Chapter Two: A Farewell to Earth

"You know, I think they give the officers nicer cigarettes," Ben said.

"They're only fresher." Lieutenant Miller had given us each a whole pack - practically a king's ransom.

"Care for a third opinion, sarge?" Corporal McMillan asked.

"No," Ben and I said.

We'd swung around to the southeast, around to where our map said there should be about two hundred yards of French and English trenches, and instead there was nothing but pure countryside. It was the biggest stretch of untouched countryside I'd seen in all of eastern France. It looked to be miles of meadows, forests, and softly-rolling hills. I kept turning back to my map, thinking we surely must've made some horrible navigational error, but the Oise was right there, right where it ought to be, running dark and cool. And we could still hear the boom of artillery some miles to the south rumbling like the pounding of ceaseless thunder.

There weren't even any of the little villages that seemed to pop up at every valley and confluence in the river. Little towns that looked like they ought to be bucolic, and when you actually marched through them, everybody shambled out like lepers, asking for francs and cheese and cigarettes. The place reminded me more of Nebraska than of France, where there might be a swath of marsh or a rocky hill between farms and where, if you situated yourself just right, you might look in any direction and not see a scrap of land touched by man. It was like that, except we marched all afternoon and never found so much as a signpost, and the game trails we found might well have been worn by animals rather than men.

"How in God's name is this the same France?" I asked.

"I'm not complaining," Ben said.

In late afternoon, we stopped for a break. We were well past where we should have found Noyan or the ruins of it. We'd followed the river, and yet we'd seen neither town nor engineering company nor a single American, Frenchman, or German. I looked idly about me, around the wildflower-strewn meadow, and gathered a posy of flowers, thinking of how much Abigail or Audrey, our daughter, would have liked them. And I immediately felt bad about how I'd behaved in Paris and in Compeigne, availing myself of prostitutes whenever the opportunity arose. To his credit, Ben had been unfaithful but a single time and had felt so horribly about it that he confessed his misdeeds in a letter home. Helen had been unexpectedly forgiving about it, and I joked that maybe she had her own indiscretions stateside. As for me, as far as Abigail knew, I was as chaste as the pope… which, in the case of several historically libidinous popes, was roughly correct.

Ben and I sat on a little hillock overlooking the Oise, smoking our smokes and sipping from our canteens, looking across the river to what looked like an infinite expanse of primal forest. I briefly wondered what we might do if we kept marching and all we found was untouched wilderness, as if the entire human race but us had vanished in the snap of some vengeful demiurge's fingers. My only complaint would have been that we'd have no women to keep us company, most of all my wife, whom I'd dishonored with my unfaithfulness. Ben must have taken my guilt for some mix of concern and recognition, because he nudged my shoulder.

"You're not dreaming. I see it, too," he said.

"Gadzooks!" McMillan whispered from behind us. "Is that…"

I shifted my attention upwards… it was a castle in the clouds, or at least it looked to be. In our time across France, we'd seen a few castles. Ancient, decrepit things of half-crumbled stone, hardly suitable for a hermit to live in. But this was a soaring, majestic thing, many miles off but finer than any castle I'd even heard of, with its spires and buttresses and pennants, shining white marble and gleaming yellow gold. Some part of me knew that it couldn't be real, that nothing so grand and beautiful could have been untouched by this war.

"It's probably in the hills," I mumbled. "We just can't see them through the fog."

"Right," Ben said. He didn't sound at all sure of it.

We stared at it for perhaps two minutes, wondering how so wondrous a mirage could possibly present to us. And, though I have never been a believer in modern miracles, I thought that this was surely the sort of thing that had spurred those ancient prophets into their scriptural ecstasy. I looked to Ben to confirm that he saw what I saw, and when I turned back it was gone. All that remained was a vaguely tower-shaped cloud silhouetted by the sun as afternoon faded to evening.

"Should we hoof it a bit until nightfall?"

"There's no point in going any further," I stated. "We're already past where we ought to have found the 33rd. We'll scout again tomorrow and, if we don't find anything, we'll turn back with our tail between our legs and tell command we couldn't find them."

"That'd be the honest truth," Ben said. "No shame in that."

"No, I suppose not."

+++++

We slept underneath a copse of trees, the night air cool without being chilly, and awoke to gray skies. They were the sort of skies that perfectly disguised the sun, turning every last scrap of sky into a vaguely luminous blob of gray. No sooner had we started off along our search, a fog rolled in. Rather, it appeared almost instantly, as if the river itself was roiling great mastheads of cotton white onto the earth to obscure our vision. I could see Ben and several men behind me and perhaps ten yards of path ahead - yes, I found an actual path, old paved stone like some ancient Roman road. Distant artillery growled like thunder.

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The stones crunched underfoot - it was odd to have a stone path after walking for miles through gentle fields. I'd slept without my boots on, letting the cool grass slide between my toes. But now we were back in the real world… a ruined road. Guttered old buildings. A half-collapsed church passing by in the fog like a ghost ship. I looked back to my map, wondering if that might be the St. Girard church indicated near the second German bridge.

"Does anybody see a name on that church?" I said, and the men crawled around the grounds like scavenging beetles looking for carrion.

McMillan returned with half of a cracked plaque. It read: St. Gi-. "Do you figure this is it?"

"Yeah, this is it. We've gone too far, so we…"

"Englisch! Englisch!" I heard someone yell from back in the fog.

Then the bullets started flying. Fortunately, the krauts were just as blind as we were, too foggy to even see muzzle flashes from more than forty feet away. I could hear the grunting of truck or tank engines grumbling to life. I could smell the mild sewage smell of the river - the actual river, clouded and reeking, and not the pristine fairytale thing we'd walked along the day before.

Ben and I ran for cover. "They've got armor on the other side," I said.

"We need to retreat."

I shook my head. "We need to keep those guns on the other side of the river or the kraut feints are going to have a lot less feint to them - we've got to blow the bridge."

Corporal Lacosse was our demolitions man - he only carried a single box of dynamite as opposed to, say, the dozen that an engineering company might have. But it might be enough to blow a hastily-constructed bridge. He pulled out his detonator and coils, assembling the explosive as the rest of us kept under cover, popping up to take the occasional shot right down the bridge, though I'm not sure we actually hit anybody. The fog was gradually easing up and I could see the steel pylons of the bridge's base.

"Before the enemy has visibility, please," I said to him.

Lacoss cursed, tossed a length of cable to the side, and pulled out some more, crimping it into the detonator box and then carefully tracing the lines out to the explosive charge. "Something's happened to my wires… maybe it was just a bad batch. This should work…"

Before I could say anything, Ben grabbed the dynamite and dashed for the bridge, zigzagging back and forth to avoid being an easy target. He placed the charge as far down the bridge as he could and dashed back, suddenly stumbling and sprawling out on the road as a crack echoed out from across the river. He'd been shot! Not too badly, though, because he scrambled to a military crawl, clutching at his shoulder.

"Ben!" Without really thinking, I sprinted out right into enemy fire and dragged Ben the rest of the way off the bridge, where we ducked behind the pylon. "Ben, are you…"

Ben shot me a panicked look - he was more worried about the explosives than about his flesh wound. He depressed the explosives trigger one, two, ten times and nothing happened. "The wire must be broken somewhere… I… I can crawl out and fix it."

"You're hurt. I'll do it," I said. Ben's hand clamped down on my wrist - he wasn't going to let me go.

"I'll play you for it." I held out my hand for a game of Rochambeau. "One-two-three-shoot!" My paper beat Ben's rock. "I win, I'm getting the wire."

Before Ben could object, I sprinted down the bridge. By now, a breeze from the north was puffing in and pushing the fog away. It was the worst timing I could have asked for, our cover dissipating just as the Germans got really serious about stopping us. One… two tanks roared to life and started down the bridge toward me. Bullets zipped past, pinging off the steel struts of the bridge. I dropped to my belly and crawled along, checking the wire, checking the wire… there! The little wrapping had come off and left the wire exposed and corroded. I went to cut the bad wire with my knife to splice it and, as I did, something sparked, just for an instant…

Then, there was nothing.

+++++

I will admit that I've always been a skeptic of the clouds-and-harps heaven imagined by revivalist preachers. But I've always assumed there must be something after we slip this mortal coil. But I wasn't expecting that something to be so much nothing - gray, featureless nothing infinitely more obfuscating than the fog I'd been marching through a few minutes before. But I wasn't marching now - I didn't appear to have any body whatsoever, let alone one with legs capable of marching.

There was no sense of space or time. I could have been suspended in a droplet of amber for an eon or hurtling through the deepest cosmos at dizzying speeds. If this was to be my eternal fate… well, it wasn't hellfire, but it was going to be a long eternity.

Then I saw her. She was faint and distant at first, as if viewed through a perfectly homogeneous mist, but soon her form grew and became clear. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen, slim but with very feminine proportions only partly obscured by a gossamer blue gown. Her hair was a silvery blue, her skin creamy and flawless, her facial features delicate and achingly beautiful. And she had gossamer wings, like those of a dragonfly but silvery and jeweled. In that instant, I realized that I was not looking upon a woman - she was an angel. Not quite as I'd ever imagined angels to look, but every bit the divine perfection I might have expected.

My heart pined for her. My hand reached for her… I had a hand now, hazy and indistinct, but a hand. She remained just beyond my reach and, as I looked on, her eyes slowly fluttered open. A look of concern furrowed her delicate brow, followed by curiosity as she took me in. Her lips parted, as if to speak, and suddenly I found myself tumbling away.

I took in a great breath of air and my eyes shot open. I sat up, gasping, my eyes adjusting to the light. I found myself situated in the center of some sort of palatial suite, a great domed room with sunlight streaming in from hundreds of stained glass windows, with marble and gold and dark silk ornamenting the walls all around. I heard weeping… a young woman with hair the color of rose gold wept in a heap not too far from me… I was in the middle of some sort of glowing circle upon the floor and she sat just beyond its circumference. The complex geometries of the circle gradually faded.

"What's wrong?" I asked - the voice that came out wasn't my own. It was high and sweet. It sounded like springtime flowers smell. Was I dreaming?

The young woman looked up. She was very pretty, if a bit pale, her emerald eyes streaking tears down rosy cheeks. "It… it worked! Thank Gaia, it worked! I thought we'd lost you." She sprang up rushed toward me, wrapping me in a great big hug and weeping into my shoulder. "Oh, my princess! I thought we'd lost you, Laeanna!"

"Um," I said, "who's Laeanna?"