The Grenadiers

They went into the line on the second night, in the dark, on boards.

There was no other way in. The road along the dunes went on to a village that was not a village any more, only walls, and in the walls there was a dump of stores and a dressing station and a cookhouse with no roof, and men from the Guards with lanterns, waiting; and from the end of the village the way to the line was duckboards. Planks, nailed to cross-pieces, laid end to end across the mud, a yard wide, going away from the last wall into the dark across the flat drowned country towards the flickers, with water on both sides of them. Not mud. Water. Black, flat, still, with the rain falling into it and the flickers on the edge of the sky going in it, yellow and white, upside down.

“Keep to the boards,” said the Guardsman with the lantern at the head of C Company. He was a big man in a groundsheet, with his face blacked, and his voice was very quiet and very clear, as if he were telling them something about the weather that he had told a great many people. “Don’t step off. You step off, you’re in to the waist, and the mud’s got you, and with that kit on you’ll not get out on your own. Man in front’s got hold of the man behind. Don’t let go. No lights. No smoking. No talking. If a flare goes up, stand still. Don’t duck. Don’t look at it. Stand still and it’ll go out. Right.”

They went out onto the boards in single file, each man holding the man in front by the back of his pack.

Lucien had Harlan’s pack in his hand. Harlan was in front of him; Harlan had asked to be, which nobody understood, and then Lucien understood, in the first hundred yards, because Harlan was taller than anybody and could see further, and because if anybody went off the boards it would be the man in front, and Harlan had decided it was going to be him.

It took three hours. It was a mile and a half.

They went along the boards in the dark across the flat, in the rain, very slowly, a step at a time, with the water on both sides of them going on into the dark. Sometimes the boards were above the water and sometimes they were under it, an inch, two inches, so that you walked in it and felt for the next board with your boot; and sometimes there was a board missing, and the man in front said gap over his shoulder in a whisper, and you felt for the edge with your toe and stepped long. Twice the guns ahead stopped, all at once, and the silence was worse than the noise. Once a flare went up.

It went up from somewhere ahead, from the French, with a soft pop like a cork, and climbed, and burst, and hung, a white light swinging on a little parachute, very bright, so bright that the whole of the flat drowned country was lit round them for a mile, every inch of it, white and black, the water and the stumps of trees and a wagon on its side half under the water with its wheels in the air, and the long line of C Company on the duckboards across it, standing still, with their faces white.

Nobody moved. Lucien did not look at it. He looked at Harlan’s pack in front of him, the canvas, the straps, every stitch of it white in the flare, and held it, and did not breathe; and the light swung down slowly on its parachute and went into the water somewhere off to the left with a hiss, and it was dark.

They went on.

---

The line was a wall.

He had known it would be. Achille had told him in February and the thin grey sergeant had told him in Kansas and he had known; and it was still nothing like what he had thought. They came off the end of the duckboards at one in the morning into a long narrow space, a passage, between two walls of mud, sandbags, piled up higher than a man on both sides, and floored with duckboards with water under them, and went along it, and it turned, and turned again, and came out into the line.

A wall. On the side towards the French, a wall of sandbags, mud in bags, black and wet, seven feet high and as thick at the bottom as a man was tall, going away to left and right in the dark further than he could see. A step on the inside of it, of more sandbags, to stand on, to look over. And behind it, on the side away from the French, another wall, lower, and between the two walls a space, a passage a few feet wide, floored with boards, with water under them, and men in it.

Not standing in it. Living in it. There were shelters built into the back of the front wall, low, roofed with corrugated iron and more sandbags, like the dog kennels under the galleries on the lake shore, and men lying in them asleep, and men sitting at the doors of them in groundsheets doing things to rifles, and a man on the fire step every few yards, standing very still, looking over the top through a gap in the sandbags towards the French. A brazier with a sheet of iron over it, glowing red under the iron, and a dixie on it. A smell of tea, and wet wool, and smoke, and under it something else, sweet and bad, that Lucien did not know and did not want to.

It was clean. That was the strangest thing. In the middle of the night, under the guns, in a passage between two walls of mud with water under the boards, it was clean. The boards were scraped. The sandbags on the inside of the wall were squared off and faced, the way the British sergeants had made them square the fire steps at Smoky Hill to the inch. The rifles in the hands of the men at the doors of the shelters were clean. And the men themselves, when he saw their faces in the red light of the brazier, were shaved.

“Guards,” said Sergeant Cutter, beside him, very low, in a voice Lucien had not heard from him before. “Look at that. Will you look at that.”

---

Sergeant Hodge looked at feet.

He was the platoon sergeant of the platoon of Guardsmen that the third platoon of C Company was given to. That was how it was done: C Company was shared out, section by section, among the companies of the Guards battalion, so that every American section had Guardsmen on either side of it in the line, and every American was standing next to a man who knew what he was doing, like an apprentice put beside a journeyman at a bench. Lucien’s section had a stretch of the line forty yards long between two traverses, and twelve Guardsmen in it, and Sergeant Hodge.

He came along the boards at first light, at stand-to, with every man on the fire step and the light coming up grey over the flat. A short man, broad, forty, very brown, with a clipped moustache and pale eyes in a face like a clenched fist, in a leather jerkin over his tunic; and he went along the line of men on the fire step, slowly, and he did not look at their faces. He looked at their feet.

At each man’s boots on the fire step. One after another. The Guardsmen’s, which were black, and greased, and somehow, in the mud, polished. And then the Americans’, which were not.

He stopped at Lucien’s.

He looked at them for a long time.

“When did you last change your socks, son?” said Sergeant Hodge.

His voice was not like the thin grey sergeant’s or the short dark one’s at Smoky Hill. It was slower and broader and flatter, a country voice, with the words drawn out, and it came from somewhere a long way from London.

“Kansas, Sergeant,” said Lucien. “On the ship. I don’t know.”

“Get them off.”

“Sergeant?”

“Get them off. Boots and socks. Now. On the step.” Sergeant Hodge looked along the fire step at the rest of the American section, at their boots. “All of you. Boots and socks off. Now. And then you’re going to rub your feet with this,” he took a tin out of his jerkin and held it up, “which is whale oil, and stinks, and you’ll put a dry pair on, and you’ll do it every morning at stand-down and every evening at stand-to and I’ll be here watching you do it, and the man that doesn’t will lose his feet by Christmas and I’ll have him on a charge for it.” He looked along the line. “Who’s got a dry pair?”

Lucien put his hand inside his tunic.

He had the three pairs from Madame Lemaire, still in their brown paper, against his chest. He had kept them there off the quay and along the causeway and over the boards in the dark, with the letters, because Achille had said, and because she had said gardez-les sèches, and they were dry. He took them out.

Sergeant Hodge looked at them.

“Where’d you get those?”

“Ostend, Sergeant. A lady. On the quay.”

Sergeant Hodge looked at the brown paper for a moment longer. Then he looked at Lucien’s face, for the first time, the way Sergeant Cutter had looked up from the church shoes on the first afternoon in hut forty-one.

“Well,” he said. “Somebody’s got sense.” He moved on along the step. “Share them out. Two men a pair. And tomorrow the rest of you’ll have them off the ration party, the same as us, and you’ll be grateful.”

Lucien gave one pair to Harlan.

He did it without thinking about it. He tore the brown paper off one of the parcels and there were the socks inside, grey, thick, a wool that smelled of sheep and of somebody’s kitchen, and he held them out, and Harlan, beside him on the step, with his enormous boots off and his feet white and wrinkled and dead-looking on the sandbags, looked at them and did not take them.

“Those are yours,” said Harlan.

“Take them.”

“You asked for slippers for those.”

“Take them, Harlan.”

Harlan took them. He held them in his big hands for a moment, the grey Belgian socks, and looked at them the way he looked at good earth; and then he put them on, slowly, one and then the other, over his white feet, on the fire step, in the first light, with the French a quarter of a mile off over the top of the wall; and wriggled his toes in them.

“Huh,” he said. “Those are good socks.”

---

Sergeant Hodge was from the Fens.

He told them that the first week. Not much else; he was not a man who told you things, any more than Sergeant Cutter was, but he told them that, one night in the shelter behind the traverse, with the brazier going under its sheet of iron and the dixie on it and the guns going over, and Harlan asking.

“Lincolnshire,” said Sergeant Hodge. “The Fens. Flat. Flatter than this. You’ll not have heard of it.”

“I’m from Nebraska,” said Harlan. “It’s flat.”

“Not like the Fens it’s not.” Sergeant Hodge drank his tea. “The Fens was all water once. Sea and marsh and reeds and eels. Then the Dutch came, two hundred years back, three, and drained it. Dykes. Ditches. Pumps. Windmills to work the pumps. Took it off the sea and made it fields.” He looked at the tea. “Best earth in England. Black. You put a spade in it and it goes in like butter, and you can grow anything. My father had forty acres of it. Potatoes. And he said to me when I was a boy, he said, Albert, never forget it’s only borrowed. The sea wants it back. One night it’ll come and take it.”

Harlan was looking at him.

“That’s what this is,” said Sergeant Hodge. He jerked his head at the wall, at the flat drowned country beyond it. “This was fields. Same as the Fens. Took off the sea, three hundred years ago, by the Belgians, with dykes and ditches and sluices. Polder, they call it. Good earth. Black. Then the French came in fourteen, and the Belgians opened the sluices on the river down there, at the mouth, at high tide, to stop them. And the sea came in.” He drank. “And it never went out again. That’s what you’re looking at, over the top. That’s a farm. That’s forty farms. Under three foot of sea.”

Nobody said anything.

Harlan put his mug down on the boards. He got up, bent, because the shelter was low, and went out, and stood on the fire step in the dark, and looked over the top through the gap in the sandbags at the flat country going away under the flares to the French, silver and black, water, with the stumps of the trees standing up out of it in rows where the hedges had been and the ditches had gone.

Lucien went out after him and stood beside him.

Harlan did not say anything for a long time.

“They flooded it,” he said, at last.

“Yes.”

“On purpose.”

“To stop the French.”

“I know why.” Harlan looked at it. A flare went up, a long way off to the right, and hung, and lit it, the whole drowned country, white, and went down. “My father’d give his eye teeth for one acre of that. One acre. He’s been breaking sod on the prairie for thirty-six years, and the sod fights him every inch, and he’d give anything. And they had all of it. And they opened a gate and let the sea in on it.”

His voice was very quiet. Lucien had never heard it like that.

“It’ll come back,” said Lucien. “When the war’s over. They’ll shut the gates and pump it out. Like the Dutch did. The sergeant says.”

Harlan looked at the drowned country for a long time.

“It’ll be salt,” he said. “My father says you put salt on good earth, you kill it. For years. You can’t grow anything.” He took his hands off the sandbags. “They’ll pump it out and it’ll be salt.”

He went back into the shelter.

Lucien stood on the fire step and looked at it a while longer, the water, in the dark, with the rain on it and the stumps of the hedges standing up in rows, and thought of the lake, which was half salt and half not, and which had never been anything but water, and never belonged to anybody, and fed everybody on the lake shore every morning of their lives.

---

He could see where the water was shallow.

He found it out on the fifth day. Sergeant Hodge took four of them out, at dusk, the last light going grey over the flat, through a gap in the wire in front of the wall that was not a gap unless you knew it was there, into the drowned country, to look at a stretch of their own wire that the French had been shelling, so that they would know it in the dark; and they went out on their bellies, on the mud at the foot of the wall, and then into the water.

It was cold. It went in through his tunic and his shirt at once and took his breath. He lay in it on his elbows with his rifle held up and looked out over it in the last of the light, the flat grey water with the rain on it, going away to the French, with the wire in it, rusted, on iron pickets, in long tangled rows, and the stumps of the hedges, and a dead horse, very old, with its ribs standing out of the water like the timbers of a wreck.

And he saw it. He did not know he was looking for it. He saw it the way he saw it on the lake every morning of his life, without thinking: the colour of the water. Here, darker; there, lighter, a little, a grey with something yellow under it, in a line, going away towards the French, crooked, a yard wide; and he knew what that was. On the lake that was a sandbar. You kept off it, with the Marie-Ange, or you ran up on it and stuck. Here it was something else. A bank. A road, under the water, raised, the way the road along the dunes was raised on its causeway; or the top of a dyke between two fields, with the fields deeper on either side.

He touched Sergeant Hodge’s sleeve, in the water, and pointed.

“Sergeant. There. That’s shallow.”

Sergeant Hodge looked at him. Then he looked where Lucien was pointing, at the water, for a long time, with his face like a clenched fist.

“How do you know that?”

“The colour.”

“There’s no colour. It’s all bloody grey.”

“No, Sergeant. Look. It’s lighter. Yellow underneath. That’s mud close to the top. A foot. Less. On either side it’s darker. That’s deep. Three feet. Four.” He looked at it. “It’s a road. Or a bank. It goes all the way out there, crooked. You could walk on it. Up to your knees.”

Sergeant Hodge looked at the water, and then at Lucien, and then at the water again.

Then he did a thing Lucien did not expect. He slid out from the foot of the wall into the water, on his belly, with his rifle held up, very slowly, towards the line Lucien had pointed at; and when he got to it he stopped, and got up onto his knees, in the dusk, very low, and then put one hand down into the water beside him.

The water came to his elbow. He put his other hand down a yard to the left. It came to his shoulder.

He looked back at Lucien for a long moment, kneeling in the water on the drowned road in the dusk with the rain on him.

Then he came back, on his belly, very slowly, and lay beside Lucien again at the foot of the wall.

“Where’d you learn that?” he said. Very quietly.

“On the lake, Sergeant. At home. You have to see the bars or you go aground.”

Sergeant Hodge was quiet for a while, lying in the water.

“There’s eight thousand men been in this sector three years,” he said, at last, “and they’ve got maps of the drains and the dykes from the Belgians and the old roads off the old surveys and they still go in to the neck in the dark looking for them. And you looked at it.” He looked at Lucien. “From the lake.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Hm,” said Sergeant Hodge. It was nearly the sound Harlan made.

---

The Guards were not what he had thought.

He had thought they would be like the photographs of them in L’Abeille, tall, in red, in fur hats, on horses, enormous. They were not. They were ordinary men. Some were tall and most were not. They were farm labourers and miners and men from the London docks and one was a footman from a great house in Wiltshire, who still, in the line, under shellfire, folded his groundsheet the way he had been taught to fold a tablecloth. They talked about football, and beer, and girls, and the food, which was bad, and the French, whom they did not hate, and their own officers, whom they did not discuss in front of the Americans, and the war, which they did not discuss at all. They were very tired. You could see it in them, the way you could see it in the two sergeants at Smoky Hill: three years of it on their faces, and in the way they stood, and the way their eyes went along the top of the wall all the time without their heads moving.

And they shaved. Every morning, in the line, in cold water, in a mess tin, with the shells coming over. They shaved and they cleaned their buttons and they scraped the boards and they squared the sandbags, every day, as if somebody were coming to inspect them; and on the third day Kerrigan asked one of them why, a big slow miner from somewhere in the north called Bates, and Bates thought about it for a long time and said:

“Because it’s the only thing in this place that’s up to us.”

Kerrigan did not ask anything else.

---

On the last night of the second week, in the shelter behind the traverse, with the brazier going, Lucien asked Sergeant Hodge about the prince.

He had not meant to. He had been thinking about it since the quay; since before the quay; since the morning in October last year on the wharf with old Tregre reading out the announcement, and the casualty return, Aldridge, Adolphus, Anstey, and his grandmother at the window saying pauvre mère. He had known this was the battalion. Sol Weintraub had known it, on the ship, from a paper. The second battalion of the Grenadier Guards. The prince’s.

“Sergeant,” he said. “Were you here? Last year? When the prince…”

He stopped.

Sergeant Hodge did not look up. He was cleaning his rifle, on his knees, with a piece of four-by-two on the pull-through, by the light of the brazier, and he went on doing it, slowly, the cloth going through the barrel and coming out and going through again.

He did it for a long time.

“I was here,” he said.

Nobody in the shelter said anything. There were six of them in it, Lucien and Harlan and Kerrigan and Sol Weintraub and two Guardsmen, and the Guardsmen had gone very still.

Sergeant Hodge finished with the barrel. He held the rifle up to the brazier and looked down it at the red light, the way Harlan looked down a barrel on the range. Then he put it down across his knees.

“Not tonight,” he said.

He did not say it unkindly. He said it the way you would say it to a child who has asked to go out in the boat in a blow. Not tonight. As if there were going to be a night.

“Yes, Sergeant,” said Lucien.

Sergeant Hodge looked at him across the brazier, with his pale eyes in his clenched face, for a long moment. Then he looked at the wall of the shelter, the sandbags, the side towards the French.

“It’s not far,” he said. “Two miles. Inland. Along the line.” He picked up the rifle again. “You’ll see it. I’ll take you. Not tonight.”

He put the pull-through down the barrel again, though it was clean, and pulled it through, and the shelter was quiet except for the brazier ticking and the guns going over, a long way up, like trains going over a bridge in the dark with the water under them.