Matross

We crossed the Seine on a bridge the engineers had built in the night, a long floating road of steel boats with planks across them, and it moved under the truck the whole way over, the way a hay wagon moves on soft ground.

“Don’t look down,” said Szabo.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a river,” said Szabo, “and we’re on it.”

Dunne looked down. He went green and held on to the side of the truck, and Szabo patted his back, and the truck lurched and the gun behind us swung on its hook and came straight again, and then we were over, on the far bank, in a town with no windows, and the river was behind us. Downstream there was a city on the bank, big, with church towers, and smoke coming out of it in three places, rising slowly and leaning over in the wind.

“Rouen,” said Peter. “They burned Joan of Arc there.”

“Who did?” said Dunne.

“The English.”

“I thought the English were on our side.”

“They are now,” said Peter. “It was a long time ago. Everybody’s been on everybody’s side at some point. That’s what history is.”

“Doesn’t sound much like a subject,” said Szabo.

“It isn’t,” said Peter. “It’s a warning.”

---

The mail came at the first halt on the far side, in an orchard on a slope above the river, and there was one for me from my mother and one in a hand I did not know, from England.

I read my mother’s first. I always do. It was three pages, close, both sides, the way she writes when she has saved it up.

“What’s the news?” said Brandauer, who always asked, because he liked to hear about the cows.

“My father’s done his back.”

“Bad?”

“Lifting a sack of feed.” I turned the page. “She says he won’t see the doctor. She says he’s walking like a question mark and pretending he isn’t. They’ve had to take on a man. Full time. A man called Lyons from Bedford.”

“Is he any good?”

“She says he’s a good worker but he talks to the cows.”

“So do I,” said Brandauer.

“She says he talks to them about politics.”

Brandauer thought about it. “That’s not good for them,” he said seriously. “What does he pay?”

“She doesn’t say. She says hay’s gone to thirty-two quid a ton, in Boston, which is robbery, and my father says he’ll sell the second cut standing before he takes thirty-two for it, and she says he’s being foolish and he knows it.” I read the next bit and stopped.

“What?”

“Nothing.” It was about the wall along the brook. She said my father had gone down to look at the wall in August and stood there a long time and come back and said he would leave it till I was home. She said she did not know why that should make her cry, but it had.

I folded the letter and put it in my shirt.

The other one was from Gaines. It was one page, in pencil, in a small upright hand, from a hospital in the south of England.

Wheeler. Back is mending. They say I will keep the lung, though I will not be running for Parliament. Socks dry. English nurses very kind and the food very bad, which you will already know. Tell Baca if you see him that I loaded the right number and he wrote the wrong one. Tell Brandauer not to milk anything that is not his. Tell Mercer to look after his hands. W. G.

I read it out. Brandauer laughed until he had to sit down. Peter, on the trail, looked at his hands, and then put them in his pockets.

---

The motorcycle came up the slope in the middle of the afternoon.

We heard it this time before we saw it. Ridley was standing by the gun with Baca’s book open on the shield, and he did not look round, but he closed the book.

“Here’s your friend, Sergeant,” said Hollis.

“He’s not my friend.”

“He’s somebody’s friend,” said Szabo, “and he’s coming up here.”

The General came over the top of the slope on the motorcycle with the same two Frenchmen behind him on the other machine, and no car this time, and stopped by the truck, and got off. He was dustier than before, and thinner, and his face was burned darker, and there was a cut on his chin that had been stitched.

“Ridley.”

“General.”

“I was passing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I was not passing,” said the General. “I came twelve miles out of my way, and Harris is furious, and I’ve left him with the committee at Elbeuf, where he’ll be furious for an hour and then useful.” He sat down on an ammunition box, as he had the first time, as though it was his box. “Is there coffee?”

There was coffee. Brandauer had it in his hands before anybody asked.

“Thank you, Brandauer,” the General said.

Brandauer went red to the ears. “You remember my name, sir.”

“You told me it. A month ago.” The General drank. “And Mercer. And Hollis, and Szabo, and the boy, Dunne. And that one.” He looked at me. “You didn’t tell me your name. You stood by the shield and looked as if you wanted to say something and didn’t say it.”

“Wheeler, sir.”

“Wheeler.” He looked at me over the mug. “What did you want to say?”

I did not answer at once. Ridley was looking at me. Peter was looking at me. I could feel them.

“Sir,” I said. “It’s about a village.”

---

I told him. He sat on the ammunition box with the coffee and waited, the way Peter waited, the way the King had waited in front of the woman on the church steps. Saint-Ouen. The fifteenth of July. The mortars in the report. Forty-four rounds. The record. Auguste on the stairs. The sergeant at the water point. No mortars.

He did not interrupt. When I had finished he sat for a while with the mug in his hands.

“The fifteenth of July,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“That was Ferrers’s month. I came on the twenty-eighth.” He turned the mug round. “Ferrers kept files. He was a careful man; he’s in a hospital in Hampshire with half a foot, and he wrote to me last week to ask whether I was keeping them properly. I’m not. They’re in four tin boxes in a schoolroom in Bayeux.” He looked up. “Do you know who made the report?”

“No, sir. Nobody does. The sergeant said a patrol, or an observer, or the resistance, or a man who said he saw something.”

“Yes,” said the General. “That’s the list. I’ve had that list read to me before.” He was quiet. “I’ll look.”

“Sir?”

“In Ferrers’s boxes. And at battalion, and at division, if they’ll let me, which they won’t, at first. I’ll look for who said there were mortars in Saint-Ouen on the fifteenth of July.” He put the mug down on the ground between his boots. “I’m not promising to find him. I’m telling you I’ll look.”

“Why, sir?”

He looked at me for a long moment with those pale eyes.

“I send the numbers now,” he said. He picked up the mug again and found it empty and held it out, and Brandauer filled it.

---

“The family,” the General said. “The Morels. Where are they?”

“At the relief centre, sir. In the school in the town where the King was. In June. Or they were.”

“Which town?”

I told him as near as I could. He nodded; he knew it.

“Have you written to them?”

“No, sir. I don’t know how it would get there.”

“Write,” said the General. “Now, if you like. Give it to me. The committees take my letters, because I take theirs. It’ll be in that school by Friday.” He looked at me. “If they’re still there. If they’re not, somebody in that school will know where they’ve gone, and it’ll follow them.”

“Sir, I don’t know what to write.”

“No,” said the General. “Nobody ever does. Write it anyway.”

So I sat on the trail of the gun with Peter’s pad on my knee, in an orchard above the Seine, with Lawrence of Arabia drinking our coffee six feet away, and tried to write to Lucien.

It took me half an hour. I wrote it in English, plain, because his English was better than my French. I said where we were. I said that I hoped his mother was well, and his grandmother, and that the roof would be mended before the winter. I said that I did not know if he wanted to hear from me and that he need not answer. I said that I would come and buy the eggs, after, if he would sell them to me. I did not say anything about his father. I wrote it three times and tore up the first two, and Peter, who could see what I was doing from the corner of his eye, did not say anything at all.

I gave it to the General folded, without an envelope, because I did not have one. He put it inside his tunic without reading it.

“Friday,” he said.

---

He stayed an hour, the first of many, and he spent most of it arguing with Peter. I had never seen anybody argue with Peter and enjoy it.

It started with Rouen.

“Joan of Arc,” said the General, looking at the smoke. “Mercer, you were telling them about Joan of Arc. I heard you as I came up the hill.”

Peter went brick red. “Yes, sir.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That the English burned her there.”

“Did they?”

Peter looked at him. “Sir?”

“The English had her tried,” said the General. “By a French court. French bishops. A French judge. They handed her to the English to be burned, and the English burned her, and everybody’s blamed the English ever since because it’s simpler.” He drank his coffee. “That’s history too.”

“With respect, sir,” said Peter, and I saw his chin come up, “the English paid for the trial. And the English held the town. It wouldn’t have happened without them.”

“Quite right,” said the General. “So who did it?”

“Both,” said Peter.

“Both,” said the General. “Now you’re a historian.” He put the mug down. “Most people choose one. It’s more comfortable. What are you going to do after this, Mercer?”

“Go back to the university, sir. If they’ll have me. History.”

“Research?”

“I’d like to.”

“Then go back and do it,” said the General. “Don’t do what I did.”

“What did you do, sir?”

“I wrote a book about myself,” said the General, “and spent forty years being less interesting than it.”

Peter laughed out loud, and then stopped.

They went on. They argued about the Normans, and about whether Rollo had been a king or a bandit, and the General said that the difference was mostly a matter of how long you held on to what you took; and about the Duke, and the referendum the Normans had been promised, and whether people should be allowed to decide what country they belonged to.

“They should decide,” said the General. “And then live with what they’ve decided.”

“And if they decide wrongly?” said Peter.

“Then it’s theirs,” said the General. “That’s the whole of it. It’s theirs. I told a prince that once, in a tent, in 1918. He didn’t like it either.”

I thought of Madeleine Morel by the cart, tying the chair on. I did not say anything. Peter looked at me, and then away, at the river.

---

Ridley did not say much the whole hour. He stood by the gun. Once, when Peter and the General had got onto something about crusader castles that none of the rest of us could follow, I saw the General look over at Ridley and Ridley look back, and something passed between them that I could not read, the way something passes between my father and old Munroe at the fence without either of them saying anything.

When the General got up to go, he went over to Ridley.

“How’s the leg?”

“It aches when it’s going to rain.”

“It always is going to rain,” said the General. “In this country.” He held out a packet of cigarettes. Ridley took one. The General took one. They stood by the gun and smoked, the two of them, not saying anything, looking down the slope at the river.

“You should have been a sergeant-major by now,” the General said.

“They offered.”

“And?”

“I said I’d rather have a gun.”

The General laughed, the short surprised laugh. “So would I,” he said. “They never offered me one.”

---

It was Dunne, of all of us, who started it about Eli. He had heard me say once, in the lane, that there had been a Wheeler in the old war in the artillery, and when the General was pulling his goggles on Dunne said:

“Wheeler’s family was in the artillery, sir. In the Four-Year War.”

I could have killed him. The General stopped with the goggles on his forehead.

“Were they?”

“One of them, sir,” I said. “My great-great-great-grandfather. Eli.”

“Whose artillery?”

“Crane’s, sir. Colonel Crane’s. Massachusetts.”

“Rank?”

“Matross, sir.” I felt my face go hot. “On paper. The family says he was a gunner. The captain made him one at Monmouth, after the gunner died in the heat, and it never got to the paymaster. So it says matross on his discharge, and on his pay, and nobody knows if he was ever paid at all.”

The General took the goggles off again.

“A matross,” he said. “Who was really a gunner.”

“Yes, sir. The family says.”

“And the army wrote him down as something he wasn’t, and didn’t pay him for what he was.” The General looked at me, and his face did the crooked thing, up one side. “The army got my name wrong for thirteen years, Wheeler. Ross. Shaw. Aircraftman. Private. It’s quite usual.” He pulled the goggles down. “What was he like? Your matross.”

“I don’t know, sir. Not really. He dropped his musket at Kip’s Bay and ran, and they charged it to his pay. That’s what the family tells. And then he went back, in the artillery.” I stopped. “My grandfather used to say it was because it’s harder to drop a cannon.”

“Is it?” said the General.

“Yes, sir. I’ve tried.”

He laughed at that, properly, and kicked the motorcycle into life.

“He liked order, I expect,” he said, over the engine. “Your matross. Everything in its turn.” He looked at me through the goggles. “So do you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So did I,” said the General. “Once. Friday, Wheeler. The letter.” And he went off down the slope, fast, with the Frenchmen after him, and over the top of the hill towards Elbeuf and the furious Harris, and the dust settled in the orchard.

---

Nobody said anything for a while.

“He’s coming back,” said Brandauer. “You can tell. He likes it here.”

“He likes the coffee,” said Szabo.

“He likes the sergeant,” said Hollis.

Ridley, by the gun, opened Baca’s book again on the shield and did not look up.

“Clean the sight, Mercer,” he said.

“It’s clean, Sergeant.”

“Clean it anyway.”

Peter cleaned it. I sat on the trail with my mother’s letter in my shirt and Gaines’s in my pocket. Lucien’s was in the General’s tunic, going down the road to Elbeuf.