The Second Kansas

The Guards went on the Thursday night, and nothing looked any different.

That was the thing he could not get over. He stood on the fire step at the left end of the section’s forty yards at stand-to on the Friday morning, in the grey, and looked along the line, and it was the same. The same wall, seven feet high, squared off and faced. The same boards, scraped. The same shelters in the back of the wall, the same brazier with its sheet of iron, the same board across the hole full of water where the shelter had been. The same drowned fields going away to the French, flat, with the wire in them and the stumps of the hedges in their rows and the old dead horse with its ribs up out of the water. The same Eye, a long way off inland, with the glint on the stump of the tower.

And there were no Guardsmen in it. Not one. From the traverse on the right to the traverse on the left, and beyond, for a mile, along the whole of the battalion’s front, every man on the fire step was the Second Kansas.

It was theirs. The newspapers at home would say so, Sol Weintraub said; the papers would say that the Realm’s own men now held their own line on the coast of Flanders, alone, under their own officers, and that the General had what he had crossed the sea for. It would be in L’Abeille. Old Tregre would read it out on the wharf.

It did not look any different. That was all. He stood on the fire step and looked at it and it was the same line, the same mud, the same water, and the only difference was that the men in it did not know it as well.

---

Sergeant Hodge had gone at ten on the Thursday night, with the last of the Grenadiers, down the boards.

He had not said much. He was not a man who said much. He had come along the section’s forty yards at nine, at the end, with his pack on and his rifle slung and the leather jerkin over his tunic, and stopped at each of the Americans of the section in turn, at their feet, the way he had stopped at them on the first morning. He looked at each man’s boots. He did not say anything about them. He looked at them and nodded and moved on.

He stopped at Lucien.

He looked at Lucien’s boots for a long time. Then up, at his face.

“Your road,” he said. Very low. “To the pump house. You keep that to yourself, son. You and your Swede. You don’t draw it on any map for anybody that’ll send other men down it in the daylight to see if it’s there.”

“No, Sergeant.”

“And you keep off the water by day.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Hodge looked at him a moment longer, with his pale eyes in his clenched face. He looked as if he were going to say something else. He did not. He took the tin out of his jerkin, the tin of whale oil, half empty, dented, with the lid held on by a piece of string, and gave it to Lucien, and went on along the boards.

At the traverse at the left end, by the board over the hole, he met Sergeant Cutter.

Lucien saw it. He was not meant to; nobody was. The two sergeants stood on the boards in the dark by the traverse, a foot apart, the short brown one from the Fens with the jerkin and the clenched face and the short brown one from the Philippines with the flat-brimmed campaign hat he still wore in the line when he could, against all orders; and they looked at each other, the way two men look at each other across a field who have both ploughed it. Neither of them said anything for a while.

Then Sergeant Hodge nodded at the ribbon on Sergeant Cutter’s chest. The one nobody in hut forty-one knew.

“Where?” he said.

“Jolo,” said Sergeant Cutter.

Sergeant Hodge nodded slowly, as if that were a thing he had heard of, and perhaps he had.

He looked along the line, then, past Sergeant Cutter, to where Lieutenant Whitcomb was standing on the fire step by the second traverse, with his field glasses, looking out over the top at the dark, very straight, very earnest, in his new trench coat with the belt done up, twenty-four.

“Your lad?” said Sergeant Hodge.

“Mine,” said Sergeant Cutter.

Sergeant Hodge looked at Lieutenant Whitcomb for a long moment.

“Stand at his elbow,” he said.

He went past Sergeant Cutter, and round the traverse, and out of the line onto the boards, and down them into the dark, towards the village, with the last of the Grenadiers; and Sergeant Cutter stood on the boards by the traverse and watched him go, for a long time, with his face under the flat brim not doing anything at all.

---

Lieutenant Whitcomb wanted to do something.

It was in him like a fever, from the Friday. Lucien saw it at stand-to, in the way he stood on the fire step, and the way he looked out over the top through his field glasses at the French wall, a quarter of a mile off across the water, for a long time, longer than there was anything to see; and in the way he walked along the section’s forty yards, up and down, all day, looking at things. At the wall. At the wire. At the men. He had been six weeks in the line with the Guards and he had not been allowed to do anything; the Guards’ company commander had done it, and the Guards’ sergeants, and Lieutenant Whitcomb had followed them along the boards and watched and written things in a notebook. Now there were no Guards. Now it was his.

“We’ve been sitting here,” he said to Sergeant Cutter, on the Friday afternoon, in the shelter behind the second traverse, which was his. Lucien was outside it on the fire step and heard it, the way everybody heard everything in the line. “Six weeks. Sitting behind a wall. Letting them shell us. That’s not what we came for, Sergeant. That’s what the British have been doing for three years and look where it’s got them. The General didn’t bring us over here to sit.”

“No, sir,” said Sergeant Cutter.

“The spirit of the offensive. That’s the whole of it. That’s what the pamphlet says. You have to make them feel you. You have to make them know you’re there and you’re not going to sit behind a wall and take it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A raid,” said Lieutenant Whitcomb. “A small one. Ten men. On their wall. Opposite the pump house. We go out at night and we go in and we bring back a prisoner, and then we’d know who’s opposite, for certain, without all this,” he waved his hand, Lucien could hear him wave it, “lying in a ruin listening to them talk about soup. And they’d know we were here.”

There was a silence in the shelter.

“I’d not do that, sir,” said Sergeant Cutter.

He said it quietly, very respectfully, in his dry flat voice, the way he said everything. Lucien, on the fire step outside, stopped breathing.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s open water, sir. Four hundred yards of it. You can’t go across it fast. You can’t go across it quiet. They’ve got wire out we’ve never seen, and the Guards never went across it in two years except the once, at the farm, and you heard Hodge tell what that cost.” Sergeant Cutter was quiet for a moment. “And because we’ve got a man in the pump house every night forty yards from their wall who can tell us who’s opposite, sir, and what they ate, and when they’re going to be relieved. Without losing anybody.” Another pause. “I’d wait, sir. I’d learn the ground. I’d let Prudhomme listen. I’d not go over that water till somebody makes me.”

Lieutenant Whitcomb did not say anything for a long time.

“Somebody might,” he said, at last.

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Cutter. “Somebody might.”

---

He thought about Sergeant Hodge.

He lay in the pump house that night, on the platform of sandbags, with his ear to the hole in the brick and Harlan beside him with his rifle, and the water lapping at the rusted engine under them, and thought about Sergeant Hodge in the shelter behind the traverse at Klaverdijk with the grey light coming, saying 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.

I’d not do that, sir, Sergeant Cutter had said.

Stand at his elbow, Sergeant Hodge had said, by the board over the hole.

He thought of the face on the bay horse at Smoky Hill saying two words, Sergeant. Jolo. And of Sergeant Cutter’s face moving, under the flat brim, for the only time in three months.

He thought that Sergeant Cutter was doing for Lieutenant Whitcomb what Sergeant Hodge had done for the prince. And that it had not been enough for the prince. Not because Sergeant Hodge had not done it; because somebody at brigade had wanted the farm back.

He lay with his ear to the brick and listened to the French.

---

The French knew the Guards had gone.

They knew it on the first night. He heard them say so. The Parigot said it first, at one in the morning, out of nothing, the way he said everything: les Rosbifs sont partis. The roast beefs have gone. Y a plus que les cow-boys. There’s only the cowboys now.

Comment tu sais? said somebody. How do you know?

Ça s’entend, said the Parigot. You can hear it. Ils font du bruit. Ils toussent. Ils parlent. Ils marchent sur leurs planches comme des vaches. Les Rosbifs, tu les entendais jamais. They make noise. They cough. They talk. They walk on their boards like cows. The roast beefs, you never heard them.

Lucien lay on the sandbags and thought about Walt Haskell talking all the time about everything, and Kerrigan laughing in the dark, and the boards at night under the boots of three thousand men from thirty polities who had been taught to dig in black prairie sod.

Les pauvres, said Pépère.

Then, after a long time, in his deep slow voice, the thing he had said before, a fortnight ago, about new men; but differently now, not as a thing he thought but as a thing he knew.

Maintenant ils vont attaquer.

Now they’ll attack.

Tu dis ça depuis quinze jours, said the Parigot. You’ve been saying that for a fortnight.

Je le dis encore, said Pépère. I’m saying it again. Ils sont seuls, asteur.

They’re on their own now.

He said asteur. Lucien heard it. Not maintenant, this time, the French of France; asteur, the old word, the lake shore’s word, the word his father said to the boat and to the railway car and to the hook. À cette heure. From a farmer from the Berry, in the middle of France, with forty cows. It came across the water in the dark as if it had been his father saying it.

He did not translate it for Harlan.

At six in the morning, in the cellar under the village, he told Captain Pruett what Pépère had said, and Captain Pruett wrote it down, and then sat and looked at what he had written for a long time; and then he took a sheet of paper out of the box under the door on its two boxes, and wrote it again, on that, and folded it, and put it in an envelope, the way he had with the cellars of the Casino.

---

There were guns coming up.

Everybody knew it by the Saturday. You heard them at night, behind, on the road along the dunes: wagons, and horses, and engines, a lot of them, more than the rations and the wire, going along the causeway towards the village and past it and stopping somewhere behind the dunes, and men shouting very low, and the sound of heavy things being moved, and then nothing. And in the morning there was nothing to see, because nothing moved by day under the Eye; but there were new paths in the grass on the backs of the dunes, and new tracks in the sand, and the cookhouse with no roof in the village was feeding men nobody knew.

And there were officers.

They came up the boards on the Saturday night, after dark, five of them, with a guide; staff officers, with red on their collars and their caps, and clean boots, and maps in leather cases, and one of them with a thing Lucien had never seen, a periscope, a long tin box with a mirror at each end, that you could put up over the top of the wall and look through without putting your head up. They came along the section’s forty yards with Major Corliss, the battalion’s commander, a heavy quiet man with a grey moustache whom Lucien had seen twice; and they did not stop. They went through the section and on along the line, towards the sea, to where the line came up out of the drowned fields onto the dunes.

To look at the Casino. Everybody knew that too, by the morning.

Lieutenant Whitcomb went with them, as far as the end of the section. He came back alone half an hour later, very fast along the boards, and stood on the fire step by the second traverse with his field glasses, looking along the line towards the dunes in the dark, though there was nothing to see in the dark at all.

Sergeant Cutter stood on the boards a yard behind him and did not say anything.

Lucien, on the fire step at the left end, by the board over the hole, waiting for the time to go out to the pump house, looked at the two of them in the dark: the earnest one in front, looking towards the dunes, and the brown one behind, at his elbow, looking at him.

---

They came out of the line on the Sunday night.

Another battalion of the Second Kansas came up the boards and took over, and C Company went down to the village, and then on, through the village and past it, along the causeway, three miles, to the reserve, which was a town. A small one, inland, off the dunes, behind a long low rise of ground where the Eye could not see. It had houses with roofs on. It had a church with a roof on. It had a square with a pump in it and cobbles and a café with its windows boarded and a sign over the door in Flemish and French, and people. Belgian people, women and old men and children, in black, in the street, at the doors, looking at the soldiers go past with the faces of people who had been looking at soldiers go past for three years.

And it had a cinema.

Not a real one. A hut, by the station, on the edge of the town, a long wooden hut like the huts at Smoky Hill, with benches in it and a sheet at one end and a machine at the other on a table, with a man turning a handle; and on the Sunday night, when C Company had been fed and had washed, for the first time in a fortnight, in tin baths in a brewery, in hot water, every man in turn, they were marched to it, by companies, and sat on the benches in the dark, and the man at the other end turned the handle.

There was a film about a dog. It was very funny. Kerrigan laughed so much that he fell off the bench.

And then there was the other one.

It said so on the sheet, in white letters on black, before it began. THE REALM’S MEN LAND IN BELGIUM. And then there was a ship. Grey. Coming in to a quay. In the rain.

The hut went very quiet.

It was the quay at Ostend. Lucien knew it at once, the stones, the cranes, the sheds, the railway lines let into the stones. It was flickering and grey and there was no sound, only the machine whirring behind them and the man turning the handle; and the ship came in against the stones on the sheet, silently, very slowly, with the tugs at her bow and stern, and the gangway went down, and men came down it.

The Second Kansas. In the rain, in full kit, with the cork taken off at the top. Coming down the gangway onto the stones, and their legs going out from under them, all of them, men grabbing at each other and at nothing, stumbling, the way they had. On the sheet in the hut it was funny. The hut laughed. Kerrigan, back on the bench, laughed louder than anybody; and then on the sheet there was a big red-haired man coming off the gangway and sitting down hard on his pack, and it was Kerrigan, and the whole hut roared, and Kerrigan stood up on the bench in the dark and bowed.

Then the General.

By the motor car. On the stones, in the rain, with no waterproof on, very straight, with his hands behind his back, with the British officer and the German officer beside him. Watching. On the sheet his face was grey and flickering and there was nothing in it, and the hut stopped laughing all at once, and sat very still, and looked at him; and he looked back out of the sheet at them, at the gangway, at the boots coming off it, without moving, for a long time.

Lucien sat on the bench in the dark and watched it.

He watched it all. The ship and the gangway and the stumbling and the General. He looked for the other gangway. The forward one, with the column going down it two by two, and the packs in a pile by the shed, and the gangs of twenty under the cranes with their hooks. The man who had straightened up at the foot of the forward crane and lifted his hook, once, like a hand.

It was not there.

The film went from the after gangway to the General to the after gangway again, and to the Second Kansas falling in between the railway lines in the rain, and to the motor car driving away with its flags, and to the colours, and then it ended. There was no forward gangway in it. There were no cranes swinging over the forward hatches, and no slings coming up out of the holds, and no gangs on the stones with hooks. There was no table at the end of the quay with a grey cloth on it, either, and no women in black shawls with coffee. There was the Second Kansas, and the General, and the ship, and the colours.

The sheet went white. The man stopped turning the handle. The lights came on.

The hut stood up and stretched and talked, loudly, all at once, about Kerrigan on his pack, and the dog, and the General’s face; and Lucien sat on the bench in the light and did not get up.

“Lucky,” said Harlan, beside him. “Come on.”

“They weren’t in it,” said Lucien.

Harlan looked down at him.

“Who?”

“The labour battalion. Théo. The men with the hooks. They were there. They were working before we were off the ship. They were working when we marched away.” He looked at the white sheet. “They cut them out.”

Harlan looked at the sheet too, for a long time, the white of it, with nothing on it.

“Huh,” he said, at last, quietly.

He did not say anything else. He put his big hand on Lucien’s shoulder, the way Lucien’s father had put his in the cathedral, and left it there a moment; and then they went out of the hut with the others into the dark, into the town with roofs on it, to the barn where C Company was to sleep in straw, three miles behind a line that was unambiguously American, and did not look any different.