The Message

Source

As the men filed out of the trenches to begin their stint away from the front, Louis looked around. The muddy dugout where he'd been living for almost three weeks almost felt like home to him now. He chuckled as he thought back to his first impressions of the hole in the earth he now called "home."

"Something amuses you, lad?" the Baron asked.

"I grew up in a small village, we didn't have much but our home was dry in the rains and warm in the winter. This place is neither, yet I think of it as home. Is that odd?"

"Not really lad, a fellow can get used to almost anything. It's not pleasant, it certainly isn't comfortable, but you get fed, you have a blanket and a place to sleep which is relatively dry, and as long as the rats leave you alone, there are worse places to be, I suppose."

"You suppose?"

"I've seen places in the world which make this seem like a palace. Dirty, overcrowded, thieves and murderers everywhere you turn, let's just say that at least here, those who are trying to kill you wear a different uniform and it isn't personal and it isn't all the time."

"I've heard that parts of Marseilles are like that." Though Louis had never been there, he'd heard stories.

"Ah lad, every big city has places like that, even Paris, places you don't go at night, at least not alone."

"But worse than this muddy hole with it's vermin, the artillery, the constant fear of death?"

"Tell me the truth lad, after you'd been here a while, were you in constant fear for your life?"

Louis thought for a moment, his gaze became distant, as if his mind was traveling to the past, which in a sense, it was.

"No, now that I think of it. Perhaps I was just too tired to care any more."

"That's part of it, I'm sure." The Baron paused for a bit, packing up the last of his kit as he did so.

"I think that if a situation isn't too dire, at least not all of the time, our minds adjust to that new reality. We're still cautious, still afraid of being wounded or dying, but it isn't an immediate thing, it's not something you need to deal with right now. So you don't dwell on it, at least I don't."

Louis laughed, "All I was wondering Baron is how this absolute sewer of a dugout can be considered home."

The Baron smiled, "Do you care about your squad mates?"

"Well sure."

"And they care about you, which in essence is what home is, where people care about you and you care about them. It's not the furnishings, it's how a place makes you feel."

Louis nodded, "That makes sense."

"It's the only thing that makes sense out here, lad. Now let's get going."

Back in the rear, the men were put up in barns and houses which the inhabitants had fled from when the Germans had first come this way in 1914. It wasn't luxurious, it was plain, simple, yet to many of the men, raised in similar small villages, it was better than living in the mud.

Louis had spent the better part of a day cleaning his kit, they'd all been issued new clothing and had gone through delousing. Louis thought how wonderful it was to not have vermin crawling all over him. He actually felt nearly human again. Which pleased him more than he could have thought possible.

As he wondered what to do with himself now, the Baron came in, a somber look on his face.

"Louis."

"Yes, my sergeant?" Louis said with a grin. It somehow annoyed, and amused, the Baron to be called by his rank, which he now wore on his sleeve. So the men enjoyed reminding him of his new responsibilities.

"The found the lieutenant ..."

Louis stood up, "Is he ..."

"Quite dead, yes. His family has been notified, of course, but the regimental commander thought it would be fitting if some of the men who served with him went to see his family. They live fairly close to this place, a short train ride, which the battalion commander arranged tickets for."

"Tickets for who?" Louis was puzzled, yet there was a sinking feeling in his gut.

"For us, lad. The captain told the major that you and I are the only ones left who actually knew the lieutenant."

"What about Charles? Or Hervé?"

"Home leave while the Army rebuilds the regiment. You and I are the only ones available."

"But what if ..."

"What if you don't want to see the lieutenant's wife, his mother, his children? I don't want to either lad, but it's a duty we must perform. Would you want a stranger telling your mother that you were dead?"

"I suppose not, but ..."

"No 'buts' laddie, it's up to us."

Louis stared out the window at the passing countryside. The train ride to the lieutenant's home had been less than three hours, now that their solemn task was concluded, they were returning to the front.

Louis remembered the sobs of the lieutenant's wife, the dazed faces of the children when told that their father was not coming home. Ever.

But most of all he remembered the look on the lieutenant's mother's face. She had gazed heavenwards, said a short prayer, then had simply asked, "Did my boy suffer?"

The Baron had answered as honestly as possible. How he had gone missing during the attack but had been found a few days later when the fighting had seesawed back to where he had gone missing.

The lieutenant had been found, face down in a shell hole, a dead Frenchman on top of him. It looked for all the world that the lieutenant had not been hit at all by enemy fire. One of the men, a long-time veteran, speculated that the lieutenant had been knocked unconscious, how they would never know, and had then fallen into the water with a dead man on his back.

"He drowned, Baron, that's the only thing I can think of. Unconscious, with the weight of the dead guy holding him down, he probably drowned."

Louis shivered again at the thought of it, but all the Baron had said to the man's mother was, "No madam, he did not suffer."

And perhaps he hadn't.