Drancy-le-Nord

We saw it on the ninth of April, a Monday, from the top of a railway embankment north of the city, where the column stopped for an hour while the engineers did something to a bridge.

Not the smudge on the horizon now. The thing itself. Roofs, grey, going on and on to the south as far as you could see, and smoke standing up out of it in four or five places, and chimneys, and gasholders, and the railway lines running into it in bundles, and in the middle of it all, on a hill, a long way off, a church, white, with domes on it, very white against the grey.

“What’s that?” said Dunne. “The white one.”

“Sacré-Cœur,” said Peter. “The Sacred Heart. On Montmartre. It’s the highest hill in Paris.”

“It looks like a cake,” said Szabo.

“Everybody says that.”

“What’s it for?”

“They built it after 1871,” said Peter. “After the Commune. It took forty years.” He had his hands in his pockets. “The Church said it was to make up for the sins of France. The workmen said it was put on top of the hill where the Commune started, so they’d have to look at it every morning on the way to work.”

“Which was it?” said Hollis.

“Both,” said Peter.

“Where did the Commune start?” said Dunne.

“Up there. On that hill. Over guns.” Peter took his hands out of his pockets. “The National Guard had two hundred cannon parked on Montmartre. Paid for by the people of Paris, by subscription, in the siege. And the government decided to take them away, so one morning before light they sent the army up the hill to get them. And the army got up there in the dark, and took the guns, and then they stood there.”

“Why?”

“They’d forgotten the horses,” said Peter.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

“The horses,” said Brandauer.

“To pull the guns. They forgot to bring them. So they stood on top of the hill with two hundred guns and nothing to move them with, waiting for the horses, and it got light, and the women came out for the bread and found the army standing about on the hill, and they went and woke everybody up. By the time the horses came the whole of Montmartre was in the street, and the soldiers turned their rifles butt upwards, and by the end of the afternoon two generals had been shot against a garden wall.”

“Because of the horses,” said Hollis.

“Because of the horses.”

“I would not have forgotten the horses,” said Brandauer.

“No, Karl,” said Peter. “You’d have brought the cows as well.”

Ridley put his head out of the cab of the truck. “Mount up.”

We got back up into the truck. Peter was the last. He stood on the embankment a moment longer, looking at the white church on its hill, and then he climbed up over the tailboard and sat down beside me, and the column went on.

---

The battery went forward before light on the Tuesday, the tenth, to a new position in a railway goods yard on the northern edge of the city.

The infantry had gone through the night before along the main road half a mile to the west, fighting, and we could still hear them to the south of us, the machine guns going in bursts down in the streets and the mortars after. The yard had been theirs since midnight. Nobody had been into it since.

It was a big yard. Sidings, a dozen of them side by side, with goods wagons standing on some of them, and a water tower on iron legs, and a signal box, and cinders everywhere, black, and beyond the last siding a long high fence.

Ridley put No. 3 gun on a patch of cinders between two sidings. We dropped the trails and dug the spades in, which in cinders is like digging in gravel, and Peter put out the aiming posts and laid on them, and it was only when that was done, and the light was coming up grey in the east, that I looked up over the shield and saw the building.

It was a block of flats. Newer than anything round it, of grey concrete, four storeys high, built round three sides of a big yard, like a horseshoe, with long rows of windows, and some of the windows had glass and some had nothing. The open side of the horseshoe faced the railway, and across it there was a fence of wire, two fences, high, with more wire coiled along the top, and at the corners wooden towers on legs, with little roofs.

There was nobody in the towers.

There were people at the wire.

They stood all along it. Some of them were holding it. They did not call out and they did not wave. They stood and looked at us across the sidings, at the guns and the trucks and the men with spades, in the grey light, hundreds of them, and more coming out of the doors of the building into the yard behind them, slowly, and standing, and still nobody said anything, them or us.

“What is it?” said Dunne.

Nobody answered him.

“Peter. What is it?”

Peter was at the sight with his hand on it. He was looking over the shield at the wire.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You know everything about France.”

“I don’t know,” said Peter.

The telephone went.

---

“Fire mission,” said Ridley.

We did it. There was nothing else to do. Ridley said the numbers and Peter set them and checked them and said “Set,” and Brandauer handed me the round and I put it in and closed the block, and “Fire,” and the gun went off, and the flash lit the cinders and the wagons and the fence.

The people at the wire did not move. Most of them. A few went down on the ground with their arms over their heads, and after a while they got up again, slowly, and came back to the wire, and held it.

We fired twelve rounds. Then “End of mission,” and the barrel ticking, and the smoke going away across the sidings towards the fence.

Captain Kettering went across with Lieutenant Garland and a sergeant from the command post with a rifle. We watched them pick their way over the sidings, stepping over the rails, and go along the fence to where there was a gate, a double gate of wire on a wooden frame, with a chain on it. They stood at the gate a long time. The people inside came along the wire towards them and stood on the other side of the gate, and the captain stood on this side. Then the sergeant went back to the truck and fetched a pick, and broke the chain, and the captain went in.

He was in there twenty minutes. When he came out he came back across the sidings by himself, walking, not fast, and he stopped at No. 3 gun because it was the nearest.

“Sergeant Ridley.”

“Sir.”

“The guards went in the night.” He had his notebook in his hand. He looked at it. He did not open it. “Garland thinks three thousand people. In there. Men. Women. Children. They haven’t been fed for nine days. There’s one tap.”

“Orders, sir?”

“Water first. The water truck and every can we’ve got. Then food, whatever the cooks have.” He looked round at the guns. “The guns stay manned. There’ll be missions all day. Turn and turn about, two men off each gun at a time. I’ve sent to battalion for the doctor. And to division. And to anybody else I can think of.”

“Sir.”

Kettering stood there a moment longer by the gun, with the notebook.

“Get them water, Ridley,” he said, and went on to No. 2.

---

Ridley sent Dunne and me first, with Szabo and Hollis from the ammunition, and the water cans.

Inside the gate the yard was beaten earth, bare, with nothing growing in it, and the building went up on three sides of us, the rows of windows, and there were people at the windows on every floor, looking down. The smell came out to meet us at the gate. I am not going to write the smell down. It was the first thing and it was everywhere, and after an hour I could not smell it any more.

They came to the water. They did not push. That is the thing I remember best. They came with tins and cups and bowls, and one man with a shoe, and stood in a line, and held them out, and we poured, and they drank, and went to the back of the line and stood in it again.

Szabo had brought a box from the ration truck. He opened it on the ground by the gate. Chocolate, in the flat bars, and tins of meat with the key on the side.

Dunne took a bar and gave it to the man in front of him, a young man, or not old, with a shaved head and hands that were all knuckles, and the man looked at it, and tore the paper off with his teeth, and ate it in three bites. Dunne opened a tin of meat and gave him that, and the man ate it with his fingers, out of the tin, standing up, fast, looking at Dunne the whole time over the top of the tin.

Then he sat down. He sat down on the ground very suddenly, as though a rope had been cut, and was sick, and lay on his side on the earth with his knees drawn up and his whole body shaking.

“Dunne,” I said. “Stop. Szabo, put it away.”

“What?”

“Put it away. Don’t give them that.”

“Wheeler, they’re starving!”

“That’s why.”

Dunne was holding another bar out to a woman. I took it out of his hand. He looked at me as though I had hit him.

Ridley came through the gate. He had seen it from the gun.

“Wheeler.”

“Sergeant. We can’t give them the tins. Or the chocolate. Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“It’ll kill some of them.”

He looked at me.

“We had a heifer get out in the snow when I was twelve,” I said. “Into the woodlot. Nine days before Dad found her. She was standing up, but only just. I wanted to give her a bucket of grain and he wouldn’t let me. He gave her a handful of hay. Then an hour after, another handful. Then water with a bit of meal in it, warm. Three days like that before she had a proper feed. He said if you give a starved animal a full feed it kills her. Her insides can’t do it any more. They’ve forgotten how.”

Ridley looked at the man on the ground by the wire, who had stopped being sick and lay on his side with his eyes open.

“They’re not cows,” said Dunne.

“No,” I said.

“You’re sure,” said Ridley.

“With a cow I’m sure.”

Ridley looked at me a moment longer. Then he turned and went out through the gate and across the sidings towards the captain at the double, which I had not seen him do since the beach.

---

The order came back in ten minutes. No tins. No chocolate. Nothing solid. Milk, thinned, a little at a time, until the doctor came.

Brandauer was already at the cookhouse truck. He came back across the sidings with a crate on his shoulder, the little tins of milk the cooks put in the coffee, and the cook behind him with another crate, complaining, and the cook’s dixies.

“Half and half,” said Brandauer, punching the tins with his knife. “With the water. Like for a calf that is weak. Then thinner.”

“And spoons,” I said. “Not cups. They’ll drink a cup in one go.”

We had spoons. Every man in the battery had a spoon.

I took mine out of my mess kit.

---

The first one I fed was a man sitting against the wall of the building by the second staircase, in a jacket that had been a good jacket once, with a collar and no tie, and glasses with one lens cracked across. When I knelt down by him with the mess tin he looked at the spoon, and then at me.

“Thank you,” he said, in English. “You are very kind.”

I nearly dropped the tin.

“You speak English.”

“I taught it.” He opened his mouth for the spoon, and I gave it to him, and he held it in his mouth a moment with his eyes shut before he swallowed. “For twenty-six years. To boys. In a lycée, here, in Paris.” He opened his eyes. “I have never been to England. Is that not ridiculous? Twenty-six years.”

“Slowly,” I said. “Just a little.”

“Yes. I saw the man with the chocolate.” He opened his mouth again. I gave him another spoonful. “What is your name?”

“Wheeler. Jim Wheeler.”

“Castel. Henri Castel.” He held out his hand, and I took it, with the spoon in the other. It weighed nothing. “You are American.”

“Yes.”

“From where?”

“Massachusetts. A farm. Outside Lexington.”

“Lexington.” He smiled. Some of his teeth were gone at the side. “‘It was one by the village clock, when he galloped into Lexington.’ I taught them that. Longfellow. The boys hated it.” He shut his eyes. “Every year, they hated it.”

I gave him the spoon.

“They wrote that I was not French,” said Monsieur Castel, with his eyes shut. “In the register. Because my grandfather was born in Oran. In Algeria. Which was France when he was born there, and is France now. I was born in Paris. My father was born in Paris. But they wrote the grandfather.” He opened his eyes. “My wife was entered also, because she married me. And my daughters, because they were mine.”

“Where are they?”

“They went in October. On the train.”

“Where to?”

He looked at me.

“East,” he said.

I filled the spoon again from the tin. My hand was all right. I held it out and he opened his mouth and took it.

“In 1938,” he said, “I wrote to your consulate. Here, in Paris. For my wife and the girls, to go to America. My wife had a cousin in Philadelphia, who would have had them. I wrote three times.”

“What did they say?”

“That there was no place.”

I did not say anything for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Yes,” said Monsieur Castel. He opened his mouth for the spoon.

---

At about eleven Ridley sent for me to bring water to the gatehouse.

It was a wooden hut just inside the gate, with a desk, and a stove, and shelves, and a typewriter with its cover on. The stove door was open and there was ash spilling out of it onto the floor, and paper, half-burned, the edges brown and curled, and ledgers, big ones bound in grey cloth, some on the shelves and some on the floor by the stove, and two or three of them burned through the middle so that you could see the stitching. Whoever had been doing it had run out of time.

Peter was at the desk. The captain had sent for him first thing, for his French, and he had been in the gatehouse since, with Garland. He had a ledger open in front of him, the one that had been lying open on the desk when they came in. Ridley was in the doorway.

I put the water can down.

“What is it?” said Ridley.

“A register,” said Peter. “Arrivals.” He turned it round on the desk so that we could see. The pages were ruled in columns, and the columns were filled in violet ink in a small upright hand, neat, every line. “Number. Name. Date of birth. Place of birth. Date of arrival here.” He moved his finger along the line. “Date of departure. And this one.”

“What’s that?”

“Convoy.”

“Convoy to where?” said Ridley.

“It doesn’t say. It gives the number of the train.”

Ridley came in from the doorway and stood behind Peter and looked at the page over his shoulder for a long time.

“Who kept it?”

“A clerk.” Peter turned the pages, a handful at a time. “It’s the same hand all the way through.” He turned back to the front. “This one starts in October. Last October. There are twenty-three of them on the shelves. The first ones are 1942.” He turned forward again, slowly. “After Christmas the departure column’s empty. All the way down. Nobody left.”

“Why not?”

“The trains stopped.”

“What’s the last number?” said Ridley.

Peter turned to the last page that had writing on it. The writing stopped halfway down. The last line had a number, and a name, and a date of birth, and a place of birth, and a date of arrival, the thirty-first of March, and then nothing.

“Two hundred and four thousand, one hundred and nineteen,” said Peter.

Nobody said anything. Ridley stood behind him with his hands at his sides.

Peter shut the ledger. There was a label on the cover, typed, under a strip of celluloid.

CAMP DE DRANCY-LE-NORD. REGISTRE DES ENTRÉES. XXIII.

That was the first time I heard the name. I have seen it in the papers since, more than once, and once on the newsreel at the picture house in Lexington, and I got up and went out.

“Leave it,” said Ridley.

Garland had come in behind me. “Sergeant, I was going to have them boxed up and sent back to…”

“Sir. Leave them where they were. Open at the page it was open at.” Ridley did not look round. “Somebody’s going to want to see them the way they were left. Who kept them. Which ones they burned. Which ones they didn’t get to.”

Garland looked at him. Then he looked at the shelves.

“Yes,” he said. “Leave them.”

Peter opened the ledger again at the last page and turned it round the way it had been, and took his hands off it.

---

The telephone went at the guns at noon, and Ridley and Peter and I ran back across the sidings.

“Fire mission.”

Twenty rounds, charge four. Ridley said the numbers and Peter set them, and I loaded, and the gun went back on its recoil and came up again, and the smoke went across the sidings and through the wire, and the people at the wire stood in it and did not move.

Dunne was on the ammunition. Between the twelfth round and the thirteenth he looked up from the fuzes.

“Peter. Is it in Paris? Where we’re firing?”

“Yes,” said Peter.

Dunne waited.

Peter bent to the sight. “Set,” he said.

---

The battalion doctor came at half past twelve, a captain called Lindqvist, from Minnesota, with two orderlies and a box of things. He went round the yard fast, and up one staircase and down another, and came out and stood in the yard with his hands on his hips and looked at the building, and then came to where Brandauer and I were with the dixie by the second staircase.

“Who started the milk?”

Brandauer pointed the ladle at me.

“How thin?”

“Half and half, sir. Then thinner.”

“Thinner. A third milk. Two spoonfuls every half hour and no more, whatever they ask you for. Nothing solid till I say. Not bread. Not anything.” He looked at the dixie and at the spoons. “And nobody sleeps in that building tonight. Not one of you. Lice.” And he went on.

---

In the afternoon Brandauer was on the steps of the third staircase, feeding an old man in a cap. The old man was talking, and Brandauer was answering him, slowly, in his German.

“You understand him?”

“Most of it.” Brandauer gave him the spoon. “It is not German. It is nearly German. It is like my grandmother’s sister. From the old country.”

Peter was going by with a can. “Yiddish,” he said, and went on.

“He is from Poland,” said Brandauer. “Long ago. Forty years in Paris. He was a tailor. He made trousers.” The old man said something. “He says very good trousers.” Brandauer gave him the spoon again. “He asks if I have seen his wife. Rivka. She is small, with a grey coat with a fur collar, and she was on the third staircase. He has not seen her since Sunday.”

“Have you?”

“No,” said Brandauer. “I said I would look.”

He gave the old man the last spoonful and wiped the old man’s mouth with his thumb, and stood up, and went in at the door of the third staircase, and I heard him going up, and his voice on the landings, asking. Rivka. Rivka. Then the fourth staircase. Then the fifth.

---

At two the captain wanted a list of names, for the doctors and for whoever came after the doctors. Baca could not carry anything with his leg, so they put him on an ammunition box inside the gate, with another box for a desk and Peter’s pad on it, and the people came and stood in a line in front of him, the way they had for the water, and gave their names.

“Spell it,” said Baca, every time.

And they spelled it. Some of them in English, some of them in French, with Peter standing by the box saying the French letters over in English, and some of them with their finger, on the pad, upside down, so that Baca could copy it.

---

The water truck was empty by three. Ridley and Peter and I took the cans along the yard to the water tower at the end, and the way to it went along the siding where the wagons were.

They were goods wagons, wooden, brown, the ordinary kind you see in any yard. The doors stood open. They were empty. There was straw in them, old straw, trodden flat, and a bucket in the corner of one, and in another a shoe, a child’s, brown, with a strap. On the side of each wagon, by the door, there was writing stencilled in white.

HOMMES 40. CHEVAUX 8.

“What’s it say?” said Ridley.

“Men, forty,” said Peter. “Horses, eight.”

Ridley looked at it.

A man was coming along the track towards us from the far end of the yard. A little man with a moustache, in a blue jacket and a cap with a badge on it, with a satchel on a strap over his shoulder, walking along the sleepers the way a man walks to work. When he got to us he stopped and touched his cap.

“Bonjour, messieurs.”

Peter talked to him. The man answered with his hands as well as his mouth.

“He says he’s the clerk for the yard,” said Peter. “He’s come in to work. He wants to know if the army is taking over the yard, because if it is he’ll need it in writing.”

Ridley looked at the man.

“Ask him about the wagons.”

Peter asked. The man answered at length.

“He says he did the timetables. For the yard. He says the loading was the police, not the railway. He never went near the loading.”

“Ask him where they went.”

Peter asked. The man said one word.

“East,” said Peter.

“Ask him what he thought was east.”

Peter looked at Ridley. Then he asked.

The man did not answer for a while. He looked at the wagons, and at the fence beyond the sidings, and at the people at the wire, and at us. Then he said something, short.

“He says he has four children,” said Peter.

Nobody said anything. The man stood there with his satchel. Then he touched his cap again, and said “Messieurs,” and went on along the sleepers to the signal box at the end of the yard, and up the iron steps, and in, and shut the door behind him.

Ridley watched the door.

“He’s gone to work,” he said.

“Yes,” said Peter.

Ridley turned the tap at the foot of the water tower, and the water came down into the can.

---

The General came at about half past three.

He came on the motorcycle, with two men of the Council behind him on another, with tricolour armbands, and no Harris. He came in through the gate and stopped in the middle of the yard and pushed his goggles up, and stood there looking at the building, the three sides of it, and the windows, and the people in the windows, for a long time, without moving.

Then he went into the gatehouse. He was in there a while. When he came out he looked round the yard until he found Ridley.

“Who left the ledgers where they are?”

“I did, sir.”

“Good.” The General looked at him. “The Council will want them exactly where they are. So will a court, one day.” He pulled his gloves off. “Thank you, Ridley.”

He went among the people. He went from one to another round the yard, and crouched down by them, and talked to them in French, quietly, and listened, and wrote some things down in his notebook. Later I saw him sitting on the ground by the second staircase, beside Monsieur Castel, in his greatcoat, in the dirt, with his knees up, the two of them talking, and once the General laughed, the short laugh, and Monsieur Castel smiled with the side of his mouth where the teeth were gone.

At about five he went and stood at the wire with Ridley, on the inside, looking out across the sidings at the guns, and they had a cigarette each. I was a few yards off, filling the dixie from a can.

“You knew about this, sir,” said Ridley.

The General did not answer at once.

“We were told,” he said.

“When?”

“‘Forty-two. The first of it.” He looked at the cigarette. “A paragraph at the bottom of the weekly summary, under the shipping. Men who’d got out over the mountains. A railwayman from Lyon. A priest. It said unconfirmed. The next month it said exaggerated. After that it said so every month.”

“What did you do?”

“I turned the page,” said the General.

Ridley did not say anything. They stood at the wire and smoked, and across the sidings the telephone rang at No. 2 gun and somebody shouted, and No. 2 fired, and in the yard behind them nobody looked up.

When the General went he stopped by Baca’s box, where Peter was spelling.

“Mercer. You’re very quiet.”

“Yes, sir.”

The General looked at him for a while. He did not say anything else. He put his hand on Peter’s shoulder, once, and took it away, and went out through the gate to the motorcycle.

---

The ambulances came at six, from division, a long line of them along the road by the yard, and orderlies with stretchers, and nurses in battledress with their hair tied up. They carried them out through the gate one at a time, the ones who could not walk, and the ones who could walked, holding on to each other, and the orderlies held their elbows.

They carried Monsieur Castel out at about seven. I was at the gate with a can. He saw me and lifted his hand off the blanket.

“Mr Wheeler.”

“Monsieur Castel.”

“‘It was two by the village clock,’” he said, “‘when he came to the bridge in Concord town.’” His hand went back down on the blanket. “I hope you will see it again.”

“Yes,” I said.

They carried him away along the line of ambulances, and I lost him among the stretchers.

Brandauer came down the last staircase at dusk. He had been up and down every one of them.

“Did you find her?” said Dunne.

“No,” said Brandauer.

He sat down on the cinders by the gun and took his boots off, and sat there with them in his hands.

---

We slept by the guns that night, on the cinders, under the trucks, because of the doctor’s order. Nobody slept much. The ambulances were still going along the road in the dark with their lights hooded, and south of us in the city the machine guns went on in bursts, and once a fire got going somewhere near the white church and the whole sky went orange over that side and then slowly went out.

I cleaned my spoon with the last of the water in the can, and dried it on my shirt, and put it back in my mess kit.

Szabo was lying on his blanket with his head under the tailboard of the ammunition truck.

“Professor,” he said.

“What,” said Peter.

“You didn’t tell us anything today.”

Peter did not answer.

“All day,” said Szabo. “We fired on Paris. Twice. That’s the place. The whole place. The Bastille, and the king with his head off, and the barricades, and all of it. And you didn’t say one word.”

“No,” said Peter.

Szabo waited. Then he turned over. “Okay,” he said, to the bottom of the truck.

It was quiet for a long time. Then Dunne said, out of the dark under the next truck:

“Why did they write it all down?”

Nobody answered him.

Baca was sitting up against the wheel of the gun with the gun book on his knee and a flashlight with a red rag over it. He wrote the position at the top of a new page, the way he did every night, in figures. Under it he wrote the two missions, and the times, and the rounds. Thirty-two.

“Baca,” I said. “The names. At the table. How many?”

He did not look up.

“I didn’t count,” said Baca.

He shut the book.