Chapter XVII
XVII
and Goodspeed sounds angry when he asks, to anyone, “Did you see what she did?” and Popkin grunts, “We didn’t see nothing,” but Goodspeed insists, “She flew them right up out of there and saved them,” and Popkin growls, “That was the shell that blew them,” and Veck, astonished or terrified, asserts, “The shell hit after they flew out,” and Popkin snarls, a promise that if the Negro doesn’t adhere to the lummox’s version, there’s going to be fists,
and it’s an inauspicious day when the voice of reason is Vincent the Vulture, but that’s who turns to Bagger and asks, “Who is she?,” forcing Bagger to find his voice cringed way down in his chest, as if fearful any reply might sink the supernatural ship that carried them to safety better than the Lusitania, and he ekes out, “She’s him,” hogwash when he hears it, so he clarifies, “I mean, she’s it,” no better, so he coughs mud and lets rain soothe the burn, and says, “She’s the shrieker,”
and on cue the woman’s lashes flutter apart, soft acorn eyes on Bagger, a look he can’t hold, there’s a burn of inadequacy he never felt under the glares of Aquila or Hollis or Chester or even Reis, but thankfully her eyes slide to Goodspeed, then Popkin, then Veck, all three of whom shift enough for Bagger to think they feel the same, like sandlot kids who just hit a baseball through Babe Ruth’s window, mortification wrapped in the desperate fantasy the Babe might chuck them on the chin and say, “Nice hit,”
and the woman, though, says nothing, her gentle exhale tousling Arno’s hair, and Veck asks, “Can she talk?,” and Goodspeed clears his throat and asks, “Ma’am, can you talk?
,” to which Popkin snorts, “She don’t speak Yank, dummy, this here’s France,” and Veck asks, “Any of you speak French?,” and six eyes land on Bagger, everyone’s heard him belt out a frog phrase now and then, though he only does it to enervate soldiers who associate the language with pain, plus all he knows are erotic vulgarities taught phonetically by Marie-Louise, Léche moi la chatte, Baise-moi par derrière, Suce moi la bite, and the thought of repeating any of that to this woman makes him blush like he hasn’t since boyhood,
and this makes Bagger think harder, he supposes he’s picked up a few scraps, and he licks lips still salty with another man’s blood and says, “Bonjour,” and then, after some thought, “Commen ca va?,” to which the woman only blinks, and why not, it’s the kind of casual question a waiter poses of a diner, insane to ask amid the deadly drama of a trench, so he follows it up with the only other question he knows, “Comment vous appelez-vous,”
and this gets a reaction, the woman smiles, the slightest breeze across pale pink lips, and Bagger senses she’s amused by the question, which embarrasses him, so he refocuses on Arno, who looks five years old, the rain on his face as soft as a mother’s hair, and Bagger has the strange urge to join them in the mud, curl around them both, sleep off the rest of the war,
and the dream is punctured by Popkin, “What are we supposed to do with her?,” Bagger’s back to the distasteful present, where he’s unable to cloak his hatred for Popkin, forget French, conflict’s the only language the lummox ever mastered, but Popkin answers his own question, “Reis said take care of her,” and the rain goes twice as cold as Bagger feels the need for a long, heavy axe to plant in the bastard’s face, he could warm his palms in the hot, spurting blood,
and before he can find an axe-like object, Veck drops to his knees, the P3 slugging noisily on his back, a pose of prayer, and whispers, “You all know what this is,” audible despite the shrill of German arms, and Bagger feels that he does know, yet still wants to be told, and Veck grimaces, pained by their ignorance, and says, “Hasn’t any of you heard of the Angel of Mons? ,”
and that’s right, Bagger has heard of it, even before being railroaded into the infantry, and he’s always given the tale the contempt he gives all superstitious bunk dating back to Jesus walking on the water, but having been inexplicably saved from death, the door long shut to him suffers a crack, and Bagger peeks through the crack at the honeyed wonders,
and the tale every soldier’s heard goes like this, it’s August 1914, the war still revealing itself as a world ender, and the British II Corps, with their .
303 Enfields, tries to hold a canal line in the Belgian city of Mons against the Schlieffen Plan assault of a German Army powered by artillery and esprit de corps, a futile task for Tommy until a towering angel in rippling raiments astride a white steed, hair fiery gold under a silver helmet, a flaming sword dipped in light divine, forbids the advance of a single Jerry for a whole day, for God, you see, is on the side of the Allies, and though other tales of angelic intervention followed, Joan of Arc over here, Saint Michael over there, it’s the Angel of Mons to whom the devout pray for another miracle,
and all of Bagger’s long-dead beliefs come back up for grabs, seedlings of credulity, conviction, fidelity, and allegiance, the nooses that once swung from those branches gone, and this timid renaissance of faith makes him gasp, feels like being a kid again, how snuggly, safe, and smug it feels to believe in something bigger,
and Bagger fights it, he’s taught himself to deny anything he can’t touch, feel, and hide up his sleeve, so he says, “This is no Mons,” and it’s true, from what he’s gleaned, Mons was a critical juncture, while Bois de Fays is but one negligible point in the ugly sweep of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, and if angels existed, there’s no reason one would come here,
and Veck declares, “No, it needed to be here,” and bows his head, the hysteria that lives in his shoulders shaking out through his limbs, “First Lieutenant McNabb said three hundred thousand French died in these trenches,” and the glances of Goodspeed and Popkin signal they translate Veck’s message the same as Bagger, that the whole Woevre plateau was a cemetery long before the Butcher Birds arrived,
and it had been good old dad who’d preached how angels, God’s soldiers, always went where blood was spilled, look at the Babylonian cuneiforms depicting winged lions, human-headed bulls, scorpion people, or their biblical equivalents, the cherubim, who guard gateways between realms breached by indiscriminate slaughter, this forest might always have been such a gateway, Bois de Fays means Faerie Woods, after all, and a woodland doesn’t get that name without centuries of arcane episodes,
and Goodspeed’s the first to puncture the shock, he steps up next to Veck, eyes bright behind pince-nez, his swamp energy enough to heat the chilly hole, and nods at the orange ribbon of a shell lobbed to the east, and says, “Those guns, there’s never been anything like them, ever in history, the Big Berthas, the Sea Bags, the Jack Johnsons,”
and Veck adds, “The Paris Gun,” and no one says shit to that, they’ve all heard of the Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz, a barge-sized weapon with a three-story barrel that months ago pummeled Paris with two-hundred-plus-pound shells from seventy-five fucking miles away, a distance so vast the Squareheads had to factor Earth’s curvature into their trajectory math, or so rumor had it,
and Goodspeed’s theory has a logic Bagger can’t quip aside, for if you were to forge new kinds of weapons, and those weapons flew farther and sailed higher than anything before them, it stood to reason the payloads might strike beings hovering at altitudes that, prior to the Great War, had been secure, and that one of these beings might be a goddamned angel,