The Pit

My mother has a letter from Captain Kettering about this day, which I did not know he had written until I came home, and the story they tell in Lexington has grown out of it. It was not a battle. Nobody attacked us. It was not a promotion. By Baca’s reckoning, when he could reckon again, it was perhaps twenty-five minutes from the first bomb to the aid post, and most of that was the lane.

---

It was the middle of the afternoon on the twelfth of July, a Wednesday, grey and close, with rain coming. The battery had fired in the morning and had been quiet since about one. At two Ridley got up off the trail and put his helmet on.

“Command post,” he said. “Section chiefs.” There was a conference about something, the next day’s ammunition, I think. He stood in the lane and looked at the six of us, at the gun, at the ammunition pit, once each. “Baca has it.”

“Baca has it,” said Baca, without looking up from his book.

Ridley went off down the lane with his stiff leg.

Baca was sitting on the edge of the gun pit with the book on his knees, checking the morning’s count. Gaines was beside him, cleaning the breech. Peter was on the trail, in the lane behind the gun, with the sight cover off, looking at nothing. Brandauer and I were in the ammunition pit next door, under the log roof, fuzing a delivery that had come in at noon and stacking it three high. Hollis, the replacement from Pennsylvania, was asleep in his hole in the lane. Rourke, the other one, from New York, was on watch at the gap in the hedge above the pit with his rifle. That was the section. Eight with Ridley; seven without.

“Gaines,” Baca said. “How many did you load this morning?”

“Whatever you wrote down.”

“I wrote down two different numbers.”

“Then I loaded the other one.”

Baca looked at the book with the face of a man insulted in his own house, and licked his pencil, and started again from the top.

“You’ve been on that page twenty minutes,” Peter said from the trail.

“Because it’s been wrong for twenty minutes.”

Brandauer, beside me under the roof, held up a fuze to the light and said, to nobody, “It is going to rain on this delivery,” and Baca said, “Don’t. Don’t say rain,” and Gaines smiled down at the breech and went on cleaning it.

I heard the first one. Everybody says that you do not hear the one that hits you, and that may be true; I heard the first one and it did not hit me. It was a sound I had heard every day for a month in the distance and had never heard close: a short rushing sigh, coming down out of the sky, like somebody drawing a breath through their teeth. Then a bang, not very loud, a flat crack, in the field behind the bank behind us. Earth came down through the hedge into the lane.

Brandauer said, “Mortar.”

I said, “Where?” and the second one came.

The second one came down in the lane behind the gun, about fifteen yards along, and I felt it in my teeth. The third one I did not hear at all. I was on the floor of the ammunition pit by then, under the log roof, with Brandauer on top of me, which I have never properly thanked him for, and the third one came down on the bank at the edge of the gun pit, on the lip of it, on the side where Baca was sitting.

---

There were five more after that. Rourke counted them from his hole by the gap; I did not. They came over in the next minute or so, falling all round the lane and the field behind and the field in front, none of them as close as the third. Then they stopped. Whoever was firing them had fired what he had, or had moved, or had been told to stop, and it was quiet, with smoke drifting along the lane and earth and leaves coming down out of the hedge, and somebody shouting.

It was Baca. The first thing I heard after it stopped was Baca, in the gun pit, swearing, in Spanish and English both, very loudly and very steadily, as if he was reading it out of his book. “¡Ay, cabrón! God damn it. God damn it to hell and back. Madre de Dios. God damn this whole country.”

Brandauer got off me. We went out of the ammunition pit and round the end of the bank into the gun pit. It was full of smoke and earth, and the gun was standing in the middle of it as if nothing had happened, with earth on the barrel. Baca was sitting against the back wall with his legs out in front of him, and his trousers were dark and wet from the hip down, both legs, and getting darker. Gaines was lying on the floor of the pit on his side with his arm under him, not saying anything at all. There was blood on the side of his head, and the back of his shirt was dark all down one side, and his eyes were open.

I do not know how long I stood there. Not long. A second, two. I looked round for Ridley. He was two lanes away at the command post. I looked at Baca, because Baca had it, and Baca was sitting against the wall with his legs bleeding, swearing at the sky.

There was nobody else.

“Brandauer,” I said. “Baca’s legs. Belt, above the knee. Both of them.”

“Ja.” He was on his knees by Baca with his belt off before I had finished.

“Hollis!” Hollis’s head came up out of his hole in the lane, white. “Stretcher. Off the truck. Go.”

“What happened?”

“Go.”

He went, stumbling, down the lane.

“Rourke. Stay on the gap. Sing out if you see anything.”

“On the gap,” Rourke called down.

I said it once, each. I heard myself say it in Ridley’s voice, or as near as I could get, flat and quiet. Nobody said, who put you in charge. Nobody had.

I went to Gaines and knelt down beside him. He was breathing fast and shallow, and his eyes moved and found me.

“Wheeler,” he said, very quietly.

“I’m here.”

The blood on his head was from a cut along the side of his scalp, not deep, bleeding the way scalps bleed, a great deal, without meaning much. It was his back. I got his shirt up. There was a hole below the left shoulder blade, small, not much bigger than a finger, and the blood was coming out of it, not pumping, but steadily, and when he breathed something bubbled in it, a little. They had told us at Fort Sill what that meant, in the lecture on wounds. I put my hand flat over the hole and pressed. I got my field dressing out with my other hand and tore it open with my teeth and put it on the hole with my hand over it, and it went red at once, and I pressed harder. Gaines said something I did not hear.

“Is he alive?” Baca said, from the wall.

“He’s breathing.”

“Karl. Tighter. Más. You can’t hurt me any worse than this.”

“I can,” said Brandauer, and pulled.

---

Peter was standing in the lane at the end of the trail. He had not moved since it started, as far as I could tell. He had the sight cover in his hand and he was looking at the gun. Not at Baca, not at Gaines. At the gun. His face was perfectly white and perfectly still. As I looked at him he put the sight cover down on the trail and bent and put his eye to the sight, as though he was going to lay the gun.

“Peter.”

“The gun has to be manned.” He did not look up. “If they call a mission. We have to be able to answer. Somebody has to stay on the gun.” It was a flat, fast voice, not his own. “That’s the drill. One man stays on the gun.”

It was the first rule of the section. We had had it at Fort Sill and in Devon and from Ridley.

I counted. There was one stretcher. Hollis and I would have to carry it. Brandauer had Baca. Rourke had the gap. That left nobody to keep a hand on Gaines’s back for half a mile of lane, and the hand was the only thing keeping him.

“Peter. Leave the gun. I need you here.”

He did not move. “One man stays on the gun.”

“I know. Leave it.”

“If they call.”

“Rourke can see the lane from the gap. If a mission comes he’ll hear the phone. Come here and put your hand where mine is.”

He looked at me then, for what felt like a long time, with his eye just off the sight. Then he picked up the sight cover and put it down again on the trail, very carefully, square, the way he always put it down, and came round the gun into the pit and knelt beside me, and put his hand over mine on Gaines’s back. I slid mine out. His stayed.

---

Hollis came back with the stretcher at a run.

“On his side,” I said. “Peter, keep your hand there. Don’t lift it.”

“I’m not lifting it.”

I put a second dressing on top of the first, and Peter’s hand went over that. Hollis took the feet and I took the head, and we lifted, and Peter came up with us, bent over, his hand on Gaines’s back, and walked beside the stretcher like that, which is a terrible way to walk, and he did it for half a mile.

Brandauer had Baca’s legs tied off with two belts. He squatted and got Baca across his shoulders, the whole of him, the way you carry a calf, and stood up.

“Madre de Dios, put me down, you Dutchman.”

“No.”

“Don’t put me down. You smell like a cow. It’s going to rain. Of course it’s going to rain.” The first drops were coming through the hedge. “Look at that. It rains in Massachusetts, it rains in England, it rains in France. Is there anywhere in this whole war it doesn’t rain?” He twisted his head round. “My book. Where’s my book?”

“Ridley’ll get it,” I said.

“Nobody from Massachusetts touches my book.”

“Ridley’s from Kentucky.”

“Then he can touch it.”

He swore the whole way, about the rain and Massachusetts and the Army and the Pope and anything else that came into his head. Rourke stayed on the gap. The gun stayed where it was.

It was half a mile to the aid post, which was in a farm cellar at a crossroads behind us, with a red cross painted on a sheet hung over the gate. Nothing else came over the hedge. Nobody spoke except Baca, and once Hollis, who said, “Is he still breathing?” and Peter said, “Yes,” without looking up, and Hollis did not ask again. Halfway along, a jeep came up the lane towards us, and it was Ridley, who had heard the bombs from the command post. He looked at us going past, at the stretcher and Peter bent over it and the calf on Brandauer’s shoulders, once. He did not stop us or say anything. He turned the jeep in a gateway and drove ahead of us to tell them we were coming, and when we got there two men with a stretcher were waiting at the gate, and a doctor was standing at the top of the cellar steps with his sleeves rolled up, and they took Gaines off us and down the steps before I had properly let go.

Brandauer let Baca down off his shoulders onto the second stretcher, gently, the way you put a calf down in straw. Baca caught my sleeve as they lifted him.

“Wheeler. Tell Ridley. The second number.” He was grey under the brown. “In the book. It’s the second number.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“The second one,” he said, and they carried him down.

---

I went down after him. It was a farm cellar with whitewashed walls and lamps and a smell of cider and something sharper, with men on stretchers on trestles all round the walls and two doctors and some orderlies working at them. The first thing they did to Gaines, before anything else, was put a needle in his arm, with a tube going up to a bottle hung on a nail on a beam. The bottle had something pale yellow in it, like weak tea.

“What’s that?” I asked the orderly who was holding it.

“Plasma.” He did not look round. “Blood, near enough. Somebody at home gave it.”

The doctor shook a white powder out of a packet into the wound.

“Sulpha,” the orderly said, before I asked.

Then a proper dressing, and a man with another needle, and Gaines’s eyes, which had been going away from me, came back a little, and looked at me.

“Wheeler,” he said. “Your socks.”

“They’re dry.”

“Good.” He closed his eyes, and they took him further into the cellar, and I did not see him again in the war.

They took him and Baca back that night, in an ambulance, to a hospital on the beach. From there, we heard, Gaines went across to England, and Baca stayed. Baca came back to us. Gaines did not. They both lived. I did not know for a long time whether Gaines would. A man with a hole in his back like that, in my father’s war, would very probably have died in that cellar. He did not, because of a bottle on a nail and a white powder and a needle and a doctor with his sleeves rolled up, and somebody at home, a woman in Ohio, perhaps, in a church hall on a Tuesday night.

---

We walked back up the lane, Peter and Brandauer and Hollis and I, in the rain, which had started properly. Nobody said anything. Peter’s hands were red to the wrist and he held them out a little in front of him as he walked.

When we got to the gun Ridley was there, standing in the pit with his hands at his sides. Rourke was beside him.

“Nothing came,” Rourke said. “Phone never rang.”

Ridley looked at me for a long moment with his light grey eyes.

“You took the section,” he said.

“Yes, Sergeant. There wasn’t anybody.”

“You left the gun.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

I did not explain. I stood there in the rain with Gaines’s blood on my sleeves and waited.

He looked at me a moment longer. “That was once,” he said.

Then he turned round and checked the gun: the sight, the breech, the barrel, every part of it, once. He found Baca’s book in the ammunition pit, where it had ended up, and wiped the earth off it on his sleeve, and put it inside his own shirt. He kept the count himself after that, for the rest of the war.

“Sergeant,” I said. “Baca says the second number’s the right one.”

“I know,” said Ridley, and did not take the book out to look.

Brandauer had filled his helmet from the water can. He went to Peter and said, “Give,” and Peter held out his hands, and Brandauer poured the water over them, slowly, and it ran off red into the mud of the lane. Peter scrubbed at them.

“It won’t come out from under the nails.”

“It comes out,” Brandauer said. “Calving, it is the same. Two days.” He poured again. Then he said, low, so that Ridley would not hear, “Once. What is once? Is that good, or is it bad?”

Peter looked at his hands. “Yes,” he said.

---

Captain Kettering came round in the evening with his notebook.

“Wheeler. Tell me what happened.”

I told him. He wrote it down, in his small careful hand, and did not hurry me.

“The gun,” he said. “Was it left unmanned?”

“Yes, sir.”

“For how long?”

“About twenty minutes, sir. Rourke was at the gap. He’d have heard the telephone.”

“On whose order?”

“Mine, sir.”

He wrote that down too, and looked at it, and looked at me. “And no mission came.”

“No, sir.”

“Thank you, Wheeler,” he said, in his careful voice, and went on to Rourke.

That was the letter my mother has. It is short and very correct, and says that I showed presence of mind under fire in getting two wounded men of my section to the aid post, and that he thought she would wish to know. She keeps it in the shoebox. It does not say anything about the gun.

---

That night Peter and I lay in our holes in the lane under our gas capes, in the rain, and for a long time neither of us said anything.

“Peter.”

“Mm.”

“About the gun.”

He did not answer.

“If a mission had come,” I said.

“It didn’t.”

“If it had. Men in a field we can’t see. I don’t know that I was right.”

“You were right.”

“I don’t know that.”

“You were right, Wheeler.” He said it to the dark. “I couldn’t move. I knew it was wrong and I couldn’t move off it.” He was quiet for a while. “You’ll have to forgive me for that.”

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

“There is.” He turned over.

He lay still. The rain came down through the hedge. Then he said, without turning back, “It was the cart. It was the same as the cart.”

“I know.”

He pulled the gas cape up over his head.

---

In the morning Ridley stood in the lane and looked at what was left of the section, once each.

“Wheeler. Breech.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Hollis. Ammunition. With Brandauer.”

That was all. I was on the breech in Gaines’s place, the last pair of hands before the gun, which is loading, and is still carrying, only the last yard of it. Two new men came up from the depot that day. I was not promoted. The story they tell at home has me made a sergeant in the field, or at least a corporal, and it is not true. I was a private before it and a private after it, and I was never in charge of anything again, in the war or since, unless you count the farm, and my father would tell you I am not in charge of that either.

Three days later the call came to silence the mortars. I do not know whether they were the same ones. Nobody ever told me.