At the auxiliary hospital, the dead still took up space.
They occupied drawers, ledgers, boxes tied with string that no one dared set on the floor. They left behind razors whose blades had rusted inside leather cases, broken pipes, First Communion medals, two-sou coins sewn into a lining, and above all photographs. These troubled Marthe more than anything else. A watch could be numbered. So could a wedding ring. A photograph looked back at you.
That Monday in November, the personal-effects table had been set up in the high school’s former drawing classroom. The easels were gone; hooks for the models were still screwed into the walls, above tall windows taped with blue paper against flying glass. Wind slipped beneath the frames. In the courtyard, an ambulance reversed with a grinding of chains, its driver swearing at a wheel that refused to cross the gutter.
Marthe pulled the canvas bag marked 417 toward her.
“Renaud, Jules,” she read.
Corporal Bailleul, sitting across from her, moistened his pencil with irritating care.
“Renaud, Louis,” he corrected.
“Jules.”
“It says Louis on the form.”
She turned over the small identification tag lying between them. The metal still held the warmth of her palm. The unevenly stamped letters caught her fingernail: RENAUD JULES, class of 1912, Abbeville recruiting district.
“On him, it says Jules.”
Bailleul looked up at the ceiling, as though military administration resided there, invisible but capable of hearing him.
“He died on Thursday, Mademoiselle Lenoir.”
“That didn’t change his first name.”
At the end of the table, Sister Agathe stifled something that might have been a laugh. She was sorting clean handkerchiefs for the wounded on the next convoy and did not need to turn around to know that Marthe was going too far. They had worked close enough to each other for two years to recognize an argument by the way the other breathed.
Bailleul put down his pencil.
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