The Sunken Lane

The French have a word for that country. They call it the bocage. I did not know the word until July, and now I cannot hear it without smelling it.

It was the country of the model in the tent, the little fields with the painted trees round them. The fields are small, a few acres each, some smaller, and every one of them has a bank round it as high as a man and higher, and a hedge on top of the bank, and trees growing out of the hedge, so old that their roots hold the bank together like the steel in concrete. The lanes run between the banks, worn down by a thousand years of carts until they are sunk below the fields, so that you walk along them in a green trench with the hedges meeting over your head. You cannot see out, and nobody can see in. Every field is a room with four walls, and somewhere in one of the rooms, behind one of the walls, there is a man with a machine gun who has been looking at the gaps in the hedge for a week and is waiting for somebody to come through one.

The first day we drove into it, Peter stood up in the back of the truck and looked at the banks going past and said, “It’s Devon.”

Ridley did not look up. “Devon with somebody in it.”

That was the war in July. I did not fight it. The infantry fought it. They went forward a field in the morning, through a gap in a hedge, and lost men doing it, and found the next hedge in front of them with the next man behind it, and did it again; and in the evening sometimes they were a field further on and sometimes they were back where they started, and sometimes there were fewer of them in the same place. They came back past our lane in the evenings, the ones who came back, walking slowly, with a look on their faces I saw a great deal of that month. I have seen it since at the Grange, once in a while, when somebody says the wrong thing. We fired for them. An observer up a tree or in a church tower would see something, a gun, a house with a machine gun in it, a hedge corner where the fire was coming from, and the numbers would come down the wire to us in the lane, and we would fire, over the banks, over the next room and the next, onto something none of us would ever see.

---

The lane we were in for most of July ran along the side of a low hill, east and west, with the banks so high on either side that the gun, in a pit cut into the southern bank, could fire over the hedge with its barrel up and be seen by nobody on the other side. Ridley found it. He walked along it the first evening with his stiff leg, looking at the banks, and stopped at a place where the bank was a little lower and there was a gap in the hedge above.

“Here,” he said.

We dug for two days. The bank was earth and stones and roots, roots as thick as my arm, and the roots were the worst of it; we cut them with axes and the axes bounced.

“This is not digging,” Brandauer said, on the first afternoon, leaning on his axe. “This is arguing with a tree.”

“Then win,” Baca said.

When it was done the gun sat in a pit cut back into the bank, with its trails in the lane behind and its barrel looking out through the gap, and the ammunition in a second pit beside it, three high, fuzes towards the gun. Brandauer and I built a roof of logs and earth over the ammunition pit out of a tree we found down. Ridley looked at it once and said nothing about it, which was the best thing he ever said about anything. We slept in holes in the lane under the banks, with our gas capes over us. It rained a good deal. When it did not rain, the flies came, from the fields.

---

The flies came because of the cows.

That country is full of cows, and the fighting had gone through it for a month, and nobody could get into the fields to bury them. In July, in the heat, after the rain, the whole of the bocage smelled of dead cattle, a sweet, thick, heavy smell that got into your clothes and your food and your hair and your blankets and stayed there. Everybody who was there remembers it first.

There were four lying close together under a tree in the field behind the lane, and in a quiet hour one afternoon Brandauer stood on the bank and looked at them for a long time.

“Somebody’s,” he said.

“I know.”

“Good ones. Look at the bag on the near one. She was milking.”

“I know, Karl.”

He came down off the bank and picked up a shovel, and I picked up the other one, and we went through the gap in the hedge into the field.

We dug a pit in the corner of the field, by the tree. It took the whole afternoon. The ground was full of roots there too. We rolled them in, one at a time, with ropes and the shovels and our boots, with our sleeves over our faces. Brandauer talked to them while we did it, in German, quietly, the way you talk to a cow in a stall.

“What are you telling them?”

“That I am sorry it is so late.” He leaned on the shovel. “D’Kieh warta net auf’n Landtag.”

“The cows don’t wait for the Landtag.”

“No. These ones waited for us, and we were late also.”

We covered them. It made no difference at all to the smell. There were ten thousand others. When we came back through the gap Ridley was standing in the lane. He had watched the whole of it and said nothing. He took out a packet of cigarettes and gave us one each, though he knew we did not smoke, and lit them for us, and we smoked them.

---

It was in the lane, on about the fourth of July, that I first heard the name.

A platoon of infantry was coming back past the gun in the evening, in a long straggling line, the way they did, and two of them sat down on the bank by our pit to rest, with their rifles across their knees, a sergeant and a boy. Brandauer gave them water. The sergeant drank and wiped his mouth and said to the boy, “Well, that’s Saint Owen, and they can keep it.”

I heard it the way you hear your own name across a crowded room. “What?”

The sergeant looked at me. “Saint Owen. Saint-something. The village on the hill, over there.” He jerked his head south, over the bank, over the hedges. “We took it Monday. Lost it last night. Took it again this afternoon. Lost B Company’s lieutenant doing it.” He spat. “I hope to God somebody wants it.”

“Saint-Ouen-des-Vergers?” I said, in my bad French.

“That’s the one. The one with all the apple trees.” He handed Brandauer the can. “Thanks, son.” He got up, and the boy got up, and they went on down the lane after the others.

I stood in the pit. Peter had heard. He was on the trail, cleaning the sight, and he had stopped with the cloth in his hand. We looked at each other for a while.

Then Peter said, very quietly, “They went home on the twenty-ninth.”

“I know.”

---

The next time I was sent to the command post with a message, I asked. It was in a farm two lanes away, in the kitchen, with a map on the table under a lamp and a lieutenant bent over it with a pencil. I gave him the message. He read it and wrote something on it and gave it back, and I stood there.

“Something else, Wheeler?”

“Sir. There’s a village south of us. Saint-Ouen. Could you show me where it is?”

He looked at me as though I had asked him the way to the moon. He had a telephone at his elbow and a sergeant waiting behind him with another message.

“Somewhere down there, Wheeler,” he said. “Why?”

“No reason, sir.”

He had already turned back to the map. I went back to the gun.

Peter asked him too. He told me that night, lying in his hole in the lane with his gas cape pulled up to his chin.

“I asked the lieutenant where Saint-Ouen was.”

“So did I.”

“What did he say to you?”

“Somewhere down there.”

“That’s what he said to me.” Peter looked up at the dark between the hedges. “I asked him again.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me to go back to my gun.” He was quiet for a bit. “It isn’t on the gun, Wheeler. That’s the thing. We get a direction in mils. A direction in mils isn’t a place. It’s a line. It goes out over the hedge and it ends somewhere, and the observer knows where, and the command post knows where, and we don’t.”

“I know how it works.”

“I know you know.”

I lay there. After a while I said, “It’s ours now. They took it again. You don’t fire on a village your own side’s in.”

“They took it Monday too.”

“If they lose it again, the people will be in the cellars. The way the widow was. And the infantry know there’s people there. They won’t call fire on it unless they have to.”

Peter did not say anything for a long time. Then he said, “Unless they have to,” and that was all.

I did not ask again. We fired every day, south, over the bank, and I cut the charges and handed up the rounds.

---

The mail came on the eighth. It had not come for nearly three weeks, and then it all came at once, a sack of it, and the post corporal walked down the lane calling out names, and men sat on the banks and read with their faces doing things that faces do not usually do in front of other men.

I had four. One from my mother, from the end of May, written before she knew anything, about the garden and the church supper and the price of sugar. One from my mother again, from the eighth of June, after the news of the landings had come, which said only that she had heard and that she was thinking of me every minute, and that my father had gone out to the barn when the news came and had not come in until dark. I read that one twice and put it away.

The third was from Clara. Baca was reading it over my shoulder before I had it unfolded, the way he read everybody’s.

“Who’s Ronald?”

“I don’t know yet.” I read on. “A boy from the high school. She says he’s her beau.”

“How old is she?”

“Fifteen.”

“What does Ronald do?”

I found it. “Card tricks.”

Baca sat back on the bank. “Never trust a man who does card tricks. That’s a man who knows where every card in the pack is and won’t tell you.”

“Wheeler does that,” Gaines said, from along the bank.

“Wheeler tells you. He just tells you after he’s won.”

I disliked Ronald on sight, from three thousand miles.

The fourth was in a hand I did not know, from Indiana. I opened it and turned to the end. “It’s from Oakes’s wife.”

Everybody stopped.

“It’s to all of us,” I said. “Listen.” I read it out. “Dear Boys. Mr Oakes has asked me to write and tell his section that he is home and in the hospital here, and that they are taking good care of him. He says he hopes you are all well and doing it properly.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Baca said, “That is the only sergeant in the whole Army who would have his wife write a report,” and everybody laughed.

Brandauer had one from his grandmother, in German, in the old writing, which he said she always used. He read it out to us, slowly, for the pleasure of it, though none of us but Peter could follow a word of it.

“What’s she say?” Baca asked.

“It is about the cows,” Peter said.

“It’s always about the cows,” said Brandauer, pleased, and read on.

Peter had a letter from his mother, and read it, and folded it, and put it in the limber, and did not say anything about it, and I did not ask. Gaines had two, and read them on the bank a little apart from the rest of us, and when he had read them he sat for a while looking at nothing, and then put them inside his shirt.

Baca had nothing. When the corporal had gone up the lane and come back with the empty sack, Baca stood up and dusted his knees.

“Nobody in Arizona can write,” he said. “That’s why they sent me.” He laughed and went off down the lane.

I saw him a while later, sitting in the ammunition pit by himself with his book of records open on his knees, not writing in it.

---

That evening we played cards in the lane.

It was a fine evening for once, dry, long and gold. The battery had not fired since noon. Ridley had gone to the command post, and Rourke, one of our two replacements, from New York, was on watch at the gap with his rifle. The six of us who were left sat in a ring on the bottom of the lane, on the dirt, with a blanket spread out, and played poker for French money, the board-game money, of which we all had more than we could spend.

Baca dealt. Baca always dealt.

“Why do you always deal?” Hollis asked. He was the other replacement, from Pennsylvania, who had come up at the end of June, and he still asked things.

“Because I don’t trust anybody from a state where it rains.” Baca shuffled. “Where’s Pennsylvania?”

“It rains.”

“Then you don’t deal.”

Gaines played well and quietly and won steadily and never seemed to be trying. Brandauer played badly and enjoyed it more than any of us; he looked at every hand as though it was a present. Peter played as he did everything, carefully, by the book, with his glasses on, and lost.

“You can’t play it by the book,” Gaines told him, after the third hand, kindly. “There isn’t one. That’s the game.”

“I had always suspected that,” Peter said, and went on playing by the book.

I counted the cards. I always do. By the middle of each hand I knew roughly what was left in the pack, and I bet on it.

“That’s cheating,” Baca said.

“It’s arithmetic,” said Gaines.

“In Arizona it’s cheating.”

“In Arizona you can’t write,” said Peter, and Baca threw a card at him.

I came out about even, which is where counting gets you.

When the light began to go Baca told a long story about his grandfather and a mule, which involved a river, a priest, a bet, and the mule being, by the end, in a church. I did not believe a word of it.

“And the mule?” Hollis said.

“Confirmed,” said Baca. “Same day as my uncle.”

Gaines laughed. He really laughed, with his head back against the bank, which I had not seen him do. Then Brandauer said something in German, quite slowly, with a straight face, and Peter choked on nothing and had to turn away and cough into his sleeve.

“What did he say?”

“No,” Peter said.

“Peter.”

“I’m not translating that. Not for Arizona. Not for anybody.”

Brandauer looked at the sky with great innocence.

The swifts came out over the hedges and screamed round in the last of the light. Somewhere a long way off a gun was firing, not ours, slow and regular, like a man knocking on a door. We played until it was too dark to see the cards. We were all there, Ridley at the command post and Rourke at the gap and the six of us on the blanket, all of us whole. It was the last time.

I won four hands. The last thing I remember of it is Baca gathering up the cards in the dark, counting them by feel.

“I deal tomorrow,” he said. “And nobody from Massachusetts touches this pack. I’ve seen what you people do with numbers.”

Four days later the mortars found the pit.