Paris at the End of the World Page 11

  “So,” said Neil. “Any of this useful?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, closing the book. “Yes, indeed.”

  22

  On the Secret Shelf

  Mademoiselle from Armentières, Parley-voo?

  Mademoiselle from Armentières, Parley-voo?

  Mademoiselle from Armentières,

  She hasn’t been kissed in forty years,

  Hinky, dinky, parley-voo.

  HARRY CARLTON AND JOE TUNBRIDGE, popular song of the Great War

  A researcher is a pack rat, a private eye, a grave robber, a ghoul. I’ve collected all my life, both to acquire material for books and for the pleasure of accumulation. Two garages overflowing with books, magazines, posters, documents, and letters give proof of a persistent fascination with the hunt. My appetite whetted by Neil’s material, I put my nose to the ground and began the search in earnest.

  To scavengers, the street markets of junk known as brocantes are the truffle groves of information. Any weekend, we can be found rummaging through cartons of papers, boxes of postcards, heaps of magazines, sifting through the sand of society for flecks of informational gold.

  Over twenty years of haunting brocantes and junk markets on three continents, I’d seen thousands of items relating to World War I: everything from medals and pieces of uniform to postcards and flower vases made from cannon shells. Some I’d even bought—in particular copies of magazines such as La Baïonnette and L’Illustration. Such magazines would be a good place to start my research, but to have some sense of how the war progressed, I needed more than isolated copies. Only long runs told the story in any detail, and these, I assumed, would be rare.

  The first inkling that I was wrong came the following week. At the weekly street market at Porte de Vanves, I found a few wartime copies of L’Illustration.

  “I don’t suppose you have any more?” I asked the seller.

  “Sure.” He led me to his van parked behind the stand and opened the back doors. It was filled with cartons—including one that contained, as far as I could judge, a complete run of wartime issues of L’Illustration.

  “How much?”

  “Each?”

  “For the lot.”

  “The lot?”

  “I’ll give you fifty euros,” I said.

  “Okay!”

  He was hardly able to believe his luck. Back numbers of L’Illustration, like Reader’s Digest or National Geographic in the United States, are almost unsellable. He was more than willing to carry them to the car, even at the risk, to judge from his bowed legs and red face, of a double hernia.

  After that, it was a kind of gold rush. Maybe it was just because I was actively looking, but forty-four copies of La Baïonnette appeared on a market stall five minutes’ walk from my home. Marie-Dominique located a run of Le Miroir from 1914 to 1916. In the seaside village where we have our summer home, she also spotted a pile of La Vie Parisienne and persuaded the dealer to reserve them until I arrived.

  Seeing my delight, the dealer said, “It’s material about la guerre de ’14 you’re looking for?”

  “Well, yes. In general.”

  He glanced around to see we weren’t overheard.

  “Are you interested in unusual stuff?”

  “How unusual?”

  He went digging in the back of his store and returned with two plain envelopes.

  One contained six photographs. Three were postcards. In the first, a woman lies in bed, dreaming of her soldier lover, who appears in a balloon above her head. In the second, the man himself arrives outside her window, complete with tin hat, rifle, and greatcoat. In the third picture, he’s discarded his kit and she’s pulled back the bedding to welcome him in. Since such postcards generally came in groups of eight, I could imagine what happened next.

  The other images were original photographic prints.

  Two showed a young man carrying a rifle, with fixed bayonet, and wearing a military backpack. He looked embarrassed—understandably, since, unless you counted a wispy mustache and a willing expression, he wore nothing else.

  The last photo was the strangest of all. Where the others had been, to some extent at least, professional, this one was homegrown. I could imagine the amateur photographer sloshing the print through developer and fixer in his home darkroom and grinning in satisfaction at how well it had turned out.

  It showed the rear view of a nude woman, bent over, presenting her backside to the photographer. He’d drawn on her buttocks a likeness of Kaiser Wilhelm and, to complete the tableau vivant, balanced a pickelhaube on her hips.

  Trying to assume a scholarly expression, I said, “Interesting. Do you know when they date from?”

  He pursed his lips. “About 1910, give or take.”

  He was guessing. But if these photographs did date from before the war, it added a scrap of evidence to Peter’s theory that France was preoccupied with things military long before mobilization.

  “This came from the same place,” he said, interrupting my thoughts. From the second envelope, he extracted a small folded square of cream-colored fabric.

  “Do you know what it is?”

  I did, as it happened.

  Before vulcanized rubber made condoms cheap, men put their trust in kid leather, a pig’s bladder, or a square of finely woven fabric—cotton or, even better, silk. Silk squares were produced for this purpose. They even inspired a joke. “He’s a fine boy,” a man says, admiring a friend’s new baby. “He should be,” replies the father sourly. “He was strained through a silk handkerchief.”

  “Yes. I’ve seen them,” I said.

  Not to be trumped, the stall holder said, “Not like this one.”

  He held it up to display its startling feature. It was photographically printed with pornographic scenes of monks and nuns in impious rapture and unecclesiastic dishabille.

  Even the toughest poilu, from a lingering piety, might have shunned such an item, but a foreign soldier—someone like Archie—could well have bought it while on leave, and carried it, somewhat shamefacedly, in a wallet; confirmation for pals back home, if he ever got there, that France lived up to its reputation. Weren’t condoms in their folded paper packets called “French letters” and oral sex known as “Frenching”? Sex was just one more thing, like baking bread or making cheese, at which the French excelled.

  The dealer looked at me expectantly.

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “If you take everything,” he said, “I can make it . . .” He named an obscenely inflated price.

  The postcards and photographs had no historical value. As for the handkerchief, who knew when it dated from or whence it came? Any serious historian would dismiss such material. But was it any different than the brass matchboxes, the vases hammered from shell casings? “Trench art” could encompass anything that reminded soldiers of the real world just over the horizon—fragments to cling to amidst the dirt and terror of war.

  I reached for my wallet.

  23

  Archie Under Arms

  You see, but you do not observe.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Arms, Sherlock Holmes speaking

  I chose a café for my next meeting with Peter van Diemen. It spooked me to think of sharing a glass of wine in our home with someone who, however much provoked, had beaten a woman to death.

  The prejudice was irrational, I knew. Of the many people we’d entertained over the years, a few no doubt had blood on their hands. But they’d killed in war, not, as Peter had, in the heat of domestic argument. A uniform made all the difference—that thought was running through my head as I stepped out of the August heat and into the cool.

  From a table next to a window opening onto rue de Seine, Peter raised his head. I sat down opposite. We solemnly shook hands. With that very hand. . .

  “Had any luck?” I asked hurriedly.

  “Well . . . I did discover a few things.”

  This was no surprise. The more obscure the subject, the more there
rises from its experts the unvoiced cry, “Use me!”

  Reaching under the table, he took something from an open briefcase and placed it between us: a dark blue concertina file, half filled with papers, and neatly labeled on the front “Baxter, William Archie.”

  “All that?”

  It surprised him that I was surprised. “Oh, there’s more. I just couldn’t carry it all.”

  “I’m astonished.”

  “Why? The Australian archives are very thorough.”

  “Even so, I never expected . . . from just those few documents . . .” Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?

  “A document can be very revealing, and a photograph even more.” He slid out the portrait of Archie and Stella.

  “For instance?”

  “The uniform, for a start. His tunic, the boots, the cap, the puttees. . . .” He pointed to the thick woolen bandages wound around his calves. “These tell us he was infantry, not cavalry, artillery, or signals. The records confirm this. His battalion, the Thirtieth, was entirely foot soldiers. Mainly in supply or reserve.”

  “What about the slouch hat we found?”

  Descriptions of the Australian Light Horse charge at Beersheba in 1917, the last cavalry charge in military history, made me wonder if Archie might have been one of General Harry Chauvel’s “forty thousand horsemen.”

  “Ah, yes. The hat. ” Peter leafed through the papers in the concertina file and extracted a sheet. “The assistant curator of heraldry and technology acquisitions at the War Memorial. Very sound chap. He sent me details of the items you deposited with them: a hat, a pistol, some ammunition . . .” He read for a moment. “Hat size, 61/8 inches. So it couldn’t have belonged to your grandfather.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too small. You can see from the photograph. He was a big man. That’s probably why he’s wearing a cap. They issued those when they had no hats in the correct size. Big sizes ran out first. No, the hat wasn’t his.”

  “What about the pistol then?”

  “I’m afraid not.” He consulted the memo from the War Memorial. “ ‘The Dreyse semi-automatic pistol captured by Private William Archie Baxter. . . .’ I know the Dreyse. I have one, in fact. It’s a German gun, 9.65 mm, issued to officers. It made a good souvenir because it was small. You could hide it in the bottom of a kit bag, under the dirty clothes. Nobody dug down that far.”

  So Archie was a scavenger, a ratter. It seemed that every serviceman was a pilferer. All the same . . .

  “Did you find out anything about his actual service?”

  “A great deal, as it happens. The Medical Corps also kept good records.”

  The Medical Corps! “So he was wounded? In the family there’s a tradition that he might have been gassed.”

  Of all weapons, gas was the most insidious. According to one account, “the skin of victims of mustard gas blistered, their eyes became very sore and they began to vomit. Mustard gas caused internal and external bleeding and attacked the bronchial tubes, stripping off the mucous membrane. Fatally injured victims sometimes took four or five weeks to die.” Novelist Vera Brittain, who worked as a nurse, wrote, “I wish those people who talk about going on with this war whatever it costs could see the soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning. Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.”

  But Peter shook his head impatiently. “Gassing? No, nothing like that at all.”

  Archie’s stature was diminishing before my eyes, like a sand castle eroded by the tide.

  “His legs, then?” I said. “Everyone agreed he never walked easily again after the war. He must have suffered some kind of injury.”

  “Now that is possible.”

  Peter extracted a pink sheet from his file, headed “Casualty Form Active Service.” I remembered it. The mixture of typed entries and variously readable handwriting, in colored inks that had differentially faded, had baffled me. Obviously he had more luck. Or maybe he just tried harder.

  “This is your grandfather’s entire medical history.” He ran down the list with a pencil.

  “ ‘Debarked from S.S. Ceramic Plymouth 21 November 1916.’ Well, you knew that. Then the following day, ‘Marched into Codford.’ Codford was a transit camp on Salisbury Plain. Most new arrivals didn’t have much military experience, so they’d have drilled there for a few weeks and got used to army discipline. ‘30 December Proceeded O/seas France SSO Princess Clementine.’ The Princess Clementine always sailed from Folkestone in Kent; hundreds of thousands of troops crossed the Channel on her. ‘6 January 1917. T.O.S’—that’s ‘taken on strength’—at Etaples. It means your grandfather was accepted for service in the front line.”

  “So where did they post him?”

  “Well . . . as a matter of fact, nowhere.”

  “Nowhere?”

  “Not literally. But nowhere in military terms. On January 27 he was admitted to hospital in Etaples and on February 10 evacuated back to England.”

  “He was wounded in camp?”

  “No, not wounded. You said he had problems with his legs. That’s correct. But it wasn’t related to combat. He was suffering from varicose veins.”

  24

  Dressed to Kill

  There were two fronts; there was the war front, and then in Paris there was what might be called the Montparnasse front.

  JEAN COCTEAU

  Imprisoned by asthma in his apartment at 102 boulevard Haussmann, Marcel Proust wrote at night, sleeping by day in his cork-lined bedroom, and only rising, if he got up at all, at four in the afternoon. He saw the war in fragments: glimpses through the windows of his closed car as his chauffeur, Odilon Albaret, a former cabbie and husband of his faithful housekeeper, Céleste, drove him to some nocturnal rendezvous, sometimes in the glitter of the Ritz Hotel dining room on Place Vendôme, on other occasions to the small and squalid Hôtel Marigny on rue de l’Arcade, a gay brothel managed by Albert Le Cuziat. As Proust was a partner in the business, M. Le Cuziat willingly accommodated his sadistic tastes, which “needed,” in the words of arch-gossip Cocteau, “the spectacle of a young Hercules slaying a rat with a red hot needle.”

  Seeing the city in time lapse alerted Proust to minute changes in style. Patriotism, he saw, was transforming fashion.

  As the Louvre and all the museums were closed, when one read at the head of an article “Sensational Show,” one could be certain it was not an exhibition of pictures but of dresses. Just as artists exhibiting at the revolutionary salon in 1793 proclaimed that it would be a mistake if it were regarded as “inappropriate by austere Republicans that we should be engaged in art when the whole of Europe is besieging the territory of liberty,” the dressmakers of 1916 asserted, with the self-conscious conceit of the artist, that “to seek what was new, to avoid banality, to prepare for victory by developing a new formula of beauty for the generations after the war,” was their absorbing ambition.

  With designers such as Patou and Poiret working for the army, smaller dressmakers and milliners flourished, particularly if they could improvise. Deprived of feathers from Africa and the Caribbean, Coco Chanel adapted the simple straws and berets of her country childhood. Like almost everything she did, they started a trend and increased her reputation. With silk unobtainable, dressmakers scavenged what they could. Once it became known that each flare sent up to light no-man’s-land included a small silk parachute to slow its descent, soldiers on both sides risked their lives to retrieve them for their girlfriends back home. Two could be sewn into a pair of knickers, and four made a good-sized blouse.

  Uniform chic

  Meanwhile, in Paris, shrewd designers suggested to their all-too-suggestible clients that it was their duty to dress well, so long as their clothes included some acknowledgment of the war. In a Baïonnette cartoon, a dowager asks a couturier if selling expensive clothes in wartime
is unpatriotic. “Are you saying I’m not a patriot, Baroness?” he replies indignantly. “But who created the gown in Pekin taffeta called ‘Croix de Guerre,’ and the ‘Where Will It End?’ evening coat?” Proust noticed that

  young women were wearing cylindrical turbans on their heads and straight Egyptian tunics, dark and very “warlike.” They were shod in sandals, or puttees like those of our beloved combatants. Their rings and bracelets were made from fragments of shell casings from the 75s, and they carried cigarette lighters consisting of two English half-pennies to which a soldier in his dug-out had succeeded in giving a patina so beautiful that the profile of Queen Victoria might have been traced by Pisanello.

  1915 fashions—the military look

  Soldiers on leave in Paris, expecting to see many women in mourning, were told the custom of wearing black for a year after the death of a loved one had been allowed to slide—“the pretext being,” wrote Proust, “that [the deceased] was proud to die—which enabled them to wear a close bonnet of white English crêpe (graceful of effect and encouraging to admirers), while the invincible certainty of final triumph permitted them to substitute satins and silk muslins for the earlier dark cashmere, and even to wear their pearls.”

  Better than trench-art accessories or having your dressmaker run up a military-looking costume was winning the right to wear a uniform. The first stop for anyone with the slightest connection to an ambulance service or to the armed forces was, as had been the case with Misia Sert, their tailor or dressmaker. The Regent Tailor on boulevard de Sebastopol offered to create “military uniforms in satin, suede, leather, whipcord, gabardine, khaki etc. Cut and styling beyond reproach.” For those who couldn’t afford made-to-measure, plenty of stores offered ready-to-wear. In Henri Barbusse’s novel Under Fire, a poilu on leave in Paris is dazzled by “the shop windows displaying fantastic tunics and kepis, cravats of the softest blue twill, and brilliant red lace-up boots.” The New America, a manufacturer of military wear in bulk, advertised, “Wholesalers, department stores and tailors etc. who would care to contact us will receive an immediate proposition that will allow them to double their business in a week.”