Book Four: The Gunner's Line Part Six: The Capital Characters
Chapter Twenty-seven
Inconnu
James Wheeler. The northern edge of Paris. Friday, 13 April 1945.
What is hardest to hold is that the crime required no monsters, only a bureaucracy.
The doctor wanted the dead in the ground before dark on the Wednesday.
“Division has nobody else until Friday,” said Captain Kettering, in the morning, by No. 3 gun, with his notebook shut. “The infantry have gone on past the old fortifications and we’re out of range of most of it till noon. Nos. 1 and 2 stay on call. No. 3 to the burial. Lieutenant Garland has the place.”
“Sir,” said Ridley.
The place was a piece of waste ground beyond the water tower, between the end of the yard and the road, nettles and old sleepers and a burned-out truck on its side. Garland had pegged it out with tent pegs and a length of signal wire. A long trench, forty metres, Garland said, and as wide as a man is tall.
“How deep, sir?” said Ridley.
“The doctor says two metres.”
Ridley looked at the pegs, and then at the building.
“Deeper,” he said.
There were cinders on top, a hand deep, and under the cinders clay, yellow, and then stones. We dug in our shirts. Nobody talked. Dunne dug faster than any of us, and did not stop when Ridley told him to the first time, and Ridley had to say it again and take hold of the handle of his shovel.
“Water, Dunne.”
“I’m all right, Sergeant.”
“I didn’t ask you. Water.”
Dunne went and drank from the can and came back and started again, slower.
At ten we started bringing them up.
Hollis went first, down the cellar steps of the end staircase, with a blanket from the trucks over his shoulder. He did not say anything to me this time. I went down after him.
I am going to put down only what I have to. They were on the floor of the cellar, in rows, where the others had put them as they died, and the others had covered their faces with whatever there was, a coat, a shirt, a page of newspaper. We carried them up in the blankets, two men to a blanket, up the cellar steps into the light and along the yard and out through the gate to the trench. They weighed nothing, most of them.
Brandauer carried with me. On the stairs he looked at the coats. Every one. Once, at the bottom, he turned back the collar of a coat on a small woman and looked at it, and put it back the way it had been, and took the other end of the blanket.
Monsieur Darras stood at the head of the trench with an exercise book. He was one of the Council’s men who had come with the General on the Tuesday, a schoolmaster from Saint-Denis with a tricolour armband and a fountain pen, and he wanted every one of them written down. Peter stood beside him. As each one came he knelt and went through the pockets, the way Darras had asked him to, for papers, a letter, a name sewn in a collar, anything.
Most of them had nothing. The papers had been taken at the gate when they came in, Peter said, and put in boxes in the gatehouse, and the boxes were the ones in the stove.
Darras wrote in the exercise book every time, in a small square hand. After the fourth or fifth I asked Peter what he was writing.
Peter read it to me off the page. “Inconnu. Homme. Environ quarante ans.” He did not look up. “Unknown. Man. About forty.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s what we know.”
Darras wrote it again for the next one, and the next. Inconnu. Femme. Environ soixante ans. Inconnu. Inconnu. Enfant. Sometimes Peter found something, a letter in a coat lining, a name on the back of a photograph, and then Darras wrote the name instead, slowly, and asked Peter to spell it twice, and blotted it.
The chaplain came at noon in a jeep, Captain Hale, from division, a Methodist from Kansas with a long face and a book. He stood at the end of the trench with his book shut and looked at it for some time.
“Mercer,” he said. “You’re the one with the French. Do you know what they were? What church?”
“No, sir. All of them, Mr Darras says. And some none.”
The chaplain looked at the trench a while longer.
“Then I’ll read it,” he said, “and anybody who has something else can say it after.”
He read it. “I am the resurrection and the life.” His voice went out over the waste ground and the sidings, not loud. We stood at the side of the trench with our caps off and the shovels at our feet, and the people who could walk had come out of the gate and stood behind us, a crowd of them, in their blankets.
When he had finished, an old man came forward from among them. He was very thin and had a cap on, and he did not take it off. He stood at the edge of the trench and said something in a language that was not French and was not German either, a long prayer, quick, rocking a little on his feet, and some of the people behind us said the end of it with him.
Then a man with a brown face and a grey stubble came and stood where the old man had stood, and held his hands open in front of him, and said something in Arabic, short, and drew his hands down over his face.
Then the priest from the town, who had come on a bicycle at eleven and stood all this time at the back holding it, came forward and said the Latin, and made the sign of the cross over the trench.
Nobody stopped anybody. When the priest had done, the chaplain nodded to Ridley, and Ridley picked up his shovel.
We filled it in.
Darras stood at the head of it with the exercise book until the end. When the last of the clay was on, he wrote something at the bottom of the page and blotted it and shut the book, and put the fountain pen in his pocket.
“What did he write?” said Dunne.
Peter asked him.
“The date,” said Peter. “And the place. And that they were buried by the American soldiers.” He picked up his shovel. “He says, so that it’s known who did it.”
Brandauer sat on the running board of the ammunition truck afterwards with his boots off and his feet in a bucket.
“She was not anywhere,” he said.
I sat down beside him.
“Not in the building. Not in the hospital tents. I went and looked at the tents this morning, all of them. Not in the cellar.” He looked at the water in the bucket. “Not anywhere.”
“The register, maybe.”
“Peter looked. Last night. I asked him.” Brandauer moved his feet in the water. “There are many Rivkas.”
The families started coming in the afternoon.
Nobody had told them. It went round the northern districts the way news goes, from door to door, and by three o’clock they were coming along the road from the south and the west, on foot, women mostly, some old men, a few on bicycles, one with a handcart with nothing in it.
Baca had copied his list out fair in the night, in capitals, by the flashlight with the red rag, and in the morning the cooks had given him the lid of a packing case and he had pinned the sheets to it and propped it against the gatepost. The families stood in front of it in a crowd and read it. They read it with their fingers, down the columns, slowly, the ones at the front, and the ones at the back waited, and nobody pushed.
A woman in a green hat found a name. She did not say anything. She made a noise, one, like somebody who has been hit, and put her hand flat on the sheet over the name, and then she turned round and looked at us, at Baca on his box and Peter beside him, and Peter pointed to the hospital tents, and she ran. An orderly caught her up at the tents and took her in.
That was one.
Most of them read the list and did not find anything. They read it again from the top. Some of them read it three times, and then stood back from it and let the next ones in, and stood in the road and looked at the building. Some of them came back to the board an hour later and read it again.
A man in an overcoat with a black band on the sleeve asked for the register. Darras took him into the gatehouse. They were in there ten minutes. When they came out the man stood by the gate for a while with his hat in his hand. Then he said “Merci, monsieur” to Darras, and shook his hand, and walked back down the road the way he had come.
“What did it say?” I said to Peter.
“What it says for all of them,” said Peter. “A date. And the number of a train.”
A woman came up to me at the gate with a photograph. She was holding it out in front of her in both hands and saying something to me in French, quickly, and I did not understand any of it. The photograph was of a girl of about sixteen, with dark hair in a ribbon, laughing, in a summer dress, in front of a hedge.
I looked at it for a long time. Then I shook my head.
The woman held it out a moment longer. Then she took it back and went on to Szabo, who was by the water cans, and held it out to him, and he looked at it and shook his head, and she went on to the next man.
The General came on the Thursday morning, with Harris in the car this time and two of the Council’s men, and the new mayor of the town, a man the committee had put into the town hall on Tuesday, in a suit that was too big for him and a sash.
“At two o’clock,” said the General, to Ridley, at the gate, “every grown man and woman in the town is going to walk through this camp. In at the gate, round the yard, past the gatehouse, out to the grave, and home. The Council asked for it. The general agreed. The mayor’s posted it on the door of the town hall and sent a man round with a drum.”
“Will they come, sir?” said Ridley.
“The mayor thinks so.”
“Do you?”
The General looked at the building.
“Some of them,” he said. “The ones who didn’t know will come because they want to see. The ones who did know will come because it’ll be noticed who didn’t.” He pulled his gloves off. “I’d like your section on the gate, Ridley. Keep them walking. Not fast. They’re to see it.”
“Sir.”
“And nobody is to touch them. Whatever anybody says. Ours or theirs.”
They came at two.
They came along the road from the town in a long line, two and three abreast, men in their hats and their Sunday overcoats, women with handbags, some with shopping baskets, as if they had come on the way to somewhere else, an old couple arm in arm, a man on two sticks. Several hundred of them. There were gendarmes at the front, the new ones, with armbands over their old uniforms, and the mayor in his sash, and they stopped at the gate, and the mayor looked at the General, and the General nodded, and they came in.
They came in talking. By the time they got to the second staircase they had stopped.
We stood along the route, the section, one man every twenty yards or so, and kept them moving. They went round the yard past the staircases, and the people who had not yet gone to the hospital sat on the steps of the staircases in their blankets and watched them go by, and did not say anything. They went past the gatehouse, where the door stood open and the register lay open on the desk where it had been left, at the last page, and every one of them looked in. They had to. It was in the way.
A woman fainted by the third staircase. She went down without a sound, in her good coat, and Dunne got to her before she hit the ground and caught her under the arms and sat her on the step. A woman from the camp who was sitting on the step moved up to make room for her. After a minute the woman from the town got up, and looked at the woman from the camp, and went on.
A man stopped by Peter at the gatehouse. He was a man of about fifty, in a grey hat, with a moustache, the kind of man who keeps a shop. He said something to Peter, low and quick.
Peter did not answer him.
“What’d he say?” said Dunne, from the next post.
“He says they didn’t know,” said Peter.
There was a woman from the camp sitting on the gatehouse step, an old woman, with a blanket round her and her hair cut off short. She had been sitting there since the morning. She looked up at the man in the grey hat and said something to him, five or six words, not loud.
The man stood still.
“She says,” said Peter, “‘You heard the trains.’”
The man looked at her. Then he went on round the yard with the others, walking, not fast.
The yard clerk came through in the middle of the line, in a dark suit and a black tie, with a woman beside him who held his arm. He did not look at the gatehouse. He looked at the ground in front of his feet the whole way round the yard. When he passed Ridley’s post at the gate he lifted his eyes once and saw Ridley, and touched his hat, the way he had on the track, and went on.
Ridley did not do anything.
At the grave, at the far end of the route, Szabo had the post. A man stopped at the edge of the trench with his hat on. He was a big man in a good coat with a fur collar, and he stood looking at the clay with his hat on his head and his hands in his pockets, and Szabo took a step towards him.
“Szabo,” said Ridley, from the gate. Not loud.
Szabo stopped.
The man looked at Szabo. Then he looked back at the trench. Then he took his hands out of his pockets, and took off his hat, slowly, and held it, and stood there a while longer, and went out to the road.
The General stood by the gate with Ridley for the last hour, watching them come out.
“Every one of them will tell their grandchildren they didn’t know,” the General said. “Some of them will be telling the truth.”
“Which ones?” said Ridley.
“That’s the trouble,” said the General.
The news came on the Friday morning at six, down the telephone from battalion.
Lieutenant Garland came out of the signal box, where he had the command post, and walked across the cinders to the guns. He walked the way Kettering had walked back from the gate on the Tuesday. He stopped at No. 3 gun because it was the nearest.
“The Prime Minister’s dead,” he said.
Nobody said anything.
“Roosevelt?” said Dunne.
“Yesterday. At Charter House. They say it was very quick.” Garland looked at the paper in his hand. “The Governor-General has sent for Truman.”
“Who’s Truman?” said Hollis.
“The deputy,” said Peter. “From Missouri.”
“I never heard of him.”
“Nobody has,” said Peter.
Garland went on to No. 2 with his paper.
Ridley took his cap off. He stood by the gun with it in his hand and did not say anything. After a moment Baca, on his box, took his off too, and then the rest of us, one after another, standing on the cinders round the gun in the grey light, and nobody said what for.
“He’s the only one I remember,” said Dunne. “I was three when he came in.”
“My old man’s got his picture in the kitchen,” said Szabo. “Over the stove. Next to the Pope.” He turned his cap round in his hands. “He’ll put a black ribbon on it. He’ll put a black ribbon on it and he’ll cry, and my mother’ll tell him to stop, and he won’t.”
“He came to Phoenix,” said Baca. “In ‘thirty-six. On the train. My mother took us down to see him go by. He waved at the whole platform. My mother said he waved at her.”
“Did he?”
“Everybody’s mother said that,” said Baca.
The woman from the gatehouse step was in the yard. She had been there since the morning before, and the orderlies had tried twice to take her to the tents and she had not gone. She had heard us. She had seen the caps come off. She got up off the step with her blanket round her and came across the yard and out through the gate, very slowly, across the cinders and over the rails, and stopped in front of Peter.
She asked him something.
Peter told her.
She looked at Ridley, standing by the gun with his cap in his hand. She went to him, and stood in front of him, and said something, quietly.
Ridley looked at Peter.
“She says she’s sorry,” said Peter. “For your loss.”
Ridley stood there with the cap.
“Tell her thank you,” he said.