Losing Julia (27 page)

I stood still and closed my eyes and rubbed my temples until all the prisoners and the guards disappeared and then walked over to the
Totenkammer
and the
Krematorium,
which I was afraid to touch in case it felt warm. Before I walked back to the train station I bought a postcard that said “Never Again” and tucked it into my pocket, but by the time I reached the station I had decided that never again was not nearly enough. Even if it was the best we could do it was not adequate at all; not even if not another single drop of human blood is spilled again in anger. But of course the blood keeps spilling, doesn’t it? And as I stood watching the train approaching, I thought that maybe the real horror is not what happened at Dachau but what didn’t happen after Dachau. Certainly we know now once and for all that humanity can never be brought to its senses.

The dragon lives.

“SO WHEN ARE
you going to show us a picture of your girlfriend?” I asked, looking over at Page. “Aren’t you two engaged or something?”

We were sitting with Lawton, Giles and Daniel in a humid, smoky bar on our last night of rest before returning to the front, which was still audible some twenty miles away, like a far-off storm rumbling across the Kansan plains. The room was crowded with a mix of French and American soldiers and it was difficult to hear across the rough round table where we sat. In the candlelight the dense air had an almost yellowish tinge and the room smelled of sweat and tobacco mixed with the sweetish aroma of spilled drinks that made the floor slightly sticky. I’d begun to feel a hint of nausea and I couldn’t decide if it was because of the smoke and drinks or because I knew I would soon be back in the trenches.

“I don’t have it anymore,” said Page, taking a long drag of his cigarette. I looked at his hands wrapped around a beer mug and noticed that they were covered with various nicks and cuts, especially near the knuckles. I looked down at mine and they looked the same, with dirt buried deep under the nails and into the cuticles and a thin scar across the top of my left hand where I had snagged it on barbed wire. Trench hands. So different looking than I remembered them; all scrubbed for church, gripping the rake in the backyard and piling up the red and yellow and brown leaves, anxiously tapping a pencil at school. I raised them up and opened them wide and then squeezed them closed a few times before reaching for my beer.

“You don’t have it?” asked Giles, signaling the plump, elderly French barmaid for a fourth round of drinks. In his left hand he fingered one of two Iron Crosses he had found on the bodies of German soldiers after we captured their trench. He’d been in good spirits ever since.

“I don’t have it.”

“What did you do, sell it?” asked Lawton, whose large face looked unusually haggard while his eyes were fiery red from drink.

“She broke up.”

“With you? She broke up with you?” asked Lawton.

“Shut up,” I said.

“It’s just a little surprising, I mean, if Mr. Page here isn’t the catch of the century, then… ”

“I’m sure you’ll straighten things out when you get home,” I said hopefully. I’d assumed that Page was as good as married and I had privately hoped to be invited to a big Boston Brahmin wedding after the war.

Page shrugged.

So that’s why he’d been so quiet lately. I was sorry I’d mentioned her in front of the other guys. I tried to imagine his sense of helplessness, being so far away.

“That’s got to be tough,” said Giles, shaking his head. “I’m sort of glad I broke up with Meredith before I enlisted. That way I don’t have to think about her being unfaithful. Nothing worse than sitting in a fucking trench imagining some guy back home screwing the daylights out of your girl in some nice comfortable bed.”

“Would you shut the fuck up?” I said. I noticed that Page had tightened his grip on his beer mug.

“So who’s buying the next round?” asked Daniel.

“I’m broke,” said Lawton.

“So let me get this straight,” I said. “You expect us to buy your beers so you can save your money for whores?”

“Seems reasonable to me,” said Lawton, smiling his big impish smile.

“I’ll get them,” said Page, reaching for his pocket.

I stared at the small flame of the red candle that burned in an empty green wine bottle in the center of the table. The bottle was almost covered with layers of different-colored wax that had dripped down its sides. I thought of all the other men who had sat around it laughing and talking and wondered how many were now dead.

“I got a letter from my kid brother yesterday,” said Giles. “He wants to know how many Heinies I’ve killed.”

“How many have you killed?” I asked.

“No idea.” He looked around the table. “Do you guys count?”

“I counted the first three,” admitted Page. “Then I stopped.”

“ ’Course you can’t always be sure,” said Giles.

“No, you can’t,” said Daniel.

“Can’t beat Lawton here,” I said, slapping him on the back. A week earlier Lawton had shot a German spotter right out of a belfry from eight hundred yards.

“What about those guys in the artillery, firing those fuckers all day and night,” said Lawton. “That’s gotta add up.” We shook our heads solemnly.

“So what are you going to tell your brother?” asked Daniel.

“I’m going to tell him that I’ll kick his ass if he signs up.”

“Why don’t you just tell him what it’s like?” I asked.

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious.”

He looked at me steadily. “I’ve tried. I can’t.”

“How about you, Page?”

“I stopped trying.”

“Daniel?”

He shook his head.

“Well shit, if none of you learned men are going to tell the good folks back home what’s going on, who the fuck is?” asked Lawton, raising his voice. I thought of a letter Lawton had recently dictated to me to write to his parents, how there was no mention of death or violence at all, as if the worst things were the inconveniences; as if we were all on a big camp-out and someone forgot the marshmallows.

“I wonder what the Germans write,” I said. “‘Dear Pa, it’s just like shooting pheasant. Please send more schnapps.’”

“Their letters are probably not much different from ours,” said Daniel.

“Do you think they still believe they can win?” asked Giles.

“I don’t think they believe they’ll beat us, but I don’t think they believe we’ll beat them either,” said Daniel.

I pulled out a cigarette and lit it, then took a long sip of beer.

“Do you suppose they have many deserters?” asked Giles.

“Not nearly enough, as far as I can see,” said Lawton.

“Does anybody ever get the feeling that this thing could go on forever?” I asked, looking around the table.

“I’ll give it another year,” said Page. “Two at the most.”

“Two? Christ, I’m not putting up with this shit for two years,” said Giles.

I tried to imagine two more years but I couldn’t. The idea made my eyes redden so that I had to turn away. I reached for my beer and finished it off.

Nearby a table of French soldiers began singing.

“Fucking sheep to slaughter,” said Lawton, who was visibly drunk.

We sat in silence, listening to the song. Watching the soldiers with their arms around each other and their drunken smiles and bleary eyes made me enormously sad. What if their mothers could see them now? Their girlfriends? And where would they be in a month? A year? And what about us? As I listened to them my sadness slowly transformed into intense anger; anger that we were here, that nobody who wasn’t here could ever understand us, that the rest of the world just went on without us. The anger came more often now. It was easier to deal with than sadness or fear.

When they finished singing we clapped and turned back to our table. Giles pulled out a deck of cards and began shuffling. I tried to concentrate on the quick movements of his hands but my vision blurred. I slowly looked around the table; first at Daniel, then Page, then Lawton, then Giles. It struck me what fun I’d be having if only there wasn’t a war and how much I’d miss them when it was over.

“Is life fucking absurd or have I been drinking too much?” I said finally, feeling a heaviness in my tongue.

“It’s absurd,” said Daniel, who looked tired and thin.

“Thank you.” I belched loudly.

“Paddy here’s got a hell of a point,” said Lawton, both lisping and slurring. His red eyes flickered as he talked and his left knee bounced up and down under the table.

“I get the feeling Lawton needs to get laid,” said Giles, as he began dealing. A cigarette dangled from his lips and after he inhaled he held the smoke in for a moment and smiled appreciatively before exhaling.

“Bunch of fucking fodder is what we are,” said Lawton, leaning so far back in his chair I feared he would fall over.

“Well shit, you might as well just stand on the parapet and whistle at the Germans,” said Page.

Lawton began to whistle.

“Give this man another drink,” said Giles.

“Worm food. We’re fucking worm food,” said Lawton, leaning his shoulder against me and raising his glass. “To worms, who’ve never had it so good.”

“The thing is, Lawton, the worms have always won in the end,” said Daniel. “Live, love and die. No answers. Little justice. Never has been, never will be.”

“I feel so much better,” said Lawton.

Daniel continued: “So you can say life is senseless and cruel or you can make a stand and try to impose your own meaning and values on it.”

“I’m afraid I’m no good at that,” said Lawton.

“What about the people that are important to you?” asked Page.

“They keep dying off,” said Lawton, draining his glass.

“So you think we’re all mad?” I asked.

“Oh most definitely,” said Lawton.

“To madness then,” said Giles, raising his glass.

“To madness,” we said, clinking our glasses.

What is happening to me now is more tragic than the “passion play.” Christ never endured what I endure. It is breaking me completely.

—Isaac Rosenberg, British Army, in a letter written

January 26, 1918. Killed in action, March 31, 1918.

“LET ME ASK
you something,” I said to Daniel as we sat in a dugout after spending the morning carrying ammunition boxes and Marmite pots of food along the communication trench to the firebay. Daniel had just finished shaving in a small mirror nailed to a wooden beam and now gently tapped out powdered toothpaste onto his toothbrush. “So do you think it’s worth it, all in all? Living, I mean. Do you think the good outweighs the bad in the long term?”

“Most days I do,” he said.

“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t think that all the happiness in the world can make up for the misery. Not for one moment. After the first child died in a fire or the first mother ran out of food I think the whole bloody thing should have been called off.”

Daniel turned and looked at me and I felt my anger in my face and noticed that my hands had tightened around my metal coffee cup, which was cold. After he finished brushing his teeth he sat down and slowly untied his boots, which were caked with dried mud. Then he pulled them off, scraped them clean with a knife and slowly removed his socks, which had to be peeled from his skin like adhesive tape. After massaging and inspecting his feet, he pulled out a fresh pair of socks from his pack, put them on and laced up his boots. After rolling his wool puttees he stood, walked to the entrance of the dugout and pulled aside the hanging blankets. Then he turned back to me and asked, “You’ve never been in love, have you Patrick?”