Saint-Martin

The war stopped in November. Not the fighting; the moving. The front came to a halt along a line of canals and flat fields on the edge of Belgium, and the battery went into a farmyard on the edge of a village of red brick, with a church tower you could see for ten miles, and dug the guns in, and stayed.

“How long?” said Dunne.

“Till it stops raining,” said Hollis.

“When will that be?”

“March,” said Szabo.

It rained for nine days. The farmyard turned to mud, and then the mud turned to something worse than mud, a grey soup that came over the tops of your boots and pulled at them when you walked, so that every step was two steps. We laid duckboards. The duckboards sank. We laid more on top of them. Brandauer said that he had seen cows lost in mud like this in a wet spring in Wisconsin, and Dunne asked if they got them out, and Brandauer said some of them.

Then on the tenth day it froze. I woke in the night in the hayloft where the section slept and it was silent, the rain had stopped, and in the morning the farmyard was hard as iron and white, and the duckboards were stuck in it at angles like gravestones, and the water in the buckets had a skin of ice you could stand a mess tin on.

“Better,” said Ridley, looking at it.

“It’s freezing,” said Dunne.

“It’s hard,” said Ridley. “You can move a gun on hard.”

---

The farm was a big one, a dairy, and the farmer was a widower with a grown son who had been taken by the French in 1942 and two daughters who did the milking, and forty cows in a long brick byre that was the warmest place in the village. Brandauer found it the first day. By the third day he was milking with the daughters at five in the morning, and by the end of the week the farmer was calling him Karl and giving him eggs, and Brandauer was bringing the eggs back to the section in his helmet.

“Don’t ask,” he said, the first time.

“I wasn’t going to,” said Szabo, already cooking one.

I went with him one morning. I had not milked since the orchard in June. The byre was dark and warm and smelled of hay and cows and milk, and the daughters looked at me and said something to Brandauer, and Brandauer said something back in his German, which they could follow a little, being near enough to Belgium, and they laughed.

“What did you tell them?”

“That you are a dairy farmer from Massachusetts,” said Brandauer, “and that you are very slow but very careful.”

“Thanks.”

“They asked how many cows.”

“Nineteen.”

He told them. The elder daughter looked at me and said something.

“She says that is a hobby,” said Brandauer.

I milked four cows that morning. The elder daughter came and watched me do the fourth and did not say anything, and then she nodded, the way Madeleine Morel had nodded at the wheel, and went back to her own.

---

We heard about the Dutch in the third week. A man came through the village on a bicycle, a thin man in a long coat, Dutch, who had got out through the lines somehow and was going south to a cousin, and the farmer gave him soup in the kitchen, and Brandauer and I were there with the milk.

He talked to the farmer in French, slowly, and the farmer kept stopping him and asking him to say things again. Then the farmer turned and looked at us.

“Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?” I said, which was about the limit of what I had.

The farmer spread his hands. He said a word. Tulipes. He made a motion with his hand to his mouth.

“Tulips,” said Brandauer.

“What about them?”

The Dutchman looked at us. He had very pale eyes and the skin was tight over his face. He said, in careful English, “In Amsterdam, they eat the bulbs. Of the tulips. There is nothing else.”

Brandauer stood very still with the milk can in his hands.

“And the cows?” he said.

“There are no cows,” said the Dutchman. “The French took the cows.”

He finished his soup. The farmer gave him bread for the road, and a piece of cheese, and the Dutchman put them inside his coat very carefully, and thanked everybody, and went out to his bicycle and rode away south on the frozen road.

Brandauer did not say anything all the way back across the farmyard. In the hayloft he sat down on his blanket and looked at the eggs in his helmet for a long time.

“Karl?” said Hollis.

Brandauer took one of the eggs out and turned it over in his fingers.

“Tulips,” he said.

He gave the eggs to the cook that night, all of them, for the whole battery, and did not bring any back for a week.

---

The letters came on the Thursday, the sixteenth, in two batches. The first was the ordinary post, from home. The second came separately, by a dispatch rider who came into the farmyard on a motorcycle in a spray of frozen mud and asked for Sergeant Ridley.

He had three letters. One for Ridley. One for Peter. One for me.

Ridley’s was a single sheet. He read it standing by the gun and put it in his shirt.

“From him?” said Hollis.

“Clean the sight, Mercer,” said Ridley.

Peter’s was four sheets, both sides, in a small fast hand that went uphill. Peter read it on the trail, and then read it again, and at one point laughed out loud and then put his hand over his mouth.

“What?” said Szabo.

“He says,” Peter said, and read it out, “‘Cairo is exactly as I left it, which is the most damning thing I can say about any city. I am at the same desk. Someone has moved the inkwell. I have not yet found out who, and it is occupying more of my attention than the war.’” He turned the page. “‘You will by now be in winter quarters. Read Gibbon. He is wrong about almost everything and it will do you good to find out why. Report in December.’”

“Who’s Gibbon?” said Dunne.

“A man who wrote a very long book about Rome falling down,” said Peter.

“Did it?”

“Eventually,” said Peter. “It took about a thousand years and six volumes.”

Mine was one sheet, folded twice.

Wheeler. I have had an answer from division. They have no record of who reported mortars at Saint-Ouen on the fifteenth of July. They say the call came up from a forward post through the company and the battalion and was acted on. I have the name of the infantry lieutenant who passed it, and he is in a hospital in Brussels with a chest wound, and I have written to him. I do not promise anything.

The letter you gave me reached the school. The committee tells me the family has had help with fuel for the winter. That is the committee’s doing and not mine, and I would be obliged if you did not thank me for it.

Lawrence.

I read it twice. Peter watched me read it.

“Anything?” he said.

“A lieutenant in Brussels.”

Peter nodded. He did not say anything else. He went back to his own letter, and after a while he turned the page, and I saw him reading the same paragraph three times.

---

The letter from Saint-Martin came two days later, on the Saturday. It came in a committee envelope, brown, with a stamp on it and the name of the town where the King had been, and my name written on it in a hand I knew from the back of a cigarette packet in a farmyard in June.

I did not open it at once. I put it in my shirt and went and did the morning’s work, which was cleaning the gun and checking the ammunition and digging the frozen mud out of the trail spades with a pick, and Peter watched me do it and did not say anything. At noon I went up into the hayloft, where it was empty, and sat on my blanket and opened it.

It was one page. It was in English, with French in it where the English ran out, and the French was underlined, as if he wanted me to see that he knew it was French.

Jim.

I have your letter. Thank you for the letter.

We are in Saint-Martin with the cousin of my mother, Madame Hébert. She is a widow also. The house is small. We are four in two rooms. It is assez.

My grandmother is dead. The twelfth of October. She was very old and the winter came early and she did not speak again after the summer. The doctor says it was the age and the cold. We have buried her by my father.

The shop is boarded. The roof is not finished. When the spring comes I will finish the roof. My mother says we will open again in the spring. She does not say it to me. She says it to the cousin, so that I hear.

My mother does not say your name. When I said I had a letter she went out of the room.

The committee gave us wood for the winter.

Lucien.

That was all.

I read it three times. Then I folded it and put it back in the envelope and put the envelope inside my shirt, against my vest, and sat on the blanket.

After a while somebody came up the ladder. It was Peter. He did not come all the way up. He stopped with his head and shoulders above the edge of the loft and looked at me.

“Well?” he said.

I took the envelope out and held it out to him. He came up the last two rungs and sat down on the straw beside me and read it. He read it slowly. When he got to the end he folded it along the same folds and gave it back.

“The grandmother,” he said.

“October.”

“The twelfth.” He took his glasses off. He looked at them. He did not polish them. “That’s the day I sent the coat.”

I did not say anything.

“The coat for the winter,” said Peter. “From my mother. Through the committee. It went on the twelfth.” He put the glasses back on. “It’ll have got there after.”

“Lucien’ll have it.”

“Lucien won’t want a woman’s coat.”

“His mother will.”

Peter looked at me. Then he looked at the letter in my hand.

“His mother doesn’t say your name,” he said.

“No.”

“She’ll wear the coat, though.”

“Yes,” I said. “I expect she will.”

He sat there. Down below in the farmyard Szabo was shouting at Dunne about something, and the cows were lowing in the byre, and Brandauer’s voice came up through the boards saying something in German to one of the daughters.

“He thanked you for the letter,” Peter said.

“He thanked me for the food. Every time. In the barn.”

“I know. I was there.”

“It’s the same.”

“No,” said Peter. “It isn’t.” He got up and went to the ladder, and stopped at the top of it. “He wrote back.”

Then he went down, and I heard him cross the frozen yard, and the door of the byre open and shut.

---

I wrote back that night, by a candle in a tin, on a page of Peter’s pad. I wrote it in English, plain. I said I was sorry about his grandmother. I said I hoped the wood would last. I said that we were in a farm with forty cows and that Brandauer was milking them. I said nothing about his mother. I did not know how to say anything about her that would not be worse than nothing.

At the end I wrote: Thank you for the letter.

I looked at that for a long time. Then I left it.

In the morning I gave it to the dispatch rider when he came through, addressed to the committee, with a note in Peter’s French asking them to send it on to Saint-Martin, to the Morels, at the house of Madame Hébert. The dispatch rider put it in his bag with the others and kicked his motorcycle into life and went off down the frozen road towards the town, and the church tower stood up out of the white fields behind him, and you could see it for ten miles.