Bell Harry

by Nicholas Best

  Well, I don’t mind saying, it was a shock to some of the boys, going to Europe. We’d enlisted to fight the Japanese, no one else. Way we saw it, the war in Europe was nothing to do with us, not our business in the least.

  If the British and the Germans wanted to slug it out, then let them. It was nothing for us to get involved in.

  Why should we, when the Germans done nothing to us? The British had run like rabbits at Dunkirk and now they were prepared to fight to the last American, is how we saw it. Why should any of us die for them?

  But there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about it, even if we’d wanted to. Not even the guys with German names who still had family over there. We just had to do what we were told in the army, and if that meant shipping out to Europe, then that’s what it meant. You had to obey orders, in the military.

  We shipped from Baltimore, first time most of us had seen the ocean. The ship was an old rust bucket, some kind of tramp steamer that had known better days. It had room for eighty passengers, but now it was carrying three hundred GIs, eight or nine to a cabin, all crammed in there like sardines.

  That’s what it felt like, sardines. We were in this old tin can, no room to turn around, just waiting for the Germans to take a shot at us as we came by. They had packs of U-boats on the ocean, sitting out in the middle just waiting for us.

  That’s all they had to do, wait till we came by. Must have been a real turkey shoot, from where they were sitting.

  First day at sea we had lifeboat drill, everyone on deck in their life preservers, mustering at the lifeboats. The way the officers explained it, we were in enemy territory the minute we left harbor and we had to know what to do if we were torpedoed.

  Actually there wasn’t much we could do, because even if we did manage to get away in the lifeboats, nobody would stop to pick us up. Other ships couldn’t afford to, in case they got hit too. They had orders to keep right on going, leave us to our fate. Like I said, a turkey shoot.

  The rest of the time the deck was off limits and we had to stay down below, keeping out the way. I don’t remember how long that crossing took — maybe nine or ten days, maybe more — but it seemed like forever. I hated every minute of it. I’m no sailor, and I never pretended to be. The ship pitched and rolled like you’d never believe, never stopped moving for a moment.

  I was sick as a mule from day one right up until we reached Liverpool — never stopped puking even when I didn’t have anything left to puke. The other guys were the same.

  We all just lay in our bunks, barfing into our helmets and waiting for a torpedo to come through the wall and put us out of our misery. It wasn’t a happy time.

  Anyhow, we reached Liverpool in the end, got there all in one piece. The Germans must have missed us, or maybe the Navy kept them busy. Whatever the reason, we made it to the other side, came in safe and sound with no U-boats bothering us and saw land out the porthole, the first we’d seen since leaving home.

  Liverpool was a big town, but it didn’t look like much, from the porthole. Half of it was in ruins, far as we could tell. There were buildings everywhere just lying in heaps, rubble every which way.

  We learned later they’d been bombed eight nights in a row. The German air force kept coming back night after night, hitting them again and again, trying to put the docks out of business, knock the whole town down once and for all. That’s how the Germans operated, knocking everything down.

  There was a band on the dockside when we arrived, playing Sousa marches and Over There, all those kinds of tunes. We were glad to get ashore after being cooped up so long. But it was a shock too, because we’d never seen anything like Liverpool before.

  The people all looked deadbeat, for one thing. Their clothes were patched and most of them were pale and hungry. Food was rationed in England, they couldn’t just eat what they wanted. They had to have a ration book, and even then they only got powdered egg and a hunk of bacon every other week.

  We’d only been there a few days when we heard our first air raid siren. We were out of Liverpool by then, in a place called Catterick in Yorkshire. We were in our bunks, about midnight, when the siren began to sound, which meant German bombers were coming over.

  It took us a while to figure out what the noise meant, and then we panicked, every one of us. We thought the bombers were coming for us, personally, like they even knew we were there. Why else would the siren sound, if they weren’t coming for us?

  Turned out though the bombers were just passing through, on their way somewhere else. It was routine for the sirens to sound, but we didn’t know that at the time. We thought our last moment had come, which just shows how much we had to learn.

  The British were very polite about it, but you could tell they didn’t think much to us, shitting our pants the first time we heard the siren go. We wised up real quick, didn’t let it happen again.

  I had two friends by then, buddies from my platoon. One was Billy Williams, an orange picker from California. He was a farm boy like me, and we both came from big families. We’d been together since boot camp.

  The other was Dutch Branigan, from Illinois. He was a city boy, older than us, and he’d been around. I don’t know what he did back home, because he never said, but I guess maybe it wasn’t legal.

  Dutch was a hard-looking guy, the kind who either makes sergeant or winds up in the stockade. He knew about girls too, which neither of us did, so we both looked up to him, a man who knew the score.

  He was good in a fight as well. I saw him in a pub once, when some British soldiers came over and asked when the Yanks were going to do any fighting. Dutch showed them, right there. And when the snowdrops came and broke it up, Dutch was nowhere to be found.

  He was out the back and over the wall, too smart to stay there with the others and get caught. That’s the kind of guy he was.

  We all lived in a tent together in Catterick, and later in a Nissen hut, which was a kind of tin shack that you could build in a hurry. The British were putting them up in thousands, with so many troops coming through.

  The huts had a stove in the middle, which was okay for anyone who could get near it. Everyone else froze to death.

  We stayed there right through the winter of 1943 and the early months of 1944. We knew it couldn’t last much longer than that, because there was bound to be a second front in 1944. We’d be invading Europe soon enough to fight the Nazis and take pressure off of the Russians.

  The word was we’d go into combat in the spring maybe, or the summer at the latest. It’s what we were there for.

  Sure enough, in the spring of 1944, we got the order to move out, pack up the camp and go. We didn’t know where, just ‘someplace in England’. We went by truck some of the way, then by train, sitting up all night in one of those strange little trains they have in England.

  We still didn’t know where we were, because they’d taken all the station signs down, and the road signs as well, to confuse the enemy. We only knew it was south, a long way south from Yorkshire. And a lot nearer France.

  Next day, we were put in trucks again and driven across country for a couple of hours. It was different country to Yorkshire, different kinds of houses and villages, very pretty in the spring sunshine. This was early March, when things were starting to look good again after the wintertime.

  We knew where we were as well, because a British kid had told us when we threw him some gum. We were in Kent, near the English Channel.

  Well, I was interested in that, because Kent is where my folks came from, way back. We got a family Bible that says so. A place called Maidstone someplace, I don’t know where. It’s where the Tylers were from, before we came to Colorado.

  You can check it out on a website nowadays, if you know how those things work. The Mormons got it all written down, where every American family comes from. The Tylers were from Maidstone, Kent.

  But it wasn’t Maidstone we were going, or anyplace near. We couldn’t see much from the back of the truck, but we weren’t
in country anymore, we were coming to some kind of town. The trucks were slowing down, the whole convoy bunching up through the streets.

  It wasn’t long before we turned in through a pair of gates and found ourselves in an army camp, a real one, with real buildings, not just a bunch of tents and Nissen huts. It belonged to the British army, but now it was ours. It was where we were going to stay, until we moved over to France.

  We were glad to get out of the trucks, after the long ride. Billy and me found our beds first, bunking together and keeping one for Dutch, like we always did.

  We found out where we were too, because our officer told us. We were in Canterbury, a little old town in the middle of Kent that had been there since Roman times. It’s where Christians got started, in England.

  They kept us busy for the first couple of days, cleaning the camp up and getting it properly fixed. It took a while to make it look like the US Army lived there. It wasn’t until the third day that we were given time out to go into Canterbury.

  We were issued a pass until midnight and told the liberty truck would leave from Canterbury bus station at eleven to bring us back to camp. We could walk if we missed it, because it wasn’t far. About a mile, at most.

  So we went in to Canterbury that afternoon, soon as we were done for the day — hitched a ride in a jeep and went to see what a town looked like, that had been there since Roman times. A lot like Liverpool, is the answer, because the Germans had bombed Canterbury too, bombed a lot of it flat. Most of downtown was flatter than a pancake, with rubble piled up and weeds growing all around.

  There’d been a Woolworth’s there once, the same Woolworth’s as back home, right on the main street. But there wasn’t a Woolworth’s now. There wasn’t anything at all, except an open space for hundreds of yards and old bits of junk scattered all around that had belonged to someone once. They had little wooden signs up in front of every shop, saying what used to be there.

  The rest of the town didn’t look so bad, the bits the Germans missed. It was real old, like a Hollywood movie. Some of the streets were so narrow the houses were almost touching overhead.

  It was pretty too, the bits that were still there. There was a cathedral in the middle, the only tall building in the place. It had a big central tower and two little twin towers at one end. Up above, way above the central tower, they’d fixed a barrage balloon on a steel wire. It was there for the Germans to run into, if they ever came over again.

  We went to look at the cathedral, in through a little door with sandbags all around. It was quite a place, the biggest old building I ever seen.

  They’d taken all the windows out, so they wouldn’t get broken in the bombing, and done a lot of other stuff as well. I guess they knew what they were doing, because the old cathedral was still standing, while everything else had fallen down. The British have experience of that kind of thing.

  It was getting dark by the time we’d finished looking at the cathedral, so we found a pub that was still standing and went in for a drink. It was a nice old place down by the river that had missed the bombing.

  There were other guys from the 1051st in there before us, hanging around the dartboard. There were a few British as well, old men mostly, so we bought them a drink and made sure they didn’t feel left out.

  We were under orders to make sure the British weren’t left out. They didn’t like Yanks, most of them, and there was trouble sometimes. Our orders were to not rile them if we could avoid it — keep out of trouble and see nobody got upset.

  We’d only been in Canterbury a week when we had a dance at the camp, all the British girls from the neighbourhood and anyone else who wanted to come. A couple of hundred did, all tripping along the road to the camp in their best dresses.

  They didn’t have any stockings, so they browned up their legs with gravy and let that do instead. They didn’t have much soap either, which meant they stank a bit, some of them. Not their fault, when they couldn’t get anything in the shops.

  We were all in our best uniforms too, nice and smart for the girls. Billy and me were nervous, because we weren’t much good with dames.

  The Yanks were all supposed to be sex maniacs, according to the British, but actually we were just a couple of nice boys who didn’t know much about women. We didn’t keep nylons in our pockets and trade them for sex, like some guys are supposed to have done. We wouldn’t have known how.

  Actually, I liked British girls. They weren’t so grabby as Americans and they had softer faces, something to do with the climate. They paid their share on a date, always insisted on paying half, even if they were short of money. That’s what I was told, anyway.

  It was a good dance. The girls were as shy as we were, but they warmed up quick enough. There weren’t any men for them around Canterbury, because the British boys were all away at the war.

  The girls had gotten tired of waiting, some of them. The war’d been going on a long time and they never knew whether they might be killed or not. So they lived for the moment and worried about the rest later.

  Some of the older British men didn’t like it, seeing them go with GIs. One old Brit used to pour glue in their hair, to show what he thought. Must have been crazy in the head, if you want to know what I think.

  We didn’t get laid at the dance, like some of the guys claimed they done, but we did meet a girl who invited us back to her house, next time we had a pass.

  She was called Ivy, and she lived near the cathedral in a little row house that hadn’t been bombed. She gave us her address and said we’d be welcome to come by, if we wanted. We could have tea with her parents.

  We did, a few days later. Dutch, Billy and me, we went round to Ivy’s house one afternoon and had tea, British-style. We brought some chocolate with us, and cans of fruit, so we didn’t arrive empty-handed. The British appreciated that kind of thing, when food was so hard to come by.

  Her mom was real pleased with us, fussing round and making sure we were comfortable. She was glad to have us in the house.

  But it was her dad we noticed most, Ivy’s old man. The house was a store as well, a greengrocer’s store that sold vegetables and stuff. The front part of it was the store, looking onto the street, and then you went through to the back, where the family lived.

  Ivy’s dad stayed in the front, running the store. He was a little old man of about fifty, completely blind in both eyes. Couldn’t see a thing. He didn’t even have any eyes, just a pair of empty sockets, where they’d been once. He looked like a skull.

  Ivy told us he’d been hit in the bombing. The blast tore his eyes out before he knew what was happening, sucked them right out of his head. They dug him out of the rubble a few hours later, but it was too late for his eyes, even though the rest of him was okay. That was that. Nothing anyone could do.

  Well, that just about brought it home to us, what the war was all about. Guy loses his eyes for no reason. What did he ever do to the Germans, that they did that to him?

  But he didn’t let it bother him, I’ll say that much for him. He was a gutsy old guy, Ivy’s dad. Me, I’d have never stopped hollering about it, but old Bert Marden just got on with his life, did the best he could and never complained.

  He still ran the store every day, handling the merchandise and weighing it up on a pair of scales, with brass weights. You never would have guessed he was blind, if you didn’t know.

  He did everything by touch, that old man, didn’t miss a trick. He just carried on as normal, because anything less would have meant the Germans had won.

  He never got cheated either, because nobody would have dared. I can see him now, handling those weights, running his fingers over everything to feel what it was. He was scary in a way, that old guy with no eyes. I’ve never been able to forget him.

  Before long we were stopping by two or three times a week, whenever we could get a pass. We liked it at Ivy’s because it was a real home, not an army camp. We’d been in the military more than two years by then, sleeping in bunks all the
time, nothing but soldiers all around.

  It was good to get away from that for a while, spend time in this little old English house, pretending there wasn’t a war on for a few hours. I was homesick by then and so were the others. We all just wanted the war to be over, so we could go back home and get on with our lives.

  We got to know Bert Marden real well, sitting on an upturned crate in the back of the store, helping him out with sacks of carrots and potatoes. He’d had a bad time in the bombing, even though he didn’t complain about it. He came out with things sometimes, showed his mind was still dwelling on what had happened. He couldn’t let it go.

  He seemed half-crazy, some of the things he said. Kept babbling on about a tunnel, and a river under the cathedral. He said there were skeletons in there, and a skull belonged to a guy named Becket. There was a silver king and jewels on the floor, and golden treasure in a casket, like in a movie.

  It had all been there for hundreds of years, according to Ivy’s dad, all just lying there, buried under the cathedral.

  We didn’t believe him at first. Like everyone else, we just thought he was some mad old guy who’d lost his mind. Easy to do, after what he’d been through. There were plenty of people like him in England, after four and a half years of the Germans dropping bombs on them.

  But then we got to thinking. He didn’t seem mad, Ivy’s dad. Anything else you talked about, he was sane as anybody. He wasn’t a nut. He didn’t have eyes, but that didn’t make him a nut. He was as sane as the rest of us.

  So we wondered if what he had to say was true. That maybe there was buried treasure there, right under the cathedral. Maybe he was right all along.

  ‘Let’s go see,’ said Dutch.

  We strolled round there one afternoon, looking like tourists in the sunshine. The whole of that side of the cathedral was a bombsite, craters everywhere and rubble every which way. There wasn’t any opening into a tunnel, like old Bert had said, but then maybe it had all got rearranged with more bombs coming down.