Cerulean

He had made up his mind not to move away from the shell of
the church. He wanted to stay where he could push his feet
against the outside wall as he lay in his hole. It made him feel
that he was in contact with something permanent in the constantly
changing landscape. At home, he went to church twice every
Sunday. But that was a lifetime ago, and now he measured the
passage of time in used-up lives. The tally was forty-nine
There were places where the war had barely touched the green
fields and dark woods. Children still played within sight of
quiet front line trenches in sectors where neither side did more
than fire the occasional shot to re-establish presence. But here,
around Private Paul Dupuis, the process of rooting up and
poisoning the land had begun. Someone had drawn a line on a map
isolating here a farmhouse, and there a whole village. And then,
the newly created anomalies had been ground into powder and
levelled.
The fighting had not been severe on this front until the
last big push from the Allies and the counter-attack which had
returned everyone to their previous positions. In front of Paul,
no-man's-land stretched invitingly. It was torn a little by high
explosive, but it still looked like pasture and tillage. There
was still green grass, still bird-song like the birds at home,
and there were walls of brick and masonry untumbled, though
redundant, now that roofs and people were gone.
He was hidden away on the edge of what had been a hamlet.
Beside him, fallen gravestones ironically commemorated death at
its natural rate. A hundred yards back, the little houses were
almost intact, but the church had been shelled to knock down the
tower. Whether the Germans had done that to deny it to Allied
artillery observers or vice versa did not matter. The gap between
the lines was quite wide here; Paul was three hundred yards from
the nearest friendly trench and nearer to the enemy line than to
his putative comrades. He seldom spoke to them now but, all day
and night, he watched and listened to the men in field grey.
Their songs were pleasant now to his ear and the smell of their
food homely.
This was his third day by the church; he knew that he should
move on, but he was reluctant to leave. He cautiously stretched
his legs to give cramped muscles some work to do. On the other
side of the wall, the people had once listened to words so
familiar that they were nearer to feeling than to thought.
'Almighty and most merciful Father; we have erred, and strayed
from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the
devices and desires of our own hearts.' Even here, there were
still people who believed in a forgiving Father, and in an
existence that transcended the pain of every day? Once, back
there in the church, the people had a prayer of supplication to
use in times of epidemic illness. How did it go? 'Almighty God,
who in the time of King David, didst slay with the plague of
Pestilence threescore and ten thousand; Have mercy upon us
miserable sinners, who are now visited with great sickness and
mortality.' He still thought in the language of his mother's
church and not the Latin of the one that his father had
abandoned. Who cared now who David was, let alone who God might
have been? Paul could remember the rest of the words but what was
the point?
He thought about Regine. She loved somebody who didn't exist
any more. He wanted to put his hand to the pocket of his jacket
where he kept her letters, but it was safer to keep still. He was
sorry, in a way, that he could only remember the liturgy in
English. He had tried to speak French to Regine when they first
met, but she stopped him by putting her hand on his lips. "You
don't think in French," she had told him
"But you speak to me in English."
"Silly. It's as much my language as yours. But my parents
are Quebecois. They aren't comfortable in English, so I never use
it at home."
"Do you think in English?"
"About you, yes."
Her last letter was in his pocket with the others. He had
tried to answer it, but he didn't know what to say. When her
father died, Regine would have known exactly what would happen
to his soul. She would have gone with her mother to the church
on Rue Ste. Anne and they would both have been able to imagine,
in a French that was not the tongue of these people of Northern
France, the soul of Regis Delvigne ascending to heaven after the
proper supplication to his heavenly father. But Paul could no
longer believe in the goodness of the god that they worshipped.
For him, God with a big G had become a god with a small G; one
of many gods. Anglican and Catholic, Methodist and Unitarian;
everyone seemed to have a god. His own God was either dead or,
more probably playing dead out of embarrassment or shame.
Three score and ten thousand slain with a plague of
pestilence. He had managed to believe that Man was responsible
for the war, but God must be responsible for the epidemic of
Spanish influenza. Spanish! About the only country that wasn't
in the war.
There was a change since yesterday. With the morning sun in
his eyes, it was difficult to make out what it was. As the sun
rose, something threw a long shadow in front of the German line.
Dupuis smiled. Whoever did that was an optimist. Forty lives ago,
he might have fallen for that one. You fire at the empty petrol
can to check the range and the wind. Minutes later, a periscope
pops up from the trench moving slowly and patiently until the
brain on the other end of it perceives the two holes in the can
to be in line. Then the imaginary line drawn between the exit
hole and the entry hole and extrapolated out to the west would
intersect the sniper's nest. His nest.
He eased his position a little. No, he thought, however you
looked at it, the flu epidemic had to prove something about the
god who had made himself responsible for mankind. Both of
Regine's brothers, in Princess Patricia's Regiment, had been
killed, and now her father had been pointlessly and gratuitously
taken. Paul made an impatient involuntary movement frowning up
at the sky. 'My father's house has many mansions.' Did they all
look like this one now, he wondered? Roofless and almost without
walls. Behind him, on the other side of the wall, a crucifix hung
out at an angle where the nave had once ended. They had nailed
Him on so firmly that he defied gravity. He was more credible
than his father, thought Paul. Ecce homo. But Paul had seen far
worse than crucifixion.
Down here, in a niche of ruined wall thrust up by the
shellfire weeks before, he held in his hands the physical
representation of another religion whose words also changed from
country to country. Just like His liturgy, the words varied but
the sentiments remained constant. He had heard the dark little
Welsh sergeant haranguing his raw recruits from one of Lloyd
George's pet regiments. 'It's the soldier's best friend if you
care for the working parts. It was lovingly made by craftsmen
beside the bosky Lea to be your guide, your friend, your guardian
and your handmaiden." The Welsh Windbag should have been an NCO
instead of a politician and then perhaps some of those young
miners from the valleys and pale clerks from London offices would
have had a few more weeks of life. "Hold it at its point of
balance and feel the weight of it, the lovely limb of walnut
resting in your hand. Stroke it as you would the thigh of your
sweetheart or your wife. They are only flesh and blood. But this,
your beloved, is life itself, if you learn her secret ways.' The
same words to each new batch of recruits, the same words passed
on from sergeant to corporal, corporal to lance-jack; priests of
the mystery of arms, all of them vicars of the grim reaper. The
precise language of this religion changed according to
whereabouts in the line you were and which side of it you were
on, but in essence it was a constant. It was the anthem of the
time.
What chance did a God of Love have against that? Perhaps
there still is a God to intercede for them, thought Paul. But not
for me. He could not ask forgiveness for so many lives cut short.
Especially not for the last one; he had watched him for a full
day. He knew how he smiled and laughed, how he lit a cigarette,
how he ate and how he defecated. He had ended him as the light
began to fade.
There were five rounds in the rifle and five on the piece
of sky-blue glass that he had put at his right hand. He had no
idea why he put them there every day for he never emptied even
one magazine in a day's work, but he often looked at them to rest
his eyes after an hour's concentration on the narrow field
through his telescope. Joined by a black steel clip were five
bottle-shaped cartridges. Their cases were of gleaming brass and
their bullets clad in whitely shining nickel. At their very ends,
at the tip and apex of their beings, were dull points. The
bullets were of a shape and size and sectional density such that
they would give up all their energy in an instant when they hit,
propagating a shock-wave that minced flesh and splintered bone.
They would leave the muzzle at twice the speed that a shout or
a whistle can travel through the air, little celestial messengers
of nickel, lead and tin.
The glass on which they lay had come from the stained glass
window which must once have been above him. It was of a
brilliance and blueness that he had only seen once before. He and
Regine had lain on their backs in the meadow-grass, the summer
before he came to France, trying to see a skylark which was
singing like a brook roping and unravelling over stones. They
made their hands into narrow tubes the better to see the lark
against the dazzling clear sky. Regine had spotted it first and
laughed. He remembered the lark's song and her laugh as though
they were parts of the same wonderful fabric of sky and warmth.
Often, as he lay motionless waiting for a target, he would recall
the cloudless vault of sky.

He drew a deep breath and slowly eased himself into position
to examine the enemy line through his telescope again. He
scrutinised the line inch by inch, moving on only when there was
nothing more to see. At a point where shellfire had excised a
part of their parapet the night before, he lingered. Twice he
caught sight of a head, but the glimpses had been too brief. He
would return to the spot later when the light was easier. In the
meantime, he should make a note of what he had seen. With a stub
of pencil he wrote on the page, '0645 B3d.24.75. Cap with blue
band observed twice. Prob men moving towards N.' It would mean
something to Intelligence. It would be part of their jig-saw;
part of the sky at the edge of the picture, perhaps.
Something entered the gap and stayed there for a moment as
though a man with a burden had paused. He gently raised his rifle
and moved his body until his shoulder was at the butt and his eye
at the rubber eyepiece of the sight. It took a moment to find the
place, and something else caught his eye. A steel observation
plate had been put up between the sandbags just to the right of
the gap. It had been there yesterday but now it was more visible
because it was wholly in shadow. He could not see the plate but
only a rectangular blackness, an absence of any shape or
substance. Nothing to see, thought Paul. You know it's there
because there is nothing to see.
Before he met Regine, he had wanted to become a priest. His
father had been against it. Paul was used to his father's
pretence at atheism and it did not bother him. The goodness of
both his parents would be self-evident to God and, besides, he
had believed that he could intercede on his father's behalf when
he died. It had been a comfort to him that he would be able to
perform that service for Paul Dupuis Senior.
"Why do you and your mother have to pray? Can't he see into
your souls?" When he was younger, Paul had suffered agonies of
loyalty when his father seemed to torment his mother with these
questions, but he understood now that his father had spoken not
as though he did not believe in God, but as though he were
denying him. When Paul's tally reached twenty, he wondered what
point there was in God not stopping all this. And at some time
after it reached thirty, he had stopped praying. It seemed
pointless. If he had actually believed in Satan, he would have
prayed to him. Or to Lucifer. Yes, more probably to the archangel
Lucifer who fell because he would no longer unquestioningly obey.
Each death on his conscience weighed heavier than the one
before. The burden he carried now was only just supportable, but
it seemed to him that he was under an obligation to continue.
Eight lives ago, or was it nine, he had missed a difficult shot
at a German sniper that the men in that part of the line had
nicknamed Barbarossa because the rumour had got about that he had
a red beard. Barbarossa's score was supposed to be several dozen.
He didn't have anything personal against the German; in fact, he
had sometimes imagined meeting him. Neither of them could choose
who to shoot. If Paul could choose, he would shoot Big Willy, der
Kronprinz, and then the Welsh Windbag, the lecher Lloyd George;
there would be a balance in that. He had scored forty-nine so far
and at forty-eight he wondered if an impartial observer would see
the world's great mountain of corpses as those killed justly and
those killed unjustly. They had all been murdered and those of
their murderers who had killed in a righteous cause had hands as
bloody as those whose consciences had never been troubled by
considerations of right and wrong.
He had had an earlier opportunity to kill Barbarossa when
they were both in the Festubert sector. There was no real reason
to believe that it was the same sniper but the men and officers
in the line were convinced. He had him clear in the cross-hairs
but he had missed when the mount of his prismatic sight had moved
at the critical moment. It was a poor design and Paul knew that
the old hands used any method available to make it firm. But he
was months younger then and still did as he was told and he had
been told that the Warner-Swasey sight had to be removed from the
rifle when it was not in use, so it had to be removable. He went
through agonies of remorse as Barbarossa continued his nightly
cull at the rate of a round dozen a week and on his next day out
of the line he went to the forward lorry workshop and begged some
brazing flux. That afternoon, Paul cut a razor blade into slivers
which he wedged into the dovetail of the sight-mount with a smear
of flux on each one. The hygroscopic flux sucked in moisture from
the air and rusted the steel wafers and the mount immovably to
the rifle action. He had felt guilty at disobeying an
instruction. When he had killed his fiftieth German, he would
disobey again. He would resign from the war. He would no longer
serve.
Paul gentled the rifle across to look again at the steel
plate and, at the moment he did so, the loophole in it opened.
Reflected light caught its top edge and in a second Paul had the
loophole in his sight. There was no wind to allow for and no
warmth to make a wavering mirage of hot rising air. It was an
easy shot. If he missed, he would hear the clanging impact
against the steel; if he was accurate, he would hear nothing. The
sight rose and fell as Paul breathed in and out, settling on the
point of aim as he held his breath. He gently increased the
pressure between trigger-finger and thumb until the sear released
and the firing pin fell. Always, before he heard the bang, came
the thrust of the butt against his shoulder, a split-second when
he was no longer in France or anywhere else. The explosion of hot
gas seemed to release him from conscience and responsibility, but
it didn't last long. He held his breath for two or three seconds
and as soon as he exhaled it, he was back on the earth. This time
he knew, when he returned, that something was wrong.
There had been no clang of lead on steel so the shot had
been good. But, at the moment of firing, there had been a
subliminal impression of something. Paul closed his eyes for a
moment and tried to recover the impression. It came suddenly to
him in an burst of vivid colour as though a tiny portion of his
field of view had been moved to the centre and blown up far
beyond anything that a terrestrial glass could achieve. There had
been a change since yesterday in the sandbag rampart. Now as he
looked, it had changed again.
In the stillness, in the cold and frosty humidity of the
morning air, the gas from his rifle barrel hung an evanescent
sign as clear to an informed eye as though a marker board had
been erected pointing to his nest. The loop-hole had been opened
to tempt him into revealing himself at the only time of day that
his own powder would flag his presence. His opponent was already,
must already, be about to fire on him and Paul could not easily
move. The only chance was to fire at the place where the German
sniper's head must be. He worked the bolt back and forward
blessing his rifle for the speed of its action, and he put the
post of the prismatic sight on the unseen extrapolated head. In
the infinitesimally short space of time that it took for Paul's
brain to instruct his finger to pull, in the vanishingly brief
moment that it took for the impulse to rush down the nerve to the
muscle, the German bullet struck him just above the bridge of his
nose. No time and all of time extended before him. Paul's
fiftieth remained as golden threads of cordite behind the shining
bullet in the chamber of his rifle. His hand, as it fell, brushed
the cerulean blue glass on which he had placed his spare
cartridges and it shattered into shards and splinters the colour
of a summer sky.