Somewhere in France - Rilegato

Gardiner, John Rolfe

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0375407405 ISBN 13: 9780375407406

Casa editrice: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1999

Riassunto

As World War I rages, a collection of letters home from Major William Lloyd to his wife, Emma, on Long Island describes life as a doctor on the front lines in France and his growing obsession--apparent to everyone but himself--with a young French nurse working with victims of "trench" fevers

Su questo libro

L'autore:

John Rolfe Gardiner is the author of three previous novels -- Great Dream from Heaven, Unknown Soldiers, and In the Heart of the Whole World -- and two collections of stories, Going On Like This and The Incubator Ballroom. He is the winner of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. His stories frequently appear in The New Yorker.
        He lives in Unison, Virginia, with his wife and his daughter.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

On October 3, 1917, a few days before his American medical team arrived to join him in Chaumont, Major Lloyd entered the Hôtel Rive Haute for a final inspection. As a roving officer of the Chief Surgeon's staff, he had requisitioned the building for Base Hospital 15 of the Allied Expeditionary Force. A few French casualties were temporarily in beds on the ground floor, attended by a single French doctor.
        From somewhere inside, a husky voice rang through the marble columns and echoed in the stairways:
"Where is the pity for those who have none,
Who can forgive what the Germans have done?"
        "Be quiet!" he called out.
        The singing continued, and he cocked his ear for its direction.
        "Quiet, I said! This is the commanding officer!"
        Only for another day, until Colonel Hanson arrived.
        "This is a hospital!"
        The song was finished, but a humming continued. The Major despised this sort of insolence. He came through a doorway at the back of the lobby, into a large bathroom. A small fellow was on his knees, scrubbing the floor. The man stopped, did not turn, but gazed upward with a saintly patience at the urinal in front of him. There was a powerful smell of ammonia around him. It was perfume to the Major's sense of hygiene. This, and the picture of the poor man at his thankless task, turned the officer's mood, filled him with pity and self-reproach.
        Good enough, he thought, the man must come with the building. I'll make a place for him in the table of organization. "Well done. What's your name?"
        Still he would not look up, but went back to his chore. His exertions had pulled the shirt from his trousers, exposing his back. Closer, Major Lloyd saw that he'd been quite mistaken. He was staring down at a woman's waist and hip. Quickly, he turned away, and asked again, "But who are you?"
        The deep voice, the pants, military-issue, and the rolled sleeves. All this and the bobbed black hair had deceived him. At last she turned to him. Her lively round face was red, and wet with perspiration; her large gray eyes, accusing.
        "My name is Jeanne Prie," she said. "I am a nurse. I will work for you, if you please. But not in such filth."
        At the Major's request, she did stay on after the French patients had left. And on. Without the usual papers or references because she so clearly knew what she was about, and worked harder than any two others. For several months, there was only brief mention of the nurse as "my French wonder" in Major Lloyd's mail home, though she was making a name for herself through all ranks of the hospital.
        Within a year, the Major's family could sense her presence and influence in all his news, even when her name was not written. By then, Lloyd knew that her presentation of herself as a charwoman on her knees had been a clever bit of theater to ensure herself a part in the coming practice of military medicine in Chaumont.

October 20, 1917
Somewhere in France
        The rear of an army in battle is the most discouraging sight. The Adjutant here, a bad penny from my school days, is the worst sort of scoundrel and ought to be horsewhipped. The nurses, even the untrained, do adequate work, though the morals of my Americans are sometimes lax. We have a French wonder who puts them all to shame. The hospital's enlisted men are sluggards. The German prisoners, the intelligent ones, believe their cause lost, and only fight on to inflict as much damage on the world as possible.
        
            Dr. Lloyd's observations pressed against the censors' nets like determined Sargasso eels, and many passed through, making their way across the Atlantic to the Lloyd drawing room in Manhattan. Here they wriggled under the watering eyes of his wife and mother, as the women thought again of the husband's, the son's, honorable duty and danger.
        The two were eager to share whatever words survived. Once a week, or once a month--the irregularity of delivery was unconscionable--the widow-mother, Mrs. Helen Livingston Lloyd, would arrive in the city from the old family plantation at Moriches on the South Shore of Long Island, carrying another letter, or at least a tin of pastries to sweeten the commiseration with her daughter-in-law, Emma.
        "Why does he write so misshapenly?" Emma scolded on one of these visits.
        "A pretty script is only a vanity," the older woman, pulling irritably at the retractable chain of her pince-nez, defended her boy. Years earlier when she had asked the same question, one of his schoolmasters had said, "A true intellect rushes on with what it has to say without stopping to admire its penmanship." He had nothing like the fine hand of so many of his peers.
        And so her only child, her "Boykins," her "Billy Lengthwise," her "Buster," had been sometimes a hero even by default.
        "Don't call him those names," Emma pleaded. He still offered his mother the childish endearments, while Emma made do with "William" at the end of a letter. He was forty-four years old and a major, commissioned at Allentown, where his unit from Roosevelt Hospital had been trained in June of that year, 1917, before shipping off to his "somewhere in France."
        It was a somewhere with a Roman triple-arched stone bridge and a fifteenth-century church with magnificent glass, and wonderful walks, "if there were only time," beside fields worked by shaggy-footed draft horses. "Even here in the zone of advance, you'd hardly know there was a war on."
        It was selfish of her to suspect that he took a secret pleasure in the heroic mystery of his "somewhere," and the mother-in-law, Helen, dismissed Emma's quibble. It was the censors they should blame. Her Billyboy, now Major Lloyd, had told them how silly the rules were. How matters of far greater moment were published daily in the papers, how the French sent letters to his unit giving name, rank, organization, place, on the outside of their envelopes.
        In Helen's and Emma's mail from France, there was sometimes a blot of ink where a proper name should have been, a person or a place. And some of their letters had the text washed completely black where Dr. Lloyd must have attacked the week's news with a cavalier indifference to regulation. Emma would be furious with him, but the mother, Helen, again blamed the ignorant sentries. She turned their insult into public shame, as if new insights from the family hero had been denied to the world. Information such as this, already received:
        The Poilu is a marvelous, filthy, courageous, ignorant fighting man. . . . I pass my life among men who have looked death in the face and been unafraid. . . . The French officers of the rear are delightfully reassuring and totally ineffective. . . . The health of the French people is remarkably good.
        Thanks to you, Emma, I have the Emerson at my bedside. I hope you've bought another copy so that you and the children will not be without his advice; two copies, in fact, one for the city and one for Moriches. The boys especially should have another go at these essays. I believe they went right over Willie's head on his first try. And Louis may have been too cocky to listen to anyone's counsel. Keep reminding them that Nature manifests the rules for their conduct. That's the key to it all. They've just got to open their eyes to Nature, God's first Bible.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0375407405
• ISBN 13: 9780375407406
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 273