She came through in her frilled bed-cap and nightdress, carrying a candle. She blew out the candle and slipped under the bedclothes and took Centaine in her arms, crooning to her and holding her until at last she slept.
At dawn Centaine was on the knoll again, and the days and weeks repeated themselves, so that she felt trapped and hopeless in the routine of despair. There were only small variations from this routine: a dozen new SESas in the squadron flights, still painted in factory drab, and flown by pilots whose every manoeuvre proclaimed even to Centaine that they were new chums, while the numbers of the brightly painted machines that she knew dwindled at each return. The columns of men and equipment and guns moving u p the main road below the chateau became denser each day, and there was a building current of anxiety and tension that infected even the three of them in the chateau.
Any day now, the comte kept repeating, it's going to begin. You see if I'm wrong. Then one morning the little American circled back over where Centaine waited on the hillock and he leaned far out of the open cockpit and let something drop. It was a small package, with a long bright ribbon attached to it as a marker. it fell beyond the crest of the hillock and Centaine urged Nuage down the slope and found the ribbon dangling in the hedgerow at the bottom. She reached up and disentangled it from the thorns, and when Hank circled back again, she held it up to show him that she had retrieved it, and he saluted her and climbed away towards the ridges.
In the privacy of her room Centaine opened the package. It contained a pair of embroidered RFC wings and a medal in its red leather case. She stroked the lustrous silk from which the silver cross was suspended, and then turned it over to find the date and Michael's name and rank engraved upon it. The third item, in a buff envelope, was a photograph. It showed the squadron aircraft drawn up in a wide semi-circle, wingtip to wingtip, in front of the hangars at Bertangles, and in the foreground the pilots stood in a group and grinned self-consciously at the photographer. The mad Scotsman, Andrew, stood beside Michael, barely reaching to his shoulder, while Michael had his cap on the back of his head and his hands in his pockets. He looked so debonair and carefree that Centaine's heart squeezed until she felt she was suffocating.
She placed the photograph in the same silver frame as that of her mother, and kept it beside her bed. The medal and the RFC wings she placed in her jewelbox with her other treasures.
Then every afternoon Centaine spent an hour in the churchyard. She paved the raw grave with red bricks that she had found behind the toolshed.
Only until we can find a mason, Michel, she explained to him as she worked on her hands and knees, and she scoured the fields and the forest of wild flowers to bring to him.
In the evenings she played the Aida recording and pored over that page of her atlas that depicted the horse- headshaped continent of Africa, and the vast red expanses of empire that were its predominant coloration, or she read aloud from the English books, Kipling and Bernard Shaw, that she had retrieved from her mother's upstairs bedroom, while the comte listened attentively and corrected her pronounciation. None of them mentioned Michael, but they were all aware of him every minute; he seemed to be part of the atlas and the English books and the jubilant strains of Ai'da.
When at last Centaine was certain she was utterly exhausted, she would kiss her father and go to her room.
However, as soon as she blew out the candle, her grief would overwhelm her once again, and within minutes the door would open softly and Anna would come to take her in her arms, and the whole cycle would begin again.
The comte broke in. He hammered on Centaine's bed room door, awakening them in those dark and early hours of the morning when all human energy is at its lowest ebb.
What is it? Anna called sleepily. Come! the comte shouted back. Come and see. With gowns hastily thrown over their nightclothes, they followed him through the kitchens and out into the paved yard. There they stopped and stared up at the eastern sky in wonder, for although there was no moon, it glowed with a strange wavering orange light as though somewhere below the horizon Vulcan had thrown open the door to the furnace of the gods.
Listen! commanded the comte, and they heard the sussuration upon the light breeze, and it seemed that the earth beneath their feet trembled to the force of that distant conflagration.
It has begun, he said, and only then did they realize that this was the opening barrage of the great new Allied offensive upon the Western Front.
They sat up the rest of that night in the kitchen, drinking pots of black coffee, and every little while trooping out again into the yard to watch the fiery display as though it were some astronomical phenomenon.
The comte was exultant as he described to them what was taking place. This is the saturation barrage which will flatten the barbed wire and destroy the enemy trenches. The boche will be annihilated, he pointed to the fiery sky, who could withstand that! The thousands of artillery batteries were each firing on a front of a hundred yards, and over the next seven days and nights they never ceased. The sheer weight of metal which they hurled on to the German lines obliterated the trench work and parapets, and ploughed and reploughed the earth.
The comte was aflame with warlike and patriotic ardour. You are living in history. You are witness to one of the great battles of the ages, But for Centaine and Anna, seven days and seven nights was too long a time; the first amazement soon turned to apathy and disinterest. They went about the daily life of the chAteau, no longer heeding the distant bombardment, and at night slept through the pyrotechnics and the comte's summonses to Come and watch! Then on the seventh morning, while they were at breakfast, even they were aware of the change in the sound and intensity of the guns.
The comte sprang up from the table and ran into the yard again, his mouth still full of bread and cheese, and the corf ee bowl in his hand. Listen! Do you hear it? The rolling barrage has begun! The artillery batteries were rolling their fire forward, creating a moving barrier of high explosive through which no living things could advance or retreat.
The brave Allies will be ready for the final assault now In the forward British trenches they waited below the parapets. With each man in full battle-dress, his equipment burden was almost sixty pounds in weight.
The thunder of the bursting high-explosives Tolled away from them, leaving them with dulled senses and singing eardrums. The whistles of the section leaders shrilled along the trenches, and they roused themselves and crowded to the feet of the assault ladders. Then, like an army of khaki lemmings, they swarmed out of their burrows into the open, and peered around them dazedly.
They were in a transformed and devastated land, so ravaged by the guns that no blade of grass nor twig of tree remained. Only the shattered tree stumps stuck up from the soft fecal-coloured porridge of mud before them. This dreadful landscape was shrouded in the yellowish fog of burned explosives.
forward! the cry passed down the line, and again and whistles trilled and goaded them on.
