Secondary

The fence went up on the last Saturday in April, and for five weeks after that the world was the size of a park.

It was barbed wire, two rolls high, on stakes, and it ran right round the camp, through the trees and along the edge of the lake and across the drive where the old gentleman used to walk his dog, and there were guards on the gates who were not from our battalion and would not talk to us. Nobody went out. The post came in and did not go out, or went out and was read first, which came to the same thing. The village was a mile away across two fields and might as well have been in Ohio.

On the first Sunday the old gentleman came down the drive on the other side of the wire with his dog and his stick, and stood there looking at us. Baca and Peter and I were at the wire, because there was nowhere else to be.

“What’s he want?” Baca said.

“Nothing,” Peter said. “He’s looking.”

“At what?”

“At us. While he can.”

The old gentleman lifted the stick, once, the way my father lifted his hand at the depot, and turned and went back up to the house with the dog going ahead of him.

“Was that a wave?” Baca said.

Peter did not answer. I did not wave back.

---

We did the things that had to be done, and then we did them again. We finished the waterproofing, and Ridley checked it, and a man from the battalion came and checked it, and an officer came and checked him. We loaded the trucks, and unloaded them, and loaded them again in a different order, because somebody had worked out that the first things we would need on the far side were at the bottom.

“Who worked it out?” Baca said, on the third loading, with a box of fuzes in his arms. “I want his name. I want to write to his mother.”

“He’ll have been an officer,” Gaines said.

“Then I want to write to his mother twice.”

We counted the ammunition. We cleaned the gun, which was clean. We played cards for money we had no use for and lost it and won it back. We were given things: a lifebelt like a bicycle tyre that went round your chest and blew up from a little bottle; a gas cape, which we were told to keep; pills for seasickness, which I took and was sick anyway; and a little packet of French money, printed for the purpose. Baca fanned his out on the bunk like a hand of cards.

“This is money from a board game,” he said. “I’m going to buy the railway.”

“It’s perfectly good money,” Peter said.

“Good where?”

“In France. Presumably.”

“You ever seen French money?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know this isn’t the board game?”

Peter opened his mouth and shut it again. It turned out to be good in every shop in Normandy, though there was nothing in the shops to buy.

Then there was a card, with useful sentences in French on one side and their English on the other. Brandauer turned his over and back, slowly, the way he read everything.

“Is there one for cows?”

“There’s ‘Where is the enemy?’” Peter said. He was reading his own with his mouth set. “And ‘We are your friends.’ They’re on the same side. One under the other.”

“So?”

“So you’d want to be careful which one you said first.” He took off his glasses and polished them for a long time, and put the card in the limber without another word. I kept mine, and I have it still. There is no sentence on it for I am sorry. I looked, later.

---

The maps came on the first of June.

We were called to a big tent at the end of the camp, the whole battery, a hundred and some men on benches in the heat. There were two military policemen at the tent door who had not been there before, and the flap was tied shut behind us. Captain Kettering was standing at the front beside a table with a cloth over it. He waited until we had stopped talking. Then he took the cloth off the table.

It was a model, made of something like rubber and painted, a piece of coast about as big as a door. There was a long straight beach, and low sand hills behind it, and behind those a flat country of fields cut up into small shapes, with little painted trees along their edges; and among the fields were large patches painted pale blue that were not the sea. There were roads built up on banks across the blue, and villages of a few houses each, with churches. A long way inland, at the top of the model, was the edge of a town and a harbour. Everything had a name on a little flag, and the names were not names. They were words, a fruit and a colour and a man’s name, so that if you were taken you could not tell anybody where you had been going.

“Gentlemen,” the captain said. “This is a stretch of the coast of France. We are going to land on it.”

Nobody said anything. Somebody near the back let out a long breath.

“It is in the Cotentin,” the captain said. “That is a peninsula in Normandy. It sticks up into the Channel like a thumb, and the port of Cherbourg is at the top of it.” He touched the harbour with a cane. “The operation is called Rollo. It is one part of a larger landing, elsewhere. That is the main landing, and I can tell you nothing about it, and I know very little. Ours is the secondary assault.” He moved the cane down to the long beach. “This is where we go ashore. For the purposes of the operation, its name is Longship.”

He talked for a long time after that. I wrote it down that night in pencil, against the rules, and burned the page in the morning because I was frightened of the rules, so what I have is what I wrote down the next night from memory, which is not the same thing. I remember the blue.

“These are not lakes,” the captain said, with his cane on the pale blue. “They were fields. The French have flooded them, on purpose, by opening the gates that keep the sea out. Anybody who lands has to come off the beach along the raised roads, and the roads can be covered by guns. There are four.” He touched them one by one and said their names, which were the names of cards in a pack.

“Somebody in London plays poker,” Baca said under his breath, and the captain heard him, and let it go.

“The navy will shell the villages behind the beach at dawn, before we come in,” the captain said. “The guns are in them.” He moved the cane. “The battery’s position for the first day is here. In the sand hills, at the head of the second road.” He put the end of the cane on a little bare patch of painted sand among painted grass and held it there while he looked round at us. “I want it found quickly, and I want it properly done.”

I looked at the patch of painted sand for a long time. Then I looked past the blue, at the fields inland with the little painted trees along their edges in lines. I looked across the tent at Ridley. He was standing at the side with his hands still at his sides, and he was already looking at me. He did not nod. He just looked.

Remember these.

---

The word that went round the battery after the briefing was secondary.

By supper every man in the camp was saying it, and most of them were saying it as though it had been said about their mother. The main show was somewhere else, with the main army and the main generals and the main newspapers, and we were the other one. The man from the fourth section, the same man, said it loudest. He stood up at his bench with his mess tin in his hand.

“They’ve picked the battalion that’s good enough to land,” he said, “and not good enough to land anywhere that matters.”

A good many men laughed. I laughed.

“Is it bad?” Brandauer said to me. “Secondary?”

“It means nobody at home’s ever going to hear about it,” I said.

Baca pointed his spoon at me. “In the March of Arizona,” he said, “secondary is where you want to be. Primary is where everybody’s looking. Including the people with the guns.”

“That isn’t how it works,” somebody said down the table.

“That’s exactly how it works. Ask any horse thief.”

Brandauer thought about it, chewing. Then he said, “D’Kieh warta net auf’n Landtag.”

There was a pause.

“The cows don’t wait for the Landtag,” Baca said. “Fine. What’s that got to do with it?”

Brandauer thought about that too. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seemed to fit.”

Gaines had not said anything. He was sitting on the end of the bench cleaning a mess tin that was already clean. The man from the fourth section said it again, louder, about the battalion that was good enough to land and not good enough to matter, and Gaines looked up.

“You ever been primary?” he said, quite mildly.

The man looked down the tent at him. “No.”

“I have,” Gaines said, and went back to the mess tin.

Nobody said anything for a while after that. The man from the fourth section sat down. I looked at my plate.

Ridley had finished first, and on his way out he went past our bench with his mess tin and stopped at the tent door, and said it to nobody in particular.

“Secondary means there’s fewer of us,” he said. “It don’t mean there’s fewer of them.”

Then he went out. He was the only man in the battery who had been in a landing, in North Africa, and that was the whole of what he ever said to us about it.

---

Peter knew who Rollo was. Of course he did.

“Go on, then,” I said, in the hut that night. He was lying on his bunk with his hands behind his head.

“A Viking,” he said. “A Northman. He came down from the north with his ships a thousand years ago and more, and sailed up the Seine, and raided it, and wouldn’t go away. So in 911 the King of the Franks gave him the country round the mouth of the river to keep, if he would hold it against the others and be baptised.”

“Did he?”

“Both. That’s the beginning of Normandy. The Northmen’s land. A Viking who came to raid and was given the place to keep.” He was talking to the roof. “His people married the people who were there, and learned their language, and forgot their own, and a hundred and fifty years later their Duke crossed the Channel and took England. Which is why half the words you use every day are French, Wheeler, and you don’t know it.”

“Name one.”

“Beef.”

“Beef’s English.”

“Cow is English. The man out in the field with the cow was English. The man at the table eating it was Norman.” He lifted one hand off his chest and waved it. “Pork. Mutton. Veal. You kept the animals. They had the dinner.”

Baca said from the next bunk, “Does this end with us getting baptised?”

“It ends with whoever named the operation having either a sense of humour or a sense of history,” Peter said. “In my experience the Army has neither. So it must have been the British.”

“And Longship?” I said.

“It’s what the Vikings came in. A long open boat, with a sail and oars. They used to run them right up on the beach and jump out into the water.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“Yes,” Peter said. “The difference is that the Vikings came to stay. We’re rather hoping not to.”

Somebody put the light out. I thought he had gone to sleep. Then he said, to the dark, “The King is Duke of Normandy, you know.”

“I know,” I said. “I heard it at Fort Sill. In the canteen, on the radio. The resistance there sent out some kind of proclamation making him their Duke, and he said yes.”

“He said yes until the war was over and they could decide for themselves. It isn’t the same thing.” He was quiet for a while. “So we’re going to land in a country where the King is Duke, by the choice of the people in it, to fight the government of the country the Duchy is part of, alongside the Germans and the British. I am going to have to read a great deal more history before I understand that.”

“And after?”

“Possibly after.”

I turned over. “Well, they’ll be glad to see us, then.”

“Some of them,” Peter said.

---

Gaines showed me how to pack.

I had packed my kit for the landing the way the list said, and on the second of June Gaines came over and looked at it laid out on my bunk, and took out a tin of saddle soap that I had brought from Fort Sill for the gun’s leather.

“That’s mine,” I said.

“It’ll come over on the trucks.” He put it in my kit bag. “You won’t be soaping anything the first week.” Then he picked up a pair of my grey socks, my mother’s, and rolled them very tight, and put them in a little rubber bag of the kind the navy used for matches, and tied the neck of it with string, and pushed it down into the bottom of my pack, without asking.

“You’ll be wet to the waist,” he said. “Maybe to the neck. All day, maybe two days. Whatever else you have, have dry socks.”

I sat there with my hand on the pack.

“My father said that,” I said. “Keep your feet dry. At the depot, when I went. It’s the only thing he’s ever told me about his war.”

Gaines looked at me for a moment. “Where was he?”

“Belgium. In 1917.”

“Then he knew,” Gaines said, and went back to his own bunk and lay down.

After a while I asked him where he had got the bag.

“The navy.”

“How?”

“The navy has a great many of them,” Gaines said, with his eyes shut, “and I had a great many cigarettes. That’s all the economics anybody needs to know.”

---

On the third I wrote home.

I had nothing I was allowed to say, and the letter would not go for days and might be read by somebody before it went, and I sat on my bunk with the pad on my knee for an hour before I wrote a word. When I did, Baca came and read it over my shoulder, which he did with everybody’s letters, and which nobody minded, because he never told.

“Who’s Bathsheba?”

“A cow.”

He read on, moving his lips. “This is a whole page of cows.”

“I’m asking after them.”

“How many have you got?”

“Nineteen.”

“You’re asking after nineteen cows by name,” Baca said, “and your mother’s going to get one line at the bottom.”

“She gets the end. I’m telling her I’m well.”

“Tell her the food’s good.”

“It’s better than it was.”

“Tell her it’s good. Mothers like that.” He went off to read somebody else’s.

So I wrote about the weather, which was warm, and the food, which was better than it had been, and the lake, which had swans on it. I asked whether my father had seen to the wall along the brook. I told Clara that I had seen a peacock on the lawn of the big house, which was true, and that it made a noise like a gate that needed oil, which was also true. I told my mother that I was well, and that the food was good. I did not tell her anything else.

She has the letter. It is in the shoebox, a little below the one about the hedges. I read it the other day, sitting at this table. It is the most cheerful letter I have ever written, and I could not get through it, and I had to go out to the barn for a while.

---

On the Sunday, the fourth, we drove to the sea.

We went in the early morning in a long column of trucks with the guns behind, down lanes between the high hedges, and through villages where the people came out and stood at their doors and watched us go. They did not wave and did not cheer. The women stood with their arms folded.

At a cottage gate an old woman held up a little girl to see us, and the little girl waved, and every man in our truck waved back at once, and the old woman put her down.

“She waved,” Brandauer said.

“One,” Baca said. “One out of the whole county. I’ll take it.”

Then we came over a hill and the road went down to a river, and the river was full of ships.

It was Dartmouth. I did not know it then; I worked it out afterwards from a map. It is a little town of steep streets on the side of a river that runs into the sea between two hills, and the river was so full of ships that you could not see the water. They were moored in rows down the middle and along both banks, landing craft and bigger landing craft and ships I had no names for, all grey, and more were coming in round the point from the sea as we watched.

Peter stood up in the back of the truck, holding the side.

“That’s the most ships I’ve ever seen in one place,” he said. “It’s probably the most ships anybody’s ever seen in one place. Somebody will write a book about this one day.”

“You,” Baca said.

“God, I hope not. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

We drove the trucks down a ramp of concrete at the water’s edge, a hard, they called it, and onto a landing craft, the same kind we had rehearsed with, a flat steel box with a ramp at the front, big enough for four trucks and four guns and the men. Ours took the whole battery. The trucks went on backwards, so that they would come off forwards, and the guns were chained down behind them, and the ramp came up, and we were on board. A naval officer about my age came down the ladder from the little bridge and looked at us.

“Don’t touch anything,” he said.

Baca looked round at the steel deck and the chains and the trucks and the rail. “Anything?”

“Anything,” the officer said, and went back up the ladder.

We sat on the deck between the trucks with our packs and our rifles and our lifebelts and waited. We waited all of Sunday. In the evening the wind got up, and the craft began to roll at its moorings, even in the river, and men began to be sick who had not been sick before. A rumour came along the rows of craft, passed from one to the next by men shouting across the water.

“It’s off!” somebody shouted from the next craft over.

An hour later, from further down: “It’s on!”

Then: “Off!”

“Make up your minds,” Baca shouted back, and got a laugh from three craft away, and nobody told us anything.

We slept on the deck under the trucks, in the wind, with the rain coming in sideways. I lay with my head on my pack, on top of the rubber bag with the socks in it, and listened to the chains on the gun creak. Peter was under the same truck, a foot away.

“Wheeler,” he said. “Are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“I want it to start.”

“So do I.”

“That seems to me thoroughly unreasonable,” Peter said.

“It is,” I said.

“Thank you.” He turned over.

---

On the Monday it did not start, and then in the afternoon it did. The wind had dropped a little, not much. The engines started, all along the river, one after another, until the whole valley was shaking with the sound of them, and the ropes were let go, and the craft in front of us began to move, and then ours, in a line, down the river between the hills, past the little town, and out between the two points into the open sea.

People were standing on the points. I saw them as we went out, a few dozen on each side, on the rocks and the grass above the water, civilians and soldiers and sailors and girls, standing quite still, watching the ships go out. Nobody cheered. Nobody waved, mostly. They just stood there and watched, the way the women at the cottage doors had watched in the morning, and we looked back at them from the deck, and nobody on our craft said anything either.

Then we were past the points, and the sea took hold of the craft and lifted it, and the land began to go away behind us, green and then grey and then dark. I was sick over the side. When I straightened up the land was gone, and there was nothing but ships, in every direction, to the edge of the light, all going the same way.

“Well,” Baca said, beside me at the rail. “That’s that.”

Peter was sitting against the wheel of the truck with the French grammar open on his knees, not reading it. Brandauer was asleep. Gaines was sitting with his back to the gun shield and his eyes open. Ridley was walking down the side of the craft, between the trucks and the rail, looking at every chain on every gun, once.

It was the evening of the fifth of June. I was twenty-one. I put my hand on my pack, on the rubber bag, and kept it there all night.