Boston Day

By October we were in the north, in the coal country, where the fields are flat and brown and go on until they meet the sky, and the towns are black brick, and there are hills that are not hills but heaps of slag from the mines, grey and steep and bare, standing up out of the beet fields like something left behind.

“I don’t like it,” said Brandauer, the first morning, looking at them.

“They’re only slag,” said Hollis.

“I know what they are. I don’t like them. Nothing grows.”

It rained. It rained the way it had rained in Devon, every day, steady and grey, and the beet fields turned to mud and the roads turned to mud, and the war, which had been running for two months, slowed down and stopped. We heard about the Scheldt the way we heard about everything, from the signals corporal mending a wire.

“Gone wrong,” he said, up the pole, with the rain running off his helmet. “Up at the mouth of the Rhine. They tried to bounce the crossings, the whole lot, in one go, and it didn’t come off.”

“How bad?” said Peter.

“Bad enough. They’re saying the Dutch in the west are cut off for the winter now. The French still have them.” He twisted a wire. “They’re saying somebody was in a hurry.”

“Who?” said Dunne.

“Somebody with stars on,” said the corporal, and came down the pole.

---

The nineteenth of October was a Thursday. It was Boston Day.

At home it is the day for the dead, for all of them, every war since the Peace in 1779, and in Lexington there is a service on the Common in the morning, by the old stone, and the names of the men from the town are read out, all of them, from Eli’s war on, and it takes a long time. My father goes every year and stands at the back and does not sing. I had never thought about it much. In the coal country, in the rain, Captain Kettering thought about it, and at eleven in the morning he stood the battery in a row in the yard of the farm where the guns were, with the rain coming down, and took his helmet off.

“Boston Day,” he said. “I’m going to read the names of the men of this battery we’ve lost. Then we’ll have a minute. Then we’ll go back to work.”

He read them. There were seven. I had not known it was seven. Prentice, from the beach, and the man beside him in the truck, whose name I had never known and learned then, Kowalski. Two from the second section in the hedges, whom I had seen and not known. One from the fourth section, a corporal, at the Seine. Two from the ammunition section, in a truck on a road in September. He read them in his careful voice, with their towns: Bangor, Maine. Scranton. Two from Iowa. And he did not read Baca’s or Gaines’s, because they were not dead.

Then we stood for a minute. The rain came down on the yard. A cow lowed somewhere in a barn. When the minute was over the captain put his helmet on.

“Thank you,” he said. “Carry on.”

---

The General came that afternoon. He came in a car this time, a big dark one, with Harris driving, and no Frenchmen, and he got out of it in the yard in a greatcoat with the collar up, and he looked smaller than ever, and tired.

“Ridley.”

“General.”

“I’m going,” the General said. “Tomorrow. They’ve found somebody for the liaison. A brigadier. A good one, God help him. I’m to go back to Cairo and sit at the desk I came from.” He looked round the yard at the guns, and at us, and at the rain. “I wanted to say goodbye. Is there coffee?”

There was coffee. We were in the barn by then, because of the rain, a big brick barn with half its roof gone at one end, where the section was billeted on the straw, and the General sat down on a bale with the mug and his greatcoat steaming, and Brandauer stood by him with the pot.

“Wheeler,” the General said.

“Sir.”

“I’ve been through Ferrers’s boxes. All four. Twice.” He looked at the mug. “There’s nothing about Saint-Ouen on the fifteenth of July. Nothing about mortars there. Nothing from that night at all, from that part of the line. Either it didn’t come through us, or it came through and nobody wrote it down. Ferrers says it didn’t come through. I believe him. He’s a careful man.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I went to battalion. They have the call from the infantry. They have the reference. They don’t have who made it. I went to the infantry company. The captain who sent the call is dead; he was killed at the end of July. His lieutenant says it came up from a forward post. The men at the forward post have been moved, or wounded, or are somewhere in Belgium. I’ve written to division.” He turned the mug round in his hands. “Division hasn’t answered. Division won’t.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So I haven’t found him.” He looked up at me. “I’ll keep looking. From Cairo, if I have to. I write a great many letters. I don’t promise anything.”

“No, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me,” said the General. “I haven’t done anything.” He drank. “And your letter got there. The Morels have gone from the school. They’re with a cousin, a widow, in a village called Saint-Martin, four miles from their own. The boy came to the school and collected it himself. The committee woman told my man so.” He looked at me. “He didn’t send an answer. I wouldn’t expect one. Not yet.”

“No, sir.”

“Not yet,” said the General again, and looked at me a moment longer, and then turned to Peter.

---

“Mercer.”

Peter was on the straw by the wall with the limber beside him. He stood up.

“Sir.”

“Sit down, for God’s sake. Where’s your university?”

“Columbus, sir. Ohio.”

“Who teaches history there?”

Peter told him. The General took a little notebook out of his greatcoat and wrote it down.

“I’m going to write to him,” he said. “Don’t look like that. I’m not going to tell him you’re a genius; I don’t know that you are. I’m going to tell him that you were the only man in Normandy who argued with me about Joan of Arc and was right, and that you’ve read my book twice and still argue with it, which shows independence of mind and possibly poor judgement.” He put the notebook away. “And you’re going to write to me.”

“Sir?”

“Every month. Tell me what you’re reading. I’ll tell you why it’s wrong.” He wrote an address on a page of the notebook and tore it out and held it out. “That will find me. Most things do, eventually.”

Peter took it in both hands, the way he had taken the book in August. He did not say anything. His face was doing something it never did.

“Write,” said the General. “That’s an order, Private. The only one I’ve ever given you, and you’ll notice it isn’t about the gun.”

---

He went at four. The rain had stopped. He stood in the yard by the car with Ridley, the two of them, the way they had stood by the gun above the Seine, and smoked a cigarette each, and did not say much.

“Don’t get killed, Ridley.”

“No, sir.”

“You said that on the coast road.”

“I didn’t get killed on the coast road.”

“No,” said the General. “Only in the leg.” He dropped the cigarette and stood on it. “I’ll be back, I think. In the spring. They’ll want somebody for Paris who speaks French and doesn’t mind being shot at, and they’ll look round the room, and I’ll be the one who hasn’t left.” He held out his hand. “Look after them.”

“I do.”

“I know you do,” said the General. He got into the car. Harris started it. The General wound the window down. “Wheeler. Keep asking. Mercer. Write. Brandauer, thank you for the coffee. It was terrible. Every cup.”

Brandauer grinned all over his face. The car went out of the yard and down the black brick road between the slag heaps and was gone.

---

It started in the barn that night, and I started it.

We were on the straw, the section, in our blankets, with one lantern hanging from a beam and the rain starting again on the half of the roof that was left. Hollis and Szabo and Dunne were asleep. Brandauer was snoring. Peter was sitting up under the lantern with the General’s address in his hands, looking at it.

“He didn’t find him,” I said.

Peter looked up. “No.”

“Four boxes. Battalion. The infantry. Division. And nothing.”

“He said he’d keep looking.”

“I know what he said.”

Peter folded the address and put it in his shirt. “Then that’s that, Wheeler. For now. You’ve done what you can.”

“Kettering said that. In the yard, after the review.”

“Kettering was right.”

“Was he?”

Peter took his glasses off. He did not polish them. He held them. “What do you want? He’s been through the boxes. He’s been to battalion. The captain’s dead and the rest are in Belgium. What do you want that he hasn’t done?”

“I want to know.”

“You can’t know.”

“I know I can’t.” My voice was going up, and I let it. “‘It’s done, Wheeler. It’s finished.’ In that field by the orchard. You were cleaning the sight.”

“And at the fountain I said it wasn’t.”

“And that evening you were back at the sight.”

“Somebody has to be.” He was not shouting. He never shouted. He was very quiet and very fast, the way he had been at the cart and at the gun on the twelfth. “You think it’s put away for me? I carried the old woman into that barn.” He stopped. “She weighed nothing.”

I did not say anything.

“Every number,” Peter said. “Twice. And you stand there with the round in your arms. Every time. Two seconds. Like a man at a grave.” His hands were shaking. He looked at them, and put them between his knees.

The rain came down on the roof. Brandauer had stopped snoring.

“Who decides it’s over?” I said.

“What?”

“Kettering decided it was settled. The major decided the review was finished. You decided in July, and took it back at the fountain. Who gets to decide, Peter?”

He looked at me for a long time.

“Nobody,” he said. “One day there’s something else to do, and you do it. You don’t notice you’ve stopped till afterwards.”

“Eli dropped his musket at Kip’s Bay,” I said. “It still comes up at supper.”

“That’s not the same.”

“No. But it isn’t over.”

“Then you’ll be slow on the breech for the rest of the war,” said Peter, “and Ridley will take you off it. And I’ll have Hollis loading, who’s a good man and doesn’t care where anything goes.” His voice went. He put his glasses back on, fast. “I’d rather have you.”

I sat on the straw and looked at my hands.

“You’ve got the gun,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I’ve got the village.”

“I know you have,” said Peter.

Neither of us said anything for a long time. The lantern swung a little on its beam in the draught. Somewhere in the dark of the barn, Brandauer turned over on the straw, and said, quite clearly, in the voice of a man who has been awake for some time:

“The cows know.”

Then he went back to sleep, or pretended to.

Peter laughed. It was not much of a laugh. I did too. We lay down on the straw, a yard apart, and listened to the rain.

---

The telephone rang at six in the morning. A mission, in the rain, for the infantry in front, who were going in at dawn on a village beyond the slag heaps. Ridley stood by the gun with his pad and his collar up and said the numbers.

Peter laid the gun. He said each number back, under his breath, and checked it twice, the way he always did.

“Set.”

“Load,” said Ridley.

Brandauer handed me the round. I took it. I turned and put it in the breech and pushed it home with my fist and the rammer, and swung the block across, and stepped back.

“Loaded.”

“Fire.”

The gun fired. The case came out and rolled in the mud. Brandauer had the next round in my arms before it had stopped rolling, and Peter was already at the sight for the correction, and Ridley was saying the numbers, and I loaded it, and the one after that.

We fired twelve rounds. I did not stand with any of them. When it was over, and the barrel was ticking in the rain, Peter sat back on his heels by the trail and wiped the sight, and looked up at me.

“You were quick,” he said.

“So were you.”

“I’m always quick.”

“Not at the fountain.”

He looked at me. Then he held out the water can, the way he used to, before July.

I took it. I drank. I gave it back.