In the forest of Compiègne, a couple of hours north of Paris, the soldiers on guard duty came to attention as the door at the end of the train car cracked open. A ray of warm light leaked out into the gray morning. A crow circled and landed on a branch at the edge of the clearing.
The Germans came out of the train first, followed by the French and the British. They paused on the coach steps for a photographer to document the event. With no farewell, the Allies went for a walk in the woods.
The Germans stood around the train car, saying nothing. One of them tried to light a cigarette but broke down, his shoulders heaving. His colleagues looked away to give him a moment. When he recovered, they walked back to their train car on the second line.
• • •
Done.
Coal sat on the ground and leaned his head against the tree, not caring about the drizzle or the wet leaves soaking through his suit. It was a relief to not have his shoulder hurt any more, but it hardly mattered. He was a candle guttering out. As the doors on the train cars shut one after another, he closed his eyes. “Just for a moment.”
In the morning showers, he didn’t hear the train engines start up and pull away, one to the north, one to the south. Nor did he meditate on the reception that each would receive arriving at its destination.
• • •
It was cold in northern France during the winter of 1918. There was snow in December, the rivers froze for a time in January. But the spring came and with it a spray of feverfew and toothwort and yellow foxglove, until the volunteer pines in a circle around him got full enough to steal the light.
The clothes he wore fell apart after a few years to be replaced by moss and lichen and creeping vines. Mushrooms and toadstools: milkcaps, pinkgills, pale brittle stems, and jelly fungi grew wherever soil filled the hollows. In the fall, the watch resting in the palm of his hand was often circled by a fairy ring of tiny yellow mushrooms. If it inconvenienced him to have starlings nest beneath his neck for consecutive springs, it didn’t show. They quit coming when a skulk of foxes moved into the neighborhood and began to eat the eggs. Though this didn’t bother the doves who, except in the dead of winter, cooed every morning under the eves.
• • •
One day, many years after the Great War (twenty-two years, or 681,523,055 seconds to be precise), a boy came to see what the commotion was about at the park near the little train car museum not far from his home.
Through the trees he saw that someone had knocked down a wall of the museum and dragged the train coach out into the square. There were automobiles and reporters and cameras and row upon row of shiny German soldiers standing at attention. In the middle of it all was a German officer, his smile nearly hidden beneath his toothbrush moustache. He stepped up into the train car, followed a moment later by a forlorn French general.
Trying to better his view, the boy stumbled and fell into the brush. Looking up, he saw some sort of statue. Nothing like the big statue of the French general standing on the far side of the park. This was a seated man, covered in branches and leaves, tucked right in with the trees.
There was a glint of gold in the palm of its hand, maybe just tiny yellow mushrooms. The boy tried to scrape it loose from the moss and dirt. Fingers closed around his tiny hand. With a yelp, he fell back on the ground. The statue’s eyes opened.
The boy cried most of the way home.
By the time he returned, in the company of his older brothers, the crowd in the park was gone. The only ones left were men with huge hammers, smashing the French monuments. They were even hauling away the train car.
Whatever the boy had seen in the wood was gone as well. There was now only a hollow in the weeds, swarming with grubs and beetles, blanched for want of sun. By the time the boy’s brothers, in their boots, had inspected the thicket, any trace of the footprints that had walked away were gone.