Digging

The British sergeants came in July, two of them, and taught them to dig.

They came on the train from somewhere east, with a lieutenant of the Royal Engineers who stayed at the regimental headquarters and was not seen again, and they were put in a hut of their own by the water tower near Captain Pruett’s, and on the Monday morning they stood in front of C Company on the edge of the camp, where the huts stopped and the grass began, and looked at them.

They were not big men. That was the first thing everybody noticed. You thought a British sergeant would be big. One was thin and grey and forty, with a face like a walnut and a cough, from a regiment called the Coldstream that none of them had heard of; the other was younger, short and square and very dark, from somewhere in the north of England, with an accent nobody in C Company could follow at all, which the cowboy from Montana said was like listening to a man talk through a sack of gravel. They had three years of the war on their faces. You could see it. Lucien could not have said what it was. It was in the way they stood, with their weight back, and the way their eyes went, all the time, without their heads moving, along the edge of the grass, as if the grass might do something.

The thin grey one looked at C Company for a long time.

“Right,” he said. “Spades.”

---

They dug.

All of July, and into August, in the heat, on the edge of the prairie, they dug. They dug the way the two British sergeants told them to dig, exactly, to the inch, with the sergeants walking along the lines of them with measuring sticks: a fire trench, seven feet deep, with a fire step on the side towards where the enemy would be, and a parados behind, and traverses every ten yards so that a shell landing in one bay would not kill the men in the next; communication trenches going back from it, zigzag, so that you could not be fired down the length of them; dugouts, sunk deep, with timber frames and corrugated iron and sandbags on the roof. The Second Kansas dug a whole front line on the edge of Camp Smoky Hill, a mile of it, and a support line behind it, and a reserve line behind that, and the communication trenches between, in the black prairie sod, with the grass roots holding it up, in six weeks.

It was good earth. That was what Harlan said, the first day, with his spade in it. He went down a foot and turned it over and looked at it and said, that’s good earth, my father’d give his eye teeth for that, and he went on looking at it while the short dark sergeant from the north shouted at him through his sack of gravel to dig and not look. It was black and deep and it held. You could dig seven feet into it and it stood up on its own, the walls of the trench straight and dry, the roots of the grass showing in them like threads in cloth, and at the bottom it was dry too. Dry. Seven feet down in the middle of everything and not a drop of water.

Lucien stood at the bottom of it on the third day and looked up at the strip of sky.

He thought of Achille’s letter. You dig a foot down and it is water. You dig two feet and it is the lake. So you do not dig. You build.

---

He asked the thin grey sergeant about it on the second Friday.

He had not meant to. The sergeant was walking along the top of the fire trench with his measuring stick in the afternoon, looking down at them in the bays, coughing; and he stopped above the bay where Lucien was squaring the fire step, and looked down, and Lucien looked up, and said it before he had decided to.

“Sergeant. Is it like this? Where we are going?”

The thin grey sergeant looked down at him for a long moment.

“Where are you going, son?”

“The coast. They say. The Belgian coast.”

The sergeant did not say anything. He looked at Lucien, at the bottom of the seven-foot trench in the black prairie sod, with the dry walls and the grass roots showing in them like threads, and the strip of blue Kansas sky over him. His face like a walnut did not do anything at all.

“No,” he said.

Lucien waited.

“You won’t be digging where you’re going,” said the thin grey sergeant. “Not on the coast. I was on the coast. Fifteen. You put a spade in on the coast and you’re in the sea.” He looked along the trench, at the mile of it, straight and dry and seven feet deep, that the Second Kansas had dug. “You’ll build up. Breastworks. Bags of mud on bags of mud. Nothing under your feet but water and nothing in front of you but the bags.”

“Then why are we…”

“Because they told me to teach you to dig,” said the sergeant. “And because you’ll go somewhere else after, maybe. Not everywhere’s the coast.” He coughed, a long one, and spat over the parados. “And because a man that knows how to dig a proper trench knows what a proper trench is for. Even when he can’t have one.” He looked down at Lucien again. “Where are you from, son?”

“La Nouvelle-Orléans.”

“Where’s that?”

“On the water. On the lake.”

The thin grey sergeant looked at him for a moment longer, and something went over the walnut face, very briefly, that might have been the beginning of a smile, or the end of one.

“Then you’ll be all right on the coast,” he said. “It’s all water.” And walked on along the top of the trench with his stick.

---

The rifles had come in June.

They were the right rifles, Achille had written from the pine woods a year before, and nobody knew how to use them; and that was still true. They had them, three thousand of them, new, in grease, and they had the ammunition for them, and they had a range, on the prairie beyond the trenches, with targets on frames a quarter of a mile off and a red flag on a pole; and what they did not have was anybody who knew how to teach them, because the men who knew were in France, and the men who were left were Sergeant Cutter and two other sergeants from the regulars and a lieutenant from Ohio who had shot ducks.

Lieutenant Whitcomb had shot ducks. He told them so. He was twenty-four, a college man from Ohio, from a college with a football team, tall and fair and very earnest, with a new uniform that fitted him and a new pistol he did not know how to load, and he stood in front of C Company at the range on the first morning and told them that he had shot ducks on Lake Erie every autumn since he was twelve and that a rifle was only a duck gun with ambitions, and C Company looked at him, and Sergeant Cutter, behind him, looked at the sky.

Lucien had never fired a rifle.

He had never fired anything. His father did not own a gun; nobody on the lake shore did, much, except old Tregre, who had a shotgun for the ducks in the winter and had never hit one. He lay on the ground at the firing point on the first morning with the rifle against his shoulder and the stock against his cheek, the way Sergeant Cutter had shown them, and looked along the barrel at the target a quarter of a mile off on the prairie, a black circle on a white square, very small, wavering in the heat, and squeezed, the way Sergeant Cutter had said, and the rifle kicked him in the shoulder like a mule and the bullet went somewhere into the prairie and the red flag waved, which meant he had missed the whole frame.

Harlan, at the next firing point, put five into the black.

He did it without any fuss. He lay down behind the rifle the way he had lain down behind a rifle since he was eight, on the plains, in the snow, waiting for jackrabbits and coyotes and once, he said, a wolf, the last wolf in Buffalo County, which he had not shot because it was the last; and he looked along the barrel, and breathed out, and squeezed, five times, slowly, and the man in the pit a quarter of a mile off held up the white disc five times on its pole over the centre of the target.

Sergeant Cutter came and stood over him.

“Where’d you learn that?”

“Nebraska, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Cutter looked down at him for a long moment. Then he looked at Lucien, at the next firing point, who had missed the frame four times out of five.

“Lindgren,” said Sergeant Cutter. “Teach him.”

---

Harlan taught him.

Every evening, after supper, on the range, in the long gold light coming flat across the prairie, while the rest of the company was at the wash house or the cinema that was also the church. Harlan did not explain much. He was not a man who explained. He lay down beside Lucien at the firing point and said breathe out and don’t pull, squeeze and you’re looking at the end of the barrel, don’t, look at the target, the barrel’ll look after itself, and he put his big hand on Lucien’s shoulder to show him where the stock went, and on his elbow, to show him how to set it, and once, when Lucien had flinched before the shot for the twentieth time, he put his hand flat on the back of Lucien’s neck, the way you would put your hand on a horse that was going to bolt, and left it there, and said now, and Lucien squeezed, and did not flinch, and the white disc came up on its pole on the edge of the black.

“There,” said Harlan.

By August Lucien could put four in five into the black at a quarter of a mile. He found he had the eyes for it. You had to have eyes on the lake, to see a pelican at a mile, or the colour of the water over a sandbar, or the line of a squall coming across from the north shore before the stars went out; and he had them, and once Harlan had taught him not to flinch, the eyes did the rest.

“You’re better than me at distance,” said Harlan, one evening, looking at the target through Sergeant Cutter’s field glasses. He said it in the voice he said everything in, as a fact, the way he said that’s good earth. “Your eyes are better.”

“It’s the lake.”

“Huh,” said Harlan. “Maybe I should’ve grown up on a lake.”

---

The bayonet was the other thing.

They did it every morning before the range, on the parade ground, in rows, against sacks of straw hung from wooden frames, and Lieutenant Whitcomb took it, because it was the thing he believed in most. He had a pamphlet. It had come from headquarters, from the General’s own staff, and it said that the American army would not sit in holes in the ground the way the Europeans had for three years and wait to die; that it would move; that it would fight in the open, with the rifle and the bayonet, the way armies had always fought before the Europeans forgot how; and that the spirit of the bayonet was the spirit of the offensive, and that the spirit of the offensive would win the war.

Lieutenant Whitcomb read it to them on the parade ground. He read it with his face shining.

Then they charged the sacks of straw, in rows, shouting, the way he told them to shout, and stuck the bayonets in, and twisted, and pulled them out, and the straw came out of the sacks in handfuls, and blew away on the wind across the parade ground towards the prairie.

The two British sergeants watched them do it from the edge of the parade ground. They did not take the bayonet; that was Lieutenant Whitcomb’s. They stood at the edge with their hands behind their backs, the thin grey one coughing, and watched C Company of the Second Kansas charge sacks of straw in rows on a parade ground in Kansas, shouting, with the spirit of the offensive, and they did not say anything at all; and Lucien, running at the straw with his bayonet out and his mouth open on the shout Lieutenant Whitcomb wanted, looked at their faces at the edge of the parade ground as he went past, and could not read them, and thought about Achille’s letter. We went over on the 9th. I am not going to write about it.

---

The gas was in the last week.

They did it in a hut. A special hut, at the far end of the camp, sealed, with no windows, with a door at each end and a man from the hospital at each door with a watch; and they went in, ten at a time, with their masks on, the masks they had been issued in July and had been drilled in every day since, rubber and canvas and two round glass eyes and a tube going down to a tin box on your chest, and stood in the hut in the dark for five minutes while the man from the hospital let the gas in through a pipe, and breathed through the tin box, and came out the other door.

It was not the real gas. It was the gas that made your eyes run, the man from the hospital said; the real gas they would meet in France. This was to teach them to trust the mask.

Lucien went in with the third ten. He had the mask on. He had had it on every day for a month and he had hated it every day, the smell of the rubber and the weight of it on his face and the glass eyes fogging and the breath going in and out of the tin box, slow, heavy, through the tube, never enough, never as much as you wanted, the way air was on the lake at four in the morning when you breathed it in and it went all the way down to your feet.

The door shut behind them. The hut was dark.

He heard the gas come in. A hiss, from the pipe, in the corner.

And he could not breathe.

He could. He was breathing; the tin box was working; the man from the hospital had tested it. He could not believe it. He stood in the dark in the sealed hut with nine other men and the hiss in the corner and the rubber on his face and the glass eyes fogged so that he could see nothing at all, and his chest went tight, and tighter, as if somebody had put a hand flat on it and was leaning on it, and the breath going in through the tube was not enough, it was not enough, it was the bottom of the lake, it was the trawl coming up into the wind with nobody at the tiller, it was the squall off the north shore with the lee rail under and the water coming in green; and his hands went up to the mask, both of them, to tear it off.

Somebody caught them.

A big hand on each wrist. In the dark. Holding them down. Not hard. Firmly. The way you hold a man’s hands down who is going to do something to himself he will regret.

A face came close to his, in the dark. Another mask. Glass eyes, fogged, an inch from his. And through the rubber, very muffled, a slow flat voice.

“Breathe out, Lucky.”

He breathed out.

“Now in. Slow. It’s enough. It’s enough. Slow.”

He breathed in. Slow. It was enough.

The hands stayed on his wrists. All the way through. Five minutes in the dark in the sealed hut with the hiss in the corner, and Harlan Lindgren’s big hands holding his wrists down, and Harlan’s slow flat voice through two masks saying breathe out and now in and slow and it’s enough, over and over, the way he had said now on the range with his hand flat on the back of Lucien’s neck; until the door at the other end opened, and the light came in, and they went out.

Outside, on the grass, in the sun, Lucien tore the mask off and lay on his back on the prairie and breathed.

Harlan sat down beside him and took his own off, and sat with it on his knee, and looked at the grass going away from them in the wind to the edge of the world.

“I’ve been on the lake all my life,” said Lucien, to the sky. “All of it. Every morning. I’ve never been where you can’t breathe.”

Harlan did not say anything for a while.

“Well,” he said, at last. “Now you have.” He turned the mask over on his knee and looked at its glass eyes. “And you didn’t take it off. That’s the thing. That’s the only thing.”

“You held my hands.”

“I held your hands,” agreed Harlan. “And you didn’t take it off.”

At the edge of the grass, by the gas hut, the thin grey sergeant of the Coldstream was standing with his hands behind his back, coughing, looking at them. He had seen it. He looked at the two of them on the grass for a moment, the fisherman and the farm boy with their masks on their knees, and then he nodded, once, to Harlan, the nod of one man who knows what the thing is for to another; and walked away along the edge of the prairie towards the water tower.