"AttenSHUN! Company, disMISS!"
Captain Colclough had not been seen all day. Perhaps he was below decks preparing another speech to signalize their arrival in France, perhaps he was dead. And Lieutenant Green, who had never made a speech in his life, was pouring sulphanilamide into wounds and covering the dead and grinning at the living and reminding them to keep the barrels of their rifles covered against the water that was spraying over the sides…
At four-thirty in the afternoon, the Navy finally got the engines working as Lieutenant Green had promised, and fifteen minutes later the Landing Craft Infantry slid on to the beach. The beach looked busy and safe, with hundreds of men rushing back and forth, carrying ammunition boxes, piling rations, rolling wire, bringing back wounded, digging in for the night among the charred wrecks of barges and bulldozers and splintered field-pieces. The sound of small-arms fire was quite distant by now, on the other side of the bluff that overlooked the beach. Occasionally a mine went off, and occasionally a shell struck the sand, but it was clear that, for the time being, the beach was secured.
Captain Colclough appeared on deck as the Landing Craft nosed into the shallow water. He had a pearl-handled forty-five in the fancy leather holster at his side. It was a gift from his wife, he had once told somebody in the Company, and he wore it dashingly, low on his thigh, like a sheriff on the cover of a Western magazine.
An Amphibious Engineer Corporal was waving the craft on to the crowded beach. He looked weary, but at ease, as though he had spent most of his life on the coast of France under shell and machine-gun fire.
The ramp went down on the side of the Landing Craft, and Colclough started to lead his Company ashore. Only one of the ramps worked. The other had been torn away when the boat was hit.
Colclough went to the end of the ramp. It led down into the soft sand, and when the waves came in it was under almost three feet of water. Colclough stopped, one foot in the air. Then he pushed back on to the ramp.
"This way, Captain," called the Engineer Corporal.
"There's a mine down there," Colclough said. "Get those men…" he pointed to the rest of the squad of Engineers, who were working with a bulldozer, making a road up across the dunes, "… to come over here, and sweep this area."
"There's no mine there, Captain," said the Corporal wearily.
"I said I saw a mine, Corporal," Colclough shouted.
The Naval Lieutenant who was in command of the vessel pushed his way down the ramp. "Captain," he said anxiously, "will you please get your men off this vessel? I've got to get away from here. I don't want to spend the night on this beach. We'll never get off if we hang around another ten minutes."
"There's a mine at the end of the ramp," Colclough said loudly.
"Captain," said the Engineer, "three Companies have come off barges right in this spot and nobody got blown up."
"I gave you a direct order," Colclough said. "Go over and get those men to come here and sweep this area."
"Yes, Sir," said the Engineer. He went towards the bulldozer, past a row of sixteen corpses, laid out neatly, in blankets.
"If you don't get off this boat right away," the Naval Lieutenant said, "the United States Navy is going to lose one Landing Craft Infantry."
"Lieutenant," Colclough said coldly, "you pay attention to your business, and I'll pay attention to mine."
"If you're not off in ten minutes," the Lieutenant said, retreating up the ramp, "I am going to take you and your whole goddamned company out to sea. You'll have to join the Marines to see dry land again."
"This entire matter," said Colclough, "will be reported through proper channels, Lieutenant."
"Ten minutes," the Lieutenant shouted violently over his shoulder, making his way back to his shattered bridge.
"Captain," Lieutenant Green said, in his high voice, from half-way up the crowded ramp, where the men were lined up, peering doubtfully into the dirty green water, on which abandoned Mae Wests, wooden machine-gun ammunition boxes and cardboard K ration cartons were floating soddenly. "Captain," said Lieutenant Green, "I'll be glad to go ahead. As long as the Corporal said it was all right… Then the men can follow in my footsteps and…"
"I am not going to lose any of my men on this beach," Colclough said. "Stay where you are." He gave a slight, decisive hitch to the pearl-handled revolver that his wife had given him. The holster, Noah observed, had a little rawhide fringe on the bottom of it, like the holsters that come with cowboy suits little boys get at Christmas.
The Engineer Corporal was coming back across the beach now, with his Lieutenant. The Lieutenant was a tall, enormous man without a helmet. He was not carrying any weapons. With his wind-burned, red, sweating face and his huge, dirt-blackened hands hanging out of the sleeves of his rolled-back fatigues, he didn't look like a soldier, but like a foreman on a road gang back home.
"Come on, Captain," the Engineer Lieutenant said. "Come on ashore."
"There's a mine in here," Colclough said. "Get your men over here and sweep the area."
"There's no mine," said the Lieutenant.
"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.