Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  The days soon began to blur, because their march was senseless, numbed, bloody. All day they marched. Women fell to the ground and were shot. Women ran into the woods and were shot. Women stumbled and were clubbed to death. Every other day they had soup, never enough. At night they were locked into barns. Daniela’s feet were bleeding from broken infected blisters. Rysia had lost her shoes and walked barefoot leaving bloody tracks. Jacqueline had the boots that her aunt had given her. She tried to take a pair of boots from a corpse for Daniela or Rysia, but the SS guard they called Weasel knocked her down.

  They were marching east, then west, then east again, then north, she could tell by the sun. Rumor said they were being marched hundreds of kilometers to Mauthausen, where all the camp inmates not yet dead would be collected and then blown up. Daniela thought Mauthausen was in Austria, near Linz. That would be south and east, but they were sure of nothing. They set one bloody foot after the other bloody foot.

  Every day there were less of them. At night she slept on her boots to keep them from being stolen, and Daniela slept on the crude wooden clogs that cut her feet bloody, but were better than nothing. One night when they were locked into a bombed church, Rysia fought another girl for the shoes from a dying girl. They were big, but she tore off part of the shift on a corpse and made bindings around her feet. None of them were afraid to touch the scrap of bread or the clothing of the dying, because they were all dying. They all had fever and diarrhea. What there was to catch, they had. The bodies fell on the earth which no longer was covered with snow, which no longer was frozen but fresh and green. Little white flowers twinkled in the grass. The grass was coming up soft and sometimes they grabbed up quick handfuls to chew. Blossoms floated and lay soft, soft, on the earth.

  At night in the barns, always someone was weeping. All day they marched with a break at noon, for the guards to eat. She began eating buds from the trees, scratching at the bark. She ate flowers and leaves. One day she had weak watery shit running down her thighs from something she had eaten, but she continued to eat whatever alive she could grab. One day there was no more bread. Every day more women were shot where they fell. Now they were a shorter line and only four abreast, the SS men with rifles prodding them. They were no longer counted at morning and evening.

  Daniela could not walk without help. She was burning up with fever, her skin a dull purple, her mouth open, her tongue dark. She kept passing out. She kept begging to be allowed to rest and sleep and be quiet. “My head hurts so bad I just want it to stop. I’m on fire. I have to lie down. Just for a minute. I have to.”

  “Beloved, you must walk. You must continue. Hear the guns,” Jacqueline begged. “The war is coming to us. The war will set us free. Live a little longer. Just a little longer, my darling, my Daniela.” It went on and on. Women fell. Women were shot. Women lay down and died of fever, of starvation, of exhaustion, of old injuries.

  “I’m too tired. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “We can escape,” she muttered to Daniela, but Daniela fell. Quickly Jacqueline picked her up, hissed at Rysia to bear her between them. Daniela’s feet were infected and swollen horribly. She was delirious now. “Daniela, Daniela,” she begged her, chafing her hands. “Listen to the artillery. Daniela, hold on.”

  Between them they managed to get her to the end of the day. They were exhausted and she was unconscious. Jacqueline lay with her arms around Daniela, who was hot, too hot. Her skin felt like sticky leather.

  It was grey predawn. Daniela’s eyes fluttered once. “I can’t. Poor children. Shma yisroel, adonai elohenu, adonai echod.” Her breath shuddered out and she was still.

  Jacqueline let out a great cry that ripped her open. She fell on Daniela’s body. She remained there weeping until Rysia pulled her off. They were being driven out onto the road again.

  They had been on the death march on the roads for at least three weeks, maybe four, maybe forever. The sound of shelling got louder and louder. Several women SS guards disappeared that evening. The next morning, the remaining guards seemed furious and clubbed two women to death. Jacqueline said to Rysia, “I’m going to break when I can. Stay with me, watch me. Go when I go. They’re going to kill us all.”

  She watched all the morning, praising with each step her good boots and her aunt whom she had not seen since Auschwitz. The guards were nastier than usual. Women faded into the woods, but they went after them and brought them back to shoot. Explosions sounded from ahead of them on the road as well as to their right. The SS bunched up arguing. The column of ghastly dying women staggered out of the woods by a farmhouse that had been struck by a bomb or a shell. It stood with its barn behind a chest-high fence. In the road an overturned army truck still burned. A corpse in uniform lay on his back in the ditch. As everyone was pushing toward it, Jacqueline turned, grabbed at the fence, dragged herself up slicing open her knee and flung herself over. She did not even bother to look. She fell to the ground with a hard bruising jolt and ran, bent over. She ran into the barn and plunged into a haystack. She felt as if she would suffocate. Her blood roared in her ears.

  Rysia had not come after her. She was briefly furious. Then she slid into a faint. She came to again hearing the harsh voices of the SS men searching. Someone must have seen her go over. They fired into the haystack and a bullet tore through her arm. She bit through her lip but did not utter a sound. The hay would absorb the blood. She heard them leaving. Again she faded out.

  When she came to she was covered with blood, a high dangerous whine in her ears. Slowly she kicked her way out of the stack, crawling forward. The shadows were long toward the west. The sun was just rising. She had been unconscious since the day before. She examined her arm. The bullet had passed through. The arm was red and throbbing, but she must ignore it. She crept to the barn door and listened. There was heavy traffic on the road. She must strike across land. She had lost so much blood she could not stand. She watched the house. There seemed to be nobody in it. She watched it until the sun had climbed about a foot. She was raging with thirst. She must move or die where she sat.

  Still she could not make herself move. This would not be a bad place to die, quiet and alone and free of terror for a moment, with the spring sun mellowing the mud and the buds. All the chickens had obviously been stolen already, but there might be something left to eat in the house. She must make herself crawl to the bombed house.

  Then she heard her name called, just once, hoarsely, and the door of the house opened a crack. She began creeping along, dragging herself. Rysia ran on all fours like a dog and dragged her inside. Rysia had taken off her shift and put on a man’s shirt and wrapped an apron around herself. She was so thin it made a complete skirt. She had been eating a jar of jam she had found, her mouth bright red with berries. She pushed it quickly toward Jacqueline, exclaiming over her arm.

  Everything was fallen down and dusty within, looted already. Drawers, dishes were tossed all around the burned area where the bomb had fallen. Rysia pumped water for them to drink and then washed Jacqueline’s wound.

  “I thought you were dead, my Jacqueline, I thought you were dead and I was all alone in the world to die like a mouse. I couldn’t find you. I looked everyplace. Where were you? I didn’t know what to do. I just sat here and looked for something to eat. There was a cabbage but I ate it all, it was a little one, I’m sorry. But here are some potatoes.” Rysia started to slice them with a knife she had found. “A real knife,” she pointed out.

  “Find one for me too. But no, we do not eat them raw. We eat them cooked. Who’s on the road?”

  “People running. Families with carts and horses and sometimes a truck, all fleeing. It must be something good if the Boches run from it.”

  “We’ll make a little fire and cook the potatoes and eat them with forks like human beings. We’ll boil water, and I’ll clean out my wound.”

  “Jacqueline, I want to live. If only the Russians or the Americans would come!”

  “If they don’t come to us,
we must go to them. We must go carefully alongside the road and run toward them. Pack up a knife for each of us so we have something to protect ourselves and what food we can and something to carry water in, and we’ll set out.”

  “Can you travel?”

  “While there’s life in me, I can go toward freedom.”

  About noon, they began to walk through the fields, keeping the road to their right. They carried with them the four last potatoes they had found in the farmhouse, roasted with a little salt. Rysia kept kneeling to touch the ground. She broke off a buttercup and put it behind her ear. Jacqueline smiled to see it. They looked like skeletons dragging across the plowed fields, both with hair close cropped and grey, with their skulls and huge eyes and open sores, Jacqueline with her arm wrapped in a bloody shirt, with a tablecloth around her shoulders for a shawl, her grey shift still on under it and a man’s woolen cap jammed on her head.

  People were fleeing along the road and after a while they walked near it, because they did not see any SS men and nobody was paying attention. Alongside the road lay the bodies of women from their group, with ravens feeding on them. Also scattered along the side of the road were things the evacuating Germans had thrown away, another jar of jam, a bottle of kirsch and knapsack full of silver spoons. They kept a spoon apiece, threw the rest back and put the jar of jam and the kirsch in the knapsack, which Rysia carried. Jacqueline drank some kirsch. It burned all the way down and then she felt better. She washed her wound with it.

  Now there were corpses of German soldiers and occasional civilians. Rysia took a rifle from a dead soldier, but as she did not know how to shoot and Jacqueline could not use her arm, they threw it away. Instead they kept a grenade so they could kill some SS if they came back.

  They heard the sound of engines, so they hid behind a stone wall. Jacqueline lay down, letting herself slide partway into the black red swamp of nothingness. She hoped the SS was not about to appear. Maybe she would kill herself with the knife, after she armed the grenade for Rysia to throw. She must not faint.

  “It’s not the Boches,” Rysia said. “Are they Russians?”

  Jacqueline dragged herself up. A man crossing the field toward them raised his rifle. “Non, non,” she shouted, trying to stand.

  “It’s two old women,” the soldier said to the one behind him. He was speaking English.

  “We’re not old, we’re haeftlings, we’re prisoners, Jews. She is sixteen.”

  The men stared at them as if they were monsters. “You speak English,” the first one said. “You sound like an American.”

  “I’m French. She’s Hungarian. I’ve been shot.” She sat down abruptly.

  “Did we shoot you?”

  “No, the SS.”

  “I speak English too,” Rysia said and abruptly began to cry. The soldier gave her a chocolate bar.

  “You were prisoners? What did you do?” the second man asked. He stood back from them, frowning. He did not like their smell, perhaps.

  “We were Jews. That was enough. I was in the Resistance in France.”

  “You just stay here. Hey, Sarge, these two old women we found, one says she’s sixteen and they speak English and escaped from one of those camps. One’s been shot. What’ll we do with them?”

  “Just leave them for the time being. Somebody’ll be along. The medics can deal with it. Let’s go.”

  “Do you have bread?” Jacqueline asked the first man as he was turning to leave. “Anything, please! Even a bite!”

  He gave her a piece of hardtack and then they were off. Jacqueline lay propped against the wall like a rag doll with stuffing leaking. They both chewed the hardtack slowly. She felt like laughing, for their liberators had not seemed thrilled with them. They were free and helpless. She slid into unconsciousness. When she came to, she was being lifted into a truck full of women who looked like herself.

  “Who has us?” she muttered in various languages, randomly.

  “The Americans are taking us to hospital,” a voice answered in Yiddish. Jacqueline reflected as she passed out again that her Yiddish had markedly improved. Someone was holding her hand in a frantic grip, so she assumed Rysia was still with her. Oh, Daniela, she thought, I did not follow you into death, not into that country, even after I promised. But maybe I am coming along behind: slowly following after you along the red road of my blood flowing out.

  ABRA 10

  When the Lights Come On Again

  Abra had grown used to sleeping with her coat and flashlight, which the British called a torch, just beside the bed in the event a rocket bomb hit nearby, knocking out the electricity, starting a fire or demolishing the ceiling. Sergeant Farrell in the office had been trapped for eighteen hours under a stairway—which was lucky, because everything else had been smashed. He told her the darkness had been the worst of it, not knowing if he had gone blind. That had led her to keep the flashlight nearby. The V-1s had not tended to knock the power off, but the V-2s did.

  She was on American rations and thus ate well, but she froze in her rooms like everybody else and washed standing in the little kitchen. This was not as hard a winter, but it was a mean dispiriting season, ice, sleet, fog the color of old newspapers seeping through her cardboard and packing crate windows which had lost their glass from blast the spring before.

  Nonetheless London was no longer a black pit after dark. They were on dim-out rather than blackout. People stopped having freak accidents plunging into areaways and breaking their necks. Of rubble they had plenty. She lived in a partially demolished city, to which each day added new ruins. Still many of the rocket launching sites had been overrun, and fewer V-2s were falling lately.

  With the lights partially on, London looked shabby but had survived—as had she. All through the winter she had cast her web far and wide, politicking, making friends, cultivating acquaintances, putting in time at pubs and parties. She had never formally broken off with Oscar; sometimes she still slept with him. Rather she had made herself available. She picked up an RAF pilot; she allowed an Australian tankman to seduce her. She spent a Saturday night and a Sunday with a quartermaster from Harlem with whom she had reminisced about the prewar jazz scene.

  What had she found? That in truth she had lost something of her taste for random adventure, but that enough of it remained to sweeten those hours. Each of them was a log dragged across the road back. Each of them brought her further from Oscar and her long fidelity. Having had something more, she no longer confused chatter and the odd confession with good communication, but she wasn’t writing off the pleasures of occasional sex without complications. She liked going after what she wanted without truly caring what each of them thought of her.

  She dressed and put coins in the meter to heat water for the real coffee the Americans got, although never enough to last. She was expecting her girlfriend Beverly, an OSS imitation corporal as she was an OSS imitation second lieutenant. Inside the organization, no one paid attention to those arbitrary ranks. Her doorbell had given up in a bombing raid that had brought down much of the ceiling. When Beverly arrived, she had to stand outside and yell, something she rather enjoyed doing in her flattened western tones. Beverly came from Moscow, Idaho.

  This morning, Beverly, for once protective of British feelings, confined herself to tossing bits of rubble at the boarded-up window. Abra ran down to let her in. Beverly was perched on the steps smoking. “My daddy used to tell me, only fast women smoke in public and only whores smoke on the streets. But this war has gummed that up. All girls do it, like wearing pants and going off to hotels with men. What will they do with us back in Idaho?”

  “Don’t you think the same thing has been going on at home? Coffee’s ready. I looked for you last night, but I didn’t see you.”

  “We were at it till midnight.” Beverly yawned, loudly. “Lots of goodies coming in from those tame Jerries you sent over. But we think they may have got one of the women.”

  “Helga?” Abra’s hand closed tight around the cup.
r />   “No. The other one. Marlitt.”

  The handle sheared off in her hand. “Damn. I broke the stupid cup.” Cups with handles had not been manufactured in England for years. Her stomach began to hurt. She did not feel like asking more, but she was compelled. “What makes you think she’s been caught?”

  “She was giving us good stuff and now nothing, all week.” Beverly shrugged condolence. She was tall, big-boned and fair, with a broad plain face, flaxen hair worn shoulder length, a broad gape-toothed smile and the manner of a good old girl, who likes men and expects them to like her. She was a widow, she had told Abra the first time they had talked intimately, without ever having been a wife. She had been engaged to a pilot lost in ’43 on the ball bearing runs, when a third of the planes had gone down. Since then she had refused to form strong attachments to men. “Peace comes, I’ll settle down,” she predicted. “No point trying till then. Just get your ass kicked hard.”

  Abra thought that she herself had formed no close friendships with women during her first years in London because she had not wanted to expose her long pursuit of Oscar to anyone else’s cool stare. She had not wanted to sound like Djika, indomitably pursuing a course up a dead end. Now that she was free, or almost, she wanted that other gaze, a woman who would double-check her decisions and keep her from fooling herself.

  It was pleasant for both of them to go off to pubs together, comfortable in each other’s company, but always giving the other the room to move off if she wanted to pursue something. Abra felt as if she was coming back into shape. Beverly and she went to movies and plays, plunged into the parties Oscar found boring. He was not a partygoer. He preferred one-on-one, or dinner parties where conversation was possible. Beverly could jitterbug and had learned the rowdier English dances; they practiced together and off they went every chance they had. Abra felt as if she had dropped five years. She wrote her mother begging her to send a dress she could go dancing in, but she doubted that her mother would come up with anything useful. She wrote the same letter to Karen Sue with more hope.