The Sculptress V.S. Alexander (ebooks that read to you .txt) 📖

the horizon. Behind it, columns of smoke flowed into the sky.

“Shells,” he said. “Here . . . calm.”

“Calm?” Emma asked in astonishment.

“Oui.” He thought about his words for a moment before speaking. “The war is quiet here.”

“It appears active enough for me.”

Abandoned farmhouses, some boarded up, others with sagging roofs and broken timbers, stood like sad apparitions on both sides of the road. A few skinny cows, unattended by man and unrestrained by broken fences, wandered in brown fields. As the truck rolled toward the battle, Emma realized she had no idea what the Front would be like. Her slim knowledge of the war had come from Tom’s censored letters and the civilized reporting of Boston newspapers.

Richard suddenly put a finger to his lips. He turned left onto a side road that was nothing more than ruts in a field. The truck bounced through the dead grasses and sparse woods and then slowed in a shallow clearing. About fifty meters east of the clearing a barbed-wire fence stretched in both directions as far as Emma could see. Mounds of dirt, like black earthen temples, rose at various points along the line. Toward the bleak horizon, less than a kilometer past the first row of wire, another elongated length of coiled barbs and dark mounds stretched in a parallel direction. Beyond that, a vast landscape of blasted trees and cratered earth opened like a pox upon the land. Smoke drifted like an unearthly fog over the terrain while the sharp report of machine guns popped in Emma’s ears.

“My God,” Emma said, as Richard brought the truck to a stop near a group of French soldiers. Concealed by an isolated thicket, they stood chatting and smoking cigarettes.

“Oui,” Richard said. “C’est l’enfer.”

Emma stared at the all-encompassing devastation and concurred, “Yes . . . hell.”

* * *

The soldiers ignored her. Penetrating the Front was easier than she had anticipated. Part of that ease might have been due to the other activities on the minds of the Poilu—cigarettes, cheap wine, and laughter, even as artillery fire and shells shrieked nearby. From what she could judge, these men were ordinary infantry wearing mud-spattered uniforms of light blue—the equivalent of American privates—not an officer among them. The soldiers seemed unconcerned about the fighting around them, instead leaning on their rifles, savoring their cigarettes, drinking their pinard, laughing with Richard, and staring at Emma.

Richard asked the soldiers where the American doctor, Thomas Swan, was working. Emma understood at least that much. She also heard the words “woman” and “costume” in French, which solicited more laughter from the soldiers.

“What’s going on?” Emma asked him. “You told them I was a woman, didn’t you?” She glared at him, irritated by his cavalier attitude toward her situation.

The courier shook his head and pointed to one of the soldiers, a short man with a round belly and a full black beard.

The soldier stepped forward. “I speak English. I studied it in school. I will take you to your husband.”

Emma took off her helmet, allowing her hair to fall free. The men stopped their conversation and glanced at her admiringly, causing her to stare at her uniform jacket and trousers, turned a grayish-brown from the ground-in dirt.

“Oui,” Emma said. “Je suis une femme.”

“Officers or police stop women,” the soldier said. “We are not officers. Put on your helmet. You’ll need it in the trenches.”

Emma did as he asked. “Please take me to my husband. It’s important I see him.”

“Yes, but follow me carefully and watch your head. Let me talk if we are stopped.”

“Wait for me,” Emma ordered Richard.

“Two hours,” he said. “Then I must return to the hospital.”

The soldier anticipated Emma’s question. “Your husband is at a dressing station in the first trench about a half-kilometer from here.”

“Bonne chance,” Richard said.

“Au nord,” the soldier said, and led the way along a rutted trail. Emma followed as the soldier picked up his pace, his rifle thrust forward in his hands. A short distance away, a wooden ladder protruded from the top of a mound in the sodden earth. The soldier hitched his rifle, stepped onto the ladder, and descended it like a spider spinning its web. He looked up, urging her to follow. She cringed at the sloppy trench floor, but screwed up her courage, and swung her legs onto the ladder. At the bottom, her boots sank in the muck. The air smelled like stinking, unwashed flesh.

Wires snaked along the dirt ceiling. The soldier led her north to a hole illuminated by hanging lights.

Men slept or sat on crude benches carved into the earthen walls. The soldiers, including an officer, cast stony glances at them but said nothing as they hurried past. They continued through the seemingly endless trench until the soldier turned left into a connecting tunnel.

“We’re almost there,” he said and pointed to an area obscured in the gloom, leading to another ladder that jutted out of the fetid slime. He climbed up first and Emma followed.

The sunlight, though muted by a small stand of trees, stung Emma’s eyes. As her vision adjusted, another clearing appeared. Operating and equipment tables stood under a green tarpaulin covering the dressing station. Soldiers carried or dragged in the wounded as doctors in white aprons worked on the casualties.

Emma spotted Tom hunched over one of the tables. He poked mechanically at a soldier’s wound, swabbing with gauze, and prodding the flesh with his forceps. As she approached, he pulled a bullet from the soldier’s arm. Tom studied the metal captured in the bloodied forceps for a moment and then dropped it into a tin cup.

Emma tapped his shoulder.

He cast a quick glance behind and said gruffly, “Not now. I’m busy.”

“Tom,” Emma whispered.

He spun, shock spreading across his face. “Good God, Emma. What are you doing here? How did you get . . . ?”

“You needed to see me—urgently. That’s why I’m here.” She took off her helmet and put it on the ground.

“Yes . . . yes, that’s true, but I didn’t want you