The Last Night

His grandmother’s letter came at noon on the Wednesday, with the guns still going.

It came up from the town in the mail sack with the rations, the last mail before they went up, and the corporal with the voice like a mule gave the letters out in the yard of Hof Verhaeghe by hand, the way he had in the street outside hut forty-one on the last morning in Kansas, which nobody would have thought he would do. He did not call the names. He went along the third platoon in the yard and put each man’s letters into his hand and went on, and did not say anything, and his face was grey.

It was the blue envelope. Opened along the top, neatly, with a knife. Lucien took it into the barn and sat in the straw with his back to the partition and the cows breathing on the other side of it and the tiles rattling over his head, and opened it.

It was the middle of November on the lake shore. It was cold, for the lake; there had been ice on the planks of the wharf two mornings running and old Bazile had not come out to his bench by the ice house for a week and everybody had gone to look, and he was only sulking. The white shrimp had gone. The Robichaux girl’s wedding was to be on the twenty-seventh of December and the boy from Mandeville’s mother had come across the lake on the steamer to look at the Robichaux and had gone back without saying what she thought, which everybody knew meant she thought it. Ti-Paul Bazile had been taken on by old Tregre for the winter, for the oysters. The widow Fontenot had had a letter from the Grand Duchy with a seal on it, about Hippolyte, and had not opened it, and it was on her mantelpiece.

And at the bottom, under her name, the line.

Ton père dit qu’il sait que t’étais pas malade.

Your father says he knows you weren’t sick.

He read it three times. Then he read the paragraph above it, which he had gone past too fast, the first time, to get to the line.

A woman came to the camps on a Sunday. A Black lady, from the city, from the Tremé, in her church clothes, on the streetcar, with a basket. She asked at the first gallery for Octave Prudhomme. She came along the planks and stood at the top of the steps and asked your father, very politely, in our French, whether he was the man from the lake who worked at the Louisa Street wharf, and he said he was. She said her son Théophile had written to her from Belgium. She said Théophile had said to tell the old man at the wharf that his boy was on the same ship, and was not sick. She said she did not know your father to speak to so she had come to tell him herself. She had brought him a cake. Your father stood on the gallery and held the cake and did not say anything at all, and she went home.

He took the streetcar into the Tremé on the next Sunday in his good coat and found her house and gave her back the plate.

Lucien sat in the straw with the letter on his knee.

He thought of Théo Glapion on the forward well deck in the dark with the ship burning a mile off, saying je vais leur dire, I’ll tell them. He thought of a woman in her church clothes on the streetcar from the Tremé to the lake with a cake in a basket, to tell a man she did not know to speak to that his son was not sick. He thought of his father in his good black coat on a Sunday streetcar into the city with a plate.

He did not cry. He had not cried since the morning on the platform in May. He sat in the straw with the letter and the guns going and his face in his hands for a long time, not crying, until Harlan came and sat down beside him and did not say anything, and stayed.

---

They wrote the letters in the afternoon.

Everybody did. Nobody told them to; it was not an order. But at two o’clock the quartermaster sergeant came to the barn with a box, a wooden one, that had held ammunition, and put it down inside the great door, and said that any man who wanted to leave a letter could leave it in the box, and the box would go back to the town with the quartermaster’s stores when the battalion went up, and stay there; and that a letter in the box would be posted on Friday, or would not, depending; and then he went away.

The third platoon sat in the straw and looked at the box.

Then Sol Weintraub took out a pencil, and some paper, and began to write. And then everybody did.

Lucien wrote on the blue paper. The last but two sheets. He sat with his back to the partition and the board across his knees and the pen with the steel nib and the little bottle of ink in its handkerchief, the way he had sat on his bunk in hut forty-one on Sunday afternoons in June, and he did not know what to write.

He sat for a long time.

Mémère,

Tomorrow we go on the water.

He stopped. He looked at it. It was true. It was all that was true. He could not write anything else that was true without writing all of it, the cellars and the white tape and the red flags in the meadow and Sergeant Cutter’s face looking back at the tape, and the heavy guns will deal with them, and Pépère saying les pauvres gosses; and he could not write all of it, because she would read it at the window, out loud, to his father on the cane chair.

I know where the shallow places are. Papa taught me. Tell him.

Tell him I got his word. I have it in my tunic. I have it with me.

Tell the lady from the Tremé thank you. Tell her Théo was not sick either.

He signed it. And then, under his name, where she always put the line for his father, he wrote, very small:

Dis à Papa que je dis allons au bateau pour lui.

Tell Papa I say allons to the boat for him.

He blotted it and folded it and put it in its envelope and wrote his grandmother’s name on it in his best hand, and the camps at the mouth of the Bayou Saint-Jean, and La Nouvelle-Orléans, and the Grand Duchy, and then he sat with it in his hand.

---

“Lucky,” said Harlan. “Will you put something at the bottom of mine?”

Lucien looked at him.

Harlan had written his on a sheet of lined paper from a pad, in pencil, in a big slow careful hand, a page; he had sat with it on his knee for an hour and written it a few words at a time, the way he did everything, the way he dug, with his tongue between his teeth, and now it was finished, and he was holding it out.

“In French,” said Harlan. “Something. At the bottom. So she’ll have some French.” He looked at the letter. “My mother’s never had any French. She’d like that. She’d show it to the minister.”

Lucien took the letter. He did not read it. He held it on the board on his knee, Harlan’s page in pencil, with Dear Mother at the top and your loving son Harlan at the bottom, and between them, he could not help seeing, the farm and the cows and Nils and Carl and the eleven cows and the bull and a Flemish widow’s cow with a bad foot.

He dipped the steel nib in the little bottle.

Votre fils m’a tenu les mains quand je pouvais pas respirer.

He wrote it in his best hand, under your loving son, small, very even, the way his grandmother would have written it, the Ursuline hand, with the tails below the line. And then, after a moment, under it:

Lucien Prudhomme, de La Nouvelle-Orléans.

He blotted it and gave it back.

Harlan looked at it for a long time. He could not read a word of it. He looked at it the way he had looked at the oyster on the tin plate on the end of the pier at Newport News, very carefully, as if it might do something.

“What’s it say?” he said.

Lucien looked at the straw.

“It says you’re my friend,” he said.

Harlan looked at the French at the bottom of his letter for a while longer. Then he folded the letter along its folds, slowly, and put it in its envelope, and licked the envelope, and closed it.

“Huh,” he said. “That’s a lot of words for that.”

“It’s French.”

“I guess,” said Harlan.

They put their letters in the box inside the great door, with the others, thirty letters, in a heap, on top of each other, in an ammunition box, and went back to the straw to wait.

---

Achille came at five, in the dark, in the yard.

The battalion was forming up. It was going up at six; the companies were coming out of the barns and the farms all along the lane in full kit, with their rifles and their bridges, the bridges on men’s shoulders in the dark like the beams of a house going along the lane; and the guns beyond the rise had not stopped for fifty-nine hours, and the sky over the rise was lit with them, a low flickering red, like the sky over the city on the night the cotton warehouses burned when Lucien was nine. And at the gate of Hof Verhaeghe, under the board with the name in old paint, there was a man in a greatcoat with the collar up and a corporal’s stripes, standing very still, looking at the yard.

“Le petit à Octave,” he said.

Lucien went to him.

“On est derrière vous,” said Achille. We’re behind you. “La Première Louisiane. En soutien. Dans votre muraille, demain, quand vous partez. Pour la tenir.” In your wall, tomorrow, when you go. To hold it. He looked at the yard, at the third platoon forming up in the dark with the bridges. “On sera là quand vous revenez.”

We’ll be there when you come back.

He did not say if.

Lucien did not say anything. He stood at the gate in his full kit with his rifle and looked at Achille’s thin face in the dark under the helmet, lit red by the sky over the rise, flickering.

“Écoute,” said Achille. Listen. Very low, very fast. “Quand ça commence, va pas trop vite. Laisse le barrage s’en aller. Il va s’en aller de toute façon, il attend personne. Suis l’eau. Suis pas les officiers. Suis l’eau.” When it starts, don’t go too fast. Let the barrage go. It’ll go anyway, it doesn’t wait for anybody. Follow the water. Don’t follow the officers. Follow the water. He stopped. “Et quand t’as peur, pense à rien. Pense au bateau.”

And when you’re afraid, think about nothing. Think about the boat.

“Au bateau.”

“Au Marie-Ange. Au bout du quai. À quatre heures du matin. Avec ton père qui lui parle.” Achille’s mouth went in at the corner, for a moment, the place where a smile had been. “C’est ce que je fais, moi. C’est pas le tien, mais c’est le seul bateau que je connais qui a une personne qui lui parle.”

That’s what I do. It’s not mine, but it’s the only boat I know that has somebody who talks to it.

The sergeants were shouting along the lane. Sergeant Cutter’s voice, dry, flat, carrying, third platoon.

Achille took hold of the front of Lucien’s tunic, in his fist, the way he had at the bottom of the cellar steps, and held it, hard, for a moment; and let go.

“Va,” he said. Go.

He did not point. He turned and went off along the lane in the dark, against the column, towards wherever the First Louisiane was, with his hands in the pockets of his greatcoat, thin, and the bridges going past him on men’s shoulders the other way.

---

They went up in the dark.

Along the lane and through the town and along the causeway, three miles, with the bridges, under the guns, which were so loud now, so near, that you could not hear the man in front of you speak, and nobody tried; the guns were all round them, behind the dunes, in the fields, everywhere, in pits, and when they fired the whole of the dark went white for a moment and you could see every man in the column, every face, white, and the bridges, and the dunes, and then it was dark again and your eyes were full of it. The ground shook under the cobbles of the causeway. The air shook. It came in through your chest and your teeth.

At the village they went down onto the duckboards, and along them, a mile and a half, in single file, with the bridges, each man holding the man in front by the back of his pack; and Lucien had Harlan’s pack in his hand, and Harlan had the bridge on his shoulder with the cowboy from Montana, and the water was on both sides of them, black, and the flashes of the guns went in it, white, upside down.

At midnight they came into the line at the left end of the section’s forty yards, by the board over the hole full of water where the shelter had been, where the Second Kansas’s other battalion was waiting to give it to them. Nothing had changed. The wall was the same. The boards. The brazier with its sheet of iron.

Captain Pruett was there.

He was standing on the boards by the board over the hole, in his waterproof, with his cane, waiting; and when the third platoon came round the traverse he looked along it, in the dark, at the faces, until he found Lucien’s.

“Private Prudhomme,” he said. “One more night. If you will.”

---

So he went out along the drowned road for the last time.

He and Harlan. Over the wall at the left end, by the hole, and down the far side on their bellies into the water, and through the gap in the wire; and the guns had lifted. Not stopped; lifted. At midnight they had moved off the French wall opposite, as they had every night for three nights, and gone back, onto the Casino and the roads and the ground behind, so that the night parties could go out to look at the wire; and the French wall opposite the pump house was quiet, black, a quarter of a mile off across the water, under a sky that was all one flicker, red and white, from end to end.

He found the road. He did not lose it once. He did not need to look; he had it now the way he had the bar off the mouth of the Bayou Saint-Jean, in the dark, in his body, the bend round where the bridge had been and the width of it and where it dropped away. He went along it on his belly with his rifle held up and Harlan’s hand on his ankle, and the cord in the water beside them going back to the bell, an hour, three hundred yards, and came to the pump house, and up onto the platform of sandbags on the rusted engine, and lay down, on his side, with his weight on his hip, and put his ear to the hole in the brick.

The French wall was forty yards off. It was very quiet.

Then the Parigot.

Ça y est, said the Parigot. That’s it. Ils viennent demain. They’re coming tomorrow. Trois jours de marmites, c’est pas pour rien. Ça se sent. Three days of shells isn’t for nothing. You can feel it.

Ça se sent, said Pépère.

Lucien lay with his ear to the brick.

They talked about it the way they had talked about the soup. Low, ordinary, at the wall, at one in the morning, in the dark, forty yards off: that the Americans were coming tomorrow, at first light, everybody knew it, the whole wall knew it, the officers knew it; that three days of shells were the Americans knocking on the door to say so. And that the officers had a plan. And the plan was this: that the wall was to be emptied.

Lucien stopped breathing.

On laisse la muraille, said the Parigot. We’re leaving the wall. Tout le monde au Casino. Cette nuit. Dans le béton. Everybody to the Casino. Tonight. Into the concrete. Sauf les mitrailleuses. Une à chaque coin. Au coude, là-bas, et à l’autre bout. Except the machine guns. One at each corner. At the elbow, over there, and at the other end.

Et nous? said somebody. And us?

Nous, on y va à trois heures, said Pépère. We go at three. Au Casino. A pause, and then, in his deep slow voice, without any bitterness at all, as if he were talking about the weather or the cows: Les cow-boys arriveront dans une muraille vide. Et puis ils tourneront vers le Casino. Et puis on montera les escaliers.

The cowboys will get to an empty wall. And then they’ll turn towards the Casino. And then we’ll come up the stairs.

Nobody said anything behind the French wall for a long time.

Lucien lay on the sandbags with his ear to the brick and his eyes open in the dark, and Harlan beside him, very still, with his rifle; and he saw it. All of it. He saw it the way he had seen the drowned road in the dusk, all at once, the shape of it under the water: C Company going across four hundred yards behind the red flags, and the flags going away from them, and the wall empty, and the guns at the corners, at the elbow, firing along the water from the side, like a scythe; and the ones who got to the wall, turning, along the back of it, towards the Casino, the way Lieutenant Whitcomb had drawn the arrow on the barn door in chalk; and the barrage lifting off the Casino; and the stairs.

Les pauvres gosses, said Pépère.

---

They talked about Christmas.

Lucien did not understand it at first. He lay on the sandbags with the shape of tomorrow under the water in front of him, and the men forty yards off across the water, who had just said it, who were going to the concrete at three, began to talk about Christmas, in the same voices; and it was a long time before he understood that that was why. Because it was a thing to talk about that was not tomorrow.

The Parigot was going to spend Christmas with Lulu. He said so. He had decided. He had not heard from her in two months and he had decided that he would spend Christmas with her anyway, in the room over the laundry, with the stove, and a chicken, a whole one, and a bottle of real wine, not pinard, and they would go to the midnight Mass at Saint-Eustache, which he had not been to since he was twelve, because Lulu liked the music.

Marius said that in Marseille at Christmas they had thirteen desserts. Thirteen. On the table, all at once, after the big supper on Christmas Eve, for the twelve apostles and the Lord: dates and figs and almonds and nougat, white and black, and the oil bread, and quinces, and his mother’s little cakes; and the Parigot said he was lying, nobody had thirteen of anything, and Marius said vous autres, à Paris, vous connaissez rien, and counted them, one by one, on his fingers, Lucien could hear him count.

And Pépère said that ma Marthe would kill the pig.

At Christmas. Every year. The week before. The neighbours came, and they killed the pig in the yard, early, in the cold, and hung it, and the women made the black pudding and the sausages and the pâté in the kitchen all day, and the children ran about getting in the way, and in the evening there was the first of the black pudding, fried, with apples. Every year since he was a boy. His father had done it and his grandfather. And this year ma Marthe would have to do it with the neighbours and the old men, because he would not be there; and he did not know whether she would manage, because the pig was big this year, the biggest they had had, and it was a bad-tempered pig.

Elle va le tuer, ton cochon, said the Parigot. She’ll kill your pig. T’inquiète. Don’t worry.

Je sais, said Pépère. I know. C’est pas le cochon qui m’inquiète.

It’s not the pig I’m worried about.

He did not say what was.

At three they went. Lucien heard them go. Boots on boards, behind the French wall, along it, going away, towards the sea; a lot of them, low voices, the clink of things; going along the back of the wall in the dark towards the dunes and the ruin on the dunes with the cellars under it. And then the wall was quiet. Not empty. Not quite. Away along it, inland, at the elbow where it bent, a long way off, somebody coughed, once, and somebody told him to shut up, and then nothing.

He lay with his ear to the brick for another half hour, listening to nothing.

“Time,” whispered Harlan.

---

Captain Pruett was in the battalion’s dugout, behind the second traverse, in the back of the wall, with Major Corliss and a telephone and a lamp. Lucien told him at a quarter past four, kneeling on the boards in the door of the dugout with the water running out of his sleeves, because there was no room to stand.

All of it. The wall emptied. Everybody to the Casino, into the concrete, at three. The machine guns at the corners, one at the elbow inland and one at the other end. The cowboys will get to an empty wall, and then they’ll turn towards the Casino, and then we’ll come up the stairs.

Captain Pruett wrote it down.

Major Corliss, at the table behind him, a heavy quiet man with a grey moustache, had stopped what he was doing and was listening, with his pen in his hand, not moving. When Lucien had finished nobody in the dugout said anything for a long time. The guns went on outside, all of them, the whole sky.

“Zero is at seven forty-five,” said Major Corliss, at last. Very quietly. To nobody. “It’s a quarter past four.”

“Yes, sir,” said Captain Pruett.

“Send it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Captain Pruett tore the sheet out of the notebook and folded it and gave it to a runner at the back of the dugout, a boy of nineteen with a lamp, who went out past Lucien kneeling in the door and along the boards in the dark at a run, towards the duckboards and the village and the telephone at brigade.

Captain Pruett watched him go.

“It’ll get there,” he said. “By five. Brigade will read it at five. Division at half past.” He took his spectacles off and wiped them, slowly, on his handkerchief, and did not put them back on. “And at seven forty-five the barrage will go down where it was always going to go down, Private, and the battalion will go behind it across the water where it was always going to go, because three thousand men and four hundred guns and the whole of the alliance and a question in the Commons do not turn round in two hours and forty-five minutes because a farmer from the Berry is worried about his wife and his pig.” He looked at Lucien without his spectacles, with his naked tired eyes. “I’m sorry. That’s not your doing. You’ve done exactly what you were asked, every night, for five weeks, better than anybody had any right to ask. You heard it. It’s in writing. It’s at brigade by five.” He put the spectacles back on. “That’s all any of us can do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go to your platoon.”

Lucien went along the boards in the dark to the left end of the section’s forty yards, by the board over the hole, where the third platoon of C Company was sitting on the fire step in a row with the bridges along the back of the wall, waiting, with their rifles between their knees and their faces lit white and then dark and then white again by the guns.

He sat down beside Harlan.

Harlan did not ask him anything. He had been in the pump house. He had heard the boots on the boards behind the French wall going away towards the dunes at three in the morning, and he had felt Lucien beside him on the sandbags when Pépère said on montera les escaliers, and he did not ask.

They sat on the fire step.

After a while Harlan put his hand into the pocket of his tunic and took something out and held it out, sideways, without looking. It was a biscuit. A hard tack biscuit, army, the kind you broke on the edge of a sandbag. Half of one.

Lucien took it.

They sat on the fire step at the left end of the forty yards with the guns going and ate half a biscuit each, slowly, in the dark, the way his father and he had eaten bread at the tiller of the Marie-Ange at five in the morning with the lake going grey round them and the pelican waiting off the stern; and did not say anything; and waited for the light.