The Death Instinct

Chapter 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 incapacitations of fungi and parasites attacking men's feet, gangrenes propagating in undrained, rat-infested trenches. But before all this, there was shell shock.

The initial reports of the strange condition were baffling. Seemingly unhurt men presented a congeries of contradictory symptoms: rapidity of breath and inability to breathe, silence and raving, excessive motion and catatonia, refusal to let go their weapons and refusal to touch their weapons. But always nightmares — in case after case, night terrors that woke and alarmed their comrades-in-arms.

Then came symptoms more peculiar still. Deafness, muteness, and blindness; paralyzed fists and legs. All without apparent organic injury.

The French had a name for these men: simulateurs. The British too: malingerers. In fact the earliest treatment prescribed by the English was the firing squad, cowardice being an offense punishable by death in the British army. German doctors, by contrast, used electricity. The avowed theory behind the Germans' electrocution therapy was not that it cured, but that at a sufficiently high voltage it made returning to the front a preferable alternative. The German doctors had, however, overlooked a third option, of which quite a few of their patients took advantage: suicide.

Yet even these compelling disincentives failed to stem the tide. The numbers of afflicted men rose to staggering proportions. Eighty thousand soldiers in Great Britain would eventually be diagnosed with the mysterious ailment. Many of these were officers of high character and, from the British viewpoint, of unimpeachable blood and breeding. As a result, the malingering thesis came finally to be doubted.

The first doctors to take the condition seriously announced that exploding missiles were to blame. The concussive detonations set off by the mighty shells of modern warfare were said to produce micro-hemorrhaging in cerebral blood vessels, causing a neurological paralysis or shock in the brain. Thus was coined the term 'shell shock.'

The name stuck, but not the diagnosis behind it. Too many shell- shocked men had lived through no bombardment at all. It soon became apparent that psychology was more important to their condition than physiology. It became equally apparent that only one psychiatrist on the planet had advanced a theory of mental illness that could explain their symptoms: Sigmund Freud.

Gradually but in growing numbers, physicians the world over — men who had previously regarded psychoanalysis with the deepest distaste and suspicion — began to acknowledge that the Freudian concept of the unconscious alone made sense of shell shock and its treatment. 'Fate would seem to have presented us,' wrote a British physician in 1917, 'with an unexampled opportunity to test the truth of Freud's theory of the unconscious.' The test proved positive.

English, Australian, French, and German doctors reported stunning success treating shell shock victims with psychotherapy. In Britain, military authorities called on Dr Ernest Jones, one of Freud's earliest disciples — who was still barred from hospital practice because of his penchant for discussing improprieties with twelve-year-old girls — to treat what was coming to be called 'war neurosis.' Germany sent a delegation to an international psychoanalytic congress, begging for assistance in dealing with overcrowded shell-shock wards. Freud himself — so long calumniated and ostracized — was asked by the Austrian government to lead an investigation concerning the proper treatment of shell shock. By 1918, there may have been only one man alive who both accepted the truth of psychoanalysis and yet felt that Freudian theory could not explain war neurosis. That man was Sigmund Freud.

'He should be in school,' Colette said of her brother a few days later. She was behind the wheel of her truck, guiding it over badly rutted roads. She had no qualms about discussing Luc in the boy's hearing. 'But he is too — uncooperative. The teachers in Paris thought he was deaf. They also thought he couldn't talk. But he can. I know it.'

In the back of the truck, Luc was playing with his favorite toy again an old fishing reel — mouthing unintelligible sounds as he did so. 'How long has he been like this?' asked Younger.

'There was smoke everywhere after they burned Sommeilles. It got into the carpenter's cellar, but Luc wouldn't come out. That whole day he lay there. Then he caught cold, and that night he started coughing badly I thought I might lose him too. He got better, but he's been this way ever since.'

'Does he ever have trouble breathing — when he runs, for example?'

'Never,' said Colette. 'Everyone says he must have had a pneumonia, but I think it's something else. Something psychological. A "neurosis," perhaps. Have you ever heard of Dr Freud of Vienna?'

'Left at that signpost,' said Younger.

'He's a psychologist, very famous. Everyone says he is the only one to understand war neuroses. And he treats children.'

'Dr Freud of Vienna,' said Younger. 'He has a peculiar theory of what causes neurosis.'

'You've read his work? I couldn't find anything in French.'

'I've read him, and I know him. Personally.'

'But that's wonderful!' cried Colette. 'When the war is over, I am going to write to him. We have no money, but I was hoping he might agree to see Luc. Will you help me?'

'No.'

'You won't? Why not?'

'I don't believe in Freud's psychology,' he said. 'As a matter of fact, I don't believe in psychology at all. Shrapnel, bacteria, sulfur — get them out of a man's system, and you stand a fair chance of making him better. But "neurosis"? Neurosis means "no-diagnosis." How do you know Luc doesn't have a problem in his larynx?'

'I know he can talk. I know it. He just won't.'

'Well, if you're right, then he's shy. I was shy at his age.'

'He's not shy,' said Colette. 'It's as if he is — how to say it? — refusing the world.'

'Perfectly rational, given what he has seen of the world. Pull up over there,'

Colette did so, bringing the truck to a grinding halt. 'Dr Freud's patients get better,' she replied. 'Everyone says so.'

'That doesn't prove his theories are valid.'

'What does it matter, if his patients get better?' she asked.

'In that case, why not give the boy snake oil?'

'I would if it made him better. I would do anything to make him better.'

Younger opened his door. 'There's nothing wrong with your brother's mind,' he said. 'He just needs this — this bloody war to end.'

On July 13, Younger was kept busy overnight at the front, working on some badly wounded men; he wasn't able to return to base until late the next evening. Despite the hour, he commandeered a transport wagon and drove it to the French position where Colette could usually be found. When he got there, she was laundering clothes in the glare of her truck's headlamps.

She ran to him: they stood face-to-face, but didn't touch. 'Where were you?' she asked. 'At the front?'

At a certain point, men in wartime either stop thinking about death or become paralyzed by it. Younger had stopped thinking about it. 'At the moment I'm absent without leave,' he replied. 'Court-martialable offense.'

'Not really?'

'It's all right. My orderly knows where I am. Couldn't let Bastille Day go uncelebrated.' From the rear of his wagon, he pulled out a bottle of dessert wine, two glasses, a tin of foie gras, a blue cheese, a jar of strawberry preserves, fresh butter, and an assortment of English biscuits. 'Not exactly revolutionary,' he observed, 'but the best I could do.'

'Where did you get all this?' she said in wonder.

'Will you allow me, Mademoiselle?'

'With pleasure.'

She laid a blanket on the grass and arranged the articles he had brought. The night was warm. He threw his leather jacket to the ground, put his cap and pistol belt on top of it, and began corkscrewing the wine — but stopped when blood drizzled down his fingers onto the bottle. 'Do you sew by any chance?' he asked.

She lifted his sleeve and gasped at the deep laceration in his forearm. 'Wait here,' she said. When she came back a moment later with suturing thread and a disinfectant alcohol, she added, 'I don't have any anaesthetic.'

'For this?' he replied.

She poured the clear alcohol onto his wound, where it hissed and effervesced, ran a needle through one piece of his bubbling, bleeding skin and then through another, pulling the thread tight thereafter. 'How can you bear it?' she asked.

'I don't feel it,' he said.

'Of course you do,' she replied, continuing to suture.

'I'm indifferent to it.' 'A man who doesn't feel pain can feel no pleasure.'

'I'm indifferent to pleasure too.'

'That's not what the nurses say.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'How long since you've slept?' she asked.

'There's something about you I don't follow, Miss Rousseau. Specifically, your leaving Paris to live in a truck. And don't tell me it was your duty to France.'

'Why not?' she asked, piercing the last lip of open skin. 'Hold still.'

'Because women don't act out of duty to country. There's always a man in it somewhere.'

'You're unforgivable.' She cut the thread, tied it off. 'Done.'

He flexed his hand, nodded, opened the wine, poured her a glass, and offered a toast to womankind. She returned it with a toast to France. They settled down to their meal; she served him. 'You were following a boy, obviously,' Younger resumed. 'He was called to the front, and this was the only way you could go with him. The only question is whether you lost him or he lost you.'

'I wasn't following a boy.'

'My apologies — a man.'

'Not a man either.'

'A girl?'

She threw a cracker at him.

'Sorry, but it doesn't add up,' he said. 'You left the Sorbonne, which must have been the most important thing in your life. You know they won't reenroll you after the war. There will be too many men whose education was interrupted.'

'Yes.' She swept crumbs from the blanket, barely betraying her deep disappointment: 'Even Madame warned me she wouldn't be able to get me back in.'

'Then why did you leave?' asked Younger.

'I couldn't stand the charity any longer.'

He was unable to read the expression in her eyes.

'There are people,' she went on, 'willing to house those of us who have lost our families, willing to feed us. But charity comes at a price. Out here we have a roof over our heads, and I don't have to ask: anyone for bread.'

'What was the price?' asked Younger.

'Dependence.'

'We're all dependent when young. On family, if no one else.'

'To be dependent on your family is a joy,' she said. 'To be dependent on someone else is — different.'

Again she wore her indecipherable expression, but this time Younger deciphered it.

'So,' he said. 'You weren't lying, but I was still right.'

'What do you mean?'

'You weren't following a man when you left Paris. You were escaping one. A man who wanted a return on his charitable investments.'

She looked at him over the rim of her glass.

'You had a — an intimate relationship with him,' said Younger. 'No one can blame you.'

'You are very curious about my relationships.'

'Any girl would have done the same in your place.'

'Maybe an American girl would have. I didn't. You will believe me when I tell you who it was: Monsieur Langevin.'

Paul Langevin was the great French physicist notoriously coupled with Marie Curie in newspaper reports all over the world several years earlier.

'I should have known,' declared Younger. 'You said his name to once before, with more venom than any word I've heard you speak except "German." What did the rascal do?'

'He tried to undress me in the laboratory.'

'Scoundrel. Where should he have done it?'

'You think it's funny? This is the man Madame loved. The man she lost everything for. And he makes love to me almost under her nose.'

'At least he has good taste.'

'I think you are trying to provoke me,' she said. 'It was dreadful. He had put Luc and me up in his house. I thought he was being kind. But then came the laboratory, and then there was more, at night, in his house.'

'By force?'

'No — when I resisted, he would let me go. But he would make me push him away. It was unbearable. If I had left his home without leaving Paris, Madame would have understood everything immediately, no matter what I told her. It would have been agony for her. And she would have hated me.'

'So you learned to drive this truck,' said Younger. 'I couldn't think of any other way. I had to leave the university. He was always finding ways to be near me. Madame would have seen how it was, sooner or later.'

Younger paused to take it in. 'You gave up the Sorbonne to spare her.'

There was a longer silence. 'There are three things I'm going to do in my life,' she said. 'The first is to make Luc better. The second is to graduate from the Sorbonne, for my father. If they don't take me back right after the war, I'll apply and apply again until they do.'

'And the third?'

She smoothed her skirt. Then she studied him. 'Of course it's different for you. You're a man — you've had many girls, and you are applauded for it.'

'Me? I'm as celibate as a Capuchin.'

She laughed mockingly.

'If you're listening to the nurses again,' said Younger, 'they're just jealous because I spend all my time with you.'

'You never married?' she asked.

'I don't believe in marriage.'

'Let me guess why not,' she said. 'Because you think it's against man's nature to be monogamous.

'Marriage looks to the future. Not practical, when you're at war.'

'I have another explanation.' She put her glass down and picked up Younger's leather jacket and military cap. 'It's because you're American.'

'Well?'

'Well, if you were a Frenchman and you got married, you could have as many affairs as you liked. You would consider it your right. But as an American, you would have to be faithful.'

'Would I?'

'American married men are much more faithful. That's what Monsieur de Tocqueville says.' She stood up, trying on the jacket and cap. 'How do I look?'

He didn't answer.

'You don't like me to wear your uniform? All right.' She took the cap from her head and set it on his, tilting it to her liking. 'It suits you better anyway.'

As she adjusted the cap on his head, bent at the waist before him, the lapels of his leather jacket, oversized on her, fell open at her neck, allowing a small silver and mother-of-pearl locket to hang down from her white blouse. He took her wrists and slowly lowered her to the grass.

'What are you doing?' she asked.

He undid the top button of her blouse.

'Don't,' she said.

He kissed her neck.

'No,' she whispered.

He stopped, looked at her. Her fiercely green eyes stared up at him, breathtakingly. The locket rose and fell with her chest. He reached for her shirt. She scrambled away like an animal. When she sat up, on her knees, his pistol was in her hands. But it was also in its holster, which she couldn't shake loose. She flapped the gun furiously, making the gun belt wag like a dog's tail. Finally she thrashed the pistol free and pointed it at him.

'Don't move,' she said.

He raised an eyebrow. 'For the record,' he said, 'I was about to rebutton you.'

'I don't need your help buttoning,' she answered, standing and making good on that claim. He began to get up as well. 'I said don't move.'

He rose, ignoring her command.

'Just get in your car and go,' she said, wriggling out of his leather jacket and throwing it at his feet. 'If you take one step toward me, I'll shoot.'

'Go ahead.' He stepped forward to pick up the jacket. 'Better to die at your hands than in a number of other ways I can think of.'

She never had a chance to reply. The motor of a military vehicle roared nearby, and an open two-seater swung its headlights directly onto them. The vehicle pulled up not ten feet away. Younger's orderly hopped out, leaving the engine running; in the glare of the headlights, Colette was still pointing a pistol at Younger.

'Sorry, sir,' said the orderly. 'Everything all right, sir?'

'What is it, Franklin?'

"They want you back, sir. On the double.'

'Why?' asked Younger.

"Two Jerry runners got captured up near Reems,' said Franklin, referring to the city of Rheims. 'They found messages on them. The attack's coming tonight, sir. The big one.'

'Forgive me, Mademoiselle, but my country requires me,' said Younger, picking up his gun belt from the grass and strapping it on.

She frowned. 'Will they send you to the front?'

He smiled. 'I've never heard such solicitude from someone aiming a deadly weapon at me.' He extended his palm for the pistol. She gave it to him.

'Sir?' asked the private anxiously.

'I'm coming, Franklin,' said Younger. He gazed ruefully at the unfinished repast. 'Maybe the boy can have the rest of this tomorrow. Not the wine.'

Al 11:45 p.m. that night, as American and French generals in Paris enjoyed a dress-uniform dinner at the former home of Baron Charles

Rothschild, the Allied forces at Chateau-Thierry opened fire with everything they had on the invisible German divisions believed to be assembling on the north bank of the Marne. For four hours the Germans took the bombardment, unmoved and unmoving. At 3.30 in the morning, their attack began.

Under cover of a furious counter-barrage — 17,500 rounds of gas shells; thirty-five tons of explosives — unseen German hands began filling the Marne with pontoon bridges. Over these bridges came the storm troopers, in wave after wave. The French 125th was instantly overpowered and fell back pell-mell. By contrast, the naive American forward companies held their ground and were soon wiped out to a man.

The German advance was steady, irresistible, overrunning everything in its path. After two miles, the Germans were funneled between the two ridges rising up on either side of the Surmelin valley. This was an eventuality for which the Americans had prepared. Defying orders from French commanders who refused to acknowledge the possibility of a wholesale Allied retreat, the American Third Division had installed heavy artillery, well fortified, on the Bois d'Aigremont on one side of the valley and the Moulin Ruine on the other, in the rear of the Allied positions. Now these guns rained down on the exposed German infantry. On and on came the German regiments through the enfilade; they died in such great number the soil went red to a depth of six inches.

Younger's dressing station was deluged with casualties. Wagons, both motorized and horse-drawn, shuttled in and out, carrying the wounded, the dead, the dying. In the dark, early hours of July 16, a German officer with shattered ribs was brought in, but Younger, who had barely slept in seventy-two hours, refused to give the officer priority over wounded Allied infantrymen.

'American savages,' the officer remarked, in German.

'Let me think,' replied Younger in the same language as he withdrew a surprisingly long stretch of barbed wire, dripping, from a man's leg. 'Who was it that torpedoed a British hospital ship two weeks ago, then killed the surviving nurses by firing on them in the water? Oh yes, that's right — the Germans.'

The officer spat blood into a handkerchief. 'You Americans are firing on fallen men out there. You are not giving us a chance to surrender. You are killing everybody.'

'Good,' said Younger.

Although the fighting went on for another twenty-four hours, it was clear by the morning of the sixteenth that the German offensive had tailed. On the eighteenth, the Allies launched a stunning counterattack, bolstered by an American fighting force now a million strong. Suddenly the Germans, who only days before had Paris in their sights, were reeling, backpedaling, desperately trying to regroup north of the Marne to avoid a complete rout.

The next dawn, Younger's medical corps was redeployed to Soissons. The encampments of Chateau-Thierry were deserted now. All that remained was rubble, a blown-out church, and the burnt wreckage of a shot-down German Friedrichshafen bomber. The only sounds were those of military transport and the booming of ordnance in the north.

As his company rolled out, Younger looked back at the dirt road on which, for several days, he and Colette had driven, with the silent hoy in the rear of the truck. Then he put the thought from his mind. If a man doesn't look ahead, neither should he look back.

He didn't see her for the remainder of the war.

By August, the Germans were beaten. They knew it; everyone knew it. Yet the war churned on. In early November, Younger was in a bombed-out barracks near Verdun, stooped over an English gunner who had been pinned under a half-ton cannon. The gunner's leg was broken; Younger was trying to reset the fibula. Despite his pain, the man kept looking at his watch.

'Begging your pardon, sir,' said the wounded man at last, 'but will you be much longer?'

'I could just chop it off,' answered Younger. 'That would be faster.'

'The Boches, sir,' whispered the man. 'They're going to shell here in ten minutes.'

'How would you know that, soldier?' asked Younger.

The wounded man glanced about to ensure they were alone. 'It's a — a sort of arrangement, sir.'

'Is it?' Younger looked at the man's eyes to see if he was raving. He did not appear to be.

'They bomb us here for forty minutes, and then we got a spot where we bomb them for forty minutes. Same time, same place, every day. That way nobody's the worse for it.'

Younger stopped what he was doing: 'Your officers consent to this?'

'They don't know,' said the soldier. 'We gunners worked it out amongst ourselves, so to speak. You won't tell, will you, sir?'

Younger considered it: 'No, I won't.'

Two days later, at 5.45 a.m., radiomen scattered throughout France picked up an all-channels signal broadcasting from the Eiffel Tower. It was a message from Marshal Foch, the supreme Allied commander, announcing the war's end. An armistice had been signed. All hostilities were to cease at eleven hundred hours, French time.

By nine that morning, the cease-fire order had been formally transmitted to Allied commanders and communicated to the men in the trenches. Paradoxically, the soldiers with the most to gain from the news were the ones made most anxious by it. Men who had learned to throw themselves month after month headlong into machine-gun fire, numb to personal risk, suddenly feared they might die in the last two hours of the war.

At 10.30, the regiment with which Younger was serving began ferociously shelling German positions across no-man's-land. In an officer's dugout, Younger shouted to a second lieutenant he knew, asking what on earth was happening.

'We're attacking,' said the second lieutenant.

'What?' yelled Younger, refusing to believe he had heard correctly. Then he saw infantrymen filing through the network of intersecting trenches, faces taut, armed and packed for assault. From the direction of the front, he heard commands shouted and machine guns firing — from the German side, meaning that Allied soldiers were already scrambling out over the top.

'This is madness,' said Younger.

The lieutenant shrugged: 'Orders,' he replied.

At 10.56, the command went out to halt the Allied attack. It took approximately two minutes for that order to disseminate from field headquarters to radio command posts to captains in the field. At 10.58, the last Allied guns fell silent. At 10.59, the rain of German artillery let up. An ethereal, fragile silence hung in the air.

Twelve seconds later, Younger heard the whistle of one last incoming shell — by the sound of it, a volley from a long-range 75-millimeter gun. The shot hit close by; the ground shook beneath him, and plugs of dirt fell from the walls. Possibly the shell had found a dugout, perhaps even an inhabited one. All waited with suspended breath. Then they heard the eruption of three Allied howitzers, presumably aimed. it the German gun that had launched the last shell.

'No,' whispered Younger.

Naturally the Germans reciprocated. Soon the air was screaming and shaking again with a full-scale bombardment. The onslaught went on uninhibited for hours. It even featured the explosion of signal flares in the sky, pointless in daytime and harmless in effect. Neither side appeared to have an objective, unless it was to expend every last piece of ammunition in its arsenal.

Eleven thousand men were killed or wounded on November 11, 1918, in fighting that took place after all their commanding officers knew the war was over.

Younger was attached after the armistice to the Allied army of occupation. The border crossing into Germany was a revelation: in enemy country, there were green fields well tended, roofs and chimneys undamaged, cattle fat with sweet grass, farmers' wives round with plentiful harvests. The Allied soldiers — the French especially, but not only they — looked on in disgust, after the ruination of France.

In Bitburg, Younger had hospital duty. He didn't like it. The work was too regular and, if he had to be frank, too safe. One lunchtime in January of the new year, Younger was taken by surprise when an orderly tapped him on the shoulder, told him he had a visitor, and gestured to the refectory doorway, where he saw Colette in her usual wool sweater and long skirt.

He wiped his mouth, went to her. They neither shook hands nor embraced. Soldiers pushed by Younger to enter the huge, raucous mess hall.

'You're alive,' she said.

'So it seems. You're causing a commotion, Miss Rousseau.'

Several of the soldiers rushing through the doorway had skidded to an abrupt stop, causing the ones behind to trip over them, with a chaotic pileup the result, all because of the improbably lovely French girl standing in the doorway.

'On your way, you men — on your way,' said Younger, helping one up from the floor and giving him a shove. 'What brings you to Bitburg?'

'I'm trying to find the German army liaison office. I recognized your company colors outside. I thought I would-' She looked down. 'I wanted to apologize for that night. It was my fault.'

'Your fault?' he said.

She frowned. 'I flirted with you.'

'Yes. My happiest recollection from the war. I know what kind of man you're looking for.'

Her frown grew severer. 'You do?'

'One you can trust,' said Younger. 'You trusted me, and I failed you. I believe I may regret it for the rest of my life. Come on — I'll take you to the liaison office.'

'No. It's all right.'

'Let me,' said Younger. 'They'll treat you better if you're with an American.'

The exterior of the hospital was silent and gray, as were the streets of Bitburg, as was its sky, which seemed perpetually to announce a snowfall that never came. He led her to a squat brick building where a small staff of Germans operated a kind of lost-and-found — not for objects, but for soldiers. A queue of at least a hundred civilians stretched from its front door down the street. Colette, seeing the line, told Younger he should go back. Then someone at the door called out and waved them to the front. The line was for civilians, not army officers.

At the counter, with Younger translating, Colette said she was looking for a soldier named Gruber — Hans Gruber.

The stolid, thick-set German woman behind the counter eyed the French girl without sympathy. 'Reason?' she asked.

Colette explained that she had served in a hospital for flu victims near Paris in the last months of the war. Among the dying was a German prisoner — Hans Gruber. 'He was very sad and very devout. He said his company didn't even know what had happened to him. I promised to try to return his dog tag and belongings to his parents after the war.'

'Give me the tag,' said the woman. 'It is the property of the German state.'

'I didn't bring it,' Colette replied. 'I'm sorry.'

The woman made an expression of contempt. 'Regimental information?'

Colette provided it. She was instructed to come back in seven days. 'Hut I can't,' she said. 'I have a job and — a little brother.'

The woman shrugged and called for the next in line.

'I'll come back, Miss Nightingale,' Younger said to Colette when they were outside.

The reference made no impression on her: 'No, I'll find a way,' she replied.

A sort of mush "began to fall — not snow; more like clumps of congealed rain. 'You have a new job?' he asked.

'Yes,' she said more brightly. 'It starts in March. You were right: the Sorbonne turned me down. But it doesn't matter. I'll get in next year. Anyway, God took pity on me. Madame has offered me a position as a technician at the Radium Institute. I'll learn more there than I would have even at university.'

'God works in mysterious ways.'

She looked at him: 'You don't believe?'

'Why wouldn't I believe? What an outrage — these people who hold up the deaths of a hundred thousand children from the flu and blame it on God. It's not His fault.'

'It's not.' She turned away. Her voice fell: 'They've taken Luc. To a school for recalcitrant children. He was living with me in the basement of the institute. Madame is letting me stay there until my position opens up. It's perfectly nice. There are bathrooms, and books, and hot plates I cook on. But someone reported us to the authorities.'

'Fools,' said Younger. 'What is recalcitrant supposed to mean?'

'The other children are thieves and imbeciles. It's criminal. Luc learns nothing and receives no treatment.'

'He doesn't need treatment. He needs to live.'

'How do you know?' she asked. 'Are you a psychologist?'

He didn't answer.

'You could have helped him get the best treatment in the world,' she said. 'You remember how he used to write notes sometimes? He doesn't even do that anymore. He hasn't communicated with anyone for two months. Oh, why am I telling you this? Why am I here? I hate this country. I have to go — my train is coming.'

She ran away.

He expected to see her the following week. After ten days, he went to the liaison office to find out if she had come back. She hadn't. Younger lit a cigarette and gazed up at Bitburg's perpetually gray sky.

In the spring, when his discharge orders finally came through, he took a train to Paris. At the Radium Institute, he asked for Miss Rousseau. The receptionist told him that Colette was out, but expected back shortly. He waited outside.

The streets of Paris were admirable. Always a tree in the right place. The buildings handsome and large, but never too large. The smell of clean water on pavement. He wondered whether he should move there.

Colette was halfway up the steps before she recognized him. She stopped in astonishment and broke into her most radiant smile, which as quickly disappeared. She was even thinner than she had been. Her cheeks had a pretty pointing of red, but the cause, it seemed to him, might be hunger.

'Come inside,' she said.

He shook his head. They went walking instead. 'Did you find your Hans Gruber?' he asked.

'Not yet.'

'You didn't go back to Bitburg, did you?'

'No, but I will.'

'Because you didn't have money for the train. Have you been eating?'

'I'll be fine in ten days. That's when my job starts. For now I have to save everything for Luc. They don't feed him enough in school. Do I look awful?'

'More beautiful than ever,' said Younger, 'if that's possible. I found your soldier. Hans was Austrian. He volunteered with the Germans when the war broke out. They gave me an address in Vienna. Here.'

He handed her a piece of paper. She stared at it: 'Thank you.'

'How is Luc?' he asked.

'Terrible.'

'Do they ever let him out?'

'Of course. In fact his school goes on holiday at the end of this week. How long will you be in Paris? I know he'd like to see you.'

'I'm leaving this Friday.'

'Oh,' she said. 'Do come and see the institute. We have American soldiers visiting, learning Madame's radiography techniques.'

'I know. That's why I won't go in. I've had enough of the army for a while.'

'But I could introduce you to Madame.'

'No.' They had come to a street with trolley cars rambling on it. 'Well, Miss Rousseau, I don't want to keep you.' She looked up at him: 'Why did you come?' 'I almost forgot. There was something else I meant to give you.' He handed her an envelope from his pocket. It contained a short telegram, which read: i will accept boy with pleasure as new patient. advise sister to call on me directly she arrives vienna. freud

She was speechless.

'You can kill two birds with one stone,' said Younger. 'Take Luc to Freud, and pay a visit to your soldier's family.'

'But I can't. I don't speak German. Where would I stay? I can't even afford the tickets.'

'I speak German,' he replied.

'You would come?'

'Not if you're going to shoot me.'

To his surprise, she threw her arms around his neck. He had the impression she was crying.

Jimmy Littlemore unburdened the kitchen table of his feet. He stretched his good arm, poured two more whiskeys. 'I don't get you, Doc. First you practically rape her-'

'Completely false.'

'You unbuttoned her shirt. What kind of girl did you think she was?'

Younger scrutinized the autumnal color of the bourbon. 'The rules are different in war.'

'She didn't think so,' said Littlemore. 'What I like is how she knows what she's going to do with herself. She wants her sore bun, and she's going to get it.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'That school, the sore bun. Wants it for her dad. That's how I feel about making it to Washington. My dad missed his only shot with the Feds. When Teddy Roosevelt went to DC, my dad could've gone with him. He was the best cop in New York, but he had family, kids — you know. I'll probably never get the shot myself, but if I do, let me tell you, that would make him proud. So when did you find out her soldier boy wasn't dead?'

Younger's glass stopped midway to his mouth. 'How did you know that?'

'The dog tags,' said Littlemore. 'She goes to a German army office to locate a dead soldier, and she leaves the guy's tags back in France? I don't think so. I don't think she has the guy's tags. Why would that he? Because he's not dead.'

'I always said you should have been a detective.'

'She's sweet on the guy, huh? Didn't want you to know?'

Younger took a moment before answering: 'She's in love with him — her Hans. Want to know what happened in Austria?'

'I'm all ears.'