The Record

I stood in front of Ridley and told him.

I told him the way I had told Peter, counting it off: the man, the night, the hour, the stairs; our mission, the night, the hour, south; the other guns; and that I did not know. I did not tell him the last thing, about trusting myself.

“I want to know where the fifteenth went, Sergeant,” I said. “I want it checked against the map. I know it’s not my business.”

He sat against the bank with the book shut on his knees and his hands flat on it, and looked at me with his pale eyes, and did not say anything for a while.

“You want the fifteenth checked against the map.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“You know what it’ll show, maybe.”

“I don’t know what it’ll show. I know what it might.”

“Once it’s looked at, it’s looked at,” said Ridley. “You don’t get to not know it after.”

“I know, Sergeant.”

He looked at me a moment longer. Then he got up, with his stiff leg, and put the book inside his shirt.

“Wait here.”

He went off down the lane towards the command post. He did not say what he was going to do.

---

He came back an hour later, at dusk.

“Come on.”

I went with him. Halfway down the second lane I said, “Sergeant, what did the captain say?”

“Said the lieutenant could show you the record. Said he’d want to see what it showed, after.” He walked on a few steps. “Then he went back to his notebook.”

The command post was in the kitchen of the farm two lanes away. It was a big low stone kitchen with a beaten earth floor and a fireplace you could have stood up in, and the battery’s plotting table was set up on the farmhouse table under a lamp, with the map board on it and the telephones along the wall and two men in headphones. The lieutenant was the same one I had asked about Saint-Ouen in the first week of July. His name was Garland. He looked at me as I came in with no expression at all.

Ridley stood by the door with his hands at his sides.

“Wheeler,” said Garland.

“Sir.”

He had the battery’s log open on the table, a big book with ruled columns, every mission the battery had fired in it, in order, with a number. He found the night of the fifteenth with his finger and turned the book round so that I could see it.

The mission had come from battalion at ten forty-two, on a call from the infantry in front, to fire on enemy mortars reported at a grid reference. The reference was written there. Battery, four rounds, fire for effect, repeat; then the adjustments, and repeat again, with the times, down the page, to end of mission at eleven thirty-one. Then what the battery had fired, gun by gun.

“Sergeant,” said Garland. “Your book.”

Ridley took Baca’s book out of his shirt and opened it on the table beside the log. Garland ran his pencil down his own column and read it out, and Ridley answered from the book.

“Number three. First set, four.”

“Four, sir.”

“Second set, four.”

“Four.”

It went on down the page like that, set by set, the time and the count, and every time Ridley said the same number. At the bottom Garland stopped.

“Forty-four.”

“Forty-four, sir.”

“It matches,” said Garland, and made a small tick. Then he took the pencil and put the point of it on the map board, on a place, and held it there.

It was a square on the side of a little hill, a little to the left of where our guns pointed in the daytime and a good deal further, with a cross in it for a church and a few small squares round the cross for houses. There was a name printed beside it in small black capitals. I read it upside down, and then the right way up.

SAINT-OUEN-DES-VERGERS.

---

I stood and looked at it. Garland did not move his pencil. Ridley did not say anything.

It was a pencil point on a little cross on a map, and the cross was the church Lucien had drawn for me in the dust of a gatepost, with the shop opposite and the window that was his.

“Sir,” I said. “Did anybody else fire on that square that night?”

Garland looked at me.

“Everybody did,” he said.

He turned a page and showed me. The other three batteries of our battalion had fired the same mission, on the same reference, at the same time. There was a note in the margin in his own hand.

“Two more battalions on our left were called on the same area,” he said. “The infantry had their own mortars on the edge of it. And the French were putting their own fire down round the village all evening, from wherever they were.” He put the pencil down. “It was the heaviest concentration in the division that night. Four or five hundred rounds, I’d guess, into a few hundred metres. I can tell you what this battery fired, Wheeler, and where and when. I can’t tell you whose round went where. Nobody can. It doesn’t work like that.”

“I know, sir.”

“Then why ask?”

“Sir,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment longer than he needed to.

My battery fired on the village in that hour. I loaded the gun. Whose shell killed Auguste Morel is not known and cannot be.

“Does the log say anything about people in the village, sir?”

Garland’s face changed, a little.

“That’s not in the log,” he said. “The log’s the mission.” He closed it. “If you’ve got a question about the call, that’s battalion’s, not mine.” He looked at Ridley, not at me.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” said Ridley, and that was the end of it, and we went out.

We walked back up the lanes in the dark. Ridley did not say anything for a long way. At the place where our lane turned off he stopped.

“Now you know.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“That’s what you asked for.”

“I know.”

“You’ll want to tell him.”

“Yes.”

“Then you tell him,” said Ridley. “Not Mercer. You.” He looked at me in the dark. “He’ll want to hear it from the one that did it.”

He turned into the lane and I followed him.

---

I told Lucien in the morning.

He had slept in the lane by the ammunition pit, in my blanket, and Peter had sat up with him most of the night. I never asked what they talked about. When I came along the lane at first light Lucien was sitting on the bank with a cup of the cook’s coffee in his hands and Peter beside him. Peter looked at my face, and stood up, and walked away down the lane without being asked. I sat down where he had been.

I had worked it out in the night, in English and in the forty words of French I had. I said it slowly.

“Lucien. Saturday night. The night your father died. Eleven o’clock.”

He looked at me.

“My battery fired on Saint-Ouen. That night. That hour. My gun. I loaded the gun.” I held up my hands as if there was a round in them and pushed it away from me, into a breech that was not there. “Many guns fired. Very many. Not only mine. Nobody can know which shell. Nobody. But we fired on the village. I loaded the gun.”

Then I said what I could of it in French. “Nous avons tiré. Sur Saint-Ouen. Samedi. Onze heures.” And I stopped.

He did not say anything for a long time. He sat with the cup in his hands and looked at me, and his face did what it had done in the gateway, which was nothing.

Then it came apart. Not into crying. Into fury, all at once, the whole of his face. He stood up and threw the cup down the lane, coffee and all, and stood over me and shouted.

“Vous! You! Vous tous! All of you!” His hands were going. “You come to help. You come to free us. Nous libérer! And my father is on the stairs. For a shawl! Pour un châle!” Then a great deal more in French, very fast, that I did not understand, and understood. “The shop, the house, tout, all!” And then, in English, over and over: “Why? Pourquoi? Why? Why?”

I sat on the bank and did not try to answer him.

He turned and walked away down the lane, fast, past the gun, past Peter, who did not stop him, past the end of the lane and out of sight.

---

I sat on the bank. Ridley, at the gun, did not look at me. After a while Brandauer came and picked the cup up out of the lane and wiped it on his shirt and put it back with the others, and did not say anything either.

Peter came back and stood in front of me.

“Shall I go after him?”

“No.”

“He doesn’t know the lanes, Wheeler. He could walk into anything.”

“He walked here through the lines,” I said. “Leave him.”

Peter stood there a moment longer, and then went back to the trail and sat on it with his back to me.

I sat there about an hour.

He came back at about seven, walking slowly up the lane with his hands in his pockets, and stopped in front of me. His face was red and wet and furious, and he did not try to hide any of it. He said, very carefully, the way he had said my father is dead:

“I am angry. With you. With all. I do not know for how long. Maybe always.”

“Yes,” I said.

“My mother. The old one. They have nothing. I need the food. The roof. You said you can help.” He looked down at me. “You can still help?”

“Yes.”

“Then we go.”

He turned round and stood with his back to me, waiting. I got up and went to find Ridley.

---

Ridley had been to the captain again at dawn. He was waiting for me by the gun.

“Captain says two men,” he said. “Truck from the ammunition section. Lomax drives. Food for two days. You bring the two women out of the village to a barn behind our lines. It’s written down.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“After two days they go to the Norman committee. They’re the committee’s business.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Two days, Wheeler.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

---

We went to Saint-Ouen in the middle of the morning, Lucien and Peter and I in the back of the truck and Lomax driving. Lomax stopped at the edge of the square and leaned out of the cab.

“Can’t get her in there,” he said. “Look at it.”

The square was where Lucien had drawn it in the dust, with the church on one side. The church had a hole in its roof and another in its tower, and the windows were out. The shop was opposite, where he had drawn it, and the front of it was lying in the square, a heap of stone and timber and slates, and in the heap was the sign that had hung over the door, LEFEVRE, broken in two, the paint very fresh and blue: LEFE on one half and VRE on the other. And the cobbles were full of holes, round holes, small and large, everywhere, so many that the truck could not get across.

We got down and walked.

I started to count the holes between the truck and the church door, and stopped.

Lucien went into the church and down the steps to the crypt, alone. Peter and I waited by the truck.

“Should we go down?” said Peter.

“We weren’t asked.”

After a while Lucien came up the steps carrying his grandmother over his shoulder, very gently, the way Brandauer had carried Baca. Behind them came his mother, Madeleine, in the same black dress and the same man’s cap, with a bundle in her arms. She walked across the square between the holes to the truck and did not look at either of us. She climbed into the back and held out her arms for her mother, and Lucien handed the old woman up to her, and she held her.

Nobody in the back of the truck said anything the whole way out.

---

The barn was at the farm with the command post, behind our lane. The farmer had a good roof and a hayloft and a corner of clean straw that he had kept for his horse, which the French had taken in 1943. Peter went to ask him. The farmer was an old man, and he had heard about Saint-Ouen.

“Monsieur,” Peter began, “il y a une famille de Saint-Ouen-des-Vergers.”

“Oui,” said the farmer, before Peter had got any further. “Oui, oui. Bien sûr.” He was already walking to the barn. He came back with blankets himself.

Lucien handed his grandmother down from the truck, and Peter took her and carried her in and laid her on the straw. When he came out he stood in the yard looking at his empty arms.

“There’s nothing of her,” he said. “It was like carrying a coat.”

They were there two nights, and Peter did not stop the whole time.

He found more straw. He found a lamp, and then went looking for oil for it.

“The cook will have some,” he said, when I asked where he was going. “Or the farmer. One of them.”

He found a bucket and a jug and filled them at the farm pump. He went to the cook three times and came back with food each time.

“That’s more than two days, Peter,” I said, the third time.

“Is it?” he said, and took it in.

He found an American doctor from the aid post, the cellar at the crossroads, and brought him to the barn to look at the old woman, who still had not spoken. The doctor knelt in the straw and listened to her chest and looked in her eyes and held her wrist for a long time. Then he sat back on his heels.

“Tell them there’s nothing wrong with her that I can mend,” he said to Peter. “She’s very old and she’s very frightened and she’s very cold. Keep her warm. That’s all I’ve got.”

Peter told Madeleine, in French. Madeleine nodded. Peter went and found two more blankets.

I caught him in the yard with them.

“Peter. About the map. About last night.”

“Not now, Wheeler.”

He went in with the blankets.

He went to the committee in the market town, the one at the crossroads where I had seen the King, and found their office, and talked to them for an hour, and came back with a paper with a stamp on it. He showed it to me in the yard.

“The relief centre will take them on Saturday. In the school. They’ll have a room.”

“Peter.”

“Not now, Wheeler.” He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. “The lamp’s low. Is there any more oil?”

He did all of it quickly and quietly, all day, both days, the way he laid the gun.

Lucien did not speak to me those two days, except when he had to. When he had to, he did it plainly, in his English, and every time I brought the food he said, “Thank you for the food.”

“It’s nothing,” I said.

---

On the second evening I took the food over myself. Peter had gone back to the town about the paper, and there was nobody else, and I carried the pot and the bread across from the cookhouse to the barn in the dusk and went in.

The lamp was lit. The old woman was asleep on the straw under the blankets, very small, with her face to the wall. Lucien was not there; he had gone out to the pump. Madeleine was sitting on an upturned box beside her mother with her hands in her lap, still in the man’s cap, which had been her husband’s.

She looked up when I came in.

She looked at me for a long time, across the barn, in the lamplight, with the square closed face that had looked at the wheel I mended and said, through Peter, that I had done it properly. I stood in the doorway with the pot in my hands. I did not say anything. She did not say anything. She did not get up, and she did not look away, and she did not take the pot. I stood still and let her look.

Then she turned her head and looked at her mother, and did not look at me again.

I put the pot down on the straw by the door, and the bread beside it, and went out. Lucien was coming back across the yard from the pump with the bucket. We passed each other. He looked at me, and at the barn door, and went in.

---

On the Saturday morning Peter and I and Lomax took them to the town in the truck and handed them to the committee at the relief centre in the school. The woman at the table with the book was the same woman, the committee woman from the farm with the arch. She looked at me, and then at the three of them, and found the place in her book where the four names were with a line through them and the word returned, and she wrote underneath them, on a new line, three names. I could read upside down by then. MOREL Madeleine. LEFEVRE. MOREL Lucien. And something after each.

At the door of the school Lucien shook Peter’s hand with both of his, the way he used to.

“Peter. Thank you.”

“Write,” said Peter. “If you want. Through the committee.”

Then Lucien looked at me. He did not put out his hand, and I did not put out mine.

“I don’t know,” he said, in English.

“I know.”

“Later. Maybe.” Then: “Thank you for the food.” He said it exactly as he had said it every time in the barn. And he went in after his mother, and the door shut.

We drove back to the lane. Peter sat in the cab with Lomax, and I sat in the back with the empty pot. When we got to the battery the guns were firing. I got down and went to the breech, and Ridley looked at me once.

“Load,” he said, and I loaded.