Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “Someone said to me last week that Istanbul is where we flirt with the Germans who want to carry on an affair with us.”

  “So is Switzerland. There you don’t have to worry about bugs in the bed. I thought Istanbul would be exciting, reeking of wild unbridled sexuality and spices. Instead I got a dreadful case of body lice. Don’t gape at me—I got rid of them.”

  “My dear Zachary,” Jeff imitated his friend’s lordly tone, “if you think any parasites you caught would find me a virgin to their teeth or claws, you don’t understand how I passed the last few years. I’ve fed enough lice to populate Istanbul.” Jeff sighed. “I wish I’d gone with you. We never went farther east than Thessaloníki, a city Bernice and I always enjoyed.”

  “There are other, more imminent fleshpots,” Zach said with a tantalizing smirk.

  He was painting so fiercely he simply drifted socially in Zach’s wake until one night the gaunt blonde who had gone to bed with Zach wakened him by climbing on top. “He’s too drunk to get it up,” she said in a cold, precise voice, unaffected by the gin she had consumed. “How about you?” She had her hand on his prick as he sat up.

  In the morning Zach was annoyed. “Someone is going to wring that tramp’s neck,” he announced. “That was sneaky of you.”

  “Zach, I was had. I was taken without permission and used like a dildo.”

  “You don’t adore me enough,” Zach said darkly. “You lack appreciation.”

  “I appreciate you all day. At night I sleep. What do you want?”

  “More love.” Zach grinned sourly. “Everybody should love me. But you love no one. Not even your inestimable sister. You merely permit those of us adjacent to love you. You take it for granted, like water out of the faucet or the postal service. Your beauty makes you cold and passive.”

  That decided him he needed some anchor other than Zach. Jeff accompanied Zach to about half the parties he attended and some of the houses he visited, but when he settled on a steady lover, he chose a fresh-faced art student from Wales who was working in a munitions factory. All English women between eighteen and sixty had been conscripted for factory work, for nursing or the armed forces. Mary Llewellyn had translucent pale rosy skin like fine china and dark brown curls that popped out from under her turban. She was a hefty bottom-heavy girl with well-muscled and magnificently turned and rounded arms and legs. She liked to laugh, in and out of bed, and she could put away a quart of beer without pausing. Zach found her plebeian.

  “Really, Jeff, when I consider what Mother has introduced you to. You can lead a horse to champagne but he’d rather drink warm beer.”

  “She takes good care of me,” Jeff said honestly. He did not tell Zach the most important attraction, that he could talk art with her. He had not been able to do that with anyone since the group of painters he had met in Taos. She knew about shows and trends and galleries and who was doing what and where. She understood his problems finding the supplies he needed. She was close friends with a one-legged muralist named Tom Knacker and gradually through the two of them, Jeff met painters, now working for the British government. To Zach he said only, “I like her body. And she likes sex.”

  “They all do,” Zach said mournfully. “Where are the fainting frigid virgins of yesteryear whose maidenheads could only be stormed by a battering ram? Gone, all gone. War is the most reliable aphrodisiac.” He tossed a letter on the coffee table. “Your fair sister writes. News of the hearthside, apple pie put on hold for those of us fighting for our lives in the wilderness of Mayfair and Knightsbridge.”

  Jeff tore open the letter and scanned it quickly. “Bird is trying to fly the coop.”

  “About time, poor lass. She’s been your father’s keeper too many years. Off to a factory job in the wicked city?”

  “No. She’s trying to join some women’s air service.”

  “They’ve had the WAAF over here for three years. Does she really still remember how to fly?”

  “Drop that patronizing tone. She has a commercial license. But The Professor doesn’t want her to go. She wants me to intervene.”

  Zach shook his head. “Poor Bernice. She’ll never cut loose. She has too tender a conscience.”

  “I suspect so,” Jeff said, feeling the peculiar sense of comfort mingled with guilt his sister aroused in him. “I’ll write The Professor, but he has never yet listened to me.”

  In the meantime he spent more and more time painting and more and more time with Mary Llewellyn. He liked her crowd, women art students and their boyfriends, Tom Knacker, young painters. Tom had lost his leg in an auto accident before the war, but everyone assumed it was a war injury, he said. Never been a better time for a one-legged man in London. They were in and out of each other’s studios and even when they were eating stew on a rickety old table and dancing to a phonograph, wherever he turned, he saw paintings and thought about them. They looked at his work as he looked at theirs, and they saw him as one of them.

  I could live like this permanently, Jeff thought. For the first time in his life he could locate no urge to move on. The better he got to know Mary, the more there was to her. Her friends were more suited to him than Zach’s friends. He had liked the crowd around the galleries in Taos, but with a ranch job, he could not hang out with them. Mary’s friends became his friends. He was part of a couple. He painted and he hung out with painters, as if he had finally grown up to the life he had always wanted.

  DUVEY 2

  The Maltese Crossing

  Duvey had sworn he was going to stay off tankers, but he ended up shipping on the Ohio out of Clyde because he ran into his old buddy Ziggy from Detroit, who used to work the ore boats with him. It was too much to pass up, a chance to be with an old friend who was full of gossip about home. Ziggy had just returned from the Murmansk run, in a convoy that had lost half its ships to planes, subs and the weather, and he swore he’d go to hell before he’d go back to Murmansk. Duvey had known Ziggy since high school, a tall gangling basketball player whose hair looked black in the winter and ruddy brown under the sun, with a sharp nose that had a bump midway down it. They’d covered each other’s backs endless times. They’d spent a lot of happy nights drinking beer and listening to jazz.

  They signed up on the Ohio before they knew where it was headed, which turned out to be Malta. That didn’t mean much to either, for Malta was a limey run, but the Mediterranean sounded inviting after the waters off Greenland and Iceland. They could see the escort they were getting: no couple of corvettes and one ancient dowager destroyer. When they sailed out, they were accompanied by two British battleships, the Nelson and the Rodney, four aircraft carriers, six cruisers, a special cruiser bristling with antiaircraft batteries, twenty-four destroyers, four corvettes and four minesweepers—all for their fourteen merchant ships. “Piece of cake,” Duvey said. “Why don’t they give us this kind of cover all the time?”

  Cal, an Aussie who was hanging around with them, laughed at Duvey’s optimism. “Listen, mate, there aint been a convoy got through there since June, and then only two ships. It’s running the bloody fucking gamut with them pounding from all sides. It aint the bloody big Atlantic, you know. You can’t play no hide-and-seek in the Med, it’s just a bathtub full of seamen’s bones.”

  Duvey figured that Aussie just didn’t know what he was talking about, because he’d been on the Pacific till recently. Duvey had heard that Australia and New Zealand were milk runs. Cal had no idea how dangerous the coastal shipping had been, or how many ships the U-boats picked off in the North Atlantic. Duvey’d been a sitting duck on merchantmen. Here they were finally getting some protection, and he figured with the fighting ships around them, they could steam through the jaws of hell.

  He’d heard there were U-boats in the Med, but not the raging packs of them like hungry laughing sharks that surrounded the Atlantic convoys. Besides, he’d always liked it hot. In Scotland it had been damp and dreary, and for the last week it had rained, not his idea of August.

  Cal
hung with them because he was a self-taught politico like Ziggy and the two of them were always arguing about Trotsky and Prince Kropotkin. Ziggy was a highbrow and should have gone to college, but there hadn’t been money and his mother needed his paycheck, so like Duvey, Ziggy had been working since he turned sixteen. He was always reading and always ready to argue. Duvey didn’t know how Ziggy stayed alive when he wasn’t around to watch out for him and the trouble his mouth could get him in. Ziggy had a long reach and he was well coordinated, but he didn’t react fast enough in a fight. Somebody was always getting to his soft belly and doubling him over.

  Cal said Yanks were easier for him to understand than limeys. Limeys had their brains twisted around from being moldy all the time. He said men from countries with a lot of room to spread out in and swing yourself around were naturally looser and didn’t get mental bloody piles.

  During the night of August 9/10, the convoy passed Gibraltar safely, because a dense fog lay in the straits. The coast of Spain was not blacked out, and even through the fog they could see some lights. In the dawn, the mountains of Spain looked grand. Duvey and Ziggy spent a lot of time reminiscing about Detroit, till Duvey began to feel a little homesick. Ziggy said Detroit was jammed with immigrants up from the South to work in the factories. “They recruit them with big promises. Housing’s so tight, people are sleeping in the same bed in shifts. Man, I’m not kidding you. You rent a bed for so many hours, and then it belongs to some other bozo. Guys are working sixty hours a week, really racking it up. Everybody’s got cash in their pockets, but man, half the restaurants in town are closed cause they got nobody to wait tables or work in the kitchen.”

  “Even my old lady’s working,” Duvey said. “She’s running some kind of baby-sitting deal.”

  “My old girlfriend Francine got a job on a streetcar, do you believe it? They’ll be hiring old ladies to drive hack.”

  Just before midday on the eleventh, they saw a small Heinkel following the convoy. One of the aircraft carriers turned to launch but the plane was a scout and withdrew. The maneuvering of the carrier cost everyone some speed, so the next time the scout (or another like it) appeared, although one of the cruisers fired some shells, they mostly ignored it.

  The weather cleared. It was warm with a brisk dry breeze that had a different smell to it, besides the salt. There was a good chop but nothing to set the ship rolling. They were chipping and painting when suddenly the Eagle, the aircraft carrier that had swung around in the morning to launch its planes after the Heinkel, belched fire with a big explosion aft and while everybody was turning to stare, another explosion smote the air, then another, another and finally the whole ship was engulfed in flames within five minutes. Duvey just stood and gaped with the general quarters shrieking. It was a big heavily armed ship, its deck the size of his old high school, and in five minutes it was a mass of flames and twenty minutes later, it was listing. It reminded him of a tanker going up. Then he realized, sure, with all those planes on board, it must be carrying a hell of a lot of fuel. Seeing the carrier burn with those huge black clouds did not make him feel cosy, with tons of aviation fuel slopping under his feet.

  The destroyers were rushing about dropping depth charges. But the sub was gone. No oil slick appeared. It had surfaced only to fire its torpedoes. Unless someone on the Eagle had seen it too late to take evasive action, no one had observed its arrival. All that firepower, and a damned U-boat could sneak up on them. What was the use of that radar stuff? He had never been on a ship equipped with it, but the aircraft carriers and the cruisers and even the destroyers all had those funny screens like open cages turning back and forth. That sub had slipped in and slipped out, leaving the aircraft carrier burning with an enormous black plume of smoke that must be visible for fifty miles.

  Another of the aircraft carriers let off its Spitfires. He and Ziggy thought they were hunting the sub, but the Aussie Cal said they were on their way to Malta and that carrier and the destroyers with her were going back now. “Guess they’ll get there before we will,” Ziggy said, watching the slender planes going east.

  “If we get there at all,” the Aussie said. “One down and one leaving us.”

  That evening the first wave of Italian bombers came over, from Sardinia the crew speculated. They came in low and dropped their torpedoes while the antiaircraft batteries filled the air with noise and smoke. One bomber came down just off their bow, splashing water and oil up and jolting the ship. A few feet closer, and they all would have croaked. It sank like the big piece of metal it was and nobody crawled out.

  When the bombing was over, all the ships reported to each other, a chatter of relief and lively joking, because except for a couple of casualties on one merchantman from the concussion of a near miss, they were uninjured. “Those wop pilots can’t hit their grandmother,” Ziggy said. They were all feeling more cheerful. Another squadron came over in the morning of the next day, but again, damage was slight. Duvey had never been bombed before. It seemed to him not half as scary as the U-boats. You could see the fuckers coming at you and nine tenths of the time they missed. Some of their torpedoes were duds and others just streaked off for the horizon.

  They heard the scuttlebutt that one of the destroyers in the returning carrier’s screen had rammed and sunk an Italian sub off Gibraltar. Duvey hoped it was the one that had burned the Eagle.

  It was early afternoon when they heard the drone of more planes. This time flights were coming in from several angles, dive bombers, fighter bombers, torpedo bombers, all coming in at once. They were not in the sloppy formations of the last two attacks but peeled off one after the other like trained acrobats. These guys were pros. Glancing up, Duvey could see the planes were being choreographed like dancers in a big show.

  “Holy Tomoley,” Ziggy said in a soft voice. “There must be a hundred of the bastards.”

  The dive bombers were the worst. Duvey felt as if they were aiming right for his head. It was hard not to panic, to remain upright and at his post. They made such a screaming roar as they came down, it seemed to press right on all the panic buttons in the spine. It was raining bombs in clouds of smoke so dark and choking they could not see the next ship on either side, but they could hear that somebody had been hit, from the explosions.

  When the planes finally dropped what they had to drop and left and the acrid smoke cleared, the cruiser Manchester was sinking and the freighter Cormorant had been hit and was taking on water. As the afternoon wore on, she fell farther and farther behind. They could not wait for her, as they were all too vulnerable.

  Now the subs were at them, worrying them, closing in, firing torpedoes. The Ohio was constantly turning at a sharp angle, taking evasive action, crossing her own wake and almost plowing into the freighter beside them, which was turning and twisting on its own crazy way. Duvey saw the destroyers hunting off the port side of the convoy, after something. This time they were lucky or better at the pattern of their depth charges, because an oil slick came up. Dead and stunned fish floated up, surrounded by a pack of screaming gulls. Then the sub surfaced. It was not one of the German U-boats he had seen in the Atlantic, but Italian. Its conning tower was much bigger and enclosed, unlike the open tower of the German subs. While he was watching, one of the destroyers rammed her and she went down.

  Dead ahead of them lay the straits between Sicily and Tunisia, the Skerki Channel. “Still standing? Good on you, mate.” Cal came ambling up. “Guess what. This is the end of the line for the big boys.”

  “What are you talking about? We’re two days from Malta, still.”

  “They’re going back to Gibraltar in another couple of hours, that’s what I hear. The Navy’s saving their hides and leaving us to our own devices.”

  “You’re crazy,” Duvey said. “They see what’s happening. For the last twenty-four hours we’ve been peppered. Every bastard with something to shoot or drop in the whole Med is having a go at us. If they dump us here, we’ll never make it.”

  “I bee
n telling you that since we passed the Rock, mate.”

  “Shit,” Ziggy said in that soft voice the day had been wringing out of him, as if all the hardness hammered on the streets they had roamed together had been shaken into fragments. “Here come more of the kraut bastards. They must have two hundred planes.”

  The men moved sluggishly to their stations. They were getting plain exhausted. Duvey had had a headache for hours from the explosions and the smoke. His eyes burned. His throat felt sanded raw. Even if he saw a bomb dropping on his head, he couldn’t move fast enough to clear out of the way. This time, however, the planes concentrated their fire on the escorting vessels. The carrier Indomitable was hit right on the flight deck three separate times, and one of the destroyers disabled. While Duvey was watching the wounded destroyer, he realized that Cal was right: except for a few cruisers and destroyers, the big stuff was leaving them and sailing back toward Gibraltar at full speed.

  For the next two hours while they steamed on through the Skerki Channel, all hell broke loose. They were glad to see long-range fighters, Mustangs from Malta, arrive to form an umbrella over them, because the U-boats were swarming. There was little room to maneuver in the narrow waters of the channel. Duvey had had enough trouble getting used to how close the Atlantic convoys steamed along, but they had been distant neighbors compared to the cosy logjam they were causing here. One of the U-boats got the antiaircraft cruiser right off and crippled another of their remaining cruiser escort. That left two goddamned cruisers and two only of all those that had sailed out of Clyde, and ten destroyers.