The Army wasn’t sitting and waiting for the result of such inquisitions. As fast as tanks and jeeps and armored cars got ashore, the men would pile into them and they would go off, by one road or another, to find out for themselves where the enemy was and how eager he was for a fight. When they found groups assembled by the roadside with their hands in the air, waiting to be captured, they would radio word, and ground forces would come in trucks to disarm the prisoners and keep the Free French away from them. Two divisions of American paratroopers and airborne troops had been dropped at strategic points, and these had seen some fighting, but now most of them were guarding prisoners and waiting to be relieved of the burden.
After darkness fell Lanny and Jerry were treated to a meal and then told to be ready to move. Hours were irregular in the Army, and surprises frequent. Jerry had been sure they would travel up the Rhône, and that would mean first going westward, across the delta lands of that great river. But they were put into a car and driven to the north, into the mountains from which Lanny had come. These roads were mere shelves along the sides of precipices and the cars were using only dim parking lights. There was nothing Lanny could do to help, so he leaned back and closed his eyes, and when he fell asleep he dreamed that he was shut up in a concrete mixer, one of the modern sort that turns round and round as the vehicle moves along the road. Perhaps it was the guns which he heard up ahead, echoing among the mountains like thunder; but thunder sometimes stops, whereas the guns went on and on. There would be few hours of the day or night when Lanny wouldn’t hear them during the next month.
He had become a camp follower of the Army. He would follow just close enough to get all the backwash; to hear the shooting but not to be in danger from it; to see the ruins and the wreckage; and to hear the groans of wounded men, but not himself to suffer anything worse than discomfort. He was a part of the Army brain, which had to be kept safe; they told him that, and it should have satisfied him, but sometimes he tried to help where he shouldn’t, and gave his food away to women and children for whom he was sorry. When the discomfort became too great he would recall the ribald song he had heard the recruits singing on route marches at home, in which they told one another that they were in the Army now, they were not behind the plow, they would never get rich—and they called themselves a bad name which happened to make a rhyme.
VIII
This “flying column” came to a town where there had been fighting, but it was over. Lanny was put up in a second-class inn—the Quartermaster Corps had a squad car which followed behind the troops and picked out the best for the higher brass and the second and third-class for riffraff such as translators. Anyhow, there were bedbugs, and Lanny wasn’t surprised or shocked, for he had taken walking trips through Provence and knew what goes with the romance and picturesqueness of the Old World. After two or three hours he was glad to go to work again and get his sleep while riding in a concrete mixer.
Here were not only more “krauts” to be interrogated, but also the Free French, the maquisards. They came down from the mountains, on bicycles, in horse carts, in wood-burning busses which sometimes gave out and had to be pushed up the small hills so that they could coast down the long ones. They were for the most part young fellows, of draft age, high-spirited and unwilling to be enslaved; they were tough and inured to hardships, the sort with whom Lanny had hidden out in the mountains of northeastern Italy. They were enraptured to meet a comrade, and they told hair-raising stories. They were armed for the most part with hunting rifles and some had old-fashioned pistols fit only for museums; with these they had fought Germans armed with machine guns, and had not done so badly. They had wrecked the railroads and most of the bridges in this mountainous land, and perhaps they had made a mistake, they said, laughing, for it would slow up the pursuit.
What they all wanted was to get a Garand rifle and a bandolier of cartridges, and be allowed to go after the enemy. The Army took them on as scouts, paying them the French equivalent of two dollars a day, which was magnificent. They had to swear that they would not kill the German stragglers or the French collaborateurs; both were to be made prisoners, the former to be shipped off to the prisoner camps which had been built for the fighting in North Africa, and the latter to be imprisoned and tried under French law. After that the Partisans would go happily off, and the Army would be kept well supplied with facts about the Ninteenth German Army it was pursuing. Wherever the enemy stopped to resist, the Army would radio the location to the nearest airstrip, and the planes would come and make his life hardly worth living.
Such was the P.A.’s life for the next month. He learned, as men do, to accommodate himself to rough circumstances. He learned that the Army had a marvelous new insecticide called DDT; it was made into bombs, and you turned a little screw and it shot out a fine spray; a few seconds of that over and in your bed and you could sleep; it also came in the form of a powder, and you dusted your clothing with it to ward off lice. You learned to help work your car out of the mud when it rained, and when the earth dried you learned to eat gray dust and like it. You learned to carry some food with you, and to heat it with a little gasoline poured into sand or soft ground. You had a warm overcoat and put it on at night—for the high Alps, covered with snow, lay only a few miles to the east. You learned to sleep whenever you were not working or eating.
IX
The route led straight to the north, through the towns of Valensole and Castellane. It was famous as the road which Napoleon had taken on his return from Elba; the French had flocked to him then as now they were flocking to the Americans. The modern French have divided the province into departments: Alpes Maritimes, Alpes Basses, Alpes Hautes—that is, Sea Alps, Low Alps, High Alps. In the first group the rivers flow to the Mediterranean, and you travel along the sides of gorges. When you get farther north, the land drains into the Rhône, to the westward; there you climb through one mountain pass and go down into a valley, cross a swift stream and then climb into another pass, each higher than the one before. When you came to a bridge that had been blown-up, you had to wait while the combat engineers who boast of having hairy ears put a new bridge together out of ready-cut sections of steel. Watching that sight you could be proud of your country.
Indeed, Lanny Budd was proud all the time. Surely if you were going to have war, this was the right kind to have: war in which other people had done the job of tiring out the enemy, and all you had to do was to chase him three or four hundred miles, for which purpose you were provided with an increasing swarm of vehicles. Lanny didn’t see much of the infantry—they didn’t have time to catch up. The motorized men considered themselves the crack troops and would do the job and let the “dogfaces” clean up and collect prisoners.
The “old man” who directed this chase was a Brigadier General Butler, and Lanny never saw him. Later he got a glimpse of General Patch, commander of the whole of Operation Anvil; a tall, nervous-appearing man, who bore the nickname of Sandy. A couple of days after the landing he issued an order which was read to groups of the men wherever they could be reached, telling them that the enemy was stunned and that they should “press on, regardless of fatigue and possible shortages of food and equipment.” Thus the team of Lanny and Jerry occasionally had to forage for their grub. It was no trouble, for the peasants came out with chickens and eggs and all the kindly fruits of the earth, ready to swap them for American luxuries or even give them for love.
Lanny recalled Browning’s poem: “It was roses, roses, all the way, and myrtle mixed in my path like mad.” The people in the villages put out bedsheets in token of surrender, or the tricolor, or crude imitations of the Stars and Stripes as tokens of joy. They had waited so long for this day, and they hadn’t expected it so soon. They stood by the roadside and cheered; they tried to drop peaches and pears into the men’s laps, and the girls climbed onto the running boards and hugged and kissed their deliverers. “This is the damnedest ever,” the men said, and it made them feel proud of themselves; they tried not to think about the buddies w
ho had missed the show by getting drowned in the surf or shot while storming the fortifications. This was still going on—there were always gunshots ahead, and men coming back on litters, often with a blanket over their faces.
As a rule men at the front know only the tiny sector where they march and fight; but Lanny, being in close contact with other officers, could ask questions. He had told them why he was so concerned about Cannes, and they reported that the city was being pounded by sea, land, and air. It held out for ten days, and of course that meant that whatever Charlot had tried to do, he had failed. Lanny had no way of finding out what had happened to him. Jerry Pendleton was also on tenterhooks, because his wife and children were in Cannes. After the surrender he could hope to find out what had happened to them and to the pension.
Marseille, the great port which the Army had figured to take on D-day-plus-fifty, was taken in eight days, and Toulon in twelve. In the former city there had been a revolution, and the Germans and their collaborators were hunted like wild beasts. Both those ports would be put to immediate use; their capture would mean supplies not merely for Operation Anvil, but for the armies in the north via railroads and highways.
X
And what about Paris? Lanny, who had risked being put in the guardhouse in the effort to get help to that city, learned that it had been liberated on August 25, the same day as Cannes; but he had no way to learn what had happened to the de Bruyne family or to Raoul’s wife and her friends. By that time his flying column had come into the department of Isère, a high land of forests and vineyards, pastures for cattle and horses, fields of wheat and rye, and mulberry trees for silk culture. It was harvest time, and the peasants were hard at work in the fields; they stopped to wave to Americans and let them know that they had come at the right moment—to keep the Germans from sending all the food away. In the middle of Isère, on the river of that name, is the ancient city of Grenoble, with a famed university, and factories that made twenty million pairs of gloves every year. The workers told Lanny that they would have to change their models now, American hands being longer and thinner than German.
From there were roads leading westward, downhill into the valley of the Rhône. The strategy of this bold dash became apparent; it wasn’t to take a lot of mountain scenery and glove factories; it was to outflank the enemy who had been putting up stubborn resistance all the way up the Rhône. Fast columns rushed down the valleys of two rivers, the Isère and the Drôme, that empty into the Rhône. They posted themselves on the heights which overlook the narrow valley, and their artillery fire wrecked the enemy vehicles and blocked the roads. The enemy forces, raked by machine-gun fire and bombed incessantly from the air, had to fight their way through a twelve-mile stretch of death and destruction. It was a badly shattered Nineteenth German Army which got through and fought its way on up the river.
The team of Lanny and Jerry stayed with the column which rolled northwestward and came to the Rhône at Lyon, a great manufacturing city, which welcomed them with a fervor they would never forget. More roses and more myrtle! After that the route was northward, a main highway over which the son of Budd-Erling had motored times beyond counting. There was enemy resistance all the way, but only what the military men call delaying action. Back where the translators worked there was the sound of guns, but no steel or lead. The Allies had command of the air, and only twice during this long anabasis did Lanny and his pal have to dive into a ditch.
Most of the time it was routine business, asking the same questions of unshaven and exhausted, dust-caked and stinking Germans: Some were frightened and some surly; by long practice Lanny had learned to recognize different types and what technique would work best with each. By comparing one statement with others he could be sure which were lying. There was nothing he could do to the liars, and he didn’t want to; poor devils, they were trying to help their country. The easiest way was to tell everything, and perhaps get a cigarette as a reward.
Some of these unfortunates were gray-haired old men, and some were boys of sixteen. They had endured incredible sufferings on the Russian front, the Italian front; they had lost fingers and toes, noses and ears, by freezing. One old man had had his legs run over by a tank, and had survived, as he said, because the mud was so soft. One boy, tending an antiaircraft gun in Berlin, had been deafened by a bomb burst and recently had been wounded because, being deaf, he did not dive into a ditch as fast as the others. All had been promised an easy time ordering Frenchmen about; now they told with horror of American planes which had chased them on the roads and made life a nightmare. To the last man and boy they had swallowed Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda, and they talked about the “Wuwas” that were going to save Germany. One boasted that all South England was already in ruins and that twelve million people had been killed. Another talked proudly about the “V-4,” of which Lanny had never heard mention, which was designed to blow up the entire main island of Britain!
In the course of a month of such service the P.A. interviewed several thousand men, and only once did it happen that he was recognized. A sturdy SS sergeant had been in Hitler’s Leibstandarte at the Berghof, on duty at the gate, and had seen the Führer’s American friend arriving and departing several times. The days of Lanny’s posing as a Nazi were over forever, so he didn’t have to worry. He knew that he wouldn’t get much out of that fellow, and he didn’t. Let him go back into the horde, and be shipped to North Africa, and from there to America; he would be well fed in a stockade, and in due course would come back to Germany to make another try at world domination. Lanny had no hope for the men who had grown up under the Nazi discipline, but he thought that something might be done with the German children, if anybody was willing to take the trouble.
XI
The route followed the River Saône, which flows into the Rhône at Lyon. Straight north, and it was more of a picnic than ever. The enemy was in flight, and didn’t have far to go, for at points to the eastward troops of Georgie Patton’s Third Army were waiting. At Dijon some twenty thousand of the enemy were caught between the two forces and brought to surrender. That meant a respite for the translator team, for when a whole army has surrendered what it knows becomes of interest only to historians; the military men move on to new fields. Lanny had time to beg a couple of Paris newspapers from Third Army officers, and to read them and learn what a lot of history he had been missing in one fateful month.
The General with the two pearl-handled revolvers had been having a joyride wilder than had ever been dreamed by any Napoleon or Alexander. His armies had romped all the way across France and into Luxembourg, and he was now defending bridgeheads which he had established across the Moselle River, between Luxembourg and Germany. Whole divisions had been surrendering to him. At the same time the British had broken out of Normandy and had been making an equally spectacular dash, getting across the Seine and rolling along the coast of the Channel, thirty or forty miles a day, surrounding and investing one small port after another. This included Dunkerque—and what pleasant news that must have made for Rick, who had been there with Lanny! More important yet, it meant taking one after another of the launching sites of the buzzbombs which had been making London so miserable. The newspapers reported a partial lifting of the blackout in that long-suffering city.
Other items had been left out of the papers, but Lanny gathered them from officers whose friendship and confidence he had won. The sudden and unforeseen gains had put a tremendous strain upon the American Army’s transport. Their artificial harbor had been pretty much wrecked by storms, and the enemy garrisons were still holding on to the principal ports. Le Havre had only just been taken, and Boulogne and Calais were still under siege. To carry supplies the long distances to the front the Army had set up a system called the Red Ball Express, an endless chain of trucks rolling eastward on one highway and coming back on another. New York City had got used to one-way streets, and now Europe was being taught about one-way streets three or four hundred miles long! So great was the demand for gasolin
e that pipe-lines were being laid on the bed of the Channel, and also across France. Patton’s Army was being supplied by air, and had come to a halt because it couldn’t get enough.
XII
Lanny had given his family the designation of his unit; you didn’t give an address, for you never knew where you would be, and even if you had known you wouldn’t have been allowed to tell. It was the business of the APO, Army Post Office, to find you wherever you had been sent; and soon after Lanny’s Seventh Army made contact with Patton’s Third, he received a letter from Paris. Captain Laurel Creston was there! She had managed at last to get permission to cross the Channel, and now was completing an article about how the French had welcomed their liberation. She wanted so much to have Lanny read it and was sending a carbon copy, taking the precaution to put it in a separate envelope. Lanny received the letter, but not the manuscript, and he never knew why—it was the way of things in war.
Straightway the P.A. made application for a week’s leave to visit Paris. He wanted to make sure that Washington knew where he was, and that there was no call for him; he promised to come back and work for another month unless there was a call. His Seventh Army had been taken into what was to be the Sixth Army Group, and it was heading eastward, presumably for the Belfort Gap, a wide valley leading into Germany just north of Switzerland. Jerry was going along; he was a very happy lieutenant-translator—having received a letter from his wife. Cerise had boarded a lot of German officers during the war, but they had not molested her—they had been trying to win the friendship of the French. She added that they hadn’t looted the pension before their surrender, the reason being that they had been surrounded.
Lanny managed to wangle permission to be flown on a transport plane which was taking permanently incapacitated men home via Paris. “Sad Sacks” they were, but the very thought of home gave them new life. The P.A. chatted with as many as he could, but he only had an hour or so before he was set down at Le Bourget.
One Clear Call I Page 72