The Listening Post

Captain Pruett’s office was a cellar.

It was under the village at the end of the duckboards, under a house that was not there any more, down eleven steps of brick that were wet, into a vault that had been for beer once, or wine, and had a curved roof and walls that sweated. There was a table in it made of a door on two boxes, and a lamp, and a map pinned to the wall with drawing pins, and a telephone in a leather case, and a stove; and Captain Pruett, at the table, in his waterproof, with his spectacles on his nose, writing.

He looked up when the corporal brought Lucien down the steps on the Monday morning.

“Sit down, Private.”

There was a box. Lucien sat on it.

Captain Pruett looked at him across the door on its two boxes for a long time, the way he had looked at him across the table in the hut by the water tower in June, over the spectacles, with the folder open. There was no folder now. There was the map on the wall, and the lamp, and the cellar sweating.

“I have three officers in this brigade,” said Captain Pruett, “who speak French. Very good French. One was at the Sorbonne for a year. One had a French governess. One is a professor of French literature at a college in Pennsylvania and has written a book on Racine.” He took his spectacles off and wiped them. “I sent the professor out to the Guards’ listening post last week for four nights. He came back each morning and gave me a report. The reports said that the French opposite were talking, and that he could not understand what they were saying.”

Lucien did not say anything.

“Not a word,” said Captain Pruett. “He was extremely distressed about it. He has written a book on Racine.” He put his spectacles back on. “He said it was not French. He said it was a dialect, or a patois, or argot, the slang of the trenches, and some of it was not even that, it was some southern language, and he could not follow it; and then he said, which I thought interesting, that it sounded to him a little like the French he had once heard spoken by an old woman in a market in New Orleans, and that he had not been able to follow her either.”

He looked at Lucien.

“Racine,” said Captain Pruett, “did not write for men in a breastwork at two in the morning. Can you follow it, Private?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“No. Nor do I. That is why I came up the boards for you.” He looked at the map on the wall. “There’s a listening post. The Guards have kept it for two years. It’s out in front of your section, in the water, forty yards from the French wall, and men lie in it at night and listen; and what they hear, mostly, is French, which they don’t speak, and what they report is that the French are talking. Which we know.” He turned back. “I want to know what they’re saying. Which regiment is opposite. Whether they’re being relieved, and when. Whether they’re bringing anything up. Whether they’re planning a raid. Whether they’re tired, or frightened, or bored, or well fed. Anything. Everything. I want a man out there who can understand them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s cold,” said Captain Pruett. “It’s wet. It’s dangerous. You’ll be out there from an hour after dark until an hour before light, six hours, seven, lying still, and if the French find the post they will put a bomb into it, or a machine gun on it, and that will be that.” He looked at Lucien over his spectacles. “I’m not ordering you. I want you to understand that. I asked you once in Kansas whose side your language was on, and you gave me an answer I’ve thought about since. I’m not going to order a man to put it to use for me after asking him that. I’m asking.”

Lucien sat on the box in the cellar under the village and looked at him.

He thought of his grandmother at the kitchen table at six in the morning with the blue paper. Pas le français de l’école. Le nôtre. Comme tu parles. He thought of Madame Lemaire on the quay at Ostend, in the rain, with the empty mug: C’était à moi d’abord. He thought of the widow Fontenot at the top of her steps.

“It’s on my grandmother’s side, sir,” he said. “Still.”

“Yes. I imagine it is.”

“I’ll go.”

Captain Pruett looked at him for a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, and picked up his pen.

“Who’s the best shot in your company?” he said.

---

It was Harlan. It could not have been anybody else.

“Somebody has to be with you,” Captain Pruett had said, writing. “To keep watch while you listen. You’ll have your ears full; you won’t have eyes as well. He’ll have a rifle and he’ll watch the French wall and if anybody comes out of it towards you he’ll know before you do.” He had looked up. “The best shot.”

So it was Harlan. Sergeant Cutter said so, without hesitating, when Captain Pruett asked him at the head of the duckboards that evening, and Harlan heard it, and looked at Lucien, and did not say anything at all; and that night at dusk they went out.

Sergeant Hodge took them. The first night, to show them; after that, he said, they would go alone. They went over the wall at the left end of the section’s forty yards, by the hole full of water where the shelter had been, with a board across it, and down the far side on their bellies into the water at the foot of the wall, and through the gap in the wire that was not a gap unless you knew; and then Sergeant Hodge stopped, in the water, and put his mouth to Lucien’s ear.

“Your road,” he said. “The one you saw. It goes most of the way. Can you find it in the dark?”

Lucien looked out over the water.

It was not quite dark. There was the last of the light in the west, over the dunes, a thin grey line, and the water caught it. Flat. Grey on grey. The stumps of the hedges in their rows, black. The wire. And there, a yard to the left of where he lay, going away into the dark towards the French, crooked, a yard wide: lighter. A little. Yellow underneath. He could see it. He did not know how; he could not have said what it was he saw; but it was there, the way the bar off the mouth of the Bayou Saint-Jean was always there under the water on a dark morning, and his father steered round it without looking.

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Then lead.”

He led.

On his belly, on the drowned road, with the water over his back and his rifle held up in front of him in both hands and the mud under his elbows, a yard at a time, feeling for the edge with his knees, the way you felt for the next duckboard with your boot. Harlan behind him with a hand on his ankle. Sergeant Hodge behind Harlan. Twice he lost it, and stopped, and lay still in the water and looked, and found it again, a yard on, lighter, crooked; and once a flare went up, from the French wall, ahead, very close, much closer than any flare he had ever seen, so close he heard the pop of the cartridge, and they lay flat on the drowned road with their faces in the water and their rifles held up and did not move while it swung down over them, white, and went out.

It took an hour to go three hundred yards.

---

The pump house was a ruin of brick, in the water.

It had been, Sergeant Hodge said, the house of a little steam engine that pumped the water out of the drains of the polder into the river, in the old days, before the sluices were opened, when the fields were fields; and the road it stood on was the road to it, along the top of the dyke, for the cart that brought the coal. Now it was two walls and half of a third, standing up out of the drowned fields at the end of the drowned road, with the iron of the engine rusted inside it, and half a roof, of tiles, slipped, and a chimney stump.

The Guards had built a platform in it. Sandbags, on the rusted engine, two feet above the water, behind the brick of the wall that faced the French, so that two men could lie on it side by side, out of the water, with their heads below the top of the brick. There was a hole in the brick, low, the size of a man’s fist, that you could put your eye to, or your ear. There was a cord, tied to a stake in the sandbags, that went away into the water, back along the drowned road, three hundred yards, to the wall, where it was tied to a bell; and if you pulled it the bell rang in the Guards’ section, and the Guards stood to.

And on the other side of the brick, forty yards off across the water, the French wall.

Sergeant Hodge put them on the platform and lay with them for an hour. He did not say anything. He showed them the hole in the brick, and the cord, and how to lie, on your side, with your weight on your hip and not on your elbow, so that you could stay still for hours; and then he put his mouth to Lucien’s ear.

“Listen,” he said. “That’s all. Just listen.”

And he went back into the water and along the drowned road on his belly in the dark, alone, and they were alone.

---

He listened.

At first there was nothing. There was the water, lapping at the brick of the pump house, very gently, the way it lapped at the posts under the floor of the front room at home; and the rain on the slipped tiles over their heads; and the guns, a long way off, going over, high up, like trains on a bridge; and Harlan breathing beside him on the sandbags, very slow, very quiet, the way he breathed out on the range. And under all that, a long way off, beyond the dunes, the sea, going on and on.

He lay on his side with his ear to the hole in the brick and listened to all of it and could not hear the French at all.

Then a cough.

It came across the water out of the dark, from the French wall, forty yards off, very clear, so clear that he jumped on the sandbags and Harlan’s hand closed on his arm. A man coughing. A long, deep, wet cough, from low down in the chest, going on and on, the way old Bazile coughed on the bench by the ice house in the winter; and then stopping; and then a man clearing his throat, and spitting.

And then a voice.

He heard it. He held his breath and heard it. It came across the water in the dark, low, a man talking to another man, behind a wall, at night, the way men talked behind the walls on this side, the way the Guards talked at the doors of their shelters when the officers were not there: not loud, not whispering, ordinary. Words. French words. He heard the shape of them, the up and down of them, the music, and it was French; there was no doubt of it, it was French, it was the language that had come out of his mouth before he could walk. He lay with his ear to the hole in the brick and listened to it with everything he had.

And could not understand it.

Not a word. Not one. It went past him in the dark like the river under the bridge at St Louis, all of a piece, quick, folded, with the words running into one another so that he could not find the edges of them; and the sounds were wrong. The vowels were wrong, flattened and pushed forward in the mouth, and the ends of the words were swallowed, and there was a sound in the middle of it, a rolled r at the back of the throat, that nobody on the lake shore made, that he had heard once in his life, from the French consul’s secretary on Royal Street, in June, the week of the rosary, and had thought was an affectation.

He lay there for an hour and understood nothing.

He thought: it is the professor. I am the professor. And something went through him on the sandbags in the dark that was worse than the cold.

---

Then the other voice answered.

A different man. Further along the wall. Older, slower, with a deeper voice; and he said something back, short, and it was a little different from the first, a little slower, the words a little further apart; and in the middle of it, like a fish coming up out of the water into the light of a lantern, there was a word.

La soupe.

He heard it. He was sure of it. La soupe, the soup, in the middle of the slow man’s sentence, as clear as if his grandmother had said it at the kitchen table. And then the first man laughed, and said something quick, and in the quick thing there was another word, froide, cold; and then the slow man said toujours, always, and that was three words, and they made a thing. The soup. Cold. Always.

He lay with his ear against the hole in the brick and held his breath and felt it come.

Not all at once. It came the way the lake came up in the morning out of the dark, a little at a time, grey and then less grey and then a shape, and then another shape, until you could see. One word in five. Then, after another hour, one word in four. The quick man was the hard one; he talked like the secretary at the consulate, from the front of his mouth, with the ends swallowed, fast, and there were words in it that were not words at all, that were nothing Lucien had ever heard in French or in anything; le jus, which was juice, which he said they were drinking, and le pinard, which he said they were not drinking enough of, and le cafard, which was a cockroach, and which the quick man said he had, which made no sense, and then, after a while, from the way he said it, did. The slow man was easier. The slow man talked a French that was further back in the mouth, and slower, and some of his words were the words of the lake shore, nearly, with the vowels a little different, the way the cadien of the men from Opelousas was a little different from the French of the camps; and when the slow man spoke Lucien got one word in three.

He lay there and listened to them talk about the soup.

That was what they talked about. For an hour. The soup, which was cold, and which came up at night from somewhere behind in a big can on a man’s back, and was cold by the time it got there, always, and had nothing in it, and was the same as last night’s and would be the same as tomorrow’s. The quick man said that the cook was a thief and a pig and that his mother was a pig. The slow man said that the cook was doing his best and the quick man said that the cook’s best would not feed a cat. The slow man said that when he was a boy at home they had soup with beans in it and a ham bone and cabbage, that his wife made it like that, still, every Sunday, with the bone from the week. The quick man said, tais-toi, shut up, tu me fais crever, you’re killing me.

Then nothing for a long time. The cough, again, from further along. Then the slow man said something very low that Lucien did not get at all, and the quick man did not answer.

Lucien lay with his ear to the brick and his eyes open in the dark.

He thought: they are hungry. They are cold, and they are hungry, and the soup is bad.

He thought of the Guardsmen at the doors of their shelters, and Kerrigan in the cookhouse at Smoky Hill over the stew that was not stew, saying it was not stew; and Walt Haskell, who had talked all the time about everything.

---

At three in the morning Harlan touched his arm.

He did it very gently, two fingers on his sleeve, and Lucien turned his head on the sandbags and Harlan put his mouth to his ear.

“Time,” he whispered.

Lucien did not want to go. He did not know why. He was so cold that he could not feel his feet, or his hands, or the side of his body that was against the sandbags, and the rain had come in through the slipped tiles all night and run down the back of his neck, and he had understood perhaps one word in three for three hours, about soup; and he did not want to go.

They went. Back along the drowned road on their bellies in the dark, three hundred yards, an hour, with the water over their backs and the cord beside them in the water, going to the wall. He led. He found the road. He did not lose it once.

At the wall Sergeant Hodge was waiting, on the fire step, at the left end of the section’s forty yards, by the board over the hole, with a mess tin of tea, hot, with rum in it, which he gave to Lucien without a word; and Lucien sat on the fire step and held it in both hands and could not drink it for a while because his hands would not stop.

“Well?” said Sergeant Hodge.

“They talked about the soup, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Hodge looked at him.

“The soup,” he said.

“Yes, Sergeant. It’s cold. It comes up from behind in a can on a man’s back and it’s cold when it gets there. And it’s always the same. And one of them says the cook is a pig.” Lucien drank the tea, finally, and it went into him, hot and sweet and full of rum, all the way down to his feet, and he felt them for the first time in seven hours. “And one of them has a cough. A bad one. From the chest. And one of them is married and his wife makes soup on Sundays with a ham bone in it.”

Sergeant Hodge was quiet for a long moment.

Then he did a thing Lucien had not seen him do. He laughed. Not loudly; very low, in his throat, a short laugh, with his face like a clenched fist coming open for the length of it.

“Two years,” said Sergeant Hodge. “Two years we’ve had that post. Two years of Guardsmen lying out there all night freezing their arses off and coming back to tell me the French was talking. And it’s soup.” He shook his head. “Course it’s bloody soup. What else would it be.”

---

He told Captain Pruett at six, in the cellar under the village.

All of it. The cough and the soup and the cook who was a pig, and the quick man and the slow man, and the wife with the ham bone, and le cafard, which he could not translate and tried to and in the end said meant that the quick man was sad. He sat on the box in the cellar with a blanket round him, shaking, and told it, and Captain Pruett wrote it down. All of it. In a notebook, in pencil, very small, very neat, the soup and the cook and the ham bone, without looking up, without saying anything, the way the clerk at the parish office on Esplanade had written none on the registration card.

When Lucien had finished Captain Pruett went on writing for a while. Then he stopped and looked at what he had written.

“Did they say which regiment?” he said.

“No, sir.”

“Did they say anything about being relieved?”

“No, sir. Only that the soup would be the same tomorrow.”

“Anything about a raid? About anything coming up? Guns? Men?”

“No, sir.”

Captain Pruett looked at the notebook for a long time.

“The quick one,” he said. “The one you couldn’t follow so well. Where’s he from? Could you tell?”

Lucien thought about it.

“Not from where the slow one’s from, sir. The slow one’s from the country. He talks further back, like us. He has words like ours. The quick one’s from a city. He talks like the consul’s secretary on Royal Street. In the front of the mouth. Fast.” He thought. “Paris, maybe, sir. I don’t know Paris.”

“No,” said Captain Pruett. “Nor do I. But the professor does.” He wrote something. Then he looked up, over his spectacles, at Lucien on the box with the blanket round him. “One word in three, you said.”

“In the end, sir. For the slow one. At first nothing.”

“And tomorrow?”

Lucien looked at the cellar wall, sweating in the lamplight.

“More, sir,” he said. “I think. It’s coming. It’s like the light.”

Captain Pruett looked at him for a moment longer. Then he closed the notebook.

“Go and sleep,” he said. “Same tonight.”

---

He did not sleep.

He lay in the shelter behind the traverse with the blanket round him and Harlan asleep beside him, all of him at once, the way he did, like a stone going into water; and he lay awake with his eyes open on the sandbags of the roof and heard it. The quick man’s voice. The slow man’s. The cough. Going on in his head, the up and down of it, the music of it, the words running into each other like the river; and he took it apart, lying there, word by word, the way his father took apart a tangle in the net on the gallery in the evenings, a strand at a time, slowly, without hurrying, until it came.

Le jus. Coffee. It had to be coffee. You drank it in the morning and it was hot and black. Juice of something.

Le pinard. Wine. The way the quick man had said it, with longing.

Le cafard. A cockroach. In your head. Going round and round in the dark, and you could not get it out.

Tu me fais crever. You’re making me burst. You’re killing me. Achille’s father said that. Old Daigle, at the end of the camps, when Achille and Lucien were small and made too much noise under the gallery: vous-autres, vous me faites crever.

He lay in the dark and thought about the slow man’s wife, making soup on a Sunday with the bone from the week, in a kitchen somewhere in France, in the country, with the vowels at the back of her mouth like his grandmother’s. And about the slow man, at the wall, forty yards off across the water, cold, at three in the morning, talking about it.

He thought: Papa asked. Ils parlent comme nous-autres?

He did not know the answer yet. He thought he would, by the end. He did not know yet whether he wanted to.