It was absurd. We both knew it. What was war if not messy? But we silently shook hands and picked up the cognacs. It was the sort of oath that men took when they didn’t know what else to do. Words that masked helplessness. We drained the glasses in one swallow.

I looked to Gaspard, standing at the bar slicing cheese. He shrugged. “He bought the bottle. Have as much as you like.”

I poured out two more and offered Papa a silent santé. “She’ll be fine, won’t she? Maman?”

He tugged at his beard. “She’d do better than you or I would if we were alone. Iron, she is.”

“Even iron rusts.”

He swirled his cognac and drank. “And it becomes more beautiful for the transformation.”

I caught a drop on the side of my glass with my thumb.

“Luc, she left this for you.” From his pocket, he took a ribbon, pale blue, from Maman’s hat.

I remembered a boy with a faded ribbon, missing his maman terribly. I tied it around my wrist.

I finished my cognac and took the rest of the bottle to the counter at the front. “Gaspard,” I said to the owner, “put the rest of this behind the bar. I know you have that hollow post, where you keep the good stuff hidden. Put this there.” I dug all of my money out and put a handful of bills on the counter. “Please, Gaspard. When this is all over, we’ll drink together. We’ll toast to another day, conquered.”

Gaspard sighed, but he took the bottle from me. “Keep your money. Just come back, you hear?”

Papa patted my shoulder and left without another word.

All of those letters I dutifully wrote to Clare, those letters piling up in Laghouat, waiting for a return that might never happen. All of those letters, waiting for an ending to our story.

I tore a blank page from the copy of Germinal in my jacket pocket. With the stub of a pencil, the words came out in furious scribbles, a place to direct all of my fear and confusion and anger.

Paris

Samedi, le 1 août 1914

The First Day

Clare,

I don’t know where you are or if you’ll ever read any of my letters. You’re off on a quest, but now, so am I. Here, this day, I’m being called to take up my sword.

The princesses my father painted were always strong enough to take the scissors to their own hair. They waited for no one. Even before you came to Mille Mots, Papa was painting you. I don’t have their courage. I don’t know how my tale will end.

I once dreamed that my ending would include tennis championships. Paris or Scotland or somewhere farther. Teaching. Maybe you. But then I’ve had nothing from you these past months and I hate it. I hate not knowing if I’ll ever hear from you again. If I’ll ever again hike with you through Le Bois des Fées or hear you laugh or just watch you sketch, so serious and intense. But maybe remembering all of that, remembering our summer, is enough. I can think of no better standard to carry into war than the memory of your face.

Luc

I had Chaffre in my section, and thank God for that. Because, when we ended up at Ferme de Brindeau, four months after the war began, I needed someone by my side.

We’d been moving closer to Enété for weeks, I knew that, but when we went into the woods and down the rise to the entrance of the caves, I almost didn’t recognize it as the place I used to know. The ground where I stood with eyes squeezed shut while Clare lost herself inside, it was churned up into mud from boots and hooves. The little spot where I’d spread leaves to sit and draw, horses were tied. It looked like any other army camp, any other place for a few thousand men to unshoulder their packs and wring out their socks. It didn’t look like a fairy woods. It didn’t look like the spot I’d once thought ours.

And, on the ground above, where I was used to seeing the backs of the farm buildings, white in the green of the woods, was rubble. Surely this wasn’t the right spot. The constantly gray sky, the shell smoke obscuring the sun, a guy could get turned around. I must only think I was so near to Mille Mots.

But then I saw the crooked tree over the cave entrance, the tree Clare leaned against when she begged me not to ignore her. I knew I was in the right spot.

“You holding up there, old man?” Chaffre nudged me on. I hadn’t realized that I’d stopped. “You look like you swallowed a cat.”

“You made that up, didn’t you?” I convinced my feet to start moving again. “Who swallows cats?”

He shrugged. “I think it works.”

I briefly wondered where the farmer had gone, the farmer I’d never actually met, but after all of Maman’s admonitions to stay off his property, imagined as stern Mr. McGregor from Peter Rabbit. I didn’t know if he’d been Brindeau or if the name had been around longer than us all.

“Keep moving, you bastard.” Chaffre poked me with the butt of his Lebel. “Or we’ll all be sleeping out here.”

But it wasn’t just the memories suddenly flooding back that slowed my steps. Of course, it was that goddamned cave.

We didn’t go in the front entrance that Clare would use when she wanted to be alone in the dark for a moment. We went around to the other side, through a narrow doorway, and down a set of chipped, uneven steps that led farther down into the gloom. I froze. On the stairs, my hand on the damp wall, I wouldn’t go another step. It was only Chaffre’s hand on my back that nudged me down.

I ducked under a low-hanging lintel. “Did it have to be caves? Did it have to be these caves?”

“Medieval quarries. Not caves. Stones were cut out of here by hand for the cathedrals.” Chaffre lifted his hand, but he stayed close. “Have you always been this tall?”

“Have you always been this talkative?”

“Yes.”

“I must’ve been desperate that night in the canteen.”

“Stop closing your eyes. You’re going to walk into a wall and the whole cave will collapse.”

“Quarry.” My eyes flew open. “It will?”

He grinned. “Joking. Really, though. Look around. You, of all people, should appreciate this.” My gaze flicked up to the ceiling, wondering if it really would fall in on me. “Not there,” Chaffre said. “The walls.”

I caught a hint of color and my breathing slowed. Tucked in the shadows was a carving. An altar hewed straight from the limestone and tinted red and yellow. Dieu, guardez-nous arched over the top in careful, blackened letters. God keep us safe. Beneath, a crucifix in relief.

“Down here?” I asked Chaffre in a whisper. Around me, soldiers’ chatter had turned hushed. “What are they from?”

“Those who were here before, it seems.” He reached out and ran a finger along the bottom of the altar, at the regimental number and the 1914. “So they can forget for a while.”

“Forget what?” I asked, but the line was already moving.

“What do you think?”

Chaffre and I had had our baptism of fire on the Marne. We stuck together and tried not to look too wild-eyed, for the other’s sake. Stumbling forward, with bayonets fixed, we listened to the different shells, timing how long until they hit the ground. Chaffre was as nervous as a clam out there, ducking every time he heard a squeal tearing across the sky, no matter how far away. When a shell finally did come down nearby, it didn’t make a sound. Or, if it did, my ears were deadened to the noise, to the whines and the screams and the raps. There was a streak of smoke and then the ground in front of us sprayed up. My insides turned to ice-cold liquid. It took a few seconds to realize that Chaffre’d been hit. Just a clod of dirt, but the size of an onion, and he went down.

I was terrified of the next shell, so I bent to get an arm under each of his. My pack, half as heavy as I was, threatened to tip me straight over on him, so I shed it. Murmuring, “Here now, you bastard,” I hoisted him up and we stumbled back the way we’d come. I was fined for leaving my pack out there, and when I finally retrieved it, found nothing left in it but my can opener and a dry washcloth. All of my socks and tinned meat and old letters from Clare that I couldn’t leave behind were gone. At least I still had that copy of Tales of Passed Times, the one I bought for Clare all those years ago. I carried it in my pocket the way others carried Bibles. With Maman’s rose pressed dry between the pages, it was all the comfort I needed.

Chaffre was fine, apart from a blinding headache for a few days. I squatted by his hospital cot and whispered thanks that his rescue had kept me from thinking too hard about our baptism. We could both count ourselves through with it. With that initial clutch of fear over, we could count ourselves real soldiers.