Montmartre

We went into Paris on the last day of April, a Monday, in the back of the truck behind No. 3 gun, and I was asleep for a good deal of it.

I had not meant to be. Nobody had slept much for two nights, waiting for the telephone at Saint-Denis, and on the Monday it rang at five in the morning, not for a mission but to say the infantry were through the gates and nobody was shooting at them, and to limber up. I sat down on the ammunition boxes when we pulled out of the park, with my back against the cab and my rifle between my knees, and when I opened my eyes again we were stopped in a street of tall grey houses with iron balconies, and a woman on one of the balconies was shaking a tablecloth out over us.

“Where are we?”

“Paris,” said Peter.

“When did we get in?”

“Twenty minutes ago. Through the gate. You missed it.”

“What was it like?”

Peter thought about it.

“A gate,” he said.

---

The streets were full and they were quiet, both at once.

People stood along the pavements and at the windows and in the doorways, and some of them cheered as the guns went by, and some of them waved, and a girl ran out between the trucks with her arms full of lilac and threw it in over our tailboard, all of it, and ran back, and Brandauer sat there with lilac in his lap and on his helmet and did not know what to do with it. But most of them only stood and looked. There were shutters closed all the way along some streets, every window, top to bottom. There were French flags at some of the windows, the plain ones, and a great many windows without anything. An old man in a bowler hat stood on the corner of one street with his hands behind his back and watched every truck in the column go past him, one after another, and did not move his face at all.

“They don’t look very happy,” said Dunne.

“Some of them are,” said Hollis.

“Most of them aren’t.”

“It’s their city,” said Peter. “And we’re in it.”

A woman at a window two floors up said something down to us, loud, and shut the window.

“What’d she say?”

Peter did not answer for a moment.

“She said it took us long enough,” he said.

---

The battery was sent up the hill.

The streets went steeper and narrower, cobbles and steps, and the trucks ground up them in first gear with the guns swinging behind, and people came out of the little shops to watch, and at the top there was a square with plane trees in it and benches and a pump, and above the roofs on one side the white church, very close now, enormous, the colour of bone.

We parked the guns in the square, all four in a row under the plane trees, with their muzzles pointing at nothing in particular. We were in reserve, Captain Kettering said. There was nothing for us to fire at. There was nothing inside the city that anybody was going to fire at, and outside it, he said, the regiments that were still fighting were somebody else’s business today.

Dunne stood by the gun and looked round the square, at the plane trees and the cafés with their chairs stacked and the white church over the roofs.

“Peter,” he said. “Is this where they were? The cannon. The ones with no horses.”

“About here,” said Peter. “Yes. This hill.”

Dunne looked at the four guns in a row under the trees.

“Well,” said Brandauer, still with lilac on his helmet, “this time we have brought the trucks.”

---

I was asleep again in the afternoon, on the tailboard of the ammunition truck, when the flag went up.

Peter woke me. He had his hand on my shoulder and he was shaking it.

“Wheeler. Get up. Look.”

The section was at the edge of the square, at the top of a long flight of steps that went down the hill, where the whole city was laid out below in the grey light, roofs and roofs and roofs, going away for miles to the south, with the smoke from the yards and the gasworks lying along the edges of it, and in the middle, a long way off, the tower. The Eiffel Tower. I had seen it in pictures all my life. It was smaller than in the pictures, and very black, and very far away.

Ridley had Lieutenant Garland’s field glasses.

“There,” he said. “By the tower. This side of it. The big building with the statues.”

I looked. There was a big building a long way off, on this side of the tower, with something along its roof, statues, and on the corner of the roof, very small, a speck of colour, moving.

Ridley gave me the glasses.

It came up close all at once, shaking because my hands were. A roof, grey stone, with stone figures standing along the edge of it, and men among the figures, soldiers, very small, three or four of them, and one of them standing up on something with a pole in his hands, leaning out over the street, and on the end of the pole a flag, blowing out stiff in the wind, red and white and blue.

“Whose is it?” said Dunne.

“The Union Jack,” said Ridley.

“The British one?”

“The British one.”

“Why not ours?”

“They got there first,” said Hollis.

“They always get there first,” said Szabo. “They’ve been doing it longer.”

“Does it matter?” said Baca.

Szabo thought about it. “My old man’ll think it matters,” he said.

I gave the glasses back to Ridley. I looked at the speck of colour on the roof by the tower a while longer without them. You could just see it was moving.

“Well?” said Peter.

“That’s it,” I said.

I went back to the truck and sat down on the tailboard. I was asleep again before Szabo had finished telling Dunne about the British.

---

Peter said it that evening.

We were sitting on the trail of the gun in the square in the dusk, the section, eating out of the mess tins. The people of the hill had come out into the square to look at the guns, the way the children had at Saint-Denis, and stood round under the plane trees in the last of the light, talking quietly, and somebody in one of the houses had a window open and a wireless on, and a man’s voice was reading out names, French names, one after another, and every so often stopping.

Peter had not eaten anything. He was sitting with his mess tin on his knees, looking out over the edge of the square to where the city was going dark.

“It should have been theirs,” he said.

Nobody said anything. I looked at him.

“The flag. On that roof.” He did not look round. “It should have been theirs. The tricolour. Their own flag on their own roof, and put there by them. They did it in ‘eighty-nine, they did it in 1830, they did it in ‘forty-eight. In ‘seventy-one they did it for two months before they were shot against a wall for it. Every time. They were the ones who showed everybody it could be done, the whole world, us included.” His voice was going up. He did not stop it. “And now there’s a British flag up there, put up by British soldiers, and the whole of Paris standing in the street with its hands in its pockets looking at it. And the ones who’d have climbed up on that roof with their own flag are in a book in a hut at Drancy-le-Nord. Two hundred and four thousand, one hundred and nineteen of them. In violet ink.”

He stopped.

The man on the wireless was still reading names. The people under the plane trees were looking at us now, at Peter.

Peter took off his glasses. He held them in his hand.

“That’s all,” he said. “I’m sorry. That’s all.”

It was quiet in the square.

“Mercer,” said Ridley.

“Sergeant.”

“Clean the sight.”

Peter sat there a moment longer. Then he put his glasses back on, and put his mess tin down on the trail, and got up and took the rag out of his pocket, and cleaned the sight, the eyepiece, round and round, in the dark, the way he always did.

---

The General came on the Tuesday morning, on foot, up the steps from the bottom of the hill.

I did not know him. None of us did. He was in a long black civilian overcoat with the collar turned up, and a beret, and a scarf, and he had not shaved, and he came up the last of the steps into the square with his hands in his pockets, a small thin man like a clerk going to an office, and walked across the square to No. 3 gun and stopped.

Brandauer looked at him.

“Monsieur?”

“Brandauer,” said the General, “I owe you a cup of coffee.”

Brandauer stared at him. Then his face did something, all at once, and he dropped the can he was holding.

“Sir! They said you were inside!”

“I was inside.” The General took the beret off. His hair stood up. “I’ve been inside since the beginning of April, in a flat over a bookshop on the Left Bank, with the Council’s people, being called Monsieur Laurent by a concierge who knew perfectly well who I was and brought me soup every night at seven and never said a word.” He looked round at us. “Ridley.”

“General.”

“You look terrible.”

“So do you, sir.”

“I’ve been eating barley.” He looked at Ridley’s face for a moment. “I said I’d buy the coffee. In Paris. In a month. It’s been seven weeks. I’m late. Can you spare me four of them for an hour?”

Ridley looked at Captain Kettering, who was standing by No. 1 gun watching all this, and Kettering looked at the General, and at the beret, and said, “Good Lord,” the way he had over the dates, and nodded.

“Mercer,” said Ridley. “Wheeler. Brandauer. And me.”

---

The café was on the corner of the square, a little one, with a zinc bar and six tables and pictures on the walls by painters nobody had heard of, the patron said, who had paid for their dinners with them before the war. The patron knew the General. Everybody in Paris knew the General that week, or said they did. He took the chairs down off a table by the window for us and wiped it with his apron and brought five cups, and a pot, and poured.

It was black, and thin, and it smelled of burned bread.

Brandauer tasted it. He held it in his mouth a long time. He swallowed.

“Well?” said the General.

“It is worse, sir.”

“I told you it would be.”

“It is much worse,” said Brandauer, with great respect, and drank the rest of it.

The General turned his cup round on the table, and looked out of the window, over the edge of the square, at the roofs going away to the south in the sun. The smoke was still lying along the edges of the city, over the yards. In the middle there was no smoke at all.

“Well, Mercer,” he said. “You were going to tell me how wrong it was.”

Peter looked out of the window too. He did not answer for a long time.

“Both, sir,” he said.

The General looked at him.

“I said that to you once,” he said. “Above the Seine.”

“Yes, sir. It’s taken me till now.”

“It takes most people longer,” said the General. “Some of them never.” He drank some of his coffee and made a face at it. “The Council met last night. In the Hôtel de Ville. The first time in the open. There were men there who’d been in hiding since 1940 and men who’d been in the camps and men who’d been in the government until about Tuesday, and they all made speeches, and the speeches were all about who had freed Paris. Not one of them said the word British.” He put the cup down. “And Paris is still here, every stone of it, and nobody in that room could say they did it. Both.”

“Both,” said Peter.

Ridley had not said anything. He sat with his cup between his hands, looking at the General.

“You’re thin, sir,” he said.

“I keep telling you. Barley.”

“You were thin before.”

“I was thin before,” the General agreed. He looked at Ridley, and his face did the crooked thing, up one side. “I’m fifty-six, Ridley. It’s allowed.”

Then he turned to me.

“Wheeler.”

“Sir.”

“Nothing.” He said it before I could ask. “I’m still looking. I’ll be looking for a while yet. I’ll write.”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked at me a moment longer, over the cup.

“You look like a man who’s going to sleep for a week,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do,” said the General.

---

I put my head down on my arms on the café table, for a minute, while the General and Peter started on something about the Hôtel de Ville and who had burned it in 1871.

When I woke up the light had gone yellow outside the window, and the General had gone, and paid. Brandauer and Ridley had gone back to the guns. Peter was sitting across the table from me with his chin on his hand. The patron was putting the chairs up on the tables round us, one at a time, very quietly.

Nobody had woken me.