Anna (16 page)

Charles was now aware of a strange tingling excitement which ran right through his body. A pulse that he had never noticed before —it was somewhere behind his knee—had started throbbing. But to his relief he was not frightened. The Germans were actually advancing upon his regiment, and he was calm and self-possessed. He was pleased with himself.

And it was evident that it would now be only a matter of minutes before the real test came. The rifle shots up the ravine were nearer. Charles saw one of the two sharpshooters on the cliff edge raise himself on to one knee and take careful aim at something. The man was a baker in everyday life. He had won half a dozen shooting contests, and his drawing-room was crowded with vases and trophies that he had carried off at local fairs. Charles watched him with the keen pleasure of an amateur looking at a professional.

“Nothing hurried,” he said to himself. “The right arm level with the shoulder and the cheek well down to the butt. Soon there will be one German the less—one German who was expecting nothing.”

At that moment the rock behind the sharpshooter suddenly showed a tiny white spot like a medal and a small volcano of
splintered stone spurted outwards. The sharp shooter dropped the rifle that he had been sighting and raised his two hands to the back of his neck. He stood like that for a moment, motionless. Then in the manner of a man at a swimming regatta, he bent his knees as if about to spring off in some graceful swallow dive—but instead he folded up feebly and slid over the crest of the rock into space.

There were evidently, Charles told himself, crack sharpshooters on both sides.

The next reminder that the enemy knew all about them was a shell which exploded right among the trees. It was a pine tree that it struck. And, when the dust at last cleared away, all that remained of the tree was a low, jagged stump. Some of its topmost branches were now lodged among the neighbouring trees. No one was hurt —for all the damage that the shell had done, it might never have been fired—but no one liked the direction from which it had come. There was the uncomfortable feeling that, while they had been sitting there guarding the road, the Germans had been steadily working up behind them.

The Captain, a little shaken in his confidence by now, began reorganising his position: he set up a defensive line at right angles to the road and posted two scouts among the bushes. The instructions given to these scouts was that at the first sight of the enemy they were to fire three shots in rapid succession to warn the main body, and then retire. The Captain watched them go and congratulated himself upon his prudence.

But the three shots rang out almost before the scouts had been lost to sight. And they were immediately succeeded by a furious volley that went tearing through the pine trees with the noise of whips. A moment later one of the scouts came darting back from one piece of cover to another and flung himself flat beside a boulder. He was pale and completely winded. All that he could do was to point into the depths of the wood in front of him and say the one word, “Germans.”

At the same moment the wood in front of them seemed to come to life—a grey, moving life that flickered and vanished among the pine trunks. A second volley, fired low, swept through them, and Charles heard the cry, like a baby's, of a man who had been shot. Their own fire, when they returned the volley, sounded thinner and oddly unreassuring.

And the shooting from the German ranks was now continuous. The Captain immediately re-drew his whole line. He recalled
all
the men who had been enfilading the road, and set them to defending
their own flank. The volume of fire which they were able to return was now as intense as the German. It brought an end to the activity among the trees in front of them. There was no longer anything to be seen. And the shots that came were single bullets, sniper's bullets.

The Captain loosened the collar of his tunic and sweated. This was his first experience of independent command, and he was faced by the most desperate dilemma of all warfare—whether to maintain his stand and allow the enemy to improve his position or to attack and risk annihilation. While he was cogitating, the German field gun which had operated earlier began firing again. This time it was more than dead trees that it hit. The first shell exploded immediately in front of a low rock behind which three men were lying. When the smoke cleared the rock was no longer there. Nor were the men. And, encouraged by this proof of support in their rear, the Germans now began advancing again. They were too rash, however, and a group of men who tried to rush a small clearing were caught by fire from all sides and destroyed. But the fact remained that the main body—nobody knew how strong—was now some thirty yards nearer. And the heavy shell bursts of the German field-gun made it impossible for the French Captain to preserve his lines. The men scattered out in every direction all round him.

Charles himself was still somewhere in the second line of defence. There were others of his own countrymen between him and the Germans. Or rather, there would have been if the German commander, putting to practical demonstration his Potsdam lectures on outflanking, had not again managed to work up behind them.

The sixth sense of the soldier warned Charles, and he turned. Through a gap in the pine trees he saw huge helmeted figures running. He opened fire, wildly and badly. Nevertheless, he saw one of the figures stop, and falter and fall over backwards. And in a wild mixture of exultation and fear—for he
was
frightened by now—he fired again. Fired, and went on firing.

The fact that the Germans were behind him had utterly destroyed all confidence he had in anyone but himself. It seemed in the suspense of the moment that his officers had betrayed him. A bullet buried itself in the tree just in front of him, and the sickening realisation came to him that he was being fired at. Fired at, not blindly, but as an individual human being to be hit and hurt and finally destroyed.

The whole woodland was now full of single elemental combats. Men had marked down other men and were intent, like hunters, upon getting them. In front of him, Charles saw
his
man, the
second man that he was going to kill. He was a big Prussian and, under the shadow of the trees, he appeared a giant. Charles saw him flatten himself on a tree trunk and raise his rifle. As he aimed he exposed the whole of his fat, drooping shoulder. Charles held his breath and fired.

It seemed as he did so that the report and the pain were simutaneous. A sudden tongue of flame burned right through him and he fell backwards. He tried to raise his arm, but it was useless. His head, too, when he attempted to turn it, seemed fixed. It grated and jarred, and he abandoned the effort. And all the time the pain within him, the red-hot agony that had suddenly arrived there, kept leaping and mounting. He fainted.

Anna took the glass stopper from the phial of perfume on her dressing-table and ran it backwards and forwards across the letter that she had just written.

“Some of it will linger,” she told herself. “It will still be clinging to the letter when it reaches him, and it will make him happy. He will remember it.”

The room, the whole apartment, was silent, it was so late. Anna looked at her watch and saw that it was after midnight. She was tired, and her hand ached from writing. It had been a long letter: into it she had crowded everything that it was safe to say. And now that she had finished it, her energy had departed suddenly, leaving her limp and weary.

She got up and went over to the mirror, and removed the pins from her hair. The heavy plaits fell over her shoulders and she began to unbind them.

“It is now the fortieth day since I saw him,” she told herself. “But I must be brave. I must go on being brave. It is only by being brave and enduring everything that I shall be able to start my life with him afresh when he returns.

She returned and took up the pages of the letter. Propping them against the mirror, in between the two candlesticks, she re-read them as she brushed out her hair. The brush made a soft hissing sound as it passed through the tresses, and this slight sound made the rest of the silent apartment seem more silent still. It seemed for a moment that she was alone again with Charles.

“…I feel that you are near me, and I know that you are safe, my darling,”
she read.
“Something tells me that you are safe and that I shall soon see you. Be careful always. My life and yours are one. I live for
the moment when you take me in your arms, and I pray every night to the Virgin to watch over you.”

She raised the letter and kissed it and then sealed it in its envelope,

Then she began brushing out the pale gold masses of her hair again.

At the foot of a tree a man is lying. His head is in a little hollow. He is on his back, as though staring at the sky through the branches. His uniform is torn and discoloured, and from a hole in his shoulder the blood has flowed, making the red earth redder. He has been crying, and the tears have dried on his cheeks mingling with the sweat that has formed there. There are flies on his face too, but he is too weak to brush them away. It is only his eyes that flicker sometimes to show that he is still alive.

His mind is clear no longer. He sees to-day and his childhood, the Prussian at whom he was aiming and his mother, the trees overhead and his bedroom in the rue d'Aubon, as though they are parts of one pattern that is now, for the first moment in his life, spread out before him in its fullness. He sees Anna. But she is only one of many other figures. He is no longer aware of the pain in the broken collar-bone. In those two hours during which he has lain there his whole body has dwelt in pain and been saturated by it. He is so weak that he cannot move his legs, which are straddling the roots of the tree. He does not even notice the noise of firing from farther down the ravine.

But he is struggling up in one last effort. His left arm is scraping across the pine needles and his shoulder is thrusting upwards. He raises his head and defies the agony of bone rasping upon torn bone.

And, through eyes that are glazing already, he sees the road again at the bottom of the ravine. Sees the unbroken rows of the spiked helmets that are passing along. But he no longer knows what they mean.

Then he falls back again.

M. Latourette's intrigues had been successful. He had got his contract, and he was in the seventh heaven of commercial delight. He was to supply the Government of the Third Empire with one hundred and thirty-five thousand leather belts, each complete with a brass clasp and five punch holes.

He had come away from the Ministry on the auspicious day when the Under Secretary had agreed to split one-half of one per cent with him, like a man re-born.

His family now saw him scarcely at all. He was out all day, going from factory to factory that he did not possess, to arrange for the manufacture of these belts for which as yet he had not even bought the leather. The punitive clause in the contract was a severe one, and he could not afford to have anything go wrong. Nor could the Under Secretary. Eventually, with his help, M. Latourette was able to divert an entire consignment intended for another contract in which the Under Secretary had no interest. And M. Latourette, the supplier of belts, was able to start his new calling.

Even so, he was no longer his own master. Those acres of leather dominated him. He spent his time in tanning-yards, in cutting shops and in brass foundries. In the evening, when he returned to the apartment, he was too tired to do anything but put on his velvet jacket and smoke his pipe. Even his little evening jaunts with Anna were now over.

For a week, Anna had not been outside the apartment. She looked pale and listless. Madame Latourette, when she remembered, tried to feel sorry for her. But there was nothing that could be done. It was unsafe for the poor girl to go out into the streets, and that was all there was to it. To be caught speaking with a German accent was to invite, at the best, arrest; at the worst, lynching. In consequence, she remained for hours alone in her room. And when Madame Latourette, growing anxious, found some excuse to knock upon the door, she would discover her as before either reading or writing, endlessly writing, in the diary which she so carefully kept locked away. The diary frightened Madame Latourette. It was something secret and mysterious going on under her own roof. She was at the mercy of those pages, and feared that her every movement, her very expressions and intonations, were being recorded.

But this afternoon, when she entered the room, she found Anna
with hat and cloak already on and her handbag—it was the handbag that the Baron had given her—in her hand. Anna looked at her and smiled.

“It is too beautiful to stay indoors,” she said. “I must go out into the sunshine.”

Madame Latourette's natural agitation doubled and multiplied.

“But do you think it is safe?” she began. “Remember what your uncle said about…”

But Anna continued only to smile at her.

“I shall speak to no one,” she said. “I shall walk a little. And then I shall come back. I shall not be away more than an hour.”

Madame Latourette was apprehensive and undecided. For a moment the thought crossed her mind that she should stand in Anna's way and forbid her to go out. But the ludicrousness of such a proceeding dissuaded her. Besides, she did not know that Anna would obey her—she might even
force
her way past her. And that would be unthinkable. Perhaps she should offer to accompany her? She could see then that Anna did nothing foolish, could keep her out of trouble. But suppose they met someone whom Madame Latourette knew? How could she explain Anna away. How could she disown her?

It was Anna herself who put an end to her indecisions. She had already crossed over to the door.

“I shall be back by the time you have had your rest,” Anna said. “I have told you that I will not go far.”

The front door closed after her and she was gone. Madame Latourette stood where she was for a moment and then began to cry. She was afraid that M. Latourette might be very, very angry when he heard.