FRANCE 1915
OVER THE CONGEALING TRENCHES of the Western Front, there was a sunset of peach and pink and purple smudged across a canvas of gold. It never failed to amaze me, even after all these centuries, that the elements cared not for human pain. That the sky and its stars paid no heed to the obliterated corpses below. That the birds still sang each morning, no matter how many men had fallen the night before.
Sometimes that sense of insignificance was a comfort. But here, languishing in a rotten maze carved into the ruined earth, I felt nothing but despair.
How simple and beautiful life could have been. How far from that humanity had strayed.
Existence had become barbed wire and stacked sandbags and stepping over the lifeless corpses of your friends. It was reeking mud and unwashed bodies, the metallic tang of gunpowder and blood, the scratch of lice and the perpetual dampness, the echoing patter of bloated rats between ground-shattering drops of random shells. And, when the weather was bad, the sensation that we were at war with the world itself – with rain and wind and sliding earth, with the booming sky and the crimson ground.
I had never known fear – nor boredom – like it.
Much to my parents’ horror, and despite my own inclinations towards pacifism, I’d lied about my age in order to enlist. My reasoning had been two-fold. First, I could not die by enemy bullet, and so I owed it to my country to donate that unique quirk of nature to the greater good. And second, some part of me hoped Arden would not find me in the trenches. Even if they were born in a male body, there was a chance they’d been spawned just over the German border from the tiny village I called home, and if that were the case, we’d be fighting on opposite sides. Reaching an enemy front alone would be nigh on impossible.
No such luck; Arden was male, and French, and he’d followed me here.
Henri had found me on the front line a few months before we turned eighteen, having searched every communication and reserve trench behind me. Despite knowing immediately that it was Arden, that he was here to kill me, I simply didn’t care . I needed him. I needed him in a way that frankly terrified me.
His arrival had felt like all those letters I’d sent home had been replied to at once. What should have been a threat had felt like a comfort, like sugary tea from a warm flask, like my mother brushing a kiss on my forehead as a child.
He had rounded the corner, and I had run to him, following that undeniable tether, pressing my rough face into the crook of his neck. It had taken all the willpower in my arsenal to prevent the tears spilling on to his starched collar.
‘Do you want to go now?’ he had whispered softly.
Do you want it to be over? Will death be a relief?
Though it was tempting, I had shaken my head. ‘No. I just want you. At least for a while.’
And so, between the bouts of fighting, we talked, and we held each other, and it was awful and terrible but less so for his presence. He told me of the life he had left behind in Lille, his father’s woodworking shop, his mother’s atrocious cooking, his twin brother’s untimely death. And I told him of my life, of my farmer parents and of Anais Lamunière, of my three sisters and of the ramshackle cottage we called home. I knew I would never return there, but the talking helped anyway.
A few weeks later, beneath the oblivious sunset, Henri and I sat side by side in our horizon-blue uniforms, booted feet kicked out over the duckboards, pinkie fingers entwined. We’d sustained several days of harsh enemy fire. Big losses and bigger grief. We’d been due to rotate back to the support trenches earlier that morning, but had been held on the front for strategic reasons we were not privy to. The soldiers around us were subdued with exhaustion, and mourning, and a maelstrom of other darknesses.
‘Can you find anything poetic to say about any of this?’ I muttered, stomach cramping with hunger, skin shrivelled with cold and wet. I couldn’t stop staring at a clumsy sculpture of a rose made from spent shells, which had been the pet project of Capitaine Dupont. He’d died a few days after its completion, on a fruitless reconnaissance mission with four of my closest camarades.
Henri, or Arden, rested his head against the wooden base of the fire step, gazing up at the watercolour sky. ‘A few things.’
‘Do share.’
‘The metaphors are half baked right now. Pencil sketches at best.’
I scoffed. ‘We’ll be dead before they become oil paintings.’
His eyes fluttered shut, dark lashes pressing into crescents. ‘This is fucking awful. That’s all I can really say.’
There was a single gunshot somewhere in the middle distance, and I flinched instinctively. Arden unravelled his pinkie from mine and laid his palm over my hand, squeezing tight.
I studied the length of my filthy, too-short trousers, wishing I could prise them off. As someone who had always taken great pleasure in fine clothing – in the creativity and self-expression fashion afforded – there was something uniquely dehumanizing about wearing a military uniform.
Like I was one of many. Like I was entirely expendable.
‘Your words have always brought me solace, you know,’ I whispered, so that the others wouldn’t hear. ‘It’s one of the things I love most about you. You have the soul of a poet.’
Suffering broke over his face like a storm, and I couldn’t quite make sense of why that hurt him to hear.
‘What else?’ he muttered, hoarse.
‘Hmm?’
‘What else do you love? It’s never quite made sense to me.’
‘Nor me,’ I admitted, and it was the truth. There was an existential pull between us, yes, but I also just loved Arden. Painfully, normally, humanly. ‘I guess … it’s not just the surface-level stuff. You’re darkly funny and fiercely bright. You believe yourself a villain, but still create pockets of goodness inside your life. And … I can’t explain it. It’s like you have a depth that other people lack. Maybe it’s who you are, or maybe it’s how long we’ve lived. There’s a … texture? A richness? To your heart. It fascinates me. I want to peel back the layers until I find your centre.’
I swallowed hard, but found I couldn’t stop now that I’d started. ‘You see me to my very core. I know that to be true. Nobody has ever known me, or will ever know me, like you do. That’s such an intimate thing. You can’t help but be drawn to someone who understands your every word, your every step, your every heartbeat. And I love the connection you have to nature. Your roots are buried so deep in the earth. When I see a gnarled tree branch or a beautiful lake, I think of you. It makes it feel like you’re all around me, in every twig and leaf, in every butterfly and every bramble.’
Something on his face relaxed, as though my words had coaxed free a knot in his muscles. ‘“The Poetry of earth is never dead.”’
‘See? A poet’s soul.’
He frowned disparagingly. ‘That’s Keats, you heathen.’
I rested my head on his shoulder, resisting the urge to sink into him entirely. ‘Sometimes I fantasize about growing old together in a little cottage by the sea. You could spend your days tending the garden, and I could embroider elaborate patchwork blankets and knit cardigans for our children, or tailor expensive suits for the upper echelons of high society, and then we could come together over bowls of soup, and you could share your poignant observations about the ocean.’
Arden’s body stilled beneath my cheek. ‘You think about that stuff?’
‘You don’t?’
‘No. It hurts too much, because it can never be.’ His voice was coarse, quiet, though nobody was really listening to us anyway. ‘But for what it’s worth, that’s what I love about you. It’s not just how kind you are, or how deeply, stupidly brave. It’s how you still allow your heart to be tender. How you never lose faith in humanity.’ He wrapped his arm round my shoulders. ‘Do you know how powerful that is? Do you know how rare you are, in a world where the sky rains fire?’
‘I don’t know about that.’ I grimaced as a rat scuttled through the trench, blood on its whiskers from whatever corpse it had gorged on. ‘Right now my faith in humanity is stretched a little too far.’
‘What’s your secret, Evelyn? How does the candle of hope in your chest never burn down to the wick?’
Gazing up at the phoenix sky, I searched myself for the answer, like running my fingers over an ancient map. ‘I think I understood a long time ago that big joy and small joy are the same. It sounds trite, but it’s true. Last year I won a major tennis tournament and brought home a huge cash prize for my family. I would’ve been on my way to the Championnat de France, if it weren’t for the war. Big joy. Really, really big joy.
‘But that victory felt no different to curling up in an old armchair with a faded blanket and reading my little sister a bedtime story. It felt no different to a perfect pot of coffee, or a warm croissant fresh from the bakery. And so even when there’s no big joy – even when it feels like we’ll never leave this trench alive – there’s still the small joy. A sunset, a flask of tea. Your hand in mine.’
Arden let this idea wash over him. ‘I thought I was supposed to be the poet.’ A sigh, long and low. ‘Though, without you, there would be no poetry. I would have only the harsh lens of my own worldview. I wouldn’t be able to see the beauty of life, because I only see it through your eyes. Muse is too simple a word for what you are to me.’
My mouth twisted into a rueful smile. ‘And yet, life after life, you take away the possibility of the cottage by the sea.’
Silence swelled between us at the mention of our inevitable fate. ‘Please know that what I do, it is for us, for this.’ He spoke gently, as though his proclamations might break me. ‘If I didn’t, the hell we’d go through … Please trust me. Do you trust me?’
A complicated question. ‘No, but also yes. I don’t know, Arden.’
His arms tightened around me. ‘You have faith in all of humanity. You have faith in love. Please, have faith in me . I do this to protect you. Do you understand that? That I would lay my body over yours, war after war after war, life after life after life?’
I nodded numbly, stunned by his sudden outpouring. He pressed his lips to the top of my head, not caring who saw. It was a less uncommon sight than one might have thought, in trenches like these. Play-wrestles that went on a few moments too long. Hands on shoulders and hands on hands. Words of comfort turned words of affection. The pent-up emotions, the pent-up drive , the despair and the kinship and the vulnerability. It was a wild furnace in which romantic love was often forged and, as the war raged on, many were becoming more brazen about it.
When he spoke again, it was so softly into my ear that I shivered. ‘I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.’
The words sent a ripple of familiarity through me, a ghost of a memory. The sensation that our love was a palimpsest, written over and over again so that I could no longer read the original.
I lifted a dirt-smeared hand to his jaw, pulling his mouth towards mine. Our lips brushed together, light as a breeze. ‘I love you.’ Another kiss, so tender I thought I might unravel. ‘And I have loved you.’ The third kiss was deeper, richer, shaking loose a sigh from Arden. ‘And I will love you.’
Then artillery blew the watercolour sky apart.
Fear detonated through the trenches as bodies scrambled to their feet. At the crack of enemy fire, there was always an initial jolt of confusion, of disorientation, of remembering where you were and what you had to do. Of willing your weakened body into horrible action. Preparing yourself to kill or be killed.
Arden’s eyes met mine in a wordless question: Is it time to go yet?
I shook my head, gesturing around at the men who had become my brothers. Pierre and his woeful shanty-singing, Antoine and his vicious nightmares. Yannick, the way he comforted Antoine in the damp dugouts we called our bedrooms. I couldn’t desert them now, couldn’t take the coward’s death when it would leave them without support.
Boots stomped up the fire steps beside us. Grim-faced men – boys, really – swarmed the trench mortars, haphazardly stuffing them with projectiles, everything off-kilter, uncoordinated, out of sync.
None of us were made for this.
I grabbed my rifle and climbed to my feet, but as I turned I saw a female figure striding towards us.
Sheets of white hair fell around her cool face, black nails curling away from her fingers like withered fossils. She was dressed in the same horizon-blue uniform, a bloodied bayonet notched in the hollow of her shoulder.
At first I thought she was a mirage. There were no women on the front line, and certainly none so casual and unaffected as this figure.
Was she a ghost? An angel come to save us?
‘This has gone on long enough,’ she rasped in our direction, eyes flitting between Arden and me.
A scintilla of understanding flared in my mind, but it was darting, elusive. I only knew that it had something to do with our twisted fates. I knew it in my very marrow.
And I also … I knew her .
She meant something to me, something deep and awful and complex.
Every inch of my skin speckled with goosebumps.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked distantly, ears roaring, suddenly frantic with the need to understand , to finally understand this thing that had evaded me for so many centuries. ‘Who are you?’
And why do I want to run to you?
But Arden had pulled the pin on a grenade, striking the percussion cap on its base before lobbing it at the white-haired woman.
‘No,’ I breathed, running towards the woman, towards the grenade, unwilling to lose this opportunity to know at last.
‘ Evelyn ,’ Arden bellowed, and his hands grabbed at my waist, trying to haul me back from the impending blast.
Determination cracked through my mind as though lit by gunpowder. I shook him free and reached the cruel-faced woman, dropping my rifle and shaking her by the sharp shoulders. ‘Who are you?’
Her lips tugged wide into a deranged grin.
The grenade detonated, and I was torn apart.
For a moment, there was only blinding, deafening pain.
The kind of pain that untethered me from the world, that separated me from all my other senses until I existed only inside of it.
It was all-consuming, unrelenting. It should not have been possible, pain like that.
It was larger than me, than the war, than the world.
Death found me not a moment too soon.