Cobra-West

We left the lane on the Wednesday morning, the twenty-sixth, before it was light.

“March order,” Ridley said, walking down the line of holes with his stiff leg. “Up. Up. March order.”

Hollis put his head out from under his gas cape. “Where to, Sergeant?”

“Forward.”

“Forward where?”

“Forward,” said Ridley, and went on to the next hole.

It took us an hour to get the gun out of the pit. We had dug it in so well, two weeks before, that it did not want to come out; the spades had grown into the bank, and the trails had sunk, and Brandauer and I had to dig round them with shovels in the dark while Ridley held a torch with his hand over it. The truck came down the lane with no lights. We hooked on. The ammunition went up into the back, three high, fuzes forward, and the log roof Brandauer and I had built over the ammunition pit stayed where it was, over nothing.

Brandauer stood and looked at it.

“Somebody will use it,” I said.

“A cow,” said Brandauer. “A cow will stand under it in the rain and be glad.”

“Get in the truck,” said Ridley.

---

The road south was full. Everything that had been waiting behind the hedges for two months was on it at once, tanks and trucks and guns and jeeps and ambulances, in a column that went forward a hundred yards and stopped and went forward again, and the dust came up off it white, because it had been dry since Monday, and settled on everything, so that by noon we were all the same colour, the truck and the gun and the men, a kind of pale grey, like a picture of ourselves in a newspaper.

“Look at Mercer,” said Szabo, one of the two new men, from Cleveland. “He looks like a statue of himself.”

Peter took off his glasses and looked at them. They were white. He wiped them on his shirt, which was white too, and put them back on, and they were no better.

“I’ve been made into a monument,” he said. “To the unknown layer.”

“What’s a layer?” said Dunne, the other new man. He was eighteen and from Rhode Island and had been with us two weeks and still asked what things were.

“Him,” said Szabo. “He points it.”

“I thought the sergeant pointed it.”

“The sergeant,” said Peter, “tells me where to point it. I point it. Wheeler puts the thing in it. Brandauer hands Wheeler the thing. Hollis hands Brandauer the thing. You hand Hollis the thing. It’s a very long way of throwing a stone.”

Dunne thought about that. “Who tells the sergeant?”

Nobody answered him. The column moved a hundred yards and stopped.

---

We passed the line in the afternoon. You could tell where it had been. There was a strip of country, a mile wide, perhaps two, where the bombers had been the day before, and it was not like any country I had seen. The fields were not fields. They were brown, all of them, every one, turned over and over as if a giant had ploughed them in every direction at once, and full of holes, overlapping, so that there was no flat ground at all, and the hedges were gone, or there were bits of them, stumps of trees sticking up out of the brown at angles, and the road had been scraped through it by bulldozers so that it ran between two banks of churned earth like a cutting. There was a smell. I will not describe the smell.

There were French tanks in it. Or there had been. They were on their sides, and upside down, and one was standing on its nose in a crater with its tracks in the air, like a beetle that has been turned over, and there were guns, and trucks, burned, and men.

Nobody in the truck said anything for a long time.

Then Dunne said, “Did we do that?”

“The bombers,” said Szabo.

“I mean us. Our side.”

“Yes,” said Peter.

Dunne looked at it going past. He was very white under the dust. “There was a village here,” he said. “On the map. I saw it on the sergeant’s map. There was a village called something, right about here.”

Nobody answered him. I looked at the brown country going past, and I did not see a village, and I did not look for one. Peter, across the truck from me, was looking at his hands.

---

On the Thursday we went into action twice, and moved four times, and fired eleven rounds.

That was what it was like, from then on. The line was gone. The French were not in front of us any more in the old way, behind a hedge, a field away, for weeks. They were somewhere ahead, going back, fast, and the tanks were after them, and the infantry after the tanks in trucks, and we were after the infantry, trying to keep up, so that we could be there if anybody needed us. We would come into action in a field, unhook, swing the trails, dig the spades in, lay the gun, and wait. Sometimes a mission came and we fired a few rounds. More often the telephone rang and Ridley said, “March order,” and we hooked on and went on down the road to the next field and did it again.

“This is the most tiring way of not doing anything I’ve ever seen,” Hollis said, on the third time, swinging a trail.

“It’s called a war of movement,” said Peter.

“Who’s moving? I’m digging.”

“The war is moving,” said Peter. “We’re following it with a shovel.”

Peter was cheerful. He was quick on the sight, quicker than he had been since Devon; he laid the gun before Ridley had finished the numbers, and checked it twice, and said “Set” in a clear voice, and when we moved he was the first to the trails. He talked. He talked to Dunne about the Vikings, and to Szabo about baseball, of which he knew nothing and said so, and to Brandauer about whether a cow could be taught to lay a gun, and he laughed. I had not heard him laugh since before the twelfth.

And I was slow on the breech. I would take the round from Brandauer and stand with it in my arms for a second, two seconds, before I turned and put it in. Ridley noticed. He did not say anything. He looked at me once, on the Thursday, at the second position, when the round was in my arms and the breech was open and I was standing there with it, and I put it in, and he looked away.

---

On the Friday afternoon we were in a field by a road, beside an orchard, waiting, with the gun laid and nothing coming down the wire. It was hot. Most of the section was asleep in the shade of the hedge. Peter was sitting on the trail cleaning the sight. I was sitting on an ammunition box beside the breech, doing nothing.

“You were slow this morning,” he said, without looking up.

“I know.”

“At the first position. Ridley noticed.”

“I know he noticed.”

He polished the sight glass, carefully, in small circles. “It’s the breech. You stand there with it.”

“I know what I do, Peter.”

“Then stop doing it.” He said it lightly, in the cheerful voice, the one he had brought out of the lane. “It’s done, Wheeler. The review’s done. The finding’s in. We did it properly. It’s finished.”

I did not say anything.

“We’ve got a job,” he said. “It’s a good job and we’re good at it. The infantry need us to be good at it. If you’re slow on the breech, somebody in a field we can’t see is waiting for a round that’s late.” He put the cloth down. “You know that. You said it yourself, on the twelfth. Men in a field we can’t see.”

“I know what I said.”

“Then come back into it. Into the drill. Do it the way you did it before.” He looked at me then, through his dusty glasses, and smiled. “You put the round in. I lay the gun. That’s what the drill’s for.”

“I know what the drill’s for.”

“Then use it.”

I stood up off the ammunition box, and he looked up at me, surprised.

“It’s finished,” I said. “That’s what you think.”

“The review said…”

“I know what the review said. I was there. I was the loader.” I could hear my voice and it was not right. “You were in the barn. You saw her. You saw the old woman. You carried her. And you sat in the lane with your arm round him. And now it’s finished, because a major came for four hours and read out a piece of paper.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“It’s what you meant.”

Peter took his glasses off. He did not polish them. He held them, and his hand was shaking a little, and his face had gone the way it went on the twelfth, white and closed and still.

“What I meant,” he said, very carefully, “is that there’s a war on. And we’re in it. And it isn’t finished, and we have to do it properly or somebody else gets hurt. That’s all I meant.”

“That isn’t all you meant.”

“Wheeler…”

“You found something you can do, and you want me doing it too, so you don’t have to look at me.” I stopped. “That’s what you meant.”

He looked at me for a long time. Then he put his glasses back on and picked up the cloth and went back to cleaning the sight glass, in small circles, very carefully, though it was clean.

“You should get some sleep,” he said. “We’ll move tonight.”

---

We did move that night, and the next day, and the day after. We did not talk about it again. We talked about other things, the way you do, the dust and the heat and the food and where we were going, which nobody knew; but not about that. When he handed me a cigarette he handed it to me the way he would have handed it to Szabo. When I passed him the water can I passed it the way I would have passed it to Dunne. Brandauer noticed. On the Sunday, at a halt, he sat down beside me on the bank of a ditch and offered me a piece of chocolate and said, looking at the road:

“You and the Professor.”

“What about us?”

“Nothing.” He ate his chocolate. “Only, in Wisconsin, when two men who work the same farm stop talking, the cows know. The cows always know first.”

“Peter isn’t a cow, Karl.”

“No,” said Brandauer. “But you are both being very stupid, in the same way, and it is a cow’s way.” He got up. “That is all. I have said it once. Like the sergeant.”

---

The country changed. That was the strange thing about the breakout, apart from the moving: in three days we came out of the hedges. They did not stop all at once; they got further apart, and lower, and the fields got bigger, until one morning we came over a rise and the country in front of us was open, rolling, with long fields of wheat going yellow and woods on the hills and roads running straight between them, and you could see for miles. Ridley stood up in the cab of the truck and looked at it for a long time.

“Remember these, Sergeant?” Hollis said, from the back.

“No,” said Ridley, and sat down.

The villages were different too. The French had gone back through them so fast that they had not had time to fight in most of them, and they were standing, whole, with their windows in, and the people came out. They came out in crowds, and they had flags, the blue and white and red of France, and some of the Norman flag with the two yellow animals, and they threw flowers at the trucks, and apples, which hurt, and held up bottles, and children ran beside the gun shouting things, and an old woman in one village stood in the road in front of our truck with a jug of cider and would not move until Lomax, who was driving us that day, stopped and took it.

“Merci,” said Lomax, who had learned it. “Merci, ma’am. Merci.”

She said something to him and patted his arm through the window.

“What’d she say?” Lomax said.

Peter leaned forward from the back. “She says you’re very brown.”

“I’m dusty.”

“She says it suits you.”

Lomax drove on with the jug between his knees, grinning, and passed it back when we halted, and it went round the whole section, and Dunne, who was eighteen and had never had cider, was sick behind a wall in the next village, and Szabo held his helmet for him.

I laughed at that. I sat in the back of the truck with the dust on me and the cider in me and the people shouting and the flowers coming over the tailboard, and Dunne being sick, and I laughed until I could not stop. Peter was laughing too, across the truck. We looked at each other, laughing, and then we both looked away.

---

On the Wednesday, the second of August, the mail caught up with us, at a halt in a little town with a fountain in the square that had a stone lion on top of it, spitting.

There was one for me in my father’s hand.

I knew it was his from across the square when the post corporal held it up, because he writes like a man digging a post hole, slowly, with his whole arm, and the letters are big and square and lean back. I had told him about the King in June. I had not expected an answer. My father does not answer letters. He reads them, my mother says, three or four times, at the kitchen table after supper with his glasses on, and puts them back in the envelope and says “Well,” and that is his answer.

I opened it sitting on the edge of the fountain. It was one sheet. It was four lines.

The hay is in.

It stayed dry.

Glad to hear it.

Tell him so if you see him again.

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time. Then I sat on the edge of the fountain with the letter in my hand and the stone lion spitting water behind me, and I could not see the square very well.

Somebody sat down on the edge of the fountain beside me. It was Peter. He did not say anything. He waited.

I held out the letter, and he took it, and read it, and handed it back.

“He’s answered the King,” Peter said.

“He’s answered me.”

“No.” Peter looked at the lion. “He’s answered the King. Through you.” He was quiet a moment. “It’s the best letter I’ve ever read, Wheeler. I’ve read a lot of letters. I’ve read Cromwell’s letters. That’s better.”

I folded it and put it in my shirt.

“I wasn’t fair to you,” I said. “On Friday.”

“No.”

“You weren’t fair to me either.”

“No,” said Peter. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirt, which was still white with dust, and they were no better. He put them back on.

“It isn’t finished,” he said. “I know it isn’t.”

“No.”

We sat on the edge of the fountain. The lion spat. The section was spread out round the square under the trees, reading letters, and a woman had come out of a house with a tray of glasses and was going round them, and Dunne was refusing his.

“We should go and get a drink,” I said.

“I think we should,” said Peter.

We got up and went across the square and had a glass of something from the woman’s tray, standing in the shade, and she asked where we were from, and Peter told her, and she said she had a cousin in Montreal, which is in New Albion, which she seemed to think was near enough.

That evening, in the next field, the telephone rang, and Ridley said the numbers, and Peter laid the gun and said “Set,” and Brandauer handed me the round.

I stood with it. One second.

“Wheeler,” said Ridley.

I put it in.