Rehearsal

The French wall was a white tape pegged across a meadow, and the water was real.

The meadow was a mile behind the town, beyond the farms, out of sight of everything, in a hollow where the ditches had overflowed in the autumn and never gone down; low, flat, grey, with the water standing on it a foot deep, two feet in places, and the rushes coming up through it, and a row of pollard willows along one side like old men with their hair on end. The engineers had come on the Saturday and pegged tapes across it. A white tape, a long way off, four hundred yards, crooked, the shape of the French wall opposite the pump house, exactly, from the aeroplane photographs. A cluster of pegs and tape in the middle of the water for the pump house. And at the far end, to one side, on the only bit of rising ground, a square of tape on stakes, with a board stuck in the mud beside it, painted. CASINO.

C Company stood at the near end of the meadow on the Sunday morning, in full kit, in the rain, and looked at it.

“Well,” said Kerrigan. “At least it’s not Kansas.”

---

They walked into the water behind Lieutenant Whitcomb.

That was the rehearsal. He stood at the front of the company at the edge of the meadow with a whistle on a cord round his neck, and in front of him, at the edge of the water, there was a line of men from battalion headquarters with flags. Red ones, on poles. They were the barrage. When the lieutenant blew the whistle the men with the flags walked forward into the water, slowly, in a line, holding the flags up, a hundred yards in four minutes, timed by a major with a watch who walked behind them; and C Company went after them, in lines, two waves, at a walk, as close behind the flags as it could get, with its rifles and its bridges.

The bridges were duckboards, ten feet long, with floats nailed under them, empty petrol tins, four to a board, and two men to carry each one. Harlan carried one with Lucien. They carried it on their shoulders into the water behind the red flags, and where the lieutenant shouted deep, they put it down, on the water, and it floated, and the next wave walked across it on the planks with their rifles held up, and the bridge went down under them into the water to the tops of the tins and stayed there, just, with the water coming over the planks.

On the third time across, it sank.

It went down all at once, under the cowboy from Montana and Sol Weintraub, with a gurgle from the tins, and the two of them went into the meadow water to the chest, in full kit, and stood there, in the rushes, with their rifles over their heads; and the men with the red flags went on walking, a hundred yards in four minutes, and the major with the watch went on walking behind them, and nobody stopped.

“Keep up,” shouted Lieutenant Whitcomb, from the front. “Keep up with the barrage. Keep up.”

They did not keep up. They could not. Nobody could. The men with the red flags walked on dry tins of their own across the meadow, steadily, on the line the engineers had marked for them where the bottom was firm, and C Company came after them through the water to the knees and the thighs and the waist, in full kit, with the bridges, falling, getting up, falling; and by the time the flags got to the white tape at the far end, four hundred yards, the first wave of C Company was two hundred yards behind them, in the middle of the meadow, in the water, in the rain, strung out over a quarter of a mile with nothing in front of it at all.

The major with the watch looked at it from the tape. He wrote something in a notebook.

“Again,” shouted Lieutenant Whitcomb.

---

They did it nine times on the Sunday and eleven on the Monday.

Every time, the flags got to the tape and C Company did not. Every time, Lieutenant Whitcomb blew the whistle and walked into the water at the front of the company, very straight, with his pistol in his hand, and shouted keep up over his shoulder, and every time C Company fell behind the flags in the middle of the meadow and the lieutenant got to the tape with the first few men and stood there, alone, at the white tape, with his pistol, waiting for the rest.

Lucien watched Sergeant Cutter.

He could not help it. Sergeant Cutter walked at the lieutenant’s elbow. Every time. A yard behind him, a little to one side, through the water, with his rifle and his campaign hat, the way he had stood behind him on the fire step by the second traverse and on the frozen field in front of the General; and every time they got to the tape, the two of them, with the rest of the company strung out behind them in the meadow, Sergeant Cutter turned round, at the tape, and looked back at it.

At all of it. The quarter of a mile of grey water with C Company in it, falling and getting up. The bridges sinking. The rain. And behind it all, a long way back, at the start, the major with the watch writing in his notebook.

His face did not do anything. It had not done anything in six months except once, on the parade ground at Smoky Hill, under the flat brim, when a grey man on a bay horse said Jolo. It did not do anything now. But Lucien, coming up to the tape behind him with the bridge on his shoulder and the water running out of his sleeves, saw it, Sergeant Cutter’s face looking back over the meadow, and thought of the Guardsmen at the elbow of the line at Klaverdijk in the grey light, sitting with their backs to the sandbags and their hands between their knees, looking at nothing.

It was the same face.

---

The guns began on the Monday at six in the morning.

Lucien was awake. He was always awake at four; he was lying in the straw of the barn at Hof Verhaeghe with his eyes open in the dark and Harlan breathing long and slow beside him, awake too, the way he had been every night since the barn door. And at six, three miles off beyond the rise, the whole world went up.

It was not a sound. It was not like the Morning Hymn or the gros noirs or the trains going over on a bridge in the dark. It was not like anything. It came in through the walls of the barn and the straw and the ground under the straw, all at once, everywhere, a single enormous thing that did not start and did not stop; and the barn shook. The tiles on the roof rattled. The cows on the other side of the partition began to bellow. The straw under Lucien moved, by itself, in little shivers, the way the water of the lake shivered on a still morning when a steamer went by a mile off.

The whole of the third platoon was sitting up in the straw in the dark. Nobody said anything.

It went on. All morning. All day. At noon Lucien went into Madame Verhaeghe’s kitchen to fetch the water she had boiled for them, and the cups on her dresser, the good ones, blue and white, on their hooks, were moving. Swinging, very slightly, on their hooks, all together, in little arcs, touching, so that the whole dresser rang with them, a thin high continuous sound, like a bell a long way off; and Madame Verhaeghe was standing in front of the dresser with her arms folded, looking at them.

She did not turn round when he came in.

“Ça a commencé,” she said. It’s begun.

“Oui, madame.”

“Trois jours?”

“Trois jours.”

She looked at the cups swinging on their hooks.

“En quatorze,” she said, “c’était trois jours aussi. Avant que les Français arrivent. Les cloches de l’église ont sonné toutes seules. Personne les touchait. Elles sonnaient, comme ça, avec les canons, toute la nuit.”

In fourteen it was three days too. Before the French came. The church bells rang by themselves. Nobody was touching them. They rang, like that, with the guns, all night.

She put her hand out and stopped the nearest cup with her finger. It stopped. The others went on.

---

He thought about the cellars.

He could not stop. He lay in the straw on the Monday night with the barn shaking and the tiles rattling and thought about them: twenty feet down, under the sand of the dunes, under the ruin of a white building with a terrace and a ballroom and a restaurant with mirrors. Concrete. Bunks. A whole company. Marius’s cousin, or somebody’s. Pépère’s cousin, who slept dry. And over them, now, at this minute, every gun in the division and the corps guns and the heavy guns the British had lent, three miles off, putting shells into the sand over their heads, one after another, all night, and the sand jumping, and the concrete ringing like Madame Verhaeghe’s dresser.

He thought: they will be lying in the bunks. They will be lying in the bunks with their hands over their ears, the way we lay in the shelter behind the traverse when the Morning Hymn came. And it will go on for three days. And they will lie there.

Ils dormiraient, Marius had said, laughing. They’d sleep through it.

He did not think they would sleep. He thought of the Parigot, who had the cockroach. He thought of Pépère, lying in a bunk in the concrete with his hands over his ears, thinking about his forty cows and ma Marthe and the soup with the bone from the week; and he did not know whether he was thinking of him as a man he was going to have to kill on Thursday morning or as a man who was being shelled, now, tonight, by his own side’s guns, three miles off, for three days, and he found that he could not tell the difference, and that frightened him more than anything since the gas hut.

Quand tu les écoutes trop, Achille had said, in the gap of the dunes. Après, tu peux plus.

He lay in the straw and listened to the guns.

---

He told Sergeant Cutter about the road on the Tuesday afternoon.

He had decided in the night. He had lain awake and thought about Sergeant Hodge by the board over the hole with his pack on, you keep that to yourself, son, you don’t draw it on any map for anybody that’ll send other men down it in the daylight; and he had thought about Lieutenant Whitcomb at the barn door with the chalk, saying there’s a road under it, part of the way, on the old maps. It was on the old maps. Somebody had found it. They were going down it anyway, in the daylight, on Thursday, all of them. And the old maps did not show where it went crooked, or where it was a yard wide and where it was two, or where it dropped away on either side to four feet. The old maps had been drawn when it was a road.

He found Sergeant Cutter in the yard, by the gate, after the eleventh time across the meadow, standing with his back to the board with the name on it, looking at the lane.

“Sergeant,” he said. “The road. Under the water. To the pump house.”

Sergeant Cutter looked at him.

“It’s not where the map says it is,” said Lucien. “Not all of it. It goes crooked, about a hundred yards out, where there was a bridge over a drain once, I think, and the bridge is gone, and the road goes round. And past the pump house there’s more of it, a little, the old cart track, forty yards to their wall. Not straight. It goes along their wall, a bit, before it gets there.” He stopped. “I can see it. In the water. The colour. Sergeant Hodge saw me find it. He went out and put his hand in.”

Sergeant Cutter did not say anything for a long time.

“Show me,” he said.

Lucien looked round the yard. There was nothing. No paper. He did not want paper. He bent down and picked up a stick from the woodpile by the barn wall, and crouched, and drew it in the mud of the farmyard, by the gate, where the frost had gone and the mud was soft: their wall, a line. The French wall, another. The pump house, a square. And the road, from the gap in their wire to the pump house, crooked, with the bend round where the bridge had been, a yard wide, two; and from the pump house on, along the old cart track, the forty yards, not straight.

Sergeant Cutter crouched beside him and looked at it.

He looked at it for a long time, in the mud, with his small pale eyes. He put his finger out, once, and traced the bend, slowly, the way the General had touched Harlan’s sock.

“How deep?”

“On the road, the knees, Sergeant. The thighs, some places. Off it, the waist. The chest. Further off, I don’t know. Over your head, in the drains.” Lucien looked at the line in the mud. “If you’re on it you can walk. If you’re off it you can’t.”

Sergeant Cutter looked at it a moment longer. Then he took the stick out of Lucien’s hand, and rubbed the whole thing out, the road and the pump house and both walls, with the side of his boot, slowly, until there was nothing in the mud of the farmyard but the mud.

He stood up.

“On Thursday,” he said, “you go first.”

Lucien stood up too.

“Sergeant?”

“You go first. In front of the platoon. Before the lieutenant. You find it, and you walk on it, and the platoon walks behind you, single file, on it, where you walk. Never mind the waves. Never mind the barrage. Never mind keep up.” He looked at the place in the mud where the road had been. “And Lindgren goes behind you. With his rifle. And I go behind Lindgren. And the lieutenant…” He stopped.

“Sergeant?”

Sergeant Cutter did not finish it. He looked along the lane, the way he had been looking when Lucien came up, towards the town and the rise and the guns beyond it, which had not stopped for thirty-four hours and did not stop now.

“I’ll tell the lieutenant,” he said. “I’ll tell him it’s my idea. Which it is, now.” He looked at Lucien. “You don’t tell anybody. You hear me? Not Kerrigan. Not Weintraub. Nobody. You go first on Thursday and the platoon follows you, and that’s all anybody needs to know about it until they’re on it.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Cutter looked at him for a moment longer, with his face under the flat brim not doing anything.

“Hodge said you could see it,” he said. “On the last night. By the hole. He said, your Frenchman can see where the water’s shallow, Cutter, I never saw anything like it, I’ve been on water all my life.” He was quiet. “He said, don’t waste him.”

He turned and went across the yard to the farmhouse.

---

Lieutenant Whitcomb came to the barn that night.

He had never come to the barn. Officers did not. He came at nine, with the guns going and the tiles rattling and the cows bellowing on the other side of the partition, and stood in the great door at the end with a lantern, and looked at the third platoon in the straw. Thirty men. There had been thirty-three in hut forty-one in Kansas, and August Brandt had gone to his liaison course, and Walt Haskell was in the sand behind the dunes, and the coal miner from the mountains had gone back with his feet in the first week with the Guards, before anybody knew about the socks.

He did not say anything for a while. He stood in the door with the lantern and looked at them.

Then he came in, and walked along the straw, between them, slowly, with the lantern. He did not look at feet. He looked at faces. Each one. The cowboy from Montana. Sol Weintraub with his spectacles. Kerrigan, lying on his back with his hands behind his head pretending to be asleep. Ed Haskell, sitting up, against the wall, with his knees drawn up, looking at nothing. Harlan. Lucien.

He stopped at Lucien.

“Sergeant Cutter’s told me,” he said. Very quietly. “About Thursday. That you’ll go first.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lieutenant Whitcomb looked at him for a long time, in the lantern light, with the barn shaking. His face was not shining. It had not shone since the barn door, since the heavy guns will deal with them; it looked thinner, and younger, and very tired, the face of a boy of twenty-four from a college in Ohio with a football team, who had shot ducks on Lake Erie every autumn since he was twelve.

“He says you can see where the bottom is,” he said. “In the water.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How?”

Lucien thought about it. He had never been asked. He had never asked himself.

“I don’t know, sir,” he said. “My father taught me. In the boat. From when I was seven. He never told me how. He’d just steer round the bars in the dark, and I’d look where he wasn’t going, and after a while I could see why.” He stopped. “It’s the colour. And the way it moves. And something else, I don’t know what. It’s like knowing what a man is going to say before he says it.”

Lieutenant Whitcomb looked at him.

“Like listening,” he said.

“Yes, sir. Like that.”

The lieutenant nodded slowly. He stood in the straw with the lantern a moment longer. Then he said a thing Lucien did not expect, in a voice Lucien had not heard him use, the voice, nearly, of a man asking a question in church.

“Prudhomme,” he said. “The cellars. In the Casino. You think they’ll still be in them. On Thursday. When the barrage lifts.”

The barn was very quiet, under the guns. Kerrigan, on his back, had opened his eyes.

Lucien did not answer at once. He thought of Sergeant Cutter in the yard at dusk, by the pump: you told the men in that barn the cellars’ll be full. And now they know. And they’ve got five days to think about it.

“I don’t know, sir,” he said. “I know what they said.”

Lieutenant Whitcomb looked at him a moment longer.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. So do I.”

He went out of the barn with the lantern, and the great door swung to behind him, and the third platoon lay in the straw in the dark with the guns going and the tiles rattling and the cows bellowing on the other side of the partition, and nobody said anything at all for a long time.

“Well,” said Kerrigan, at last, to the roof. “He’s not stupid. I’ll give him that. I’d rather he was.”