The Order

Lieutenant Whitcomb drew it on the barn door in chalk.

He had come back from the battalion conference in the town at eleven on the Friday morning, along the lane, fast, with a leather case under his arm and his face shining, and gone straight into the barn and said third platoon, on your feet, and they had got up out of the straw; and he had taken a piece of chalk out of his pocket and gone to the inside of the great door at the end of the barn, which was old oak, black with three hundred years, and drawn on it.

A line. Long, crooked, across the door from one side to the other. That was the French wall. Another line below it, parallel, a little way off. That was theirs. Between the two, nothing; he shaded it with the side of the chalk, lightly, all the way across. That was the water.

At one end of the door, the end nearest the barn wall, he drew a squiggle going up, and a square on top of it, and wrote a word beside the square in capitals.

CASINO

C Company stood in the straw and looked at it.

“Gentlemen,” said Lieutenant Whitcomb. He had never called them that before. “On Thursday next, the thirteenth, at first light, this division is going to attack.”

---

He told them all of it. He had it written in the leather case, pages of it, typed, and he read some of it and told them the rest, standing by the barn door with the chalk in his hand and pointing.

The Casino. The French strongpoint on the dunes, at the seaward end of the battalion’s front. And the French wall inland from it, eight hundred yards of it, from the Casino across the drowned fields to a point opposite the pump house, where it bent. That was the objective. The whole of it. The Casino and the eight hundred yards. The Second Kansas would take them, two battalions abreast, the second battalion on the seaward flank, on the dunes, against the Casino itself, from the front, along the sand; and the first battalion inland of it, across the water, against the French wall.

C Company was in the first battalion. C Company was at the inland end of it, furthest from the sea.

Lieutenant Whitcomb drew an arrow. It started at the bottom of the barn door, at their own line, at the place where the pump house would be; and it went straight up across the shaded water to the French wall, and through it, and then turned, along the back of the French wall, towards the sea, towards the Casino, and stopped at the square.

“That’s us,” said Lieutenant Whitcomb. “C Company. We go from our own wall, opposite the pump house. Straight across. Four hundred yards. Into the French wall opposite. Then we turn, behind it, and roll it up, all the way along, towards the sea and the Casino, and take the Casino from the flank while the second battalion takes it from the front.” He tapped the square with the chalk. “From behind. Where they won’t expect us.”

Nobody said anything. The third platoon stood in the straw and looked at the arrow on the barn door.

“There’ll be bridges,” said Lieutenant Whitcomb. “For the water. Portable ones. Duckboards, on floats, that two men can carry. The engineers are making them now. Where it’s deep, we lay them. Where it’s not, we wade.” He looked at the shading. “It’s not deep everywhere. There’s a road under it, part of the way, on the old maps. To the pump house. And from the pump house the French wall’s only forty yards.”

Lucien stood in the straw and did not move.

Your road, Sergeant Hodge had said, by the board over the hole, with his pack on. You keep that to yourself, son. You don’t draw it on any map for anybody that’ll send other men down it.

He had not drawn it. It was on the old maps. Somebody had found it on the old maps.

---

“The guns,” said Lieutenant Whitcomb. He turned a page in the leather case. “Three days of them. From Monday. Every gun in the division, and the corps guns, and heavy guns the British have lent us, and some of them have been coming up for a week, you’ll have heard them. Three days, on the French wall and the wire and the Casino. To cut the wire. To break the wall. To destroy the Casino.” He looked up. “And then on Thursday morning at first light, a barrage. A creeping one. A curtain of shells, in front of us, that moves forward a hundred yards every four minutes, and we walk behind it, close, as close as we can, and when it lifts off the French wall we’re on it before they can get their heads up.”

“Sir,” said somebody at the back. It was Ed Haskell. Nobody had heard him say anything in five weeks except yes, Sergeant and no, Sergeant. “How fast can you walk in water to the waist, sir? A hundred yards in four minutes?”

Lieutenant Whitcomb looked at him.

“Fast enough, Private,” he said. “With spirit.”

---

Then he read the reasons.

He did not have to. Lucien thought about that, that night, lying in the straw; that the lieutenant did not have to read them, that nobody had told him to, that he read them because he believed them, and because he wanted the third platoon to believe them as he did. He turned to the last page in the leather case and held it up to the light from the door of the barn, and read.

“The objects of the operation,” he read, “are, first, to secure the dune position known as the Casino, and so deny the enemy observation over the seaward end of the coastal sector. And, second, to demonstrate to the enemy, and to the Realm’s allies, the offensive spirit and capacity of the American Expeditionary Force.”

He lowered the paper.

“To demonstrate,” he said. “That’s what it says. To show them.” His face was shining. “Ten months. Ten months the Realm’s men have been on this coast, gentlemen, behind a wall, being shelled, and the British have been saying in their papers that we can’t do anything but sit, and the French have been laughing at us across the water, the Sergeant’s heard them, Prudhomme’s heard them, and the Germans have been asking our liaison officers when we’re going to do something. And on Thursday we’re going to show them. All of them. That the Realm’s army can attack, and take ground, and hold it. That we didn’t come all this way to sit.”

He folded the paper.

“That’s all,” he said. “Questions?”

---

Lucien said it before he had decided to.

“Sir,” he said. “The Casino has cellars.”

The barn went still. Lieutenant Whitcomb turned and looked at him, at the third rank, in the straw.

“Concrete ones, sir,” said Lucien. “Under the sand. Six metres. Twenty feet. The French have been digging them for three years. A whole company sleeps in them. The man from Marseille said the guns could throw everything they’ve got at them and they’d sleep through it.” He heard his own voice going on, a long way off, like the voice of a man shouting across the water at night. “Three days of guns, sir. They’ll be in the cellars for three days. And then the barrage lifts and they’ll come up the stairs.”

Lieutenant Whitcomb looked at him.

“The heavy guns will deal with the cellars, Private,” he said. “That’s what heavy guns are for. Twelve-inch shells. The British have…”

“Prudhomme,” said Sergeant Cutter.

He said only that. He did not say it loudly. He was standing at the end of the barn by the partition, where Madame Verhaeghe’s cows were, with his arms folded and his campaign hat on; and he said the name once, in the dry flat voice, the way you would say a dog’s name to stop it in the road.

Lucien stopped.

Lieutenant Whitcomb looked at Sergeant Cutter, and then at Lucien, and then at the barn door with the chalk on it. His face had stopped shining. It did not look angry. It looked, for a moment, like the face of a boy who has been told something at school that he does not want to know and is going to put away somewhere and not look at.

“The heavy guns,” he said again, more quietly, “will deal with them. That’s all. Dismiss.”

---

Sergeant Cutter found him at the pump, in the yard, at dusk.

He was washing. He had gone out to the pump in the corner by the kitchen wall, where he had met Madame Verhaeghe on the second morning, and was working the handle and putting his head under it, in the cold, again and again, as if he could get something out of it; and Sergeant Cutter came across the frozen yard and stood beside him and waited until he had finished.

Lucien straightened up with the water running off his face and stood at attention.

“Stand easy,” said Sergeant Cutter.

He did not say anything else for a while. He stood in the yard in the dusk with his hands behind his back, looking at the barn, at the great door at the end with the chalk on the inside of it that you could not see from here.

“You told them,” he said, at last. “About the cellars.”

“Yes, Sergeant. Captain Pruett. A fortnight ago.”

“I know you did. Captain Pruett told the major. I know that too. The major told brigade. Brigade told division. It went up in an envelope. It’s in a file at division with a stamp on it.” Sergeant Cutter did not look at him. “It’s done. You did it. It’s there. Everybody who has to know, knows. The General knows. He asked you in the field yesterday, in front of the whole battalion, I heard him.”

“Then why…”

“You don’t ask why,” said Sergeant Cutter. “Not in front of the platoon. Not in front of your lieutenant. Not with three days to go.” He turned his head and looked at Lucien for the first time, with his small pale eyes under the flat brim. “You told the men in that barn the cellars’ll be full when the barrage lifts. Every man in that barn’s got to go across four hundred yards of water on Thursday whether you told them or not. And now they know. And they’ve got five days to lie in the straw and think about it.” He looked back at the barn. “That’s what you did this morning. That’s all you did.”

Lucien stood with the water running off his face in the cold.

“Yes, Sergeant,” he said.

Sergeant Cutter was quiet for a long time.

“I said to him,” he said. “In the line. The day the Guards went. I’d not go over that water till somebody makes me. You heard. Everybody heard.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Well,” said Sergeant Cutter. “Somebody’s made us.”

He did not say anything else. He went back across the yard to the farmhouse, where Madame Verhaeghe had given him the room, slowly, with his hands behind his back; and at the door he stopped and looked at the barn again, for a long moment, and went in.

---

Sol Weintraub had the newspaper.

It was a London one, a fortnight old, that had come up with the mail in a bundle of papers somebody sent up to the reserve for the men, and he had it in Madame Verhaeghe’s kitchen on the Saturday night, where she let them come now, four or five at a time, after supper, to sit at her table in the warm, because Harlan had made her cow well; and he read a piece of it out, in the lamplight, very quietly, with his spectacles on his nose, the way old Tregre read L’Abeille on the wharf.

It was not long. It was on an inside page, under a heading about the coast. It said that the American army had now held its sector on the Belgian coast for ten months, and had held it with courage under very heavy shelling, which nobody doubted; and that it had not in that time undertaken a single operation of note; and that the alliance, which had been fighting for three years and a half, could not be blamed for beginning to ask whether the Realm intended its army to do more in this war than garrison a wall.

Sol Weintraub put the paper down.

“There’s another one,” he said. “From home. My mother sent it.” He took a cutting out of his tunic, small, folded, from a New York paper. “A question in the Commons. Last month. A member from Pennsylvania asked the Minister of War when the Realm’s army in Europe would be seen to fight.” He looked at the cutting. “Seen to fight. That’s what it says. And the Minister said the House could be assured that the army would play its full part at the time of its commander’s choosing.” He folded it up again. “That was the fourteenth of November.”

Nobody at the table said anything.

Madame Verhaeghe was at the stove, with her back to them, stirring something. She did not have a word of English. She did not turn round.

“Qu’est-ce qu’il lit?” she said, to the stove. What’s he reading?

Lucien told her. In her French and his. The London paper and the question in the Commons and seen to fight.

She stirred the pot for a long time.

“Pour qu’on les voie,” she said, at last. So they’ll be seen. She did not say anything else for a moment. Then: “Mon fils aussi. En quatorze. Les messieurs de Bruxelles voulaient qu’on voie que la Belgique se battait.” My son too. In fourteen. The gentlemen in Brussels wanted it seen that Belgium was fighting.

She put the lid back on the pot.

“Les généraux,” said Madame Verhaeghe, “c’est tous pareils. Et les messieurs aussi.”

---

He lay in the straw that night and could not sleep.

Harlan was beside him. Not below; there were no bunks in the barn. Beside him, in the straw, on his back, with his hands behind his head and his boots off, in his Belgian socks, looking up at the beams of the roof going away into the dark. Lucien could tell he was awake. You could always tell with Harlan; he slept like a stone going into water, and when he was not asleep he was very still in a different way.

The cows breathed on the other side of the partition. The rest of the third platoon breathed in the straw. Somewhere a long way off, three miles, beyond the rise, the guns were going, the ordinary ones, the night ones, the Morning Hymn’s cousins; and on Monday there would be others.

“Four hundred yards,” said Harlan, at last, very low.

“Yes.”

“I keep counting it.” He was quiet. “I can’t help it. I keep doing it in my head, the way my father does an acre. Four hundred yards. From our wall. Past the pump house. To theirs. In water. At a walk. With a bridge.” He was quiet again. “It’s what Hodge said. Isn’t it. At the farm. Four hundred yards.”

“Yes.”

“Across the water, to the farm and the bit beyond.”

“Yes.”

“And a gun on the flank that the bombardment never touched.”

Lucien did not answer.

“And they took it,” said Harlan. “They took the farm. Hodge said. They got there. Sixty-one killed and they got there.” He turned his head in the straw. “And they held it two days. And then they gave it back. Because you couldn’t get anything across the water to it.”

“Yes.”

Harlan looked at the beams of the roof for a long time.

“And it’s where it was,” he said. “The line. Hodge said. It’s where it was the morning they went.”

Lucien lay in the straw with his hand flat on the pocket of his tunic, over his heart, over the medal and the letters, and did not say anything, because there was nothing in the whole of the world, in either of his languages, to say.

“Huh,” said Harlan, very softly, to the dark.

He did not say anything else. After a long time he turned over on his side in the straw, away, and Lucien heard his breathing go long and slow and even, the way it went on the range before he squeezed; and it did not go into sleep. It stayed like that, long and slow and even, awake, all night, beside him, in the dark, the way his father’s had stayed at the kitchen table over the trap in the floor in the winter after the yellow fever, with his grandmother singing.