The Casino

The wall came up out of the water onto the sand, and the sand was dry.

He felt it first through his boots. Six hundred yards they had gone along the back of the empty French wall, on the French boards, in file, with their bayonets, past the French shelters and the French braziers and a French dog, small, black and white, that sat in the door of a shelter shivering and watched them go past and did not bark; and the boards had been over water the whole way, as theirs were, and the water had been under the boards, as theirs was. And then the boards went up. A little. A slope. And the water under them was gone, and there was sand, grey, coarse, with grass in it bent flat; and the wall beside them was not mud in bags any more but sand in bags, and the ground under their boots was firm and dry and rose, and they were on the dunes.

Dry. The only dry ground on the whole of the coast. Sergeant Hodge had said so in the cemetery behind the dunes with the crosses in rows: the only place you could put a spade in and not hit water, besides the French cellars at the Casino.

The firing was very close now.

---

The Casino was a ruin of white.

He saw it from the top of the slope, through a gap in the French wall where a shell had taken the sandbags out: two hundred yards off, on the highest of the dunes, over the beach, where the line ended and the sea began. It had been white. It had been, Marius had said, a great white building on the dunes over the beach with a terrace and a ballroom and a restaurant with mirrors, for the summer people from Paris and Brussels. It was walls now. White walls, broken, standing up out of the sand at angles, with the sky through them, and columns, some standing and some lying in the sand like the trunks of trees, and a long terrace along the front of it with a stone balustrade, and the balustrade broken into pieces like teeth; and everywhere, in the sand round it and on the terrace, things glinting. Gilt. Broken glass. The frames of mirrors, lying in the sand, with nothing in them, and pieces of mirror round them catching the grey light.

Three days of guns had done that. Every gun in the division, and the corps guns, and the heavy guns the British had lent. They had knocked the white walls down to their knees and broken the columns and the terrace and thrown the mirrors out into the sand.

And from under it, from low down, from the foot of the walls, at the level of the sand, the machine guns were firing.

He could see the flashes. Small, yellow, quick, in the grey, at the foot of the white walls, in a row: four, five, six of them, from slots in concrete that he could see now, grey, under the white, where the sand had been blown off it; the loopholes of the cellars. They were firing out, seaward and inland of the ruin, down the slope of the dunes, onto the open sand in front of the Casino, where the beach went down to the water and the wire on its stakes went down into the sea.

And on the open sand, in front of the Casino, there was the second battalion of the Second Kansas.

Lying down. All of it. As far as he could see along the beach, in the grey light, on the open sand, in lines, the way the waves had gone forward: lying down. Some of them were firing. Most were not. Most of them were lying very still on the sand in their lines with their rifles beside them, the way the stumps of the hedges stood in their rows in the drowned fields; and the machine guns at the foot of the white walls went along them, and along them, and the sand jumped.

Et puis on montera les escaliers.

They had come up the stairs.

---

“Down,” said Sergeant Cutter. “Down. Behind the wall.”

They lay behind the French wall in the sand at the top of the slope. Nineteen of them. Twenty, with Ed Haskell, who had come, who had got up from the back wall when Sergeant Cutter went along the boards and come after them without a word, last, with his rifle, and lay now at the end of the line with his eyes open, looking at the sand.

Sergeant Cutter lay at the gap and looked at the Casino for a long time.

He did not say anything for so long that Lucien thought he was not going to. The machine guns went on, at the foot of the white walls, along the beach. The barrage had gone, a long way off now, behind the dunes, inland, walking on into ground where nobody was. The Eye could see all of this. Lucien thought of that suddenly, lying in the sand. The Eye, a long way off inland on its long low swell of ground, with the glint on the stump of the tower: it could see the beach, and the second battalion on it, and the French wall, and the gap, and them.

“There,” said Sergeant Cutter.

He pointed with his chin. Not at the front of the Casino, where the terrace was and the loopholes and the beach. At the side of it. The side towards them, the inland side, where the French wall came up the slope of the dunes and ran into the ruin, into the foot of the white walls; and where, in the angle between the wall and the ruin, there was a doorway. A black one. Low, in the concrete, under a broken arch of white stone, with sandbags round it, and steps going down.

The back door. The stairs.

“The order,” said Sergeant Cutter, “is to take it from the flank.” He looked at the doorway. “That’s the flank.”

---

They went along the back of the French wall, the last two hundred yards, up the slope of the dunes, in the sand, bent double, in file, with Sergeant Cutter in front.

Not Lucien. There was no water. There was nothing to see that Sergeant Cutter could not see. Lucien went third, behind Harlan, who had gone up the file past him at the top of the slope without a word and put himself second, behind the sergeant, with his rifle; and behind Lucien, Sol Weintraub, with blood on his face that was not his, and the cowboy from Montana, Gallagher, without his hat, and the rest.

Nobody saw them. The French were at the loopholes at the front, firing at the beach. The wall hid them from the beach and the ruin hid them from the loopholes; and they came up the last of the slope in the sand behind the French wall to the angle where it met the white walls of the Casino, and the doorway, and lay down in the sand on either side of it.

Steps. Concrete. Going down, steep, into the dark, and turning, a little way down, so that you could not see the bottom. There was a smell coming up them. Not the line’s smell. Cooking. Coffee, le jus, and tobacco, and men; and lamp oil; and under all of it the cold wet smell of concrete in sand, of a cellar, of the trap in the floor of the kitchen at home over the lake.

And voices.

Coming up the stairs from below. A lot of them. Shouting. French. Not words he could get, at first: the noise of men in a cellar under a ruin with machine guns going over their heads, shouting at each other, all at once.

Sergeant Cutter took a bomb off his belt.

He did it the way Sergeant Hodge cleaned a rifle, without any fuss, slowly, as if he had done it a thousand times, which perhaps he had, at Jolo; he pulled the pin and held the lever down and looked at it, a moment; and then he leaned round the side of the doorway and threw it down the stairs, underarm, the way you would throw a ball to a child, so that it went down the steps and round the turn and out of sight.

Then he lay flat.

The stairs went up. A noise, and a flash, and a great push of air and dust and smoke coming up out of the doorway like the breath out of a kiln, and the white arch over it shaking; and under it, after it, from below, screaming.

Sergeant Cutter threw another one.

---

They came back up the stairs.

Lucien did not see it start. He was lying in the sand on the far side of the doorway from Sergeant Cutter with his rifle, and the smoke was coming up the stairs, and Sergeant Cutter had a third bomb in his hand; and out of the smoke, up the stairs, something came, small, black, turning over, the way a stone turns over when a boy throws it on the lake to make it skip; and it landed in the sand at the top of the steps, between Sergeant Cutter and Gallagher, the cowboy from Montana, and lay there.

Gallagher looked at it.

He had time to look at it. Lucien saw him. He lay in the sand two yards off with his rifle and looked at the black thing in the sand, very calmly, with his face that had said I’ve seen more trees today than in my whole life and I don’t care for one of them, the way he would have looked at a snake on a trail in Montana; and he reached out his hand towards it.

Then it went.

When Lucien could see again Gallagher was lying on his back in the sand at the top of the stairs with his arms out and no face, and Sergeant Cutter was sitting up against the white wall beside the doorway with both his hands pressed to his side, low down, above the hip, and blood coming out between his fingers, a lot of it, very red on the white, and his campaign hat gone.

He looked at his hands. Then at Lucien. His face did not do anything at all.

“Bombs,” said Sergeant Cutter. “Down the stairs. Keep them in. Weintraub. Lindgren. Go on.”

---

They kept them in. For a while.

Sol Weintraub and Harlan and two men Lucien did not know the names of, from the second section, lay at the top of the stairs on either side and threw bombs down them, one after another, all they had, and the stairs went up and up and up, smoke and dust and the white arch shaking, and the screaming below; and every so often something came back up out of the smoke, turning over, and they threw themselves flat in the sand and it went off, and once it hit Sol Weintraub in the arm, not the bomb, a piece of it, and he sat in the sand and looked at his arm and said oh, very politely, as if somebody had trodden on his foot in a streetcar, and went on throwing with the other one.

Lucien did not throw. He had been told to watch the wall.

Sergeant Cutter had said it, sitting against the white wall with his hands pressed to his side. Prudhomme. The wall. The broken bit. Watch it. There was a place, a little way along the side of the ruin, beyond the doorway, towards the sea, where the white wall of the Casino had been knocked down to the height of a man’s waist, and beyond it there was a corner, where the white wall turned, and you could not see round it; and there was a second stair there, Sergeant Cutter thought, a second way up out of the concrete. If they come, they’ll come round that corner. Watch it. Shoot what comes round it.

So Lucien lay in the sand behind a broken column with his rifle, the rifle he had been taught to fire on the prairie by a farm boy with his hand flat on the back of his neck, and watched the corner.

---

He heard Marius first.

From below. From under the sand, through the concrete, up the second stair he could not see, beyond the corner: a voice. Shouting. Not words, at first. Then words. And the voice went up at the end of every word, a little e on the end of everything, singing, very fast, the vowels wide open, the voice that had talked for an hour in the dark about the pointus and the sardines and the mistral, and his mother’s soup on the harbour with bread at the bottom of the bowl, and thirteen desserts.

Montez! Montez-eu! Allez, les gars, par l’autre escalier! Par le coin!

Come up! Come up! Go on, lads, by the other stair! By the corner!

Lucien lay behind the column and heard it and could not breathe.

Nous autres, les pêcheurs, Marius had said.

He held the rifle. He put his eye down to it, along the barrel, the way Harlan had shown him, at the corner of the white wall, three yards off, four, where it turned; and he did not look at the end of the barrel. He looked at the corner. The barrel’ll look after itself. He breathed out.

Boots on concrete. Coming up. Close. Beyond the corner.

Somebody came round it.

---

He was a man of forty or more, heavy, slow, in a blue coat gone grey with mud and sand, with a helmet and a rifle and a moustache, grey, like a farmer’s; a big man, broad, the way a man is broad who has lifted things all his life. He came round the corner of the white wall three yards from Lucien, bent, fast for a heavy man, with his rifle across his body; and he saw Lucien behind the broken column, and stopped.

They looked at each other.

Three yards. Less. Lucien had the rifle on him. He had it on the middle of him, on the blue coat, over the heart, the way Harlan had taught him on the prairie; and his finger was on the trigger, and he had taken up the first pressure, and all he had to do was squeeze, don’t pull, squeeze, and he had breathed out.

The man in the blue coat had his rifle across his body. Not on Lucien. He had not had time.

He looked at Lucien. At the American behind the column, with the rifle, three yards off. His face was broad and brown and lined, and his eyes were small and grey, and they went wide, a little, the way the face of the Belgian woman on the quay had gone wide, as if a thing he had been sure of had moved.

“Bon Dieu,” he said.

Very low. Under his breath. The way you say it when the boat goes aground.

And it was the voice.

The deep slow voice, further back in the mouth, with the words a little further apart; the voice that had said la soupe on the first night like a fish coming up into the light; that had talked about the cows one by one by name, and which was bad-tempered and which gave the best milk; that had said ma Marthe, always, never anything else; that had said les pauvres gosses, twice, a fortnight apart, and asteur, once, and c’est pas le cochon qui m’inquiète.

Lucien knew it the way he knew his father’s step on the gallery.

He did not squeeze.

He lay behind the column with the rifle on the blue coat and his finger on the trigger and the first pressure taken, and he did not squeeze; and he knew that he was not going to, and that he could not, and that Achille had been right in the gap of the dunes, quand tu les écoutes trop, après, tu peux plus, and that he had known it all along, since the first night, since la soupe.

“Pépère,” he said.

---

The man in the blue coat did not move.

He stood at the corner of the white wall of the Casino with his rifle across his body and looked at the American behind the column who had said it. Who had said, in French, his name. Not his name; the Parigot’s name for him, the wall’s name, Pépère, which nobody on the other side of the water could have known. Which nobody in the whole of the American army could have known. He stood with his small grey eyes on Lucien’s face and his mouth a little open under the grey moustache, very still, the way old Tregre had stood on the wharf with his spectacles in his hand.

“Qui…” he said.

Lucien did not let him finish.

“Va-t’en,” he said. Go. Low, fast, in his own French, the lake shore’s, the French of the kitchen and the lake and the children and the dead. “Va-t’en, Pépère. Redescends. Va voir ta Marthe. Va tuer ton cochon.”

Go on, Pépère. Go back down. Go and see your Marthe. Go and kill your pig.

The man in the blue coat stared at him.

His face did a thing then that Lucien did not see the whole of. It was a farmer’s face, broad and brown and slow, and Lucien watched it do something slow: understand. Not all of it. Not how; he could see that it did not understand how. But that it was being let go, by a voice behind a broken column on the sand, an American, a cowboy; and that it had been heard. All of it. The cows and the pig and ma Marthe. For five weeks. In the dark.

He took a step back. Round the corner. He did not take his eyes off Lucien’s face. He did not lift his rifle.

“Nom de Dieu,” he said, very softly. “Nom de Dieu. Qui t’es, toi?”

Who are you?

Lucien did not answer. He could not have answered. There was no answer in any of his languages; there was only the lake shore’s word, the one Marius had said in the dark, the one L’Abeille had put at the top of its editorial and the widow Fontenot had said at the top of her steps and Madame Lemaire’s grandmother had said in the Borinage.

“Nous-autres,” he said.

The man in the blue coat looked at him for one more moment. Then he was gone. Back round the corner of the white wall, and down; Lucien heard his boots on the concrete, going down, heavy, slow, the second stair, into the dark, under the sand.

---

“Lucky.”

Harlan was behind him. Lying in the sand behind the broken column, with his rifle, on his belly, a yard back. Lucien did not know how long he had been there. He had not heard him come.

“Lucky,” said Harlan again, very low. “Somebody came round that corner.”

“Yes.”

“I saw him. I had him.” Harlan’s voice was quite steady. “I had him the whole time. Over your shoulder. I had the middle of him.” He was quiet for a moment. “You were talking to him.”

Lucien did not say anything.

“I didn’t shoot,” said Harlan. “Because you were talking to him.” He lay in the sand. “Who was he?”

Lucien lay behind the column with his rifle still on the corner of the white wall where the man in the blue coat had been, with his finger still on the trigger, and the first pressure still taken, and could not let it go. He could not make his finger let go. He lay and looked at the corner, and the sand, and the gilt frame of a mirror lying in it with nothing in the frame and a piece of glass beside it catching the grey light.

“Nobody,” he said. “A farmer.”

Harlan did not say anything for a long time.

Then he reached out, past the column, and put his big hand over Lucien’s hand on the rifle, over the trigger guard, over the finger; and held it, the way he had held Lucien’s wrists in the gas hut in Kansas, not hard, firmly, the way you hold a man’s hands who is going to do something to himself he will regret, or has done it, or has not.

“Breathe out,” said Harlan.

He breathed out. His finger let go.

---

The guns of the Eye came onto the French wall at eleven.

They had been firing at the beach. At the second battalion of the Second Kansas, on the open sand in front of the Casino in its lines; Lucien had heard them start, at half past nine, a long way off inland, and the shells coming over high up and landing on the beach, one after another, steadily, the way the Morning Hymn landed on the wall every morning at nine. And at eleven they moved. Lucien heard them move. The shells stopped landing on the beach and began to land on the French wall. On their own wall. On the six hundred yards of it, from the pump house to the dunes, that C Company of the Second Kansas had walked into at eight in the morning and found empty, and that the French had left, at three in the morning, with the clink of things, knowing; and the shells went into it, one after another, from the Eye, on the boards and the shelters and the braziers and the soup can and the letter under its stone, ma Lulu chérie, and the small black and white dog shivering in a doorway.

They could not go back. Not by day. Sergeant Cutter said so, sitting against the white wall of the Casino with his hands pressed to his side and his face grey now, very grey, the colour of the sand. Four hundred yards of open water and six hundred yards of French wall between them and their own line, under the Eye, in daylight, with the gun at the elbow still firing along the water at anything that moved; they would not get ten yards.

So they stayed.

In the angle where the French wall ran into the white walls of the Casino, by the doorway and the stairs. They pulled sandbags off the French wall and built them up across the top of the stairs, a wall across a doorway, to keep the French in; and the French did not come up again, by that stair or the other. Lucien did not know why. He thought he knew. He thought of a farmer from the Berry going down the second stair into the dark under the sand, slowly, heavy, and saying something, at the bottom, to Marius, or to the officer, or to nobody; and of the cellar under the ruin of a white building on the dunes going quiet, round him, while he said it.

He did not know. He lay in the sand with his rifle on the corner and watched it.

The second battalion lay on the beach.

All day. In its lines. Some of it crawled back, in the afternoon, Lucien saw them, on their bellies on the open sand, very slowly, towards the wire on its stakes and the dunes on their own side; and the machine guns at the loopholes at the front of the Casino saw them too. Most of it did not crawl back. Most of it lay where it had lain down at eight in the morning, in its lines, in the grey, on the open sand in front of a white ruin with mirrors in it, very still, while the tide came in.

He watched the tide come in.

He could not help it. It was the only thing on the whole of the coast that was doing what it always did. It came up the beach in the afternoon, grey, slowly, a long low wave and then another, the way the lake came up on the shell beach at the end of the camps when the wind was in the south; and it came up among the lines of the second battalion lying on the sand, and round them, and over the ones nearest the water; and went on coming.

It did not look back. Achille had said that. It did not look at anything.

Beside him, behind the column, Harlan lay with his rifle and watched the corner of the white wall, all afternoon, and did not say anything at all.

Sergeant Cutter, against the white wall with his hands pressed to his side, said, at three in the afternoon, to nobody, in his dry flat voice, very quietly:

“Dusk.”

That was all. Then he shut his eyes.