Three Drives

We left the farm on the third of January, in the dark, in snow, and the farmer’s daughters came out of the byre in their shawls to watch the guns go.

The elder one came up to the truck. She had something wrapped in a cloth. She held it up to Brandauer, in the back, and said something.

“What is it?” said Hollis.

Brandauer unwrapped a corner of the cloth. It was a cheese, a round one, the size of a plate.

“She says,” Brandauer said, and stopped, and cleared his throat. “She says it is from the cow that kicked me.”

“Did one kick you?”

“On Tuesday,” said Brandauer. “I did not mention it.”

The truck moved. The daughter stood in the snow with her shawl round her and lifted her hand, and Brandauer lifted his, holding the cheese, and kept it up until the farm was behind the church and the church was behind the snow.

---

We went south.

The whole army went south that month, and the armies on either side of it, and on the maps that Lieutenant Garland pinned up in every farm kitchen where the battery stopped, the lines bent round towards one place. Peter stood in front of one of the maps one night in a kitchen near Amiens with his hands in his pockets, looking at it.

“Three,” he said.

“Three what?” said Dunne.

Peter put his finger on the map. “Us. Coming down from the north.” He moved his finger to the right, a long way, to the east. “The Germans. Coming in from the Ruhr, where we were in ‘forty-three.” He moved it down to the bottom of the map. “The Italians and everybody else, coming up from the south. Up the Rhône.” He drew his finger in from all three, slowly, towards the middle. “And there.”

His finger stopped on a word in big letters.

“Paris,” said Dunne.

“Paris.”

“How far?”

Peter measured with his thumb. “From here? A hundred and twenty kilometres.”

“How far’s that in miles?”

“About seventy-five,” I said.

Dunne looked at the map for a long time. “That’s from Lexington to Worcester and back,” he said, “about.”

“How do you know where Worcester is?”

“Wheeler’s always going on about his aunt in Worcester,” said Dunne.

---

We fired more that month than we had in the whole war before it.

The French were not running now. They had run in August and September; they had nowhere to run to now except Paris, and they knew it, and every town between us and the capital had something in it, a battery or a strong point or a line of trenches across a road, and every one of them had to be taken, and before every one of them the guns fired.

On the twentieth of January, a Saturday, outside a town on a river whose name I never learned, No. 3 gun fired two hundred and twelve rounds between dawn and dark. Baca wrote every one in the book. When it was over he sat on an ammunition box with the book on his knee and his bad leg out straight, and looked at the page.

“Two hundred and twelve,” he said.

“Is that a lot?” said Dunne.

“At Kassel we fired forty,” said Baca. “On the beach a hundred and fourteen. On the night in July, forty-four.” He shut the book. “Two hundred and twelve is a lot.”

I had loaded every one of them. My arms did not feel like arms. Brandauer had handed me two hundred and twelve rounds and Hollis had handed him two hundred and twelve, and Szabo and Dunne had broken open the boxes and fuzed them, and Peter had laid the gun for every one, twice, and Ridley had said the numbers.

Peter came and sat on the trail beside me in the dusk. He held out the water can.

I drank. I gave it back.

“You were fast,” he said.

“So were you.”

“You were faster than me.” He took his glasses off and wiped them. “You didn’t stand with one of them. Not one, all day.”

“No.”

He looked at me in the dusk.

“Is that better?” he said.

I did not answer for a while. Up the road, the town on the river was burning. You could see the glow of it against the low cloud.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Peter nodded. He put his glasses back on. He did not say anything else.

---

On the twenty-sixth a dispatch rider found us with a letter from Cairo.

Wheeler. The lieutenant in Brussels has answered. He remembers the night of the fifteenth of July. He says that there were eleven calls for fire from his company’s front that night, between nine and midnight, that he passed every one of them to battalion, and that he does not remember which forward post sent which. He says he is sorry. I believe him.

I have now written to everybody I can find who was in a position to know, and to a great many who were not, and I have run out of people to write to. I have not run out of looking. They are not the same thing.

I am coming back in March. They want somebody for Paris who speaks French and does not mind being shot at, and they looked round the room. Tell Ridley to have the coffee ready. Tell Brandauer it is still terrible.

L.

I showed it to Peter. He read it and gave it back.

“Eleven,” he said.

“Eleven calls. In three hours.”

“He remembers the night.”

“He doesn’t remember the post.”

Peter was quiet for a moment.

“Eleven,” he said again, as if he was trying it for weight.

---

The second letter from Saint-Martin came on the tenth of February, through the committee, in the brown envelope with the stamp.

Jim.

Thank you for the letter.

The snow came in the roof of the shop. I have put a cloth. In the spring I will finish.

Madame Hébert has a goat now. It eats the washing. My mother says the goat is the only one in the house who is happy.

I read your letter to my mother. The one about the cows, and Karl. I did not ask her. I only read it, at the table, in the evening. She did not go out of the room.

She did not say anything.

Lucien.

I read it on the tailboard of the truck, in a farmyard south of Amiens, with snow on the ground and the gun firing behind me at something on a hill. I read it three times. Then I folded it and put it inside my shirt with the other one.

“Well?” said Peter, from the trail, between rounds.

“She didn’t go out of the room.”

Peter looked at me. Then he bent to the sight.

“Set,” he said.

---

Dunne’s feet went in the second week of February.

It was the cold and the wet together. We had been in a field for three days in snow that thawed in the day and froze at night, and his boots had let in the thaw and frozen on him in the dark, and on the third morning he could not feel his toes and did not tell anybody, and stood at the ammunition boxes all morning fuzing rounds, white in the face, until Ridley looked at him once and said, “Dunne. Boots off.”

“I’m all right, Sergeant.”

“Boots off.”

Dunne sat down on a box and took his boots off, and his socks, and his feet were white and grey and swollen, and he looked at them as though they belonged to somebody else.

“Aid post,” said Ridley. “Now.”

“Sergeant, I can…”

“Now.”

They kept him two days. When he came back he walked carefully, the way Baca did, and his face had the look of a boy who has been frightened and is going to pretend he has not.

That night I went to my pack in the truck and found the rubber bag, the navy one, the one Gaines had given me in Devon before the landing, that had been in the bottom of my pack since June. I took out the grey socks that were in it, my mother’s, rolled tight, dry. I put them back in the bag and tied the neck with the string, the way Gaines had.

I took it over to where Dunne was sitting on his blanket with his feet wrapped in a towel.

“Here.”

He looked at it. “What’s that?”

“Socks. Dry ones. Keep them in the bag. Don’t wear them. Don’t touch them. Keep them in the bottom of your pack, and when your feet go wet and you can’t get them dry, put them on.”

Dunne took the bag. He turned it over in his hands.

“Where’d you get it?”

“Somebody gave it to me.”

“Who?”

“A man from Boston.”

Dunne looked at the bag. Then he looked at me.

“Don’t you need it?”

“I’ve got more socks,” I said. “My mother sends them every Christmas. She’s under the impression it’s the only thing the army doesn’t give us.”

“Is it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Keep your feet dry, Dunne.”

He put the bag in his pack, at the bottom, and pushed it down with his fist, and looked up at me.

“Thanks, Wheeler.”

I went back to my own blanket. Peter was lying on his, with his hands behind his head, looking at the roof of the barn. He had seen it all. He did not say anything for a long time.

“Gaines,” he said, at last, to the roof.

“Yes.”

“And your father. At the depot.”

“Yes.”

Peter was quiet.

“That’s three,” he said.

“Four,” I said. “Eli. Valley Forge. They made shoes out of rawhide.”

Peter turned his head and looked at me across the straw.

“Your family,” he said, “is entirely made of socks.”

---

On the fifteenth the battery came up onto a long ridge, high, with a wood behind it and the country falling away in front of it to the south, white fields and black woods and the grey line of a river, and beyond that, very far off, a long smudge on the horizon, low, darker than the sky, that did not move.

Ridley stood at the top of the ridge with his hands at his sides and looked at it.

“That it?” said Baca, leaning on his stick.

“That’s it,” said Peter.

Nobody said the name. We stood on the ridge, the section, in the snow, and looked at the smudge on the horizon for a long time, and behind us Lieutenant Garland’s telephone began to ring.