Breastworks

The French shelled the wall every day, and every night they built it again.

That was the line. He understood it by the end of the second week, the way he had understood the lake by the end of his first summer in the Marie-Ange: not all at once, but by the shape of the days, one after another, until the shape was in him and he did not have to think about it. You could not dig, so you built. You built the wall up out of bags of mud, seven feet high and as thick as a man was tall, and lived behind it; and the French, a quarter of a mile off across the drowned fields, behind their own wall, put shells into it, and the shells knocked holes in it, and at night you came out with more bags and filled the holes. And in the morning they put more shells in, and you filled those. It did not end. It was not meant to end. It was the tide.

He learned the hours of it the way he had learned the hours of the tide in the passes.

At stand-to, in the first grey light, nothing; the French were standing to as well, behind their wall, and everybody looked at everybody across the water and nobody fired. Then breakfast, theirs and the French; you could see the smoke of the French braziers going up behind their wall in thin blue lines, and smell it, sometimes, when the wind was from the south, bacon, or something like bacon. Then at nine, as regular as the Angelus at the cathedral, the first ones: a battery somewhere behind the French line, a long way back, four guns, which the Guards called the Morning Hymn, putting four shells along the wall, one after another, every morning, at the same place, as if somebody were checking that it was still there. Then nothing until eleven. At eleven, a heavier one, further off, which you heard go over high up with a sound like a train on a bridge and land a long way behind, on the duckboards or the village or the road along the dunes. In the afternoon, anything. In the afternoon the French did what they liked, and you sat in the shelters behind the wall and listened, and tried to tell by the sound of each one, as it came, where it was going.

And at dusk, stand-to again, everybody looking at everybody; and then dark, and the flares, and the wiring parties, and the ration parties coming up the boards, and the bags.

“You’ll get so you know them,” Sergeant Hodge said, the first afternoon. “Which is ours. Which is going over. Which is going to land in your lap. Takes about a fortnight.” He drank his tea. “If you’ve got a fortnight.”

---

The Eye saw everything.

That was what they called it, the Guards, and then the Americans, without anybody telling them to: the Eye. It was inland, a long way off, to the south, where the drowned fields stopped and the land began, at last, to go up. Not much. Not a mountain. On the lake shore it would not have been anything; you would not have noticed it. Here, in country flatter than the lake, flatter than the prairie, it was a mountain. A long low swell of ground, three or four miles off, with a wood on the top of it and the broken roofs of a village and the stump of a church tower, grey, and on the clearest mornings, if you looked through Sergeant Hodge’s field glasses from the fire step, you could see the glint of something on the stump of the tower, and that was the Eye.

The French had their observers there. With telescopes. And telephones, down to the guns. From the top of the stump of that tower they could see the whole of the line, the whole of the drowned country, every yard of it, the wall and the duckboards and the village and the road along the dunes, all of it laid out under them like a map on a table; and if anything moved on it by day, anything at all, a man, a wagon, a smoke from a fire too thick, they saw it, and a minute later the shells came.

“Can’t it be taken?” said Harlan, the first time Hodge showed it to them through the glasses.

Sergeant Hodge took the glasses back and put them in their case.

“It’s been tried,” he said.

He did not say anything else. He did not need to. Lucien looked at the long low swell of ground on the edge of the drowned country with the glint on the stump of the tower, and at the four miles of water between, flat, open, with the wire in it and the stumps of the hedges and the old dead horse; and thought of the flare going up over the duckboards on the first night and the whole of C Company standing on the boards in the white light with their faces lit.

So nothing moved by day. That was the rule. By day you stayed behind the wall and kept your head down and did not make a smoke and did not go along the boards, and the line lay out on the drowned country under the Eye as still as a dead thing; and at night, when the Eye was blind, it came alive, and everything that had to be done was done, in the dark, in the water, with the flares going up.

---

The Haskell brothers were from Ohio.

They were the two brothers in hut forty-one whom nobody could explain, the ones the rule had missed: Ed, who was twenty-four and had a wife in Dayton, and Walt, who was nineteen and had lied about it, the wrong way, to go with his brother, because the clerk in Dayton had not been told that brothers were not to go together and had put them on the same train. They had been on the same train and in the same hut and in the same bunks, one above the other, the way Lucien and Harlan were, and in the same section, and in the line they were in the same shelter, behind the traverse at the left end of the section’s forty yards, with three Guardsmen.

Walt Haskell was a talker. He talked all the time, in a high quick Ohio voice, about everything: about the Guards and how they shaved, about Dayton and the motor cars they made there, about a girl called Ruth who worked at a soda fountain and had not written, about what he was going to do after, which was to go to Detroit and get a job building engines. Ed did not talk. Ed listened to his brother talk, and smiled sometimes, and told him to shut up sometimes, and once, on the ship, in the bunks four high, Lucien had seen him reach up in the dark and put his hand on the slats of his brother’s bunk above him and leave it there, the way you put your hand on the gunwale of a boat.

Walt Haskell had started shaving in the line. Every morning, after stand-to, in cold water, in a mess tin, like the Guards. He did not need to; he had nothing on his face to shave. He did it because the Guards did it. He sat on the fire step at the left end of the section’s forty yards with his mess tin on his knee and a little round mirror propped on the sandbags, every morning, and scraped at his face, and talked.

The Thursday was the first of November. La Toussaint. At home the whole lake shore would be at the cemetery with buckets of whitewash and chrysanthemums in pots, doing the tombs, and his grandmother on a kitchen chair that somebody had carried for her, telling them where they had missed. He thought about it at stand-to, on the fire step, in the grey.

The Morning Hymn came at nine on the Thursday as it came every morning.

Lucien heard the first one. You heard it go off a long way back behind the French wall, a flat thud, and then nothing, and then the sound of it coming, which was not a whistle, which was nothing like the sound the boys made at Smoky Hill when they played at shells; which was a sound like a sheet being torn, slowly, very slowly, all the way down the middle; and it landed where it always landed, on the wall, forty yards to the right, in the Guards’ section, and the wall jumped, and mud and water came down over everything.

He was in the shelter. He was sitting with his back against the sandbags with his knees drawn up, and Harlan beside him, and Sergeant Hodge cleaning his rifle; and when the first one landed he did what everybody did, which was nothing, and waited for the second.

The second one came, torn sheet, and landed further along, to the left. Nearer.

The third one did not sound like a torn sheet. It sounded like nothing. There was no sound of it coming at all. There was only the shelter going up and down under him, the whole of it, all at once, with a noise so big it was not a noise but a thing that hit him all over, his face and his chest and his ears, from inside; and then the air was black, and full of mud, and he could not see, and could not hear, and there was mud in his mouth and his eyes and he was lying on his side on the boards and did not know how he had got there.

Then Sergeant Hodge’s hand on his collar, pulling him up. Sergeant Hodge’s face an inch from his, black with mud, with the pale eyes in it, and his mouth moving, and no sound coming out of it at all.

Then the sound came back, in a rush, all at once, as if a door had been opened: shouting, a long way off and then close, and the fourth shell landing, further to the left, beyond the traverse, and something else, a high thin noise that went on and on and did not stop and that he did not know.

“Out,” Sergeant Hodge was saying. “Out, out, out. Left. The left end. Go.”

They went.

---

The shelter behind the traverse at the left end of the section’s forty yards was not there.

The traverse was there, the wall of sandbags that went across the line to stop a shell in one bay killing the men in the next, and the front wall, the wall towards the French, was there, with a great bite out of the top of it, and the fire step. The shelter had been built into the back of the front wall, low, roofed with corrugated iron and sandbags, three yards long; and now there was a hole there, in the back of the wall, full of water, with smoke coming off the water, and the corrugated iron standing up out of it at an angle, bent, like a sheet of paper somebody had crumpled, and sandbags everywhere, burst, mud, in heaps, on the boards and in the water and on the fire step.

And Ed Haskell, on his knees on the fire step, with his hands in the mud.

He was digging. With his hands. At the heap of burst sandbags and mud on the fire step where the left end of the shelter had been, and the high thin noise was him, coming out of him with every breath, the same noise, on and on, while his hands went into the mud and came out and went in again.

Two Guardsmen were digging with him. With their hands. Then Sergeant Hodge was there, and Lucien, and Harlan, and Kerrigan, and Sergeant Cutter from somewhere along the line, all of them, on their knees on the fire step in the mud with their hands in it, digging, and nobody saying anything, and the high thin noise going on.

They found one of the Guardsmen first. He was alive. He was under a foot of mud with the corrugated iron over his face and he was alive, and they got him out, and he sat on the boards and coughed up mud and looked at nothing.

They found the other two Guardsmen after that. They were not alive.

They found Walt Haskell last.

He was at the far end, where the fire step met the traverse, where he sat in the mornings with his mess tin on his knee and the little round mirror propped on the sandbags. He was sitting there still. He was sitting with his back to the traverse and his legs out in front of him and the mess tin on the boards beside him, upside down, and his face was clean. That was the thing Lucien saw. There was mud on everything, on all of them, on the walls and the boards and the iron and the water, and Walt Haskell’s face was clean, and white, and shaved, and his eyes were open, and he looked surprised, a little, the way he had looked on the parade ground at Smoky Hill the first time Lieutenant Whitcomb said duck gun with ambitions. There was no mark on him that Lucien could see. None at all.

Ed Haskell stopped digging.

The high thin noise stopped. He knelt on the fire step in the mud and looked at his brother sitting against the traverse with his clean surprised face and his eyes open; and he put out his hand, slowly, as if it were very heavy, and put it flat on his brother’s chest, over the heart, the way he had put it on the slats of the bunk above him in the dark on the ship; and left it there.

Nobody said anything. Sergeant Hodge stood up, slowly, on the fire step, in the mud, and took his cap off.

The Morning Hymn was finished. It was always four. The line was quiet.

---

“Concussion,” said Sergeant Hodge, that night. “There’s no mark. There’s often no mark. The air does it. It goes into you and stops everything.” He was not looking at any of them. He was looking at the brazier. “He’ll not have known.”

Nobody said anything.

They had carried them out at dusk, on stretchers, along the boards, the three of them under groundsheets; the Guardsmen had done it, the way the Guards did everything, without anybody telling them, four men to a stretcher and the boards under water and the flares going up. Ed Haskell had walked behind his brother’s. Sergeant Cutter had gone with him, the whole mile and a half to the village, and had come back alone at midnight, and had said nothing to anybody, and gone to the left end of the section’s forty yards and sat on the fire step where the shelter had been until stand-to.

Lucien could smell it.

He had smelled it since the first night. Sweet and bad, under the smoke and the tea and the wet wool. He had not wanted to know what it was. He knew now. It had a name. It was all through the line, all the time, in the mud and the water and the walls themselves, because the walls were mud, and the mud was the drowned fields, and there had been three years of men in the drowned fields; and now, in the shelter behind the traverse, with his knees drawn up and his back to the sandbags, he could smell it on his own hands, under the nails, where he had dug.

He did not wash them. There was nothing to wash them in that was not the same water.

---

They built the wall again that night.

Everybody. The whole section, and the Guardsmen, and men from along the line; Sergeant Hodge said so, at nine, and they came out of the shelters and went to it. You filled the bags from the mud at the back of the line, behind the parados, where the ground was a little higher, a shovelful at a time, two men to a bag, one holding it open and one shovelling, in the dark, in the rain, with the flares going up; and you carried them to the hole and handed them up to the men on the wall, and they laid them, the way bricklayers lay bricks, crossed, each bag over the join of the two below, and stamped them down, and called for more.

Lucien held the bags. Harlan shovelled. Harlan shovelled the way he did everything, steadily, without any fuss, the spade going into the mud and coming out full and the mud going into the bag, over and over, for four hours, and did not say anything, and did not stop.

At one in the morning a flare went up, close, very bright, right over them, and hung, and everybody froze, on the wall and at the bags and at the shovels, the way the Guardsman with the lantern had told them on the first night; stand still, don’t duck, don’t look at it. And in the white light Lucien saw Harlan’s face, a foot from his, over the mouth of the bag, with the spade held still in the air full of mud; and it was wet, the whole of it, with the rain, and with something else, running down out of his eyes into the mud on his cheeks, and he was not making any sound at all.

The flare went down. It was dark. The spade came down into the bag.

“He was nineteen,” said Harlan, very low, in the dark, shovelling. “He wanted to build engines.”

“Yes.”

“In Detroit.”

“Yes.”

Harlan shovelled. The bag filled. Lucien tied it and lifted it and passed it up to the man on the wall and held the next one open.

“I’ve got two brothers,” said Harlan. “Both younger. Nils and Carl. Nils is seventeen.” He shovelled. “When we were at Smoky Hill I was glad. That they wouldn’t send us together. The rule. I thought it was a stupid rule, and I was glad of it.” He stopped, with the spade in the mud. “I’m glad of it now.”

He went on shovelling.

By stand-to the wall was up again, seven feet, squared off, faced, with the boards scraped and the burst bags taken away; and where the shelter had been at the left end there was the hole full of water with the iron standing up out of it, and a Guardsman had put a board across it, and the line was as it had been, as if nothing had happened. At nine the Morning Hymn came. Four shells, one after another, on the wall, in the Guards’ section, forty yards to the right.

---

He caught the eel on the Saturday night.

He did not mean to. He was on the wiring party, out in front of the wall in the water with Sergeant Hodge and four others, at two in the morning, lying on his belly in it with his rifle held up while two Guardsmen mended a stretch of wire that the Morning Hymn had cut; and something moved against his hand in the water. Something long and smooth and alive. And his hand closed on it, the way it had closed on a thousand of them in the bottom of the Marie-Ange in the dark, before he knew it had.

It twisted. He held it, behind the head, with his thumb and his finger, the way his father had taught him when he was seven; and it twisted and wrapped itself round his wrist, cold and strong, and he lay in the water in the dark and held it and did not let go, and did not know what to do with it.

Sergeant Hodge was beside him. He looked at it, in the dark, at the thing wrapped round Lucien’s wrist.

“Is that what I think it is,” he said.

“Eel, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Hodge was quiet for a moment.

“Well,” he said. “Don’t let go of it.”

He cooked it on the brazier at four, in the shelter behind the traverse, in a mess tin, with the dixie moved off. He did it the way his grandmother did it, as near as he could, with nothing: skinned, with his clasp knife, which was not how you skinned an eel but was all there was, and cut in pieces, and fried in the fat from the bacon ration that Sergeant Hodge had been keeping in a tin, and salted with a pinch of the salt from the packet in Kerrigan’s mess kit that Kerrigan had been keeping for something. The shelter filled with the smell of it. It was the first smell in a fortnight that was not the line.

Sergeant Hodge ate the first piece. He held it in his fingers, hot, and looked at it, and put it in his mouth, and chewed, slowly, with his eyes shut.

He did not say anything for a long time.

“The Fens,” he said, at last. “When I was a boy. My grandfather had a trap for them, a wicker one, in the drain at the bottom of the forty acres, and we’d have them on a Friday. Fen tigers, they call us. Because of the eels. Because we eat anything that comes out of the water.” He opened his eyes and looked at Lucien across the brazier. “I’ve not had an eel in four years.”

“There’s more out there, Sergeant,” said Lucien. “In the water. I could feel them. In the drains under the fields, where the dykes were. They’re in the old drains.”

Sergeant Hodge looked at him for a moment longer.

“Course they are,” he said. “Course they bloody are. Three years, and nobody thought.” He took another piece. “Nobody from the water, that’s why. Nobody in this whole line from the water but me and the fishermen from Grimsby, and the fishermen from Grimsby are dead.” He chewed. “Well. Now there’s you.”

Harlan ate a piece. He held it the way he had held the oyster, very carefully, as if it might do something.

“What is it?” he said.

“Eel.”

“Huh.” He chewed. “It’s like the inside of a fish.”

Kerrigan laughed. He laughed for the first time since the Thursday, a short bark, and then stopped, as if he had remembered; and then, because nobody told him not to, he laughed again.

---

Captain Pruett came up the boards on the Sunday night.

Lucien did not know he was coming. Nobody did. The ration party came up at ten, along the boards out of the dark, the way it came every night, with the dixies and the sacks and the water in petrol tins and the mail; and at the end of it, behind the last man, there was an officer in a waterproof, with a cane, very carefully, feeling for the boards with it, the way a blind man feels for the kerb.

He came into the line at the traverse and stood there, in the dark, looking along the boards.

“Prudhomme,” he said. “Is there a Private Prudhomme here?”

Lucien knew the voice. He knew it from the hut by the water tower at Smoky Hill, with the spectacles on the nose and the finger under the line and extraordinary. He got up off the fire step.

“Sir.”

Captain Pruett came along the boards to him, slowly, with the cane. He was thinner than at Smoky Hill. His waterproof was too big for him and his face under the cap was grey, and the spectacles were wet, and he took them off and wiped them on his handkerchief and put them back on and looked at Lucien, in the dark, for a long moment.

“Private Prudhomme,” he said. “You’ll remember me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I asked you a question once. In Kansas. About your language.”

“Yes, sir.”

Captain Pruett looked at him. Then he looked over Lucien’s shoulder, at the wall, at the top of it, at the dark beyond it where the French were, a quarter of a mile off across the drowned fields, behind their own wall, with their braziers and their bacon and their Morning Hymn.

“I find,” said Captain Pruett, “that I need it.”

He said it very quietly, and very carefully, as if he had rehearsed it on the boards, the whole mile and a half, feeling his way with the cane; and as if he did not much like the taste of it, and was going to say it anyway.

Sergeant Hodge, on the fire step behind Lucien, made a small sound through his nose. It was nearly the sound Harlan made.

“Yes, sir,” said Lucien.