The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel Read online

  Your Imogen

  There is a voice at the dugout’s entrance. Boot heels rap on the steps, descending as Ashley folds the letter away. Jeffries comes in, taking off his gas mask bag and tin hat and hanging them on a huge nail. Jeffries is B Company commander, at twenty-six the oldest officer in the company. His blond mustache is so fair as to be nearly invisible. The other officers joke that he is a German agent.

  Jeffries sets his revolver on the table and calls to Ashley.

  —Spymaster? You awake?

  —I am now.

  —Your eyes were open.

  —I sleep with them open, Ashley says. I close them only when I’m awake.

  Jeffries snorts derisively. —Got any rats today?

  —They’re about, but I’ve not been hunting. May have heard one a moment ago.

  Jeffries eyes the muddy floor with faint interest. He sits down before the table on an upturned crate.

  —Heard about you and Kameraden. Awfully decent of you to go over.

  —Ought not to have.

  Ashley tosses the overcoat from his body. He rises from the bunk.

  —Three days, Ashley says, he’s been moaning about his wife. Telling her how he’ll kiss her, what presents he’ll bring to her and the children. He spoke to us too, you know, telling us how he’d been to London once and saw Buckingham Palace. One night he even spoke to God. Think it was God, at any rate. Said he’d done his best, but he hadn’t done enough. He swore he’d never killed a man, had only wounded a few.

  —Is that so? I always thought he was reciting poetry—

  —It was poetry, much of the time. Love poems. I think they were to his wife.

  Jeffries nods. He takes out a leather tobacco pouch and a small meerschaum pipe. He packs the bowl and lights it with a long match.

  —Then last night, Ashley continues, he starts begging for us to kill him. Says he knows one of us speaks German. One of us is a kind man who will come over and send him west. I felt he was speaking to me.

  —The spymaster grown sentimental over the Hun? I don’t believe it.

  Ashley sits down at the table. He yawns and rubs his eyes.

  —So I went over last night. Found him awake but done for. His guts a puddle of blood. He’d lived off the water in the shellhole for three days, though it was brimming with corpses. He could speak at first. I gave him a drink from my bottle. Then I tried to carry him. We didn’t get far. I shot him in the next shellhole. Missed the first time, took off part of his head. It felt like pure bloody murder.

  —Don’t be absurd. Decent of you to go over at all.

  —Possibly. Yet there was something else about it. At Crécy—

  There is a faint shuffling on the other side of the table and both soldiers jump to their feet. On the dirt floor a rat licks a half-empty can of Maconochie that has been left as bait. Jeffries grabs his revolver from the table and fires twice. The shots from the large-caliber Webley ring loud in the dugout, the dirt geysering up as the bullets strike. The rat bolts along the wall into the darkness. Both men sit down.

  —I say, those buggers are improving.

  —Natural selection, I suppose, Ashley remarks. We killed the slow ones and only the quick ones are breeding now. We ought to stud them. We could race them at Epsom Downs.

  —Why not over here, at Chantilly? After all, the Continental horses are otherwise engaged.

  Ashley grins and sets his revolver on the table.

  —Brilliant, Ashley agrees. They’d be our legacy to the French. Fitter rodents. Fleet of foot. The veritable flower of their race. We’ll start the first studbook right here.

  Jeffries takes a box of cartridges from a shelf. He releases a tab on his pistol and tilts the barrel down. The bullets in the revolver’s cylinder extrude outward and Jefferies replaces the two spent cartridges with those from the box.

  —Sorry, Jeffries says. That beast interrupted. You were saying—

  —Crécy.

  —Of course. The battle or the town?

  —The battle.

  —Hundred Years’ War?

  —That’s right, Ashley says. Beginning of the end of knighthood proper, all that bosh. English longbows mowing down the flower of French chivalry.

  Jeffries sets the pipe back in his mouth.

  —Shame we can’t re-create that.

  Ashley grins. —Rather. But the part I was thinking of was after the battle. Ordinarily the victors would take the enemy knights prisoner and ransom them. But some of the French were too badly wounded for this. So the English sent out footmen to kill these wounded knights. This wasn’t meant to happen.

  —Only other swanks ought to have done it, Jeffries offers. Not peasants.

  —Precisely. At any rate, I was thinking of how these footmen used daggers.

  Ashley takes a bayonet from a shelf. He holds the blade before the candle on the table.

  —The daggers were long—longer than this—and came to a fine point. The old miséricorde, the mercy giver. Plate armor was too hard to pierce, so you’d lift the wounded knight’s arm and plunge the dagger through the armpit into the heart.

  —And so the end of chivalry.

  Ashley watches the reflection of the slinking candle flame on the blade.

  —You see, I wrote an essay on this at Cambridge. At the time it struck me as rather unsporting.

  —It’s not so bad, Jeffries says. Sharp dagger to the heart. Quick at least.

  Jeffries lifts the bottle of whisky from the shelf.

  —Have a drink? Fine stuff. Bennett picked it up on leave.

  —No thanks.

  Jeffries shrugs. He pours some whisky into an enameled mug. Ashley is still looking at the bayonet.

  —What do you think it feels like, Ashley asks, a dagger straight in there? If one’s dying already—does it even hurt?

  Jeffries shakes his head, but he does not answer. He takes a sip from the mug.

  —First-rate whisky, Jeffries finally murmurs.

  Ashley puts the bayonet back on the shelf and sits down. Jeffries strikes a match to relight his pipe.

  —Shame about Kameraden. Bringing in wounded often turns out like that. But the men can get some sleep tonight. You kept your own skin, that’s what counts.

  —I suppose.

  —Very decent of you to go over.

  THE HOUSE

  —Tristan, she whispers. Wake up, it’s the next stop.

  I open my eyes to the white light of the train car. Through the window I see autumnal trees, their yellow leaves carried off by a gust of wind. Picardie.

  —The autumn has come early here, Mireille says. I heard it was cold all last week.

  The conductor announces the stop over the scratchy loudspeaker, but we are still ten minutes away. I look at my notebook in Mireille’s lap.

  —Did you read the letters?

  —All of them.

  —What did you think?

  She hands me back the notebook.

  —Elles sont belles, she says. Mais c’est une histoire triste. I kept hoping things would work out for them, even though I knew they wouldn’t. And the war—Tristan, it’s all so dark. Of course it’s interesting, but I couldn’t read it for pleasure. I know you have to learn about this to get the money—

  —It’s not just about the money.

  —But isn’t that why you’re here?

  I look out the window at the flat brown fields.

  —When I first heard about the money, all I thought about was where I could live and what I could do with it. But after I came to Europe and heard about these people, after I read their letters—

  I shake my head. —It just makes me feel terrible to think about it. The money’s dirty. The only reason it’s still around is because of all the bad things that happened to them. I bet that’s why Imogen never wanted it.

  The white building of the station appears in the window. We take our bags from the luggage racks and sit back down. Mireille looks at her hands.

  —I know y
ou care about this story, she says. It’s part of what I like about you. But you can’t spend your life feeling sorry—

  —I don’t feel sorry for them. However badly things went for Ashley, I bet you anything he wouldn’t have traded his life for mine. They knew what they cared about, both of them. Even if they lost it, at least they knew.

  —You care about things. Last night you were talking about so many things. Paris and Notre Dame, the old man in Toulouse—

  The train is pulling into the station. We go down the aisle and wait beside the sliding door. I adjust the straps on my backpack, looking out the window at the station house, a one-room brick building with its windows painted over in white enamel. I shake my head.

  —That was before. Now all I do is go around looking for old papers. So what do I care about now? Dead people?

  Mireille looks at me.

  —They’re not dead to you.

  Mireille’s friend waits for us in the station parking lot, a tall girl leaning against an old Peugeot hatchback wearing a pair of headphones. When she sees Mireille she runs up and embraces her.

  —This is Hélène, Mireille says. She’s lending us this beautiful car while we’re here.

  Hélène pulls off her headphones and we exchange awkward kisses on each cheek. She opens the hatch of the tiny Peugeot and I toss in our bags. As we drive off Mireille warns me that the house we are staying at has been in bad shape since her grandfather died twelve years ago.

  —It’ll be a little dirty, she says. But you like old things, don’t you?

  We drive to a supermarket in town to buy groceries for our stay. Mireille tells me to get anything I’ll need. I wander the aisles with wide eyes, staring at the exotic wares labeled with words I’ve seen only in textbooks. Mireille laughs when she sees the cheese and bread in my corner of the cart.

  —There’s a kitchen there, she says. You don’t have to eat like that.

  —I like to keep things simple.

  Mireille puts a blue can of sel de mer in the shopping cart. She looks at me.

  —No one has lived there for years. You’ll see.

  We drive for half an hour through desolate farmland, chestnut-colored fields and shedding trees. I snap pictures with my camera as Hélène and Mireille talk quietly in the front seats. They seem to be having a disagreement about Mireille coming to Picardie early. They’re talking in French and the conversation is hard to follow from the backseat.

  We turn off the road and follow a long driveway to an old farmhouse, two stories tall and in great neglect. Ivy grows erratically up walls of chipped brick; copper gutters sag under the weight of dead leaves. A few of the windowpanes have long and curving cracks in the glass. We load the groceries into a wooden shed that links to the house.

  —The refrigerator is broken, Mireille says. But it’s cold enough in here.

  I unpack vegetables and cheese onto an old workbench in the shed. We enter the house through a side door. In the kitchen we test the faucet and it burps brown water, then runs clean and clear.

  Mireille shows me the large living room with its fireplace and a set of worn armchairs. The wooden floor is coated with antique grime and partly covered by a huge threadbare carpet, the fringed ends fraying to nothing. Hélène and I collect firewood outside and stack it beside the fireplace. Mireille takes me upstairs to the bedrooms.

  —You can choose first, she says.

  The rooms are all similar, so I choose one for its wallpaper: curling ivory flowers on a dark purple background. In the corners the paper is sliding off the walls. Beside the window there is a metal bed with creaky steel springs and a bare mattress. Mireille kneels before the fireplace and frowns.

  —It’s filled in, she says. But we can use the one downstairs.

  She stands up and dusts off her pants.

  —My grandfather never wanted to fix anything. My parents don’t use the house, but they can’t sell it for some reason, taxes or something. When we were at lycée, Hélène and I used to come here to drink, but I never had a reason to sleep here—

  Mireille looks at me.

  —Not until now, she adds. Do you have your sleeping bag?

  I get my sleeping bag from my backpack. Mireille pulls it out of the stuff sack, fluffing the feathers in the air and spreading the bag gently over the mattress.

  —Et voilà, she says. I know it’s dirty, but I thought you might like it—

  —It’s perfect. Better than the Ritz.

  Mireille smiles. —I’ll go look for a pillow.

  2 November 1916

  Patience Trench

  Somme, France

  The misery begins long before the attack. The nights grow long and longer still, the days only a gray smoke of clouds and chilling rain. The rain begins in October and does not cease for three weeks. The soldiers can hardly remember the sun.

  The ground becomes its own galaxy of wretchedness, a cesspool of failed ambition. Land that begins as green fields and neat villages is pulverized by explosive shells for days and weeks and months. All relics and histories of civilization sink back into the earth, pummeled into dirt or dust, divided and subdivided into finer particles and finally fused with icy rain into a single sucking gray morass, the binder and fixative of this chance apocalypse.

  The mud is everything. It is contagious, the destiny and endpoint of all mankind. The mud coats and replaces all things until men no longer believe in anything else, until they can stare with wonder at any surface that has survived, clean and immaculate. The frontispiece of a King James Bible. A silk scarf, still faintly scented with perfume. If the soldiers take out these objects to admire, they will also become tainted, so they preserve them inside their tunics or haversacks as long as they can.

  In the last week the cold snaps into frost, the tumbling rain and slush hardening to snowflakes drifting westward. A dry stinging wind. The pools in the shellholes crust with an inch of ice. One morning the men crawl out from their sleeping quarters, shelves in the trench wall curtained with a waterproof sheet, and when they look over the parapet toward the front line all is blanketed in white.

  Ashley stands on a fire step sweeping no-man’s-land with his collapsible periscope. At intervals he blows warm air onto his gloved hands, cupping them tightly. He wishes it would snow more, ten times more, until the pitiful ridge across no-man’s-land gleamed as white as the Weisshorn. It must be a few hundred miles from here, but it feels like ten thousand.

  Ashley shuts the periscope and comes down the stairs into company headquarters.

  —Hunting season is over, Ashley says. If we couldn’t get forward in the slop, we shan’t get forward in this.

  Jeffries shakes his head. —I wouldn’t be certain. Brass hats will want to straighten the lines before we settle in for winter. And they’ll want the Empress.

  —Impossible.

  —We’re long past impossible.

  Two days later they receive their orders to attack. The battalion is to travel by night to Patience Trench, arriving at the position well before dawn. From there they will attack the following morning. B Company will be in the second wave.

  Their target is a German fortification called Empress Redoubt, a prehistoric burial mound rising dramatically from a bog of icy mud. The white chalk of the mound’s summit has been shaped by months of shelling into a queer humanoid projection: to the staff officer who named the redoubt, it resembles the figure of the Empress of India in her youth. The enemy has fortified the mound into a maze of barbed wire and dugouts and tunnels and concrete pillboxes; the British general staff claims the redoubt is an essential artillery observation point that must be seized.

  In truth it is useless to both armies. But it is the only landmark in an ocean of mud and the enemy holds it. The crumbling chalk and rusting wire of the redoubt look down upon the British every morning, upon subalterns inspecting troops at dawn stand-to, upon staff officers eyeing the position with field glasses. Since July the British have attacked the redoubt four times, failing e
ach time at great cost.

  The soldiers now believe the Empress to be German.

  The evening before they go forward, Ashley asks his servant Mayhew to clean his revolver. Private Mayhew is a stocky man from Wiltshire who joined the army because he thought it would be easier than dairy farming. He lopes among the trenches in an odd shuffle, never looking another man in the eye when he can avoid it. But Private Mayhew wears the 1914 star. He fought at Mons and Loos, and the other soldiers say he has survived too many battles to ever be killed now. Ashley does not like Mayhew personally and finds him a poor servant, but Mayhew is a crack shot and an experienced soldier, and orderlies fight side by side with their officers. So Ashley keeps him on.

  Mayhew takes the revolver from Ashley. He murmurs the name Patience Trench, giving a low whistle.

  —Patience Trench, Mayhew repeats. Hoped I’d never see it, sir. Worst of the worst, they say. Chum of mine come out of there last week. Not any kind of trench, he said, just shellholes strung together. Nowhere to kip but in the mud—

  Ashley smiles. —Look on the bright side, Mayhew. We shan’t be there but a few hours.

  The battalion begins its march shortly after supper, the sky well darkened in the November blackness. They travel by a sunken road flooded with icy water and dead horses. The road has been photographed by German airplanes and is printed on German trench maps of the sector in red ink. German artillery officers who have never laid eyes upon the road know it intimately, raining explosive shells on every curve and rise with pinpoint accuracy, night and day.

  The road is a channel of misery and there is no other way forward.

  Ashley marches at the front of his platoon, an electric torch in hand, the muck lapping at his knees. Small bergs of blue ice bob in the channel, the water pockmarked by the tumbling rain. The soldiers slog forward at a crawl. They are all heavily laden, carrying rifles and haversacks and shovels, the bodies draped with bandoliers and water bottles and bombs. Some of the men have added equipment on their shoulders: iron pickets, coils of barbed wire, drums of Lewis gun ammunition. They duck under sagging telephone wires that have been strung and restrung zigzag above the sunken road to hold taut. The men have no waders. Their feet are wet and painfully cold, but they suffer with little complaint. A few of them are singing.