Longship

I have written this chapter four times, and each time the day comes out more orderly than it was. This is the last time. Where I do not know what happened, I will say so.

---

The aeroplanes went over at about one in the morning.

I was awake. Nobody on the craft was asleep except Brandauer, who could sleep anywhere and did, sitting up against a truck wheel with his helmet over his face. The sea had gone down a little but not much, and the craft was doing what landing craft do in any sea, which is to climb each wave and fall off the far side of it with a crash that goes through the whole steel box and every man in it. I had been sick until there was nothing left, and I was lying on the deck feeling the crashes come up through my back.

Then there was a sound above the sea and the engines, a long low sound, a long way up, that went on and on and did not stop. I rolled over and looked up and could not see anything, only cloud and the dark.

“Bombers,” Baca said, somewhere near my feet.

“Not all of them.” That was Gaines. “Some of those are carrying men.”

“Carrying them where?”

“Over there. Ahead of us. They drop them in the dark.”

Nobody said anything for a while. The sound went on for most of an hour. Peter was lying beside me with his hands folded on his chest like a man laid out.

“Then it’s started,” he said.

“We’re not even there yet,” I said.

“No,” Peter said. “We’re not.”

Later there were flashes on the sea ahead, low down, orange and white, without any sound, that lit up the bottoms of the clouds. The bombing. They went on until it began to get light.

---

It got light grey. There was no sunrise, or not one we could see; the dark got thinner, and greyer, and there was a mist on the sea that the light came into and filled, so that we seemed to be moving through grey wool with ships in it. Then the mist thinned in front, and there was a line along the bottom of it that was darker than the sea, and the line was France.

It was lower than I had expected. I had expected cliffs, like Devon. It was a low line of sand hills, pale, with the grey sky over them and the grey sea under them, and behind them nothing, a flatness going back into the mist.

“It looks like Revere,” I said.

Peter was standing beside me at the rail. “What’s Revere?”

“A beach. At home. The Sunday school took us when I was ten. It was cold and there was nobody on it.”

“I hope it’s as dull as that,” Peter said.

Then the navy began to fire.

The big ships were behind us, out in the mist, and they fired over our heads at the land, and the shells went over with a noise like a train going through a station without stopping, a tearing, rushing noise, over and over, so many at once that it became one noise. On the line of sand hills, and behind them, the ground went up. It went up in brown and black and grey, in great slow fountains, along the whole length of the coast as far as I could see in both directions, and the sound of it came back to us a few seconds later, a deep thudding that you felt in your stomach. Baca had both hands over his ears and was shouting something, and I could see his mouth going and could not hear a word of it.

The smoke drifted back over the sand hills and joined the mist. Somewhere behind them something caught fire and went on burning, a column of dark smoke that went straight up and leaned over at the top. I watched it for a while. I thought it was a gun position that had been hit, if I thought anything at all.

Ridley went down the craft between the trucks and said the same thing to every section, quietly. When he got to us he stopped and looked at each of us in turn.

“Drivers in,” he said. “Everybody else on the truck or by it. Nobody off the ramp till the truck’s off. Then follow the truck.”

He said it once, and went on to the next section. We had done it twenty times in Devon.

I got up onto the back of the truck beside the ammunition, with Brandauer. Peter was on the other side with Gaines. Baca was in the cab beside the driver, with his book of records buttoned into his shirt. I felt in my pack for the rubber bag, and it was there, and when I looked up Gaines was watching me do it, and looked away.

---

We were in the second wave. The infantry had gone in first, perhaps half an hour before, and we came in behind them, when the beach was supposed to be taken, or at any rate occupied, so that the guns could come ashore and support them inland. As we came close the navy stopped firing at the beach and started firing further inland, so that the noise went over us and away, and we could hear other noises then, closer: the small dry cracking of rifles, a long way off, and the hammering of machine guns, and every now and then the flat crump of something bigger landing near the water.

We could see the beach. It was wide, wider than in Devon, flat wet sand with the tide well out, and all over it there were things sticking up: wooden posts driven into the sand at an angle, pointing out to sea, and iron things like the giant jacks that children play with, and some of them had round objects tied to the tops, which were mines. There were men on the beach, a great many of them, small at that distance, moving up the sand towards the hills, some running and some walking and some lying down, and I could not tell from the craft which of the ones lying down had chosen to. There were craft already in, grounded at the water’s edge with their ramps down, empty, and some trucks on the sand, and one craft to the right of us was on fire.

“Look at that,” Brandauer said, and I looked.

A shell landed in the sea about thirty yards to our left. The water went up in a white column and came down on us like rain, salt, and the craft lurched, and somebody behind me said something to God that I will not write down. Then another, behind us.

“Who’s he shooting at?” Brandauer said.

“Us,” said Gaines.

“He’s not very good.”

“Don’t tell him,” Gaines said. “He might practise.”

Somebody had a gun in those sand hills, or behind them, that the navy had not found.

The craft hit the bottom. You feel it before you hear it: the whole box stops going forward while you keep going, and you hit whatever is in front of you, which for me was a box of fuzes. Then the ramp went down with a long screech of chain, and there was the beach, grey sand and grey water and the posts, and the water in front of the ramp about four feet deep and moving.

The first truck went. It went down the ramp with its exhaust pipe sticking up behind the cab like a chimney, the way we had made them in Devon, and hit the water and kept going, with the water up to its doors, pushing a wave in front of it like a boat, and the gun behind it bucking and swinging; and it came out on the far side of the deep water with the sea pouring off it, and started up the beach. Then the second. Then us.

“Hold on,” Brandauer said.

I held on to the side as the truck went down the ramp. It hit the water, and a great cold heave came up over the tailboard and soaked me to the waist in one go, and the engine roared and the whole truck tilted, and Brandauer’s hand was on my collar, and the gun behind us was swinging. Then the wheels bit. We came up out of the deep water into the shallow and then onto the sand, and the driver put his foot down, and we went up the beach between the posts, following the tracks of the truck in front, because the tracks were the place where somebody else had already not been blown up.

---

We got about two-thirds of the way to the sand hills before the truck stopped.

It was the sand. The wet sand near the water was firm, and the dry sand higher up was soft and deep, and the truck went into it to the axles and stopped, with its wheels spinning and throwing sand up over the gun behind. The driver rocked it, forward and back. It would not go. And we were sitting on an open beach, in soft sand, with things landing near the water behind us and the rifles cracking somewhere ahead, and the sand hills a hundred yards off, and the patch of painted sand that was our position somewhere in among them.

“Come on,” the driver was saying to the truck. “Come on, you.”

Ridley was out of the cab before he had finished. “Unhook,” he said. “Ropes.”

We went.

The gun had drag ropes. They are long ropes, with loops for your shoulders, that you hook to the gun to pull it by hand, and every gun carries them and nobody ever uses them except in training, where Dempsey had once made us pull a gun half a mile across the red dirt at Fort Sill for no reason any of us could see. We unhooked the gun from the truck and swung the trails together and hooked the ropes on, and six of us put the loops over our shoulders, and Ridley took the trail to steer.

“Heave,” Ridley said.

We pulled two tons of steel through a hundred yards of soft sand, uphill, with the sand going over our boots at every step. I was on the front rope, on the right, with Gaines beside me on the left. The wheels sank, and stopped.

“Dig it out,” Ridley said. “Brandauer. Mercer.”

They went down on their knees and dug at the wheels with their hands and their helmets, and the rest of us leaned on the ropes. Baca was behind me, swearing in Spanish, steadily, without stopping for breath, the same three or four words over and over like a man saying a rosary.

“Heave.”

It moved. It went a yard and sank again. I remember Gaines’s breathing beside me, and the loop of the rope cutting into my shoulder through my jacket, and the sand in my mouth, and that I was soaked to the waist and sweating at the same time, and that I could see nothing but the sand in front of my feet. Somewhere about halfway up, with the wheels sunk again and all of us heaving, I could hear my grandfather telling it, that Eli was on the drag rope at Brandywine when they had to pull the gun back.

I laughed.

Gaines turned his head and looked at me as though I had lost my mind. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing. My family.”

“Your family’s funny?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“Pull, then,” Gaines said, and we pulled.

We got it into the sand hills. There was a gap between two of them, where a path had been, and the gun went up it and over, and on the far side was a hollow, and a lieutenant from the battalion was standing in it with a map.

He looked at the gun, and then at us. “You’re C Battery?”

“Yes, sir,” Ridley said.

The lieutenant pointed. “Number three goes there.”

It was the bare patch of sand from the model. I had looked at it for an hour in the tent, and it was exactly the same, a patch of sand among grey grass in a hollow. I stood and looked at it, soaked and filthy and out of breath.

“That’s it,” Peter said beside me. “That’s the patch.”

“I know.”

“It’s exactly the same.”

“Wheeler,” Ridley said. “Spades.”

---

We put the gun into action in the hollow in the sand hills.

The trails would not hold in the sand. The spades went in too easily and would have come out again at the first round, so we filled sandbags from the hollow itself and piled them behind the spades and stamped them down. It took a quarter of an hour, which was too long, and Ridley said nothing about it. The truck came up behind us at last, having been dug out and pushed by a bulldozer with a navy man on it, who waved as he went past as though we were at a fair.

“Who’s he?” Baca said.

“Navy,” said Gaines.

“What’s the navy doing on a bulldozer?”

“Winning,” Gaines said.

We unloaded the ammunition and stacked it, three high, fuzes towards the gun. Peter was on the sight. Baca had his book out on his knee. A wire came over the sand hill from somewhere, laid by a man from the signals running with a reel on his back, and the telephone at the gun buzzed, and Ridley picked it up and listened.

The observer was forward, with the infantry, somewhere past the flooded fields; I never saw him. He could see something we could not. The numbers came down the wire from the command post in the next hollow, and Ridley read them off in his flat voice. Peter turned his wheels and said them back to himself, quietly, twice.

“Set,” Peter said.

I fuzed the round and cut the charge and passed it to Brandauer, who passed it to Gaines, who put it in the breech and rammed it home and closed it.

“Fire,” Ridley said, and the gun fired.

It was the first round C Battery fired in France. I do not know the time. It was full light by then, still grey, with the mist lying in the low ground behind the sand hills and the sun trying to get through it in the east, low down, a pale yellow smear. The gun jumped back against the sandbags, and the sandbags held, and the smoke went out over the sand hill in a slow cloud and hung there, because there was no wind. The brass case came out of the breech and fell into the sand, smoking.

“One,” Baca said, and wrote it down.

I was holding the next round. I had it against my chest, the way you carry them, both arms round it, the brass cold through my wet jacket, waiting for Brandauer to turn for it. And for a few seconds, while the smoke hung and the noise rang in my ears, I looked up and out of the hollow, over the gun, and saw it all at once, the way you sometimes see a field all at once from the top of a hay load. The beach behind me through the gap, with the craft coming in and the trucks coming out of the water with their pipes up and the men wading. The ships out in the mist. The gun in front of me with its smoke. Peter’s back, bent at the sight. The brass cases in the sand. And away in front, past the sand hills, the flat flooded fields going off into the mist, white, and the column of black smoke I had seen from the sea, still going up, somewhere out there where I could not see what was burning.

I stood there holding the round.

“Jim,” Brandauer said. He had turned, and had his hands out.

I gave him the round, and the next numbers came, and I did not look up again for an hour.

---

We fired on and off all morning.

“What are we shooting at, Sergeant?” Baca asked once, between missions, with his pencil over the book.

“Battery of French guns,” Ridley said. “Behind a village.”

“The one that’s been shelling the beach?”

“Could be.”

Later it was a strong point on one of the raised roads that the infantry could not get past. The third time, Ridley did not say, and nobody asked. The shelling on the beach behind us stopped some time before noon.

“That us?” Baca said, looking up from the book.

Nobody answered him.

At about noon the first prisoners came back. They came along the path through the sand hills in a line, with two of our infantry walking behind them, perhaps thirty of them, French soldiers in their long coats with their hands on their heads or at their sides. They looked like men who had been in a concrete hole in a sand hill since before dawn while the navy fired at it. Some of them were boys. One had no boots. They did not look at us, and we did not say anything to them, and they went on down the path towards the beach.

“Some of them were older than my father,” Peter said, when they had gone.

I found that I had been holding my breath.

---

About an hour later Brandauer and I were sent with cans for water to a point at the back of the beach where the navy was putting it ashore. On the way, along the top of one of the sand hills, there was a trench, a French trench, empty, and in the bottom of it there was a rifle.

It was a French rifle, long and thin. There was a helmet beside it, and a coat, and a mess tin with something still in it, and nobody. The trench ran off along the sand hill to where its far end had been hit by a shell from the sea and was a crater.

I stopped.

“Leave it, Jim,” Brandauer said. “It might be wired.”

“I’m not going to touch it.”

I stood there anyway. Whoever had been in that trench had gone in a hurry that morning and dropped his rifle and run, and was somewhere back there in the fields behind the flooding now, alive or not, with nothing in his hands.

“What are you looking at?” Brandauer said.

“Somebody ran,” I said.

“Good,” said Brandauer, and we went and got the water.

---

The news of Brittany came in pieces all afternoon.

The first piece was from the navy man on the bulldozer, who came past again at about two and slowed down and shouted across to Ridley.

“Big one’s in Brittany!”

“Is it,” Ridley said.

“That’s what they’re saying!” And he went on, waving.

“Where’s Brittany?” Baca said.

“The other side of the bay,” Peter said. “West. A long way.” That was about all I knew of it, too.

The second piece was from a corporal in the signals, who came to mend the wire at about three. He talked while he worked, with the pliers in his mouth half the time.

“British and ours and everybody,” he said. “On the Breton beaches. At dawn, same as you. Five of them. It’s gone well, they’re saying.”

He came back an hour later, to mend it again, and he was not talking so much.

“Not on all of them,” he said. “There’s one where they got pinned at the water’s edge all morning. Nearly got thrown back into the sea. They only got off at the end by the skin of their teeth.”

“Which one?” Peter said.

“Don’t know. They’re calling it the hard beach.” He twisted the wire and bit off the end. “And there’s a French prince gone in with the first wave. A Bonaparte. The one who ran the resistance over there.”

Peter, who had said almost nothing all afternoon, said, “Good God.”

“What?” Baca said.

“I’ll explain later,” said Peter, and he did, that night, at great length, and I did not follow most of it.

Nobody told us anything officially about Brittany that day, or for some days.

---

By the evening our gun had fired one hundred and fourteen rounds, and every one of them was in Baca’s book. Nobody in the section had been hurt.

“Second section lost a truck,” Baca said, coming back from the command post with the book under his arm. “Went over a mine at the top of the beach. This afternoon.”

“Who?” Gaines said.

“Prentice. And the man beside him.”

“Prentice from Maine?” I said. “That sang in the cab?”

“That’s him.”

I saw the truck afterwards, on its side at the top of the beach. I had known Prentice to say good morning to. He was from Maine, and he sang in the cab.

Captain Kettering came round the guns at dusk, as he had at Kassel, with his notebook. He was wet to the chest like the rest of us, and very pale. He checked Baca’s count against his own, and it agreed.

“Properly done,” he said. “All of you. Properly done.”

Then he went on to the next gun. I watched him stop by the second section’s gun and stand there a long time with his hand on the shield.

We did not sleep. We dug holes in the sand for ourselves beside the gun, and the sand ran back into them as fast as we dug, and in the end we lay in shallow scoops under our gas capes.

“Finally,” Baca said, from under his. “Something it’s good for.”

The guns went on firing all night, other people’s, all along the coast. Aeroplanes went over. Somewhere out in the flooded fields there was firing, rifles and machine guns, on and off, and once a long scream that stopped, which I will not describe. The mist came up off the water in the fields and lay over everything, white in the dark, and the column of smoke was still going up out of it, somewhere inland. I could see it against the sky when the flashes lit it.

Gaines was in the scoop next to mine. Some time in the night he said, very quietly, so as not to wake anybody, though nobody was asleep, “Wheeler. Your socks dry?”

I felt for the rubber bag in the bottom of my pack. It was there, and the socks inside it were dry.

“Yes,” I said.

“Put them on, then. First day’s the longest. After that they’re all the same length.”

I sat up in the dark, in the sand, in France, and took off my boots and my wet socks, my mother’s, and put on the dry ones, my mother’s, and lay back down.