Book Four: The Gunner's Line Part Three: The Hedgerows Characters
Chapter Sixteen
What It Did Not Ask
James Wheeler. The bocage, in France. Monday, 24 July 1944.
The Register does not settle this. It records that the Allied powers made a decision, that the decision killed very large numbers of people who had chosen nothing, that it was taken in a war against a regime doing far worse, and that the men who took it did not afterwards claim it had been clean.
There was a review. I had not asked for one, and I did not know there would be one. It was Captain Kettering who asked for it, I found out afterwards. When Ridley went to him with my question on the Wednesday and the lieutenant showed him what the log showed, he wrote it all down in his notebook, and then he reported it upward and asked for it to be looked at by somebody who was not him. He did not have to.
It was held on the Monday, the twenty-fourth, in the farm kitchen, at the big table under the lamp where Garland had put his pencil on the map.
A major came from the divisional artillery to do it. His name was Ashby. He was a tall, tired, polite man of about forty with a thin moustache and a briefcase, and he arrived in a jeep at nine in the morning and set himself up at the end of the farmhouse table, with Captain Kettering beside him and a clerk at a little table by the fire with a typewriter.
Ridley had lined us up against the kitchen wall by then, the seven of us from No. 3 gun who had been on duty on the night of the fifteenth.
“Helmets off,” he said. “Answer what you’re asked.”
We stood with our helmets in our hands. The major looked along the line of us, and at Ridley, and at Lieutenant Garland, and at the captain, and told us what it was. I wrote it down that night, as near his words as I could get them.
“This is a review of the orders received by this battery on the night of fifteen July, of the battery’s records of the fire mission it carried out in response to them, and of the procedure followed by the crew of number three gun in carrying it out. It is not an inquiry into the conduct of operations generally, nor into the decisions of any formation above this battery. Its purpose is to establish whether the battery and the crew acted in accordance with their orders and with the prescribed procedure. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir,” we said.
He went through the orders first. Garland gave him the log and the message forms from battalion, and he read them all, slowly, turning the pages, and asked Garland things in a low voice that I could not hear from the wall.
Then he held out his hand. “Sergeant. The gun record.”
Ridley took Baca’s book out of his shirt and put it on the table.
“This is your hand?”
“Some of it, sir. It’s Corporal Baca’s book. I’ve kept it since the twelfth.”
“Since the twelfth?”
“Corporal Baca was wounded on the twelfth, sir.”
The major wrote that down. Then he laid the book beside the log and checked it, line by line, with a ruler and a pencil, the way Garland had for me. It took a long time. The clerk waited with his hands over the keys.
“The gun record agrees with the battery log,” the major said, at last, for the clerk, and the clerk typed it.
Then he called us to the table, one at a time.
Peter was third. I heard all of it from the wall.
“You laid the gun, Mercer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was every set of data checked?”
“Twice, sir. Every set. Twice.”
“Thank you.”
“Twice, sir,” said Peter again.
The major looked up at him. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you, Mercer.” And Peter came back and stood next to me against the wall, with his hands shut tight at his sides.
I was fourth.
“Name and number.”
I gave them.
“Your duty on the gun?”
“Loader, sir.”
“Were you the loader on the night of fifteen July?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you receive each order through your sergeant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was every round loaded in accordance with the drill?”
“Yes, sir.”
“To your knowledge, was there any misfire, any fault with the piece, any round loaded on a charge other than the one ordered?”
“No, sir.”
“Did any man of the crew, to your knowledge, depart from the prescribed procedure at any point during the mission?”
“No, sir.”
He wrote it down. The clerk typed it. It had taken about three minutes.
He put down his pen. “Thank you, Wheeler.”
I had decided, standing against the wall, that I would not ask. I heard myself do it anyway.
“Sir. Were there people in the village?”
He looked up. He did not look angry.
“That isn’t a question this review is constituted to answer, Private,” he said. And then, after a moment, more quietly: “I understand why you ask it.”
“Sir.”
“Thank you,” he said again, and I went back to the wall. Peter did not look at me. At the end of the line Ridley was looking at the fireplace.
When he had seen all of us, the major turned over the pages of Captain Kettering’s notebook, which the captain had given him with the rest. He stopped in the July entries. I was at the end of the wall nearest the table, and I could read the captain’s small careful hand upside down by then, the way I could read everybody’s. It was the twelfth.
No. 3 gun unmanned approx. 20 min. while casualties evacuated; Pte. Wheeler; no mission called in the interval.
“Twelfth July,” said the major. “The gun was unmanned for twenty minutes?”
“Mortar fire on the position, sir,” said Captain Kettering. “Two men of the section were wounded. They were getting them out. No mission was called in the interval.”
The major looked at it a while longer. Then he said, “That falls outside the scope,” and turned the page.
The finding was read out at the end, before the major left. He read it standing up, from the clerk’s typed sheet, and I wrote down the gist of it that night.
The battery received a properly transmitted order to fire on a target reported as enemy mortar positions at a stated reference. The battery’s records of the mission are complete and accurate and agree with one another. The crew of number three gun carried out the orders received, in accordance with the prescribed procedure, without departure from it. No further action is required in respect of the battery or the crew.
That was all.
When the major had gone, Captain Kettering came out into the yard, where we were standing about not knowing whether we were dismissed. He stood a moment with his notebook in his hand, and then came over to me.
“Wheeler.”
“Sir.”
“I’ve been through it all again myself, line by line,” he said, in his careful voice, not unkindly. “So has the major. It was properly done. Every round. There’s nothing more to find.” He paused. “I know it’s hard. But the matter’s settled now. You’ve done what you could, and so have we.”
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded, and went back into the kitchen, and I heard him say something to the lieutenant about the next day’s ammunition.
Ridley told me the other thing, that night.
I was sitting on the bank by the gun after dark, not doing anything, and he came and sat down beside me, which he had never done. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, looking straight ahead at the hedge:
“You asked a question this morning.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“I’m going to answer it. Once.”
I waited.
“I was at the command post on the fifteenth, before the call came. I’d gone over about the ammunition. I was standing at the end of the table when it came through from battalion, and I heard Garland read it back. The request from the infantry said the mortars were in the village. It said there were civilians still in the village, in the cellars. The infantry knew it. They’d been in and out of the place for two weeks and seen them. Battalion knew it. The note came with the call.” He was quiet a moment. “Somebody up the line decided the mortars were worth the risk. Not Garland. Not Kettering. Higher. I don’t know who.” He was quiet again. “That’s the answer. They knew.”
I could not think of anything to say. After a while I said, “Why are you telling me?”
“Because you asked.”
He got up. He stood there a moment, looking down at me in the dark.
“It doesn’t make it yours,” he said. “And it doesn’t make it not yours. Twenty-four years, and I don’t know what it makes it.”
He went back to his hole, and did not say it again, then or ever. I have never repeated it to anybody until now.
Two days later, on the Wednesday, I saw the sergeant at the water point at the crossroads, where the infantry came back to fill their cans and so did we. He was the one who had sat on our bank in the first week of July and said that’s Saint Owen, and they can keep it. He was at the next tap. He saw me and nodded, the way you nod at somebody you have seen once.
“Sergeant,” I said. “Saint Owen. Saint-Ouen. Did you go in on the Sunday? After the shelling on the Saturday night?”
“We went in.” He watched the water going into his can. “Sunday, first light. The sixteenth. After the barrage. Expecting a fight.” He shook his head. “Nothing. Nobody. Not a Frenchman in the place. Not a soldier, I mean. Just people in the cellars. And a dead man on some stairs in a shop. An old guy. We had to step over him.”
He did not know I knew who the dead man was, and I did not tell him.
“And no mortars,” he said. “That’s the joke.” He did not laugh. “That’s what the whole thing was for, the mortars. They’d been giving us hell all week, and somebody said they were in the village, and the whole damn division put a barrage on it. And we went in, and there weren’t any. No pits, no base plates, no ammunition, no nothing. They were never in there.”
“Where were they?”
“We found where they’d been the next week, I think. A mile on, in a wood, behind a farm. Or somebody’s. I don’t know. But they were never in the village.”
“Who said they were?”
He shrugged. “Somebody’s report. A patrol, an observer, the resistance, a guy who said he saw something. Wrong farm, wrong square on the map, something. I don’t know who. Nobody’s going to find out. It happens every day.” He screwed the cap onto his can. “Hell of a thing,” he said. “Those people.”
He picked up his can and went back up the road with it. I never saw him again, and I never learned his name.
So the review found a proper order, complete records, and a crew that did what it was told, by the book. All true. I was the loader.
It did not ask whether there were people in the village. There were, and the officers knew it.
It did not ask whether the mortars were there. They were not.
It did not ask whose shell came into the shop a little after eleven. Nobody can ever know that.
I had tried to talk to Peter about the finding the night of the review, in the lane, before Ridley came to the bank. Peter had a pencil and a sheet of paper on his knee.
“It’s what I expected,” he said. “It did what it said it would do.”
“That’s all?”
“What else is there?” He wrote something. “Soap. The committee won’t have soap. A coat for the old woman, for the winter. Paper and envelopes, so that Lucien can write, if he wants to. To anybody.”
“Peter.”
“I’ve written to my mother for some of it already.” He looked at the list. “Do you think a parcel sent through the committee would reach them?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll find out,” he said.
I tried again the next night and got the same list, longer.
He found out. The parcels reached them. I learned that in the autumn, and not from him.
On the morning of the twenty-fifth the battery was ordered to be ready to move at an hour’s notice. In the afternoon the sky to the west filled with bombers, more than I had ever seen, going over towards the line in a long roar that lasted for an hour. It was the beginning of the breakout.
Brandauer stood in the ammunition pit with his head back. Hollis started counting them out loud and stopped.
“Get the gun ready to move,” said Ridley.