The Flooded Country

We came off the beach on the morning of the seventh along the second road, the one the captain had touched with his cane in the tent, and it was exactly like the model and nothing like it.

It was like the model in that it was a road built up on a bank, a few feet higher than the land on either side, running straight inland across the flooded fields to the higher ground where the first village was. It was nothing like it in every other way. The model had not had the traffic. The road was one truck wide, and every truck and gun and tank and jeep and ambulance in the Cotentin was trying to go along it, inland, at the same time, and the ambulances were trying to come back, and the prisoners were walking back along the edge of it in lines, and every so often something broke down or slid off the bank into the water and the whole road stopped for an hour while men swore and pushed.

“I could walk this faster,” Baca said, the fourth time we stopped.

“Then walk,” said Gaines.

“I would. I’d miss the company.”

We were on that road for most of the day. We could have walked it in forty minutes.

And the model had not had the water. On the model it was pale blue paint. In the morning it was grey and still and quite shallow, a foot or two deep over the fields, with the tops of the hedges and the fence posts showing above it in lines and the grass growing up through it, so that it looked more like a marsh than a lake. It went away on both sides of the road as far as you could see in the mist, with trees standing up out of it here and there, and the roofs of farms. It was very quiet, apart from the road. There were birds on it.

There were also things lying in the water in the fields near the road, white and green, spread out flat.

“Somebody’s put their washing out,” Brandauer said.

Gaines looked. “That’s not washing.”

Then I saw the cords running from them. They were parachutes. Nobody in the truck said anything after that. I did not see any of the men.

---

The first village was on the higher ground at the far end of the road. The battery went into a position in an orchard behind it in the afternoon, and I saw the village properly for the first time from the back of the truck as we went through.

The navy had hit it, and perhaps the bombers too, in the night before the landing; nobody in the village could have told you which did what. It had been a village of grey stone houses round a church, on a little rise, with the road going through the middle. The church tower had a piece bitten out of the top, so that it stood up against the sky like a broken tooth, and the clock on it had stopped at a quarter past five. A row of houses along the road had no fronts. The fronts had come down into the road and been pushed to the side by a bulldozer, and you could look into the rooms as you went past, upstairs and downstairs, the way you look into a doll’s house with the front open: a bed with a blue cover, a picture still hanging on the wall, a kitchen with the plates in the rack. Two houses had burned and were still smoking. There was a dead horse in a yard, on its back, with its legs in the air, swelled up, and the smell of it came across the road. There was a hole in the churchyard, and the gravestones were thrown about round it, and some of the graves were open.

And there were people. They were standing in their doorways, the ones that had doorways, and in the road, and in the yard with the dead horse: women and old men and children, and a priest in a long black coat with a shovel in the churchyard. They watched us go past. Some of them waved. A girl of about ten ran along beside the truck for a while, and Brandauer threw her a chocolate bar, and she caught it and stopped and looked at it as though she did not know what it was. Most of them just stood and watched, the way the people in Devon had watched us go to the ships, as though we were weather.

“Why didn’t they leave?” Baca said.

“Where would they go?” said Peter.

In Hesse the villages we were in had been empty for months, or full only of the old. I sat in the back of the truck with my hands between my knees and looked at the house with the blue bed.

“We did that,” I said.

“Not our gun,” Brandauer said. “We were shooting at the guns.”

“No,” I said. “Not our gun.”

Peter was sitting opposite me. He was looking at the same house. He did not say anything, and he did not polish his glasses. He looked at it until it had gone past, and then he looked at his hands.

---

The orchard was behind a farm at the edge of the village.

It was an apple orchard, old, with the trees very big and very far apart, much further apart than ours at home, set out in rows across a sloping field with long grass under them, and cows grazing in the grass under the trees, which is a thing we never do at home because the cows strip the low branches. These had no low branches. They had been grazed under for so long that the trees had grown their branches high, out of reach, and the whole orchard was like a big room with a green ceiling.

“Those are small apples,” Brandauer said, looking up.

“Cider apples,” said Peter. “Not for eating. The whole country lives on cider, and on the brandy they make from it.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read it.”

I put my hand on the trunk of the tree nearest the gun, when we had it in. It was older than any tree on our farm, older than the farm, and there was a shell splinter in it, a jagged piece of iron the size of my thumb, sunk into the bark at about the height of my head, and the sap had run out round it and gone dark.

And the cows were bellowing.

There were perhaps fifteen of them, red and white, a big, heavy, bony sort I had never seen, with dark patches round their eyes like spectacles, so that they all looked like old men reading. They were standing in a group at the bottom of the orchard by the gate, bellowing, all of them, a long, low, miserable noise that I had heard once before, at home, when a neighbour’s man had broken his leg and nobody had milked for a day and a half. Their udders were tight as drums. Some of them were dripping.

Brandauer had stopped with a box in his arms. “Jim,” he said.

“I know.”

“They haven’t been milked.”

“Not properly. Not since the night before the landing.” I had counted it already, without meaning to. “Two days.”

“Some of them will have the fever in the bag.”

“Some of them have got it already, by now.”

Brandauer put his box down. I put down mine and went across the orchard to the gate, and he came after me without anybody saying anything. We stood at the gate and looked at them. Then I went to find somebody to ask.

---

The farmhouse was at the top of the orchard. Half the barn had gone; the roof had fallen in and the timbers were black and still smoking at one end, and there was a dead cow in the yard. The house had its windows out and a hole in the roof, but it was standing. A woman came out of it as I came up the yard, a woman of about fifty in a black dress and an apron, with grey hair pulled back and her arms bare to the elbow and black to the elbow with soot. She stopped on the step and looked at me, and I stood in the yard with my helmet in my hand and had not one word of French that would do.

“Madame,” I said, which was what I had.

She waited.

I pointed down the orchard at the cows, and made the motion with my hands, the milking motion, which is the same in any country. “Les vaches,” I said, which was off the card.

She looked at me. Then she said something, quite a lot of something, fast, with her hand going at the barn and the cows and back at me, and I did not understand one word of it, and I stood there.

“She wants to know if you’re a farmer,” Peter said, behind me.

I had not known he was there. He had followed us across the orchard to see what we were doing. He came up beside me and said something to the woman in French, and she answered him, sharply, and he answered her.

“What did you tell her?”

“That you are. And that he is.” He nodded at Brandauer, who had come up the yard behind us. “And that you want to milk her cows.”

The woman said something else, and Peter answered, and then they were talking, the two of them, quickly, back and forth, while I stood between them with my helmet in my hand like a man at a station watching a train go out. He was not speaking French the way he had spoken it to the boy on the road out of the pocket at Kassel, slowly and carefully, out of the grammar. He was speaking it. Once she stopped him and said a word over again, and he said it after her, the way he said the numbers after Ridley, and went on.

“Ask her where the pails are,” I said.

Peter asked. She pointed at a low stone building at the side of the yard, and said something more.

“In the dairy,” Peter said. “She’s been trying to milk them herself. She can’t do them all.”

“Where’s her husband?”

Peter looked at me. Then he asked her, more quietly, and the woman answered him, and at the end of it she put her hand to her mouth and turned her face away for a moment.

“He was killed on Tuesday,” Peter said. “In the barn. With the cow.”

I looked at the barn, and at the dead cow in the yard.

“Is there anybody else?”

Peter asked. She had turned back, and she answered him looking at me.

“A son,” Peter said. “They took him away in 1942 to work in a factory in the south. She hasn’t heard from him since.”

The woman said something to me directly, then, with a little nod, two words I understood.

“Merci,” she said. “Merci.”

“She says yes,” Peter said. “Please.”

I said, “Peter. You speak French.”

“A bit.” He had gone red to the ears. “Go and milk the cows, Wheeler.”

---

We milked the cows, Brandauer and I and the woman. After an hour Gaines came over to see what we were doing, and stood at the end of the row with his hands in his pockets.

“You want to learn?” Brandauer said.

“No,” said Gaines.

“Sit down.” Brandauer pushed a pail at him with his foot. “Not pull. Squeeze. From the top, down, one finger after the other. Like this.”

Gaines sat on an upturned bucket beside a red and white cow and tried it, and nothing came, and he tried again, and a thin stream went sideways onto his boot.

“She’s looking at me,” he said.

“She is a cow. She looks at everybody.”

“She’s looking at me particularly.”

“Then you are doing it wrong,” Brandauer said. “Again.”

He was very bad at it, and he kept at it, and Brandauer kept at him, slowly, with a great deal of patience on both sides, and by the end Gaines was not bad. We milked fifteen cows that had not been milked properly for two days, by hand, in a burned farmyard in France, with the guns of other batteries going off in the next field and an aeroplane going over now and then. The milk went into the pails and out onto the ground, because there was no dairy left to take it to and nobody to drink that much of it.

“Does she mind?” I said. “Tipping it out?”

Peter asked her. She answered without looking up from her cow.

“She says it doesn’t matter where the milk goes as long as it comes out of the cows.”

“That’s what my father would say.”

Peter told her. She stopped milking and looked at me for a long moment, and said something.

“She asks if your father is alive,” Peter said.

“Yes.”

She nodded, and went back to her cow.

Two of them had the fever already, in one quarter each, hot and hard. There was nothing I could do about it except milk them out as well as I could.

“Tell her she needs to strip those out four times a day,” I said. “Not twice. Four times, or she’ll lose the quarter.”

Peter told her. She had been farming longer than I had been alive, and she knew it better than I did. She listened to the whole of it, and nodded, as though it was useful.

When we had done, she went into the house and brought out a bottle of something clear and four small glasses on a tray, and stood with it in the middle of the burned yard, and poured. We drank standing. It was the brandy they make from the apples, and it went down like a lit match and stayed there. Gaines coughed. Brandauer said something in German that sounded like a prayer. She did not drink. She stood and watched us. Then she said something to Peter, quite long, quietly, looking at the barn.

He did not translate it. He thanked her, and we went back down the orchard to the gun, and halfway down I said, “What did she say?”

Peter walked a few steps before he answered.

“She said she was glad we had come. That she had waited a long time for us.”

“And?”

“And that the English ships killed her husband. She knows it was the English because the shell came from the sea.”

“The English?”

“She means all of us. It’s what they call anybody who comes from the sea.” He took his glasses off, and put them back on without polishing them. “She said she’d think about that when the cows are done.”

I did not say anything. We got back to the gun. Ridley looked at the four of us coming back with milk on our trousers and the brandy in our faces, and did not ask where we had been.

“Next time tell me first,” he said.

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“That was once,” Ridley said, and went back to the gun.

---

That evening, while we were eating, a little group came up the road from the village past the end of the orchard. There were three men with armbands, young men in ordinary clothes, with rifles, the French kind; and between them another man with his hands tied in front of him and his head down. The men with the armbands were the resistance. They had been in the village before us, we had been told, and had guided the infantry in along the roads on the night of the landing. They were walking the man with his hands tied towards the town. Some people from the village were following a little way behind, and one woman shouted something at him, and he did not look up.

“What’s she saying?” Baca said.

Peter had put his mess tin down. He listened.

“She’s calling him an informer.”

“Is he?”

Peter listened to the men with the armbands, who were talking among themselves as they walked. “They’re saying he gave names to the French police. Before. That people were taken away because of him.”

“Is it true?” I said.

“They’re saying it,” said Peter, and picked up his mess tin again.

The group went on up the road and round the bend towards the town, and the people from the village stopped at the edge of it and watched them go, and then went back. I do not know what happened to the man.

---

We stayed in the orchard two days, firing most of both of them at things beyond the hedges that we never saw. I milked the cows morning and night, with Brandauer and the woman. Gaines came to the evening milking both days, without being asked, and sat down on his bucket beside the same red and white cow.

“She knows me now,” he said.

“She is still looking at you,” said Brandauer.

On the second evening I put my hand on the quarters of the two cows with the fever. They were a little cooler. Or I thought they were.

“Better?” Gaines said.

“A little,” I said.

---

On the second night Peter and I were lying under the trees by the gun, under the green ceiling, with the apples over us. The guns had stopped for a while. Somebody further down the orchard was playing a mouth organ, badly.

“You said your French was very correct,” I said, “and nobody in France had spoken like that since Napoleon.”

“That was what the boy said. I didn’t say I agreed with him.”

“You’ve been reading the grammar.”

“Every night since Plymouth.” He was quiet for a while. “And I did three years of it at school, and a year at college. And my mother sings in French, at the piano. She says it’s the only language that will go into her songs.” Another pause. “I may have understated it a little.”

“A little.”

“You stood in that yard,” Peter said, “and said les vaches.”

“It was off the card.”

“It was very good. She knew exactly what you meant.” He had his hands behind his head. “Better than I did, for the first minute. I had to ask her to slow down twice.”

“She didn’t slow down.”

“No. Norman women don’t, apparently.” He turned his head on the grass. “Why are you smiling?”

“Why didn’t you say? All winter. You let Baca think you couldn’t order a cup of coffee.”

“It seemed better to understate it,” Peter said. “In case I was wrong about it.”

He turned his face back up to the branches. Down the orchard the mouth organ started again, the same tune, no better.

---

On the morning of the tenth the battery was ordered forward. Before we went, Ridley came along the guns with a list.

“Ammunition section’s short of men,” he said. “There’s a run to the dump in the town at the crossroads. Few miles back. They want two from this gun.” He looked at us, and his eye fell on the two who carried. “Brandauer. Wheeler.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

We went up to the woman’s door first. She came out wiping her hands on her apron. I tried to say goodbye in French and could not. I did not even have her name to say it to. I had never asked.

“Tell her goodbye,” I said to Peter. “Tell her thank you. And the fever cows, four times a day.”

“She knows about the fever cows.”

“Tell her anyway.”

Peter told her. She shook my hand, and Brandauer’s, and Peter’s, and held mine a moment longer than the others, and said something, quietly, looking at me. Peter did not translate it, and I did not ask him to.

Then Brandauer and I got into the truck and went back down the road to the town at the crossroads.