Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

D evon checked his notes, which he kept in a suitably old-fashioned canvas notebook, and continued typing on his laptop. It was always easy if he just started and kept typing for a good solid hour. That way, he didn't have the time or brain energy to doubt his own ideas. Besides, he was on the tail end of the project, so there was no shifting to another thesis now, no changing themes. No going back. Soon the miracle of the grant would come to an end, and his time in the cottage near the little French village of Ornes, where once the brave 44 th Battalion had met its sad fate, would come to an end as well.

He paused to consult the chart that the university's meteorology department had emailed him, though he didn't really need to. He had it memorized, as well as the other five spreadsheets and the fifteen colored charts that indicated the weather over the course of the battle. He'd picked this one battle because his advisor had told him to focus, which would help keep the thesis from going all over the place.

It was slightly amusing to know so much about a single event, but it was a little sad, too, with the futility of it all. The lack of supplies, plus the terrible rain that had remained positioned over the small valley, made life in the trenches a living hell. The men in the battalion had all been young and inexperienced, fighting and dying without having much effect on the overall war, which had ended three years after the battalion had met its fateful demise.

Devon pulled up Google and entered WW1, which the search engine finished for him, as he'd entered the term so many times that he and the search phrase were practically on kissing terms. He didn't even have to capitalize it, though he did, out of respect. Then he clicked on Images and scrolled through what came up.

It was always the same, hundreds and hundreds of black and white images of battlefields. Some of the images were streaked with the dust that was on the camera lens when the photo was taken, others scratched, some sepia toned. Then he typed soldiers , and pressed enter, and sighed as the familiar array of pictures of World War I soldiers displayed before him.

The young men who had fought the war had no idea what they were getting into. At the beginning, it must have seemed like a lark to join a war, as their uncles and grandfathers had. But the brutal conditions in the trenches, the lack of technology to coordinate efforts over vast tracts of land, not to mention the flu pandemic, all of that had been bad enough. To Devon, the worst of it had been the innocence that had been destroyed.

If he really wanted to torture himself, he'd entered American doughboys in the search field, as the nickname would bring up hundreds of pictures of young American soldiers fresh-faced and ready to ship out to war, but his heart wasn't in it this morning. He couldn't bear to see them, not when he was writing about the lack of bullets, the bad food, and the cold front that had lingered over the area for weeks, making the boys cold and damp and miserable.

He was fascinated, however, with how they looked, though it wasn't always good to let himself give in to his obsession. He loved their American faces, sweet and innocent, their eyes full of adventure. Their hair was typically greased back in a jaunty way, as if they assumed that once they got to the front that there'd be more Macassar oil and mirrors available so that they could check their look once they'd applied it .

So he didn't do more searches. Instead, after writing a few hundred more words, he got up and stretched, and thought about making some coffee. The French had the best coffee he'd ever tasted, smooth and silky; even the regular stuff was miles better than it was in the States, though maybe that had to do with the lack of haste in which the French drank it. Though that was only in town, as there was nobody in the cottage to watch him whip up a cup in his French press, and then to stand there drinking it black, hoping it would wake him up so he could finish his stint for the day.

Or maybe he should just go for a walk now? Anything to take him away from the dull task of replicating spreadsheets of data into small, manageable tables. He hated working with tables, and never could remember how to get them to break between rows instead of across them. Besides, it was good to step back from his obsession every now and then so that he wouldn't be so much the mad grad student who couldn't think of anything else other than doughboys or coffee rations, or canvas tents, or canvas puttees, or canvas-covered canteens with lift-the-dot fasteners, which had been invented in the Civil War, or before that—

With a shake of his head, Devon put on a pair of sneakers that would instantly mark him as being an American, but he wasn't going into town, only across the fields. Then he grabbed a sweater and jacket, and after he'd bundled up in layers, went out into the misty afternoon. He could leave the door unlocked, and usually did, unless he was going into the village or would be gone for a while.

Back home, he was lonely, just as he was now, mostly because he was always involved in his work. But also it was because nobody else he knew was doing a master's thesis on how weather affected the battle of the 44 th Battalion outside of the village of Ornes. Nobody from his college days could understand his passion for the subject, let alone take the time to listen. He bored everybody he knew within moments of meeting them, and his loneliness had grown.

At least in France, he could imagine that he was alone because there was nobody around; the grant that he'd received had included a stipend and use of a cottage that had once stood at the edge of the trenches that the 44 th had dug. The cottage was a mile from the village, which had a compact but thorough museum and history center about the war. Most academics, however, preferred to study the area that had been closer to the Western Front. That was where the Battle of the Somme had been fought, and which, incidentally, was closer to Paris, where all the amenities of life could be found, according to one of his very few fellow students.

Devon had been to Paris, of course. You couldn't come to France without going, and it had been wonderful in a lot of ways. In the end, though, Paris was just another city like Denver, big and crowded and noisy. He told himself he was here, in Ornes, because he preferred the quiet countryside, which he did. Except now that the field stretched out before him, the cool rain falling, he couldn't decide whether he was contented or lonely. Perhaps both. So he began to walk.

The air was fresh on his face, and a keen wind kicked up as he clambered up one of the mounds of earth. The edges of the trench had been dug long enough ago that they were softened by time and covered with a carpet of green grass. He was high enough that he could look across at the cemetery, which occupied the flat valley at the edge of the trenches. It was dotted with white crosses, ten rows of twenty, two hundred and one in all. There was the memorial at the far end with an inscription to the over 200 brave men of the 44 th Battalion who'd lost their lives.

Some days, he liked to go all the way around and stand in front of the memorial. He liked to admire the marble carved to look like American and French flags, crossed across their flagpoles. Beneath the flags, the stone was meant to look like mourning swags, but which, especially in the rain, usually looked like cold stone that couldn't possibly reflect, let alone empathize with, the condition of being mortal and dying in a strange country far from home.

Today was one of those days where he didn't think he could bear it. Instead, he faced away from the memorial and looked out over the acre or so of earth, the rippled rows of lush green corduroy where once the battlements of barbed wire and old railroad ties had fortified the trenches and kept out the enemy .

The wind was in his face now, but it whipped the cobwebs from his thoughts and allowed him to just look and see and not take mental notes. To not think about what would happen after he finished his exams, oral and written, to not think about what it would be like to be an associate professor whose days and nights were so focused that he would get paid for feeling bad about American doughboys. He felt bad for all of the young men, even those who had been among the enemy. The war had been a stupid, foolish rush for power, as all wars were, only this one had been tragic beyond belief. Had there been any benefits? Few, very few.

Devon shook himself and strolled along the top of a trench, his hands in his pockets, his sneakers growing damp with each step in the wet grass. With his head down, he tried to imagine that he was a young soldier, perhaps on watch in the middle of the night, or when dawn was just breaking over the edge of the battlefield.

There might be the smell of coffee, or the mournful, faraway sound of voices as the men woke up and prepared for another day of fighting. What would that coffee taste like? Who would his friends be? What was his rank? How did he feel about the shovel he'd used to dig the trenches he and his buddies were now hunkered down in? Where was the shovel, and did he have blisters from using it?

These were the thoughts that really drove him, really interested him. He wanted to know what it had felt like to be a doughboy, to really be one. Only this was the path that led his thesis advisor to roundly scold him for getting distracted from the main point, and which had driven off his more casual friends and the guys he met with on the weekend to go running or to go to the bar.

One friend had actually told him that gay guys weren't supposed to be as geeky as Devon was, which seemed a rather limited view, not to mention rude. For who was to say? Devon liked guys, but he liked burying his nose in a book and spending hours in the library. He also enjoyed walking around, like he was now, pretending he was somebody else.

He stopped and saluted an imaginary commander on watch so that he could be relieved of his duty and go get something to eat. There would only be bully beef and tea, and maybe some sugar, if he were lucky. He'd eat with his pals, and together they would make jokes about how hard the biscuits were, and laugh in the face of danger. Then maybe they'd stack shells so they could be used in battle, firing at the enemy.

In truth, though, Devon's imaginings always turned away from actual fighting and ended with an image of him in a circle of soldiers, one of whom was bending to light a primus stove so they could make some hot tea. That was the moment that always drew him, that huddle of soldiers, their faces lit by some imaginary light as if in a painting, joined together in adversity, strengthened each by the other. That's what he really wanted to be a part of, and what he always felt he'd missed out on.

Which was foolish because the price to pay for that was being involved in the war where the possibility of dying, probably needlessly, was almost one hundred percent.

Devon reached the far end of the field where the trenches ended and dipped down as though fading away as they turned onto a blacktop road that led to the village. The edge of the field was marked by a copse of trees that gave the whole area a solitary feel. Standing there always felt as though he was miles from anywhere, though only a single mile separated Devon from the small village with its shops, and museum, the patisserie that sold mostly sweet things, and the one that sold mostly daily bread, and the string of restaurants, of which there were surprisingly many for such a small place.

He turned and started walking back, trying to resist the impulse to take off his shoes so that he could connect with the earth. Truth be told, his real desire was to touch his skin to a flake of dust that somebody from the war had touched. He kept his thoughts from the idea that he might one day find bone, or blood-darkened earth caked around a bayonet because it had been over a century since the fateful battle, and surely all of that had been dug up by now. But the image was a vivid one, so he took off his sneakers and socks anyway so he could at least stand there and think about the doughboys in this one little moment, and pretend that he was one of them .

Which, as it inevitably did, led him to lie down in the wet grass along the slope of a trench, his arms and legs spread wide to absorb as much of the energy of the place as he could. He also felt that if he held still enough, he could absorb the memory he was sure the earth held, an idea that he'd never shared with anyone because they would not believe him. Worse, they would make fun of him, and while he was a steady sort of person, this one thing, this tiny part of his heart, was one he could not bear to have broken.

With the soft rain falling on his face, he looked up at the sky and thought about being a soldier. He breathed so slowly that he became almost still. This was one of his favorite moments, when the cottage seemed a faraway place that he might have made up in his imagination, and technology was farther away than that. Where the world was only the sky above, the green grass beneath, his breath misting in the cool air, mingling with the breath of soldiers, his beloved American doughboys, from years past.

He ignored the fact that the dampness was soaking into his clothes, and that soon his spine would feel like it had been fused to the earth in one long column of ice. In another minute, he would realize how foolish this was and rise into consciousness. He needed to come back to reality, go back into the cottage, change into dry clothes, and put another two good hours into his thesis. Then he could have something to eat, another cup of coffee, and then he could pull up Netflix and do his very best to watch something other than a movie or documentary about World War I.