The Cellars

The General came back on the sixth of March, a Tuesday, on the motorcycle, in the rain.

We were dug in on a slope above a river with all its bridges down. He came over the top of the slope with his goggles on and his greatcoat black with wet, and Harris behind him in the car with the wipers going, and he stopped the motorcycle by No. 3 gun and got off and pushed the goggles up.

“Ridley.”

“General.”

“I was promised coffee. In writing.”

Brandauer was already at the stove. He had been at the stove since the motorcycle came over the hill. He poured a mug and held it out, and the General took it in both hands and drank, and shut his eyes.

“Is it still terrible, Brandauer?”

“Worse, sir. The beans are from Rouen. A man sold them to Szabo.”

“Swapped,” said Szabo. “I didn’t buy anything.”

“Swapped them for what?”

Szabo looked at the sky.

“Don’t tell me,” said the General. “I’m an officer.” He drank again. “It is worse. Thank God.” He sat down on an ammunition box with his greatcoat steaming, the way he had sat on the bale in the barn in Artois, and looked round at us one at a time. “Baca. You’re back.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How’s the leg?”

“It goes where I put it, sir. Slow.”

“So does mine. Hollis. Szabo.” He looked at Dunne. “And the boy.”

Dunne had turned nineteen in January. He did not say so.

“Mercer,” said the General. “Gibbon.”

Peter put down the rag he had been cleaning the sight with. “Three volumes, sir. The rest wouldn’t go in the pack.”

“And?”

“He doesn’t like the Christians.”

“Nobody likes the Christians in the first volume. That’s what the first volume is for. What else?”

“He likes the Romans too much.” Peter took his glasses off and looked at them and put them back on. “He thinks they fell because they went soft. I think it was because it got too big. Things happened at the edges, and by the time anybody in Rome heard about them it was a year later and they’d been decided.”

The General looked at him over the mug for a long moment.

“Write that down,” he said. “Not for me. For Columbus. They’ll argue with you. Let them.”

Then he turned round on the box and looked at me.

“Wheeler.”

“Sir.”

“I came by way of Normandy. I had a day at Bayeux with Ferrers’s boxes, which still have nothing in them. And on the road east I went through Saint-Ouen-des-Vergers.”

I was standing by the shield. Nobody else said anything.

“I didn’t stop,” said the General. “I went through slowly, the way you’d go through any village. They’ve filled in the square. The church has a new door, plain wood, not painted yet.” He turned the mug round in his hands. “The shop has most of a roof. There was a boy on it with a hammer and a sack of nails. He looked down at me going by. I didn’t stop.”

“Lucien,” I said.

“I assume so. Thin. Dark. He was doing it properly. He’d started at the end the weather comes from.”

I did not say anything. The rain came down on the shield.

“And the other thing,” said the General. “Nothing. I’m still looking.” He drank. “I’ll tell you when there’s nothing, as well as when there’s something. That was the nothing.”

“Yes, sir.”

---

Peter had picked the rag up again. Now he put it down.

“Sir. Is it true they’ll rise? In Paris. When we get close.”

“Who says they will?”

“The infantry. Everybody.”

“No,” said the General.

“No, sir?”

“There’ll be no rising in Paris. The Council of the Republic has decided it, and told the joint command, and the joint command told me, in that order.” He looked at Peter. “I wasn’t asked. It isn’t mine to be asked.”

Peter stared at him.

“But Paris always rises,” he said. “In ‘eighty-nine. In 1830. In ‘forty-eight they had the barricades up in a night. Every time, sir. Every time anybody tried to hold it down.”

“And in 1871?”

“In 1871 too.”

“And how did 1871 end?”

Peter did not answer.

“Tell them,” said the General. “They don’t know. You do.”

Peter looked at the mud between his boots. “The government came in from Versailles,” he said, “in May. With the army. They fought their way in street by street, for a week, and they shot the ones they caught. At the end they put the last ones against a wall in a cemetery and shot them there.”

“How many? The whole week?”

“Nobody knows, sir. Ten thousand. Twenty.”

“Nobody knows,” said the General. “I’m getting used to that figure.” He drank the last of the coffee. “The Council has looked at what le Chef has in Paris. His police. The Sûreté. What’s left of two divisions. The whole of his ministries, with their files and their cellars. And they’ve asked themselves what he’d do to a city that rose with all of that still inside it, and they’ve decided they’d rather the city was taken than shot.” He gave the mug back to Brandauer. “There are men on the Council who think it’s wrong. They said so for a month, loudly, and I’m told one of them threw an inkwell. But it’s decided. It’s their city.”

“Then who takes it?”

The General did not answer. He looked past Peter, at the gun.

Peter looked at it too. The rain was running off the barrel in a line.

“We do,” said Peter.

“You do. And the Germans from the east, and the Italians from the south, and everybody else who’s coming. By battle. And I’ll be inside, with the Council’s people, telling them when to keep their heads down.” He stood up and did up his greatcoat. “You can tell me how wrong it was, Mercer. In a month. In Paris. I’ll buy the coffee. It’ll be worse than this.”

“It cannot be,” said Brandauer.

“It’s Paris in the sixth year of a war, Brandauer. It can be anything.”

He went over to Ridley by the motorcycle. They stood in the rain and smoked a cigarette each, not saying much, and I heard the General say, “Still a sergeant,” and Ridley say, “Still a gun,” and the General laugh, the short surprised laugh. Then he pulled his goggles down and kicked the motorcycle into life and went off down the slope to the car, and the car and the motorcycle went away along the river road to the south, one behind the other, and the rain came on harder.

Peter stood by the sight with the rag in his hand.

“Twenty thousand,” he said.

Nobody said anything.

“Or ten.” He started on the sight again, the eyepiece, round and round with the rag, the way he always did. “It always rose,” he said, to the sight.

---

The French stood on the Oise.

It was the last line they had. Peter said so, and so did the map in the farm kitchen where Lieutenant Garland had the command post: a river coming down out of the north-east towards Paris, and forests along it, big ones, with names in green, Halatte and Chantilly and others, and behind the forests a plain, and at the bottom of the plain the city, a grey shape at the edge of the paper with all the pencil lines bending round it.

Everything they had left was in front of us. They had dug in along the river and in the forests behind it and in every town between, and they had guns, real ones, more than we had met since the hedges, and for the first time since July they used them on us properly.

We fired for twelve days.

---

On the second evening, after a long shoot in the afternoon, I asked Peter where we had been firing.

He was sitting on the trail with his glasses off, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“What?”

“Where. Today. What’s it called?”

“Nobody tells us that, Wheeler. You know nobody tells us.”

“You lay it.”

“I lay a number.”

“You know which way the number points. And how far it goes, with the charge. You’ve got the range tables in your head. You could look at Garland’s map.”

Peter put his glasses back on and looked at me.

“You want me to work out where the rounds went.”

“Yes.”

“From the line and the charge.”

“Yes.”

“It’ll be give or take a kilometre. More. I don’t know exactly where the battery’s lined up from, I don’t know what the wind’s done to it, I don’t…”

“Then give or take.”

Peter did not say anything for a while. Down the line somebody was banging a dixie.

“Why now?” he said.

“I didn’t know the one on the river. In January. The two hundred and twelve.”

He looked at me a while longer. Then he got up and went across the field to the farm, and through the kitchen window I saw him standing in front of Garland’s map with a pencil, and Garland get up from the plotting table and come and stand beside him and say something, and Peter say something back, and Garland look at him for a moment and go back to his table.

When Peter came back he sat down on the trail again and held out a page torn from his pad. There was one word on it.

“Pont-Sainte-Maxence,” he said. “Or the woods west of it. Or the bridge. Give or take.”

I took my paybook out of my shirt and opened it at the back, where the pages were empty, and wrote it down. After it I put a question mark.

Peter watched me do it.

“Every day?” he said.

“If you’ll do it.”

He did not answer. But the next evening he went across to the kitchen again, and the evening after that.

---

“Creil,” he said, on the third evening.

“Saint-Leu. Or the river bank below it.”

“Gouvieux. Or the racecourse at Chantilly, it’s right beside it. They had guns on the racecourse.”

“Lamorlaye.”

“Luzarches. Or the woods north of it. There was a battery in the woods. The infantry say.”

I wrote them all in the back of the paybook, one under another, each with a question mark after it.

On the eighth evening Baca saw me doing it. He was on his ammunition box with his leg out straight and the gun book on his knee, and he held out his hand, and I gave him the paybook, and he read the page.

“What’s this?”

“Where the rounds went.”

“These are question marks.”

“I don’t know if we hit them.”

“Nobody knows that,” said Baca. “Not from here.”

“No.”

He looked at the page a long time. Then he gave it back.

“That’s a terrible book, Wheeler,” he said.

“Yes.”

He opened his own on his knee at the day’s page, the columns of figures in pencil, the times and the charges and the rounds. “Mine’s just numbers,” he said, and licked the pencil, and started writing.

---

On the sixteenth, a Friday, at about four in the afternoon, the French found us.

The first round came down behind the cookhouse truck and threw up a black fountain of earth, and the sound came after it, and Ridley was already shouting. “Down! Get in! Down!” We went into the slit trenches behind the gun, all of us, on top of each other, and the second round came down somewhere to the left, nearer, and the ground came up under my chest and hit me, and then they were coming in one after another, so close together you could not tell the sound of one from the next.

Dunne was under me. I had my arm over his helmet. I do not remember putting it there.

It went on for eleven minutes. Baca timed it afterwards from the book, because he had written down the time of the mission we had been about to fire, and we never fired it.

Then it stopped. Behind us our own heavies started, the counter-battery, going over high with a sound like a train in a cutting, and we lay in the trench and listened to them go over, and nobody got up.

Then Ridley got up.

“Sound off.”

“Mercer.”

“Brandauer.”

“Hollis.”

“Szabo.”

“Dunne.”

“Wheeler.”

“Baca,” said Baca, from the next trench. “And I’m sitting on something.”

He was sitting on Szabo’s mess tin. It was flat.

No. 3 gun was all right. There was a hole in the shield the size of a fist, and the right tyre was down, and the net was on fire at one corner, and Hollis put it out with his helmet. No. 2 was all right. No. 1 had taken one in the pit.

We heard it before we saw it. Somebody at No. 1 was calling for the stretchers, the same words over and over, not loud.

They had two dead on No. 1. Lanier, the layer, a corporal from Georgia, who had been with the battery since Fort Sill and played the harmonica on the boat coming over and was sick into it once, and everybody knew him. And a boy from the January draft, who had come up with the replacements at the farm in Picardy and loaded for No. 1, and whom nobody on No. 3 knew at all.

They carried them back past our gun on the stretchers under blankets. The boy’s boots were very new. You could see the nails in the soles, still bright.

When they had gone by I said, “Who was the other one?”

Ridley looked at me.

“January draft,” said Hollis.

“What was his name?”

Nobody knew. Ridley looked at me a moment longer. Then he went across to No. 1 and talked to their sergeant, who was sitting on the trail of his gun with his head in his hands, and came back.

“Fisk,” he said. “Harold Fisk. Akron, Ohio. Nineteen.”

I took out the paybook and wrote them at the bottom of the page, under the towns. Lanier. Harold Fisk. I did not put a question mark after either of them.

Ridley was watching me.

“Counting again,” he said.

“Yes, Sergeant.”

On the road east in August he had told me to stop. He looked at the paybook in my hand for a long time.

“Write it clear,” he said. “So somebody can read it.”

---

We changed the tyre that night in the dark, by feel, Peter and I, with Hollis holding the jack steady. It took an hour. The French were still firing somewhere off to the right, on the battery next to ours, a round every few minutes, and every time one came over we stopped and waited for it and then went on.

“Akron’s a hundred and twenty miles from Columbus,” said Peter, from under the axle.

“Have you been there?”

“Through it. On the train. It smells of rubber. The whole town.” He handed me out a nut. “Hold that.”

I held it.

“He was nineteen,” said Peter.

“Yes.”

He did not say anything else. After a while he put his hand out for the nut, and I gave it to him, and he put it back on.

---

The mail came up on the nineteenth, with the ammunition.

There was a letter from my father, one sheet, in pencil, the way he always wrote.

Jim. Bathsheba calved on the second, a heifer, both well. Clara has named her Normandy. I said it was no name for a cow and your mother said it was the only name in the house that had been anywhere, so it stands. Lyons says the frost came out of the ground early this year. There was no frost to speak of after February. Tell him if you see him. Your father.

I read it to Brandauer, in the slit trench, where we had taken to eating.

“Normandy,” said Brandauer. He thought about it. “That is a good name for a cow.”

“My father doesn’t think so.”

“Your father has nineteen cows and he names none of them. Your sister names them. It is the sister who is right.” He took the letter and read it again himself, slowly, moving his lips. “No frost,” he said. “He tells the King.”

“He tells me to tell him.”

“It is the same,” said Brandauer, and gave it back.

---

The line broke on the twenty-second.

We heard it on the telephone first, Garland’s voice on it going up at the end of every sentence, and then from the road, where the infantry started coming back with prisoners in the afternoon, past the battery, columns of French in their long brown coats with their hands on their heads, more than we had seen since August, hundreds, with the forest behind them still smoking. They did not look at the guns as they went by. Some of them were very young. One of them was crying, and the man next to him had his arm round his shoulders and was walking him along.

“That’s the last of them,” said Peter, watching. “That’s the last army they had.”

“How do you know?” said Dunne.

“Because there’s nothing on the map behind it,” said Peter. “Only Paris.”

On the Saturday, the twenty-fourth, we limbered up at first light and went forward through the forest.

The road had been cleared just wide enough for the trucks. The trees were down along both sides of it, big ones, oaks, smashed off at the height of a man and lying across each other, and the engineers were cutting them back with saws, and the whole forest smelled of cut wood and smoke. There were French guns in the trees, abandoned, with their barrels split, and dead horses, and a staff car on its roof in the ditch with its wheels in the air, and once, in a clearing, a long row of graves already dug and filled, with helmets on sticks at the heads of them, French helmets, put there by somebody.

On the other side of the forest the road went down into a town.

There was a church with a hole through its tower and a market hall with the roof in, and houses along the street with their fronts down, so that you could see into the rooms, a bed, a picture on a wall, a kitchen table with the cloth still on it. There was glass everywhere, and slates, and the smell of wet plaster.

On the wall of the first house there was a blue enamel plate with the name on it in white letters.

LUZARCHES.

It was the sixth name in the back of my paybook. It had a question mark after it.

Peter was sitting beside me in the back of the truck. He had seen the plate too. He did not say anything. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirt and put them back on.

The people were coming up out of the cellars.

They came up out of the ground as the guns went by, out of the cellar doors in the pavements and the cellar steps at the sides of the houses, blinking, with blankets round them, carrying things, a clock, a birdcage, a baby. An old man in a hat stood at the top of his cellar steps and took his hat off as the guns went past and held it against his chest. A woman next to him stood with her arms folded and looked at us and did not do anything. A boy of about twelve picked up a piece of slate out of the gutter and threw it, and it hit the shield of No. 2 gun in front of us with a crack like a rifle, and the boy stood there and waited to see what would happen.

Nothing happened. The trucks went on.

“Eyes front,” said Ridley, from the cab.

Then the column stopped. Something was across the road ahead. We sat in the back of the truck in the middle of the town with the engine running, and the people stood on the steps of their cellars and looked at us, and we looked at them.

An old woman came up out of the cellar of the house beside the truck. It had no front. She had a jug in her hands, a white one, and she came very slowly up the steps and across the pavement through the glass to the tailboard, and held it up.

Brandauer took it. He looked into it.

“Water,” he said.

He drank, and passed it to Hollis, and Hollis drank and passed it to Szabo, and it came along the truck to me. It was cold. It tasted of the cellar. I drank, and leaned out, and gave it back to her over the tailboard.

She took it in both hands. She did not say anything. She looked at me, and at the gun behind the truck, and then she turned round and went back across the pavement through the glass, and down the cellar steps, one at a time, with her hand on the wall.

The truck moved.