Ostend

The quay was grey and it was raining and there was a man on it with a hook.

That was the first thing Lucien saw, from the after well deck, at first light, with C Company drawn up along the rail in full kit with the cork still on their chests: the quay, long, stone, wet, black with rain, going away along the side of the ship with cranes on it and sheds behind and railway lines let into the stones; and the ship’s side coming in to it slowly, very slowly, with tugs at her bow and stern pushing and the water between her and the stones getting narrower, brown, full of rubbish and oil; and on the quay, waiting for her, a gang of men in oilskins with ropes, and one of them with a boathook, long, iron, on a pole, waiting to take the line.

The line came down. The man with the boathook took it and walked it to a bollard and put the eye over and stood back, and the ship came in against the stones with a long groan along her whole length that Lucien felt through the deck, and stopped.

And did not lift.

He stood at the rail and waited for it. A fortnight. A fortnight of the ship going up under him, slowly, and coming down, every minute, waking and sleeping, in the hold and on deck; and now it did not. She was still. The deck under his boots was still. It was the strangest feeling he had ever had, and he had not known he would have it, and he held the rail.

Beside him, Harlan held the rail too, and said, very quietly:

“It’s stopped.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t like it,” said Harlan, surprised.

---

The labour battalion went down first.

Lucien saw it from the rail. The forward gangway went down onto the stones, and they came down it, two by two, with their packs, in their oilskins, out of the forward holds where they had been for a fortnight, and they did not form up on the quay and march away. They took their packs off and put them in a pile by a shed, all of them, a long pile, and sergeants came along with lists, and divided them into gangs, twenty to a gang; and in a quarter of an hour, while the Second Kansas was still standing at the after rail in the rain waiting to be told, they were working. The forward hatches came off. The cranes on the quay swung round over the ship. Men went down into the holds and men stood on the quay under the cranes and the first sling came up out of the forward hold, crates, swinging, dripping, and came down onto the stones, and the men under it took it, with hooks.

They had been loading ships all their lives already, the oyster man had said. They did not see why they had to go all that way to do it.

He looked for Théo Glapion. He could not tell which one. They were all in oilskins and caps and the rain was coming down between the ship and the quay and they were a long way forward, under the cranes; and then one of them, in a gang at the foot of the forward crane, straightened up, and looked aft, along the side of the ship, at the after rail where the Second Kansas was standing, and lifted his hook, once, the way you lift a hand.

Lucien did not know if it was Théo. He lifted his hand.

The man went back to work.

---

The after gangway went down at eight.

They came down it by companies, in the rain, in full kit, with the cork taken off at the top of it at last by a sailor with a knife who cut the tapes and threw the lifebelts in a heap on the deck, so that the last thing you did on the ship was have a man cut something off your chest; and then down the gangway, which was steep and wet and moved under your boots, the only thing in the world now that moved, onto the stones.

The stones did not move. He nearly fell. Everybody nearly fell. The whole of C Company came off the gangway onto the quay at Ostend with its legs going out from under it, men grabbing at each other, at the rail, at nothing, as if the stones had tilted, and Kerrigan sat down hard on his pack and swore in a long continuous stream, and Sergeant Cutter at the foot of the gangway looked at them all with his small pale eyes and said the land’s not moving, you are, and you’ll stop, and they stopped, more or less.

And there was a motor car on the quay.

It was standing by the first of the sheds, out of the way of the cranes, with a little flag on each wing, wet, hanging down, and a driver in a waterproof at the wheel with his collar up, and the engine running; and beside it, on the stones, in the rain, a knot of officers. Five or six. In waterproofs, and caps, and one in a different cap, flat, with a red band on it, British; and one in a grey cloak and a helmet with a spike on it, which Lucien had seen in pictures in L’Abeille and never in his life, and stared at, and was told by Sergeant Cutter’s eyes not to.

And one in the middle of them, a little in front, with no waterproof at all, in the rain, in a tunic and breeches and boots, very straight, with his hands behind his back, watching the gangway.

Lucien knew him from the back of a bay horse at a distance of a quarter of a mile. He would have known him from a mile.

He was watching the boots.

Lucien saw it. He came down off the gangway onto the stones with his legs going and found his feet and looked, and the grey man by the motor car was not watching the faces of the men coming down the gangway, or the colours, or the officers. His eyes were down. At the foot of the gangway. At the boots coming off it onto the stones, one pair after another, one company after another, wet, muddy, two pairs to a step, and the men in them stumbling, the way Lucien had stumbled; and his face did not do anything at all.

“It’s him,” said Kerrigan, out of the side of his mouth, getting up off his pack. “Isn’t it. It’s him again.”

“Fall in,” said Sergeant Cutter.

C Company fell in on the quay, in the rain, in its ranks, between the railway lines, and stood there. The General was thirty yards off. He did not come over. He stood by the motor car with the British officer and the German officer and the others, with his hands behind his back, in the rain, with no waterproof on, and the rain running off the peak of his cap, and watched the Second Kansas come down the gangway company by company and fall in on the quay, for half an hour; and then he turned his head and looked along the quay, forward, to where the labour battalion was working under the cranes.

He looked at them for a long time. Longer than at the Second Kansas. The gangs under the forward crane, in oilskins, taking the slings as they came down, with hooks, very fast, the crates going off on trucks into the sheds one after another. He watched them the way Lucien’s father watched the lake at four in the morning to see what kind of a day it was going to be. Lucien could not see what was in his face. He was too far off, and it was raining, and there was nothing in it.

Then he said something, short, to the officer beside him, who wrote it down.

And he got into the motor car, and the door shut, and it went off along the quay between the railway lines with its flags hanging wet on its wings, and the knot of officers broke up and went to other motor cars, and the General was gone.

“Wonder what he wrote,” said Sol Weintraub, very low, in the rank behind.

Nobody knew.

---

There was a table at the end of the quay.

Under the overhang of the last shed, out of the rain, a long table on trestles, with a white cloth on it gone grey with wet, and urns on it, steaming, and baskets; and behind it, women. Belgian women. Six or seven of them, in black, most of them, with shawls over their heads against the cold and armbands on their sleeves with a cross on them and letters, and they were giving out coffee, in tin mugs, to the Second Kansas as it marched past by companies on its way off the quay, one mug to a man, drink it and give it back, and from the baskets, to some of the men, things wrapped in brown paper.

C Company came to it at eleven. They were halted beside it, by a miracle, because the road at the end of the quay was blocked by a train of wagons, horses, steaming, and the sergeants could do nothing about it; and the women came along the halted ranks with the coffee, and Lucien took a mug from a woman of fifty or sixty with a long grey face under her black shawl, and drank it.

It was coffee. Real coffee, black and bitter and too hot, the coffee his father made in the old pot at four in the morning, the best thing he had tasted since the oysters. He drank all of it, scalding his mouth, and held the mug out to her, and she took it.

And she said something, over her shoulder, to the woman behind her with the urn.

She said it in French.

He heard it. Everybody on the quay heard it and nobody else understood it; he heard it the way you hear your own name in a crowd. Ils sont si jeunes. Regarde-les. Ce sont des enfants. They’re so young. Look at them. They’re children.

“On a vingt-deux ans,” said Lucien. We’re twenty-two.

The woman turned round.

She looked at him. The woman behind her with the urn looked at him. They both looked at him for a long time, the way the men of the lake shore had looked at the men in collars on the wharf in June: as if a thing they had been sure of had moved.

“Vous parlez français,” said the woman with the long grey face. You speak French.

“Oui, madame.”

“Mais vous êtes Américain.”

“Je suis Louisianais.” And then, because she did not seem to know what that was: “De la Louisiane. De La Nouvelle-Orléans. On parle français chez nous-autres.”

She stared at him.

And then her face did something, under the black shawl, all at once. It broke. Not into tears; into something else, a kind of astonished laugh, that came up out of her from a long way down and took ten years off her for the length of it.

“Nous-autres,” she said. “Nous-autres! Mon Dieu. Ma grand-mère disait ça.” My grandmother said that. “Dans le Borinage. Quand j’étais petite. Nous-autres, vous-autres. Plus personne ne dit ça. Personne!” Nobody says that any more. Nobody! She looked at him with her mouth open, at the American soldier in the rain with the mud of the quay on his boots and the French of her grandmother in his mouth. “Où est-ce que vous avez appris ça?”

Where did you learn that?

“À la maison,” said Lucien. At home.

---

Her name was Madame Lemaire. She told him that. She was from Liège.

She told him the rest of it quickly, standing by the halted rank in the rain with the empty mug in her hand, because she knew the wagons would move and he would go, and she told it the way old Tregre had read the drowned off the list on the wharf, without stopping, in a flat voice, so as to get through it. The French had come in August of 1914. Into Liège, through it, in the first week; she had stood at her window and watched them go down her street, a whole army, in their blue coats and their red trousers, singing. Singing in French. Her French. They had been polite. They had paid for what they took, at first. Then they had not been polite and had not paid. Her husband had been shot in the October, against the wall of the brewery at the end of the street, with eleven other men, because somebody had fired on a French patrol from a roof, or had not, nobody ever knew. She had come north at the end of that year, when the Germans and the British came through and the French went back. She had a son in the Belgian army, on the Yser. She did not know where. She worked at the table on the quay because it was something to do with her hands.

He did not know what to say. He stood in the rank and looked at her.

“Vous parlez encore français,” he said, at last. You still speak French.

He did not mean it the way it came out. He meant something else. He meant the captain in the hut by the water tower and the question about which side a language was on, and he did not know how to say that.

But she understood him. He saw her understand him. She looked at him for a long time under the black shawl with her long grey face.

“Bien sûr,” she said. Of course. “C’était à moi d’abord.”

It was mine first.

She said it very simply, the way his grandmother had said pas le français de l’école; le nôtre. As if it were a fact about the weather.

“Ils m’ont pris mon mari,” said Madame Lemaire. “Ils m’ont pris ma maison. Ils m’ont pris ma rue. Ils ne vont pas me prendre ça aussi.”

They took my husband. They took my house. They took my street. They are not going to take that as well.

Lucien thought of the widow Fontenot at the top of her steps in her black, with the yellow dog at her feet, on the morning of the train. N’oublie pas ce que tu parles. He did not say it. He thought it, in her voice, standing on the quay at Ostend in the rain.

---

The wagons began to move. The sergeants started shouting along the road at the end of the quay.

“Madame,” said Lucien, quickly. “Les chaussons. Est-ce que vous avez des chaussons?”

She looked at him blankly.

“Des chaussons?”

“Pour les pieds. Pour la ligne. Un ami m’a écrit. Il dit que c’est la chose la plus importante.” For the feet. For the line. A friend wrote to me. He says it is the most important thing.

“Des chaussons,” said Madame Lemaire, and looked down at his boots, and back up at his face, with a deep frown, as if he had asked her for something very strange; and then the woman with the urn behind her said something, quickly, and Madame Lemaire’s face cleared all at once, and she laughed again, the second time, the astonished laugh.

“Des chaussettes!” she said. “Il veut dire des chaussettes!” He means socks! “Des chaussons, mon petit, c’est pour mettre à la maison, devant le feu. Pour les vieux.” Chaussons, my little one, are for wearing at home, in front of the fire. For old people. “Vous n’allez pas à la ligne en chaussons!”

You’re not going to the line in slippers!

“Chez nous-autres c’est des chaussons,” said Lucien, red to the ears.

“Chez vous-autres,” said Madame Lemaire, “vous parlez comme ma grand-mère.”

And she turned to the basket on the table behind her, and took out of it two of the things wrapped in brown paper, and then, after a moment, looking at him, a third, and gave them to him across the rank.

“Trois paires,” she said. “Tricotées à Ostende. Par des femmes qui parlent français et flamand et qui ne savent pas laquelle elles parlent la moitié du temps.” Three pairs. Knitted in Ostend. By women who speak French and Flemish and don’t know which they’re speaking half the time. “Gardez-les sèches.”

Keep them dry.

The rank was moving. He was moving with it, the man behind pushing him, Harlan beside him, very tall, looking down at the parcels in his hands.

“Merci, madame,” he said, over his shoulder.

She stood at the end of the table in the rain with the empty mugs in her hands and watched C Company of the Second Kansas go past her and out of the end of the quay into the town.

“Faites attention à vous,” she called after him. Take care of yourself. And then, in a different voice, louder, the way the women of the lake shore had called after the men of the First Louisiane down the platform in July: “Nous-autres!”

He did not look back. He could not have; the rank was moving. He held the three pairs of socks in their brown paper against his chest and marched.

“What’d she give you?” said Harlan.

“Socks.”

“Huh.” Harlan looked at the parcels. “How’d you get socks?”

“I asked for slippers,” said Lucien.

Harlan considered this for a long time, marching.

“Well,” he said. “It worked.”

---

The town had holes in it.

They marched through it in the rain, in column of fours, by a long straight street of tall narrow houses with steep roofs and shops at the bottom of them with their names in two languages, Flemish over French, and the shutters up; and every so often there was a house that was not there. Just a gap in the street, like a tooth gone, with the houses on either side standing against nothing, their walls open to the weather, so that you could see the wallpaper inside, flowered, three floors of it, one above the other, and a fireplace halfway up the wall with nothing under it, and on the fourth floor, standing on the edge of the broken boards, a chair. A wooden kitchen chair, standing by itself on the edge of the floor in the rain with nothing in front of it, as if somebody had got up from it a moment ago and would come back.

“French guns,” said Sergeant Cutter, walking beside the column, when Kerrigan asked. “Long ones. From the other side of the line. Twenty miles. They put one in now and then, to let you know.” He did not look at the gap. “You’ll get used to it.”

There was a church at the end of the street with no roof. The walls were standing, and the tower, and the windows were holes, and you could see the sky through all of it, grey, with the rain coming down into the nave; and there were people going into it. Women, mostly, in black. Going in at the great door under the tower, with no roof over them, to pray in the rain.

---

Out of the town the road went along the dunes.

It went south-west, on a causeway, with the dunes on the right, high, grey-green, with coarse grass on them bent flat by the wind, and the flat land on the left, very flat, flatter than the prairie, flatter than the lake, fields of mud and water with ditches across them and rows of bare trees and here and there a farm, low, with a red roof, and a windmill with no sails; and the road on its causeway between them, cobbled, with the column on it, the whole of the Second Kansas, and the wagons, and motor lorries going the other way empty, and the rain.

And over the dunes, on the right, the sea.

He could not see it. He could hear it. It came over the dunes on the wind, a long low hiss and roar, going on and on, never stopping, the way it had said in Achille’s letter. He knew where it was without looking, the way you know where the lake is from anywhere on the lake shore. The sea is at the end of everything. Whatever you are doing, it is there.

And ahead, at the end of the road, the guns.

Louder now. Not through the steel of a ship’s hull, a long way off, but in the air, in front of them, over the flat land, where the road went: the low uneven thud and roll, going on and on, with no pattern in it, never stopping. And he could see them now as well as hear them. It was getting dark, the short grey day of the Flemish autumn going out of the sky, and on the horizon ahead, low down, where the road went, there were flickers. Little ones. Yellow and white, on the edge of the sky, coming and going, everywhere along it, like the lightning over the north shore of the lake on a summer night, the heat lightning that came and went without any thunder; except that this had thunder, and it never stopped.

They marched towards it.

Harlan marched beside him, very tall, with his rifle on his shoulder and the rain running off him, and watched the flickers on the edge of the sky with his patient face.

“That’s the line,” he said.

“Yes.”

“How far?”

Lucien looked at it. He looked the way he would have looked at a squall coming across from the north shore, to know how long you had.

“Five miles,” he said. “Six.”

Harlan nodded. They marched. The sea went on behind the dunes on the right, and the flat land went on on the left, mud and water and bare trees, and the guns went on ahead.

Lucien had three pairs of socks inside his tunic, in brown paper, against his chest, over the pocket with the letters in it, his grandmother’s and his father’s and Achille’s. He put his hand flat over them as he marched, the way his father put his hand on the gunwale of the Marie-Ange at the end of the wharf at four in the morning.

He thought of the women going into the roofless church at the end of the long street in Ostend, to pray in the rain, and of the labour battalion on the quay under the cranes, with their hooks, and of Madame Lemaire at the end of her table with the empty mugs in her hands; and the Second Kansas went on along the causeway between the dunes and the drowned fields towards the flickers on the edge of the sky, by companies, in the dark, in the rain, into Belgium.