Klaverdijk

Out of the line meant carrying things.

He had thought it would mean rest. Everybody had. The Guards laughed at them for it, without unkindness, on the Friday night when the relief came up the duckboards out of the dark, another battalion, Coldstream, and took over the forty yards and the shelters and the board over the hole full of water at the left end, and the Grenadiers and their Americans went back down the boards to the village and the support line behind it. Rest, said Bates, the slow miner, when Kerrigan said the word. Rest. Aye. You’ll see.

They saw. In support you lived in the cellars of the village and in a line of shelters along the back of the dunes, and you slept in the day, and at night you carried. Everything. Everything the line needed came up the duckboards on men’s backs, at night, because nothing could move by day under the Eye: the rations and the water in petrol tins and the rum in its stone jars and the ammunition in boxes and the sandbags in bales and the duckboards themselves, in bundles, and the corrugated iron, and the timber, and the wire. Above all the wire. Coils of it, barbed, rusted already, heavy, with the barbs catching in your tunic and your hands and your face in the dark, that you carried two at a time on a pole between two men along a mile and a half of duckboards with the water on either side and the flares going up.

“This is rest,” said Kerrigan, on the Saturday morning, lying in the cellar on a pile of sacks with his hands torn to pieces by the wire. “This is what they mean by rest. I want to go back to the line.”

“Give it a fortnight,” said Bates.

---

Sergeant Hodge took the carrying party up to Klaverdijk on the Saturday night.

He did not say it was Klaverdijk. He said, at the dump at the end of the village, in the dark, twelve coils, six poles, two miles, along the support line, wire for the farm; and the Guardsmen in the party looked at each other, and at him, and did not say anything, and picked up the poles.

Lucien was on a pole with Harlan. Harlan in front, because he was taller and could see further, and Lucien behind, with the pole on his shoulder and two coils of wire swinging on it between them, and the barbs catching. They went along the support line, which was a second wall of sandbags behind the first, lower, with duckboards behind it and water under them, going inland, south and east, away from the dunes and the sea, along the edge of the drowned country, for two miles. It took four hours. Twice the duckboards were gone altogether, blown, and they went through water to the waist with the poles held up over their heads and the wire swinging. Once a shell came over, one, out of nowhere, a gros noir, and landed a hundred yards off in the water with a sound like the end of the world, and the water came down on them like rain.

At three in the morning they came to the farm.

It was not a farm. He could tell, in the dark, that it had been; there was a shape in the dark ahead of the line, beyond it, out in the water, a low ragged shape, walls, the stump of something, a gable end with a hole in it. Broken brick. And the line went round it, here, bent, the wall of sandbags turning back on itself in an elbow, because a dyke came in here from the right, out of the drowned fields, raised, a long low bank going away into the dark, and the farm stood on the dyke where it met another one, at the corner; and the line had been on the far side of the farm once, and was on the near side now.

They put the wire down at a dump behind the elbow. The Guardsmen of the carrying party sat down on the boards with their backs to the sandbags and their hands between their knees and did not say anything. They did not light cigarettes. They sat in the dark at the elbow of the line by the farm and looked at nothing.

Sergeant Hodge stood for a while, on the boards, with his hands at his sides. Then he looked at Lucien.

“Come here,” he said.

---

There was a gap in the sandbags at the elbow. A loophole, low, faced with a steel plate with a slot in it, for a sniper; and Sergeant Hodge took him to it, and pushed the shutter back off the slot, and stood back.

“Look,” he said. “It’s getting light. Look now and then don’t look again.”

Lucien put his eye to the slot.

It was getting light. A grey light, from somewhere behind them, a long way back; not light yet, only less dark. And out through the slot in the steel plate there was the drowned country, flat, grey, going away to the French, and the dyke coming in from the right, a long low dark line across the grey water, raised, like the drowned road to the pump house but higher, out of the water, a bank; and at the end of it, forty yards out, where it met the other dyke, at the corner, the farm. What was left of it. Low walls of brick, broken, with the water round them. The gable end with the hole in it. A heap of something that had been a barn. And beyond it, a hundred yards beyond, low, dark, another wall of sandbags. French.

“That’s Klaverdijk,” said Sergeant Hodge, behind him. Very quietly. “Clover dyke. That’s the farm. We called it Clover.”

Lucien looked at it.

“We had it,” said Sergeant Hodge. “All last year, the summer. The line was the far side. Out there. Where the French wall is now. We had the farm, we had both dykes, we had a bit of breastwork beyond the farm, out past the corner. Then the French came over one night, in October, a raid. Three nights before. They came over in the dark and took the breastwork beyond the farm and the farm with it and we came back to here.” He was quiet for a moment. “And brigade wanted it back.”

Lucien did not move from the slot.

“Don’t ask me why,” said Sergeant Hodge. “Nobody told us why. Nobody tells you why. It was ours and then it was theirs and brigade wanted it back. It wasn’t worth anything. It’s a farm. It’s a ditch. It’s water.” His voice did not change. “Two companies. Ours and the next. A bombardment for twenty minutes first, to cut the wire and knock their heads down. Then over. Four hundred yards. From back there,” he jerked his head behind them, “where the old support line was, across the open, to the farm and the bit beyond.”

“Across the water,” said Lucien.

“Across the water. To the knees, to the waist. There’s no way across that you can’t see from everywhere. There’s no cover. You go across it at a walk, because you can’t run in it, and you keep going.” Sergeant Hodge was quiet again. “We took it. We got to the farm and the bit beyond and we took it. Sixty-one killed. A hundred and forty wounded. And we held it two days.”

“Two days.”

“Two days. And then we gave it back. Because you couldn’t get anything to it. No rations, no water, no wire, no ammunition, nothing, not across four hundred yards of open water under the Eye. They shelled it two days and we sat in it and then brigade said come back, and we came back. To here.” He looked at the farm through the gap beside Lucien’s head, over his shoulder. “It’s where it was. The line. Where it was before. It’s where it was the morning we went.”

---

“He was my officer,” said Sergeant Hodge.

Lucien took his eye away from the slot and looked at him.

Sergeant Hodge was not looking at him. He was looking at the steel plate, the slot in it, the grey light coming through. His face like a clenched fist did not do anything at all.

“Number six platoon,” he said. “I was his sergeant. Eleven months. He came out in the November before. Seventeen. Straight from the depot, straight from the schools, straight from all of it. They give you a boy, and you’re to make him an officer, and you do it, the way you’d break in a colt. That’s what a sergeant’s for.” He stopped. “And they give you that one. And you’re to make him an officer the same as any of them, because that’s the order, the King’s order, no different from any of them. And you do it.”

“What was he like?”

He had not meant to ask. It came out.

Sergeant Hodge thought about it for a long time.

“He was all right,” he said, at last. “He was slow. He didn’t make his mind up quick, and in this place you’ve got to, and I’d stand at his elbow and tell him, I’d do this, sir, and he’d look at me a while and then he’d do it. He wasn’t clever. He wasn’t brave, particular. He wasn’t anything particular. He was conscientious. He did his rounds. He looked at feet.” Something moved in Sergeant Hodge’s face, for a moment, and was gone. “I taught him that. He did his letters. When a man was killed he wrote to the family, the way an officer has to, and he did it properly, by hand, every one, a page, and he’d sit in the dugout by the candle and do it and ask me things about the man he didn’t know. What the man was like. What he’d say if he could.” He was quiet. “The lads liked him. He was eighteen.”

Lucien did not say anything.

“He wrote to his mother the night before,” said Sergeant Hodge. “In the dugout. I saw him doing it. By the candle, on his knee. He folded it up and put it in his tunic. Here.” He put his hand flat on his own chest, over the pocket. “He always did that. Put it in his tunic, to post when we came out.”

Lucien’s hand went to his own chest. To the pocket, over his heart, buttoned, with the letters in it, his grandmother’s and his father’s and Achille’s. He did not know it had. Sergeant Hodge saw it, and looked at it, and did not say anything.

“We went at six,” said Sergeant Hodge. “After the bombardment. Twenty minutes, it was supposed to cut the wire and knock their heads down, and it cut some of the wire and it knocked some of their heads down, and there was a gun out there,” he pointed through the slot, to the right, along the dyke, out past the farm, at nothing, at the grey, “on the flank, in the dyke, a machine gun, that the bombardment never touched. Never even looked at. Nobody’d seen it. Nobody’d told the guns. And we went over at a walk across the water, and it opened on us from the side, along the line, from the right, and it took us in the side like a scythe.”

The light was coming. Lucien could see his face now, in the grey.

“First ten minutes,” said Sergeant Hodge. “Out there. A hundred yards out. Less. He was in front, where an officer is. With his pistol, in the water up to his knees. He went down. Like that. Like a man sitting down in the water. Two of the lads got him, and turned round, and carried him back, across all of it, with the gun going, and I went on with the rest, to the farm, because that’s what you do, because somebody has to.” He stopped. “He was dead before they got him to the aid post. They said. I didn’t see. I was at the farm.”

He took his hand away from his chest.

“That’s all,” he said. “That’s all there was. There wasn’t anything else. He got up, and he went forward, and the gun on the flank got him, the same as it got sixty others that morning, the same way, in the first ten minutes, in the water. He didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. He didn’t do anything. There wasn’t time.” He looked at Lucien, in the grey light, at last. “People are going to want there to have been something. I can tell you that now. They’re already wanting it. There’s a lad in the third company says he heard him shout something, and he never, I was there, he never. People want a prince to die different. He didn’t. He died the same as Lomas and Ashby and the two Pearces and the rest of them, and the King said so himself, in the paper, didn’t he. In the ordinary place.”

“Aldridge,” said Lucien. “Adolphus. Anstey.”

Sergeant Hodge looked at him.

“Old Tregre read it,” said Lucien. “On the wharf. At home. In October. From L’Abeille. My grandmother was at the window.” He did not know how to say the rest. “She said, pauvre mère.”

Sergeant Hodge did not say anything for a long time.

“Did she,” he said.

---

“There was a requiem,” said Lucien.

They were sitting on the boards at the elbow, with their backs to the sandbags, in the grey light, with the carrying party. Nobody had told them to go. The light was coming and they would have to go soon, before it came, before the Eye could see the duckboards; but nobody had moved. Harlan was sitting on Lucien’s other side with his long legs out across the boards and his hands between his knees, listening.

“In the cathedral,” said Lucien. “At home. In the city. On the Thursday after. Everybody went. The whole city. The Grand-Duc was there, in the front, in black. The archbishop. Everybody from the lake shore went in on the streetcar, in their best, my father in his good black coat. We stood at the back. There were so many people you couldn’t see the altar.” He stopped. “My father put his hand on my shoulder. In the cathedral. At the end, when the archbishop came down and went round the catafalque with the smoke. He’d never done that. He left it there all the way out.”

Sergeant Hodge was looking at the boards between his boots.

“For him,” he said.

“Yes.”

“In New Orleans.”

“Yes.”

Sergeant Hodge sat for a long time without saying anything. The carrying party sat round him. The light came up a little more.

“Sixty-one killed,” he said, at last, to the boards. “That morning. Lomas. Ashby. The Pearces, both of them, brothers, in my platoon, side by side, the gun got them both at once. Harry Dunne. Young Fairclough, that was a footman and folded his blanket like a tablecloth, same as Tibbs does. Sixty-one.” He looked up, not at Lucien, at the sandbags opposite. “Did they have a requiem for Lomas in New Orleans?”

Lucien did not answer.

“No,” said Sergeant Hodge. “Course they didn’t. They had one in his chapel in Lincoln, if they had one at all, his mother and his sisters and the minister, and the chapel half empty because the rest of the lads from the street were out here.” He was quiet. “I’m not saying it’s wrong. I’m not saying anything. He was a good lad and his father lost him and the King’s a man the same as anybody. I’m saying sixty-one.”

“There was a boy from the lake shore,” said Lucien. “Hippolyte Fontenot. Nineteen. He lied about his age. In the First Louisiane. They killed him in January. On the coast. Here, somewhere.” He looked at the drowned country through the gap, grey, flat. “His mother stands on her gallery with a dog. Every morning. Looking at the road.”

“Was there a requiem for him?”

“A Mass. In the parish. On a Tuesday.” He thought. “Twenty people. The dog came.”

Sergeant Hodge looked at him then. For a long moment.

“Well,” he said. “Then you know.”

He got up.

“Light,” he said, to the carrying party. “Up. Back. Now.”

They went back along the support line in the last of the dark, two miles, with the empty poles, and nobody said anything all the way.

---

The cemetery was behind the dunes.

Sergeant Hodge took him on the Sunday afternoon. Not Harlan; Harlan was asleep in the cellar, the way he slept, all at once; and Sergeant Hodge stood at the top of the cellar steps at three in the afternoon and looked down at Lucien, who was awake, and said, come on, then, and Lucien went.

It was out of the Eye’s sight, behind the high dunes, in a hollow, on the sand, where you could dig: the only place on the whole of the coast, Sergeant Hodge said, besides the French cellars at the Casino, where you could put a spade in and not hit water. So they put the dead there. A field of sand in a hollow of the dunes, with the coarse grass round it bent flat by the wind off the sea, and a fence of wire, and a gate made of two pickets and a board; and inside the fence, crosses. Rows of them. Wooden, painted white, with the paint going grey in the salt, and on each one a strip of tin, stamped, nailed across, with the name and the number and the regiment; hundreds of them, in rows, going away across the sand of the hollow to the far side, so many that Lucien stopped at the gate and could not go in.

The sea was just over the dunes. He could hear it. A long low hiss and roar, going on and on, never stopping.

“Come on,” said Sergeant Hodge.

He walked along the rows. Sergeant Hodge walked in front of him, slowly, the way you walk in a church, with his cap in his hand. He did not look at the crosses. He knew where he was going.

He stopped at a row near the far side, near the fence, where the sand went up into the dune.

“There,” he said.

It was a cross. White, going grey. The same as the others. The same size. The same wood, the same paint, the same strip of tin nailed across it, stamped, with a name and a rank and the regiment and the date, the twenty-first of October, 1916. It was in a row with other crosses on either side of it, the same, with other names on their strips of tin, and the same date, and the same regiment. Somebody had tied a ribbon round it, once, near the top, and the rain and the salt had taken all the colour out of it, so that it was grey, like the paint, and you could not tell what colour it had been.

Lucien stood and looked at it.

He did not know what he had thought it would be. Something else. Something bigger. A stone, or a statue, or a railing round it, or flowers. The photograph in L’Abeille had been of a young man in a uniform, sitting, looking at the camera without smiling; and the requiem in the cathedral had been the whole city, and the Grand-Duc in black, and the archbishop, and the Dies irae, and his father’s hand on his shoulder all the way to the end. And this was a cross in the sand behind the dunes the same size as the cross next to it, with a strip of tin.

“His father wanted that,” said Sergeant Hodge. “The same. No different. They say he said so. Same as the list in the paper.” He looked at the cross. “That’s Lomas, next to him. And that’s Ashby. That’s the Pearces, there, the two of them, side by side, the same as they went.”

Lucien looked at the Pearces.

Then he looked along the row, and the next row, and the next, the white crosses going grey, going away across the sand of the hollow, hundreds, the same size, every one; and somewhere in the rows nearer the gate, newer, still white, there would be one for Walt Haskell, who had wanted to build engines, and two for the Guardsmen from the shelter at the left end of the forty yards, from a fortnight ago.

“Is Walt Haskell here?” he said.

“Over there. By the gate. The new row.” Sergeant Hodge put his cap back on. “Go and look, if you like. I’ll wait.”

Lucien went.

It was in the new row, by the gate, where the sand was still raw and yellow and had not had time to go grey: a cross, white, with the paint still bright, and a strip of tin nailed across it, stamped, HASKELL, W., and a number, and the Second Kansas, and the date. The same size as the prince’s. Exactly the same. The same wood and the same paint and the same tin.

There was something on the sand at the foot of it.

He crouched down and looked. A little round mirror. A shaving mirror, the size of the palm of your hand, in a tin frame, standing propped against the foot of the cross in the sand, facing out; and in it, when he looked down into it, the grey sky over the dunes, and the edge of the cross, and his own face, very small.

He did not touch it. He knew who had put it there. He crouched in the sand by the gate of the cemetery behind the dunes with the sea going on over the top of the dune, and looked at the little mirror propped at the foot of a white cross the same size as a prince’s, with the sky in it; and after a while he stood up and went back along the rows to where Sergeant Hodge was waiting by the fence, with his cap on, looking at the sea.

“Same size,” said Lucien.

Sergeant Hodge did not turn round.

“Same size,” he said. “Every one.”