"Please, darling, do not laugh at me for writing so solemnly about a poor little life that may not, at the moment I write this, have even begun. But this may be my last pass in a long time, and the last time I will be able to have the peace and quiet to think sensibly about this subject.
"I am certain, dearest," Noah wrote slowly and carefully, "that it will be a fine child, straight of limb, quick of mind, and that we shall love it very much. I promise to return to him and to you with a whole body and a whole heart. I know I shall, no matter what happens. I shall return to help, to tell him stories at bedtime, to feed him spinach and teach him how to drink milk out of a glass, to take him out in the Park on Sundays and tell him the names of the animals in the zoo, to explain to him why he must not hit little girls and why he must love his mother as much as his father does.
"In your last letter you wrote that you were thinking of calling the child after my father if he was a boy. Please do not do that. I was not very fond of my father, although he undoubtedly had his good points, and I have been trying to run away from him all my life. Call him Jonathan, after your father, if you wish. I am a little frightened of your father, but I have admired him warmly ever since that Christmas morning in Vermont.
"I am not worried for you. I know you will be wonderful. Do not worry about me. Nothing can happen to me now. Love, NOAH.
"P.S. I wrote a poem this evening before dinner. My first poem. It is a delayed reaction to assaulting fortified positions. Here it is. Don't show it to anyone. I'm ashamed.
Beware the heart's sedition,
It is not made for war:
Fear the fragile tapping
At the brazen door.
That's the first stanza. I'll write two more stanzas today and send them to you. Write me, darling, write me, write me, write…"
He had folded the letter neatly and got out of bed and put it in his tunic pocket. Then he had put out the light and hurried back between the warm sheets.
There had been no shelling during the night. Around one in the morning the sirens had gone off, but only for some planes that had raided London and were on their way home and had crossed the coast ten miles to the west. No guns had been fired.
Noah touched the bulge of the letter under his coat as he walked down the street. He wondered if there was an American Army unit in town where he could have it censored. He always felt a twinge of distaste when he thought of the officers of his own Company, whom he did not like, reading his letters to Hope.
The sun was up by now, burning under the slight mist. The houses shone palely, swimming up into the morning. Noah passed the neatly cleaned-out foundations where four houses had been knocked down by shellfire. Now, finally, he thought, as he passed the ruins, I am in a town that is at war.
The Channel lay beneath him, grey and cold. He could see the coast of France, through the thinning haze over the water. Three British torpedo boats, small and swift, were slicing into their concrete berths in the harbour. They had been out the night before, ranging the enemy coast, in a pale, blazing wake of foam, in a swirling confusion of swinging searchlights, streams of tracer bullets, underwater torpedo explosions that had sent black fountains of water three hundred feet in the air. Now they were coming in mildly, in the Sunday morning sunlight, at quarter-speed, looking playful and holiday-like, like speedboats at a summer resort. A town at war, Noah repeated silently.
At the end of the street there was a bronze monument, dark and worn by the Channel winds. Noah read the inscription, which solemnly celebrated the British soldiers who had passed this spot on their way to France in the years between 1914 and 1918 and did not return.
And again, in 1939, Noah thought, and on the way back, in 1940, from Dunkirk. What monument would a soldier read in Dover twenty years from now? what battles would they bring to his mind?
Noah kept walking. He had the town to himself. The road climbed up the famous cliffs out across the windswept meadows that reminded Noah, as so much of England did, of a park kept in good repair by a careful, loving and not very imaginative gardener.
He walked swiftly, swinging his arms. Now, without the rifle, without the pack, without the helmet and canteen and bayonet scabbard, walking seemed like a light and effortless movement, a joyous, spontaneous expression of the body's health on a winter morning.
When he reached the top of the cliff, the mist had disappeared and the Channel sparkled playfully, blue and glittering all the way to France. In the distance stood the cliff of Calais. Noah stopped and stared across the water. France was amazingly near-by. As he watched he could almost imagine that he saw a truck, moving slowly, along a climbing road, past a church whose steeple rose into the washed air. Probably it would be an army truck, he thought, and in it German soldiers. Perhaps on their way to church. It was a queer sensation, to look at enemy ground, even at this distance, and know that, in their glasses, they could probably see you, and all in a kind of trance-like, distance-born truce. Somehow, you could not help but feel that in a war, so long as you could see the enemy, or he you, killing should follow immediately. There was something artificial, spuriously arranged, about this peaceful observation of each other; it was an aspect of war that left you uneasy and dissatisfied. In a curious way, Noah thought, it would make it harder to kill them later.
He stood on top of the cliff, regarding the doubtful, clear coast of Europe. The town of Calais, with its docks and spires and rooftops and bare trees rising into the wartime sky, lay still in its Sunday-morning quietness, just like the town of Dover below him. He wished Roger were here with him today. Roger would have had something to say, some obscure, significant point of information about the two linked towns, twins through history, sending fishing smacks, tourists, ambassadors, soldiers, pirates, high explosive, back and forth at each other across the years. How sad that Roger had been sent to die among the palm trees and jungle moss of the Philippines. How much more fitting, if he had to die, if the bullet had reached him as he stormed the beach of the France he had loved so well, or been struck down riding into a country village near Paris, smiling, looking for the proprietor of the cafe he had drunk with all one summer – or if he had been in Italy when his death had reached him, fighting perhaps in the very fishing village through which he had passed up to Rome on his way from Naples in the autumn of 1936, recognizing the church, the city hall, the face of a girl, as he fell… Death, Noah realized, had its peculiar degrees of justness, and Roger's death had been low on that particular scale.
"You make time and you make love dandy. You make swell molasses candy, But, honey, are you makin' any money? That's all I want to know…"
Later, Noah decided, after the war, he would come back to this place with Hope. I stood here in this exact spot, and it was absolutely quiet, and there was France, looking just the way it looks now. I don't know to this day exactly why I picked Dover for what might have been my last leave. I don't know… curiosity, maybe, a desire to see what it was like. A town at war, really at war, a look at the place where the enemy was… I'd been told so much about them, how they fought, what weapons they used, what horrors they'd committed – I wanted at least to see the place where they were. And, then, sometimes there was shelling, and I'd never heard a gun fired in anger, as they used to say in the Army…
No, Noah decided, we won't talk about the war at all. We'll walk here hand in hand, on a summer's day, and sit down next to each other on the cropped grass, and look out across the Channel and say, "Look, you can almost see the church steeple in France. Isn't it a lovely afternoon?…"
The sound of an explosion shivered the quiet. Noah looked down at the harbour. A slow, lazy puff of smoke, small and toylike in the distance, was rising from the spot where the shell had hit among some warehouses. Then there was another explosion and another. The puffs of smoke blossomed in a random pattern throughout the roofs of the town. A chimney slowly crumbled, too far away to make a sound, collapsing softly like bricks made out of candy. Seven times the explosions sounded. Then there was silence again. The town seemed to go back without effort into its Sabbath sleep.