by Leo Litwak
I didn’t share his sympathy for Captain Roth. It wasn’t until I suffered my own loss of confidence that I understood what Lucca knew all along, that Roth wasn’t suited to command, that it was torture for Roth to keep up appearances. He may have looked the part—held tight, braced like a West Point cadet—but he was split by the strain. Lucca tried to keep him intact. It was a vain kindness.
Sergeant Lucca should have been our commanding officer.
MAURICE SULLY CAME to me one night, after we had quit digging.
“I hear you speak French.”
“Not much. Just high school French.”
“Good enough.”
“Good enough for what?”
“We can do better than C rations, Doc.”
The next evening after digging he asked me to come with him and his buddy Nagy to forage the countryside. We might find fresh eggs, meat, wine. Who knows? Maybe even mademoiselles.
Nagy asked Maurice, “You going to eat them, too, the mademoiselles?”
“No better source of protein,” Maurice said.
The stumpy, muscle-bound Nagy was always at Maurice’s heels. You could ask, “Walking your dog, Maurice?” and Nagy wouldn’t take offense. He even seemed pleased. We asked, “Fed your animal lately, Maurice?” and Nagy got a giggle out of that.
The giggle about feeding had to do with an incident when Maurice Sully first joined us in Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, just before the division broke camp and went overseas. He was assigned the cot next to mine, a lean, weathered man with red hair, a trim ruddy mustache, a sharp, foxy face. When he smiled he bared his teeth. He was older than we were, in his late twenties. Maurice had enlisted to escape trouble but he’d found more trouble instead. You could see the evidence on the arm of his fatigue shirt where there was the ghost of staff sergeant stripes. He had spent time in the stockade and been reduced to one of us.
When he first came into the barracks he saw the medical kits on my foot locker. “Got something for what ails me, Doc?”
“I can handle blisters, amputations, clap, stuff like that.”
“What’s in your bag for amputations?”
“Tourniquets to stop the bleeding, morphine to kill the pain.”
“I’ll take morphine. I got pain to kill.”
I treated the request as a joke but afterward kept a close eye on my kits.
Maurice said he’d been in show business. To prove it he sang, did magic tricks. He pulled a pencil from his nose, shoved coins up his ears, did elaborate shuffles with a deck of cards. After a few PX beers he sang in a surprising tenor, a contrast to his hoarse, cigarette-eroded speaking voice, a song that finished with tenderness. Sleep tight, sweet children, time to hit the road.
A simple, sweet lyric from a man who wasn’t sweet and certainly wasn’t simple.
“I am an explorer of life,” he once said to me. “I go to the border, say ‘Fuck you’ to no-trespassing signs, and cross over. Who knows what they’re trying to keep from me?”
This is how Nagy came to be Maurice’s dog. At first Nagy hated Maurice. His boundaries were sharp and Maurice baited him to the edge to watch him teeter. Nagy’s rage and inarticulateness made him seem comic. His large-featured face disguised nothing. He was a terrible poker player who never learned from his losses. He was a perfect mark for any trickster willing to risk his fury. You could watch the progress of his thinking—a dim awareness, an increasing recognition, then a blowup when he realized he was the butt of a joke. Provoking him was one of Maurice’s entertainments.
During our last days in Wisconsin we went on maneuvers deep into pine woods. We hiked fifteen miles with full packs to reach our bivouac area. The kitchen wasn’t yet set up and we were hungry. There was a pond nearby; we stripped and went in. Someone caught a frog and started tossing it around. It reached Maurice and he said, “I’m hungry as hell,” opened his mouth, and pressed his teeth down on the frog.
Stanky said he’d pay a buck to see Maurice bite all the way through.
“Okay,” Maurice said, “but I need a couple slices of bread.”
Someone went for bread.
Maurice said, “I use ketchup on my seafood.” Someone got a dab of ketchup from the kitchen. By this time he had the whole platoon as audience. He told Hamilton to hold the palm-sized frog while he smeared ketchup on the bread. He put the frog between slices of bread, squeezing tight.
“You going to eat it like that, alive?” Nagy asked.
“Maybe I should kill it first. Naw,” he said. “For five bucks more I’ll eat it alive like the Hunky asked me.”
“I didn’t ask you!” Nagy shouted.
Hamilton offered a buck. Fisher and Stanky said they’d make up the rest.
Sergeant Lucca, coming from company headquarters, asked what was happening.
“Maurice is having some live seafood.”
Lucca said, “Gimme that.” He pulled the frog sandwich from Maurice and let the frog spring free.
“I would have ate it.”
“Not while I’m around,” Lucca said.
A few days later we saw a movie at the post theater with Rita Hayworth. Back in barracks Maurice said, “Ooh, I could dig up there with a spoon it looks so tasty.”
Nagy asked, “You’d eat that?”
“Rita? Any day, Hunky.”
It was a time when no working-class man spoke of oral sex save with repugnance or as a joke, and Maurice didn’t seem to be joking. Nagy, a burly stump, with a Neanderthal head, a truck driver in civilian life, asked, “You got no disgust?”
“Don’t tell me you only eat what they tell you to eat. No mind of your own, Hunky?”
Nagy said, “I ought to take you out in back of the barracks and kick the shit out of you.”
That night, lights out, we heard a panicked Nagy shout, “What you doing on my bed?”
Nagy’s bed exploded. They crashed on the floor and struggled. Then Nagy said, in a strangled voice, “Let go.” After a moment’s silence he said, “You’re a strong fucker.”
“It’s what I eat, makes me strong.”
They all laughed, and afterward, Nagy hung around Maurice and he seemed pleased when he was called Maurice’s dog.
LATE IN THE DAY, almost dark, flecks of snow still in the air, Maurice and Nagy and I left the company area and met a farmer walking down the road. I told him we were looking for food and drink. He said, “Go to Albert, who likes Americans.” He pointed up the hill to a farmhouse.
The snow on the road was packed hard by military traffic. In the surrounding hills and fields the snow was deep and smooth. The trees on the hillcrest were heavy with snow. We followed wagon tracks up the hill and saw chimney smoke from the farmhouse, glimmers of light beneath blackout curtains. Monsieur Albert, tall and burly, met us at the door. He wore a dark turtleneck wool sweater and heavy ridged corduroy trousers and wooden clogs. His dense sandy mustache was winged on both ends.
“Nous sommes Américains,” I told him.
“Oui,” he said, “C’est évident,” and welcomed us in to meet his wife and children, two young boys and sixteenyear-old Jeanelle.
We entered the room in which they dined. They had almost finished eating. There was a long plank table with the residue of their meal in the center of the room. We breathed a cozy aroma of garlic and rosemary and apples and mutton.
We’d come from our slit trenches to this real home with a wood-burning oven fed by oak logs. Maurice said, “Tell him that we who come from hell have stumbled into heaven.”
I tried to express our pleasure but my French failed me. Jeanelle chimed in with a halting gradeschool English, a shy, child’s voice, offering to translate. She was plump and timid, a plain, blue-eyed girl, with tousled dirty-blond hair, dressed in a fisherman’s wool sweater and dark wool skirt, and stockings and clogs like her dad’s.
I told Jeanelle we had been living in the snow and just being inside was a great pleasure.
She translated for her father, who urged us to warm up on f
ood and drink. He offered a sampling of his apple orchard—hot cider, cider beer, a potent hard cider. His wife brought out sausage and bread.
Maurice groaned with enthusiasm.
“You like?” Jeanelle asked.
Liked? Loved, he said. The bread, the head cheese, the hard salami, the spiced apple cider, the hard cider—it was food for royalty.
Maurice sang for our supper. He accompanied himself on the harmonica. He blew a tune, sang, blew some more. He picked out songs with some foreign vocabulary, silly, innocuous songs that he twisted so they made a different impression than what they were meant to convey. He sang almost mincingly of the different ways Europeans said “yes”—si, si, oui, oui, ja, ja, da, da—when a simple “yes” would do.
He and Nagy drank fast and were quickly high on hard cider. Albert kept pouring.
Maurice sang “Frère Jacques,” first in French—the only French he could speak—and then in a raunchy English version, perhaps invented on the spot. I told him it was childish, to cut it out, but that only set him off. One verse went,
Are you sleeping, are you sleeping,
Brother John, Brother John?
Who’s in bed with you, sir?
Our sister? Then let’s do her.
She’s family, she’s family.
Albert sang along with the French, beamed at the unintelligible English, urged his wife to join in.
She giggled and refused.
Albert held up a slice of strong cheese on a blade for Maurice’s inspection. Maurice breathed deeply. “Ahhh!”
“You like?”
Nagy said, “My buddy will eat anything. He’ll eat your cheese, your horse, your cow, your sheep, your daughter, anything.”
I told Nagy to shut up.
Maurice complimented Jeanelle on her English.
“I learn in school,” she said.
“What else they teach you?”
“I no understand.”
“They teach you to conjugate love?”
“Pardon?”
“They teach you fucking?”
“He makes jokes,” I said to Jeanelle.
She didn’t know English well enough to understand his jokes.
Albert invited us to dine with his family as long as we remained stationed near his farm.
On our way back I told Maurice I didn’t like his trifling with these generous, simple people.
“No one’s simple, Doc.”
I refused to go back to Albert’s farm with him and Nagy. He said, “Suit yourself.” Now that he’d found Jeanelle he didn’t need me to interpret.
A few days later he brought Jeanelle to our company area and paraded her before the men so everyone could see what his foraging had turned up in this frozen countryside. He steered her with a hand at the small of her back, pulling her around for introductions. He handled her in a careless way; she was docile and unresisting, a poor trophy, no tasty dish, no fantasy mademoiselle, just a plump country girl, good enough for Maurice who took what he could get.
For him, all Europe was ours for the taking. Before we were done he tried to get it all—the food, the liquor, the money, the Leicas, the Dresden china, the Lugers, the Swiss watches, the ceremonial blades, the family silver, the women. There was no issue as to how the loot was acquired, whether by barter or cash, by seduction or brazen force.
He ate everything.
• • •
LUCCA SAW ME hanging out with Maurice. “What do you see in that jerk?”
I assured him I didn’t take Maurice seriously. “He’s for laughs.”
“Stay away from him, kid. He’s nothing but trouble. Hang around him and it’ll rub off.”
What I couldn’t say to Lucca—we had no language for such notions—was that Maurice had something I wanted. I wanted to be carefree and pitiless, able to cross into forbidden territory. It wasn’t a trip Lucca would have understood. I was the aid man—technician fifth grade—assigned to the First Platoon, A Company. Those were my boundaries. He expected me to stick to my station and its duties.
“Would you want someone like him around your sister?”
“I don’t have a sister.”
“Your mother, then?”
It was a laughable idea, my mother and Maurice. Lucca didn’t like it that I laughed. There were times when I felt diminished by Lucca. He had a way of reminding me that I was an inexperienced nineteen-year-old kid. What right did anyone have to consider me a kid? I’d treated the wounded, eased the dying, certified the dead. I had the authority to send men back to salvation or to keep them up front in hell.
Only nineteen years old but I was called “Father” by a dying German soldier. We were near the German border, marching through a bleak, snow-drenched forest. We came to a frozen meadow and someone pointed to the far end of the meadow. Two German soldiers struggled through snow toward the trees, maybe two hundred yards away. The captain told Rebel to see if he could hit them. Rebel knelt, aimed, fired. One went down, the other made it into the woods. The downed man waved at us and the captain told me to go to him, and I asked for a rifleman to accompany me since I wasn’t armed.
“What are you afraid of, Corporal? You’re a noncombatant. It’s a violation of the Geneva convention to shoot you.” Sergeant Lucca intervened and told Rebel to go with me.
The wounded German was no one to fear. I could see as we got close that he was an unlikely soldier, old and fragile, among the dregs the Germans were beginning to shove into combat. He must have been trying to surrender when we spotted him. He didn’t have a weapon. He lay twisted around his right leg. He wore a gray wool uniform and cap, his eyes huge, his face pinched and unshaven, his mouth stretched as if shrieks were coming out, but it was a smothered sound, Ohhhhhhh. Ohhhhhh. He saw the red crosses on my arms and helmet and reached for me and cried, “Vater!” Father. A spike of femoral bone was sticking through his trousers. I slit his pants, bared the wound at midthigh. He’d shit small, hard, gray turds—what you might see in the spoor of an animal. The shit had worked itself down near the fracture. The stink was pungent and gagging. I put sulfa powder on the exposed bone, covered it with a compress, tied a loose tourniquet above the wound high on the thigh. He was graying fast, going into shock. He said, “Vater, ich sterbe.” Father, I’m dying. I stuck morphine into his thigh. He wasn’t eased and I gave him another eighth of a grain. I watched him lapse into shock—lips blue, sweat cold, skin gray, pupils distended, pulse weak and fluttery.
I felt as if I, too, had been shot. I yearned for him to be dead so we’d both be released from his pain.
WHEN MAURICE SAID no one was simple he couldn’t have meant the dead. The living are complicated but the dead have been stripped of all meaning.
We saw them coifed in crab-shaped helmets, dressed in gray uniforms, mouths agape, gray teeth, gray hands, worn boots, no identities, indistinguishable one from the other, dead meat, nothing to grieve.
There were times when we’d squat near the dead and break open our packages of K rations and eat the processed ham and eggs and the powdered orange juice. We’d light cans of Sterno under canteen cups and heat the bouillon and the sour coffee and afterward lie exhausted among the dead, heads braced on downturned helmets, a cigarette for those who smoked, feeling neither the misery nor pleasure of being alive, snoozing until Sergeant Lucca prodded us. We were stupefied by the death we’d breathed, and stumbled toward combat clutched by the fear that we, too, could be made simple.
We ate among the dead, slept among the dead, tried to rid ourselves of pity for the dead.
Pity hurt. I felt it in my belly and my heart and my temples. It tightened my throat and lips and made me gassy. It was a hurt that went on and on, and the only cure for it was to become pitiless.
That’s what I wanted from Maurice, the power to not give a fuck.
CAPTAIN ROTH ASKED for a patrol to cross the Sauer and bring out casualties from the front, and Sergeant Lucca chose Maurice and Nagy’s squad for the mission. Maybe Lucca hoped Mauri
ce would screw up and be sent back to the stockade. Maurice strapped on his gear, and he and Nagy and six others crossed into Germany ahead of us. The squad leader was killed when they entered a booby-trapped pillbox, and Maurice took over. They returned the next day, Maurice leading the squad.
“He showed us the way,” Nagy told us. “He took us in and took us out. The man just don’t give a fuck.” That was how he understood the source of Maurice’s courage. “He just don’t give a fuck.”
Lieutenant Klamm put Maurice in for promotion to assistant platoon sergeant. Lucca didn’t want Maurice as a noncom in our platoon. He considered Maurice an unreliable drunk who had already lost his stripes.
The lieutenant said, “I agree with General Patton, who says, ‘I don’t trust a man who don’t drink.’”
Lucca said, “You don’t have to trust a man just because he does.”
We liked Lieutenant Klamm. He was from Massillon, Ohio, and before the war had been assistant manager of a Kroger’s market. He had found his true path in the army and had no intention of returning to Ohio. We liked and respected him because there was nothing he asked us to do that he wouldn’t try himself. He never dithered; he plunged straight ahead.
He was twenty-nine years old, a few years older than most of his troops. He had tamed his appearance with a brush cut and clipped mustache to give an impression of firm maturity, but he could be lured out of character by Maurice, who had the knack of bringing out the locker-room kid in all of us. After a few beers and some raunchy lyrics, the lieutenant, red-faced and roaring, could behave like a kid. Sober again, he stiffened behind the barrier of rank, slightly pompous and formal.
Maurice sometimes sang for us after chow, and the lieutenant requested offbeat songs like “Hold Tight,” and Maurice knew how to satisfy GI desires. He sang “Hold Tight” in a way that insinuated his whole repertoire of eating—frogs, mademoiselles, whatever else provoked his appetite. He sang “My Favorite Dish, Fish,” with such lewd emphasis that the lieutenant cracked up. Did we understand what Maurice meant by fish? “Fish, fish,” the lieutenant said. “Get it?” He didn’t spell out the innuendo. He passed on the hint of edible sex with a guffaw and an elbow in the ribs, as though he were passing on a laughable absurdity rather than news of his own unconfessed hunger.