The Coast Road

The first wall was in a village on the ninth of August, a Wednesday, and I would not have seen it if the women had not brought us to it.

We had stopped in the square to let a column of tanks go through, and the people came out, as they did everywhere that month, with cider and flowers and children; but these did not come out shouting. They came out quietly, a few of them, and stood by the truck, and one woman, about my mother’s age, in a black dress, took hold of Peter’s sleeve.

“Venez,” she said. “Venez voir.”

“She wants us to come and see something,” Peter said.

“See what?”

Peter asked her. She did not answer. She pulled at his sleeve.

Ridley looked at the tanks, which were going to be some time, and looked at the woman.

“Mercer,” he said. “Wheeler. Ten minutes.”

---

It was behind the church. A wall, the back wall of a barn, stone, with a strip of grass in front of it. The stone was pocked all along it at about the height of a man’s chest, small holes, close together, some in rows, the way a wall looks after somebody has used it for practice. There were flowers on the grass in front of it, fresh ones, and some that were not fresh, and a row of candles in jam jars, burned down.

The woman said something, and Peter did not translate it at once.

“Peter.”

“Eleven,” he said. “Eleven men. On the second of August. The day before the French left. They took them out of the houses at random, she says, the men who were at home, because somebody had cut a telephone wire on the road. Her husband.” He stopped. “And her son. He was sixteen.”

The woman was looking at the wall. She said something else.

“She says they made the rest of the village watch,” Peter said. “She says she wants the Americans to see it, so that somebody who isn’t from here has seen it.”

I looked at the wall. I counted the holes. I stood there in front of that woman and counted the holes in the stone, in rows, along the wall, from the left, the way I count the cows, the way I count everything, and I got to a hundred and forty and lost my place and started again.

“Wheeler,” Peter said quietly.

“I’m all right.”

“You’re counting.”

“I know.”

The woman watched me. Then she said something to Peter, and he said something back, and she nodded and put her hand on my arm for a moment and went back towards the square.

“What did she say?”

“She asked what you were doing,” Peter said. “I told her you were counting. She said good. She said somebody should.”

---

After that I could not stop.

I counted everything that month. I counted the walls; there were four more, in four more villages, between the ninth and the fourteenth, and I counted the holes in two of them before Peter took me away. I counted the bridges the French had blown up going back, which was all of them, every one we came to, so that we crossed every river on the engineers’ bridges, swaying, with the gun behind. I counted the burned farms. I counted the dead horses in the ditches, farm horses mostly, that had been pulling whatever anybody could find to pull, and which nobody had time to bury either.

And I counted the villages that had been hit. Not by the French. By us.

You could tell. A village the French had burned on the way out had the fire in it, the black, the roofs fallen in and the walls standing; and a village the bombers had hit had the big holes, the whole houses gone, the brown; and a village the guns had hit had a pattern to it, if you knew what you were looking at, and I did. A spread. A great many small holes and a few big ones, falling round a point, round the crossroads or the church or the place where somebody had said there were mortars, the way shot falls from a gun. I had been taught the spread at Fort Sill, on the ranges, looking at where the rounds came down in the grass at the foot of the Wichitas, and I knew it the way I knew the shape of a field that wanted draining.

“That’s a battery,” I said, going through one of them, on the twelfth. “Four guns. Maybe two batteries.”

“Wheeler,” said Ridley, from the cab.

“Look at it. You can see the spread. Somebody laid on the church.”

“I see it.”

“It wasn’t us. We weren’t here. We were five miles back.”

“I know where we were,” said Ridley. He did not turn round. “Stop counting, son.”

He had never called me that. Nobody had, except my father. I stopped, for that day. I started again the next.

---

The general came on the fifteenth.

We were in action on a slope above a little river, in a field of stubble, with the gun laid and nothing coming down the wire, in the middle of a hot, still afternoon. Hollis was asleep under the truck. Szabo and Dunne were playing cards on an ammunition box. Peter was on the trail with a book, which was not the French grammar, and which he kept turning so that nobody could see the cover. I was sitting in the shade of the gun shield doing nothing.

We heard the motorcycle before we saw it. It came along the lane at the top of the field fast, too fast, with another one behind it, and a car behind that, and it slowed at the gate and turned in, bouncing across the stubble, and stopped by the truck, and the rider kicked the stand down and pulled off his goggles.

He was small. That was the first thing. A small man, smaller than me by a head, in a General’s uniform with the red on the collar, very dusty, with no helmet, and fair hair that had gone mostly grey, cut short, and a long jaw and a big nose, and very pale blue eyes in a face burned dark by the sun. The two men on the other motorcycle were Frenchmen with armbands and rifles. A British captain got out of the car looking as though he had been trying to keep up all day and had given it up.

The general looked at the gun. Then he looked at Ridley, who was standing by the trail with his hands at his sides, and his face changed.

“Ridley,” he said.

“General.”

“The coast road. Spring of ‘forty-three.” He came across the stubble with his hand out. “You wouldn’t let me fire your gun.”

“No, sir,” said Ridley, and shook it.

The general held on to his hand a moment longer than a handshake takes. Peter, on the trail, had stood up, and the book had fallen off his knee onto the stubble, and he did not pick it up. He was staring.

“You were quite right,” the general said. “I’d have put it in the sea.” He looked at Ridley’s leg. “They told me you’d been hit.”

“In the leg, sir. Two weeks after.”

“And they sent you back to it.”

“I asked.”

“Of course you did.” The general looked round at the rest of us, at the section, at Hollis crawling out from under the truck and Szabo and Dunne on their feet with their cards in their hands, and at me by the shield. He looked at each of us, once. It was the way Ridley looked at a thing.

“Are these yours?”

“Number three gun, sir. C Battery.”

“Good section?”

“Good enough.”

The general smiled at that, a quick, crooked smile that went up one side of his face. “From you,” he said, “that’s a decoration.”

---

The British captain from the car came up, a little out of breath.

“Sir, the committee at the…”

“In a minute, Harris.”

“Sir, they’ve been waiting since…”

“They’ve been waiting for four years,” said the general, without heat. “They’ll wait ten minutes.” He turned back to Ridley. “Have you got any tea?”

“Coffee, sir.”

“Coffee, then.”

Brandauer went for the pot as if he had been fired from the gun. The general sat down on an ammunition box, the way any of us would have, with his elbows on his knees, and took the mug from Brandauer and said thank you to him and looked at it.

“I’m the liaison now,” he said to Ridley. “With the resistance. Ferrers had it, and Ferrers trod on a mine outside Saint-Lô, three weeks ago, and they couldn’t find anybody else in a hurry who spoke French and didn’t mind being shot at by both sides. So they found me. I was in Cairo, at a desk.”

“I heard you were at a desk, sir.”

“I’m still at a desk,” the general said. “It’s on a motorcycle now. That’s the only improvement.” He drank some of the coffee. “Every morning the men in the armbands come in from the villages with what they’ve seen in the night. A battery here. Mortars there. Twenty men in a farm. A tank in a wood. And I sit in a schoolroom and decide which of it is true. And I pass it on. And somebody like you fires on it, before lunch.”

Ridley did not say anything.

“Half of it’s true,” the general said. “Perhaps more. They’re brave and they know the ground and they want us to win more than anybody alive. And some of it’s a man who saw a shadow. And some of it’s a man who wants his neighbour’s field.” He turned the mug in his hands. “I had a war once where we blew up railways, because we hadn’t any guns. A railway hasn’t got a cellar.” He looked up at Ridley. “How do you choose, Sergeant? On the gun.”

“We don’t, sir. They send numbers.”

“Yes,” said the general. “I know. I’m the one who sends them the numbers now. Or the ones before the numbers.” He was quiet a moment. “I was better at trains.”

---

I was standing by the shield, perhaps ten feet away, with my hand on it. I opened my mouth, and shut it again.

Ridley said, “You did all right on the coast road, sir. With the reports. We fired on what you sent us. It was there.”

“That was the desert,” the general said. “In the desert you can see a long way.” He finished the coffee and stood up. “Here you can’t see the next field.”

Then he saw the book.

It was lying in the stubble by the trail where Peter had dropped it, face up, and the general looked at it, and his face did something complicated, and he bent and picked it up and turned it over and looked at the cover. Peter had gone the colour of brick.

“Is this yours?”

“Yes, sir,” said Peter. “Sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

“So am I,” said the general. “I wrote it.” He held it out. “Have you got to the end?”

“Twice, sir.”

“Then you’ve got further than most of the people who quote it.” He looked at Peter for a moment, at his glasses and his dusty face and his white knuckles. “Don’t believe all of it.”

“No, sir.”

“Believe the parts about the camels. I was right about the camels.”

He gave the book back. Peter took it in both hands as if it was hot. The general turned to Ridley.

“I won’t ask to fire it.”

“No, sir.”

“I would have liked to, you know. Both times.” He pulled his goggles down. “Good luck, Ridley.”

“And you, General.”

He went back across the stubble and kicked the motorcycle into life and went off up the field and through the gate, fast, with the Frenchmen after him and the captain running for the car, and the dust hung in the lane for a long time after the sound had gone.

---

Nobody said anything for a while. Then Dunne said, “Who was that?”

Szabo looked at him. “You’re kidding.”

“No. Who was that?”

“That,” said Peter, very quietly, still holding the book in both hands, “was Lawrence.”

“Lawrence who?”

“Lawrence of Arabia,” said Szabo. “Jesus, Dunne.”

“I thought he was dead,” said Dunne.

“No,” said Peter. “He’s on a motorcycle.” He sat down on the trail rather suddenly, and opened the book, and looked at the first page as if it might have changed, and shut it again.

Brandauer was looking at Ridley. We all were, in the end. Ridley had gone back to standing by the trail with his hands at his sides, as if nothing had happened.

“Sergeant,” said Hollis. “The coast road.”

“What about it?”

“What happened?”

Ridley looked at him for a long time. He never talked about North Africa. Not once, in nine months.

“His raiders were out past the French line,” he said at last. “Forty miles. Coming back. The French had a column on the road between them and us. He came to the battery to ask us to put a stop on it, and he gave us the map reference himself, from a sketch his men had made, and he was right to the yard. Then he asked if he could pull the lanyard.” Ridley looked at the gun. “I said no. He wasn’t on my gun’s list.”

“You said no to Lawrence of Arabia?” said Szabo.

“I said no to a General who wasn’t on my list.”

“What did he say?”

“Said I was right.” Ridley turned back to the gun. “That’s all. Clean the sight, Mercer. You’ve got coffee on it.”

There was not any coffee on it. Peter cleaned it anyway, very carefully, in small circles, with the book on the trail beside him, and every so often he stopped and looked at the gate.

---

That night, in my hole by the stubble, I could not sleep, and after a while I heard Peter moving in his, and I said, “Peter.”

“Mm.”

“What he said. About choosing.”

“I know.”

“He’s the one who sends them. The reports.”

“I know, Wheeler.”

“He wasn’t here in July.”

“No.” Peter was quiet for a long time. “Somebody was. In a schoolroom, or a command post, or up a tree.”

“He said he was better at trains.”

“Yes,” said Peter.

I lay there and looked at the stars over the stubble. The guns were going a long way off to the east, slow, like somebody knocking.

“Did you get him to sign it?” I said.

“No.” A long pause. “I didn’t think of it till he’d gone.”

“You’ll never see him again.”

“No,” said Peter. “But I’ll know what he looked like when he said not to believe all of it.” Another pause. “And that he was right about the camels.”

I laughed. I had not laughed since the fountain. Peter laughed too, in his hole, and then we were both laughing, lying in the stubble in the dark, and Ridley’s voice came out of the dark from the other side of the gun, flat and tired.

“Sleep.”

We slept.