Before Their Time: A Memoir

by Robert Kotlowitz

  It was not quite six. Smoke from our cooking fires already clouded the early morning air; wood burned with its delicious smell. Here and there, along the road, I could see drivers checking out their trucks, part by part, exactly as we checked out our weapons. In one of the tent-lines, somebody from B Company was shaving out of his helmet, a hand-mirror propped in front of him. A couple of tents down, in our own line, Willis was on his feet stretching. I could almost hear him purr. Alongside him, Barney Barnato was brushing his teeth. Stray figures wandered about, looking for latrines. Everyone else was still asleep. There was another half-hour to reveille. I liked the early morning hour before reveille, its clarity, its stillness and sense of solitude. I always had.

  Standing there in that near-perfect light, I began to think about home. A terrible idea, as always. Thinking about home was a self-made trap that I had to avoid. At home, I had discovered on my only furlough that the old familiar grammar of life had become unreadable. They spoke another language there, about things that no longer mattered, using a vocabulary out of another time. Thinking about it would demoralize me. I had been through that before. I tried some calisthenics as a distraction, jumping stuff, clumsy push-ups. Physical activity sometimes helped. After that I brushed my teeth hard, until it hurt, drawing blood and spitting it out on the treasured Fontainebleau soil. Did it make me feel better? I don’t know, nor did it matter, because suddenly there was a disruption that wiped out all nostalgia for the moment.

  I heard the sound of hoofbeats nearby, a strange, plodding reverberation that seemed to come from inside the earth itself. I looked up. Willis was pointing toward the road, grinning his sly grin and shaking his head from side to side, as though to say, You guys’ll never believe this.

  When I turned, I saw two riders come into view, both of them young girls, barely pubescent, I guessed, cantering along at a deliberate, modest pace. They were looking neither right nor left, not at us nor at our drivers, who were already having their breakfast alongside their trucks. On and on the girls rode, not at all fast, unconscious of us, or seeming to be. I remember asking myself, as I watched them, How could they pretend not to be aware of us?

  Their hair, hanging loose down their backs, was held at their necks by black ribbons, which struck me as a strange funereal accent. They wore jodhpurs, gleaming riding-boots, and long-sleeved white blouses that shimmered in the early sun; and they were posting, I thought, in a slightly exaggerated way (not that I am an expert), rising a little too high in the saddle, pausing a split second, then falling again, slowly. Showing off, I guessed. They were very good at it, very controlled, and kept an exact pace with each other, in the authoritative way of trained riders who know their business. I had to admire them. They looked wonderful. When I glanced at Willis a moment later, he was still grinning.

  Then a third rider came into view, a young boy this time, younger than the two girls, following their trail by about fifty feet. Maybe he was ten or eleven. By now, Fedderman and Bern were at my side, Fedderman wearing only his underwear. Perhaps a couple of hundred others were also watching as the three riders, the boy looking as though he was in excruciating pain (you could tell how helpless he felt being part of this trio, how mortified he was to be trailing the two girls), trotted alongside our trucks for another moment or two, and then, with a sudden shout from the girls, rode off at high speed. You could still hear their hoof-beats after they disappeared into the woods.

  This is Fontainebleau, I told myself in the ghostly silence that followed. This is the Île-de-France, the very heart of France, heart of its aristocratic heart. Yes. But I hardly knew what I meant by that.

  “Holy shit,” Willis said, still shaking his head.

  “Cunts.” This from Barney Barnato.

  Bern made a face. Certain words profoundly offended him.

  “Noblesse oblige,” Fedderman said, beginning one of his lectures. “French variety,” he added. Then, after turning back to our tent: “They probably own the joint. All of it. Upper upper. And all that.” He spoke with a fake Brit accent, to make sure we got all the implications of what he was saying.

  A creaky bugle began to blow reveille. This broke the spell. We made a rush for our mess gear. A huge clamor rose in the morning sky, the noise of fourteen thousand men suddenly resurrected from sleep. We were getting ready for another move. In our rush, Arch reminded us, we would not make a litter. We would be especially careful today. We would leave this place exactly as we found it: perfect.

  But I was still thinking about what Fedderman had said. I knew he was right. Fedderman was smart about things like that. What he didn’t know he figured out, and unlike many smart people, he almost always came to the right conclusions. No brilliant fool, he. Noblesse oblige, he had said. French variety. I was sure those girls owned the joint, that we were camped—by very special permission—on their family’s ancient estate grounds. (And their suffering little brother? their slave? their young protector? What about him?) Maybe they deserved their little joke, I decided, to pretend that we didn’t exist, that we were invisible, while their own lives continued on a normal course, under normal assumptions, in their own front yard. It was a sure way to remind us of who we really were, in a style we wouldn’t forget.

  But it was a nasty business, to my mind.

  THERE was a brisk trade in books before we left. Most of the readers in the battalion knew each other by now, and we ran along the adjoining tent-lines calling out titles, as though we were street peddlers. I got Eric Ambler’s Journey Into Fear (a title in which I read no ironies) for Michael Innes’s Hamlet, Revenge!—the heavy scent of Levantine musk for the clear taste of high tea, a fair exchange in my view. Bern brought away Tortilla Flat, heavily dog-eared, and Fedderman traded Will James’s Cowboy for The Late George Apley, feeling that it was time “to finally take a sounding,” in his words, of John P. Marquand, whom he had never read. Even Brewster, I discovered, was at it; that was good news about Brewster, I thought. This business of swapping books was very satisfying. We felt that we got true value and more. I had also been offered A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel, Howard Spring’s My Son, My Son, and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, and rejected all three—for snob reasons, probably, because they were too popular. Fedderman, I’m sorry to say, shared that attitude.

  But none of us would be without something to read. We were stocked for the future, books packed into each fatigue pocket. A book marked the shortest, straightest, and most invigorating lifeline to the real world—the world outside that would continue on its way, in its own orbit, no matter what might happen to us. That’s what I believed. That’s what most of the readers in the Yankee Division believed.

  WE BOARDED the trucks, cracking gallows jokes with the drivers, who laughed at everything we said. They knew that as soon as they dumped us in Al-sotz they would be able to turn around and instantly head back for Normandy, leaving us deserted. We tried to settle back on our hard wooden benches, our buttocks becoming slatted as we faced each other in the truck in two straight lines. Our equipment was piled between us in a mound of canvas, metal, and K and C rations. Paul Willis, too, had spread himself out between us on the floor of the truck, amid the junk, as though he was going on a hayride, while Rocky, who made no objections to the mess, sat at the open end like the perfect squad leader, his foot hoisted up onto a metal brace, scribbling intently in a tiny pad he always carried with him. Each truck began to rev up along the endless jittery line of machines, making a swelling gravelly noise that choked all conversation; all this and more—shouting officers, resentful NCOs, blasé GIs—combined, almost simultaneously, into a single human and mechanical roar. Thus the division began to move east and north again, past the great Fontainebleau plain that we had camped on for the night, now stripped of all Yankee Division litter, latrine holes filled in, fires out, ashes damped and spread—if not pristine, then damn near—almost the way we had found it the day before, almost. Then I caught Bern Keaton staring blankly at me from the other side of the truck.
He seemed wholly abstracted by reverie and what I read as a kind of silent dread that we all knew. As I stared back, Fedderman, alongside me, always alongside me, began to snore lightly in his second sleep of the morning. I couldn’t help myself then. I was again smothered by the cataclysmic idea of home—the agonized figures of mother, father, and sister saying good-bye on our front porch, the pink blooms of our rose garden, the aging blue Chevy (a fading piece of used metal from the late thirties), our talismanic Chickering piano, standing in a corner of the immaculate living room, with my music resting on it—Beethoven, Chopin, Czerny. Home had not yet finished with me. It was always there, as inevitable as gravity. I was trapped, along with my buddies, and familiar clusters of hives began to form on the back of my neck.

  THE TRUCKS rolled on, the morning lightened. I began to hum a little tune to myself—something or other by Irving Berlin, I think—on which I fastened obsessively. I was deliberately trying to lull myself into a kind of oblivion that I hoped would last for the next couple of hours, for the rest of the morning and afternoon, with any luck, trying to quiet my rising blood while I stared over Bern’s shoulder at the passing scene—towns, squares, road signs, churches, farms, an occasional Frenchman staring blankly back at me from the side of the road without acknowledging that I was there. I could never tell what the French thought of us.

  And still we didn’t talk.

  Rheims, the road signs read.

  Verdun.

  Hours later, Nancy, Sarrebourg, Lunéville.

  “Looney-ville,” as everyone now called it. And Looney-ville it would remain, even though we never got to see it, never even came close.

  SIX

  Holes

  THIS GUY kept smiling at me—this stranger, actually. He’d been smiling at Johnson and me for fifteen minutes. He couldn’t stop. I could tell that he was helpless. He told us his name was Smith or Smitt or Schmidt, something like that. I couldn’t make it out and Johnson was no help. It was hard to concentrate on what Smith was saying at two o’clock in the morning, in the pitch black of the Alsatian countryside. Every sense seemed to be diminished by the darkness: sight, hearing, touch, even taste; only smell remained intact, in the face of an acrid assault by a concatenation of cordite, cigarette smoke, stale urine, excrement, earth, human sweat, and the chemical excess of our own pungent fear, which, like a dog, I could sniff out and clearly identify. What a stink! Johnson’s was as powerful as mine, with a palpable mountain presence of its own. Nobody in the first squad failed the fear test.

  Putting Johnson and me together was Rocky’s idea. By then we knew that he liked to shift us around, mixing it up: Bern and me, Fedderman and Johnson, Fedderman and me, Johnson and me. (He kept Brewster and Natale together for unexplained reasons of his own; perhaps it was only because they were still new to the unit.) It was supposed to keep us fresh and alert, to help us face change and rethink our responsibilities, and to learn to be resilient. It was supposed to keep us interested, too. Maybe it did. It certainly forced us to think about each other.

  Fedderman now belonged to Bern. They shared a hole together maybe fifteen, twenty feet away, the hole sited so that between us we could offer up a neat little crossfire in case of an enemy attack. That is, if we were on the mark. This new arrangement confirmed me as first assistant BAR man. If Johnson was wounded or killed, I was it. That meant two lives I had to pray for now. I tried not to think about it too much; there was a lot I was trying to push away that night when we arrived at the front. Anyway, I never prayed; I only made deals with myself—the usual promises of good behavior if I survived.

  This guy, this stranger, told us that enemy attacks were rare, but nighttime probes, on a small scale, were common. He warned us that we had better keep our eyes open, especially after dark. After dark was the sensitive time. He could hardly get the words out fast enough; it was almost a babble. Then he smiled some more, while we took it all in. Could we believe him? Was his advice reliable? Or were enthusiasm and a sense of relief carrying him away? His buddy, with whom he had shared this hole, had already pulled out for the rear, while he remained behind to brief us. They had probably tossed a coin for the honor and he had lost. I thought he was doing an okay job, except for all the smiling. I could have done without that; it put an edge on every word.

  Briefings were going on all along the line in holes just like ours as the Yankee Division slipped nervously into the positions the Fourth Armored Division was leaving with such open joy. They had done a careful job when they dug in, as though they were preparing for a long stay. The holes were deep and self-contained, meant for living and protection; ours had a neat ledge cut into one wall for supplies. The hole itself was shaped like a trapezoid, and there was plenty of room for two men. At the moment, it held three comfortably. I didn’t know whether the trapezoid shape had a purpose or not, and I forgot to ask.

  It had rained nearly all the way to Nancy once we were out of the Île-de-France, but the rain had stopped now. After unloading from the trucks in the dark, a couple of miles to the rear, Johnson took a bad spill in the fresh mud on our way on foot up to the front—no real damage done, just muck and wet filth covering him everywhere. An annoyance; another thorn. There was a smell stuck to him, too, that was unidentifiable; probably cow dung, I thought.

  Johnson was beginning to show nerves for the first time since I had known him, snorting like a horse as we squatted there in the hole, listening to Smith, or Smitt, or Schmidt talk on. While he talked, I watched a huge moon drift to the west. Scudding clouds veiled it like handmaidens. Beyond Smith’s words, there was a lunar stillness everywhere, except for the strange horsey sounds Johnson was making. I began to count the stars, listening to Smith with one ear, to distract myself—a hopeless job. Smith was still smiling. He was jubilant to be leaving for the rear. The more jubilant he seemed, the more nervous we became. And he knew it.

  “So,” he said, suddenly holding out his right hand, as though we had just struck a deal. “Can’t think of anything else.”

  We shook hands, first Johnson, then me. “Good luck,” he said. Then he was gone, rifle slung over his shoulder, heading to the rear in a slouching run. We would all soon become expert at running in that slouch. Down the line, I could hear Fedderman’s voice. He was in one of his states, as we all were. Oh, God, that whine … Bern was telling him to shut up, sounding irritable. In another moment, Rocky was at our hole.

  “You guys all right?”

  Johnson snorted. I said nothing.

  “Speak up,” Rocky said, down on one knee so he could whisper to us. In the moonlight, his bony Texan face looked anxious; all his features were creased together.

  “You’re going to get knocked off like that,” I said, meaning the silhouette he made kneeling there.

  He crouched lower and hurriedly pointed out his own foxhole, which he told us he shared with Willis and Barnato. Brewster and Natale were on the right somewhere, he said, pointing again, along with Bern and Fedderman. That accounted for everyone in the first squad. In the dark, Rocky then traced the position of the rest of the platoon. The best I could tell from what he said was that together we made a jagged line, a zigzag, with intervals of fifteen to twenty feet between each foxhole. Maybe they were even closer. Taken together, Rocky explained in a rush, the foxholes made a position; and the position was built to a plan that he didn’t bother to explain. Maybe he didn’t know the plan himself. That would be the way things usually worked with us. Then Rocky left.

  I thought I could make out a few hills up ahead, two or three hundred yards in front of us. Maybe “hills” is too strong a word; “rises” is probably more accurate. A few rises then, nothing dramatic, overlooking our own position. Given a choice, of course, I would have preferred to look down at them, rather than up. But it was hard to figure out in the dark, so I let it go; I would worry about it in the morning when everything would be revealed. I checked my watch, to have something to do. Three o’clock. The moon was still bright.

  “
You all right?” I asked Johnson.

  He was lining up some grenades on the ledge, alongside boxes of K rations, placing them in a neat row. Johnson was always very neat. It was how he did everything. I guessed he was okay even though he was still snorting while he worked. Then, far away on our left, a red flare rose slowly in the night sky, arched, sputtered, and hung in the air for a second or two before falling. A real bloom, in the middle of the night. Johnson and I both watched it, the strange light diffusing brightly against the moving clouds. I could see Bern and Fedderman watching, too, and Willis and Barnato—we were all heads up in our foxholes, pale Yankee faces lightly pinked by the red glare hanging above us. The whole division was probably watching.

  Ours or theirs? I wondered, meaning the flare. Where were they exactly? Meaning the Germans.

  And where were we?

  Rocky, like our helpful pal from the Fourth Armored, had forgotten to tell us. Maybe Rocky didn’t know. Maybe he hadn’t been filled in yet. But I wanted to know. It seemed urgent. Where we were and where they were.

  “Face front,” was Johnson’s advice when I asked him, “and you’ll sure as hell see them sooner or later.” For Johnson, that was a mouthful, and it served. I stopped worrying about it.

  THE following night, Johnson and I were chosen for outpost duty