Book Four: The Gunner's Line Part Six: The Capital Characters
Chapter Twenty-eight
The Detachment
James Wheeler. Saint-Denis, north of Paris. Thursday, 19 April 1945.
The regime that had ruled by terror had nothing to fall back on once terror failed; its armies broke, its administration dissolved, and the Allied spearheads drove into a capital where the apparatus of tyranny was already collapsing from within.
The detachment came on the Saturday morning, the fourteenth, in a long line of trucks along the road by the yard.
A company of infantry from the reserve, the first we had seen in three days who had not come from the fighting, in clean jackets, with their rifles slung. A field hospital, with its tents rolled on the trucks, and nurses, and a cook with his own stove. And a major from the military government, a short man with a briefcase and a fountain pen, who got down from the cab of the first truck and stood in the road and looked at the building for some time before he looked at anything else.
The first thing the infantry did was cut the wire.
They did it without being told. A sergeant walked along the fence with the wire-cutters from his truck and started at the corner by the first tower, and his men came after him and pulled it down in lengths and rolled it up, and when they had it rolled they did not know where to put it, so they carried it across the sidings and threw it into one of the wagons, the rolls of it one after another, until the wagon was full. Then they pulled the towers down with a truck and a chain.
The people in the yard watched them do it from the steps of the staircases.
“Sergeant Ridley,” said Captain Kettering. “The major wants the gatehouse.”
“Sir.”
Ridley took the major in, and Monsieur Darras, and I went in after them with the water can because nobody told me not to. The ledgers were where they had been on the Tuesday. Nobody had touched them, except Darras for the families, and he had put each one back where he found it.
“Twenty-three on the shelves, sir,” said Ridley. “These on the floor are the ones they burned, as they were. This one on the desk was open at the last page when we came in. It’s open at the last page now.”
The major looked at the desk, and at the shelves, and at the stove with the ash spilling out of it.
“Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll take it from here.”
“Yes, sir.” Ridley did not move. “I’d like a receipt, sir.”
The major looked at him.
“For the ledgers,” said Ridley. “Twenty-three on the shelves, and the burned ones, and the one on the desk. As found. With the date, and your name, and the time.”
The major looked at him a moment longer. Then he put his briefcase on the corner of the desk, very carefully, so as not to touch the ledger, and took out a pad and wrote, and tore the page off and signed it and gave it to Ridley.
Ridley read it. Then he folded it and put it in his shirt.
“Thank you, sir,” he said.
Baca gave Darras his list at noon, on his box by the gate. It was the fair copy, in capitals, the one that had been on the board, and he had made a second copy in the night for the major, so there were two. He gave one to Darras and one to the major’s clerk.
Then he took a folded sheaf of paper out of his shirt, the first one, the one he had written at the gate on the Tuesday afternoon with Peter spelling, in pencil, the letters going every way, and he unfolded it and looked at it, and folded it again, and put it in the back of the gun book with Ridley’s receipt.
Nobody asked him about it.
Brandauer asked Ridley for ten minutes, and went across to the hospital tents.
When he came back he sat down on the trail of the gun.
“He is asleep,” he said. “The tailor. They have him in a bed. A real bed, with a sheet.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“He was asleep. I told the nurse.”
“Told her what?”
“That I looked everywhere,” said Brandauer. “And that I would have gone on looking, and they are moving us.” He looked at his hands. “She did not speak German. A man from the infantry told her for me. From Milwaukee.” He rubbed his thumb along the side of his finger. “He spoke German like a Milwaukee man. I do not know what he told her.”
We moved at first light on the Sunday.
The guns came out of the cinders and onto their limbers, and the trucks pulled out of the yard one after another along the siding past the wagons, past the one full of wire, and past the gate, where there was no gate now, only the two posts it had hung on.
There were people on the steps of the staircases. Not many now; most of them were in the tents. They watched the guns go. Nobody waved.
The woman from the gatehouse step was standing by one of the gateposts with her blanket round her and her short hair, and when our truck went by she looked up at it, and lifted her hand, once, to the height of her shoulder, and put it down.
Dunne lifted his.
We went west, then south. Not far. Four or five kilometres.
The road went along the edge of a great railway yard, bigger than the one at the camp, ten times bigger, a whole plain of rails running south towards the city, and it had been hit. There were craters in it, full of water, one after another, and rails standing up out of them twisted, and wagons on their sides, and a signal gantry folded over like a man bending to pick something up, and in the middle of it a locomotive standing on its own with its boiler burst open.
“That’s where Tuesday’s went,” said Peter. “Some of it. Give or take.”
I looked at the yard going by. There were a great many craters.
“Which ones?”
“Give or take, Wheeler,” said Peter.
The battery went into position in Saint-Denis, in a park beside a canal, with plane trees round it and a bandstand with no roof, and blocks of flats on three sides with washing on the balconies, and on the fourth side, over the roofs, a church.
It was a big church, old, grey, with one tower and the stump of another, and Peter stood by the gun when we had dropped the trails and looked at it for a long time.
“What’s that one?” said Dunne.
“The Basilica of Saint-Denis,” said Peter. “It’s where the kings are buried. All of them. Nearly all of them, for a thousand years.”
“Are they still there?”
“Some of them.” Peter took his glasses off and put them back on. “In 1793 the Revolution opened the tombs. All of them. They took them out, the kings and the queens and the children, and put them in a pit at the side of the church with quicklime. It took them weeks. They did it in order.”
Nobody said anything.
“Henri the Fourth was the best preserved,” said Peter. “He’d been dead a hundred and eighty years and you could still tell who he was. So they stood him up against a pillar, in his shroud, for two days, and people came in off the street to look at him.”
“Why?” said Dunne.
“To see he was dead,” said Peter.
Szabo was sitting on an ammunition box, cleaning his rifle. He had stopped cleaning it.
“Professor,” he said.
Peter looked at him.
“You’re talking again.”
“Yes,” said Peter, and went to put out the aiming posts.
Lieutenant Garland had the command post in a café on the corner of the park, with the tables pushed to the walls and the map pinned up over the bar where the mirror had been.
He had the section commanders in that evening, and Ridley came back from it and stood by the gun with his hands at his sides and told us.
“There’s a red line on the map,” he said. “Round the middle of the city. The river and everything either side of it, a long way out. Nothing goes inside the red. Not one round. Not for anybody, whatever’s in there. The joint command’s orders, and division’s, and the Council’s.” He looked at us. “If the numbers come down and Mercer puts them on the map and they’re inside the red, he tells me, and I tell Garland, and we don’t fire till Garland’s checked them back with battalion. Understood?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Mercer.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Why?” said Dunne.
Ridley looked at him.
“Because it’s Paris,” he said.
I went over to the café with Peter after dark, the way I did every evening, for the names.
Garland was at the bar with the map and a lamp. He did not get up. He had stopped getting up for us in March, and he moved his elbow off the corner of the map so that Peter could see it, and went on writing.
The red line went round the middle of the city in a long loop, drawn with a crayon, the river in the middle of it and all the old streets either side, a long way out. Outside it the map was covered in pencil, references and crosses and arrows. Inside it there was nothing at all.
Peter put his finger on the yards we had passed, and then on the canal, and worked it out, with his lips moving.
“La Villette,” he said. “The gasworks. Or the canal basin. Give or take.”
I wrote it in the back of the paybook. Then I looked at the red line for a while.
“Sir,” I said.
Garland looked up.
“Did Saint-Ouen have a line?”
Peter’s finger stopped on the map.
Garland looked at me. He did not look away. He looked at me for a long time, with the pencil in his hand and the lamp on the side of his face.
“No,” he said. “It didn’t.”
Then he went back to his writing.
Peter took his finger off the map, and we went out, and walked back across the park to the gun in the dark, and he did not say anything, and neither did I.
We fired for five days from the park.
Every round went outside the red. Peter checked every one on the map before he set it, all of them, every set of numbers, and twice he went to Ridley and Ridley went to Garland, and once we did not fire at all, for twenty minutes, while the telephone went back and forth to battalion, and then the numbers came down again changed by a hundred metres, and Peter checked them, and we fired.
The French were firing back less every day. On the Monday they put a few rounds into the canal and killed a lot of fish, and the people of the flats came down in the evening with buckets and nets and took them home. On the Tuesday nothing came over at all. On the Wednesday French soldiers began walking up the road from the city with white cloths on sticks, in twos and threes, without their rifles, and sat down in the park by the bandstand where the infantry told them to, and some of them asked for cigarettes, and Szabo gave them his.
“Szabo,” said Hollis.
“They’re cigarettes,” said Szabo. “Not medals.”
The people of the flats were round us all the time.
The children came first. They stood at the edge of the park and watched the gun, and when it fired they put their hands over their ears and screamed and laughed, and when it stopped they came closer. By the second day they had found out about the brass cases. A boy of about nine with no shoes came to the edge of the gun pit and pointed at the empty cases piled by the trail and said a word, over and over.
“Douilles,” said Peter. “He wants the cases. The brass. They’ll sell it.”
“They go back for salvage,” said Ridley.
The boy looked at Ridley. Ridley looked at the boy.
“One,” said Ridley.
The boy took one, in both arms, nearly as big as he was, and ran. In the morning there were nine of them at the edge of the pit, with a handcart.
A woman came from the flats on the Tuesday, a big woman in an apron, and stood at the edge of the gun pit and talked at Peter for some time, pointing at the flats behind her and at the gun and back again.
“She’s the concierge,” said Peter. “She says we’ve broken every window on her side of the building. Every one. Four floors.”
“Tell her we’re sorry.”
Peter told her. She said something else, short, with her arms folded.
“She says sorry won’t put the glass back.”
“Tell her she’s right.”
Peter told her. She looked at Ridley, and at the gun, and at the boy with the handcart, and said something else, and went back across the park to the flats.
“What was that?”
“She says, then hurry up and finish,” said Peter.
Harris came on the Wednesday evening, in the car, without the General. He had a note for Ridley. It had come out through the lines the night before, he said, with one of the Council’s women, on a bicycle, in the frame of the bicycle.
Ridley read it by the gun and gave it to Peter, which he had never done before.
Ridley. I am inside. My head is down and so are theirs. It will not be long now. The regime is coming apart like wet paper: the ministries have stopped answering their own telephones, and half the police have gone home and the other half are deciding which half to be. The coffee here is roasted barley. Tell Brandauer it is worse than his, which I would not have thought possible.
Mercer: the Archives are untouched. So is the Sainte-Chapelle. So is everything inside your red line. Somebody drew it well.
Wheeler: nothing. I am still looking, from in here.
L.
Peter read it twice and gave it back.
“Inside,” he said.
“Inside,” said Ridley, and put it in his shirt, with the receipt.
On the Thursday night the telephone did not ring at all.
We sat round the gun in the dark in the park, the section, and waited for it. Nobody slept. The plane trees were coming into leaf, and you could smell them, and the canal, and the cordite on the gun, all together. Down to the south, over the roofs, the city was dark. There were fires along the edge of it in three or four places, the yards and the gasworks and somewhere further east, burning low and red. Inside, where the red line was on Garland’s map, there was nothing burning at all. It was just dark, a long low darkness under the sky, with the shapes of domes in it and a tower, very faint, where the clouds were thinner.
Peter was sitting on the trail beside me.
“It’s all still there,” he said. “Inside the line. All of it.”
“Yes.”
He did not say anything for a while.
“La Villette again today,” he said. “The gasworks. Or the basin. Give or take.”
I took out the paybook and wrote it, by feel, in the dark, under the others. After it I put a question mark.