Book Four: The Gunner's Line Part Three: The Hedgerows Characters
Chapter Thirteen
Numbers
James Wheeler. The bocage, in France. Saturday, 15 July 1944.
The western European front was a war of industrial armies over developed country: mechanised, artillery-heavy, fought across towns and farms and road networks, with the civilian population present throughout. Its characteristic experience was the contested advance through populated ground, and its characteristic horror was what happens to a town that two armies fight over.
I know a good deal now about that night that I did not know in the lane. This is the night as it was then, a set of numbers in the dark.
The fifteenth of July was a Saturday. It had rained in the morning and cleared in the afternoon, and the evening was long and quiet, with a low sun coming in under the hedges along the lane, and midges.
We had not fired since the morning. The two new men from the depot had come up on the Thursday, and Ridley had shown them where everything was, once. Hollis and Brandauer were in the ammunition pit. Peter was on the trail with his French grammar open on his knee. I was on the breech. I had been loading for three days, and I was still getting used to the block, the weight of it as it closes, which I had watched Gaines do a thousand times and never felt.
Brandauer slapped the back of his neck and looked at his hand.
“In Wisconsin,” he said, “the mosquitoes carry off the calves. These are nothing. These are only the little brothers.”
“Then why are you hitting them?” said Hollis.
“Out of respect.”
Peter turned a page. “They’re French midges,” he said, without looking up. “Nobody has told them about the Duchy.”
“So tell them,” said Hollis. “You’re the one with the book.”
“My French is for people.”
Brandauer looked at the sun coming under the hedge. “At home they are bringing the cows in now.”
“It’s only dinner time at home,” I said.
“Then they are thinking about bringing the cows in.” He scratched his neck. “D’Kieh warta net auf’n Landtag.”
“Or for the Army,” said Hollis. He had heard it a dozen times by then and had started finishing it for him. Then he said, “Anybody heard about Baca?”
“He is in the hospital on the beach,” said Brandauer, “swearing at the nurses in two languages.”
“And Gaines?”
Nobody answered that. Nobody knew.
One of the new men, the younger one, was sitting on the bank with his helmet in his lap, looking at the raw place in the earth at the edge of the gun pit where the third bomb had come down on the Wednesday. He had not been there for it. He had been told. He said, “Is it always this quiet?”
Hollis looked at Brandauer, and Brandauer looked at the ground.
Ridley, from the gun, said, “No.”
There was firing in front of us all evening. The infantry were in the fields ahead, a mile or two beyond the hill, and there was always firing there: rifles and machine guns rising and falling, the flat bang of grenades, and every so often the sigh and crack of mortar bombs. Since the twelfth I could not hear that sound without my shoulders coming up round my ears.
At about nine, at dusk, the mortar fire got heavier. It was coming down on the infantry in front of us. You could hear it a long way off, a lot of bombs, one after another, then a pause, then more.
Brandauer stood up in the ammunition pit and listened. “Somebody’s catching it.”
“Sit down,” said Ridley.
He sat down.
It went on for an hour, on and off. Then it was dark. Then, at about a quarter to eleven, the telephone at the gun buzzed.
Ridley picked it up. “Number three,” he said, and listened, and wrote on the pad on his knee. He put the telephone down on its box and turned to the gun.
“Fire mission.”
We were on our feet before he had finished saying it.
He read the numbers off the pad, flat and clear, one at a time.
“Battery.”
All four guns together.
“Charge five.”
In the ammunition pit I heard Hollis say it to himself, “Five, five,” and then the small soft sound of the bags coming off the round, six and seven.
“Deflection,” said Ridley, and a number. “Elevation,” and a number.
I do not remember them. I have tried. They were Peter’s numbers, not mine.
“Four rounds.”
Peter said each number back under his breath as he set it, with his eye to the sight and his hands on the two wheels. Then he said them again, checking. The barrel went round in the dark, a little to the left of where it had been, and up, and stopped.
“Set,” said Peter.
“Load,” said Ridley.
Brandauer handed me the round, the way he had handed them to Gaines. Fifteen kilograms, thirty-three pounds, brass and steel, cold from the pit. I put the nose of it into the breech and pushed it home with my fist and then with the rammer, all the way, until it seated, and stepped back and swung the block across. It shut like a heavy door in an empty house.
“Loaded.”
“Fire.”
The man on the lanyard pulled it.
It lit the lane. A gun at night lights everything for an instant, white and orange, the banks and the hedge and the trees over the lane and every face round the gun, and then it is darker than before, and your ears are ringing, and there is the smell. Then the other three guns of the battery fired along the lane, flash, flash, flash. Then, further off, to the left and the right, other batteries in other lanes, all firing south over the hill, until the whole of the dark behind us and on both sides was flickering the way the sky flickers at home in August with heat lightning, and the noise came in from everywhere at once.
I had not known there were so many guns round us.
“Who’s that?” the younger of the new men shouted, from the end of the trail. “All of that. Who is it?”
“Everybody,” Hollis shouted back, out of the pit.
The case came out of the breech and rolled, hot, and Brandauer kicked it clear and handed me the next.
“Loaded.”
“Fire.”
And again, and again. Four rounds, and the barrel hot, and Ridley back on the telephone, listening, writing.
“Deflection,” and a number a few mils off the last. “Elevation,” a little up. “Four rounds.”
Peter’s lips moving at the sight. Then he stopped.
“Wait,” he said.
Ridley waited. Along the lane the other guns were already firing. Peter took his hands off the wheels, put them back, said the numbers again from the beginning, and looked.
“Set.”
“Load.”
“Loaded.”
“Fire.”
We fired for about forty minutes, from about ten to eleven until about half past. In that time our gun fired forty-four rounds. Ridley put a mark in Baca’s book for every one, in fives, with the time at the top of each set of numbers.
I watched the breech. I pushed each round until it seated, and swung the block all the way across, and stepped back before Ridley said fire, because the recoil comes back past the loader’s hip, and at Fort Sill I had seen what it does to a man who is not clear of it. My arms were tired. I was slower than Gaines.
“Faster, Wheeler,” said Ridley, once, between sets.
“Yes, Sergeant.”
Brandauer, handing me a round in the dark, said, “The little brothers have gone.”
“What?”
“The midges. Look. All gone.”
They had. A gun firing every minute will drive anything away.
About the twentieth round I said, under my breath, “I hope we have him.”
“Ja,” said Brandauer, and handed me the next one, and I pushed it home harder than I needed to.
I did not think about Saint-Ouen. I have looked, at this table, for a moment in those forty minutes when I did, and there is not one. The barrel going a little to the left and up was the barrel going a little to the left and up. It did that twenty times a day.
At about half past eleven the telephone buzzed again. Ridley listened.
“End of mission,” he said, and then, to us, “Cease firing.”
Brandauer had just handed me a round, and I stood there holding it.
It was very quiet. It is always quieter after a mission at night than before it started, because your ears are ringing and everything round you seems to have stopped to listen. The other guns along the lane had stopped, and the batteries to the left and right, one after another, until there was nothing at all.
Hollis put his head up out of the pit. “Listen.”
We listened. The mortar fire in front had stopped. There was a little rifle fire, a long way off, and then not even that.
“That’s them done,” said Hollis.
“Jim,” said Brandauer. “You can put it down.”
I put the round back in the pit, carefully, fuze towards the gun.
Ridley wrote the last figures in the book, the time and the count.
“How many?” said Hollis.
“Forty-four,” said Ridley. He closed the book and put it inside his shirt. “Clean the gun.”
We cleaned it in the dark, by feel, the way we had learned to, and burned the bags in the pit, which made a great flare of light in the lane that we were not supposed to make at night and always did. Then there was nothing to do, and we sat down.
The barrel ticked.
A gun barrel after forty-four rounds is too hot to touch, and as it cools it ticks, a small sharp sound every few seconds. We sat round it in the lane in the dark, Peter and Brandauer and Hollis and the two new men and I, and Ridley a little apart with his back against the bank.
“What’s that?” said the younger of the new men.
“The barrel,” said Brandauer. “Cooling. Like the stove at home when the fire’s out.”
Nobody said anything after that for a long time, and the barrel ticked.
Then Peter said, to nobody, “I wonder where that was.”
“Somewhere down there,” I said.
“Yes,” said Peter. And then, “Somewhere.” I heard him take his glasses off and polish them in the dark, for a long time.
After a while I said, “What were you thinking about? On the sight.”
“The numbers.”
“Nothing else?”
“That’s what they’re for, Wheeler.”
“It worked, then.”
“It worked perfectly,” Peter said.
“Get some sleep,” said Ridley, from the bank.
We went to our holes. Peter’s was next to mine, and after a while he said, out of the dark, “Wheeler.”
“What?”
“You were faster than you think. By the end.”
“Ridley said faster.”
“Ridley says faster to everybody,” said Peter. “Once.”
I lay under my gas cape and listened to the barrel tick until it stopped, which took a long time, and then I listened to nothing, and then it was light.
Captain Kettering came round the guns in the morning with his notebook. We stood by the gun while he did it.
“Any faults in the night, Sergeant?”
“None, sir.”
“Ammunition?”
“Forty-four expended, sir. All charge five.”
He took Baca’s book from Ridley and checked it against his own, line by line, with his pencil, while we waited, and the younger of the new men stood very straight, as if it was him being checked.
“Properly done, Sergeant,” the captain said.
“Sir,” said Ridley.
And the captain gave him back the book and went on to the next gun.