A Little After Eleven

It was Rourke who saw him first, from the gap in the hedge, on the Wednesday afternoon.

“Wheeler,” he called down into the lane. “There’s a Frenchman asking for you.”

“Somebody’s cart,” said Hollis. “Your public, Wheeler.”

I came up the lane wiping my hands. There was an infantry corporal at the end of it, by the farm gate, with his rifle slung, and beside him in the gateway a thin man in a black waistcoat, filthy, with a week of beard and his hair over his eyes and his shirt torn at the shoulder, standing very straight, looking down the lane at the guns.

I did not know him. Then he saw me.

“Jim,” he said.

It was Lucien.

---

“This one yours?” said the corporal.

“Where did you find him?”

“Behind B Company, this morning. Walking about asking everybody for the American who mended wheels. ‘The battery of Jim.’” He said it the way Lucien would have, and then looked as if he wished he had not. “He’s been passed down the line all day like a sack of mail. Somebody at battalion said C Battery had a Wheeler who’d been round the farms in June. So. Is he yours?”

“He’s mine.”

“Good,” said the corporal. “I got a war to get back to.” And he went.

Lucien stood in the gateway. He did not come forward. He did not shake my hand, which he had always done, every time, with both of his. He was wearing his father’s waistcoat, too wide for him; I knew it, because I had sewn a button back on it in June. His face was not doing anything. Lucien’s face was always doing something, laughing or talking or listening, and now it was still and grey under the dirt, and his eyes were very dark and very steady.

He said, in English, “Jim. My father is dead.”

---

In June he had had ten words of English that I had taught him and a dozen he had got from the cook. He had more now. It came out broken, with French in it and his hands going, and I understood all of it.

“Your English,” I said.

“I learn. From the soldiers. The Americans, they are in Saint-Ouen, they go, they come back, they go. I talk with them.” For a moment it was nearly the old Lucien. “And the priest, he has a book, a dictionary, for the school. In the cellar I learn, with a candle.” He looked at me. “I think, I need English. To talk with you. When you come to buy the eggs.”

His face did not change at all when he said it.

“When?” I said. “When was it?”

“Saturday. In the night.” He held up his hands and showed me with his fingers. Eleven. “Onze heures. Eleven hours. Un peu après. A little after.”

“Where were you?”

“In the cellar. Under the shop. All four. All evening there are shells, small ones. And then come the big ones.” His hands went out, all round him. “Très, très nombreux. Very many. From everywhere. One, one, one.” He made the sound of them with his mouth, and his hands shook the air. “The house is shaking. The shop is coming down on us. And my grandmother, she wants her shawl. The black one. It is upstairs in her chair. She is cold, she is afraid, she asks, she asks.” His hands stopped. “My father says, I go. Between the shells. It is only the stairs.”

He stopped. He looked at me. Then he said, very carefully:

“The shell comes into the shop. My father is on the stairs. He is dead. At once. He does not suffer, the doctor says.”

He said something in French that I did not catch. Then, in English again: “The shawl also.”

I put my hand on his arm. He let it stay there.

“Your mother,” I said. “Your grandmother.”

“Living. We stay in the cellar until the shells stop. Onze heures et demie. Half past eleven. A little after. And then until the morning.” He did not look away. “With my father on the stairs.”

“And in the morning?”

“In the morning the Americans come into the village again. This time they stay. The priest comes. Sunday, in the afternoon, we bury him in the churchyard. Quickly. The priest, and us three, and some neighbours, and one American, a sergeant. He stands at the back with his helmet off.” He touched his own head where the helmet would have been.

“And now?”

“Now the shop is down. The front, it is in the square. The house, no roof. Monday it rains.” He counted it off on his fingers, the way I would have. “We have nothing to eat. Everything we bring home on the cart, from the farm, it is in the shop under the stones. The village has nothing also. My mother and the old one are in the church, under, the crypt, with nine other people. My grandmother does not speak. Not since Saturday. Not one word. My mother will not leave her.”

“How did you get here?”

“I walk. Tuesday, first light, north, through the lines. To the farm, the committee. The woman with the book. She says for Saint-Ouen she can do nothing, not until the fighting is further.” He pushed the fighting away from him with one hand. “And I remember, on the gate, you say, if you need anything, ask for Jim. So I ask. Everybody. All the day.”

He stood there a moment.

“Food. A roof. For my mother and the old one. Some days. Not long. Until the shop.” Then: “You can help, Jim?”

“Yes,” I said.

---

I took him down the lane and sat him on the bank by the ammunition pit, and went to the cook.

The cook had cooked in a hotel in Chicago before the war, and he was as near to a decent man as the Army allowed cooks to be. He was scraping a pan when I came in.

“There’s a Frenchman in the lane,” I said. “His father’s been killed. He hasn’t eaten since Monday.”

The cook looked at me for a moment. Then he wiped his hands and put a loaf in my arms, a whole one, and a tin of meat on top of it, and a tin of peaches, and a can of coffee.

“Do I sign for it?”

“For what?” said the cook. “I never saw you.” And he went back to the pan.

When I got back, Brandauer already had a pot on in the lane. He held out his hand for the coffee without asking what it was for. Hollis came over and put a chocolate bar on the bank beside Lucien.

“It’s the good kind,” he said, and went red, and went back to the pit.

The two new men stood about not knowing what to do. Then the younger one took off his own jacket and put it round Lucien’s shoulders, because he was shaking, though it was July. Lucien looked at the jacket, and then at the boy.

“Merci,” he said.

The boy went red to the ears and walked off down the lane.

Lucien ate slowly, a little at a time. He tore the bread into small pieces and put each one in his mouth and waited.

“Langsam,” said Brandauer, crouching by the pot. “Slow. Or it comes back.”

“I know,” said Lucien. “Slow.” Everybody in Normandy knew it by then.

Peter came down from the trail while he was eating. He saw who it was and stopped in the middle of the lane.

Lucien looked up. “Peter.”

Peter did not say anything. He sat down on the bank beside him and put his arm round his shoulders, which I had never seen Peter do to anybody, and sat there. Lucien went on eating, with Peter’s arm round him, and neither of them said a word.

I stood in the lane and looked at them.

---

A little after eleven. On Saturday. Until a little after half past.

On Saturday, from a quarter to eleven until half past, I had loaded forty-four rounds into the gun in the dark. Ridley had written the time at the top of each set of numbers in Baca’s book, and the book was in Ridley’s shirt, ten yards from where I stood. We had fired south, over the hill. Saint-Ouen was south, over the hill, somewhere. And there had been more guns firing that night, behind us and on both sides, than I had known were there.

It could have been the French, firing back into their own village; they had guns too, and mortars, and they fired into villages as readily as anybody. It could have been any of the twenty batteries round us. It could have been us.

---

I went up the trail to the sight, where Peter had been, and waited. After a while he came. He stood by the sight and looked at me.

“You should be telling Ridley this,” he said. “Whatever it is.”

“I’m telling you first.”

“He said to tell him first. In the orchard.”

“I know what he said.”

He waited.

I held up my hand and counted it off on my fingers.

“Lucien’s father was killed on Saturday night. By a shell, in the shop, on the stairs. A little after eleven.” One finger. “The shelling went on until a little after half past.” Two.

“Wheeler.”

“Let me count it.” Three. “We fired a mission on Saturday night. From about a quarter to eleven until about half past. South. Forty-four rounds. It’s in the book.”

Peter did not say anything.

“So did a great many other guns.” Four.

“Yes.”

“And I don’t know where ours went.” The thumb. “I don’t know where theirs went. I don’t know.”

I had run out of fingers.

“We don’t know it was us,” said Peter.

“I know.”

“There were a hundred guns. You saw them. The whole sky.”

“I know that. That’s why I’m going to ask.”

Peter looked along the lane towards Ridley.

“That isn’t the worst of it,” I said.

He waited.

“I don’t trust myself any more.”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought I’d know. If it was ever them, I’d feel it, pushing the round home.” I held my hands out and looked at them. “I was thinking about the midges.”

“Wheeler, nobody could have. There’s nothing in the numbers.”

“I know.”

---

Peter took his glasses off. He did not polish them. He held them in his hand and looked at them, and then he put them back on and looked at me through them, and his face was as white as it had been in the pit on the twelfth, when he would not leave the gun.

“Are you sure you want to know?” he said, very quietly.

“Yes.”

“If you ask, you’ll find out. One way or the other. You don’t get to choose which.”

“I know.”

“And if you don’t ask.”

“I’ve tried not asking,” I said. “I tried it for two weeks.”

Peter nodded. “All right,” he said. “First, food. Then a roof for them. That’s what he came for. That doesn’t wait for anything.” He said it in the flat quick voice he used for the numbers.

“Go and ask Ridley,” he said. “I’ll stay with Lucien.”

I went down the trail and along the lane to where Ridley was sitting against the bank with Baca’s book on his knees, and stood in front of him. He looked up, and saw my face, and closed the book.