I originally wrote this piece back in 2015. I’ve had the privilege of visiting the National WWI Memorial and Museum in Kansas City, MO several times, and I wanted to write a WWI story that captured the solemn and melancholy feeling of exploring that place and its exhibits. I’m also a fan of alternate history and sci-fi, so I brought that angle into the narrative as well. I’m still proud of the results.
My bones rattle me awake. When I open my eyes, I can see the whole room trembling. The stones of the farmhouse wall shake within the confines of their mortar, the old wooden shelves scream and creak, and Grandmère’s little old watercolor has broken from its nail and fallen to the floor once again. Through the hole in the rotting shingles, a dark and immense shape is moving through the gray clouds.
An airship! Scrambling out of bed and not bothering to lace my boots as I pull them on, I run to the window and open the frayed curtains. The panes of glass which the frame once held are long gone, letting me climb onto the sill and dangle my legs over the edge.
I’ve seen so many airships, good and bad, yet I still don’t know what I ought to think. The doughboys who have gone up in them say it is a wonderful feeling. I wonder if it is the same in the bad ones. The ones that fly so high you can hardly see them, which hadn’t come bringing aid to the soldiers and country folk. The ones that gave London and Paris fire in exchange for bullets that did nothing.
This ship is bad: you can tell straight away. It is painted all in black but for the Kaiser’s golden eagle on its side. Four propellers as big as a house on each side and yet another in the back…must be a new model. On its underside, they have printed the year of deployment in dark red. 1929, this year. Fifteenth year of the Great War.
“Alfred!” a voice behind me hisses a moment before its owner pulls me back inside. “Stay down, they’ll see you.”
I wrench myself free and stick out my tongue. “We’ve nothing they would want. And you’re too ugly to be one of their wives.”
Emilie is nearly a lady, nine years older than I. She might still find a nice young man to court her, Grandmère says, if there are any still alive. Soldiers don’t count, for they’re dead men from the moment they enlist. So my sister’s skin has gone ruddy from work, and she bartered her hair to keep us in firewood last. What has grown back looks more like straw, and she holds it from her face in a stubby little braid.
“You know it isn’t about what they want,” she hisses at me as she closes the curtains. “What would the townsfolk do for crops if our earth was scoured?”
“They’ve plenty of earth already,” I answer, shrugging. “I don’t care if it’s a bad ship or not. It’s still the only fun I have around here.”
Emilie puts a finger to her lips and shakes her head. “You mustn’t say such things around Grandmère.…”
All of a sudden we hear a great clatter from downstairs, and an even greater shriek. Emilie gasps as she hurries down the ladder to the first floor of the farmhouse, and I scramble after her.
Grandmère is sitting in her rocking chair by the window, shaking like she has seen Grandpère’s ghost. In her hands is our only lamp, which she grips as she stares up at the ceiling. The little table beside her has been knocked on its side in her haste. When Emilie touches her arm, she is nearly struck.
“No, no,” Emilie whispers, gently patting Grandmère’s arm. “It’s only us. Emilie and Alfred. No Germans here.”
The fire in Grandmère’s clouded eyes begins to die, and her grip on the lamp loosens enough for us to take it away. For a few moments she sits quietly, her hands folded in her lap as though she is ashamed. Then she whispers, “There are always Germans here.”
Grandmère and Emilie can remember the beginning of the war, that warm day six years before I came along when someone shot the archduke. “Back then they all said it was only for fun,” Grandmère tells us. “Something to keep us busy until Noël.” And then she spits.
Grandpère rotted in a trench back when the fighting was still in this corner of France, and Papa’s biplane went down over the Channel before I was born. Grandmère took Emilie and Mama in, thinking they would only stay until I was born. But Mama lost too much blood that night, and even Grandmère could not turn away a newborn and a girl in the dead of winter. So when morning came, she made Emilie help her dig Mama’s grave.
No, Grandmère is not a kind woman. She would not have lived this long if she was. Nor is she cruel, not without cause. “To survive,” she often says, “you must be of use to someone.”
The people in town need supplies: food, weapons, medicine, news from loved ones in the west. The soldiers who pass by on their way to the front lines need a distraction. No one is better than Grandmère at making things go where they are needed. When our field and garden are ripe and our animals have given all they can, she takes what she can carry and goes into town. Those who have nothing can take what they need, but those with wares to trade have to barter with Grandmère. They fix our broken tools;, give her seeds or an animal somewhat less sickly. The priest always seems to have a spare bottle of communion wine in the cellar. Soldiers pay well for a glass or three when they stumble across the farmhouse. They do not ask where it comes from – or why their guns and kits are a little emptier when they wake.
Grandmère presents us with her newest haul as we scrape the last spoonfuls of water-clogged porridge from our bowls. Four boxes of bullets and a bottle of laudanum, and a small cloth pouch that she opens. Twenty German coins spill on to the tabletop. Our eyes gleam at the clattering pieces of metal, worthless as they are.
“The bottle must go to Madame Thierry,” Grandmère mumbles as though trying to remind herself. “The rest goes to the church.” There is already a basket of cans and vegetables sitting next to the front door. “Be back by midday.”
Emilie nods while looking down at the table. “Yes, Grandmère.” She stands up like a machine and starts to clear the table.
“You must take the old path.”
We both stop where we are and look up at her. “You mean it?” I ask, smiling. Emilie looks as pale as a sheet.
“Oui.”
Emilie’s hands begin to shake. “But, Grandmère…”
She raps her cane on the floorboards. “Go.”
“We will, Grandmère.” Emilie finishes picking up the dishes and cleans them slowly, now frowning. “Alfred, get your coat.”
The new path from our farm to the village is long and winds east, past the remains of the old battlefield. The old path is much quicker, and it passes right through what was once the no man's land. When our men still held this part of France, that ground was full of barbed wire and the empty shells of bullets. Grandmère says you could hear the guns from miles and miles away. They buried the dead soldiers here when the war was just starting out, before everyone learned how the Treatment could make them useful again. Emilie says that is all nonsense, and there is nothing buried there but old land mines. She would know: she saw a boy step on one. She won’t tell me what it looked like.
I run ahead of Emilie, searching for things that the soldiers from long ago have dropped. A dead man often loses his helmet, or someone passing through will leave behind his fine knife when he stops to rest, and these we can use. I also run because I know I can make Emilie take my shortcut if I reach the trench first.
We needed a new path to the village because the soldiers dug a trench across our old one. They hadn’t any time to fill it in before they could flee, so it is there still after all these years, cutting across the bottom of the hill. It is ten feet long and just as deep, and it goes nearly to the edge of our village. Grandmere and Emilie don’t like it, but it is quicker than either path.
I run down the hill and jump into the trench. We’ve just had a good rain, so the mud is soft again; I sink up to the tops of my boots in an instant.
“See what good that did you?” Emilie has stopped at the edge of the trench, her face red from running and from yelling curses at my back.
“This is a better way to the village, Emilie.”
“I’m taking the bridge.”
“Then I will meet you on the other side!” I pull my legs out from the mud and begin to walk west, where the village lies.
A moment later, Emilie lands at my side. “I’ll beat you later if Grandmère doesn’t.”
Our men took nothing with them when they left this place. The wooden platforms and roads are still there, and so are the little caves they carved out of the walls to place their beds in. The mud is full of bags carrying old food, or a deck of cards, or a letter that crumbles when you try to read it. Piles of dirt and rocks fell across the path when the walls grew weak and collapsed; that is where you might find a helmet, or a boot, or pieces of bone. By now they are getting harder to see, because the grass and the poppies are growing over them.
This ground doesn’t seem to want any flowers other than poppies. They grow everywhere there. We mostly find them just beyond the trench, but just as often they come out of old footprints or the cracks in the wall.
“Each one of them is a soul, you know,” Grandmère once told us. “That is why there are so many in that place.” In town they call it Poppy Lane.
The far end of the trench is shallow. More men died here, the grown-ups say, because the walls fell down so often. There are certainly more of the dirt piles; Emilie and I have to walk on top of them to go on. Spots of green, red and white catch my eyes. Stuck halfway in the dirt are a scuffed hat and a skull.
Emilie stops. “Do you think he was somebody important?”
“No one liked him if he was,” I answer, pointing out the poppies growing from his eye sockets. I reach down to take the hat, but Emilie shoves my hand away.
“Don’t touch it!” she says.
“Why not? He doesn’t need it anymore. Besides, it’ll sell for something in town. Grandmère takes things from the soldiers all the time.”
“Never from the dead ones.”
“But they aren’t around to care!”
Emilie must have been hoping for more than that, because she frowns and shakes her head. “Keep walking towards town,” she says, handing me her basket of goods. “I’ll follow you later.”
“What are you stopping for?”
“I said go, Alfred.”
She is in the sort of state where she never answers your questions, so I stick my tongue out at her and begin walking again. Emilie stays where she is, watching as though I have to be gone before she can do whatever she stopped to do. When I am far enough away from her, I duck behind a pile of rocks and peer back at her. She is on her knees, covering the skull and hat with dirt until only the poppies are sticking out.
What a waste of a good hat.
The trench grows shallower until it turns back into flat ground, as though the soldiers grew too tired to dig anymore. Emilie grabs me by the wrist and pulls me back towards the main road, muttering about how we never should have strayed from it. It isn’t long before we go over a hill and see the smoking chimneys of Courties on the other side.
Grandmère says Courties has been there just as long as France, if not much longer. She tells us it was once a rich village where many people lived, back when we fought the English instead of the Germans. Emilie says that is all fool’s talk, and that it has always been as miserable as it was then. For once I think Emilie was right.
Twenty little stone houses are clustered in the valley, placed wherever there is room for them. Nearly all of them face the church, which stand above them all as it should. The gray bricks have turned very dark and worn, and the steeple went missing long ago, but it still looks finer than the rest of the village. I wish the Germans would come and blow it away with one of their great machines. Then, I think, I would not have to visit such a dreadful place any longer.
Emilie is much too good at reading my face. “Look cheerful, Alfred,” she says. “Don’t you want Father Duchamp to treat you well?”
“Not really…”
She scowls. “Then at least try and stay quiet this time.”
It is dark inside the church. The curtains have all been drawn shut so the light will not hurt the sick and the wounded. Because it is not Sunday, the church has become part of Madame Thierry’s hospital. The benches have all been pushed aside to make room for cots and blankets. Everything smells of Armagnac brandy and dead flesh. Ladies from town move from cot to cot, checking the bodies that lie there and sometimes covering a face. No one ever speaks to anybody.
The only voices come from the other side of the room, where a lady and a man are whispering to each other. The lady is very small and made of wrinkles, and she wears her white hair without a lock out of place. The man is younger but frightens me much more. Everything about him is gray, like the statue of Mary behind the altar: even his eyes are gray all over, for they see nothing. Yet his head still turns at the sound of Emilie’s step. He expects her at the same time each week. “Mademoiselle Jacquinot? Is that you?”
“Oui.” Emilie lets me go, walks up to him and curtsies. “Bonjour, monsieur. Madame Thierry.” She clasps the handle of the basket and looks down at her dirty boots, so she does not have to look at the old woman.
Grandmère never has anything good to say about Madame Thierry. At first Emilie and I did not understand: were they not the same sort of woman? Grandmère collected food and clothes for the needy, Madame collected medicine. Her grand stone house on the edge of the valley had been a hospital for as long as we could remember. She was doing good, was she not?
Grandmère snorted at us when we asked her that. “Oh, Madame certainly does good,” she said, “if you’re on the right side of her grudges.”
In time we understood what she meant. Madame’s rooms were never quite as full as they could have been. Officers who found their way to Courties from the prison camps were greeted with the softest beds and the closest care – if they were French. All the others were spread out through whatever was left. If they had been given the Treatment, she sent them away and made them rest in the church or her barn. Whenever sickness swept through the village, it was always the poorer families – those who had spoken ill of her in the past – for whom there was not enough time or medicine to spare.
Madame Thierry’s dark eyes glare out at Emilie from her puckered face. “Do you have the laudanum?” she says. Her voice is like stones rubbing against one another.
“Oui, madame.” Emilie reaches into her basket and hands Madame a little brown bottle.
Madame snatches it away, peers at what is inside. “That is all?”
“Grandmère does not withhold from you. You know that.” Emilie looks up at Madame, letting her see her frown.
Madame’s grip on the handle of her cane tightens, and then grows loose once more. She stows the laudanum somewhere in the folds of her black dress.
“Alfred! Come give Father Duchamp your basket!” Emilie says as she handed her own to the old priest. “All the rest is for you.”
I drag myself forward and thrust out my arm, taking care not to look at Father Duchamp. Emilie glares down and gives my ankle a little kick, but the Father did not seem to notice nor care that I am being rude. He takes my basket, smiling at me and putting a hand on my head. “Merci beaucoup, Alfred.”
I step away. He is too close – besides, it is Grandmère he should be thanking, and not me.
“Do you need anything back at the farm, mademoiselle?” Father Duchamp says to Emilie.
“No…” Emilie looks around the room.
“Is something wrong?”
“Is Billy still here, monsieur?”
Father Duchamp’s face turns solemn as he nods, then points to a cot in the corner.
Billy Green is his name. He first came here three years ago, running from a camp the Germans had locked him up in. But no cages could hold him, he said with pride. Not an American. He had bright eyes and a crooked grin. He lived in the church and helped out at our farm sometimes because he wanted to make Emilie smile, and it worked.
One night he vanished. A few months later he came wandering back, and only Emilie could recognize him. He was wearing a German uniform. He never said why. He never said anything at all after that. His skin has gone gray, his eyes dull. His breaths are shallow, as if it hurts to take them. I don’t know why it would; all he does is lie on his cot and stare at the ceiling.
“It’s because he’s trying to remember Heaven,” the ladies who tend to him tell me. “He was given the Treatment too many times, you see.”
I once asked Grandmère what the Treatment was, and what it did to men: she spit on the ground and shook her head. Emilie said that no one besides the scientists really knew what the Treatment was, and that it wouldn’t be proper to speak of what it did.
“Of course you would say that, you’re a girl!” I told her. “The older boys will tell me if I ask them.”
“Go and ask them, then. Don’t come to me when you wish you hadn’t.”
All of the boys who are nearly grown up live outside of town in a hidden camp that the men built. If you are old and strong enough, you go there and learn all about fighting in the war, and if you learn well they sneak you across the lines to go kill Germans. Someday I will go, I hope.
At first the boys told me the Treatment was a government secret; they’d be locked up if they told anyone. When I gave them a few coins and swore I wouldn’t breathe a word of it, then they told me everything they knew.
“When you die out on the front,” they said, “the scientists come and take your body to a laboratory in the city. Then they work on you to make you better.”
“I heard they put a shock through your brain to wake you up!”
“Non, I think it’s a serum they put in your blood.”
“It’s both! I’ve seen it done.”
“But what does it do to you?” I asked.
“You come alive again,” the oldest of the boys whispered. “And when you do, you’re stronger and you don’t have to eat and won’t get sick. Nothing can kill you but a bullet, so you get to do the important jobs once you’re sent back to the front.”
“And what happens if a bullet gets you?”
“They’re supposed to let you be,” one of them said. “But they can do it again if you signed a form. Sometimes they make you sign it. Then they can keep bringing you back as long as they have you in one piece…”
“I hope they do!” said another. “I think it would be grand to fight Germans over and over and see them be frightened of you!”
In the church, Emilie sits down beside the cot and takes Billy Green’s hand, as she has done so often. He does not seem to know she is there; if he does know, he does not care to look at her, and that is not like him at all. Emilie combs his ragged brown hair and straightens his blankets. “Je suis desole,” she whispers. “I am very sorry…”
Why should she feel sorry for him? He came over here to fight in the war because he wanted to, didn’t he? Besides, Grandmère says that tears do no one any good.
“There will be troops marching over the main road,” Father Duchamp tells Emilie as we prepare to leave town. “You will be safer if you go through the forest.”
So we walk north, past the tents on the edge of town and out of the valley. One moment there are no trees, and the next they are everywhere. Emilie says this is one of the last old forests in France. It is all that Courties has for a wall, so they have never cut it down for firewood.
It is dark and quiet inside. The branches and leaves keep out the sun, and the birds have all gone away. There is the cold wind, and the snap of twigs beneath my feet. There are stranger noises as well, the cries of horses and the rumble of wheels.
I want to see what is happening, so I pull myself away from Emilie and try to climb the nearest tree. Emilie pulls me back down just as quick. “Not by yourself, you aren’t.” She makes me hold her basket and goes up first, stepping from one branch to another. I follow when she is too far ahead to stop me.
Emilie is sitting on the tallest branch, a hand keeping the sun from her eyes as she looks about. All of a sudden she stops, and her hand flies to her mouth.
“What is it?” I say as I sit down beside her.
“Hush!” she whispers, and points.
They are cutting their way through the woods and coming towards us; a long line of men dressed in the Kaiser’s gray. There must be hundreds of them! Coming back from the front, I supposed. They look as though they have seen fighting. They hang their heads and bend beneath the packs they carry, and most of them are missing their funny little helmets. Their horses are thin, and the wagons they pull are filled with dead and wounded men. No one says a word, except to pass on an order.
One man happens to glance at our tree and sees the basket I left by its trunk. Then he looks up into the branches, right at me. I want to make a rude gesture at him, but Emilie stops my hand and casts him a wicked look instead. Keep walking, she seems to say with her eyes. You have no business here.
He seems to understand, perhaps even agree; he lowers his head once more and is lost in the gray sea of marchers.
They file on for a few more minutes before the line begins to grow more scattered and comes to an end at last. By now the sun has gone, covered up by dark storm clouds. Fat, cold raindrops pour down on our heads, but Emilie does not move. Instead she waits until the last of the soldiers is far away before she lets me climb down. We start for home once more in silence; with one hand Emilie holds her coat above her head to keep away the rain, and with the other she pulls me along by my wrist. Every few seconds she looks behind us.
All of a sudden she stops, listens, and clutches her basket as though she would like to throw it. “Run when I tell you to,” she whispers.
I look where she was pointing, towards a cluster of trees and bushes. Something tall and thin is in the shadows, moving toward us. Something shaped like a man.
Emilie shoves me down the path and runs after me as the man comes stumbling towards us, groaning and pressing a hand to his side. She grabs a rock and turned around to throw it. The man stops, raises an arm and yells out to us. His voice is that of a German, yet he speaks in broken French. “Please wait!”
It takes us by surprise, and we stop without meaning to. Emilie takes a step forward, the rock still in her hands. “Who’s there?”
The man is able to walk into the light before his legs fail him – it is the German from before, who looked up at us in the tree. Why, he is not a man at all! He is barely older than either of us! Blood is coming out of a wound in his side faster than his dirty bandage and hands can keep it in. He trembles and whimpers, but after a while he crawls toward me and speaks. “I need…your help…”
Emilie takes my hand, and we kneel at the German boy’s side. When she tries to take off the bandage, he pushes her hands away.
“You’ll die if you don’t let me take a look at it,” she says.
“I know.” A bit of color seems to come back into his gray face as he thinks of it. “Please bury me where Commander will not find me. I do not want to come back…not again…”
Something about this feels very wrong. “Shouldn’t we tell someone, Emilie?”
“We aren’t going to.”
“But he’s a German!”
The German boy is looking at me now. There is fear in his eyes. “They will send me back to the front if you tell. This way I shall not hurt you good people any longer. You want to kill a German, yes? Now you can.”
Emilie speaks, because now I cannot. “We will help you. We promise.”
The German boy smiles. “Thank you…” He takes one last shuddering breath. By now he has stopped moving, and his skin has gone all gray once more. The flesh begins to stiffen and crumble, falling away from the bones. I touch his cheek; it comes away in her hand, and then turns to dust.
Emilie stops me as I stand up to run. “You can help, Alfred.”
It is half an hour before we make our way out of the woods. We bury what is left of the German boy under a tree and carve a little cross in the bark. Emilie says a few prayers. I stand as far away as I can without angering her, shifting from one foot to the other. At last she stands, but she does not move away.
I tug on the sleeve of her dress. “Grandmère is waiting for us, Emilie.”
“I want to stay here a moment longer.”
“But the German’s dead, isn’t he?”
Emilie kneels in front of me and takes my hands. “Alfred,” she says, “you must promise never to tell anyone about this, for our sake and his. Do you understand?”
“What if someone finds out?”
“Then they will tell you that you’ve done a very bad thing, and you must remember that they are wrong. Can you do that?”
I don’t know what to say, so I decide to say nothing at all.
Grandmère does not look up when we step through the door of the farmhouse. “Your lunch is cold,” she says
“Pardon, Grandmère,” says Emilie. “We had to wait for the road to clear.”
Grandmère nods. She already knows we would rather not talk of whatever it is, and neither would she. We eat our cold lunch, and then Emilie leaves to work in the garden. I climb up to my room and try to forget the boy in the woods. The day passes us by and ends without another word.
On most evenings I am quick to fall asleep, but tonight there is no such luck. Each time I close my eyes I can only see the German boy’s crumbling face. After a few hours I crawl out of bed and sneak downstairs.
Emilie and Grandmère share a bedroom. Grandmère is already snoring, but Emilie is still awake, reading a book by the light of a nearly melted candle. She looks up and raises here eyebrows as she sees me in the doorway. “What is it, Alfred?”
“May I stay with you a little while?”
Emilie frowns, but closes her book and pats the end of the bed. I sit down, hug my knees and stare at the wall.
“You’re thinking about the German boy.” It is not a question.
“Emilie…” I am not sure how to begin. “…what was it like before all of this?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean before the war. Do you remember much?”
Emilie gets out of bed and sits down beside me. “I remember clear skies and good harvests and warm fires in the winter. I know Mama liked to smile and laugh and Papa worked hard for us. And it was quiet. It was always so quiet.” Now she is staring off at the wall too.
“Do you think the German boy is in Heaven now?”
“I hope he is.”
“What happened to him and to Billy…” I take a breath. “It won’t happen to me, will it?”
Emilie does not say a thing. She only puts her arms around me and cries until the morning comes.