Rehearsals

We were at sea on Thanksgiving, in a gale in the North Sea, and I forgot it.

I remembered on the Saturday, when we were already ashore at Harwich, standing on a quay in the rain waiting for a train. It went through me like cold water.

“What is it?” Peter said.

“It was Thanksgiving. Thursday.”

He thought back. “We were being sick on Thursday.”

“I forgot it.”

“So did I,” he said. “I expect Dayton managed without me.”

It is a small thing we do at home, at Thanksgiving, for somebody in the family a long time ago, and I will come to it in its place. I had done it every year of my life that I could remember. That was the first year I missed it, and I was twenty. I have never told my mother.

England was rain. I can think of perhaps four days that winter when it did not rain. We went west by train from Harwich, through London in the dark, which we did not see except as a long time of stopping and starting and a smell of smoke, and in the morning we were in Devon, in the far south-west, where England runs out into the sea. The battery was put into a camp of huts in a park belonging to a big house, with a lake and a great many old trees and the rain coming down on all of it. The house had been a school before the war and was a hospital now. The family who owned it lived in four rooms at one end, and on Sundays the old gentleman came out with a dog and a stick and walked round the camp and spoke to everybody.

“Where are you from?” he asked me, the first Sunday.

“Massachusetts, sir.”

“Ah,” he said. “The tea.” He seemed very pleased with himself, and walked on with the dog.

“What tea?” I said.

“Boston, Wheeler,” Peter said. “The harbour. Seventeen seventy-three.”

“Oh,” I said.

---

The sergeant who came to replace Oakes was waiting for us at the camp. His name was Amos Ridley.

He was about forty-two. He was not tall, and he was not broad, and you would not have looked at him twice in a street. He had a long, plain, weathered face and very light grey eyes and the stillest hands I have ever seen on a man. He could stand for an hour with them at his sides and they would not move once, not to scratch or fidget or touch his face, and when they did move it was to do something, and then they stopped again.

Baca tried him on the first evening, in the hut.

“Where you from, Sergeant?”

“Kentucky.”

“Whereabouts?”

“The hills. County with no railway in it.”

“How long you been in?”

“Since ‘twenty.”

“What made you join?”

“It was the Army or the mine.”

Baca waited. “And?”

“I looked at the mine,” Ridley said.

Peter, on the next bunk, looked up from the limber. “Were you at Fort Sill, Sergeant? Did you know Sergeant Dempsey?”

“Dempsey was a private,” Ridley said.

He had been at Fort Sill when Dempsey was a private, and in Panama and in the Philippines, and at a dozen posts in the West with names I had never heard of. In 1942 and 1943 he had been with a battery in North Africa, against the French there, and had come out of it with a wound in his leg that made him walk a little stiffly in the cold. Brandauer asked him about the leg, once.

“North Africa,” Ridley said, and that was all any of us ever heard about North Africa from him.

He had been a regular soldier for twenty-three years, and he was the only man in the battery, the captain included, who had been a soldier before anybody had been asked to be one. He did not do anything for show and he did not do anything twice.

That was the thing everybody learned about Ridley in the first week. He corrected a thing once.

He corrected me on the second day. I had stacked the ammunition boxes in the pit the way Oakes had liked them, four high. Ridley looked at them.

“Three,” he said. “And the fuzes on this side.”

He did not say why, and I did not ask. I restacked them, and I have stacked them three high with the fuzes towards the gun every time since. I worked out the reason for myself about a month later, which was that you could not get at the bottom box of four without taking the top one off, and in the dark, in a hurry, with the gun waiting, you did not want to be taking a box off.

A man in the second section was told once, in January, to check his sight before reporting it set. In February he reported it set without checking, in an exercise, and it was off. Ridley did not say anything to him at all. The next morning the man was on the ammunition truck and somebody else was on the sight. Nobody had heard it decided.

“That,” Peter said to me that night, “is the most frightening thing I’ve seen in the Army.”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“That’s what I mean.” He took off his glasses and did not polish them; he just held them. “I am going to check my sight twice for the rest of the war.”

He did. I used to hear him at it, very quietly, every time, saying the numbers over to himself like a man saying his prayers.

Ridley did not joke and did not drink with us and did not tell stories. But he never once told me a thing that was not so. If he did not know a thing he said he did not know it. If a thing was my fault he said it was, once, and then it was over.

---

Two weeks after we came to Devon a lorry brought four new men to the battery. Ridley brought one of them down to our gun and stood him by the trail.

“Gaines,” Ridley said. “He’ll load.”

Then he went back up the line.

Walter Gaines was a Black man, twenty-eight years old. He put his kit down and looked at the gun the way a man looks at a horse he is going to have to ride, and then he looked at us. On his sleeve, where the cloth had been kept from the sun and the wash, there was a darker shape where a corporal’s stripes had been.

“Where you from?” Baca said.

“Boston. The South End.”

“Wheeler’s Massachusetts,” Baca said.

Gaines looked at me. “Whereabouts?”

“Lexington.”

“Well,” Gaines said. That was all.

“What were you in before?” Peter said.

“Massachusetts Light Infantry. Seven years.”

I had never heard of it. It was one of the sixteen Black regiments, and it was raised in my own Province, and I had never heard of it until he said its name.

“Germany?” said Baca.

“Since the spring of ‘forty-two. The Weser crossings.” Gaines sat down on an ammunition box. “And the winter.”

Baca whistled, low. The Weser crossings were the first offensive the Union fought alongside the Germans, and everybody who was in the winter fighting says it was the worst of the war. Gaines had been in all of it.

“Where’s the regiment now?” Brandauer said.

“Nowhere. They dissolved it in the summer.” He said it the way you would say a man had moved away. “They were doing all of them. Most of our men went to the King’s Own Massachusetts. It took our honours. Carries them now.”

“And you?”

“Some of us went wherever they were short. I asked for the guns.” He looked at the hundred-and-five. “They gave me a short course at a gunnery camp in the autumn. Here I am.”

He had been a corporal in his regiment. He came to us a private.

Nobody explained that to us, or to him. The Army said, when anybody asked, that a man coming new to a trade starts at the bottom of it, which was true, and was the rule for everybody, and was why I was still a private myself. The Army also did not make many Black corporals in the Corps of Artillery for a long time afterwards, which is also true. I do not know which of the two it was in his case. He did not know either. I asked him once, a long time later, in France.

“Wheeler,” he said, “I have been asking for a year, and nobody is going to tell me.” He thought about it. “Anyway, a corporal has to keep the records. I’d rather carry shells.”

So he was the most experienced soldier in the section except for Ridley, and the most junior, and he was put on loading. I passed the rounds to Brandauer and Brandauer passed them to Gaines, and his were the last pair of hands before the breech.

There had been about three Black families in Lexington when I was growing up. I had been to school with a boy from one of them and had never once been to his house or he to mine, and that was the whole of what I knew. For the first weeks I did not know what to say to Gaines, and so I said less to him than I would have said to anybody else, and he noticed, because he noticed everything. Those weeks were not bad, exactly. They were nothing.

Brandauer said to him what he said to everybody. On the second evening, at the stove, he leaned over.

“How many cows do your people keep?”

Gaines looked at him for a long moment.

“My people,” he said, “keep a third-floor flat on Shawmut Avenue. And they have not, to my knowledge, kept a cow since about 1860.”

“That is a great pity,” Brandauer said, seriously.

Gaines laughed. It was the first time any of us had heard him laugh.

There was trouble once. In January, in the queue at the cookhouse, a man in the fourth section, whose name I am not going to write, said it loud enough for Gaines to hear, and meant to be heard.

“Army must have run out of white men.”

Gaines did not answer him. Ridley was in the queue behind.

“That was once,” Ridley said, in exactly the voice he used for the ammunition boxes.

The man turned round to say something back and saw who it was, and did not say it. He never said anything like it again in Ridley’s hearing, or, as far as I know, in anybody’s.

Afterwards I caught Gaines up on the path.

“Is there much of that?”

He looked at me as though I had asked whether there was much rain in England.

“Wheeler,” he said, “I have been in the Army seven years.”

I did not ask again.

---

On Christmas Day we had the afternoon off, and a good many of the battery went down to the village, which was a mile from the camp across two fields and a lane between high banks. The six of us from the gun who were not on duty went to the public house, which was called the Plough and was older than anything in Lexington.

“Will they let us in?” Brandauer said, at the door.

“It’s a pub,” Baca said. “They’ll let anybody in who’s buying.”

I had heard the King once since Honolulu, in a broadcast to the forces in the spring, over a loudspeaker on a parade ground in New Jersey, mostly drowned by the wind. I did not know that he spoke on Christmas Day every year, to all of his realms at once, from London. The landlord knew. At five minutes to three he turned up his set on the shelf behind the bar.

“Quiet, now,” he said, and the whole room went quiet: the farmers and the old men and the two land girls and the six of us, and a soldier of the British Army who was home on leave, and the landlord’s wife, who came out of the kitchen drying her hands.

At three o’clock the King spoke.

It was the voice from our kitchen in Lexington two years before. It was quieter, if anything. He spoke about the families who had somebody away and the families who had nobody to come home, and he spoke about the realms, all of them, Britain and America and the rest, and said that he was thinking of every one of them that day, and of every man and woman of them who was far from home in the service of the others. He did not say anything about winning. He never did.

When it ended the landlord played God Save the King on the gramophone, and everybody in the room stood, and so did we. Then one of the farmers, an old man with a face like a walnut who had been watching us all afternoon, spoke to me across the room.

“Well, he’s ours, you know.”

He did not say it unkindly.

“He’s ours too,” I said.

“You only got him second-hand.”

“Then we got him cheap,” said Baca.

The whole room laughed, the English and the Americans together. The old man bought Baca a beer, and they argued about it for an hour, with the land girls taking sides.

While they were arguing I looked round the room and saw Gaines standing by the fire with a glass in his hand, a little apart, listening. The landlord’s wife went over and said something to him, and he answered, and she laughed and patted his arm, and gave him a mince pie off a plate.

At the end of the hour the old man put his glass down.

“I suppose,” he said, “he can belong to anybody who’ll stand up for God Save the King in the Plough on Christmas Day.”

“That’s settled, then,” said Baca.

“That’s settled.”

After a while I went over and stood by the fire with Gaines.

“All right?” I said.

“All right.” He ate some of the mince pie. Across the room Baca was buying the old man a beer back. “By his rule,” Gaines said, “he’s mine too.”

“I expect he is.”

“I stood up,” Gaines said.

---

From January we rehearsed.

We were told it was training, and it was training, but every man in the battery knew that you do not take a field battery that has been in Germany and bring it to the far end of England and teach it to come off a boat unless you mean it to come off a boat somewhere in particular. There were a hundred guesses in the battery that winter about where, and every one of them was wrong.

First we waterproofed the trucks. That took weeks, and it was the dirtiest work I did in the whole war. Every part of the engine that water could get into had to be packed with a grey putty that smelled of fish, and sealed, and a tall pipe fitted to the exhaust and another to the air intake, sticking up behind the cab like a chimney, so that the truck could drive through water up to the driver’s chest and keep going. Then we drove them into the sea to see if it worked.

The first time, ours did not. It stopped in four feet of water in a bay with a cold wind blowing, and we had to get out and push it back up the beach while a naval officer on the shingle watched us with his arms folded. Ridley looked at the engine, and then at the driver.

“Once,” he said.

“Sergeant.”

The driver did the packing again himself, all night, by a lamp, and the next time it worked.

We learned to get the gun off a landing craft. A landing craft is a flat steel box with an engine at one end and a ramp at the other that drops down when it hits the beach. The idea is that the ramp goes down and the truck drives off with the gun behind it and goes up the beach and into action. That is the idea. The ramp goes down into water, not onto sand, because the craft grounds where it grounds and not where you would like, and the truck goes down the ramp into the sea and either keeps going or does not, and the gun comes after it, bumping, and if the truck stops the gun runs into the back of it, and if the gun goes off the side of the ramp it is in the sea and so is anybody standing near it. We practised it until we could do it without thinking. We practised it at night. We practised it with the ramp coming down into five feet of water and the sea running, and I went in over my head twice, with my rifle, and came up both times with the rifle, laughing.

“What’s funny?” Peter said, hauling me up by the strap.

“Nothing.”

Twice, in March and in April, we did the whole thing. It was a rehearsal of a landing, on a beach further along the coast, a long straight beach of shingle with a lagoon behind it and some villages that had been emptied of their people so that we could use it. We embarked at night in a port, and went out to sea, and lay there being sick, and came in at dawn, with the navy firing over our heads at the hills, and came ashore, and fought our way up the beach against nobody, and went into action in the fields beyond, and fired at a hill, and were told how we had done. Both times men were hurt. Not in our battery; but men were hurt, because that is what happens when you put thousands of men and their trucks and guns onto a beach in the dark and tell them to hurry.

The second time, we were lying in the lagoon dunes afterwards, waiting to be told how we had done.

“We have now landed twice on a beach that is not the beach,” Peter said, “and we shall land once more on the beach. I should like it noted that I don’t think much of the planning. In my experience it’s the first time you do a thing that you learn how to do it. The rehearsals only teach you how to rehearse.”

“That’s the most cheerful thing you’ve ever said,” said Baca.

Ridley was lying a little apart, with his helmet over his eyes.

“No,” he said. “You learn where everything is.”

We did. By April there was not a man in the section who could not have found every box on the truck in the dark, and put the gun into action in a field he had never seen.

---

The country behind that beach, and all round the camp, was full of hedges.

Devon is cut up into small fields, each one with a hedge round it, and the hedges are not hedges the way we have them at home, a line of bushes along a wall. They are banks of earth as high as a man, with stones in them and trees growing out of the tops and roots holding them together, so old that the lanes between them have been worn down by the cartwheels until they are sunk below the fields, like trenches. You could not see over them. You could not get a truck through them. You could not see, from one field, what was in the next.

When we went into action in the fields behind the beach on the April rehearsal, the gun had to be put in a corner of a field with a hedge on two sides. It took us a long time, and a good deal of language from Baca. When it was in, Ridley stood and looked at the hedge for a long while. Then he looked at me.

“Remember these,” he said.

“I will, Sergeant.”

---

In March we were sent on a road move to a range in the east of England, to fire the guns we had been given that winter, which were new. We went in a convoy of trucks for two days across the south of England, and it was on that move that I saw the guns that were not guns.

I was in the back of the second truck, with the tailboard down, watching England go by, which I was fond of doing. We were going along a road in flat country, somewhere in the south-east, with a wood on one side and open fields on the other, and in one of the fields there was a battery of guns. Four guns, in a line, with their barrels up, under netting.

I looked at them for about as long as it takes to say it.

“Those aren’t guns,” I said.

“What?” said Peter, and looked, and Brandauer looked, and by then we were past, and the wood had come round and hidden the field.

“They looked like guns,” Brandauer said.

“They weren’t.”

“How do you know?” Peter said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “They just weren’t.”

I worked it out over the next hours, going over it, and that evening, when we had stopped for the night, I told Ridley.

“Four guns in a field,” I said. “Under netting. No pits, Sergeant. The spades weren’t dug in. The trails were lying on the grass. No ammunition boxes anywhere. No truck. No men. No path worn in the grass between the guns and anywhere else.” He was listening. “And the barrel of the third one was bent. A little. In the middle.”

“Bent.”

“The way a steel barrel can’t bend.”

Ridley thought about it. They were guns the way the picture in my mother’s parlour is the King.

“Then do not tell anybody else,” Ridley said.

I did not. He did not say what they were, and I do not know if he knew.

I know now, or I think I know. In the summer of 1945, in Paris, I met a sapper who said he had spent the spring of 1944 blowing up guns with a pump.

“Rubber,” he said. “Rubber and wood and painted canvas. And wireless messages going back and forth from headquarters that weren’t there. A whole army in the south-east of England that wasn’t an army. For the French to see from the air. So they’d think it was coming at a place it was never going to come.”

“Did it work?”

“It worked,” he said. “There were French divisions waiting at the wrong stretch of coast on the day you landed. They’d have been waiting for you otherwise.”

I have no way to check it. It is either true or the best story a sapper ever told, and I have decided to believe it. I saw one battery of it, from the back of a truck, for about three seconds.

---

In April, just before the second rehearsal, we had a day’s leave, and Peter and I went into Plymouth.

Plymouth had been bombed, the way the English cities had been bombed, and I had not seen anything like it, not even in Germany, because in Germany it had been villages and here it was a city. The middle of it was gone. There were streets of it that were not there, only the lines of where the streets had been, cleared, with the rubble pushed back into heaps and the weeds coming up through it, and the shells of churches standing up out of it with no roofs, and people walking along the cleared lines to work as though the buildings were still there. It had happened three years before.

On one of the streets at the edge of it, where the houses stopped being gone and started being only damaged, there was a bookshop with boards over half its windows and the door open. Peter stopped as if he had been pulled on a rope.

“Peter.”

“Five minutes,” he said, and went in.

I went in after him, because there was nothing else to do. It was dark inside and smelled of damp paper. An old woman sat at a desk at the back with a shawl round her and did not look up. Peter went along the shelves for half an hour, taking books down and putting them back, with the limber over his shoulder, and I stood by the door and looked out at the street.

“That’s thirty minutes,” I said.

“I know.”

He came out with one book. It was a French grammar, a fat one with a brown cover, for schools. He paid for it and put it in the limber.

“Find anything?” I said.

“A grammar.”

He did not say anything else about it, and I did not ask. I had been in the back of the truck on the road out of the pocket at Kassel when the French boy with the bandaged hand told him that nobody in France had spoken like that since Napoleon.

He worked at it every evening after that, in the hut, by the stove, with his lips moving. One evening in May he looked up from it.

“Wheeler, do you know the French for ‘the price of eggs’?”

“No.”

He told me, and I have forgotten it. It was probably on the page he was on.

---

At the end of April the letters stopped going out. Nobody told us; they simply stopped collecting them.

“There’ll be a delay,” the post corporal said, sitting in his hut with the sacks.

“How long?”

“There’ll be a delay.”

Then the camp was closed. A fence went up round it that had not been there, and guards on the gates who were not ours, and nobody was let out, not to the village, not to the Plough, not anywhere, and the old gentleman with the dog did not come round on Sundays any more.

On the last evening before the fence I wrote to my mother. She gave me back all of my letters when I came home, in the shoebox, and that one is near the top.

Dear Mother. It has rained again, which you will not be surprised to hear. We had Christmas in a public house called the Plough, and an old farmer told us the King was only ours second-hand, and Baca told him that meant we got him cheap, and the landlord’s wife gave out mince pies. Our sergeant is a man called Ridley, from Kentucky. You would like him. He does not say much. The hedges here are very high. I am well and the food is good. I will write again soon.

The food was half true. I did not tell her about the guns that were not guns, because Ridley had said not to. I did not know when I would write again. I put in the hedges instead.