Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “It would help if Eddy didn’t view us as so obviously expendable.” Jeff found Algiers less enticing than Zach did. He missed the London art scene. He did not like the French colonials. His Parisian friends had been artists, bohemians, leftists. Here he enjoyed none of the intellectual fervor or play he associated with speaking French. He was also unaccustomed to the colonial position, to being one of a small minority comfortably squatting on a large impoverished population. He was not used to being in a city, large areas of which were hostile and closed to him. The weather was iffy. The rain laid the sticky heat and the dust by making mud. The frequent bombing made every cock in Algiers crow all night, in competition. He remembered Renoir’s paintings of the local landscape, but he was not moved to try his hand. When he felt most open to the land, he thought rather of Cezanne. But he was not painting, only sketching desultorily.

  Zach plunged into the Casbah with zest, the narrow streets jammed with robed men, veiled women, begging children, the streets of prostitutes each in a cubicle open to the passerby behind a curtain that would fall after a customer entered. “Ah, the stench of the stews!” Zach flung back his head. It stank certainly, with open sewers running down both sides of the tiny winding, always climbing streets, tobacco, incense, hash, the baking smell of strong sun on stucco and stone, the aroma of little cups of sweet Arabic coffee that came on brass trays as they sat cross-legged in sidewalk dens. Jeff reflected that it stank no worse than the flophouses and shantytowns he had slept in, and he had seen child prostitutes in Chicago and El Paso. Here, however, there were more and larger flies. It was a subject for a Mediterranean Hogarth. Zach and he were spending almost all their time together. Jeff felt overwhelmed at times, crowded emotionally.

  He desperately missed his Welsh art student, Mary Llewellyn. He missed the yellow London fog and the bomb ruins in the rain. He missed their neat apartment in Chelsea near the embankment. He missed seeing paintings two or three times a week, staring at them, going back to look again, talking over what he had seen and what he was trying to do and what others were attempting. In London he had felt himself fully a painter. It was a royal gift, the milieu he should have had in his early twenties that the Depression had robbed him of. He had hated to leave it. He missed it daily.

  Nonetheless he was aware that it was war that had brought him to London, and he was here to pay for that beautiful time that had been granted him, the taste of the life he, with more money or born in less interesting times, might have led, and might conceivably live after the war. That remained his fantasy: that he would survive, return to London, perhaps even marry Mary Llewellyn, share a studio and paint forever. She was the first painter he had ever been involved with, and the relationship had felt much fuller, much richer, than he was used to. They never ran out of something to talk about.

  When word came that a French liberal was in trouble, one of their jobs was to hide him or her, temporarily, if that would do the trick; if not, they had to spirit their protégé over a border to safety, or install him or her in the back country somewhere, just so they could keep them away from the Darlan government and keep them out of prison. It was a war against Allied Headquarters, who found this worrying about Communists and Jews, as they put it, ridiculous. Finally it was war against the old Vichy establishment.

  Zach managed to visit one of the prison camps, which had made him keener on what they were doing. He described it as a hell hole run by sadists who wanted to be Nazis. Jeff felt satisfied with their work, but he minded strongly that it was necessary. Some war. The wrong allies, the wrong enemies here. At least in Tunisia everybody was fighting the Germans.

  However with their new assignment, he began to like the French better. Instead of gouty right-wing generals, dealers in vegetable oil and financial manipulators trying to convert worthless francs into dollars, all of whom talked about the native problem, sneered at Roosevelt and held anti-Semitism as a passionate faith, they were dealing with younger officers, petty merchants, the little punks who had stuck their necks out, mechanics, refugees who had fled here to get away from the Nazis. They were dealing with people who had trusted the Americans and still wanted to like them.

  “The British, they don’t like us and we don’t like them,” a dealer in secondhand furniture told them. “Fire and water. We don’t mix.”

  “They don’t think much of us either,” Jeff said. “They think we’re children.”

  “You are,” the merchant said. “But soon in this war, you’ll ripen or rot.”

  The furniture seller had become a friend. Many nights they sat in the back of his shop drinking wine. “Before I got into the war,” Jeff said, in French, as all their conversations were conducted, “I had a sense of it as a crusade of good versus evil. But now that I see our side in action, I don’t know. I see fortunes being made. I see business as usual. I see us shoring up the corrupt and the rich.”

  “To fight evil you do not have to be good. If you are simply a little less brutal, that too is an improvement. You don’t have to believe your side is just to recognize the Nazis are the shit of the earth.”

  Jeff felt responsible to these people, even though he had been happily in London when OSS had gotten them in trouble, recruiting them into the local Resistance. When OSS received word that the French police were searching for weapons and arresting everyone who had them, Zach and Jeff scrambled to collect the weapons that had been smuggled in so charily and doled out to the resistants. Most of them were World War I issue, but would serve as a ticket to a camp. One room in their office gradually filled with aged weapons. Then an acquaintance of Zach’s who was recruiting agents in Spanish Morocco to function in Franco’s Spain said he could find a use for old rifles, so Jeff and Zach smuggled a truckload over the border the day before Christmas.

  When they got back to Algiers, OSS was buzzing. Admiral Darlan had been shot by a young royalist student. Who had put him up to it was anybody’s good guess, but the youth was marched out and shot at dawn on the twenty-sixth. “Just in case he might get conversational,” Zach muttered. “A good job well done, whoever organized it. It might even be us.”

  “We aren’t that smart.”

  “Some of us are, my dear, some of us are.”

  “Zach, don’t pretend you know more about this than I do.”

  “Where is that dear naive boy of yesterday who didn’t know his cock from a teething ring? The pity of it. You’re right, dear thing, I know nothing. But I have suspicions as ripe as the smell of the Casbah.”

  “Now will they let de Gaulle come over?”

  “Never. Now it will be General Giraud.”

  “At least he fought the Germans.”

  “Escaped from a prison camp, he did, no mean feat. He’s not neanderthal—merely neolithic. A slow improvement I would guess.”

  Not so they could notice it. As fast as warrants were drawn up to seize those out of favor with the still repressive and still proto-Fascist government, Jeff and Zach tried to get there first. However, the police chief of Algiers, who had been helping them, was arrested himself and accused of conspiracy in the murder of Darlan. They were able to get a few of their people on every British boat that left for London. There the British would quarantine them and give them a bad month or two, but then they could join the Free French. Jeff felt as if they were scooping up sand in a bucket by the seaside; moreover their activities did not give him a glowing faith in the results of an Allied victory for the oppressed peoples of Europe and Africa. Nonetheless under OSS aegis, there was room for their clandestine liberation work, as well as the sweetheart relationship SI enjoyed with Giraud’s intelligence network. One of Jeff’s unsettling discoveries about intelligence and irregular warfare was how much room existed for improvisation, for the chosen vendetta or crusade. It made for a quite personal war.

  In January came the Casablanca conference, when Churchill and Roosevelt decided to bring de Gaulle to North Africa and force a shotgun marriage of convenience with Giraud, because of the rising
clamor about Allied cooperation with French Fascists. Gradually the de Gaulle supporters began to gain some power inside OSS, and in Algiers itself Jeff noticed people wearing the cross of Lorraine or scrawling it on walls.

  Their little contingent celebrated the Soviet victory at Stalingrad on February first, when they heard of it, by drinking everything they could get. A French auto mechanic swayed on a table singing “The International.” Jeff sang it with him, although in English. Zach said it was one of the silliest songs he had ever heard and it would never take off, lacking catchy words and a catchy tune. However it had been a smashing victory and they would all be likelier to live longer because of it.

  February came and with it the disaster at Kasserine Pass, when green American troops were overrun and surrendered en masse, panicked. After that the whole command was shaken up, and OSS came out a little higher up the mountain, because they at least could not be blamed—and British intelligence could. More OSS men poured into North Africa.

  Jeff got a letter from his father, an unusual occurrence. The Professor had a small neat engraved-looking hand, capitals with flourishes. The letter itself was full of self-pity, gloom and foreboding. He did not know what would become of either himself or Western civilization. He saw the time as a twilight of the gods, an end of the world he had known. So much the better, Jeff thought, remembering soup kitchens, lying flat on top of freight cars in twenty-below weather, hungry children with dead eyes and sores on their legs.

  Jeff also heard from Bernice, who was in Texas. She enclosed a photo. “This is me in my zoot suit. That’s my buddy Flo.” Two beings ensconced in vast and ill-fitting GI flying overalls, flight caps and goggles posed in front of a flimsy-looking plane that Zach, fascinated by the photo, identified as a PT-19—a standard light trainer. Her letter did not keep to neat lines but ran up the margins of the little blue V-mail. She was living in a tourist court with several other women. Army trucks picked them up before dawn to take them to Howard Hughes Field. She gushed about their drill instructor. In the photo she bore an immense grin. It was hard to tell her age or sex, only that she looked enormous and joyful. She was determined not to wash out. All the women were great. Some of their instructors were out to get them, but some were sweet and helpful. They were going to show everybody. She hoped Jeff was safe and well. She herself had never been better in her life.

  Jeff put the photo in his wallet, from which every couple of days her face shone out at him with that wide glowing grin, incandescent with unselfconscious satisfaction. He had not seen her look that happy since she had turned twenty-one and finished with school.

  Letters from Mary came in clumps. She missed him as much as he missed her. She was faithful, she assured him, and had painted his portrait from memory. She was sketching some but they were working a sixty-hour week in the munitions factory and she was a bit overtired. She hoped he would be posted back to London soon. Everyone was seeing a movie called Mrs. Miniver with Greer Garson, a bit soupy. It was a hard winter and she had a dreadful cold she could not shake. Their mutual friend Tom Knacker had got a commission to paint a mural in a new officers’ club up near York.

  Rumors were that Sicily was next, if they ever succeeded in finishing off the Germans in Tunisia. Zach caught the clap and got rid of it, without having to go into the camp where regular army personnel with VD were cured and punished at the same time. Zach went to a private doctor who did not report his problem.

  Guadalcanal was being proclaimed a great American victory. Casualties in Tunisia continued high. They were soon to be moved up to an OSS detachment there, they learned in March. All negotiations having failed, they decided to effect a last remedy before departing Algeria. One moonless night, they broke ten of their people out of a camp near Bou Saada. Zach had planned out the operation thoroughly and it went as he had envisioned, except for a guard who was tardy making his rounds. Zach slit his throat in thirty seconds.

  Two years and three months after he had entered the military, the scrawny balding guard was the first person Jeff had seen killed. It sat uneasily on him. He decided, driving the truck at dead heat over the brutal mountainous road, that it would perhaps be easier to kill than to witness killing. They slipped their men into a Free French unit, no questions asked. Jeff kept wondering if Zach had needed to kill the guard. Would not rendering him unconscious have permitted the escape as easily?

  During the raid itself he had not been particularly frightened. He had been calm, at times almost bored, efficient in what he was supposed to do. It had oddly resembled some of the pranks Zach used to dream up and Jeff to carry out with him, when they were both at St. Thomas. It had scared him no more than those adventures, whose worst outcome could have been only expulsion and his father’s wrath. He had always had the same dreamy detached sense of seeing himself acting during those escapades.

  Zach too was remembering St. Thomas. He squeezed Jeff’s knee, as they bounced over the goat trail that passed for a highway. “Remember the time we bombed the provost’s house with horseshit, old dear? And when the three of us played bullfight with your fair sister’s red skirt? Though the bull was real and mad enough. Ah, Hemingway, what nonsense is committed in thy name.”

  When they were finally back in their quarters, shortly after Jeff had gone to bed, Zach came into his room, whispering his name as he let himself down on the side of the bed. Jeff faked sleeping. He thought at once that Zach wanted him, yet could not believe it. Zach slid his hand under the blanket and caressed his penis. Jeff groaned as if in sleep and twisted away, curling into the fetal position. He was simultaneously convinced that Zach knew he was awake and that he had fooled Zach, who remained sitting on the bed’s edge another few minutes, and then left. A few minutes later, Jeff heard the outer door slam.

  He began to brood over the idea of switching to SI. After all, in spy work behind enemy lines he would be endangering only himself. He felt the urge he had in London, suddenly acute again, to distance himself from Zach. Yet he blamed himself for his response. War was killing, what had he supposed when he volunteered? Zach did it well, that was all; and he would probably do it badly. That momentary fumbling after the raid was meaningless. Zach had felt horny and nobody else was handy. He did not want to have sex with Zach. He did not want to feel that much within Zach’s power. He did not want to embrace Zach or have Zach embrace him.

  Just before they left for Tunisia, a letter came from London in an unfamiliar hand. It was from Tom Knacker, Mary’s one-legged painter friend. He wrote that he was sorry to be the one to tell Jeff, but Mary had been killed in an accident in the factory where she worked, the evening of the previous Thursday.

  Two and a half weeks ago, Jeff counted numbly. She had been dead already for two and a half weeks, dead before they got their orders, dead before they pulled off their raid at the prison camp. Tom wrote that Mary had been taken to hospital and had died there the next morning, without regaining consciousness. Tom had taken some of her things for Jeff, because he knew Mary had really loved him. Her family had not objected. The funeral had been held in Wales. When Jeff came back through London, he should ring up Tom. Until then Tom would hold on to Mary’s things for Jeff. They were all dreadfully sorry.

  He felt a futile raging anger as strong as his grief. How could this happen? He had been ready to commit to her. She was a civilian. It was not right. He felt the same smothering anger he had felt as an adolescent toward his father, when The Professor emerged from his study to interfere suddenly in their lives, to promulgate some edict from Olympus. If there was a god, he was probably an egoistic self-involved dogmatist like his father, and any changes he made would be for the worst.

  He could not accept Mary’s death, bizarre, accidental. His fantasies were smashed like a cheap tenement bombed. He had lost not only the first woman he had shared more than a bed with, he had lost his imagined future. His after-the-war had vanished.

  ABRA 4

  Hands-on Experience

  Research and Analysis W
ashington felt to Abra like a continuation of academia. They were housed in the annex of the Library of Congress, a stately white marble building connected by tunnel with the library across the street. There were the professors and the graduate students, in essence, and she of course was a graduate student. Given the minimal level of her ambition, that suited her just fine, although she considered herself fortunate as she had at Columbia that she did not depend on her stipend to live. Here the academic hierarchy flourished. Oscar was Oscar to sociologist Franz Widerman, with whom he had studied in Frankfurt, while his old professor remained formal Dr. Widerman to him. She was calling him Oscar and he was calling her Abra. That far she had gotten with him, but no further.

  One difference with academia was that they were all organized in teams and had to work together. Another was that every time the big chief of OSS, Wild Bill Donovan, came through, everything got turned topsy-turvy. Charging in with Langer, the boss of R & A, kowtowing to him, Donovan would decide they should study how to infiltrate the Tibetan monasteries or how to use rabid bats against the Japanese in the South Pacific, and there went somebody’s time wasted for six months.

  One of the big team projects at the moment was developing an accurate estimate of the military manpower pool available to the Germans. Another was centered on harbor conditions in Sicilian and Italian ports. Another team worked with the Office of Economic Warfare on selection of bombing targets, also a big project in London R & A. Some reports were for internal use, some for other sections of OSS, such as Special Operations (SO) or Secret Intelligence (SI). Others were done for the military or the State Department. Some projects were requested and some originated in R & A and were then peddled to likely customers in other departments or agencies.