'I say I saw a mine.'
The men behind the Captain listened uneasily. Now that they were so close to the beach it was intolerable to remain on the craft on which they had suffered so much that day, and which still made a tempting target as it creaked and groaned with the swish of the rollers coming in off the sea. The beach, with its dunes and foxholes and piles of material, looked secure, institutional, home-like, as nothing that floated and was ruled by the Navy could look. They stood behind Colclough, staring at his back, hating him.
The Engineer Lieutenant started to open his mouth to say something to Colclough. Then he looked down and saw the pearl-handled revolver at the Captain's belt. He closed his mouth, smiling a little. Then, expressionlessly, without a word, he walked into the water, with his shoes and leggings still on, and stamped heavily back and forth, up to the ramp and around it, not paying any attention to the waves that smashed at his thighs. He covered every inch of beach that might possibly have been crossed by any of the men, stamping expressionlessly up and down. Then, without saying another word to Colclough, he stamped back out of the water, his broad back bowed over a little from weariness, and walked heavily back to where his men were running the bulldozer over a huge chunk of concrete with an iron rail sticking out of it.
Colclough wheeled suddenly from his position at the bottom of the ramp, but none of the men was smiling. Then Colclough turned and stepped on to the soil of France, delicately, but with dignity, and one by one his Company followed him, through the cold sea-water and the floating debris of the first day of the great battle for the continent of Europe.
The Company did not fight at all the first day. They dug in and ate their supper K ration (veal loaf, biscuit, vitamin-crowded chocolate, all of it with the taste and texture of the factory in it, denser and more slippery than natural food can be), and cleaned their rifles and watched the new companies coming into the beach with the amused superiority of veterans for their jitteriness at the occasional shells and their exaggerated tenderness about mines. Colclough had gone off looking for Regiment, which was inland somewhere, although no one knew just where.
The night was dark, windy, wet and cold. The Germans sent over planes in the last twilight and the guns of the ships lying offshore and the anti-aircraft guns on the beach crowded the sky with flaming steel lines. The splinters dropped with soft, deadly plunks into the sand beside Noah, while he stared up helplessly, wondering if there ever was going to be a time when he would not be in danger of his life.
They were awakened at dawn, at which time Colclough returned from Regiment. He had got lost during the night and had wandered up and down the beach looking for the Company, until he had been shot at by a nervous Signal Corps sentry. Then he had decided that it was too dangerous to keep moving about and had dug himself a hole and bedded himself down until it was light enough, so that he would not be shot by his own men. He looked haggard and weary, but he shouted orders in rapid-fire succession and led the way up the bluff, with the Company spread out behind him.
Noah had a cold by then, and was sneezing and blowing his nose wetly. He was wearing long woollen underwear, two pairs of wool socks, a suit of ODs, a field-jacket, and over it all the chemically treated fatigues, which were stiff and wind-resistant, but even so he could feel his chilled bones within his flesh as he made his way through the heavy sand past the smoke-blackened and ruptured German pillboxes and the dead grey uniforms, still unburied, and the torn German guns, still maliciously pointed towards the beach.
Trucks and jeeps pulling trailers loaded with ammunition bumped and skidded past the Company, and a newly arrived tank platoon clanked up the rise, looking dangerous and invincible. MPs were waving traffic on, Engineers were building roads, a bulldozer was scraping out a runway for an airfield, jeep ambulances, with wounded on stretchers across the top, were sliding down the rutted road between the taped-off minefields to the clearing stations in the lee of the bluff. In a wide field, pocked with shell-holes, graves registration troops were burying American dead. There was an air of orderly, energetic confusion about the entire scene that reminded Noah of the time when he was a small boy in Chicago and had watched the circus throwing up its tents and arranging its cages and living quarters.
When he got to the top of the bluff Noah turned round and looked at the beach, trying to fix it in his mind. Hope will want to know what it looked like, and her father, too, when I get back, Noah thought. Somehow, planning what he was going to tell them at some distant, beautiful, unwarlike day made it seem more certain to Noah that that day would arrive and he would be alive to celebrate it, dressed in soft flannels and a blue shirt, with a glass of beer in his hand, under a maple tree, perhaps, on a bright Sunday afternoon, boring his relatives, he thought with a grin, with a veteran's long-winded stories of the Great War.
The beach, strewn with the steel overflow of the factories of home, looked like a rummage basement in some store for giants. Close offshore, just beyond the old tramp steamers they were sinking now for a breakwater, destroyers were standing, firing over their heads at strong-points inland.
'That's the way to fight a war,' Burnecker said beside Noah.
'Real beds, coffee is being served below, Sir, you may fire when ready, Gridley. We would have joined the Navy, Ackerman, if we had as much brains as a rabbit.'
'Come on, move!' It was Rickett, calling from behind them, the same, snarling, Sergeant's voice, which no sea voyage, no amount of killing, would ever change.
'My choice,' Burnecker said, 'for the man I would like most to be alone with on a desert island.'
They turned and plodded inland, leaving the coast behind them.
They marched for half an hour and then it became evident that Colclough was lost again. He stopped the Company at a crossroad where two MPs were directing traffic from a deep hole they had dug to one side, with just their helmets and shoulders sticking out above ground level. Noah could see Colclough gesturing angrily and he could hear the violence in the Captain's voice as he yelled at the MPs who were shaking their heads in ignorance. Then Colclough got out his map again and yelled at Lieutenant Green, who came up to help.
'Just our luck,' Burnecker said, wagging his head, 'we got a Captain who couldn't find a plough in a ballroom.'
'Get back,' they heard Colclough shout at Green. 'Get back where you belong. I know what I'm doing!'
He turned into a lane between high, gleaming green hedges, and the Company wound slowly after him. It was darker between the hedges, and somehow much quieter, although the guns were still going, and the men peered uneasily at the dense, intertwined leaves, made for ambush.
Nobody said anything. They trudged on both sides of the damp road, trying to hear a rustle, the click of a rifle-bolt, a whisper of German, over the everlasting infantry squash-squash of their shoes, heavily scuffing in the thick clay of the lane.
Then the road opened up into a field and the sun broke through the clouds for a while and they felt better. An old woman was grimly milking her cows in the middle of the field, attended by a young girl with bare feet. The old woman sat on a stool, next to her weathered farm wagon, between whose shafts stood a huge, shaggy horse. The old woman pulled slowly and defiantly at the teats of the smooth-shouldered, clean-looking cow. Overhead the shells came and went and occasionally, from what seemed like a very short distance, there was the excited rattle of machine-guns, but the old woman never looked up. The girl with her was not more than sixteen years old, and was wearing a tattered green sweater. She had a red ribbon in her hair and she was interested in the soldiers.
'I think maybe I'll stop right here,' Burnecker said, 'and help with the chores. Tell me how the war comes out, Ackerman.'
'Keep moving, soldier,' said Noah. 'Next war we'll all be in the Services of Supply.'
'I love that girl,' Burnecker said. 'She reminds me of Iowa. Ackerman, do you know any French?'
'A voire sante,' Noah said. 'That's all I know.'
'A votre sante,' Burnecker shouted to the girl, grinning and waving his rifle, 'a votre sante, Baby, and the same to your old lady.'
The girl waved back at him, smiling.
'She's crazy about me,' Burnecker said. 'What did I say to her?'
'To your health.'
'Hell,' said Burnecker, 'that's too formal. I want to tell her something intimate.'
'Je t'adore,' said Noah, remembering it from some echo in his memory.
'What does that mean?'
'I adore you.'
