Frost and Hay

I have told this story more than any other in this account, at the Grange and after church and at Thanksgiving, and to the man at the drugstore, and to my mother’s sister in Worcester, who did not believe it. Each time I tell it the King says a little more and I say a little less, so that in the version they tell in Lexington now, the King and I had a conversation. We did not. He said about forty words to me and I said about twenty to him, and most of mine were “sir”. Peter wrote it down that night, and copied it out for me last Christmas in a card, and I have his copy in front of me. Where my memory has drifted from it, I have gone by his.

---

The town was a market town a few miles back from the beach, at a crossroads, on the higher ground, with a square in the middle and a church and a town hall, and streets of grey stone houses running off the square, and a hospital at the end of one of them, run by nuns. I never learned to say its name. The infantry had taken it on the seventh, after a fight. There were holes in the houses on one side of the square and the glass was out of most of the windows, but it was standing, and the people were in it, and the ammunition dump was in a field at the far edge of it.

We came in at about ten in the morning, Brandauer and me and a driver from the ammunition section called Lomax, who was from Georgia and drove as though the truck had insulted him. We did not get far. The road into the square was blocked by a jeep turned across it and two military policemen with their arms out, and Lomax swore and stopped. One of the policemen came over to the cab.

“You’ll have to wait,” he said. “The square’s closed.”

“Closed for what?” Lomax said.

“I’m not allowed to say.”

Lomax looked at him. “That’s the first time I ever heard of a square being closed,” he said. “In a war.”

“It’s the first time I ever closed one,” said the policeman. “You can get down and stretch your legs if you like. Stay by the truck.”

So we got down.

There was a crowd in the square. Not a big one: a hundred people, perhaps more, townspeople, standing along the sides in front of the houses and on the steps of the church, with soldiers in among them, ours and a few British, and some men with armbands like the men who had walked the informer up the road two nights before. There were flags. Somebody had hung them out of the upstairs windows round the square, homemade, sewn out of whatever red cloth there had been in the town, each with two yellow animals on it, one above the other, walking, with their faces turned to look out at you.

“What are those?” I said.

Brandauer looked up at them for a while. “Lions?”

“Dogs,” said Lomax.

They were leopards, or lions; nobody seems to agree. It is the flag of Normandy. Most of those had been made in the night, in a hurry, with the yellow cut out of whatever was yellow, curtains and a child’s dress and the lining of a coat.

There were also papers pasted on the walls of the houses, printed, the same sheet over and over, as if somebody had come round with a bucket of paste and a stack of them. I went and looked at one. It was closely printed in French, with a heading in big letters, and I could not read any of it except one word in the heading, which was nearly English.

“What’s it say?” Lomax called from the truck.

“I can read one word.”

“Which?”

“Duc.”

“Duck?”

“I think it means Duke.”

“Well, which is it?” said Lomax, and I did not know.

---

They came out of the town hall at about half past ten.

There was a stir at the door first, the way there is at a church door before a bride comes out. The policemen on the steps stood up straighter, and the crowd went quiet, and the door opened and some men came out. A man in a dark suit with a sash across his chest in three colours, blue and white and red, who was the mayor. A woman in a nun’s habit, white and grey, and a man in a white coat with blood on the cuff, who must have been the hospital. Two British officers and one of ours, a colonel. Two or three men in raincoats who looked round the square the whole time and never at anybody in particular. And in the middle of them, a man in a long khaki raincoat with nothing on it, no badges, no rank, and no hat.

He was talking to the mayor as he came out, turned towards him a little, and I could not see his face properly from where I was, by the jeep, about thirty yards off, with people in the way. But I heard his voice, saying something to the mayor in French. It was the voice from the kitchen in Lexington and from the shelf behind the bar in the Plough, the same slow quiet voice, as if he did not want to wake anybody, and I knew it the way you know your father’s step on the stairs.

“That’s the King,” I said.

Brandauer said, “What?”

“That’s the King.”

“Don’t be a damn fool,” Lomax said. Then he looked, and did not say anything else.

Then the crowd began to cheer. Not all of it. Most of the people round the square cheered, and some of them shouted the same thing over and over, Vive le Duc, which even I could make out. A woman near us on the church steps was crying and shouting it at the same time, and a little boy on his father’s shoulders was waving a paper flag with the two yellow animals on it. But there was a group of men at the corner of the square, by the bakery, with armbands, who did not cheer and did not shout. They stood with their arms folded and watched, and one of them said something to the man next to him, and the man next to him nodded.

Then somebody at the back, I never saw who, shouted something else, a different thing, once. One or two people near him shouted it too. People turned round and looked at them, and it stopped.

“What’s he shouting?” Lomax said.

“I don’t know.”

“It isn’t the same thing,” Brandauer said.

---

He went along the side of the square, along the crowd, with the mayor beside him and the men in raincoats round him, slowly, stopping. He shook hands. He bent down to the little boy on his father’s shoulders and said something, and the boy hid his face in his father’s hair. He stopped by the woman crying on the church steps and took both her hands, and stood like that for a while, listening to her, with his head bent. She talked and talked, and he did not say anything at all.

Then he came on along the side of the square towards our street, because his own car was waiting in it, behind our truck. The policeman came back to us.

“Back against the truck, boys,” he said. “And stand still.”

So we stood there, the three of us, Lomax and Brandauer and me, in a row against the side of a truck full of empty ammunition boxes, with our helmets on and our rifles slung, and he came along the street.

I could see him properly then. He was not tall, about my height, a little less. He was forty-four, I have since read, and he looked older, and tired. His hair was light, going back from his forehead, and he had a long face and very pale blue eyes, light like water, with lines at the corners of them. His raincoat was wet at the hem. He walked like a man who had been walking all morning and expected to walk all afternoon. He looked exactly like the picture in my mother’s parlour and not like it at all, because the picture does not get tired.

He stopped in front of me.

Lomax was nearer the car. I had picked one of the empty ammunition boxes off the back of the truck when the policeman moved us, and I was holding it against my chest the way you hold a round.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning, sir,” I said.

That was the first mistake. You are supposed to say Your Majesty the first time and sir after. We had had a lecture on forms of address at Fort Sill, and I had sat through it as the most useless lecture in the Army. When it came to it I said sir, the way I would have said it to a captain. One of the men in raincoats looked at me. The King did not seem to notice.

“Where is home?” he said.

“Lexington, sir.”

“In Massachusetts.” He did not say it as a question.

“Yes, sir.”

“Is it a farm?”

“Yes, sir. Dairy, and apples. And hay.”

“Did you have a frost this spring?”

I stood there with the box against my chest and for a moment could not answer. Then I remembered my mother’s letter in April, about the frost in the first week of May the year before, that had got most of the blossom on the old trees in the top orchard, and my father walking round them in the morning and saying nothing for an hour. That had been 1943. I had no idea about 1944.

“Last year, sir,” I said. “In May. It got the blossom in the top orchard. I don’t know about this year.”

“A frost in May is a cruel thing,” he said. “And the hay?”

“First cut’ll be about now, sir. My father’ll be at it without me.”

He looked at me for a moment with those pale eyes, and he smiled, not much, at the corner of his mouth.

“Then I hope it stays dry for him,” he said.

He nodded, once, and went on, to Brandauer.

“And where is home?”

“Wisconsin, sir.”

The King said something to him in German, and I caught the word Wisconsin in it and nothing else. Brandauer answered in German. The King laughed, a short surprised laugh, and said something more, and Brandauer answered again, and the King laughed a second time. Then he was past us and getting into a car behind our truck, a long dark car with nothing on it, and the men in raincoats were getting in round him, and the car was going, slowly, down the street and round the corner, and gone.

Lomax let out his breath.

“That’s it?” he said.

“That’s it,” I said.

“He didn’t say anything about the war.”

“No.”

“Didn’t tell us to do our duty. Didn’t say the Union was proud of us.” Lomax took his helmet off and looked into it, as though there might be something in there. “Didn’t give an order.”

“He asked about the hay,” I said.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Lomax.

---

I was still standing there with the box. Brandauer was next to me with his mouth open, and the crowd was breaking up in the square behind us, talking, and the policemen were moving the jeep.

“What did he say to you?” I said.

“He asked me in German where in Wisconsin,” Brandauer said, “and I told him.” He said it in a kind of daze. “And he laughed when he heard me.”

“Why?”

“He said I spoke the German of the old Kingdom. The way the old people spoke it in Hanover when he was a boy. He said he had not heard it in years.”

“And then?”

“So I told him the one about the cows.”

“The Landtag?”

“D’Kieh warta net auf’n Landtag,” Brandauer said. “And he laughed again. And he said he would remember it.”

I do not know whether he did. Brandauer has told it in two letters since, and both times the King laughs a little longer.

We loaded the truck at the dump. I do not remember doing it. We drove back to the battery in the afternoon, with Lomax driving as though the road had insulted him too, and found it in a new position, in a field behind a hedge further inland. I got down. The whole section was there round the gun.

“I’ve seen the King,” I said.

“Sure you have,” said Baca.

“He has,” Brandauer said. “I saw him too. He talked to me in German.”

Then everybody believed it at once and wanted to know everything, all together. Baca wanted to know whether I had asked for a promotion.

“No.”

“No? You had the King standing in front of you and you didn’t ask for a promotion?”

“He didn’t ask about promotions. He asked about the hay.”

“A wasted opportunity,” Baca said. “I’d have asked for one for you.”

Gaines had been sitting on an ammunition box with his mess tin. He put it down. “What did you say to him?”

I told him about the frost and the hay, and about my father being at it without me. Gaines thought about it.

“That’s a good answer,” he said, and nodded, and picked up his mess tin again.

Ridley was laying out the aiming posts for the new position, and did not stop. He said, without turning round, “Did he say anything?”

“He asked about the hay, Sergeant,” I said. “And the frost.”

Ridley put the post in, and straightened it.

“That’s about right,” he said, and went to the next one.

---

Peter did not say anything until that night. Then he got out the French grammar and opened it at the back, where there were some blank pages, and took out a pencil.

“Tell me exactly,” he said. “Every word. In order.”

“Why?”

“Just tell me.”

So I told him, and he wrote it down.

“He said ‘Good morning’,” Peter said. “Not ‘Good morning, soldier’. Not anything else.”

“Just good morning.”

“And you said?”

“‘Good morning, sir.’”

Peter’s pencil stopped. “Sir.”

“I know.”

“Not Your Majesty.”

“I know, Peter.”

He wrote it down. “Sir,” he said to himself, and shook his head, and went on. “Then?”

I told him about home, and Massachusetts, and the farm, and the frost.

“And then he said, ‘A frost in May is a cruel thing, my boy.’”

“Did he say ‘my boy’?”

I thought about it. “No.”

“Then take it out.”

“I didn’t put it in. You did.”

“You said it. I wrote it. Now neither of us has.” He crossed it out. “Go on.”

Later I had the King saying that he hoped it would stay dry for my father, and for me. Peter looked at me over his glasses until I said that the last part was not there either, and he crossed that out too. It took an hour. When he had done he read it back to me from the beginning, and it was exactly it.

“What were they shouting?” he said. “The ones at the back. Say it as near as you can.”

I said it as near as I could.

“Probably Vive la République,” Peter said.

“Long live the Republic?”

“Yes.”

“Weren’t they glad to see him?”

“Most of them were.” He closed the book on the pencil. “Some of them want France to decide what Normandy is. Not the Normans on their own.”

“And he came anyway.”

“He came anyway,” said Peter.

“Why write it down?” I said. “Nobody’s ever going to want it.”

“Somebody ought to have it right.”

“Nobody’s going to ask.”

“That isn’t the point,” Peter said, and put the grammar away in the limber.

---

I wrote to my father that night. I told him I had seen the King, and that the King had asked about the frost and the hay, and that I had told him the first cut would be about now and that my father would be at it without me, and that the King had said he hoped it would stay dry for him. I did not tell him anything else.

The King had come over four days after the landing, while the fighting was still close, against the advice of everybody whose job it was to keep him alive. He gave no orders and had no command. He went round the towns meeting the mayors and the resistance and the hospitals, the people who had to keep the water running. Some of the people in those towns did not want him, and some of them still do not. Lucien tells me they are to have a vote on it, when things are settled.

My father’s answer came in August, on the road out of the hedges, after a good deal had happened that I will come to. It was in his large slow hand, and it was four lines long, and I have it.

The hay is in.

It stayed dry.

Glad to hear it.

Tell him so if you see him again.

I never did see him again, except on a newsreel. I heard his voice on the radio twice more in the war. More than once I have sat down to write to him and tell him, the way my father asked, and each time I have got as far as the envelope and not known what to put on it.