A/N: This was my major work for English last year. Enjoy.

A Great War

By Whirr

11th September 1917

I rubbed my eyes, yawned, stretched. The bed was soft and comfortable, made with feather pillows, crisp sheets and Maman’s old patchwork quilt. I lay there with my eyes closed. The sounds of early morning were there; the incessant chatter of birds, the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves on the road below my window, the faint clatter of pots downstairs. I opened my eyes. Tiny patches of sunlight littered the room, as early morning rays crept through thin, lacy curtains.

I dressed, and went downstairs for breakfast. It was a quiet affair. Papa sat at one end of the table. Jérôme and I sat on his right side, facing Maman and the three officers. Papa talked to them, in an odd mixture of French and English.

--

That day, more of them arrived. I had walked into town, to find them standing by the town hall. They were billeted mainly to other families in the town. They split off from the main group rather hesitantly, in twos or threes. In the end, there were eight or so left standing there. They were to stay at our home with the three officers. Kinsella, Holder, Winterbottom, Green. I knew the names, had heard them in conversation many a time. The sounds themselves rung of some other world, outside of all that I knew, which began and ended with Renescure.

I saw them set off in two motor cars, and I followed, albeit at a slower pace. I arrived later in the afternoon, and I was not aware of them again until that night. I was sitting with Maman, and the room was still and quiet. The men had retired someplace else, and Jérôme was asleep. The faint sounds of music upstairs drifted down to us. I heard Maman sniffle and sensed her tense a little.

I put down my book, and quickly left the room.

I crept up the stairs. The old gramophone played Madelon, and the floorboards moved beneath my feet. They were dancing. A slice of golden light fell through the doorframe, into the dark of the hall. I heard them laughing and joking – rough, unpleasant accents and all – and the sound of their boots hitting the floor as they moved. They intrigued me, these tall, young, fearless prophets from a far off land, where the sun shone year round, and people went about their business in the balmy heat, where men joked and did the best they could, and women were strong and independent. That was what Henri told me, anyway, and I was in no position to disagree.

I paused at their door. I did not understand most of what they said, but they just sounded so… happy. I put my ear to the door and breathed deeply. How could they be so light-hearted in the wake of such a war?

The Great War, they called it.

Three years, it had lasted now. I wondered for the babies, the little ones who had been born in those years, into a world of war. War was all they had ever known. Their world was one of pain and suffering, where fathers were non-existent. Mme. Foulard from the village had a small child, a girl called Lucie, who could often be heard crying in the night. The soft, wavering cry was not easily forgotten, nor the sensation it sent running down my spine – one of desperation and panic, for what was to be done when the enemy was your own?

The song finished, and I heard them cease their dancing. I realised with a jolt that they would, any minute, be heading towards the door. I hurried down the hall, careful not to make any noise. Their door opened, and the slice of light expanded to fill the entire hall as they poured out. They were quiet now, as though suddenly aware that they were guests. I felt their eyes on my back as I turned into my own room.

I shut the door. A fire crackled in the grate. I changed quickly, and fell into the bed, thoughts of nothing swirling in my mind. There was nothing to wonder. Nothing to wonder. There were just facts. There were men staying in our home. The bed was warm. There was a war going on, though I knew nothing of the reasons. Army against army, state against state, man against man. I knew only what I heard from visitors to our little town, and though here, in my own home, were visitors of a different sort, visitors who had seen exactly what I wondered to know about, I knew no more than I had before their arrival. It was a shame, really.

Madelon played on in my head, and light from the fire danced sylph-like on the ceiling, one moment calm, tranquil and simply beautiful, the next magnificent in its vividness, lighting up the entire room with colours of red and gold and everything in between, and all the while slowly lulling me into a strange, dream-like sort of trance.

--

Wind whipped lightly through the newly opened window, causing the newspaper snippets pinned to the walls to flap soundlessly. It whispered to the dark-haired girl asleep on the bed, gently shifting one stray curl over her closed eyelids. The words and pictures on the walls danced through her dreams – broken dreams of far-off sunny paradises, punctuated with scenes of bayonets and gunshots. And grey. Grey skies and landscapes and… and faces. Oh, grey faces.

Oh, Geneviève… How you wish and wonder and weep for those you cannot help, evils you cannot change. Do you not know that not living your own life will not save theirs? You will never truly know the horrors they know, never truly will you experience the dark terrors of their minds. So why do you surround yourself with their pain? Why do you dream of the life that they have come from?

Theirs are not the only lives being wasted by this war.

This war.

And the words and images danced on in her dreams, filling her mind with the woes of places she would never see and people she would never meet.

They were long gone.

--

Days went by, and we hardly heard of the soldiers while at home, save for meal times. Much of what I learned about them was picked up during trips into the village, where I would often pass groups of them, talking, or looking dubiously at the sky. From what I could gather, with my limited English, they were to stay two days longer, before setting off to ‘Wipers’.

Passchendaele was slowly becoming a disaster. The newspaper cuttings on my walls grew steadily more numerous, as each day passed by, and with each new addition made; the dark weight inside my heart grew hopelessly heavier. And now these men, who had lived and breathed amongst us, were going to join them, and I couldn’t help but wonder… how long would it be before they joined the others on my walls? How many months, weeks or days would it be before they themselves were whisked from this life, to reappear as figures in print, haunting my dreams, and those of many others?

They may as well have been ghosts already.

And what for?

Enemies and allies alike graced the green patterned paper. Allied and Entente. Les boches and les français. German. British. ANZAC.

--

Two days later, and they were gone. It seemed that they had only just arrived. Our little streets seemed empty again, without the joviality and spirit of the soldiers. Their airs lingered, giving the place an overall sense of loss and incompleteness. The very cobblestones on the pavement had come alive during those few days. We had experienced Renescure in a way we hadn’t for three years. Fancy that the presence of a few foreign soldiers for a week or so could have brought back so many memories.

Memories of a town alive with the bustle of everyday life, with children playing in the streets, and colourful stalls run by friendly, squat little men, selling all manner of things. Where everyone knew everyone else by name, and the birth of a new baby brought a new burst of hope and freshness every month or so. Where men went happily to work on the mills each day, and the sole worry for many families was whether the next day would bring with it rain or not.

But the world I had grown up in had suddenly disappeared, and I, too old to feign ignorance on the account of naivety, yet too young to fully comprehend the very cause that had turned my utopia upside-down, had clung to the only thing I knew how to do well – reading. Yet what I had found in the day-old newspapers snatched from my father’s waste-paper bin had not offered me any kind of consolation. The stories that I had found seemed to mock my confusion and helplessness. People were dying, in numbers that terrified me. And yet I could not understand why, explanations eluded me.

In my opinion, the world had lost its mind.

So I surrounded myself with all that I could find, in the hope that the reason would come to me. The reason that a whole generation had been exploited and that millions of children had lost their fathers. And then, then they had arrived, and I had seen first-hand just what was being lost.

Our fourth winter was looming in front of us. The streets were quiet and dead with the icy chill of the coming season. I spent increasingly frequent amounts of time inside, sitting alone, perusing through scraps of newspaper. It was a routine now, which I could not break out of. During one of these rituals I was interrupted by Jérôme, who entered the room noisily, a wooden toy car trailing behind him pulled by a piece of string.

I looked up.

“What are you doing, Genie?”

I stared at him.

“Genie? What are you doing?”

I looked at my hands, at the newspaper clippings lying on the table, and then back at Jérôme. He was standing by the door, watching me intently. The little car sat forgotten at his side and the string hung limply from his hand.

I shook my head, and looked back at my hands. Leave.

“Someday,” Jérôme said, “You’ll speak again Genie. You have to.”

And then he followed my silent order, closing the door quietly behind him, such a contrast to the way he had entered. The precision and carefulness of this action, with thought and care for my own condition, made me wonder that he was only eight. Maybe this war aged us all.

The faces of men and young boys gazed up at me from the black and white pages in front of me. I imagined Henri’s face on theirs. He had been away for a year now. We heard news occasionally. I guess we were lucky that it had not yet been that which we all feared.

And then Jérôme’s face swam into my head and appeared on the body of the young soldier with the wide-eyed grin, and the bayonet that seemed much too large for him. Tears sprang to my eyes, and slid slowly down my cheeks, falling in a puddle on Jérôme’s chest. I tried to wipe them away, but they only smudged the picture. His ruined face brought more watery expressions of grief, and soon the soldier’s body was just a black smudge in a sea of meaningless words. Silently, I watched my hands, moving more slowly than usual, as they picked up the little cutting, and tore it, straight down the middle.

My eyes dried up with this action, and suddenly, I felt a passionate burning of anger, in a place inside of me that I had long forgotten ever existed. I looked at the table, littered with little cuttings. Why? What good had it ever done anyone? So, with the strength of three years’ built-up frustration, I lifted the little table and flung it across the room. It landed with a crash, and the bits of newspaper floated towards the floor, like ugly, menacing snowflakes.

And then I sunk back into my chair and wept again. But this time, it was not for the wasted lives of men I did not know. No. With the ruined products of my own wasted life scattered around me, I cried noisily and unashamedly for that very life, those three years spent wishing and wondering and weeping. I heard footsteps at the door, and it was opened by Maman. The look of mixed surprise and confusion and worry on her face made me realise how pathetic I must have appeared to her, and indeed to anyone else who might have witnessed my simultaneous collapse and rise from those shackles.

I got up, smiled like I hadn’t in three years, and hugged her. This action seemed to surprise her even more. Then I left the room, and skipped gaily through the halls, running my hands along the walls, a smile as wide as M. Gerbac’s windmill plastered across my face. Then I was in my room, ripping each cutting carelessly from the walls, turning back all the hours of painful tediousness spent fixing each one perfectly to the green paper, in all of twenty seconds. I flung open the window and breathed in the fresh air. I wanted the entire village to know of my crazed happiness, and to be just as happy as I was.

And then I saw him. The tall, gangly figure was unmistakeable. I almost screamed with happiness. I tore out of my room, through the hall and down the stairs, passing an extremely shocked Maman, who was still standing in the parlour doorway. I reached the front door just as it was being opened from the other side.

I stopped dead. My heart fluttered.

And then he was in front of me, and I launched myself at him. There was a little chuckle of surprise as I threw my arms around his neck. I breathed the scent of his clean-pressed uniform. Under the fresh parfum that had been carefully worked into it by a washerwoman somewhere, was Henri’s familiar scent – a mixture of Sylvie’s cowslip ointment and the faint odour of sweat, the result of continuous hard work.

I heard Maman’s hurried footsteps behind me, and then she was all over him, talking and fussing and crying with joy. I stood aside, taking in the odd sight of him standing there in the hall, unable to wipe the smile from my face. Jérôme appeared from upstairs. He saw Henri, and his eyes lit up. He ran to him and jumped into his arms. Henri stumbled backwards and laughed. Our front hall was alive with the joy and happiness it had seen so rarely since this war had started. And for the first time in three years, I was part of it.

Henri produced little cadeaux for Maman and Jérôme, and they received them with gratitude and much excitement, particularly on Jérôme’s part. Then he put Jérôme down and turned to me. His eyes were bright and sparkling with happiness, yet behind them I could see the terrors of war. And this, which this morning would have sent me weeping to my room, hardly bothered me at all.

“What about you, Genie? What would you like?”

I opened my mouth, and for a moment thought that no sound would come out. But then the words came, flowing just like they used to, and completed my state of dazed ecstasy.

“Nothing, Henri. I did not believe it was possible for anyone to be as happy as I am today. I suppose I have proved myself wrong.”

Maman’s eyes were on me, but I did not know what she was thinking. My gaze was fixed on Henri. And it would be, for a very good time longer.

--

It turned out that Henri had returned because he was injured. Not terribly badly of course, but enough to warrant being sent home a few weeks early. For the rest of that day, I hardly let him out of my sight. I talked like nothing else, demanding he tell me everything. Maman was speechless. She had been returned two lost children in one day. She kept repeating that it was a complete miracle. Papa did not say much, but even he could not keep the tears of joy from springing to his eyes.

The next day, I would not stir at the arrival of the paper. In fact, I would not even lay eyes on it. I would not know, therefore, that it would contain an article headed, ‘LES AUSTRALIENS A L’ATTAQUE DE PASSCHENDAELE’, or that this title would bring with it the news of hundreds of ANZAC deaths. I would not know that listed among the dead would be Holder and Winterbottom, and the officer who had sat at our table each night to dine with us, Lieutenant Staples. And neither would I mind. I had realised that these men had made a choice, and that whiling away my own time in misery and sad contemplation would not change their minds. It was better to live and let live, than to wish for things you could not have.

I was young again.

And on that note, maybe this war didn’t age us all. Maybe it made us more aware of the horrors that man could bring upon his fellow man, and tore apart families and friendships. But it also brought people together, as it had done today. Of course, this did not justify the terrible things that were happening so close to where we sat that day, in happiness and love. But if it could do this to a family once distant and cold, then why not for others? And if it would, as some said, be the War to End All Wars, then would not people realise that really, they are not so different from their enemies? That their foe had families and towns and communities and, above all, an intuitive goodness that could be twisted and manipulated and contorted almost beyond repair, but was always there, no matter how far gone one seemed?

We sat for hours, until it was dark and Sylvie lit the fire and it crackled happily in the grate, illuminating our contented faces in strange ways, so that we appeared fantastic and ethereal and a far cry from the war-ravaged world that we lived in. And still, I could not shake the feeling of whole and utter completeness that united us that night.

A war, yes. A Great War.