Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [29]
The first time this happened, Colette cried out in triumph. Younger smiled. As they worked at close quarters in the back of the truck, her fingers would frequently touch his when exchanging an instrument. Or her body would brush against him. On every such occasion, she would quickly separate herself, yet Younger had the notion that the contact might have been deliberate. With the wounded or sickly, Colette was kind, but not particularly gentle or compassionate. With the healthy, she was flint. In part, Younger could see, this brusqueness was self-protection; she was too pretty to interact with soldiers on other terms. But there was more to it. Younger wondered what it would take to soften her.
One evening when Colette was busy with her computations, Younger took advantage of the lull to work by flashlight on some equations of his own. He became conscious after a while that Luc was standing by his side.
The boy handed Younger a book. It was in English, published the previous year. The author was one Toynbee; the title was The German Terror in France. The short volume had been well-thumbed; was it possible the boy could read English?
Younger began paging through the book. It was then that the boy handed him a note saying he hated the dead—the first time Luc had ever communicated to him in this fashion. After that the boy sat down against a tire of the truck, playing with an old toy.
“Where did you get that?” asked Colette suddenly, seeing the book in Younger’s hands.
“Your brother gave it to me.”
“Oh.” Her body relaxed. “He wants me to tell you what happened to our family.”
“You needn’t.”
She looked at Luc, who kept playing his game. “You can read about it if you want,” she said, indicating a place in the book where a page had been dog-eared and a passage underlined. Younger read it:
Sommeilles was completely burnt on Sept. 6th. “When the incendiarism started,” states the Mayor, “M. and Mme. Adnot (the latter about sixty years old), Mme. X. (thirty-five or thirty-six years old), whose husband is with the colours, and Mme. X’s four children all took refuge in the Adnots’ cellars. They were there assassinated under atrocious circumstances. The two women were violated. When the children shrieked, one of them had its head cut off, and two others one arm, while everyone in the cellar was massacred. The children were respectively eleven, five, four and one and a half years old.”
“Great God,” said Younger. “I pray this wasn’t your family.”
“No, but that was our village—Sommeilles,” she said. “We moved there when I was little—Mother, Father, Grandmother, and I. Luc was born there. When the war started, all our young men went off to the army. The village was defenseless. The night the Germans came, Luc and I were sent to the carpenter’s, because he had a hidden basement. That’s the reason we lived. The Germans killed everyone, but they never found us. All night long we heard gunshots and screaming. The next day, they were gone. Our house was burned, but still standing. Mother and Father were dead on the floor. Father had put up a heroic fight, you could see that. Grandmother was still alive, but not for long. Mother was naked. There was a lot of blood.”
Luc had stopped his game while his sister spoke. When it was clear that she had finished, the boy started playing again.
“Everyone assumes you have to be sad,” said Colette, “for the rest of your life.”
SIX
WITH THE GREAT War came great disease—unheard-of illness on an unprecedented scale.
The last was the worst: the flu of 1918-19, spreading with the continent-crossing armies, hiding in the warm but broken lungs of homeward-bound soldiers, ultimately killing millions in every corner of the earth. Before the Spanish flu, there had been the agonies of phosgene and mustard gas, which could burn away a man’s eyes and his flesh down to the bone. Before the poison gas, there had been the repulsive