Inspection

The field was a quarter of a mile from the farm, and the quarter of a mile was mud.

Kerrigan said so at six in the morning, standing in the door of the barn with his boots in his hand, looking at the yard. It had frozen in the night. The mud of the yard was hard on top, a crust, white with frost, with the ruts of the cart in it like iron; and under the crust, when you put your foot on it, it was the same mud it had always been, the mud of the whole of Flanders, and it came up over the toe of your boot to the laces.

“All night,” said Kerrigan. “All night, polishing. With spit. I bought the polish. With four shillings out of a helmet.” He looked at the yard. “Are we supposed to fly?”

Nobody answered. There was no answer. Sergeant Cutter came out of the farmhouse, where he had been given a room by Madame Verhaeghe because he was a sergeant and had looked at her cows’ feet on the first day without being asked, and stood in the yard in the frost in his gleaming boots and looked at the third platoon in the door of the barn with theirs in their hands.

“Put them on,” he said.

They put them on. They marched to the field in them, a quarter of a mile, along a lane between two ditches with the frost on the hedges, and the mud came up over the toes to the laces, every step, and by the time they got to the field forty pairs of boots that had stood along the wall of the barn in the lantern light like the boots of the Guards were the colour of the lane.

Kerrigan said nothing at all, the whole way. That was worse than anything he could have said.

---

The field was behind the town, on the far side of the long low rise, where the Eye could not see. It was big and flat and grey with frost, with a row of bare poplars along one side and a ditch along the other, and the battalion was drawn up on it by companies at eight in the morning, in full kit, in the cold, in ranks, with the colours; and it stood there.

It was not like Smoky Hill. There was no band. There was no heat. There were not twelve thousand men; there were nine hundred, which was what the battalion had, which was not what it had had on the parade ground of dust in August. The sun came up behind the poplars, low, red, and did not give any warmth, and the frost on the field did not melt, and their breath went up in the still air over the ranks like the smoke from the braziers going up behind the French wall.

Nobody fainted. You could not faint in that cold. You stood, and your feet went, inside the boots, inside the socks, and then your hands, and then your face, and you stood.

Lucien stood in the third rank of C Company, with Harlan beside him, very tall, and Sol Weintraub behind, and looked at the back of Kerrigan’s neck in the rank in front, red with cold, and thought about the lake in January, at four in the morning, with the ice on the planks of the wharf and his father’s breath going up over the gunwale of the Marie-Ange as he bent to it. Allons, ma belle. He had the medal in the pocket over his heart, with the letters. He could feel it there, a small hard oval, through the cloth.

At ten the cars came.

---

He was on foot this time.

He got out of the first car at the edge of the field, by the poplars, with the staff getting out of the others behind him, and he did not get onto a horse. There was no horse. He came across the frost of the field on foot, at a walk, alone, a little in front of the staff, the way he had ridden at Smoky Hill a little in front of them; a grey man in a long coat, very straight, with his hands behind his back and his cap pulled down, walking across a frozen field in Flanders towards nine hundred men.

The battalion came to attention. Nine hundred rifles coming in against nine hundred shoulders, in the cold, a sound like a wave hitting the shell beach; and then nothing, the field silent, the breath going up.

He came along the front of the first company. Slowly. And Lucien, in the third rank of C Company, could see him, a long way off along the front of the battalion, and saw what he did.

He looked at boots.

Of course he did. Everybody in the battalion had known he would. He came along the front rank of the first company at a walk and his eyes went down, along the boots, one pair after another, the mud on them, the frost on the mud; and he stopped, now and then, in front of a man, and looked at the man’s boots for a long time, and then up, and said something, short, and the man answered, and he went on.

He was older. Older than at Smoky Hill. Four months. He looked as if they had been longer than four months. The face under the cap was the same, lined, brown, the grey moustache cut close, the small pale eyes; and it was greyer, and the lines were deeper, down from the nose to the corners of the mouth, and he walked a little more slowly than he had ridden. But his back was the same. Very straight. And his eyes went along the boots the same way, without his head moving, the way Sergeant Hodge’s went along the top of the wall.

He came to C Company at eleven.

---

He stopped in front of Sergeant Cutter.

He looked at Sergeant Cutter’s boots first. Then up, at his face, under the flat brim of the campaign hat that Sergeant Cutter had worn to the inspection against every order that had ever been given in the Army about it.

“Sergeant Cutter,” said the General.

Not Sergeant. Not Jolo. His name. Lucien heard it from the third rank. The General knew his name now, and had not known it at Smoky Hill; somebody had told him, or he had asked, or he had looked for it, in the four months since a parade ground of dust in Kansas, on a list, among a million names.

“Sir,” said Sergeant Cutter.

The General looked past him, at Lieutenant Whitcomb, at the front of the company, with his sword at the carry, very straight, very white under the cold.

“Your lieutenant?” said the General.

“Yes, sir.”

Lieutenant Whitcomb saluted. He did it very well. He brought the sword up and down and his whole body did it, and C Company, behind him, let its breath out, all at once, a long white cloud in the cold; and the General returned the salute, briefly, without looking as if he had noticed anything about it at all.

“Lieutenant,” he said. “What do you think of the ground in front of you? In the line.”

Lieutenant Whitcomb had not expected it. You could see that from the third rank. His face went whiter.

“It can be crossed, sir,” he said. “With spirit.”

The General looked at him.

He did not say anything for a long time. He stood in front of Lieutenant Whitcomb on the frozen field and looked at him, at his face, at the sword at the carry, at the new trench coat with the belt done up; and Lieutenant Whitcomb stood and was looked at, and did not breathe; and behind him, a yard back, at his elbow, Sergeant Cutter stood and looked at nothing.

“Can it,” said the General.

It was not a question. Lucien did not know what it was. It came out in the flat level voice, dry, the voice that had come across ten yards of dust at Smoky Hill, and it did not go up at the end the way a question goes up, and it did not go down the way a thing goes down when you agree with it. It stayed level. It stayed exactly where it was, in the cold air in front of Lieutenant Whitcomb’s face, for a moment, and then the General looked away from him, down, at the boots of the front rank, and walked along them.

---

He came along the front rank, and the second, looking at boots. And then the third.

He stopped in front of Harlan.

Harlan was the tallest man in the battalion. He stood in the third rank at attention with his rifle at his side and his eyes on the poplars a quarter of a mile off over the General’s head, and the General stood in front of him and looked at his boots, which were enormous, and muddy to the laces, and under the mud dark with oil.

“Take your boot off, son,” said the General.

Harlan did not move for a moment. Then he did. He gave his rifle to Sol Weintraub behind him without looking round, and bent, on one leg, in the third rank, on the frozen field, and unlaced the boot, the left one, with his big fingers that were stiff with cold, and pulled it off, and stood on one foot in the frost with the boot in his hand.

He had a sock on. Grey. Thick. Wool that smelled of sheep and of somebody’s kitchen in Ostend.

The General looked at it.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he took his own hands from behind his back and put his gloved hand out, and touched it. The sock. On Harlan’s foot. With two fingers, at the toe, the way Lucien’s grandmother touched the cloth of a coat in a shop on Royal Street to know what it was. And the field was so silent that Lucien could hear the rooks in the poplars a quarter of a mile away.

“Dry,” said the General.

“Yes, sir,” said Harlan.

“When did you put it on?”

“This morning, sir. At six. I change it twice a day, sir. Morning and night.”

“Who told you to?”

“Sergeant Hodge, sir. Of the Grenadiers. When we were with them.” Harlan stood on one foot in the frost with his boot in his hand. “And before that a man’s friend wrote him from the line and said to bring socks. So we brought them.”

“Where did you get this pair?”

Harlan did not answer at once. He thought about it, the way he thought about everything, slowly, on one foot, in front of the commander of the Realm’s armies in Europe, as if it were a field.

“Ostend, sir,” he said. “A lady on the quay. With a table. She gave them to him.” He moved his head, very slightly, sideways, at Lucien beside him. “He asked for slippers.”

---

The General turned his head and looked at Lucien.

It was the first time. At Smoky Hill the small pale eyes had gone across his face for less than a moment, in the third rank, and had not stopped. At Ostend they had been on the gangway, on the boots, thirty yards off in the rain. Now they stopped. They came along the third rank of C Company from Harlan’s face to Lucien’s and stopped on it, a yard away, and stayed.

He did not know what was in them. He had looked at that face harder than he had ever looked at anything, on a bay horse in the heat, and on a sheet in a hut by a station, and he did not know what was in it, and he did not know now, a yard away. Lined. Grey. The eyes small and very pale, very steady, under the peak of the cap, looking at him the way his father looked at the lake at four in the morning: to see what kind of a day it was going to be.

“Slippers,” said the General.

“Chaussons, sir,” said Lucien. He heard his own voice, a long way off. “In our French, at home, chaussons are socks. In theirs, the lady’s, they’re slippers. For old people. In front of the fire.” He stopped. “She laughed, sir.”

The General looked at him.

Behind the General, among the staff, a little back, there was a thin officer in a waterproof too big for him, with spectacles, and a cane. Lucien had not seen him until now. Captain Pruett. He stepped forward one pace, and said something very low, close to the General’s shoulder, that Lucien did not hear; and the General did not turn his head, and did not answer, and went on looking at Lucien’s face.

And then he spoke in French.

---

“Vous êtes de la Louisiane,” he said.

It was not a question either. It was the French of a book. Lucien heard that at once. Correct, careful, every word in its place and every word pronounced, all the way to the end, slowly, the vowels flat and American underneath, the way the professor’s would be, the way the French of the Ursulines’ Norman nun must have been to his grandmother in 1844: right, and pinched, and from somewhere else. A man’s French who had learned it at a desk, and practised it, and had never once in his life said asteur.

“Oui, mon Général,” said Lucien. “De La Nouvelle-Orléans. Des camps du lac, au bout du bayou Saint-Jean. Mon père pêche la chevrette. Chez nous-autres on parle comme ça, on a toujours parlé comme ça…”

It came out fast. He could not stop it. It came out of him the way it came out on the wharf, the lake shore’s French, all of a piece, with the words running into each other and the ends of them gone and nous-autres in the middle of it, in front of the General, on a frozen field, in the third rank.

The General held up his hand. A small movement, his gloved hand, from the wrist.

“Plus lentement,” he said. “Je vous prie.”

Slower. Please.

Lucien stopped.

He thought of the hut at Smoky Hill on the first afternoon, and the tall boy lying on the bunk below his with his hands behind his head and his boots on, looking up at the slats: could you say that again. Slower.

He said it again. Slower. He said it the way he said English, a word at a time, finding them, putting them down one over the join of the two below. De La Nouvelle-Orléans. Du lac. Mon père est pêcheur. And the General listened to it with his head a little on one side, the way Captain Pruett had listened in the cellar under the village, and Lucien could see him take each word, and turn it, and put it in its place.

“Vous êtes l’homme du poste d’écoute,” said the General.

You’re the man from the listening post.

“Oui, mon Général.”

“Le Casino.” The General said it carefully, with all its letters. “Les caves. Le béton. Six mètres.” He looked at Lucien. “C’est vous qui l’avez entendu?”

The cellars. The concrete. Six metres. It was you who heard it?

The field was very quiet. Lucien could feel Harlan beside him on one foot, not moving. He could feel the whole of the third rank of C Company not moving. He could feel the medal through the cloth over his heart.

“Oui, mon Général.”

“Vous en êtes sûr?”

You’re sure of it?

Lucien thought of Marius in the dark behind the French wall, laughing, with his hands; Lucien had heard his hands. Ils sentiraient rien. Ils dormiraient. He thought of Pépère’s cousin who slept dry in the concrete.

“Je suis sûr de ce qu’ils ont dit, mon Général,” he said. “Je sais pas si c’est vrai. Je sais qu’ils l’ont dit. Trois hommes. Trois nuits.”

I’m sure of what they said. I don’t know if it’s true. I know they said it. Three men. Three nights.

The General looked at him for a long time.

“Et de nous,” he said. “Qu’est-ce qu’ils disent de nous?”

And about us. What do they say about us?

Lucien did not answer.

He did not know whether to. He stood in the third rank with the General a yard in front of him and the frozen field all round him and nine hundred men not breathing, and he thought of Pépère, in his deep slow voice, at four in the morning, forty yards off across the water, saying it twice, a fortnight apart. Les nouveaux, ça attaque toujours. He thought of les pauvres gosses. He thought of asteur.

The General waited. He did not look impatient. He stood and waited, very straight, with his gloved hands behind his back again, the way he had stood by the motor car on the quay at Ostend in the rain without a waterproof, watching boots come down a gangway, for half an hour.

“Ils disent que les nouveaux attaquent toujours, mon Général,” said Lucien. “Pour se faire voir.”

They say new men always attack. To be seen.

He said it slowly. He said it in the General’s French, as near as he could, not his own; he did not know why. He said it so that there would be no doubt about any word of it.

The General did not move.

Nothing happened in his face. Lucien was looking at it, a yard away, as hard as he had ever looked at anything, harder than at the water over the drowned road in the dusk, and nothing happened in it at all. The small pale eyes stayed on his. The lines stayed where they were. The grey moustache did not move. It was the face of a closed door; it was the face he had seen in L’Abeille in March, held up on the wharf by old Tregre; it was the face on the bay horse. And then, for a moment, so short a moment that Lucien could not have said whether it had happened, the eyes went away from his, down, not to his boots, not to anything, to the frost on the field between them; and came back.

“Merci,” said the General.

He said it in French. Then he turned his head to Major Corliss, who was standing two paces behind him, and said, in English, in the flat dry voice, quite loud, so that the whole of C Company heard it:

“Every man in this battalion is to have a dry pair of socks twice a day, morning and night. I want it in writing by tonight. I want to know who is responsible for it, by name, in every company. And I want to know why it took a sergeant of the Guards and a woman on the quay at Ostend to see to it.”

“Yes, sir,” said Major Corliss.

The General looked at Harlan, on one foot.

“Put your boot on, son,” he said.

He went on along the third rank, looking at boots.

---

The cars went at noon. The battalion stood at attention on the frozen field and watched them go, along the lane by the poplars, the way C Company had watched the back of a grey man on a bay horse go away along the front of the division at Smoky Hill; and then the colonel said something, and the companies were turned and marched off the field by the ditch, into the lane, back towards the farms and the town, through the mud.

Captain Pruett did not get into a car.

He came across the field on foot, with his cane, slowly, through the frost, to C Company as it was turning, and said something to Lieutenant Whitcomb, and Lieutenant Whitcomb looked surprised and said something to Sergeant Cutter, and Sergeant Cutter said Prudhomme, without turning his head; and Lucien fell out of the third rank and went to him.

They stood at the edge of the field by the ditch. The battalion went past them into the lane.

“Private,” said Captain Pruett.

“Sir.”

Captain Pruett looked at him through his spectacles, which had frost on the edges.

“He reads them,” he said. “The reports. I didn’t know that until this morning. I send them up to division in envelopes and I assumed somebody at division read the first line of each and put them in a file. He reads them.” He looked at the frozen field, at the place where the General had stood in front of the third rank of C Company. “All of them. The cellars. What the farmer said about new men. The soup.” He was quiet for a moment. “He asked me in the car this morning whether the soup was true.”

Lucien did not know what to say.

“I said it was,” said Captain Pruett. “He asked me whether you were reliable. I said you were the most reliable thing on this coast, including the tide.” He looked at Lucien. “He asked me whether you made things up to please. I said you’d told me a farmer’s wife makes soup with a ham bone on Sundays, and that I couldn’t think of anything less likely to please anybody at division in the whole of the war.”

The last of the battalion was going past into the lane. Harlan was at the end of C Company, with his boot back on, looking back over his shoulder at Lucien by the ditch.

“Sir,” said Lucien. “Why does he want to know about the Casino?”

Captain Pruett did not answer.

He stood by the ditch with his cane and his frosted spectacles and looked at Lucien for a long time; and then he looked away, along the lane, at the battalion going back through the mud towards the farms, nine hundred men in ranks with the frost on their shoulders and their breath going up; and then he looked at the long low rise beyond the town, behind which, three miles off, there were the drowned fields, and the wall, and the French, and the dunes, and on the dunes a ruin with cellars under it.

“Go back to your company, Private,” he said. “Go on. Catch them up.”

Lucien went. He went along the lane through the mud after the end of C Company and caught Harlan up, and walked beside him, and they did not say anything for a long time.

“What’d he say?” said Harlan, at last. “The General. In French. What’d he ask you?”

Lucien told him.

All of it. The Casino. The cellars. Vous en êtes sûr. And qu’est-ce qu’ils disent de nous, and what he had said back. Harlan walked beside him through the mud with his rifle on his shoulder and his face turned to the lane in front of them and listened to the whole of it.

He did not say anything when it was finished. He walked.

They came to the gate of Hof Verhaeghe, with the board over it and the name in old paint, and Madame Verhaeghe was standing in the door of her kitchen with her arms folded, looking at them come in, at their boots, which were the colour of the lane.

“Lucky,” said Harlan, very quietly, at the gate.

“Yes.”

“Why’d he want to know that?”

Lucien looked at the old woman in the doorway of her kitchen. Then he looked back along the lane, at the long low rise beyond the town, grey in the noon light, with the frost on it; and behind it, three miles off, though you could not see them, the dunes.

“You know why,” he said.

Harlan stood at the gate for a moment longer.

“Yes,” he said. “I know why.”