BOOK XI

 

STENDHAL

After the first barrage, the boy beside Gabriel Tait was instantly killed, hit by shrapnel in the neck and chest. His eyes were still open, unbelieving.

Tait’s ears were ringing. The world was one enormous crazy high note, a clutch of piano keys struck by a giant’s fist. He couldn’t hear the German cannons and machine guns, still thumping shells and bullets into the ground, into sandbags, into men. He could only see the horror of his surrounds, inside the high-pitched whine in his head.

But what Gabriel Tait knew, what passed through his mind in the last moments of his life, was that the dead boy beside him had a silver ring under his tongue. And in his blood-soaked breast pocket there was a letter from his sister.

She’d sent the silver ring folded inside a passage from Stendhal. It was from Les Privilèges. The boy’s older sister had been studying in Paris when the war began. She loved Stendhal and she loved her brother. She’d translated the passage for him. It was an offering to the gods, a prayer, a hymn, a wish that would never fail to resist death. A guarantee: enshrined, worded, printed, unimpeachable. She loved her brother very much.

Article 8: Whenever the privileged person shall carry, for two minutes, on his person or wear on his finger, a ring that he has briefly put in his mouth, he will remain invulnerable for whatever duration he determines. Ten times a year, he shall enjoy the sharp eyesight of an eagle and will be able to run a distance of five leagues within an hour.

She’d sent the ring and the letter to her brother, and the boy had shown it all to Gabriel Tait just now, read the letter out and popped the ring under his tongue, laughing.

And then the shelling began.

It was 19 July 1916.