Good Hope Road: A Novel (14 page)

Only now do I notice the blue feet of the birds, their red combs like blood against their white feathers.

‘The queen of chickens, and the chicken of kings,’ James say, ‘is how Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin put it in 1825.’

‘He was a renowned gourmand,’ he explain when I look blank-like at him. ‘There’s still folks who hold that these chickens are the finest tastin’ in the world.’

It strikes me that with their colourin’, these some mighty fine, patriotic chickens. Red, white and blue, same as the French flag, same as the Stars and Stripes, and I take it as a right lucky omen that we seen them.

Gaillard hawk noisily and spit into the straw. ‘She should put a couple of these in the oven for us,’ he grumble. ‘Do her bit for France.’

James and I, we don’t say nothin’, but I know he’s thinkin’ like I am, ’bout the son the old lady talked of, and just where he might be right now.

We packin’ up to leave early the next mornin’, when she come out, carryin’ somethin’ in her apron. It’s six eggs, still warm from the hens. She hand them to us, not a hint of a smile on her face. ‘
Bonne chance
,’ she mutter.

She stand there, alone on the steps of her chateau, watchin’ silently as we leave.

Gaillard teach us to rub tallow on the inside of our boots, to ease the rubbin’ and the blisters on our feet. We march on, through more villages, small, old, broken. More chateaus, all black and empty. The fighting’s been more recent here, and the villagers just ’bout startin’ to return; they stand in their shelled doorways and open walls and wave slowly as we pass. Ain’t no farmhands here no more, hardly no young men at all. They all at the Front. Only old women left now, too mule-headed to leave their homes.

We push north, past the marshes of Saint Gond where we hear tell fifteen thousand French and twenty-five thousand Boche have been killed. The numbers, they too big to make sense; when I try and imagine how many men that might be, I get lost. I think instead of one Frenchman, who liked nothin’ more than to raise red, white and blue chickens.

I think of that old lady’s son and wonder if he here, in one of the many fields we pass, where patches of beets still growin’ ’bout the newly dug graves. Soldiers’ caps, the red
kepis rouge
, hang on wooden crosses, lookin’ from a distance as if the fields fully in bloom.

Verzenay • October 1914

here’s the smell of war around Verzenay. Sharp, bitter – it bite the back of our throats. The stink of cordite, machine oil and axle grease hang thick over the road that leads to the village. We see a couple of Boche aeroplanes – for planes they been steady flyin’ over this here part of the Front, we hear tell – flyin’ so low that Gaillard say he can make out them Boche airmen wavin’ mockin’ like at him.

The clink and clank of iron and steel all around, the rhythm of a thousand boots. Automobiles honkin’ down the roads, and horses so nervous, they toss their heads and stamp. Sparks shoot from under their hooves as they hit against the stones. Colonial troops everywhere, veteran soldiers and new recruits, grey-beards and boys with the growin’ still in them, talkin’, singin’, cussin’, the square crowded with all kinds of uniforms. French poilus, British Tommies and Canadian troops. Karan call out to a band of brown-skinned soldiers from India and they fold their hands and bow in greetin’. We pass a battalion speakin’ a strange tongue – it seem awful familiar but I can’t make out not one word. James, he assure me it English they speakin’, regular old English, spoken with a bonnie Scottish accent, is all.

Men everywhere, hootin’ and hollerin’, cuppin’ their hands and yellin’ at the Boche. The battle lines lie on the hillside below, close enough that we can make out the long white trenches and the dust clouds movin’ up and down the lines as the shells fall. A rattlin’ in the background, from the French mitrailleuse machine guns, mixed with the sharp crack-crack of rifle fire. We so close to the Front, we even hear the French officers shoutin’ to their men. Their voices carry in itty bitty pieces, like snatches of song.

The music of the war, and it both light a fire and run cold as ice inside of me.

There’s a sudden tootin’ and honkin’, from a row of vehicles makin’ their way up the streets. The crowd parts clean down the middle, to let them through.

‘Easy!’ James says sharply, as a crush of bodies pins us to the sides of the buildings. We thinkin’ it some grandee general and his staff goin’ hell-bent for breakfast, but the honkin’ come closer, louder, and now I see the big, red cross painted on the sides. This ain’t no general’s convoy, but medic wagons, back from the Front.

They pull up right in front of us, before the entrance of the lean-to hospital where stretchers bein’ rushed out. The crowd go silent, watchin’ as the wounded are offloaded. They covered in blood and dirt, most cannot walk, and those that can are so beat up, they stumble on the cobblestones, some sinkin’ right down with their eyes closed. Soldiers with holes torn right through their bodies, men missin’ eyes and hands and legs, and there’s a dead quiet as it sink in, really sink in, just what we all headed for.

This ain’t no rinky dink fight we been marchin’ towards, but war, full-blown war, the likes of which none of us ever seen before.

‘What’s it like then, over there?’ someone ask, hesitatin’ like.

The Tommy he speakin’ to is tryin’ to make his own way into the hospital, usin’ his rifle for a crutch. He barely look up. ‘A real bloody picnic,’ he say as he limp away.

An angry buzzin’ start to build among us. We cuss out the Boche proper, swearin’ to take revenge for all they done, for each and every one of these terrible wounds we see before us. A soldier sittin’ on the ground look up, his eyes so weary there ain’t enough sleep in all the world to take the tiredness from them.

‘We did the same to them,’ he say quietly. Ain’t no boastin’ in his voice, no anger, ain’t much of anythin’ at all, only a long, drawn-out emptiness.

‘You hear?’

James look up from his writin’. ‘Tonight,’ he nod.

That wounded Tommy from earlier today, he stuck in my head, makin’ me right restless. Most of the
jeunes
, they gone drinkin’, Karan being set on gettin’ as drunk as he can get on the finest champagne he can find. I don’t feel up to it, and instead, go wanderin’ ‘bout on my own. Ain’t no purpose to my walkin’, down this street, then that, tryin’ to quiet them butterflies in my gut. It get quieter the further I go from the centre. By and by I come to the end of the village. The houses come to a stop sudden like, and up ahead, there a clear view in all directions of the hills. Ain’t seen nobody around for quite some time that I been walkin’, but who should I see now but a single legionnaire, sittin’ on a kerbstone overlookin’ the hills and scribblin’ away in his notebook.

Yankee James.

‘We head out tonight,’ I repeat. I shade my eyes and look towards the trenches. ‘Goin’ to be us there soon.’

Them thoughts that been goin’ round and round my head all afternoon, they start up once more and before I know what’s what – ‘We goin’ to make it back, right?’

Soon as I blurt the words, I feel foolish. He goin’ to think I’m ’fraid, is what. ‘’Course we makin’ it back,’ I say quickly, answerin’ my own question. ‘We makin’ it back, and come New Year’s Eve . . .’ My words fall away, hangin’ between us. He don’t say nothin’, just keeps starin’ at them hills.

‘I charge by the page,’ I say jestingly, to change the subject.

‘What?’ He look at me, confused.

I nod at the notebook in his hands. ‘That stuff you always writin’ in there. If it a story, and I’m in it, I charge by the page.’

He grins.

‘So is it? A story?’

‘A journal.’ He hesitate, tappin’ his pen against the leather cover. ‘But there might be material here for more. I’d like to write a novel, based on my experiences perhaps. After we’re done. With the war. After we make it back.’

We both quiet awhile. The evenin’ glow with the special light that be late October’s. It that in-between time, before sunset, after most of the day is done, with bluest sky and a last bit of sun before dusk come rollin’ through. A sudden burst of cloud, not from the sky but risin’ like a mushroom from the trenches on the hillside below. Now I hear it, the explosion. That cloud, it slowly break apart, black-gold in the light.

‘They’re still pickin’ grapes,’ James observe. He ain’t lookin’ at the trenches, but at the hillside opposite, planted with vineyards touched root to stem with evenin’ shine. Only now do I notice them, the last grape pickers of the day. Their skirts swing as they move through the vines. I hear their singin’, real faint, in between the guns and the faraway voices of the officers as they command their men below.

I strain my ears to listen and slowly I begin to make out another, older, softer tune. The quiet song of evenin’, and the woods we come marchin’ through. Of trees turned fire-coloured, of an iron bench in a lonesome park. The rhythm of the stones in an old, old church, so age-soft they feel smooth as a woman’s skin beneath my hands. All the rattle and shake of the war on one hillside, and on the other, the slow hum of the windmill that is still whole, how, nobody can say. It stand tall, untouched by the shells, its long arms circlin’ the evenin’.

I ain’t got the words to describe how I feel, so I don’t say nothin’, but standin’ there, that wounded Tommy heavy on my mind, takin’ in the trenches, and the grape pickers steady singin’, I feel like the world, it been torn clean in half.

James point with his notebook, towards the vines and the windmill and the hills that roll gently away towards Paris. ‘That’s what we’re fightin’ for really, isn’t it?’

The world, it been cut in two. Verzenay, she stand right in the middle, and lookin’ out at the hills on this clear fall day, I finally get just why this war so important. The hills rise around us. Here, these golden vines and there, the roarin’ guns and men, covered in smoke. Don’t know what lies ahead, don’t know what goin’ to happen to us out there. But this much I do know now: it ain’t no grand, slap-up ruckus we headed for but somethin’ much more than that. It like there two sides to the world. On the one side lie everythin’ good and bright and worth our days on this earth; on the other, all that threaten this.

That’s what we fightin’ for, that’s why we here. That’s why this war, this war to end all wars.