remember now what she had felt, thought, then: whether they would ever return or not, if perhaps that anguished day had not been the actual end of home and hope. Nor did she try to remember now, going on to the kitchen; the husband had brought food and fuel for the stove and Marya and the girl were already starting a fire in the stove; again she said to the girl:
‘Why dont you rest?’
‘No,’ the girl said again. ‘Let me be doing something.’ The lamp was lighted now; it was that near to darkness before she noticed that the husband had not yet come in from the stable. She knew at once where he would be: motionless, almost invisible in the faint last of light, looking at his ruined land. This time she approached and touched him.
‘Come now,’ she said. ‘Supper is ready,’ checking him again with her hand at the open lamplit door until he had seen the older sister and the girl moving between the stove and the table. ‘Look at her,’ she said. ‘She has nothing left. She was not even kin to him. She only loved him.’
But he seemed incapable of remembering or grieving over anything but his land; they had eaten the meal and he and she lay again in the familiar bed between the familiar walls beneath the familiar rafters; he had gone to sleep at once though even as she lay rigid and sleepless beside him he flung his head suddenly and muttered, cried, ‘The farm. The land:’ waking himself. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Go back to sleep.’ Because suddenly she knew that he was right. Stefan was gone; all that was over, done, finished, never to be recalled. He had been her brother but she had been his mother too, who knew now that she would have no children of her own and who had raised him from infancy; France, England, America too by now probably, were full of women who had given the lives of their sons to defend their countries and preserve justice and right; who was she to demand uniqueness for grieving? He was right: it was the farm, the land which was immune even to the blast and sear of war. It would take work of course, it might even take years of work, but the four of them were capable of work. More: their palliation and their luck was the work they faced, since work is the only anesthetic to which grief is vulnerable. More still: restoring the land would not only palliate the grief, the minuscule integer of the farm would affirm that he had not died for nothing and that it was not for an outrage that they grieved, but for simple grief: the only alternative to which was nothing, and between grief and nothing only the coward takes nothing.
So she even slept at last, dreamless; so dreamless that she did not know she had been asleep until someone was shaking her. It was the older sister; behind her the girl stood with her worn dirty sleepwalker’s face which might be pretty again with a little soap and water and a week of proper food. It was dawn and then she, Marthe, heard the sound too even before the older sister cried: ‘Listen, Sister!’, the husband waking too, to lie for an instant, then surging upright among the tumbled bedclothing.
‘The guns!’ he cried, ‘the guns!’ the four of them transfixed for another ten or fifteen seconds like a tableau while the uproar of the barrage seemed to be rolling directly toward them; transfixed still even after they began to hear above or beneath the steady roar of explosions, the whistle of the shells passing over the house itself. Then the husband moved. ‘We must get out of here,’ he said, lurching, plunging out of the bed, where he would have fallen if she had not caught and held him up, the four of them in their night clothing running across the room and then out of the house, quitting one roof, one ceiling only to run stumbling on their bare feet beneath that other one filled with thunder and demonic whistling, not realising yet that the barrage was missing the house by two or three hundred metres, the three women following the husband, who seemed to know where he was going.
He did know: a tremendous crater in the field which must have been from a big howitzer, the four of them running, stumbling among the dew-heavy weeds and blood-red poppies, down into the crater, the husband pressing the three women against the wall beneath the lip facing the barrage where they crouched, their heads bowed almost as though in prayer, the husband crying steadily in a voice as thin and constant as a cicada’s: ‘The land. The land. The land.’
That is, all of them except Marthe. She had not even stooped, erect, tall, watching across the lip of the crater the barrage as it missed the house, skirting the house and the farm buildings as neatly and apparently as intentionally as a scythe skirts a rosebush, rolling on eastward across the field in one vast pall of dust filled with red flashes, the dust still hanging in the air after the flashes of the shell-bursts had winked and blinked rapidly on, to disappear beyond the field’s edge like a furious migration of gigantic daylight-haunting fireflies, leaving behind only the thunder of their passing, it too already beginning to diminish.
Then Marthe began to climb out of the crater. She climbed rapid and strong, agile as a goat, kicking backward at the husband as he grasped at the hem of her nightdress and then at her bare feet, up and out of the crater, running strongly through the weeds and poppies, dodging the sparse old craters until she reached the swathe of the barrage, where the three still crouched in the crater could see her actually leaping across and among the thick new ones. Then the field was full of running men—a ragged line of French and American troops which overtook and passed her; they saw one, either an officer or a sergeant, pause and gesticulate at her, his mouth open and soundless with yelling for a moment before he too turned and ran on with the rest of the charge, the three of them out of the crater too now, running and stumbling into the new craters and the fading dust and the fierce and fading stink of cordite.
At first they couldn’t even find the bank. And when they did at last, the beech tree had vanished: no mark, nothing remained to orient by. ‘It was here, Sister!’ the older sister cried, but Marthe didn’t answer, running strongly on, they following until they too saw what she had apparently seen—the splinters and fragments, whole limbs still intact with leaves, scattered for a hundred metres; when they overtook her, she was holding in her hand a shard of the pale new unpainted wood which had been the coffin; she spoke to the husband by name, quite gently:
‘You’ll have to go back and get the shovel.’ But before he could turn, the girl had already passed him, running, frantic yet unerring, deer-light among the craters and what remained of the weeds and the quenchless poppies, getting smaller and smaller yet still running, back toward the house. That was Sunday. When the girl returned with the shovel, still running, they took turns with it, all that day until it was too dark to see. They found a few more shards and fragments of the coffin, but the body itself was gone.
Once more there were twelve of them though this time they were led by a sergeant. The carriage was a special one though it was still third class; the seats had been removed from the forward compartment and on the floor of it rested a new empty military coffin. The thirteen of them had left Paris at midnight and by the time they reached St Mihiel they were already fairly drunk. Because the job, mission, was going to be an unpleasant one, now that peace and victory had really come to western Europe in November (six months after the false armistice in May, that curious week’s holiday which the war had taken which had been so false that they remembered it only as phenomena) and a man, even though still in uniform, might have thought himself free, at least until they started the next one, of yesterday’s cadavers. So they had been issued an extra wine and brandy ration to compensate for this, in charge of the sergeant who was to have doled it out to them at need. But the sergeant, who had not wanted the assignment either, was a dour introvert who had secluded himself in an empty compartment forward with a pornographic magazine as soon as the train left Paris. But, alert for the opportunity, when the sergeant quitted his
