The Cauldron

The first boat I was ever in that was bigger than a rowboat was a liner that had carried people to Bermuda for their holidays, and it carried four thousand of us to Germany in July 1943, and I was sick from the second hour to the eleventh day.

I spent most of the crossing on a canvas bunk in a hold that had been a ballroom, four bunks high, with the man above me sick as well. Peter was not sick at all. He sat on the deck in the wind with the limber between his feet and read the whole of a history of the Hanseatic League, which he said was appropriate, and came down twice a day with crackers.

“What does it look like up there?” I said.

“It looks like the ocean.”

“Peter.”

He sat on the edge of the bunk below mine. “There are ships to the edge of the world on every side, Wheeler, in rows. And destroyers going up and down the rows like dogs round sheep.” He put a cracker in my hand. “Eat that. Slowly.”

On the seventh night there was an alarm, and we were all ordered up on deck in our life jackets in the dark, and stood there for two hours while the destroyers ran about somewhere out of sight. Once, far off to the north, there was a light on the water, low and orange, that stayed for a while and went out.

“What is it?” somebody said along the rail.

Nobody answered. Nobody told us, then or afterwards.

We came in at Bremerhaven, at the mouth of the Weser, on a grey morning with gulls. The guns came off in nets, swinging, and I watched ours come down onto the quay. A hundred-and-five in a net looks like the easiest thing in the world to drop.

“You’re thinking it,” Peter said, beside me.

“I’m thinking it.”

It came down onto the stones as gently as a hen settling, and the crane let it go. All along the quay men were watching their own guns come down out of the sky on the end of a crane.

---

We went south by train. The guns went on flatcars and we went in the cars behind, the old kind of car with doors in every compartment, and we were three days getting to where we were going, because the railways had been bombed so many times that nobody could tell us how long anything would take, and the train stopped for hours in fields for reasons nobody gave.

I had a map of Germany from a magazine, which I had bought in New Jersey while we waited for the ship, and I followed us on it. We went through Bremen and then up the valley of the Weser, which is where the war in Germany had stopped going the wrong way two years before. At home the papers called it the Miracle of the Weser.

Brandauer asked a man about it at one of the stations, an old railwayman with a lamp. They talked for a while in German, and the old man got rather loud.

“What did he say?” I said, when the train had started.

“He says there was no miracle,” Brandauer said. “Only men and guns. He says it was a stand, and nothing else, and he would thank us to say so.”

You could still see it. There were trenches along the far bank, gone soft at the edges and grown over with weeds, and the stumps of trees that had been cut down to clear the field of fire, and a church on a bluff above the river with the whole top of its tower off, so that the bells hung out in the air on their beams. There were graves, a great many of them, in rows in fields beside the line, with wooden crosses that had been painted white and were not white any more. Peter was at the window with me.

“A good many of those will be boys our age,” he said. “Younger. They stood there in the winter of 1941 with nothing behind them.” He watched the crosses go by. “The whole of the rest of the war in Europe happened because they didn’t run.”

I did not say anything.

We changed trains at Hanover, and stood for an hour on the platform while they found us an engine. Hanover is the King’s. I mean that he is King there, the same man, King of Hanover as well as of us and of Britain, which I had known the way you know such things and had never once thought about. On the wall of the station, above the door to the waiting room, there was his picture, in a gilt frame with a little crown carved at the top. It was the coronation picture, the very same one that was in my mother’s parlour cut out of a magazine, and I stood on a railway platform four thousand miles from Lexington and looked up at it, and it looked back at me exactly as it did over the parlour sofa. I had to sit down on my kit.

Brandauer went and asked a porter about it. Brandauer could ask anybody about anything. The porter looked up at the picture, and at us, and said two words.

“He says it is the King,” Brandauer reported.

Peter took off his glasses and polished them. “Thank you, Brandauer.”

“You are welcome,” Brandauer said.

---

Private Karl Brandauer was the first of the men who were with us the whole way, and he was in the section until the end. He was from the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin, from a dairy county up towards the lake, and his family had farmed there since 1850. He had grown up speaking German at home and in the church and at the co-operative, and English at school, and he did not seem to think there was anything remarkable about that. He was big and slow and very good-natured, and he could carry nearly as much as I could, which made us the two carriers of the section, and we did the ammunition work together from Germany to the end.

On the first day he asked me what we kept.

“Nineteen milkers,” I said. “Some young stock.”

“What breed?”

I told him. He told me his. By the time we got to Göttingen we had been through feed, and calving, and a heifer of his that would not take the bull, and the price of hay in Massachusetts and in Wisconsin, and Peter, on the seat opposite, had put down his book.

“If either of you says the word butterfat again,” he said, “I am going to ask for a transfer to the infantry.”

“They don’t have cows in the infantry,” Brandauer said.

“That,” said Peter, “is the attraction.”

We talked about cows for three years after that, the way other men talked about girls or baseball, and we did it partly for Peter.

In Germany Brandauer talked to everybody. He talked to the porters and the women selling apples at the stations and the old men on the benches and the children who came to the side of the train with their hands out, and they understood him, and they laughed. They were not laughing at him, quite. They said, when he asked them, that he talked like their grandfathers. He used words that nobody had used since the old Kaiser’s time, and turned his sentences round the way people did in the country a hundred years ago, and put an American R in the middle of everything, rolling round at the back of his throat like a wheel in a rut.

At Göttingen an old woman on the platform made him say something three times over, and laughed until she cried, and then gave him a whole loaf of bread and would not take any money for it.

“What did you say to her?” I asked him, when the train had pulled out and the loaf was going round the compartment.

“Something my grandmother says.” He said it again, for me. “D’Kieh warta net auf’n Landtag.”

“Meaning?”

“The cows do not wait for the Landtag.” He broke off a piece of the bread. “Whatever the government is arguing about, the milking still has to be done.”

“Say it again.”

He said it again, and I said it after him, and he laughed nearly as much as the old woman had.

I have been saying it ever since, in an accent that I am told is neither German nor Wisconsin nor anything else, and my father has learned it too, and says it at the milking when the news is bad. It is the only German he knows.

---

The battery joined its battalion at the end of July in the hills of Hesse, south and west of Kassel, in country that the French had held for two years and had been pushed out of that summer.

The section’s corporal had come to us from another battery when we got to Germany. His name was Eddie Baca, and he was from the March of Arizona, from a town in the desert south of Phoenix. On the first morning in the hills he looked out at the fields.

“So this is Hesse,” he said.

“Hesse-Nassau,” Peter said. “The Prussian part. Prussia took it in 1866. The Grand Duchy of Hesse is further south, and has a Grand Duke of its own.”

“So this isn’t Hesse.”

“It’s Hesse. It isn’t the Grand Duchy.”

“It is Hessen,” Brandauer said helpfully. “But Prussian.”

Baca looked from one to the other. “I’m going to call it Germany,” he said.

Peter explained it to me twice more that week and Brandauer once. I have it straight now and did not then.

Baca asked me to say the name of his town, and I said it, and he shook his head.

“Again.”

I said it again.

“No,” he said, with great sorrow. “Again.”

I never once said it to his satisfaction. He said that he had seen rain about eleven times in his life before he joined the Army, and that he had now seen it every day since July, and was beginning to suspect it was being done to him personally. He was small and quick and had the best eyes in the battery, and he kept the section’s records and checked every round we fired against the command, and if you got a charge wrong Baca knew before you had finished getting it wrong. He was twenty-five. He was the first man I knew in the Army, after Peter, who I would have said was a friend before I would have said he was a soldier.

Our sergeant was Oakes. He was forty-four, and he had been a schoolteacher in Indiana, and he had been in the artillery in the last war and come back into it for this one. He was a fair man and a patient one, and he knew the gun as well as anybody I have known, and he had an ulcer that kept him awake at night and that he did not tell the doctors about.

“They’ll send me home,” he said, when Peter found him one night sitting on an ammunition box with his arms round his stomach. “And then who’ll you have?”

So that was the section at Kassel: Oakes, Baca, Peter on the sight, Brandauer and me on the ammunition, and three others whose names I will put in when they matter. There were eight of us, and the gun.

---

I had expected Germany to look foreign, and it did, and it did not. It was farm country. The fields were smaller than ours and longer and thinner, in strips, and the villages were closer together and had the houses all in a bunch round the church instead of out on their own land, so that a farmer walked out to his fields in the morning and back at night. But the fields had hay in them and potatoes and beets, and the cows were cows, and the cows were thin.

The first village we were in, an old man with one arm kept a dozen milkers in a byre attached to his house, so that the smell of them came through into his kitchen. Brandauer and I went over to look at them. The old man came out and stood with us.

“Ask him why they’re so thin,” I said.

Brandauer asked him. The old man answered for a long time, without any fuss, the way my father said it rained, and Brandauer listened and nodded.

“He says the French took a share of everything he grew and everything they gave. Then a larger share. Then, the last winter, all of it.” Brandauer listened again. “His son was taken the first winter, to work in France. He has not heard from him since. His son’s wife is working the fields, with the girls.” He stopped. “He doesn’t know if his son is alive.”

The old man said something else, looking at me.

“He asks how many cows you have.”

“Nineteen.”

The old man listened to that, and asked something else.

“Are they good milkers?”

“Some of them.”

The old man nodded, and went into the house and came back with a jug of cider and three cups.

I do not know his name.

A woman in a village further on said something of the same kind, the other way round. We had been in the place a day, and she stopped Brandauer in the street and talked to him for a while, quite politely, and he thanked her. He did not tell us what she had said until we were back at the gun.

“She says it is very good that we have come,” he said, “and she is very grateful.” He took off his helmet and looked into it. “And that we are two years late.”

“She’s right,” Peter said.

“She can take it up with the Prime Minister,” said Oakes.

Nobody said anything else.

---

I knew very little about the fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth of September while they were happening. It was called the Cauldron of Kassel, I know now, and three French armies were trapped in it, and after it the French in Germany were finished as an army that could attack. At the time we had been moved twice in a week, the second time at night, without lights, along roads full of other guns and other trucks and tanks going the same way. The noise from the north and east had been going on for days, a low noise that you felt in the ground more than heard, like a train going over a bridge a long way off and never getting to the other side. The infantry going past us looked tired and pleased. A private in a battery knows what is within about a hundred yards of him, and what the sergeant tells him, and what the cook says, and the cook is usually wrong.

On the fourteenth we went into position on a slope above a village in a valley, with woods behind us and a road running along the bottom of the valley below, and a ridge across the valley with more woods on it.

“French are on the other side of that,” Oakes said. “A great many of them. They’re trying to get out.”

We dug in the gun. We dug the pits for the spades and the pits for the ammunition and the pits for ourselves, in that order, which is the order you always do it in, and it rained.

“Personal,” Baca said, digging.

We did not fire that day. In the night we heard the guns of other batteries firing, all along the valley and over the ridge, and we lay in our holes and listened to them, and nobody slept much, and in the morning there was a mist in the valley that hid the village.

On the fifteenth, at about eleven in the morning, the telephone went.

Oakes listened, and wrote on his pad, and said, “Fire mission,” and we were on our feet before he had finished saying it. Peter was on the sight. Brandauer and I were at the pit. Then the numbers came, in Oakes’s schoolroom voice, clearly, as though he were dictating to a class. The charge. The direction. The elevation. The fuze. The number of rounds. Peter said the direction and the elevation back under his breath as he set them, and Baca wrote them down, and I heard the charge and cut it.

You pull the shell out of the case, and there are the seven bags on their string, numbered, and you take off the ones the command does not want and drop them in the pit for the burning, and put the shell back, and the round is ready. I had done it ten thousand times at Fort Sill. My hands did it. I fuzed the shell and cut the charge and passed it to Brandauer, who passed it to the loader, who rammed it home, and the breech closed. Oakes looked at Peter.

“Set,” Peter said.

“Fire.”

The gun fired.

It was the same noise. It was the same jump of the whole piece back against the spades, and the same breath of hot air and powder that comes back over you, and the same brass case coming out of the breech and rolling across the pit, smoking, for somebody to kick out of the way. It was exactly the same as Fort Sill. Then the next numbers were coming and I had to cut the next charge.

We fired for about three hours.

Sometimes it was one round at a time, while the observer walked the fire onto whatever he could see, and then a great many rounds as fast as we could load them, and then we stopped, and waited, and the numbers came again.

“That’s the road,” Oakes said once, to nobody, with the telephone at his ear.

A while later he said, “Crossroads,” and later still, “Wood.”

“How does he know?” Brandauer said to me, at the pit.

“Command post tells him,” Baca said, writing, without looking up.

I did not see any of it. I saw the inside of a pit, and the boxes, and my hands, and the back of Brandauer’s neck, and the barrel of the gun going up and coming down, and the cases piling up, and the smoke, which lay in the valley with the mist and did not move. Once the whole battery fired together, all four guns, and the ground jumped under my knees, and Baca, writing, did not even look up.

At about two in the afternoon the numbers stopped coming. We waited. Oakes listened to the telephone a while longer and then put it down.

“That’s all,” he said.

We stood about in the pit with our ears ringing, waiting for something else to happen, and nothing did. The barrel was too hot to touch. We cleaned it. We counted what we had fired, and Baca checked the count against his book.

“Matches,” he said.

We burned the bags. Nobody was hurt. Nothing had gone wrong. There had not been a single misfire on our gun, or a single round fired on the wrong charge, or a single thing done out of its order. Late in the afternoon Captain Kettering came round the guns, walking from pit to pit in his careful clean way with his notebook. He looked at Baca’s count and checked it against his own.

“That was properly done, Sergeant,” he said to Oakes. Then he looked at the rest of us. “Properly done.”

He went on to the next gun.

I lay in my hole that night, too tired to sleep, with the guns of the other batteries still going off along the valley. Peter was in the next hole.

“Wheeler,” he said, in the dark.

“What.”

“Not one misfire.”

“No.”

“Not one wrong charge.”

“No.”

He was quiet for a while. “It works,” he said. “All of it. Dempsey’s clock. The whole thing.”

“It works.”

---

On the eighteenth the pocket was finished, and on the nineteenth the battery moved forward, over the ridge and down the far side, along the road we had been firing on.

It was the same road, or it was the only road over that ridge that I could see on any map. Which part of it was ours nobody could have told me. Every battery in that valley and the next one had been firing on it for three days, and the planes had been at it too, and so had the French themselves, trying to get out.

There were trucks on it, burned, nose to tail, for perhaps two miles. There were guns in the ditches with their wheels in the air, and wagons, and a tank on its side in a stream. There were French soldiers. Some of them were alive and walking the other way, west, in long grey columns along the verge, without helmets, guarded by a few German soldiers who looked as tired as they did. Some of them were not alive, and were lying where they had been when it came down, in the road and in the ditches and in the field beside the road, in their coats. The smell of that road I will not try to put down. The trucks had to go very slowly. We sat in the back of ours and looked at it go past, all of us, and nobody said anything for a long time.

“Well,” said a man from the third section, “that’s what it does.”

“Shut up,” somebody said.

When the column stopped, one of the prisoners came over to the side of our truck, a boy of about nineteen with no cap and a bandage round his hand. He put two fingers to his mouth.

Peter gave him a cigarette and lit it for him, and then he said something to him in French, slowly and carefully, in the French he had done at school. The boy listened politely, smoking. Then he answered, quickly and at some length, and the men round him in the column laughed, and Peter laughed too, and went red to the ears.

The trucks moved on. The boy lifted his bandaged hand.

“What did he say?” I said.

Peter took off his glasses and polished them.

“He said my French was very correct,” he said. “He said it was a pity nobody in France had spoken like that since Napoleon.”

“Is that bad?”

“It is very bad, Wheeler.”

He bought a French grammar the next spring, in England.

There was a village at the bottom of the far side of the ridge, where the road came down. It had been hit. Some of the houses had been knocked down and some had been burned, and the church had a hole in its roof, and there were people in the street, Germans, women mostly, with handcarts, picking things out of the houses. They had been in the pocket with the French. Outside a house that had no front wall an old woman sat on a chair in the street with her hands in her lap, just sitting.

“That’s a shame,” I said.

Nobody answered, and we went on.

---

We were in Germany until November. The front went west, towards the frontier the French had crossed in 1939, and we did not go with it. The battery was pulled back into reserve in a village near Göttingen, to refit and to train, and we did not fire another round at anybody in Germany. Nobody told us why.

“It’s because we did it properly,” Baca said. “They don’t want to spoil us.”

Kassel was the only time.

The rain stopped and the cold came, and the leaves came off the woods in the hills, and Baca saw his first snow. He stood in it with his face turned up and his mouth open.

“If this is what it’s going to be like,” he said, “I’d like to go home now, please.”

Oakes’s ulcer got worse. He went on not telling anybody, and in November, when the battery was ordered back to the coast, the doctors found out anyway, at the inspection everybody had before we sailed, and they sent him home. He came round the gun with his kit on his shoulder and shook hands with every man in the section.

“You’re a good section,” he said. “I’d like to have been with you for whatever’s next.” He shook my hand last. “I’m sure you’ll do it properly.”

Then he got into a truck and went, and we never saw him again. I wrote to him after the war, at the school in Indiana, and his wife wrote back that he had died in the spring of 1945, of the ulcer, which had been a cancer all along.

We were told we were going to England, and that it was something big, and not to talk about it, which was easy, because we did not know anything to talk about. We went north by train, the way we had come, up the Weser, past the graves, and through Hanover, where I looked for the picture in the station and it was still there, and to the coast, and onto a ship.

Brandauer stood at the rail as we pulled out, and said it, quietly, to the land going away.

“D’Kieh warta net auf’n Landtag.”

“What do you mean by it?” I said. “Just now.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It seemed like the thing to say.”