Ordinary Men

It came the way the light came.

On the second night he had one word in three from the slow man and one in five from the quick one. On the third, one in two, and one in three. On the fourth night he lay on the platform of sandbags in the pump house with his ear to the hole in the brick and the water lapping at the rusted engine under him, and the quick man said something fast and long and furious about a sergeant, and Lucien understood all of it, every word, the whole sentence at once, the way you suddenly see the far shore of the lake on a morning when you have been looking at grey for an hour; and he lay there with his heart going and did not move.

After that it was only a matter of the words.

The words were the hard part. Not the sounds; the sounds he got used to, the vowels in the front of the mouth and the swallowed ends and the r at the back of the throat, the way you get used to the motion of a different boat. The words. They had words for everything that he did not have, and they had them for the things that mattered most. Coffee was le jus. Wine was le pinard. Bread was le brichton. A rifle was un flingue, a bayonet was Rosalie, as if she were a girl. A shell was une marmite, a cooking pot, and a big one was un gros noir, a big black one. To be killed was casser sa pipe, to break your pipe. To be sad, to be so sad you could not get up, was avoir le cafard, to have the cockroach. The war was la guerre, still. They had not found anything else to call it.

He learned them the way he had learned the lake, without being told, one at a time, from the way they were used, until he had them; and in the mornings in the cellar under the village Captain Pruett wrote them down in a separate notebook, a word to a line, with the English beside it, very neat, and said nothing about it, and Lucien understood after a while that Captain Pruett was making a dictionary.

---

The quick man was from Paris.

The others called him le Parigot. It was not his name; it was what you called a man from Paris, the way the men at Smoky Hill had called Lucien Louisiana, before Harlan. He was young. Lucien could hear that. He was young and quick and angry, and funny when he was angry, and he talked all the time, the way Walt Haskell had talked all the time, about everything: about his sergeant, who was a pig, and the cook, who was a pig and a thief, and the officers, who were children, and the gros noirs, which were the only honest things in the whole war because at least they told you what they thought of you. He had a girl in Paris called Lulu who worked in a laundry in a street with a name that Lucien could not catch, and who had not written for a month, and he talked about her every night. He talked about her the way Walt Haskell had talked about Ruth at the soda fountain. Lucien lay in the dark and listened to it and did not think about Walt Haskell’s clean surprised face, and thought about it.

The slow man was from the country. The Parigot called him Pépère, which was what you called your grandfather, or an old man you were fond of; he was forty, perhaps, or more, older than most of them, with a deep slow voice and a French that was further back in the mouth, and he was from a place called the Berry, in the middle of France, where there were cows, and a river, and fields of wheat. He had a farm. He had a wife, whom he called ma Marthe, always, my Marthe, never anything else, and three children, and an old mother, and forty cows, and he did not know how ma Marthe was managing the cows. He talked about them the way Harlan talked about the earth. In the long hours after midnight, when the Parigot had run out of things to be angry about, Pépère talked about the cows, one by one, by name, and what each one was like, which was bad-tempered and which gave the best milk and which was getting old; and the Parigot said, tais-toi, Pépère, tu me fais crever avec tes vaches, you’re killing me with your cows, and Pépère did not stop.

Lucien lay with his ear to the hole in the brick and listened to a farmer from the middle of France talk about his cows, at two in the morning, forty yards off across the drowned fields, behind a wall of mud, and turned his head on the sandbags and whispered it into English for Harlan; and Harlan lay on his belly with his rifle along the sandbags and his eye on the French wall, and listened.

“How many?” whispered Harlan.

“Forty.”

“Huh.” Harlan was quiet for a while. “We’ve got eleven. And a bull.” He thought. “What’s his wife going to do with forty cows on her own?”

“He doesn’t know. He worries about it.”

“I’d worry about it,” said Harlan.

---

The man who coughed was further along the wall.

Lucien did not learn his name. The others did not say it; they said lui, him, or le pauvre, the poor one, or they said nothing and you heard the cough, deep and wet and from low down in the chest, going on and on in the dark, and then the spitting, and then the cough again. It was worse every night. On the fifth night it went on for a quarter of an hour without stopping and Pépère said something very low to the Parigot that Lucien did not get, and the Parigot did not answer.

On the sixth night he did not hear it.

He lay and listened for it. For an hour. He lay with his ear to the hole in the brick and listened to the Parigot and Pépère and the water and the rain and the guns going over, and under them, the whole time, for the cough; and it did not come.

At two in the morning the Parigot said, out of nothing, il est parti.

He’s gone.

Lucien held his breath.

Évacué, said Pépère. Ce matin. Sur un brancard. Il pouvait plus respirer. Evacuated. This morning. On a stretcher. He couldn’t breathe any more.

Il a de la veine, said the Parigot. He’s in luck. L’hôpital. Des draps. Des infirmières. The hospital. Sheets. Nurses. He was quiet for a moment. Then, in a different voice, lower: Il en reviendra pas. He won’t come back from it.

Non, said Pépère.

That was all. They did not say anything else about the man who coughed. They talked about the soup.

Lucien lay with his ear against the brick for a long time after that. He thought about a man on a stretcher, going back along whatever their duckboards were, in the morning, past the Eye, with his chest full of the drowned fields. He thought about the line of men under the one tree on the parade ground at Smoky Hill, being given water. He thought about Walt Haskell, and the hole full of water with the iron standing up out of it, and the board across it.

In the cellar at six he told Captain Pruett that the man with the cough had been evacuated, and Captain Pruett wrote it down.

---

Marius came on the seventh night.

That was what they called him. Marius. The Parigot said it, loudly, the first night he was there, ah, voilà Marius, here’s Marius, and laughed, and Pépère laughed, and it was a joke that Lucien did not get at first, and then, from the way they used it, did: that every man from Marseille in the French army was called Marius by the others, whatever his name was, the way every Irishman in the Second Kansas was called Paddy except Kerrigan, who would have killed you. He had come up with a draft, to fill the gaps. He was loud. He was the loudest man Lucien had ever heard behind a wall, and the others told him to shut up every five minutes, and he did not; and his French was the hardest of all of them.

It was not the Parigot’s French. It was not Pépère’s. It was something else, singing, up and down, very fast, with the ends of the words not swallowed but added to, a little e on the end of everything, la soupe-eu, le pinard-eu, so that every sentence went up at the end like a question; and the vowels were open, wide open, and there were words in it that were not French at all, that were some other language underneath the French, the way the Spanish was under the French of the city at home in the names of the streets.

Lucien lay with his ear against the brick on the first night of Marius and got one word in ten.

But he got what Marius was talking about. He got it in the first hour, from the words he did get, and it went through him on the sandbags like the rum in the tea.

Marius was talking about the sea.

La mer. He said it over and over, la mer-eu, in his singing voice. He was a fisherman’s son. From a place near Marseille called l’Estaque, on the water, with a harbour, and boats called pointus, which were pointed at both ends, which he said were the best boats in the world; and his father had one, and he had fished in it with his father since he was seven. He talked about it the way Pépère talked about the cows. The boat, the nets, the sardines that came in the spring in silver thousands, the wind that came down the valley from the north in winter, the mistral, so cold and so hard that it blew the boats out to sea and you could not go out for a week; and the fish his mother made into a soup on the harbour, with everything in it, rock fish, and saffron, and garlic, and bread at the bottom of the bowl, that the Parigot had never heard of and Pépère did not believe.

Tu connais rien, said Marius, to the Parigot. You don’t know anything. Vous autres, les Parisiens, vous connaissez rien à la mer. You Parisians don’t know anything about the sea.

And then, a little later, in the middle of a long singing sentence about the sardines, he said it.

Nous autres, les pêcheurs…

We, the fishermen.

Lucien stopped breathing.

He lay on the platform of sandbags with his ear against the brick, and the water lapping at the rusted engine under him, and the rain on the slipped tiles, and Harlan’s shoulder against his, and heard a Frenchman say it. Nous autres. Forty yards off across the drowned fields, behind a wall of mud, at two in the morning, a fisherman’s son from Marseille, in a voice that sang up at the end of every word, talking about the sea: nous autres, les pêcheurs. His word. The lake shore’s word. The word his grandmother said and old Tregre said and the widow Fontenot said and L’Abeille had put at the top of its editorial in June of last year, Nous-autres, on est Louisianais. The word that the nun from Normandy had said was for the kitchen. The word Madame Lemaire’s grandmother said in the Borinage. The word nobody from France was supposed to say any more.

He had his mouth open. He did not know it. He had his mouth open against the brick, and he was going to say something, he did not know what, he was going to say it out loud across forty yards of water to a man from Marseille he had never seen; and Harlan’s hand came down on his arm, hard, and held it.

He shut his mouth.

He lay there shaking. Harlan held his arm and did not let go and did not say anything, and the water lapped at the engine, and across the water Marius went on about the sardines.

“What,” whispered Harlan, at last, very low. “What is it?”

“He said it.”

“Said what?”

“Nous autres.” Lucien turned his head on the sandbags. “We. The way we say it. At home. Like us. He said it.”

Harlan was quiet for a long time.

“Huh,” he whispered. And then: “Don’t say it back.”

“No.”

“Not tonight,” said Harlan.

---

He told Captain Pruett about the Casino on the eighth night.

He had heard it for three nights by then, in pieces, and had not known what it was, and then had. The Parigot said it first, angrily, about a company that had been moved: les veinards, the lucky ones, au Casino. Then Pépère said it, about his cousin, who was there: au Casino, il dort au sec, dans le béton. At the Casino he sleeps dry, in the concrete. Then Marius, who had come through it on his way up with the draft, talked about it for an hour, loudly, with his hands, Lucien could hear his hands.

It was on the dunes. Away along the line towards the sea, where the French wall came up out of the drowned fields onto the sand. It had been a casino, a real one, for the summer people from Paris and Brussels, before the war, a great white building on the dunes over the beach with a terrace and a ballroom and a restaurant with mirrors, and cellars for the wine; and the shells had knocked the white building down, years ago, and the French had gone into the cellars. Concrete cellars. On the dunes, where the sand was dry and above the water, so that you could dig, at last, down, the way you could not dig anywhere else on the whole coast; and the French had dug, and poured more concrete, and dug again, for three years, until under the ruin of the casino on the dunes there were rooms, and passages, and stairs, deep, dry, where a whole company slept in bunks, out of the rain, under twenty feet of sand and concrete that the gros noirs could not touch.

On pourrait leur balancer tout ce qu’on a, said Marius, laughing. They could throw everything they’ve got at them. Ils sentiraient rien. Ils dormiraient. They wouldn’t feel a thing. They’d sleep through it.

Captain Pruett did not write it down at once.

He listened. He sat at the door on its two boxes in the cellar under the village, at six in the morning, with the lamp and the stove, and listened to Lucien say it, all of it, the cellars and the concrete and the twenty feet of sand and the stairs, and he did not pick up his pencil. He sat with his hands flat on the table and his eyes on Lucien’s face; and when Lucien had finished he sat for a long time.

“Twenty feet,” he said.

“That’s what he said, sir. Six mètres. I think that’s twenty feet.”

“About that.” Captain Pruett looked at the map on the wall. He got up, and went to it, and stood in front of it with his back to Lucien and looked at it, at the end of it where the blue of the sea was, and the line of the dunes, and a small square drawn in red ink with a name beside it that Lucien could not read from the box. He stood there for a long time.

Then he came back and sat down and wrote it. All of it. On a separate sheet, not in the notebook, very carefully, and slowly, and read it through twice, and folded it, and put it in an envelope, and wrote on the envelope, and sealed it.

“Thank you, Private,” he said. “That’s very useful.”

He said it in a voice Lucien had not heard him use. He said it as if it were not useful at all, as if it were the opposite of useful, and as if he wished he had not been told.

---

On the same night, late, Pépère said the other thing.

It was nearly four. The Parigot had been talking about a rumour, the way the men in hut forty-one had talked about rumours at Smoky Hill, out of the sides of their mouths in the ranks: that the Americans opposite were going to attack. The new ones. The cowboys, Marius called them, les cow-boys, and laughed. The Parigot said it was nonsense. The Parigot said nobody in his right mind would attack across that water, not the British, who had been here three years and knew, not anybody.

Pépère did not laugh.

Ils sont nouveaux, he said, slowly, in his deep voice. They’re new. Les nouveaux, ça attaque toujours. Pour se faire voir. New ones always attack. To be seen. A pause. Nous autres, en quatorze, on a attaqué aussi. Avec les pantalons rouges. We attacked too, in fourteen. In the red trousers.

Nobody said anything for a while, behind the French wall.

Les pauvres gosses, said Pépère, at last. The poor kids.

Lucien lay with his ear against the brick, and the water under him, and Harlan beside him, very still, with his rifle; and did not translate it.

Harlan did not ask.

---

The singer was the last.

He did not come every night. He came late, at four, or after four, when the others had stopped talking and there was nothing on the French wall but the rain, and the sentries, and the water; and he was not near. He was further along, inland, towards the Eye, a long way along the wall, so that you only just heard him, and then only when the guns had stopped and the wind was right. Lucien did not hear him speak. He did not hear anybody speak to him. He only heard him sing.

Low. A man’s voice, not deep, not high, ordinary, singing to himself, very quietly, in the dark, the way his father hummed to the net on the gallery in the evenings without knowing he was doing it. Old songs. Songs Lucien half knew, the tunes of them, songs of the country, slow, with verses and the same line coming back at the end of each one.

On the tenth night, at a quarter to five, with the light not yet coming and the rain stopped and the water flat and black and still all round the pump house, the singer sang a song that Lucien knew all the way through.

À la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener…

He knew it before the first line was finished. He had known it since before he could walk. His grandmother sang it at the window every morning when the brown sail of the Marie-Ange came round the end of the last camp, the first verse, low, in her old cracked voice, until the boat came alongside; and every morning of his life he had heard it coming across the water to him from the gallery, from a long way off, before he could see her.

J’ai trouvé l’eau si belle que je m’y suis baigné.

He lay on the sandbags with his ear to the brick and his eyes shut, and heard it come across forty yards of the drowned fields of Flanders from a man he could not see, low, in the dark, in the French of France, the same tune, the same words, his grandmother’s song.

Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

His lips were moving. He did not make any sound. He lay on the platform of sandbags with his mouth against the brick and said the words with the singer, without a sound, every one, the way he said the responses at Mass; and Harlan’s shoulder against his felt him shaking, and Harlan did not put his hand on his arm this time. Harlan lay still and let him.

The singer sang the second verse, and the third. And then the verse his grandmother had only ever sung once, on a Thursday at the end of August last year, on the gallery after supper, when Achille was in the pine woods; the verse his father’s hands had stopped on the net for.

J’ai perdu mon amie, sans l’avoir mérité…

Mon amie. My girl. The singer sang mon amie, with the e on the end, for a girl; his grandmother sang mon ami, without it, for a friend. Lucien lay with his eyes shut and heard it and knew that it was amie by the rest of the verse, by the rose and the lover in it; and he knew too that you could not hear it. The two words were the same in the mouth. There was no difference in the sound at all, not the smallest, between a friend lost and a girl lost; the difference was only on the paper, in a letter at the end that you could not hear, and his grandmother had chosen one, and the singer had chosen the other, and in the dark, sung, it was one word.

Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

The singer stopped.

There was nothing after it. No voice, no answer, nobody telling him to shut up. Only the water, flat and black and still round the pump house, and the rain beginning again on the slipped tiles, and far off beyond the dunes the sea.

“What was it,” whispered Harlan, after a long time. “What was he singing?”

Lucien opened his eyes.

“It’s a song my grandmother sings,” he said. “When the boat comes in.”

“What’s it say?”

He did not know how to say it in English. He tried.

“A man goes for a walk,” he said, “and he finds a fountain, and the water is so beautiful he bathes in it. And there’s a bird singing in a tree. And he says to the bird, sing, you have a happy heart, and mine is crying.” He stopped. “And the end of every verse is the same. Il y a longtemps que je t’aime. Jamais je ne t’oublierai.”

“What’s that?”

“I have loved you for a long time,” said Lucien. “I will never forget you.”

Harlan did not say anything.

He lay on the sandbags with his eye to the gap in the brick and his rifle along the sandbags, watching the French wall forty yards off across the water in the dark, where the singer was, somewhere, along it, towards the Eye; and Lucien could feel him not saying anything, the way you can feel a man thinking in a boat beside you before dawn. For a long time.

“Time,” said Harlan, at last, very gently. “Lucky. It’s time.”

They went back along the drowned road on their bellies in the dark, three hundred yards, an hour, with the cord in the water beside them, and the light coming up grey behind the Eye, and the French wall going quiet behind them; and in the cellar at six Lucien told Captain Pruett that a man on the French wall, a long way along towards the high ground, had sung a song.

Captain Pruett looked at him.

“What song?”

“An old one, sir. From the country. My grandmother sings it.”

Captain Pruett held his pencil over the notebook for a long moment. Then he put it down, without writing anything, and took his spectacles off, and rubbed his eyes.

“Go and sleep, Private,” he said.