They Were Coming for Him by Berta Vias-Mahou

Author:Berta Vias-Mahou [Berta Vias Mahou]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788494365805
Publisher: Hispabooks
Published: 2016-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

AN IMPALPABLE MEMORY

And Jacques’s father, killed at the Marne. What remains of that obscure life? Nothing, an impalpable memory, the weightless ash of a butterfly wing consumed in a forest fire.

All he had left was a photograph, a simple group snapshot. In order to see him properly, to adequately bring out that black-and-white figure lost forever in the midst of a regiment of men who like so many others had gone to fight in the French countryside only to be buried in mass graves, he’d have had to cut it out. To snip around or otherwise score the silhouette of that young man clad head to toe in the eye-catching uniform of the Algerian-born tirailleurs. The Zouaves. Their cropped, collarless jackets. Their sleeveless waistcoats. Their oversized, baggy trousers, fashioned from light-colored fabric. The serousel. And their woolen sashes wrapped around their waists. Their leather shin guards. Their fez-like hats with the tassel hanging from them. Or their turbans, in all different colors depending on where each battalion hailed from. Turbans cut from a cloth so long they sometimes used them as tents.

An entire detachment of men who’d been sent to their certain deaths all decked out in stunning regalia. Thousands upon thousands of men done up as if for some folk dance. The perfect target. The reds, blues, and whites of their raiment drew the focus of the enemy as a matador’s magenta cape does a bull. Or his smaller red cape and dowel. They looked like fighting cocks, flaunting their plumage before an adversary they couldn’t even see. They died before advancing more than a few steps. Jacques imagined the cries of the wounded, sprawling in the mud. Wait, what’s this? Blood! Many of them had only just recently grown too old for play.

It was all he had left of him. That photograph and a chunk of the mortar that had killed him and that the government of France had gone to the trouble of having sent to his widow. His name was Lucien-Auguste Cormery. He was five feet, six inches tall. His hair and eyebrows were light brown. His eyes, blue. His occupation, according to his papers, driver. He’d been wounded at the Battle of the Marne and then transferred to the military hospital at Saint-Brieuc, where he endured a week of agony with a shattered skull. He’d died on October 11, 1914. That was pretty much all he knew about him. A few years back, Jacques got it into his head to visit his gravesite, which nobody in the family had ever been able to see. It was the grave of a stranger, but it made an enormously profound impression on him, because his father, when he’d died, was much younger than he himself was at the time. It was as if he were standing before the grave of his son.

Exhaustion was getting the better of him. He set the pen down next to his manuscript and leaned on the table. He was getting up every morning at around five and going for a walk out to the castle.

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