The Death Instinct (7 page)

    Hours later, under the stars, they repacked the girl's truck. She was surprisingly strong for her size. An explosion shook the earth gently beneath them, its firestorm erupting far away, deep in the woods. 'You're not afraid?' asked Younger.

    'Of the war?'

    'Of being alone with a stranger.'

    'No,' she said.

    'You're trusting.'

    'I never trust men,' she answered. 'That's why I'm not afraid of them.'

    'Sound policy,' said Younger. He looked up at the twinkling canopy above. 'I saw something today I'll never forget. An American marine sergeant was ordering his platoon out of a trench. They were outgunned, outmanned, but the sergeant decided to attack. His marines were too afraid to come out. The sergeant said to them - well, it involves a term that shouldn't be used in polite company. Shall I say it?'

    'Are you joking?' asked Colette.

    'The sergeant yelled, "Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?" His men came out. It was a bloodbath.'

    'Did he live, the sergeant?'

    'Yes, he did.'

    A sound like a banshee's scream was followed by another explosion. This time the blast was closer. The ground shook, and they could see fires burning perhaps a thousand yards away.

    'You should get out,' said Younger. 'Tonight. If the Germans break through, they'll be here before morning. They may do worse to a French girl than your soldiers did.'

    She said nothing. Younger reshouldered his gear and set off for the woods again - in the direction of the explosions.

    It was July, 1918, before he saw her again. Germany had commenced a series of ferocious offensives in France, determined to seize victory before the United States could fully mobilize. Hundreds of thousands of seasoned German troops were pouring in from the east, where Russia's new Bolshevik rulers had surrendered, releasing the Kaiser's armies from the Eastern Front. By the end of May, Germany had pressed the French forces back to the Marne, only fifty miles from Paris.

    But there, at Belleau, at Vaux, at Chateau-Thierry, Americans blocked the German advance, charging to their deaths with an abandon unseen in Allied troops since 1914. United States newspapers trumpeted the Yankee victories, wildly exaggerating their importance. The question was whether the new line would hold.

    For forty days, the two sides threw wave after wave of firepower and young men into brutal, indecisive combat. Slowly the fighting ground to a halt, reduced to the exchange of blistering shell attacks from well-fortified entrenchments. The pause was ominous. The Germans appeared to be reinforcing again, massing yet more divisions.

    In this quiet before the storm, a produce market of dubious legality had sprung up in the village of Crézancy, overlooked by the huge, glinting American guns planted high up on the Moulin Ruiné. Bent and wizened French farmers sold whatever goods they had managed to keep back from government requisitioners.

    It was Luc whom Younger saw first. He recognized at once the little boy buying cheese and milk, wordlessly shaking his head at some exorbitant demand and consenting to pay only after receiving an acceptable price. Younger greeted the boy warmly. In a burst of inspiration, he pulled from his pocket a sealed jar crawling with maggots. Luc's eyes opened wide.

    'They're larvae,' said Younger in French. 'In a short time, each of these fellows will wrap himself up in a cocoon. A week or two later, the cocoon will break open, and out will crawl - do you know what will crawl out?'

    The boy shook his head.

    'A fly. A common, bluebottle blowfly.'

    This information appeared to boost the boy's already high estimation of the seething mass inside the jar.

    'Would you like to know why they're such good friends to wounded men? Because they eat only dead tissue. Living cells have no appeal to them. Here, take the jar. I have more. Very few young men have pet maggots.'

    The boy accepted the present and drew something from his own pocket, offering it in exchange.

    Younger raised an eyebrow. 'A grenade.'

    Luc nodded.

    'It's not live, is it?' asked Younger.

    Setting down the grubs, Luc engaged the grenade's pin, unscrewed its cap, withdrew the spring, removed the pin, unhinged the nozzle, and held it up in the air.

    Younger leaned down, smelled the dry powder within. 'I see. Excellent. Live indeed.'

    The boy reversed the process, deftly reassembling the grenade, and offered it again to Younger, who accepted the gift quite carefully. He was thanking Luc when a girl's voice spoke sternly behind him.

    'Did you let him touch that?' she asked.

    Younger turned to see the boy's sister.

    'You want him to think grenades are toys?' she went on angrily. 'So the next time he sees one on the ground, he'll pick it up and play with it?'

    Younger glanced at Luc, who plainly didn't want his sister to know he'd been carrying a live grenade around. 'Quite right, Mademoiselle,' said Younger, pocketing the weapon. 'I don't know what I was thinking. Luc, a grenade is not a toy, do you hear me? Only someone completely familiar with how they work should ever touch one.'

    'I'm sorry,' she said to Younger, mollified. 'He likes to play with guns and ammunition. He's forever scaring me.'

    'I heard you went back to Paris,' Younger answered.

    She frowned. Luc tugged her skirt. The girl excused herself, bent toward him, and the boy made hand gestures between their faces - some kind of sign language. Her answer to him was strict: 'Absolutely not. What's the matter with you?' To Younger she explained, 'Now he wants to go to the front with you.'

    'I'm afraid that's impossible, given your age, young man,' said Younger. 'Although the way this war is going, you may yet have your chance. But perhaps you'd like to see an American base?'

    The boy nodded.

    Younger spoke to the girl: 'It would be a great service to us if you came to our base with your truck. We have an X-ray machine, but compared to yours it's primitive. There are many men I could help.'

    'All right,' she said. 'I can come this afternoon. But I still - I don't know your name.'

    For the next several days, Colette's truck pulled into Younger's field hospital every evening, rumbling up the dirt road in a cloud of dust. With Younger seated beside her, they would set off to various encampments as far away as Lucy-le-Bocage. Dozens of men, wounded but reinserted into their platoons, had not regained their health as they should have. Younger wanted to reexamine them all. Usually the X-rays uncovered nothing, but every now and then, as Younger suspected, the ghostly skeletons showed a minuscule fragment of shell previously missed.

    The first time this happened, Colette cried out in triumph. Younger smiled. As they worked at close quarters in the back of the truck, her fingers would frequently touch his when exchanging an instrument. Or her body would brush against him. On every such occasion, she would quickly separate herself, yet Younger had the notion that the contact might have been deliberate.

    With the wounded or sickly, Colette was kind, but not particularly gentle or compassionate. With the healthy, she was flint. In part, Younger could see, this brusqueness was self-protection; she was too pretty to interact with soldiers on other terms. But there was more to it. Younger wondered what it would take to soften her.

    One evening when Colette was busy with her computations, Younger took advantage of the lull to work by flashlight on some equations of his own. He became conscious after a while that Luc was standing by his side.

    The boy handed Younger a book. It was in English, published the previous year. The author was one Toynbee; the title was The German Terror in France. The short volume had been well-thumbed; was it possible the boy could read English?

    Younger began paging through the book. It was then that the boy handed him a note saying he hated the dead - the first time Luc had ever communicated to him in this fashion. After that the boy sat down against a tire of the truck, playing with an old toy.

    'Where did you get that?' asked Colette suddenly, seeing the book in Younger's hands.

    'Your brother gave it to me.'

    'Oh.' Her body relaxed. 'He wants me to tell you what happened to our family.'

    'You needn't.'

    She looked at Luc, who kept playing his game. 'You can read about it if you want,' she said, indicating a place in the book where a page had been dog-eared and a passage underlined. Younger read it:

    Sommeilles was completely burnt on Sept. 6th. 'When the incendiarism started,' states the Mayor, 'M. and Mme Adnot (the latter about sixty years old), Mme X (thirty-five or thirty-six years old), whose husband is with the colours, and Mme X's jour children all took refuge in the Adnots' cellars. They were there assassinated under atrocious circumstances. The two women were violated. When the children shrieked, one of them had its head cut off, and two others one arm, while everyone in the cellar was massacred. The children were respectively eleven, five, four and one and a half years old.'

    'Great God,' said Younger. 'I pray this wasn't your family.'

    'No, but that was our village - Sommeilles,' she said. 'We moved there when I was little - Mother, Father, Grandmother, and I. Luc was born there. When the war started, all our young men went off to the army. The village was defenseless. The night the Germans came, Luc and I were sent to the carpenter's, because he had a hidden basement. That's the reason we lived. The Germans killed everyone, but they never found us. All night long we heard gunshots and screaming. The next day, they were gone. Our house was burned, but still standing. Mother and Father were dead on the floor. Father had put up a heroic light, you could see that. Grandmother was still alive, but not for long. Mother was naked. There was a lot of blood.'

    Luc had stopped his game while his sister spoke. When it was clear that she had finished, the boy started playing again.

    'Everyone assumes you have to be sad,' said Colette, 'for the rest of your life.'

Chapter Six

    With the Great War came great disease - unheard-of illness on an unprecedented scale.

    The last was the worst: the flu of 1918-19, spreading with the continent-crossing armies, hiding in the warm but broken lungs of homeward-bound soldiers, ultimately killing millions in every corner of the earth. Before the Spanish flu, there had been the agonies of phosgene and mustard gas, which could burn away a man's eyes and his flesh down to the bone. Before the poison gas, there had been the repulsive incapacitations of fungi and parasites attacking men's feet, gangrenes propagating in undrained, rat-infested trenches. But before all this, there was shell shock.

    The initial reports of the strange condition were baffling. Seemingly unhurt men presented a congeries of contradictory symptoms: rapidity of breath and inability to breathe, silence and raving, excessive motion and catatonia, refusal to let go their weapons and refusal to touch their weapons. But always nightmares - in case after case, night terrors that woke and alarmed their comrades-in-arms.

    Then came symptoms more peculiar still. Deafness, muteness, and blindness; paralyzed fists and legs. All without apparent organic injury.

    The French had a name for these men:
simulateurs
. The British too: malingerers. In fact the earliest treatment prescribed by the English was the firing squad, cowardice being an offense punishable by death in the British army. German doctors, by contrast, used electricity. The avowed theory behind the Germans' electrocution therapy was not that it cured, but that at a sufficiently high voltage it made returning to the front a preferable alternative. The German doctors had, however, overlooked a third option, of which quite a few of their patients took advantage: suicide.

    Yet even these compelling disincentives failed to stem the tide. The numbers of afflicted men rose to staggering proportions. Eighty thousand soldiers in Great Britain would eventually be diagnosed with the mysterious ailment. Many of these were officers of high character and, from the British viewpoint, of unimpeachable blood and breeding. As a result, the malingering thesis came finally to be doubted.

    The first doctors to take the condition seriously announced that exploding missiles were to blame. The concussive detonations set off by the mighty shells of modern warfare were said to produce micro-hemorrhaging in cerebral blood vessels, causing a neurological paralysis or shock in the brain. Thus was coined the term 'shell shock.'

    The name stuck, but not the diagnosis behind it. Too many shell- shocked men had lived through no bombardment at all. It soon became apparent that psychology was more important to their condition than physiology. It became equally apparent that only one psychiatrist on the planet had advanced a theory of mental illness that could explain their symptoms: Sigmund Freud.

    Gradually but in growing numbers, physicians the world over - men who had previously regarded psychoanalysis with the deepest distaste and suspicion - began to acknowledge that the Freudian concept of the unconscious alone made sense of shell shock and its treatment. 'Fate would seem to have presented us,' wrote a British physician in 1917, 'with an unexampled opportunity to test the truth of Freud's theory of the unconscious.' The test proved positive.

    English, Australian, French, and German doctors reported stunning success treating shell shock victims with psychotherapy. In Britain, military authorities called on Dr Ernest Jones, one of Freud's earliest disciples - who was still barred from hospital practice because of his penchant for discussing improprieties with twelve-year-old girls - to treat what was coming to be called 'war neurosis.' Germany sent a delegation to an international psychoanalytic congress, begging for assistance in dealing with overcrowded shell-shock wards. Freud himself - so long calumniated and ostracized - was asked by the Austrian government to lead an investigation concerning the proper treatment of shell shock. By 1918, there may have been only one man alive who both accepted the truth of psychoanalysis and yet felt that Freudian theory could not explain war neurosis. That man was Sigmund Freud.

    'He should be in school,' Colette said of her brother a few days later. She was behind the wheel of her truck, guiding it over badly rutted roads. She had no qualms about discussing Luc in the boy's hearing. 'But he is too - uncooperative. The teachers in Paris thought he was deaf. They also thought he couldn't talk. But he can. I know it.'

    In the back of the truck, Luc was playing with his favorite toy again an old fishing reel - mouthing unintelligible sounds as he did so. 'How long has he been like this?' asked Younger.

    'There was smoke everywhere after they burned Sommeilles. It got into the carpenter's cellar, but Luc wouldn't come out. That whole day he lay there. Then he caught cold, and that night he started coughing badly I thought I might lose him too. He got better, but he's been this way ever since.'

    'Does he ever have trouble breathing - when he runs, for example?'

    'Never,' said Colette. 'Everyone says he must have had a pneumonia, but I think it's something else. Something psychological. A "neurosis," perhaps. Have you ever heard of Dr Freud of Vienna?'

    'Left at that signpost,' said Younger.

    'He's a psychologist, very famous. Everyone says he is the only one to understand war neuroses. And he treats children.'

    'Dr Freud of Vienna,' said Younger. 'He has a peculiar theory of what causes neurosis.'

    'You've read his work? I couldn't find anything in French.'

    'I've read him, and I know him. Personally.'

    'But that's wonderful!' cried Colette. 'When the war is over, I am going to write to him. We have no money, but I was hoping he might agree to see Luc. Will you help me?'

    'No.'

    'You won't? Why not?'

    'I don't believe in Freud's psychology,' he said. 'As a matter of fact, I don't believe in psychology at all. Shrapnel, bacteria, sulfur - get them out of a man's system, and you stand a fair chance of making him better. But "neurosis"? Neurosis means "no-diagnosis." How do you know Luc doesn't have a problem in his larynx?'

    'I know he can talk. I know it. He just won't.'

    'Well, if you're right, then he's shy. I was shy at his age.'

    'He's not shy,' said Colette. 'It's as if he is - how to say it? - refusing the world.'

    'Perfectly rational, given what he has seen of the world. Pull up over there,'

    Colette did so, bringing the truck to a grinding halt. 'Dr Freud's patients get better,' she replied. 'Everyone says so.'

    'That doesn't prove his theories are valid.'

    'What does it matter, if his patients get better?' she asked.

    'In that case, why not give the boy snake oil?'

    'I would if it made him better. I would do anything to make him better.'

    Younger opened his door. 'There's nothing wrong with your brother's mind,' he said. 'He just needs this - this bloody war to end.'

    On July 13, Younger was kept busy overnight at the front, working on some badly wounded men; he wasn't able to return to base until late the next evening. Despite the hour, he commandeered a transport wagon and drove it to the French position where Colette could usually be found. When he got there, she was laundering clothes in the glare of her truck's headlamps.

    She ran to him: they stood face-to-face, but didn't touch. 'Where were you?' she asked. 'At the front?'

    At a certain point, men in wartime either stop thinking about death or become paralyzed by it. Younger had stopped thinking about it. 'At the moment I'm absent without leave,' he replied. 'Court-martialable offense.'

    'Not really?'

    'It's all right. My orderly knows where I am. Couldn't let Bastille Day go uncelebrated.' From the rear of his wagon, he pulled out a bottle of dessert wine, two glasses, a tin of foie gras, a blue cheese, a jar of strawberry preserves, fresh butter, and an assortment of English biscuits. 'Not exactly revolutionary,' he observed, 'but the best I could do.'

    'Where did you get all this?' she said in wonder.

    'Will you allow me, Mademoiselle?'

    'With pleasure.'

    She laid a blanket on the grass and arranged the articles he had brought. The night was warm. He threw his leather jacket to the ground, put his cap and pistol belt on top of it, and began corkscrewing the wine - but stopped when blood drizzled down his fingers onto the bottle. 'Do you sew by any chance?' he asked.

    She lifted his sleeve and gasped at the deep laceration in his
forearm. 'Wait here,' she said. When she came back a moment later with suturing thread and a disinfectant alcohol, she added, 'I don't have any anaesthetic.'

    'For this?' he replied.

    She poured the clear alcohol onto his wound, where it hissed and effervesced, ran a needle through one piece of his bubbling, bleeding skin and then through another, pulling the thread tight thereafter. 'How can you bear it?' she asked.

    'I don't feel it,' he said.

    'Of course you do,' she replied, continuing to suture.

    'I'm indifferent to it.' 'A man who doesn't feel pain can feel no pleasure.'

    'I'm indifferent to pleasure too.'

    'That's not what the nurses say.'

    'I beg your pardon?'

    'How long since you've slept?' she asked.

    'There's something about you I don't follow, Miss Rousseau. Specifically, your leaving Paris to live in a truck. And don't tell me it was your duty to France.'

    'Why not?' she asked, piercing the last lip of open skin. 'Hold still.'

    'Because women don't act out of duty to country. There's always a man in it somewhere.'

    'You're unforgivable.' She cut the thread, tied it off. 'Done.'

    He flexed his hand, nodded, opened the wine, poured her a glass, and offered a toast to womankind. She returned it with a toast to France. They settled down to their meal; she served him. 'You were following a boy, obviously,' Younger resumed. 'He was called to the front, and this was the only way you could go with him. The only question is whether you lost him or he lost you.'

    'I wasn't following a boy.'

    'My apologies - a man.'

    'Not a man either.'

    'A girl?'

    She threw a cracker at him.

    'Sorry, but it doesn't add up,' he said. 'You left the Sorbonne, which must have been the most important thing in your life. You know they won't reenroll you after the war. There will be too many men whose education was interrupted.'

    'Yes.' She swept crumbs from the blanket, barely betraying her deep disappointment: 'Even Madame warned me she wouldn't be able to get me back in.'

    'Then why did you leave?' asked Younger.

    'I couldn't stand the charity any longer.'

    He was unable to read the expression in her eyes.

    'There are people,' she went on, 'willing to house those of us who have lost our families, willing to feed us. But charity comes at a price. Out here we have a roof over our heads, and I don't have to ask: anyone for bread.'

    'What was the price?' asked Younger.

    'Dependence.'

    'We're all dependent when young. On family, if no one else.'

    'To be dependent on your family is a joy,' she said. 'To be dependent on someone else is - different.'

    Again she wore her indecipherable expression, but this time Younger deciphered it.

    'So,' he said. 'You weren't lying, but I was still right.'

    'What do you mean?'

    'You weren't following a man when you left Paris. You were escaping one. A man who wanted a return on his charitable investments.'

    She looked at him over the rim of her glass.

    'You had a - an intimate relationship with him,' said Younger. 'No one can blame you.'

    'You are very curious about my relationships.'

    'Any girl would have done the same in your place.'

    'Maybe an American girl would have. I didn't. You will believe me when I tell you who it was: Monsieur Langevin.'

    Paul Langevin was the great French physicist notoriously coupled with Marie Curie in newspaper reports all over the world several years earlier.

    'I should have known,' declared Younger. 'You said his name to once before, with more venom than any word I've heard you speak except "German." What did the rascal do?'

    'He tried to undress me in the laboratory.'

    'Scoundrel. Where should he have done it?'

    'You think it's funny? This is the man Madame loved. The man she lost everything for. And he makes love to me almost under her nose.'

    'At least he has good taste.'

    'I think you are trying to provoke me,' she said. 'It was dreadful. He had put Luc and me up in his house. I thought he was being kind. But then came the laboratory, and then there was more, at night, in his house.'