Nous-Autres

The new boys looked at the water.

They had come up on the Saturday night with the battalion, from the draft, from the base at Ostend where the ships came in; a hundred and forty of them, to fill the gaps, in new boots and new tunics with their packs on, and they had come down the duckboards in the dark holding the man in front by the back of his pack and into the wall at the left end of the section’s forty yards by the board over the hole, and on the Sunday morning at stand-to they stood on the fire step in the grey and looked out over the top at the drowned fields.

Lucien watched them do it. He could not help it. They looked at the water the way he had looked at it on the first morning with the Guards, eight weeks ago, nine: at the wire in it, and the stumps of the hedges in their rows, and the old dead horse with its ribs up, and the French wall a quarter of a mile off, black, broken, built up again in the nights since with new bags; and they did not see anything. They did not see the road. They did not see the places where it was dark and the places where it was lighter. They saw water.

One of them, a boy from Indiana with a round face and a cold, stood beside Lucien on the fire step on the Monday morning and looked at it for a long time.

“Is that where you went?” he said. “On the thirteenth?”

“Yes.”

The boy looked at it.

“It doesn’t look like much,” he said.

“No,” said Lucien.

---

His grandmother’s letter came at noon.

It came up with the rations and the mail at dawn, the mail from home, three weeks of it, all at once, in sacks; the first since the brewery. And it was not the answer to his letter from the box inside the great door of the barn, tomorrow we go on the water. That letter could not have reached the lake shore yet. It was a letter she had written on the first of December, before; a letter from before, in her small upright Ursuline hand, from a lake shore that did not know yet that there had been a thirteenth.

He read it on the fire step, sitting, with his back to the wall and Harlan beside him.

It was about Christmas. The Robichaux girl’s wedding was still to be on the twenty-seventh and the boy from Mandeville’s mother had sent a cake. Old Bazile had come back to his bench by the ice house. Ti-Paul was making a crèche for the church on Esplanade out of cypress and the shells from the beach, and the Holy Family had shrimp-boat sails for a roof. The men of the lake shore were building the bonfire on the levee for Christmas Eve, the way they did every year, the feu de joie, so that Papa Noël could find his way up the river in the dark, and this year old Tregre had said it was to be the biggest there had ever been, so that it could be seen from Belgium.

And at the bottom, under her name, the line.

Ton père dit que le bateau t’espère.

Lucien read it, and sat with the blue paper on his knee, and did not move.

“What’s it say?” said Harlan, after a while. He always knew. “The line at the bottom.”

Lucien did not answer for a long time.

“It says the boat is waiting for me,” he said.

“Huh.” Harlan looked at the blue paper. “That’s good.”

“It says more than that.” Lucien looked at the word. Espère. In his grandmother’s hand, with the tail on the p going below the line. “There’s a word. Espérer. In the French they speak over there,” he moved his head, a very little, at the French wall a quarter of a mile off across the water, “in the school French, it means to hope. Only to hope. J’espère. I hope.” He looked at it. “At home it means to wait. Espère-moi. Wait for me. My father says it to the boat when he goes up the steps for something he’s forgotten. Espère, ma belle.” He stopped. “It means both. At home. It means both at once. The same word. You can’t wait for something without hoping, and you can’t hope for something without waiting, so it’s the same word.”

Harlan was quiet.

“So the boat’s waiting for you,” he said slowly. “And it’s hoping.”

“Yes.”

“In one word.”

“Yes.”

Harlan thought about it for a long while, on the fire step, with his long legs out across the boards.

“That’s a lot for one word,” he said.

“It’s French,” said Lucien.

“I guess,” said Harlan. And then, after a while: “It’s a good word.”

---

The note from the First Louisiane came at four, with a runner.

A boy of eighteen from Thibodaux with a pelican on his badge, who came along the boards at dusk asking in French and English for Prudhomme, le petit à Octave, and looked at Lucien when he found him with enormous solemn eyes, and called him Monsieur; and gave him a piece of paper, folded small, torn from a notebook.

Four words. In pencil, in the small hard hand that went straight across the page.

Écoute-les pour moi.

A.

Listen to them for me.

He folded it and put it in the pocket of his tunic, the left one, over his heart, with the others. His grandmother’s letters and his father’s word in capitals and Achille’s letter from Kansas and Madame Verhaeghe’s son’s medal. The pocket would button again now. He had taken things out of it, in the days since the brewery, and written them down, some of them, and not others, on the last of the blue paper; and put the rest back.

---

Captain Pruett was on the boards by the second traverse, at stand-to, with his cane.

“It’s Christmas Eve, Private,” he said, when Lucien asked. “Nobody over there is going to say anything useful tonight. Not one word. They’re going to talk about their mothers.” He looked at Lucien over his spectacles. “You know that.”

“Yes, sir.”

Captain Pruett looked at him a long time.

“I sent the dictionary home,” he said. “The notebook. The words. Le jus and le pinard and le cafard and all the rest. A man at division wanted it for the file. I said it was mine, and sent it to my wife in Philadelphia, and told her to put it in the drawer with the silver.” He looked at the French wall in the dusk. “I don’t know why.”

Lucien did not say anything.

“Go on,” said Captain Pruett. “Go and listen to them talk about their mothers. Take Lindgren.”

---

It was clear.

The first clear night since Ostend. The rain had stopped in the afternoon and the wind had gone round to the north and dropped, and the cloud had gone off the sky over the drowned fields as the light went, all at once, the way it went off the lake on a winter evening after a norther; and when they went over the wall at the left end by the board over the hole, at six, there were stars. All of them. The whole sky. More stars than he had seen since the lake, since the step of the camp at the end of the wharf with the frogs going in the reeds; so many that the drowned fields under them were not black, but grey, a grey glitter, with the stars in them, upside down.

And frost. On the water at the edges, at the foot of the wall, a skin of ice that broke under their elbows like the ice on the planks of the wharf at home on a January morning. On the stumps of the hedges. On the wire, every strand of it, white, so that the rows of wire stood up out of the water in the starlight like the rows of a vineyard after a snow.

The flares went up from the French wall, now and then, and hung, and came down, and the frost burned white in them, and went out.

He found the road. He did not need to look.

It took an hour. It always took an hour. On their bellies, three hundred yards, with the water over their backs, colder than it had ever been, so cold it was not cold but something else, a kind of burning; and Harlan’s hand on his ankle; and the cord in the water beside them going back to the bell. Past the bend where the bridge over the drain had been. Past the place, twenty feet off the road on the inland side, where Kerrigan had stood in the wire; there was nothing there now, the First Louisiane had gone out on the second night and brought him in, Lucien had been told, and he was in the hollow behind the dunes, in the new row by the gate, near Walt Haskell. Past it. To the pump house, two walls and half a third, with frost on the slipped tiles of the half roof, and up onto the platform of sandbags on the rusted engine, and down, on his side, with his weight on his hip, and his ear to the hole in the brick.

The French wall was forty yards off.

It was not quiet.

---

They were talking.

All along it. More voices than he had ever heard from it, low, ordinary, behind the wall in the dark, the way men talk who have been given something; and he could smell, across forty yards of frozen water, coming through the hole in the brick, something that was not the line. Wine. And oranges. Somebody behind the French wall was eating an orange, and the smell of it came across the water in the frost, so sharp and so sweet that Lucien lay on the sandbags with his eyes shut and was, for a moment, at the French Market at home on the levee in the week before Christmas, with his mother, who had died in the yellow fever, holding his hand.

The Parigot was there.

He heard him at once. The quick voice, from the front of the mouth, with the ends swallowed; and it was happy. He had never heard it happy. He had heard it angry and funny and sad and frightened, and now it was happy, and he was telling the whole wall about it, loudly, over and over, so that the others told him to shut up and he did not. Lulu had written. At last. A letter, that had come with the Christmas post, two months late; she had been ill, she had had the fever, the influenza, in the room over the laundry, for six weeks, and her sister had not known his address, and she had not been able to write, and she was better, and she was not angry, and she had not found anybody else, and she was knitting him something, and she did not say what.

Elle tricote, the Parigot said, to the wall, over and over, as if it were the most wonderful thing that had ever happened in France. She’s knitting. Ma Lulu tricote.

Lucien thought of a letter under a stone on a box in a French shelter, ma Lulu chérie, three lines, pour Noël je; and of the shelter not being there when they came back along the boards at dusk. He thought that the Parigot had written another one since. He thought he must have.

Des chaussettes, said Marius, laughing, his voice going up at the end. Socks. Je te parie que c’est des chaussettes. I bet you it’s socks.

Marius was there.

He was counting the thirteen desserts again. On his fingers, Lucien could hear his fingers; to somebody new, who had not heard it before, who did not believe it either. Dates. Figs. Almonds. Nougat, white and black. The oil bread. Quinces. His mother’s little cakes. And somebody said ça fait que sept, that’s only seven, and Marius said attends, attends, wait, wait, j’ai pas fini, I haven’t finished, and went on.

Lucien lay on the sandbags and listened to a fisherman’s son from Marseille count desserts in the dark on Christmas Eve, forty yards off across the frozen water, and his face was wet, and it was not the water from the drowned road.

Harlan, beside him, did not say anything. He lay with his rifle along the sandbags and his eye to the gap in the brick, watching the French wall, and his shoulder against Lucien’s.

---

Then Pépère.

He knew the voice the way he knew his father’s step on the gallery. Deep, slow, further back in the mouth, the words a little further apart. He had not heard it since a corner of a white wall on the dunes, three yards off, saying qui t’es, toi?

He had not known. He had lain on his back in the straw of the barn at Hof Verhaeghe in the nights since, and in the shelter behind the traverse, and had not known; whether the man in the blue coat had gone down the second stair into the concrete and stayed there, or come up again in the afternoon by some other way, or been in the cellar when the British heavy guns put their twelve-inch shells into the sand over it, or been killed by a bomb going down the first stair, Sergeant Cutter’s or Sol Weintraub’s or Harlan’s; or been killed by his own guns from the Eye, on the French wall, at eleven, with the soup can and the dog. He had not known. He had told himself he did not need to know.

The voice came across forty yards of frozen water in the starlight, and it was alive.

And it was telling the story.

Lucien did not understand at first that that was what it was. Pépère was talking to somebody new, too, the way Marius was; slowly, the way he talked about the cows; and Lucien lay with his ear to the brick and got one word in two, and then, as he listened, all of it.

Au Casino, Pépère was saying. Le treize. Par le deuxième escalier. Je monte, je tourne le coin, et il est là. At the Casino. On the thirteenth. By the second stair. I come up, I turn the corner, and he’s there. Un Américain. Derrière une colonne. À trois mètres. Avec son fusil sur moi. Comme ça. An American. Behind a column. Three metres. With his rifle on me. Like that.

Et alors? said somebody. And then?

Et alors il m’a appelé Pépère.

And then he called me Pépère.

There was a silence behind the French wall.

Arrête, said the Parigot. Stop it. Tu nous l’as déjà racontée, celle-là. You’ve told us that one already.

Je la raconte encore, said Pépère. I’m telling it again. Il m’a appelé Pépère. Un Américain. En français. Et il m’a dit, va-t’en, Pépère, va voir ta Marthe. Va tuer ton cochon.

Comment il savait, pour ton cochon? said the somebody new. How did he know about your pig?

Je sais pas, said Pépère. I don’t know. A long pause. Il parlait comme mon grand-père. Comme les vieux, chez nous, quand j’étais petit. À l’ancienne. He talked like my grandfather. Like the old people at home when I was small. In the old way. Another pause. Il savait ma Marthe. Il savait le cochon. Il savait Pépère. He knew my Marthe. He knew the pig. He knew Pépère.

C’est un ange, said Marius, not laughing. It’s an angel.

C’est pas un ange, said Pépère. C’était un gosse. Avec de la boue jusqu’aux yeux. Je lui ai demandé qui il était.

It wasn’t an angel. It was a kid. With mud up to his eyes. I asked him who he was.

Et?

Et il m’a dit, nous-autres.

Behind the French wall, nobody said anything for a long time.

Lucien lay on the sandbags with his ear to the brick and his eyes shut and the frost on the slipped tiles over his head, and Harlan’s shoulder against his, and did not breathe.

Nous-autres, said Marius, at last, very quietly, in his singing voice. Comme nous autres, à Marseille.

Comme ma grand-mère, said somebody else, further along. Like my grandmother.

Ben oui, said Pépère. Comme nous-autres.

---

At midnight the singer sang.

Lucien knew him at once. The voice from a long way along the wall, inland, towards the Eye; not deep, not high, ordinary; the voice that had sung à la claire fontaine at a quarter to five in the morning in November with amie instead of ami. It came from much nearer now. From the wall forty yards off, opposite the pump house; he had moved, or been moved, the way men are moved along a wall to fill the gaps. And it did not sing to itself, low, the way it had in November. It sang out. Into the frost and the starlight, over the drowned fields, loud, the way a man sings in a church when the organ starts.

Minuit, chrétiens, c’est l’heure solennelle…

Lucien opened his eyes.

He knew it. He had known it all his life. They sang it in the cathedral at home at the midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, every year, the whole cathedral, two thousand people and the bells going in the tower over the Place d’Armes and the bonfires going up on the levee all down the river in the dark for Papa Noël; and his grandmother sang it, at the window, after, in her old cracked voice, when they came home on the last streetcar to the lake shore at two in the morning, and his father stood on the gallery and listened with his hat in his hand.

Où l’Homme-Dieu descendit jusqu’à nous…

And the wall took it up.

Le monde entier tressaille d’espérance…

Espérance. He heard it go past in the song, the way la soupe had gone past on the first night, like a fish coming up into the light of a lantern. His grandmother’s word, at the bottom of the blue paper, with the tail of the p below the line. The whole world trembles with it. Waiting. Hoping.

Not all at once. One voice, and then two, and then ten, and then the whole of the French wall, all along it, inland and seaward, the Parigot and Marius and Pépère and all the men whose voices he knew and all the ones he did not, behind their wall of mud in bags in the drowned fields of Flanders at midnight on Christmas Eve, singing. Loud. Badly. In tune and out of it. The way the lake shore sang at the fais do-do. The way the men of the First Louisiane had sung down the platform of the station in July of last year.

Peuple, à genoux, attends ta délivrance…

He was singing.

He did not know he was going to. He did not decide. It came up out of him on the platform of sandbags in the ruin of the pump house, the way couchez-vous had come out of him on the drowned road and allons out of his father to the boat, from under everything, in the language under all the others; and he lifted his head off the brick, and sang.

Out loud. Through the hole in the brick and over the top of it, into the frost, across forty yards of frozen water, in his own French, the lake shore’s, the cathedral’s, his grandmother’s at the window at two in the morning with his father on the gallery with his hat in his hand.

Noël! Noël! Voici le Rédempteur!

Harlan’s hand closed on his arm.

And then did not pull him down. It stayed there, on his arm, and held it, the way it had held his wrists in the gas hut; and did not pull.

---

The French wall stopped singing.

Not all at once. The way it had started. One voice stopped, and then another, and then the whole of it, all along, inland and seaward; until there was only the frost, and the starlight on the water, and the flares, and far off beyond the dunes the sea, going on and on.

And one voice. His. Alone. Coming out of the ruin of a pump house in the middle of the drowned fields, forty yards from the French wall, finishing the verse, in an old French that a Parisian would have heard as archaic, and rustic, and anglicised, and that a farmer from the Berry heard as his grandfather.

Noël! Noël! Voici le Rédempteur!

He stopped.

Nothing. The water. The frost. Somewhere a long way off, inland, at the elbow, a man coughed, once.

Then a voice came across the water from the French wall, forty yards, very clear, the way voices carry over water at night in frost.

Qui chante là?

Who’s singing there?

It was not Pépère’s voice. It was not the Parigot’s or Marius’s or the singer’s. It was a voice he did not know. An officer’s, perhaps. A careful voice. French of France. Not angry. Asking.

Lucien lay on the sandbags with Harlan’s hand on his arm and the stars over the slipped tiles and the frost.

He could have said nothing. He knew that. He knew what Sergeant Cutter would have said, and Captain Pruett, and what Achille would have said in the gap of the dunes in November: don’t. He knew that the French wall could put a bomb into the pump house, or a machine gun on it, and that would be that. He knew all of it.

Écoute-les pour moi, Achille had written, four words, in pencil.

He had listened. Eight weeks. He had listened to them talk about the soup and the cows and Lulu and the sardines and thirteen desserts and ma Marthe and the pig. He had listened until he could not squeeze. He had listened until a farmer from the middle of France told the story of him to the whole wall on Christmas Eve, and a man from Marseille said comme nous autres.

He put his mouth to the hole in the brick.

“Nous-autres,” he said.

Not loud. He did not need to say it loud. It went across forty yards of frozen water in the starlight the way the French had always come across it to him, every night, in the dark, through the hole in the brick, ordinary, the voice of a man behind a wall at night talking to other men.

---

There was a silence on the French wall that went on for a long time.

Then, from along it, a little way, the deep slow voice. Further back in the mouth. The words a little further apart.

C’est lui, said Pépère.

That’s him.

Nobody answered him. Nobody on the French wall said anything at all; and Lucien lay on the sandbags with his ear to the brick and listened to forty yards of French wall being silent, the whole length of it, inland and seaward, the way the cathedral at home went silent at the elevation, two thousand people at once; and it was not the silence of men listening for something to shoot at. He knew that silence. He had lain in it for eight weeks. This was the other one.

And then Pépère’s voice again. Louder. Across the water. To him.

Joyeux Noël, nous-autres.

Lucien shut his eyes.

He did not answer. There was nothing to answer. It had been said. He lay on the platform of sandbags on the rusted engine in the ruin of the pump house and heard the French wall begin to talk again, low, ordinary, all along it, the way men talk who have been given something; and somebody laughed, Marius, and somebody told him to shut up, the Parigot; and further along, inland, the singer began, very quietly, to himself, the way he had sung in November, the first verse again.

Minuit, chrétiens…

---

“Lucky,” said Harlan, after a long time. Very low.

“Yes.”

“What did you tell him?”

Lucien did not answer at once. He lay with his cheek on the sandbags and the frost on the tiles and the stars through the half of the roof that was not there, and thought of the lake. Of the bonfires going up on the levee tonight all down the river in the dark, the biggest there had ever been, so that it could be seen from Belgium. Of his grandmother at the window at two in the morning, singing, and his father on the gallery with his hat in his hand. Of the shell beach at the end of the camps, and a shape on it under a canvas, very still, leaning a little on its blocks, with the seam on the starboard side tarred by a boy of fifteen whom nobody had asked. Waiting. Hoping. The same word.

Ton père dit que le bateau t’espère.

“Who we were,” he said.

Harlan was quiet for a while.

“Who are we?” he said.

“Nous-autres,” said Lucien.

Harlan thought about it. Lucien could feel him think about it, beside him on the sandbags in the dark, slowly, the way he thought about everything, as if it were a field and he had to walk the whole of it before he said what it would grow.

“Noo-zoht,” said Harlan, carefully.

Lucien laughed.

He did not mean to. It came out of him on the platform of sandbags in the pump house in the drowned fields at the first hour of Christmas Day, low, short, the way it had come out of him on the fire step at six in the morning of the thirteenth at Kerrigan’s joke about the corporal; and Harlan, beside him, very tall, with his rifle along the sandbags and his eye to the gap in the brick, did not see what was funny, and waited.

“That’s near enough,” said Lucien.