The Badge Rouge
As he eased the barn door closed, Morris heard laughter. It was muffled, but it was laughter. It seemed like a long time since he’d heard anyone laugh without a hushed or bitter edge on it.
The laughter had come from the little house, twenty or thirty foggy yards from the barn. The yellow light in the window drew him even as he realized that the smartest thing to do would be to put the lamp out. As he took the one step up onto the porch, the laughter rumbled and crested again, but when he knocked, it stopped instantly. He heard movement inside.
A full minute passed before the door cracked open to reveal a stooped man in suspenders and a loose linen shirt. Even through an opening no more than six inches wide, Morris could smell food cooking. Morris said, “Bonsoir,” and then, in the French he had heard spoken his entire life in Canada, “Joyeux Noël.”
The little man’s eyes dropped to Morris’s uniform and he nodded and backed away, opening the door farther. It hit something solid, and Keystone stepped out from behind it, holstering the Remington Rand .45 caliber automatic they all carried. “Done?” Keystone said.
“As you see,” Morris said. His dog tags were out of sight beneath his tunic, which he’d buttoned almost to the throat. “Guess what? I finally got my induction notice.” Keystone, who knew the story of Morris’s multiple attempts to enlist, gave him a grin.
The room was obviously the center of the farm’s domestic life. On the small rectangular table in front of the window burned the kerosene lantern. There was a small divan, its two cushions shedding stuffing material, against the wall, with a single upholstered chair between it and the table. Beyond that, in the far-right corner, was a kitchen with a wood-burning stove as well as a counter that contained basins for washing dishes, a rack for drying them, several stacks of heavy plates and bowls, and a tin box full of cutlery.
The place smelled like heaven: steam rose from a big pot on the stove, carrying with it the scents of herbs and garlic. The left side of the room was largely taken up by an unfinished round wooden table with three candles burning on it and six cane-seated chairs drawn up to it. Keystone’s and Sabathia’s rifles stood sentry duty behind the table, leaning against a rough-plastered wall. Sabby came in from somewhere to the left, so apparently there was a hallway there. He was using a crude cane, too short for him, but it let him ease the weight on the sprained ankle. “You made it,” he said.
“It wasn’t that far.”
“This is Claude,” Sabby said, nodding at the man who had opened the door. “And the wizard of the stove, who is down the hallway, doing something—”
“She is make dress for dinner,” said Claude from the kitchen. He had picked up a broad wooden spoon and was stirring whatever was in the pot.
Keystone said, “What kind of M-units you got?”
Morris didn’t even have to check. “Ham and lima beans, mystery meat and noodles.”
“Chocolate?”
“Got some.”
“Put it all on the table with ours. They have in the oven—hold onto something so your knees don’t buckle—a chicken, can you believe that? An actual goddamn chicken.”
“Is a coq,” Claude, tasting the liquid in the spoon.
Keystone, pulling up the chair beside Sabathia, said, “Don’t have a heart attack. It just means—”
“I know what it means,” Morris said. At the stove, Claude was laughing.
“Madame Loiseau,” Sabby said, “is going to make something, something French, out of this canned crap we been hauling around. We’re gonna have a real, honest-to-Christ Christmas dinner, can you believe that?”
Claude—or, rather, Morris thought, M. Loiseau—put the spoon down and turned to face them. “If come the Boche—mmm, les allemandes—”
“The Krauts,” Sabby said.
“Yes, merci, if come the Krauts, you must all point the guns at us, at Hélène and me, yes?”
“Yes,” Sabby said. “We busted in and took you prisoner. Nothing you could do about it . . .”
“I am sorry,” M. Loiseau said. “For Christmas, we should not . . .” He let his voice taper off, and then he shrugged.
“It’s a war,” Keystone said. He had a deep, resonant voice that after all that time on the battlefield seemed too big to be brought indoors. Keystone evidently heard it, because he grimaced and said much more quietly, “We thank you.”
“I think,” Morris said, “that we should take the lamp out of the window.”
“Yes, yes, yes.” M. Loiseau put down the spoon and replaced the lid on the pot. “This is a good idea.” On the way to the table, he caught his toe on a small oval hand-braided rug halfway between the kitchen area and the front door. “Always,” he said, with a quick glance down at it, “always I am making myself trip here.”
“Want me to move it?” Morris asked.
“Non, non,” M. Loiseau said, picking up the lantern. “Under we have . . .” He put the lantern back on the table and used his right hand to mime hammering a nail. Then he held up his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart and said, “Stick up.”
From the unseen part of the house, which Morris guessed comprised a short hallway leading to a small bedroom, came a tiny woman carrying a thick towel. She was making a straight line for the kitchen, but she threw a quick, bright-eyed look at Morris and then faltered for a moment when she registered where her husband was standing. “Claude,” she said and followed it with a short sentence in French that was very much in the imperative, too fast for Morris to follow, and her husband nodded quickly, placed the lantern on the table, and said to Morris and the others, “More wood.” He went outside, disappearing almost instantly in a thick wreath of fog.
“Bonsoir, Madame Loiseau,” Morris said. “Joyeux Noël.”
“Yes,” the tiny woman said. She forced a smile, but her eyes darted to her left, in the direction she had come from, before they returned to him. She wore a formless parchment-colored dress, probably yellow many years ago, and a violet shawl with fringe from which the dye had been leached unevenly, turning bits of it an unappealing pink. Covering her hands with the towel, she picked up the simmering pot and moved it to the back of the stove and then turned to face him. “This,” she said, pointing imperiously at the canned rations on the table. “This is food?”
“Manner of speaking,” Keystone said, and Mme. Loiseau said, “Pardon?”
“Sorry,” Keystone said. “Yes, ma’am, it’s food.”
Since Morris hadn’t sat down yet, he said, “I’ll bring it over,” and stacked the three tins so he could lift them all at once. Mme. Loiseau squinted dubiously at the tins as he approached, then stepped aside and indicated a relatively empty area on the scarred wooden counter. “Here’s how you open it,” he said, and when he’d snapped off the little key and unwound the strip of tin that sealed the can, Mme. Loiseau picked it up between thumb and forefinger, her other fingers spread wide as though to avoid contact with the tin, and took a halfhearted sniff. Instantly, her entire face screwed up and she straightened the arm with the tin in it to get it as far from her as she could without actually throwing it. Her other hand came up to her mouth. All three men burst into laughter, and they were still laughing when the door opened and M. Loiseau came in with an armload of wood, shushing them even as he himself began to laugh at the expression on his wife’s face.
“Eating this,” Mme. Loiseau said, “you can win, eating this?”
“We can try,” Keystone said, and then he started laughing again.
“Well.” Mme. Loiseau put it down and stood, hands on hips, staring down at the tins of rations. “If I can cook turnips twelve nights in a row, I can cook this.” She undid another tin, sniffing it this time from eight or ten inches away. “I have onions,” she said. “I have garlic. I have rosemary.” She put the tin down and said to the soldiers, “I promise you. You will not smell this.”
They’d eaten a few bites of almost everything—the mystery meat, which Mme. Loiseau had identified as “la viande de cheval” and Morris had translated as “horse meat”—defied improvement, but the chicken, which they’d just cut into, was perfect (if tough) and the other M-rations had gone into Mme. Loiseau’s stew without, as she said, absolutely destroying it. Mme. Loiseau was once again in the back bedroom, which she’d visited several times, always coming back wiping her hands on the white dress and looking worried.
M. Loiseau had pulled the cork from an unlabeled bottle of earthy-tasting red wine and was raising his glass and saluting the holiday again when the front door flew open, just missing Morris in his chair. Four German troops pushed their way in, rifles pointing directly at Morris, Keystone, Sabathia, and M. Loiseau.
“All hands on the table,” said the heavyset, red-faced soldier in the lead, whose left sleeve bore the single green stripe of an Unteroffizier, the German Army’s lowest-ranking sergeant. He registerd the empty hands and jerked his gun toward the ceiling. “Up,” he said in English. “Everyone up.” He stepped farther into the room, the others crowding behind him. “Put the bottle down, old man.” His English was accented but serviceable.
They all rose, hands uplifted. One of the German privates, a boy still in his teens, pulled the door partway closed, saw the rifles standing against the wall, and said something in German to the sergeant.
The sergeant’s reply was also in German, but the meaning was clear: he motioned the young private to take the weapons out onto the porch. As the boy complied, the sergeant said, “Hands on heads. Now. Not you, old man. Who else is here?”
“My wife,” M. Loiseau said. “My daughter. She is ill, my daughter. Are you hungry?”
“We will eat,” the sergeant said, “in a few minutes.” He waved the other two soldiers, one heavy and balding prematurely, the other thin and sharp-featured, toward the hallway. Both men, rifles still extended, took their first steps, then stopped simultaneously.
“Oh,” Mme. Loiseau said, coming into the room. She stopped, took in the two armed men in front of her, and said, “More guests. Joyeux Noël.” There was a quaver in her voice that brought home to Morris the fact that they could all die in this room: he, Sabby, Keystone, and the Loiseaus.
“Stay there,” the sergeant said to Mme. Loiseau. “My men will check the rest of the house. Who else is here?”
“Our daughter,” Mme. Loiseau said. “She is, she is ill.”
The sergeant motioned the two waiting privates forward, and Mme. Loiseau watched them go with her fingertips pressed to her mouth. The young German private who had taken the rifles out onto the porch was just coming back in, and the sergeant said to him, “Schmidt. Take their sidearms.” Schmidt, looking slightly panicked, approached them as though they were mined.
There were noises from the back of the house. “Please,” Mme. Loiseau said, “it is only my daughter. She is not well.”
“Schmidt,” the sergeant snapped. “Get their guns.” They all kept their hands on their heads as Schmidt relieved them of their sidearms. The boy’s uniform was too big for him. His cheeks were pink with either cold or embarrassment, and up close, Morris could see that he wasn’t yet shaving.
More noise from the hallway announced the reemergence of the two soldiers, looking more relaxed. One of them said, “Ein Mädchen,” and the sergeant nodded as the young soldier, Schmidt, took Keystone’s automatic.
Morris breathed in the aroma of the food and felt the room’s warmth, which until then he hadn’t really noticed. He thought, We probably won’t live through dinner, and, feeling a gaze, looked up to see the sergeant regarding him, his mouth pulled slightly to the left.
Morris said, “We were—” and his voice broke. He swallowed and said, “about to eat, we were about to—”
“I can see that,” the sergeant said. At that moment, Schmidt, who was trying to carry three automatics, dropped one with a bang and emitted a little sound that sounded to Morris like the German version of eeek. Everybody jumped a little. Schmidt threw an anxious glance at the sergeant, bent with a grunt to pick up the dropped weapon, and then stopped at the door, since he had no free hands. The sergeant shook his head slowly and pulled the door open, and Schmidt, going through it, apparently forgot about the step down because he dropped about six inches and landed with a thump and an “Ooof.” The sergeant let the door swing closed on the boy, blew out some air, and said in a half-whisper, “Scheisskopf.” One of his men, the plump one, smothered a laugh.
“My wife,” M. Loiseau said, with courage that flooded Morris with shame, “wished you a merry Christmas.”
“Yes, yes,” the sergeant said. “Frohe Weihnachten, merry Christmas, joyeux Noël, however you want to say it. Now be still until Schmidt gets back.”
“If he doesn’t get lost,” Keystone said, and the plump soldier laughed again and the sharp-featured one followed suit and then looked up quickly to see the sergeant glaring at him, but then the sergeant laughed, too, and at that moment it seemed to Morris that the flames on the candles, which had been flickering in the draft from the door, were suddenly burning straighter and brighter. And then Sabathia began to laugh as well, and M. Loiseau said, “Please, Unteroffizier, send one of your men back to the kitchen with me so he can guard me while I can get some more glasses and another bottle of wine.”
The sergeant took a slow look around the room, his eyes slowing when they reached Morris, and then he said to the plump soldier, “Go with him.”
Twenty minutes later they were all sitting around the table and some German rations had been scrambled together, heavily seasoned, doused with wine, and left to simmer on the stove. Since there were only six dining chairs for nine people, M. and Mme. Loiseau shared one, the sharp-featured private was jammed very uncomfortably next to Morris on a chair with one short leg that rocked every time either man shifted his weight, and the Unteroffizier, whose uniform announced his name as Autenburg, had pulled up the upholstered chair that had previously been at the table in front of the window. It was the most comfortable but it was also lower than the others, which would have had a slightly comic effect—Autenburg’s blunt, bright red, mercilessly shaved face at a child’s height above the food—if it hadn’t been for the sight of his gun on the table next to his plate. It was the sole weapon in sight, although the German privates all still had their sidearms in their holsters. All the Americans’ weapons were outside on the porch, but Morris knew that Keystone kept a little two-shot Derringer .38 in his boot.
Autenburg drained his second glass of wine and put it down. “We were winning,” he said in his deep voice, almost as deep as Keystone’s. His left hand held a fork, from which dangled a piece of chicken. Now that he’d lowered his glass, he returned his right hand to the neighborhood of his gun. He wagged his head side to side, an equivocal gesture. “Winning for the moment, at any rate, and they sent us on a flanking maneuver to take out one of your guns, and the fog came in, and we were cut off.”
“Lost.” Keystone said. “Repeat after me, lost.”
“We were not lost,” Autenburg snapped. “We knew where our troops were. I know exactly where we are now. But there remained the problem of returning to our lines without getting the Scheisse—excuse me, Madame—shot out of us. Our men don’t like the fog any more than yours do.”
“I am getting up now,” Mme. Loiseau said, “to check on my daughter and to stir some more seasoning into your horrible food.”
“Helmut,” Autenburg said. The sharp-featured soldier got up quickly, sending Morris and the chair he’d been sharing with Helmut toppling sideways. Morris hit the floor, hearing the laughter around the table, and brought his eyes up to register that he was inches from a holstered German automatic. He darted a glance upward to meet the eyes of the boy Schmidt, who shook his head urgently, shifted the chair back a few inches, extended a hand, yanked it back, and then held it out again.
“Danke schön,” Morris said, getting up.
Autenburg raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment of the German as Mme. Loiseau and Helmut disappeared into the hallway, and Keystone asked him, “Are we in France or Belgium?”
“Belgium is nine or eight kilometers away, and we are in German-occupied France,” Autenburg said. His eyes flicked to M. Loiseau, who was staring at the tabletop, his neck stiff and his mouth a straight line. “But it probably will not be so for long.”
M. Loiseau sighed, and the heavier of the German privates sighed with him. Werner, his name was, although Morris didn’t know whether it was a first or last name.
“You are from where?” Autenburg asked Morris.
“Canada.”
Autenburg squinted at something only he could see. “In the north.”
M. Loiseau rose, and Autenburg flicked a finger at Werner, who followed. M. Loiseau went into the kitchen, where he bent down and out of sight and, from the sound of it, began to rummage through a cabinet. Werner looked questioningly over the counter at Autenburg and got a peremptory nod in response.
“He’s only getting more wine,” Sabathia said. He had spoken rarely since the Germans barged in, even as the atmosphere around the table lightened, although he had laughed once or twice. “He’s got half a dozen bottles down there.”
Autenburg nodded at Sabathia’s foot. “Shot?”
Sabathia made a snorting sound. “Sprained. Tripped over a dead guy in the dark.”
“Yours or ours?”
Sabathia grimaced, and suddenly Morris could visualize the uniform on the fallen solder who had until then been, to him, only a pair of eyes. Sabathia licked his lips.
“German,” Morris said, since no one else volunteered, and for the first time the dead man’s face came into focus. “Very young.”
Autenburg continued to stare at Sabathia, who was almost squirming, and then brought his eyes slowly to Morris. He wiped his mouth with an open palm as though he’d tasted something bitter. “Yes,” he said, with a glance at Schmidt, who was pretending not to listen. “They are sending very young ones now.”
From the other side of the counter, where M. Loiseau was struggling with another cork, Werner, who was probably no more than twenty himself said, “Children. They are sending children.”
Morris said, without thinking, “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
“Yes,” Autenburg said. He pushed his plate away with some uneaten chicken on it. Schmidt looked at the remaining bit—most of a wing—longingly. Autenburg pushed the plate over to him. “You have read Remarque?”
“I have,” Morris said. “In English.”
“A great book,” Autenburg said. “Like his soldiers, like Remarque’s hero, after the Great War we will have to return home.” He touched the barrel of the automatic beside his plate with his forefinger and then pulled his hand back. “If we live through the defeat, we will have to return home. Seeing what we have seen.”
From the kitchen, Werner said, “Doing what we have done.”
Autenburg blinked heavily in Werner’s direction. “This is worse than Remarque’s war, the Great War,” he said. “I have soldiers who are fifteen, sixteen.” He blinked again. “Some maybe younger, but this is what they have been told to say. Fifteen, sixteen.”
“Sixteen,” Schmidt said with his mouth full, then threw a quick glance at Autenburg and blushed scarlet.
“All war is dreadful,” Morris said.
Autenburg said, “And yet you are here. You are Canadian, you did not have to come. Your country did not draft anyone until, what? A month ago? You have read Remarque. You have read—” He paused, evidently searching his mind for something. “The badge, the badge rouge—”
“The Red Badge of Courage. Yes, I’ve read it.”
“And still you are here. Why?”
Morris had the sensation that the entire room, which seemed to him somehow to have been holding its breath, suddenly rushed at him from all directions until he was alone in a very bright pinpoint of light from a single candle, and there was a sustained note, as though from a violin, in his ears. Swallowing, he tasted Sophie Resnick’s bubble gum again and remembered the big table, completely covered by the food for the holiday, and the two of them knotted together in the secret space beneath it. He blinked it all away, heard his heart drumming in his ears, and felt the weight of the dog tags hanging around his neck. It had seemed so simple in the stable to remain who he was, not to accept the disguise Keystone had offered him. But here it was, far too soon, the moment he’d thought wouldn’t come. He met Autenburg’s eyes and said, “I’m a Jew.”
Keystone groaned and Sabby’s head snapped around, his mouth open. Autenburg and Morris held each other’s eyes as though they were alone in the room, and then Autenburg brought his right hand up to the top of the table and put it on his automatic.
Morris swallowed and said, “You asked.” He tapped the pocket of his tunic to show there was nothing hard inside it and then, very deliberately, inserted two fingers and came up with his pack of cigarettes. Feeling Autenburg’s gaze, he shook out one for himself and then extended the pack across the table at Autenburg. “Would you like a Jewish cigarette?”
For a moment it seemed as though Autenburg might laugh and accept it, but there was an abrupt jabber in French from the hallway, a woman’s voice, some panicked-sounding questions in German, and then a low female wail that scaled up into a shriek. Instantly, all the Germans had their guns in their hands and Autenburg said to the others, “Wait here,” and disappeared into the hallway.
Where he was standing, M. Loiseau clasped his hands together at his chest and began to pray aloud.