The Limber

The camp at Ayer was three weeks of standing in lines. We were given clothes that fitted nobody and boots that fitted some of us, and needles in both arms, and a haircut that took about forty seconds and was the same for everybody. We marched up and down a frozen field and learned to turn round without falling over. We were shouted at by a corporal from Fall River who could shout without seeming to take a breath, which I have since learned is a thing that is taught, and he was very good at it. We were given tests. They were the sums from Boston again, only harder, and some questions about which way a gear would turn if another gear turned the other way, which I could have answered at nine, and some about words, which I was less good at.

On the last Friday they read out where we were going. Two hundred of us sat on benches in a hut with the stove going, and a man read the names off a list, in no order that anybody could see, with a word after each one.

“Infantry. Infantry. Engineers. Signals. Infantry.”

When he got to me he said, “Artillery,” and looked up for a moment, as though he wanted to see what an artilleryman looked like, and then went on.

I caught the corporal from Fall River on the way out.

“Why artillery, Corporal?”

“You can lift and you can count,” he said. “They want both. Most of you can only do one.”

I wrote to my father that night and told him, and said it was the same as Eli. My father wrote back in his large slow hand, which he used about twice a year.

Dear James. Glad to hear it. It is a good deal harder to drop a cannon. The cows are all right. Bathsheba has a cough. Your father.

That was the whole letter.

---

The artillery school is at Fort Sill, in Oklahoma-Sequoyah. I worked out the distance on the train: one thousand seven hundred and some miles by the way we went, which was not the shortest way, and three days and two nights, and I saw more of the Union through a dirty window in those three days than any Wheeler since Eli had seen at all.

We went down to New York and across the Hudson in the dark, and in the morning we were in the hills of Pennsylvania, with snow on them and small towns in the bottoms of the valleys, each one with a church and a mill and a river, so that it looked like home pulled out longer. Then Ohio, which was flat, and went on being flat for a day. Then a night, and then at St Louis we crossed the Mississippi, and I stood at the window of the car with my mouth open like a boy at a circus.

“It’s only a river, Wheeler,” said a man from Rhode Island behind me.

“That’s not a river. That’s a county.”

It was brown and it was as wide as from our house to the Centre, and it was moving, all of it, the whole width, as if it had somewhere to be.

Then Missouri, which was hills, and then the long country, which I had not known was there. Oklahoma-Sequoyah came up out of the night and went on into the next afternoon without changing, brown grass and a wind you could see moving in it, and a tree every mile or so as if somebody had put it there to show it could be done.

“Poor country,” I said.

The man from Rhode Island pointed. Far off, standing up out of the plain like churches, were the grain elevators, and you could see them from twenty miles away, and round them the wheat stubble went to the edge of the world.

“Poor,” he said.

I took it back.

We got off the train at Lawton in a wind that took my cap off and sent it about forty yards along the platform, and a sergeant watched me run after it and did not say anything.

---

Fort Sill was red. The dirt was red, a red like brick, and in the wind it got into everything, into the barracks and the blankets and your food and your ears, and it got onto the guns, and keeping it off the guns was a good half of our lives there. There were mountains to the north and west, the Wichitas, which were not much as mountains go, low and grey and lumpy like piled stone, but they were the first mountains I had seen that were not in a picture, and the ranges ran out towards them, and we fired at them for most of a year.

There was an infantry regiment on the post as well, the Oklahoma-Sequoyah Light Infantry, who had been raised there and had been there since before the last war, and who regarded the artillery school as a lodger. They had their colour in a glass case in their headquarters, the silk worn thin and mended, and in our second week we were taken to see it as part of a lecture about the Army.

“The Corps of Artillery has never carried colours,” the lecturer said. “The guns are its colours. A gunner who loses his gun has lost what an infantryman loses when he loses the colours, and you would do well to remember it.”

A boy beside me from Vermont whispered, “What if you just drop it?”

I laughed out loud.

The lecturer stopped. “Something amusing, Private?”

“No, sir.”

I got four days of washing pots, and did not explain why it was funny.

---

The barracks were long wooden huts with a stove at each end and forty men between them. On the first night the man in the bunk next to mine was sitting up reading, with a canvas bag open beside him. He was thin and fair, with steel-rimmed glasses.

“Wheeler,” I said. “Lexington.”

He looked up. “Mercer. Dayton.” He thought about it. “The Lexington?”

“It’s the only one I’ve been to.”

He seemed to find that satisfactory, and went back to his book. A while later, without looking up, he said, “Do you read, Wheeler?”

“The farm paper.”

“That’s a start.”

It came out over the next weeks, a little at a time. He was nineteen, a year older than me, and he had done two years of history at the college at Columbus. His father taught Latin at a high school, and his mother taught the piano, and he had a younger brother, and that was nearly everything he told me about his family in the first six months. He was short-sighted, though not so short-sighted that they would not take him, and he took his glasses off and polished them whenever anybody said something foolish, so that you could tell what he thought of a lecture by how clean his glasses were at the end of it.

“Why’d you join?” I asked him, in the first week.

“They’d have called me up in June anyway,” he said, “and I didn’t want to sit an examination on the Peace of Boston knowing I wouldn’t be there for the results.”

He told his jokes in exactly the voice he used for everything else.

The bag was the other thing everybody noticed about Peter. It was a canvas bag of the sort a plumber keeps his tools in, with a leather strap, and it had books in it, and he took it everywhere he was allowed to take it and a few places he was not. He took it to meals. He took it to the latrine. In the first month he took it out to the gun park, and set it down on the trail of a howitzer while we were being shown how the breech worked.

The instructor was a staff sergeant called Dempsey, who had been in the Corps for nineteen years and looked as though he had been made out of the same red dirt as the post. He picked the bag up off the trail and weighed it in his hand.

“What’s in this, Private?”

“History, Sergeant.”

“How much?”

“About six hundred years, Sergeant. But it’s mostly the English.”

Dempsey looked at him for a long time. Then he gave him the bag back.

“If that’s ever on my gun again,” he said, “I’ll fire it at the Wichitas.”

In the second week we were taught that the old guns, the ones in pictures, went into action with a limber, a two-wheeled cart that carried the ammunition and hooked on to the trail, so that the horses pulled the limber and the limber pulled the gun; and that our guns did not have them, because a truck did the work now, and the ammunition came in the truck. That night in the hut Peter came in with the bag over his shoulder.

“Somebody ought to tell Mercer,” I said. “He’s still carrying his limber.”

It was not a very good joke. But it went round the hut, the way a not very good joke goes round a barracks, and in the morning a boy from Albany leaned over as Peter put the bag down at breakfast.

“Unlimbered, Mercer?”

“I am always prepared,” Peter said, without looking up, “to come into action.”

It stuck for three years. Men who had never been to Fort Sill and did not know where it came from were saying it in Normandy.

But that was not how we became friends. We became friends over the clock.

---

First there was the gun.

“Hundred and five millimetres,” Dempsey said, with his hand on the shield. “Which is a little over four inches, for those of you as can’t think any other way, and after today you’ll think this way, because the Army is metric. She weighs about two tons. Two wheels.” He kicked a tyre. “When she comes into action these two legs are swung apart behind her and the spades on the end are dug in, and then she’ll stand.”

She stood like a man with his feet apart, braced for a push. The hundred-and-five, we called her, or the piece. A truck pulled her. It took a section of men to serve her, and at Fort Sill they taught every one of us every job on her, so that any man could do any other man’s work if he had to.

Dempsey took a round out of its box, out of its cardboard tube, and put it in my arms.

“Fifteen kilograms,” he said.

“Thirty-three pounds,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“Fifteen kilograms, Wheeler.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

I never once, in three and a half years, thought of it as fifteen kilograms. I spent the first month converting everything back into rods and pounds in my head.

Dempsey took the shell out of its brass case and showed us the charge, seven little cloth bags of powder tied together on a string and numbered.

“The further you want her to go, the more bags you leave in,” he said. “The command says charge five, you take off six and seven and they go to one side, and you put her back together, and screw in the fuze, and set it if it wants setting, and she goes to the loader. The bags that come out get burned in a pit afterwards. Don’t ever let me see a man keep one.”

If you have ever seen a powder pit go up after a long day’s firing you will not forget it.

All of that is ammunition work. I was put on it in the fourth week, and I stayed on it, more or less, for the rest of the war.

It is the heaviest work on the gun and the least thought of. Everybody wanted to lay. The layer sits on the side of the piece with his eye to the sight and his hands on two wheels, and turns the gun to the direction the command gives and raises it to the elevation the command gives, and it looks like the important part, because it decides where the shell goes. Carrying was what you gave the big quiet men who were no good with numbers, and I was big, and I was quiet among strangers, and nobody had yet asked whether I was good with numbers. When the list went up the boy from Albany, who was put on laying, came over.

“Sorry, Wheeler,” he said.

“It’s all right.”

It was all right. I had been lifting things since I could walk, and here was a job that would tire out any two other men in the section, and I could do it all day. Dempsey timed everything by a big clock on a post at the edge of the gun park, and I started timing myself on it too, how long it took me to fuze a round and cut a charge and pass it, and I got it down and down until there was nothing left to take out of it. By the end of the second month I was faster at it than anybody at Fort Sill.

Dempsey stood behind me one afternoon with his arms folded and watched me do it three times.

“Who taught you that?”

“Nobody, Sergeant. I timed it.”

“Against what?”

I nodded at the clock.

He looked at the clock and back at me. “Keep doing it,” he said, and walked off.

---

The clock was Dempsey’s own. It was a big round clock with a sweep second hand, in a wooden case with a glass front. A section would be given the order to come into action, and the truck would pull the gun into place, and we would pile off and unhook it and swing the trails and drive the spades and lay it and load it, and report it ready.

Dempsey would look at the clock and tell us how long it had taken, and then how long it ought to have taken, and the second number was always smaller.

“Again,” he would say.

We did it a hundred times. We did it in the dark. We did it in the wind, which got the red dirt into the breech, and it had to be cleaned out before you could load. We did it with men taken out of the section, so that five did the work of eight, and then four.

“The war won’t wait for you to be comfortable,” Dempsey said.

He had been in the last one, but he never said anything about it except that the French had been good gunners and that was why we had to be better.

In the middle of May, on a hot afternoon with no wind for once, we came into action badly. The truck stopped short, and we had to manhandle the gun the last few yards, and in swinging the left trail I swung it wider than I meant, because I was trying to make up the time, and the end of it caught the post and knocked Dempsey’s clock off its nail. It fell about five feet onto a stone. The glass broke and the second hand came off, and lay there in the red dirt pointing at nothing.

Nobody saw it but me. Dempsey was at the far end of the line with another section, and the others were on the gun, laying and loading, with their backs to the post. I was the end man on the trail, looking straight at it.

I picked it up and put it in my shirt.

That night after lights out I took it into the latrine, which had a light, and mended it. The second hand had come off its spindle and the spindle was bent, and I straightened it with the blade of my pocket knife, which my grandfather always called Nathan’s knife and said had been in the family since the old war, though I do not suppose there is any way to know. I swore at the spindle a good deal. I put the hand back on and set it going against my own watch. The glass was gone and there was nothing to be done about the glass. I pushed the broken pieces out of the frame so that nobody would cut themselves, and wiped it, and in the morning before breakfast I went out to the gun park and hung it back on its nail.

Then I went to find Dempsey.

He was in the hut at the end of the gun park with a mug of coffee.

“Sergeant, I knocked your clock down yesterday with the trail. I broke the glass.”

He put the mug down.

“I put the hand back on,” I said. “It’s keeping time. I’ll pay for the glass.”

He went out and looked at it. I went with him and stood behind him. He looked at it for a while, with the morning sun on the empty frame.

“The hand came off?”

“Yes, Sergeant. The spindle was bent.”

“You straightened it.”

“With my knife.”

“Set it against what?”

“My watch.”

“And the glass?”

“I took the pieces out, Sergeant. So nobody would cut themselves.”

He looked at the clock for a while longer. The second hand went round. Then he looked at me, the same way.

“You’ll pay for the glass,” he said.

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“And the next time you break something on my gun park, you bring it to me broken. I’d sooner know what’s broken than what’s been mended.” He turned back to the hut. “I’ll decide whether it’s mended.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

When I got back to the hut Peter was sitting on his bunk with the limber open, reading. He did not look up.

“That was the clock,” he said.

“It was.”

“I saw you go out to the latrine with it. About midnight.”

“I was mending it.”

“I know. I could hear you swearing at the spindle.” He turned a page. “Did you get the hand back on?”

“It’s keeping time.”

“And then you went and told him.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I broke it.”

“I thought you’d put it back and say nothing,” he said. He looked up then, and took off his glasses, and polished them. “Nobody would ever have known, Wheeler.”

“I’d have known.”

He put his glasses back on and looked at me a moment longer, the way Dempsey had looked at the clock.

“Your secret is safe with the history department,” he said, and went back to his book.

From then on he was my friend, though neither of us said so. I asked him once, years after, in France, what he had decided about me that morning.

“That you were the only man in the hut who would rather be caught than lucky,” he said.

---

Peter was put on laying in the summer. He was very good at it. He had steady hands and patient eyes and he could do the sums for a correction in his head while the rest of us were still looking for a pencil, which made two of us in the section who could, and the sergeants noticed both of us that summer.

“The trouble with laying,” he said to me one evening, “is that you put the gun exactly where the numbers tell you, and then you never see where the shell goes. You’re responsible for a thing you can’t see.” He thought about it. “That’s a historian’s whole problem in a sentence.”

“At least you get to sit down.”

“That’s true,” he said. “It’s a great comfort to me.”

We were taught very little about where the shells went. Dempsey did it at a blackboard in the hut, with a piece of chalk that kept breaking.

“The guns don’t see the target,” he said. “The observer sees the target. He’s forward, somewhere he can see, and he sends back where it is. The command post works out from that what each gun has to do and sends it to the guns as numbers. Charge. Direction, in mils. Elevation. Fuze. Number of rounds.” He drew a hill on the board and put the guns behind it. “The guns see the numbers.”

Peter put his hand up. “So a man on the gun knows where the target is about the way a man in a post office knows what’s in the letters, Sergeant.”

Dempsey looked at him. “That’s about the size of it, Mercer. And that’s why it works. You can put the guns a long way back, behind a hill, where nothing can see them, and still hit what the observer sees.”

There was another thing we had been taught, in our first week. A lieutenant from the legal corps came out from the town to give us a lecture in a cold hut with a stove that smoked. It was about the oath. He read the second part out.

“‘I further swear that I will obey the lawful orders of the officers set over me, and that I will not obey an order that is unlawful, and that I understand the second of these duties to be as binding upon me as the first.’” He put the paper down. “Any questions?”

There were none. The stove smoked. Then a man at the back put his hand up.

“Sir, does that mean we can refuse to go on a march in the rain?”

“It does not,” the lieutenant said.

Everybody laughed, and he did too. Peter wrote something down. I did not. I remember the smoke in that hut very well, and the cold, and the lieutenant’s face when nobody had a question, which was a little tired. I do not remember a word of what he said after the part he read out.

---

There was not one Black man in my training company, or in any of the batteries I saw at Fort Sill in 1942. The Army had Black regiments then, sixteen of them, in the infantry, and they had their own camps, somewhere else. The only Black men I saw on the post were civilians who worked on the roads and in the laundry. I did not notice it at all. It changed in the next year, and I noticed it then.

On a Sunday in the summer Peter took me to see a burying ground on the post. He said it was the only thing at Fort Sill worth a walk. It was a cemetery of the Apache, with rows of small stones, and some of them had names.

“The Army held them here as prisoners of war,” he said. “From their surrender in the south-west in the 1880s. Other places first, and then here, from 1894. They weren’t let go until 1913.”

“That’s ten years before I was born.”

“And twenty-nine before we’re standing here.” He looked along the stones. “Twenty-seven years they were here. No trial. No sentence. No end date. Children were born here who were prisoners from the day they were born. Old men died here.”

“What had they done?”

“That’s a good question,” Peter said. “The Army never answered it.”

“How do you know all this?”

“It’s in a book,” he said, and patted the limber.

We walked back along the road in the heat without saying anything.

---

In the autumn they made us into a battery. Until then we had been a training company, a crowd of men who happened to be in the same place, and then one day in October a list went up, and a great many of the men we had trained with went one way and a great many of us went another, and those of us who were left found ourselves C Battery, four guns and the men to serve them, and a captain to command it, and sergeants we had never met, and a number of trucks. Peter and I were on the same gun. We had both asked, separately and without telling each other, and we found out when the list went up.

“That was careless of us,” Peter said.

“It was.”

The captain was Edward Kettering. He was a schoolmaster from Connecticut who had been in the reserve, about thirty-five, a tall, careful, clean man who wrote everything down. On the first morning he stood on the tailboard of a truck and spoke to the battery.

“I know very little about war,” he said, “and a great deal about getting a thing done properly. I intend to make you into a battery that does things properly, because in my experience a thing done properly turns out right more often than a thing done brilliantly.”

Afterwards Peter said, “That’s the first speech I’ve heard in the Army that I agree with all of.”

“So do I.”

I still do, mostly.

Dempsey did not come with us. He stayed at Fort Sill to train the next lot. On our last day he came down the line and shook my hand, which he had not done before.

“Remember about the clock, Wheeler.”

“I will, Sergeant.”

We spent the winter at Fort Sill as a battery, firing at the Wichitas in the snow, which they had that winter. Christmas was in the hut. My mother sent a fruit cake in a tin, the same tin, and two more pairs of grey socks, and a letter saying that Clara had come top in arithmetic and that my father had sold the old bull. Peter had a parcel too, from Dayton, and he opened it on his bunk.

“What is it?” I said.

“A book.”

He put it in the limber.

In the spring of 1943 we were sent east to wait. The guns were taken away to be loaded onto ships, and we followed them, and I did not see the red dirt again, though I found it in the seams of my kit for another year. I still have a little of it in a matchbox. My mother found it when she unpacked my kit in the autumn of 1945.

“What on earth is this?”

“Oklahoma,” I said.

She put it on the shelf over the sink, where it still is.