal assistant, the Captain was sure, because of his French, and because he was industrious and smart. Will had the same feeling as when he’d been kicked out of the Tiger Mess. He got no certificate this time, but he had the distinct impression he was being thrown out of Company D.
This wasn’t precisely the case. Will would still eat and sleep and fight with his company, but he was also to serve as assistant and bodyguard to the extremely well-connected M. Frenchy, who had letters from on high, through Sedgwick and McClellan all the way up to Stanton, giving him permission to put himself in the way, taking pictures of the field. Frenchy called himself an artist and a scientist; his aim, he said, was to quantify and qualify the brutality of war.
Packed bodies in a sunken road. Try as he might, Will could not resolve them into separate boys. They lay in a dead tangle, arms and legs thrown over each other. It struck him that they would embrace each other forever. Will put this picture high on the north wall of the house.
Will carried photographic equipment and helped arrange the dead, always looking away from their faces as he moved them. Some were stiff. Frenchy had screamed at him when he balked at forcing a fallen cavalryman’s arm into a more pleasing position. Will broke the poor man’s shoulder, crossing his arm over his chest, and he wondered that the whole Rebel army did not come pouring down on him, for so abusing their dead. When he was not posing the bodies, he was helping to bury them. Will put the cavalryman by himself in a deep grave lined with hay. Frenchy cursed the burying, because his precious dead were vanishing into the ground.
The Third joined the lazy pursuit that toddled after the fleeing Rebels. As they traveled, Frenchy taught Will the photographic process, screeching at him when he wasted a plate. He spent hours in Frenchy’s cramped wagon mixing collodion from guncotton and sulfuric ether and alcohol, then coating the mixture onto glass plates. Frenchy scolded like a harpy, and whenever Will did something that displeased him especially, he would emit a furious, resonant honk, like the noise of a calliope. But he also spoke generous praise — his assistant was learning quickly. Pressed for time, he brought a plate back to Will in the wagon, and let him develop it while he took another wet plate and went to make another picture. Will removed the plate from its holder. He held it over a pan and poured developer over the glass. The developer reeked like a cocktail of vinegar and blood, and he almost dropped the negative when a violent sneeze shook him. Leaning down, and squinting in the dim yellow light of the lantern, he could see the image, rising out of the glass as if up through water.
A boy with his legs all twisted up impossibly: someone has stolen his hips and replaced them with a little stretch of earth. His hand is cupped behind his ear, as if he is straining to hear some news. Will put this one on the east wall, where it would catch the light of the rising sun.
At Fredericksburg, Frenchy was made busy by the carnage below Marye’s Heights. It was December, and bitter cold. Frenchy was lost in a wilderness of borrowed coat — his own was still wet from a fall off a pontoon bridge into the Rappahannock. He swam like an otter, and had looked like one, with his wet brown hair and shiny black eyes.
With his head in his camera, Frenchy was blind to danger. It was Will’s job to keep an eye out for sneaking Rebels. A truce had been called, to gather the dead and wounded, but Will did not trust them to keep it. A profusion of boys was strewn on the ground, none of them closer than a hundred yards to the stone wall against which Burnside had thrown them.
“Did you ever think you’d be a photographer?” Frenchy asked from under the camera hood, saying the word with great reverence.
“No,” said Will. When he was a boy, he had wanted to become a sailor, because he and Sam had been great admirers of Typee, and had imagined a scummy pond behind their house to be the wide green bay of Nukuheva. Later, Will thought he would be a doctor, for no good reason except that to doctor was not to farm like his father. Now, he thought he might have been growing up all this time merely to be a brick in a wall of corpses.
Frenchy pulled his head from the camera and made a confession to Will, to whom he was beginning to show something like affection. It was his hope, he said, to take a picture of a soldier at the precise moment of his death, because he believed the departing soul, invisible to a human eye, could be seen by the camera. Soon after his confession, Frenchy found a squirmer on the cold field, but by the time he’d moved the camera and made it ready, the boy was dead.
Will was much in demand that whole day through. In the late afternoon, when the light had grown too bad for taking pictures, he took up a pick to open the frozen ground for graves, and worked at it till his arms and shoulders burned. He wanted to weep from exhaustion, but there were always more dead to bury, some of them naked because ill-clad Rebs had crept forth from the lines to steal their clothes in the night. When he stopped working, he could barely raise his arms to feed himself. He found Frenchy in a hospital tent, with his camera set up by the bedside of a blond-headed boy who looked for sure to be a goner. Will’s hands were a mess of blisters. Frenchy gave him a plate to develop, but he dropped it, which earned him a cursing so thorough Will had to resist an urge to knock the little man down. Frenchy nearly got ejected from the tent, for all that he brought out his omnipresent letters and waved them like a little set of battle colors. He took up his vigil again, and sent his assistant away.
Will went back to Company D. They’d been held in reserve for most of the previous day, having seen just a smidgen of action when they were called up in support of a battery below Fredericksburg. Despite the shells bursting over their heads, their only casualty was a boy who had been overcome with excitement and accidentally shot himself in the knee. Jolly was having his dinner with a few other members of the Leper Mess. A tall thin fellow named Lewy Greeley, who was unpopular on account of his incessant proselytizing, was lamenting his fate. “This is the worst regiment ever,” Lewy said, stabbing beans with a spoon. “We see no good action and are overrun with godlessness. I think I will go off and join the 110th.” He meant the 110th Illinois, a regiment composed entirely of Methodist ministers. He nattered on about them incessantly, about their somber uniforms and pious behavior: they sang booming hymns as they loaded, primed, and fired. God was with them in precisely the way he was not with this here assembly of lawyers and farmers.