At the Edge of Summer

I had Chaffre in my section, and thank God for that. Because, when we ended up at Ferme de Brindeau, four months after the war began, I needed someone by my side.

We’d been moving closer to Enété for weeks, I knew that, but when we went into the woods and down the rise to the entrance of the caves, I almost didn’t recognize it as the place I used to know. The ground where I stood with eyes squeezed shut while Clare lost herself inside, it was churned up into mud from boots and hooves. The little spot where I’d spread leaves to sit and draw, horses were tied. It looked like any other army camp, any other place for a few thousand men to unshoulder their packs and wring out their socks. It didn’t look like a fairy woods. It didn’t look like the spot I’d once thought ours.

And, on the ground above, where I was used to seeing the backs of the farm buildings, white in the green of the woods, was rubble. Surely this wasn’t the right spot. The constantly gray sky, the shell smoke obscuring the sun, a guy could get turned around. I must only think I was so near to Mille Mots.

But then I saw the crooked tree over the cave entrance, the tree Clare leaned against when she begged me not to ignore her. I knew I was in the right spot.

“You holding up there, old man?” Chaffre nudged me on. I hadn’t realized that I’d stopped. “You look like you swallowed a cat.”

“You made that up, didn’t you?” I convinced my feet to start moving again. “Who swallows cats?”

He shrugged. “I think it works.”

I briefly wondered where the farmer had gone, the farmer I’d never actually met, but after all of Maman’s admonitions to stay off his property, imagined as stern Mr. McGregor from Peter Rabbit. I didn’t know if he’d been Brindeau or if the name had been around longer than us all.

“Keep moving, you bastard.” Chaffre poked me with the butt of his Lebel. “Or we’ll all be sleeping out here.”

But it wasn’t just the memories suddenly flooding back that slowed my steps. Of course, it was that goddamned cave.

We didn’t go in the front entrance that Clare would use when she wanted to be alone in the dark for a moment. We went around to the other side, through a narrow doorway, and down a set of chipped, uneven steps that led farther down into the gloom. I froze. On the stairs, my hand on the damp wall, I wouldn’t go another step. It was only Chaffre’s hand on my back that nudged me down.

I ducked under a low-hanging lintel. “Did it have to be caves? Did it have to be these caves?”

“Medieval quarries. Not caves. Stones were cut out of here by hand for the cathedrals.” Chaffre lifted his hand, but he stayed close. “Have you always been this tall?”

“Have you always been this talkative?”

“Yes.”

“I must’ve been desperate that night in the canteen.”

“Stop closing your eyes. You’re going to walk into a wall and the whole cave will collapse.”

“Quarry.” My eyes flew open. “It will?”

He grinned. “Joking. Really, though. Look around. You, of all people, should appreciate this.” My gaze flicked up to the ceiling, wondering if it really would fall in on me. “Not there,” Chaffre said. “The walls.”

I caught a hint of color and my breathing slowed. Tucked in the shadows was a carving. An altar hewed straight from the limestone and tinted red and yellow. Dieu, guardez-nous arched over the top in careful, blackened letters. God keep us safe. Beneath, a crucifix in relief.

“Down here?” I asked Chaffre in a whisper. Around me, soldiers’ chatter had turned hushed. “What are they from?”

“Those who were here before, it seems.” He reached out and ran a finger along the bottom of the altar, at the regimental number and the 1914. “So they can forget for a while.”

“Forget what?” I asked, but the line was already moving.

“What do you think?”

Chaffre and I had had our baptism of fire on the Marne. We stuck together and tried not to look too wild-eyed, for the other’s sake. Stumbling forward, with bayonets fixed, we listened to the different shells, timing how long until they hit the ground. Chaffre was as nervous as a clam out there, ducking every time he heard a squeal tearing across the sky, no matter how far away. When a shell finally did come down nearby, it didn’t make a sound. Or, if it did, my ears were deadened to the noise, to the whines and the screams and the raps. There was a streak of smoke and then the ground in front of us sprayed up. My insides turned to ice-cold liquid. It took a few seconds to realize that Chaffre’d been hit. Just a clod of dirt, but the size of an onion, and he went down.

I was terrified of the next shell, so I bent to get an arm under each of his. My pack, half as heavy as I was, threatened to tip me straight over on him, so I shed it. Murmuring, “Here now, you bastard,” I hoisted him up and we stumbled back the way we’d come. I was fined for leaving my pack out there, and when I finally retrieved it, found nothing left in it but my can opener and a dry washcloth. All of my socks and tinned meat and old letters from Clare that I couldn’t leave behind were gone. At least I still had that copy of Tales of Passed Times, the one I bought for Clare all those years ago. I carried it in my pocket the way others carried Bibles. With Maman’s rose pressed dry between the pages, it was all the comfort I needed.

Chaffre was fine, apart from a blinding headache for a few days. I squatted by his hospital cot and whispered thanks that his rescue had kept me from thinking too hard about our baptism. We could both count ourselves through with it. With that initial clutch of fear over, we could count ourselves real soldiers.

Both sides settled into trenches, first shallow temporary affairs, then dug deeper, shored up, reinforced with duckboard and dugouts. If I’d been a lesser man, I’d have felt like crying. These were all the signs of a siege. I’d studied history for too many years to think that anyone ever came out of a siege a winner.

By the time we got to the Aisne, our uniforms were stiff with dried mud, that pale, chalky Picardy mud that clings to everything and refuses to wash off. That mud was in everything we ate, everything we drank, everything we touched. We no longer jumped at barrages or flinched at the light from a star shell. Chaffre carried a pocket shrine, a little case with a lead statue of the Virgin Mary. These days he kept her right in his pocket, rubbing in each prayer until her face was worn smooth. I touched the ribbon at my wrist and said my prayers to Maman.

Chaffre’s face had lost some of its roundness, his cheeks some of their pinkness. All of us were weathered like the walls of the trenches, beaten by wind and rain and countless sleepless nights. Our uniforms were patched, stained, soaked through with the smell of war. We were tougher, too. Fear was replaced by weariness. It left Chaffre hard-eyed, me numb.

He took to watching my face more carefully, and I wondered if I’d aged more than he had. “What is it?” I finally asked one morning, as we slouched after a night raid. “Have I grown horns? Because I bayoneted a man who looked like my papa. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had horns.”

He quickly passed a hand over his face, wiped away whatever expression he’d let slip, and pushed out a grin. “Horns would be an improvement on that god-awful mug of yours.”

I ignored him and pillowed my pack beneath my head. Sitting up against a trench wall, I’d sleep if given a half-quiet ninety seconds.

Chaffre spoke once more, softly. “You just look all done with this, Crépet.”

Of course I was. I’d been done with this the moment the mobilization orders went up all over Paris. Without opening my eyes, I said, “Aren’t we all?”

Now we were here, for a few days’ rest in these caves beneath the battlefields. Poilus crouched around smoky fires along the ledges, warming tins of clumpy stew. The fires were more smoke than flame, but they bit the chill. The caves were dry and far enough beneath the ground that the sounds of war were muted. Instead we heard hushed voices, the snorts and nickers of the horses, the occasional echoed snatches of song. And, of course, the clank of hammer upon chisel and chisel upon stone. The cave was more than a barrack or a stable or a church. It was a refuge.

“Will you make one?” Chaffre asked as I stopped to run a hand over a picture of Marianne, Goddess of Liberty. It was carved straight into a stone pillar, tendrils of her hair wrapping around the plinth.

“Do you see how beautiful all this is?” I traced the edges of the carving with the side of my palm. “Not me.”

“You always talk about how you come from a long line of artists.”

And one of them a sculptor. Though Maman hadn’t carved in years, I still remembered the shards of stone beneath my feet, the magic of watching a face appear in solid stone beneath her chisel.

I wrote to Maman, dutifully. I reminisced, I complained about the food, I quoted bits from her favorite poems. The sort of letters we all sent home. She wrote back cheery notes of her own. This year her roses had lasted long into the fall. Marthe had a new recipe for galette that used very little butter. Oh, and did she tell me about the poor Belgian family she’d taken in?

But to Clare, I couldn’t dissemble like that. The last letter I sent, the day the war began, fear and uncertainty made me write things I’d only ever thought. I didn’t write to her again after that. I didn’t know what to say. These battles, they were changing me from the boy under the chestnut tree to a grim-faced soldier. What was there to write? How could I tell her that the world we thought was so beautiful was rotten to the core?

And so when I sat back in the caves during that week of rest, reading, watching the artists at work, trying not to look at the ceiling, and Chaffre asked, “Will you make one?” all I could say was no. The soldiers who spent one day killing and the next carving altars and figures and spreading trees, they were sorted. They could separate the human and the machine within all of us. I wasn’t there yet.

“Crépet, you think too much.” Chaffre passed me a pair of sardines on the tip of his knife. “It’s much simpler than that.”

I swallowed the oily little fish and washed them down with a swig of sour wine.

“You’ve heard of that Austrian fellow, right?”

“Was he that sniper?”

“Not here, in Vienna.” He waved his hand and narrowly missed impaling me. “The doctor who asks people about their dreams and their childhood and then discovers that the root of all their problems is that they’re in love with their own mothers.”

“I seem to have missed that at school.”

“These poor saps here, we don’t need to ask them their dreams. The chap who carved the regimental insignia, he’s hoping to be remembered a hero. The one who carved la belle Marianne, so noble and stately, well, he’s missing his mother. Note that the one over there”—he pointed to a soldier drawing the curves of a nude woman with lamp black—“misses an altogether different sort of woman.”

“And those who carved the altar?” That altar chipped out at the foot of the stairs, that crucifix carved above and a low kneeler beneath. On rainy days, when the stones of the caves seeped, Jesus wept.

“Those who’ve lost their faith,” Chaffre said softly. “And those who are trying to find it again.”

“Chaffre, what would you carve?” I finally asked.

“Hand me a chisel, and I’m as likely to gouge out my left eye as the stone wall.” He tapped his chin. “My dog, Macquart. Most loyal bastard you’ll ever meet. My mother said he’s been sleeping at the foot of my bed since I left.” He untied the canteen at his waist that held his daily ration of pinard. “Or maybe a decent glass of wine.”

“You wouldn’t know a decent glass of wine if it crawled in bed with you.”

His eyes twinkled above the rim of the canteen as he emptied it.

A lanky soldier, cap pulled low over his eyes, reached over and smacked the canteen from Chaffre’s hands as he walked past. I flinched. It rattled off down the tunnel.

He grit his teeth until the other poilu passed. “Or maybe Joyeuse.” Charlemagne’s legendary sword. “Would I be stronger?”

With bent head, I went to retrieve his canteen. You are, I wanted to say to him. Sometimes I think you’re stronger than me. But I passed it to him with a nudge to the shoulder. “The strongest person I ever knew was a girl. I don’t doubt that she could attack any man who looked at her sideways.”

He looked wistful. “Clare?”

My smile slipped.

“And you?” Candlelight flickered on his face. “What would you carve?”

“Summer,” I simply said. The one summer when the world was perfect. When I seemed right on the edge of the future. The one summer before things began slowly crumbling beneath my feet. “I’d carve summer.”