The Polder

“Couchez-vous!”

He shouted it in French. He did not know he was going to. It came out of him the way allons came out of his father to the boat, from somewhere under thinking, in the language that was under all the others; and then, because nobody behind him had a word of it, he shouted it again in English, over his shoulder, as loud as he had ever shouted anything, louder than across the lake to the Robichaux in a fog.

“Down! Get down! On the road! Flat!”

And went down himself.

Flat. On the road. On his belly, the way he had gone along it every night for five weeks, with his rifle held up in front of him in both hands and the water over his back and the mud under his elbows and his chin just out of it; and the water closed over his shoulders, cold, all at once, and he lay on the drowned road in the grey light with his face a foot above the surface and looked along it.

Behind him the platoon went down.

He heard them. Splash after splash, along the road behind him, one after another, the whole file, the way the boats of the lake shore went into the water off the rollers on the shell beach in the spring. Harlan first. He felt Harlan’s hand on his ankle, at once, the way it had been on every night in the dark. Then the others. Not all at once. Some of them did not know what he meant, and stood, and looked at him, and then saw the spouts, and went down.

The spouts came along the water from the side.

He watched them come. A line of little white jets, very fast, coming along the surface from inland, from the elbow, one after another, like a row of fish rising, like the first of the rain on the lake when a squall comes off the north shore, and the sound with them, dry, quick, even, a stick along a picket fence. They came along the water to the road, and over it, a foot over his head, two feet, the sound of them going over like tearing silk; and on, across the road, out over the water on the seaward side; and away.

And then they came back.

---

The waves were standing up.

He could see them. He lay on the road with his chin out of the water and he could see them on both sides, inland and seaward, the long lines of C Company in the water to the thighs and the waist, in two waves, going forward towards the empty wall behind a barrage that was four hundred yards ahead of them now and walking away; and they were standing up. They had to. You could not lie down in water to the waist. There was nothing to lie down on. If you lay down in it you went under, and with sixty pounds on your back and two hundred rounds in your pouches and your boots full you did not come up.

So they stood. And the gun at the elbow came along the water from the side, steadily, the white spouts walking, and went through them.

He watched it. He could not stop watching it. He lay on the road and watched the gun at the elbow go along the first wave of C Company inland of the road the way a scythe goes along a standing field, from the side, in one long stroke, and the men in it go down, one after another, not all at once, the way the flags in the meadow had gone forward; just down. Into the water. A man with his rifle up. A man with a bridge. Two men with a bridge between them, going down together, and the bridge floating up off them on its petrol tins, empty, and turning slowly round on the water.

The second wave came on behind. It came on. It did not stop. It came on into the water where the first wave had been, through it, past the bridge turning on its tins, towards the empty wall, at a walk, the way they had been told, close behind the barrage; and the gun at the elbow came back along the water from the side and went through it too.

Like a scythe, Sergeant Hodge had said, at the slot in the steel plate at Klaverdijk. It took us in the side like a scythe.

He thought: it is the farm. It is Hodge’s farm. It is the same morning.

---

The wire was under the water.

He saw that as well, when the spouts had gone over again and he could lift his head an inch. On the seaward side of the road, where the other platoons of C Company had been going forward in their waves, a long way out, two hundred yards, men were standing still. In a line. In the water to the waist, standing still, not going forward, not going down. Twisting. Pulling. One of them was pulling at his own legs with both hands under the water.

Wire.

Three days of guns had gone onto the wire. Every gun in the division and the corps guns and the heavy guns the British had lent, to cut the wire and break the wall. And the shells had come down on the drowned fields and gone into the water, and burst in the water, in the mud, under the surface, and thrown up the great white columns they had all watched from the fire step for three nights; and the wire had been under the water. It was always under the water. The French had put it there, in rows, on iron pickets, two feet down, three, where you could not see it, the way the old Belgians had put the drowned road there. And the shells had gone into the mud round it and thrown up the water and the wire had stayed where it was, under the surface, uncut, in its rows, waiting for the waves of C Company to walk into it at a walk behind the barrage in the grey light.

And they had walked into it. And they were standing in it, in a line, in the water to the waist, held, the way a shrimp is held in the mesh of a trawl, pulling at their legs; and the gun at the elbow came back along the water.

He put his face down. He put it in the water, the whole of it, on purpose, so as not to see; and held it there, in the cold and the mud and the dark, with Harlan’s hand on his ankle, until he had to breathe.

---

When he lifted it the lieutenant was standing up.

Behind him. On the road. Lieutenant Whitcomb, who had been fourth in the file, behind Sergeant Cutter, flat on the road in the water like the rest of them; and now he was standing. On the drowned road, in the water to his knees, in his trench coat with the belt done up, with his pistol in one hand and his whistle in the other, turned towards the seaward side, towards the line of men held in the wire two hundred yards off, and the rest of C Company in the water beyond them; and he was blowing the whistle.

Lucien did not know why. Nobody ever knew. To rally them. To bring them on. To show them where the road was, so they could come to it. To do something. You have to make them feel you. He stood up on the drowned road in the grey light and blew his whistle at the men in the wire, and waved his pistol, the way you would wave to men in a field to come in out of the rain; and Sergeant Cutter, flat on the road beside him, at his elbow, reached up and took hold of the skirt of his trench coat with one hand and pulled.

The spouts came back along the water from the side.

Lieutenant Whitcomb went down. Like that. Like a man sitting down in water. He sat down on the drowned road in the water to his chest, with the whistle still in his mouth, and looked surprised, a little, the way Walt Haskell had looked against the traverse; and then he lay back, slowly, into the water, and the water went over his face.

Sergeant Cutter had him before it closed.

He had him by the collar of the trench coat, flat on the road, on his own belly, in the water, with his other hand on his rifle, holding the lieutenant’s face up out of the water; and he lay there, and held it up, and looked at it.

Lucien could see his face. Sergeant Cutter’s. A yard away, behind Harlan, in the grey light, on the road. Under the flat brim of the campaign hat that he had worn into the attack against every order that had ever been given, with the water to his chin. And it did not do anything. It did not do anything at all. It looked at the lieutenant’s face in the water, the face of a boy of twenty-four from a college in Ohio with a football team, with the whistle still in its mouth and the eyes open, for a long time; and then Sergeant Cutter let go of the collar, and the water closed.

“Go on,” said Sergeant Cutter.

He said it to Lucien. Across Harlan. Very low, flat, dry, the voice that had said you will clean them in the farmyard.

“Prudhomme. Go on.”

And I went on with the rest, Sergeant Hodge had said, at the slot in the steel plate. Because that’s what you do. Because somebody has to.

Lucien went on.

---

He went along the road on his belly. The way he had gone every night for five weeks. With his rifle held up and the water over his back and the mud under his elbows and Harlan’s hand on his ankle, a yard at a time, towards the pump house, which was a hundred yards off, two walls and half a third standing up out of the water; and the platoon came behind him on its belly in file on the road, and the spouts went over them, a foot over, two feet, tearing silk, and on, and away, and back.

The gun could not see them. He understood that. Lying on the road with the water over their backs and only their heads out, a file of heads in the water, they were nothing; they were the stumps of the hedges, they were the old dead horse. The gun at the elbow was firing at men standing up. It was firing at the waves. And the waves were standing up because nobody had told them there was a road, and they could not lie down without it.

He could not think about that. He put it away. He put it in the pocket with the letters and buttoned it and went along the road.

At the place where the road went close to the line of the waves, a little way short of the pump house, there was a man in the wire.

Twenty feet off the road. On the inland side. Alone. A man from one of the other platoons, a boy, standing in the water to his chest, held, with his rifle gone and both his arms up out of the water, the way you hold your arms up when somebody says hands up; and he was not hit, and he could not move, and he was calling. In English. Not loud. Help me. Somebody. Please. I’m caught. Help me.

Lucien did not stop. He could not stop. He lay on the road and went on, a yard at a time, and the boy in the wire called, and he went on past him, and did not look, and the boy’s voice went on behind him, please, and Lucien thought of Gustave Tregre in the water in the dark, twenty feet off, calling for his mother in French for three hours, and of Achille lying in the water listening to him.

Behind him there was a splash, and a curse, and Kerrigan’s voice, very loud.

“Ah, Jesus. Hold on, son. Hold on, I’m coming.”

Lucien turned his head.

Kerrigan had gone off the road. He had gone off it on the inland side, towards the wire, into the deep water, standing, to his chest, wading, with his rifle held up over his head in both hands, towards the boy in the wire twenty feet off; a big red-haired Irishman from Boston who would rather fight anybody than the British, wading through the drowned fields of Flanders in the grey light towards a boy he did not know, saying hold on, son, hold on, in the voice he had used in the cookhouse at Smoky Hill to say you, Louisiana.

“Kerrigan,” shouted Sergeant Cutter. “Kerrigan, get down.”

Kerrigan got to the boy. He got to him and got one arm round him and took hold of the wire under the water with his other hand, Lucien saw him do it, and pulled.

The spouts came along the water from the side.

---

They came into the pump house on their bellies, over the broken brick at the foot of the wall that faced their own line, one after another, and lay on the platform of sandbags on the rusted engine, and on the engine itself, and in the water round it, against the brick, out of the line of the gun, for the first time since the whistle.

Lucien counted them. He did not decide to. He lay on the platform with his cheek on the sandbags where he had lain every night with his ear to the hole in the brick, and counted the third platoon of C Company as it came in over the brick out of the water, the way his grandmother counted the boats coming in round the end of the last camp. Harlan. Sergeant Cutter. Sol Weintraub, without his spectacles, with blood on his face from somewhere that was not his. The cowboy from Montana, Gallagher, who had lost his hat. Ed Haskell, who came in last, very slowly, and lay against the brick with his eyes shut.

Twenty-one.

There had been thirty in the barn at Hof Verhaeghe on the Tuesday night when the lieutenant came with his lantern.

He did not know where the other nine were. He knew where two of them were. He lay on the sandbags with his cheek where his ear had been every night for five weeks and did not think about where they were; and through the hole in the brick, the hole the size of a man’s fist that faced the French, forty yards off, he could see the French wall.

It was very quiet.

---

They went the last forty yards along the old cart track.

On their bellies. Sergeant Cutter said so. He lay on the sandbags for a minute, no more, with his chest going up and down and the water running off the flat brim of his hat; and then he lifted his head and looked at the twenty men lying in the pump house and in the water round it, and said, in the dry flat voice, right, the way the thin grey sergeant of the Coldstream had said it on the first morning at Smoky Hill. Right. Prudhomme. Show us.

So Lucien showed them. Out of the pump house on the side away from their own line, over the brick, into the water, and onto the old cart track, which went along the French wall, a little, the way he had drawn it in the mud of the farmyard with a stick and Sergeant Cutter had rubbed it out with his boot; not straight. Forty yards. He went along it on his belly with Harlan’s hand on his ankle and the French wall coming up in front of him, black, broken, ragged, close, closer than he had ever been to it, closer than in five weeks of nights, so close he could see the sandbags in it, French sandbags, a different cloth, a different shape, burst, with the mud coming out of them, and the holes the three days had made in it, and the wire in front of it, cut, here, broken, lying in coils on the water where the shells had thrown it up.

The gun at the elbow did not see them. It was firing at the waves.

He came to the foot of the French wall. He put his hand on it. Mud, in bags. The same as theirs.

He went up it, on his knees, on the burst sandbags, and over the top, and down the other side, into the French wall.

---

It was empty.

He stood on the boards behind the French wall with his rifle and looked along it, and it was theirs. It was the same. A wall of sandbags on the side towards the Americans, high, with a step to stand on; and behind it a lower wall; and between them, a passage, floored with boards, with water under them. Shelters built into the back of the front wall, roofed with iron and sandbags, like the dog kennels under the galleries on the lake shore. A brazier, with a sheet of iron over it, cold. Traverses, every ten yards. It was the same. They had built it the same way, the French, with the same mud in the same bags, because it was the only way there was to build anything on this coast; and it was empty, from the traverse on one side of him to the traverse on the other, and beyond.

The platoon came over the wall behind him and down onto the boards, and stood, and looked at it.

Nobody said anything.

There was a can on the boards by the brazier. A big one, of tin, dented, with straps on it, for carrying on a man’s back. It had a lid. Lucien went and knelt by it and lifted the lid.

Soup.

Cold. A grey skin on it. Beans, and something else, a few pieces of something. It had come up in the night, on a man’s back, from somewhere behind, the way it came up every night, and it had been cold when it got there, always, and there had been nothing in it, and it had been the same as the night before and would be the same as tomorrow’s; and then at three in the morning everybody had gone along the back of the wall to the Casino, to the concrete, with the clink of things, and left it.

He knelt on the French boards with the lid of the soup can in his hand and could not move.

La soupe, the slow man had said, on the first night, in the middle of a sentence, like a fish coming up into the light of a lantern. Froide. Toujours.

“Lucky,” said Harlan, behind him, very quietly.

He put the lid back on.

---

There was a letter in the second shelter.

He saw it as they went along the boards. Sergeant Cutter had said along, along, towards the sea, roll it up, and they went along the boards behind the French wall, in file, with their bayonets, looking into each shelter as they passed it, and the shelters were empty, a blanket, a pair of boots, a mess tin, a pipe; and in the second one, on a box that had been a table, under a stone so it would not blow away, there was a sheet of paper, with writing on it, in pencil.

He stopped. He could not help it. He bent and looked at it in the grey light.

Ma Lulu chérie,

And then three lines. A quick hand, from the front of the mouth. Ça fait deux mois que t’as pas écrit et je sais pas si t’es fâchée ou si t’es malade ou si t’as trouvé un autre, et je m’en fous, je veux juste savoir. Pour Noël je…

It stopped there. For Christmas I. Nothing else. He had not finished it. He had been called, or he had not known what to say, or it had been three in the morning and time to go to the concrete; and he had put the stone on it so it would not blow away, and gone, and meant to come back to it.

Lucien did not touch it.

He stood bent over the box in the French shelter with the rifle in his hands and looked at it, and thought of the Parigot at one in the morning, saying he would spend Christmas with Lulu anyway, in the room over the laundry, with a chicken and real wine and the midnight Mass at Saint-Eustache because she liked the music.

It was not his. He did not take it. He left it under its stone.

“Prudhomme,” said Sergeant Cutter, from along the boards.

He went.

---

They had gone fifty yards along the back of the French wall when the firing began at the Casino.

They heard it start. Away along the wall, towards the sea, where the French wall came up out of the drowned fields onto the dunes; a long way off still, six hundred yards, seven, but not far enough. The barrage had gone over the Casino. It had lifted. It was walking on, beyond, into the ground behind the dunes, roaring, where nobody was. And in the quiet it left behind it over the dunes, the firing began: rifles, first, a crackle, and then machine guns, one, two, three, more, the dry quick sewing-machine sound, from the dunes, from the ruin on the dunes, from the stairs.

And under it, very thin, very far, the sound of the second battalion of the Second Kansas, on the sand, in front of the Casino, in the open.

The third platoon stood on the boards behind the empty French wall and listened.

Et puis ils tourneront vers le Casino, Pépère had said. Et puis on montera les escaliers.

Sergeant Cutter stood on the boards at the head of them, with the water running off him, and the flat brim of his hat, and his rifle, and looked along the wall towards the dunes, towards the firing, for a long time. Twenty men behind him. Nineteen, with Ed Haskell sitting against the back wall with his eyes shut.

Lucien thought he was going to say we stay. He thought he was going to say it the way he had said I’d not do that, sir, very respectfully, in the shelter behind the second traverse.

“The order,” said Sergeant Cutter, “is to roll it up. Towards the Casino. And take it from the flank.”

Nobody said anything.

“The second battalion’s out there,” said Sergeant Cutter. “On the sand. In front of it. You can hear them.” He did not look round. “The order is the order. And the second battalion is out there.”

He went along the boards towards the sea.

They went after him.