Before Their Time: A Memoir

by Robert Kotlowitz

  We had spent the day quietly acclimating ourselves and trying to catch up on sleep. Everything was quiet as we all settled in—a lucky break for us. Maybe, after all, we had relieved the Fourth without the Germans learning about it. That would mark a real achievement.

  Meanwhile, Johnson, always fastidious, had placed his shaving equipment on the ledge in our hole, alongside his grenades and boxes of K rations, leaving an equal amount of space for me. To the inch, exactly; I watched him measure it. I liked that, after the mess I had lived with and grown used to with Ira Fedderman. I had a pretty good idea what Fedderman’s foxhole looked like this morning. I glanced over our parapet—the Fourth had really constructed their defenses—but could see nothing, neither Bern nor Fedderman. Yet there was a sense of activity out there, a settling-in everywhere down the line. Metallic noises, the sound of a shovel somewhere, mutterings, whispers. Even, briefly, the hollow echo of artillery fire to the east that made everything seem real for the moment.

  In the morning light, the rises I had seen the night before now appeared as dun-colored ridges, not steep, not long, but humped in camel-like folds here and there, as though they were hiding something. Undoubtedly they were. But they didn’t look forbidding or menacing. They looked innocent. It was raining again, a light drizzle that created a floating mist all around us. This gave me an illusion of protection and invisibility, as rain often did. If I couldn’t see the Germans, my theory went, they couldn’t see me.

  Rocky checked us out every couple of hours. We knew that he was trying to keep busy in a responsible way, making sure that we felt his presence and authority as the perfect squad leader. At first, that morning, Rocky crawled from hole to hole on his knees and elbows, carbine cradled in his arms, just as the books said. Later, probably feeling safer when the day wore on without incident, he rose to a crouch as he made his connections among us. (He was accompanied once or twice, as I remember, by Arch, who seemed to appear out of nowhere, asking a lot of edgy questions; Arch’s questions were always edgy, wherever we were.) Everything was still calm, still quiet. Wet, too. We might have been on bivouac at Camp Jackson or maneuvering in the Tennessee foothills in the spring rains. By mid-afternoon of the first day, I began to feel a little giddy. It was a touch of overconfidence, accompanied perhaps by a rise in blood pressure. Excitement, I knew, could do that to me. I had survived, without a serious scare, for sixteen hours. We were on the line, in position, and we were intact.

  At four o’clock, Rocky arrived for the third visit of the day. Flat on his belly this time and without looking at us, he told Johnson and me that we were to go on outpost duty from midnight until dawn—or rather, the moment before dawn, the few seconds just before the first light rises. (He found several ways of saying this, to emphasize how important it was.) He told us that on outpost we were to be alert to all strange sounds, all movement, to anything that felt like a threat. Our real job was to warn C Company of any impending dawn attack that would most likely come from those folded hills that rose in front of us. (I eyed them as Rocky talked on, trying to remember their outlines and imagine the Germans hidden inside them.) We were to sit in the outpost trench face-to-face, feet touching. The pressure of our feet against each other, which we would regulate as needed, would make sure that we stayed awake. He paused at this before going on, so that we would remember it. One of us, he then added, would face in the direction of the enemy lines, the other would face ours. That seemed obvious. At three o’clock, approximately the midway point, we would change positions.

  “Any questions?” He waited a moment. “You better get some sleep,” he said then, appearing reluctant to leave us. “You got all that now?” he asked.

  Poor bastard. I could tell how worried he was. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing myself. I suppose he was feeling guilty, too.

  “And where the hell is the outpost?” I finally asked. I was already shaking a little, my usual way.

  “What an asshole,” Rocky said, meaning himself. (We always seemed to be forgetting to exchange essential information in the first squad.) He pointed straight ahead. “That’s it out there,” he said. “Maybe a hundred yards, a little to the left of that pile of shit. See it?”

  Yes, I saw it.

  • • •

  DUSK came soon enough. Johnson and I began to open some of my C rations. I preferred C to K rations; they really filled you up, even had a taste, but you had to try to forget that they looked like dog food. I could tell that Johnson was as abstracted as I was, that he was beginning to lose his focus little by little. He spat a lot of thick, phlegmy stuff, and chewed on some hangnails, but the snorting had stopped. I was even worse, almost out of control, and trying desperately to hide it. I couldn’t even open my can of C rations properly. It was a simple, familiar task, repeated a thousand times during my infantry training, yet I sliced my thumb open, deep in the fleshy part, with the jagged edge of the half-open can, cursing myself when I saw the blood. It was a piece of childish clumsiness worthy of Ira Fedderman. It took me half a minute to get my self-possession back, to try to smile as I felt my thumb begin to throb.

  “You’re really bleeding,” Johnson said.

  “It’s nothing.” I spoke with all the piety of the professional stoic. “Where’s the first-aid stuff?”

  We spent five minutes trying to stop the bleeding, and finally, bandaged and abashed, I was able to settle back against the wall of the foxhole and slowly eat my rations, in control of myself at last. Johnson, too, was better after this tiny crisis. He stopped spitting and the noises he had made did not come back. We had four hours to midnight.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  Johnson nodded.

  That was how we passed the time, asking each other obvious questions, checking our watches, synchronizing them, napping, defecating into our helmets (twice each) and dumping it onto the ground behind us—and slowly, as it grew darker, hour by hour, losing ourselves to the thought of the lonely job ahead.

  At 11:45, Rocky was at our hole again. Arch was with him, both of them flat out.

  “You guys ready?” Rocky glanced at my thumb but said nothing.

  We grunted.

  “Two things. Do not fall asleep. You fall asleep you’ll wake up with your throats slit.”

  “That’s no bullshit,” Arch said.

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “What’s the other thing?” I asked. Actually, we were whispering, had been whispering for hours, hissing at each other.

  “Be sure to get back before dawn. If you’re still out there when it’s light, you’re out there forever.”

  “You guys sure you’re okay?” Arch asked—just to put his two cents in, I thought. Suppose we weren’t?

  This time only Johnson grunted. Rocky handed a rifle to him. “Give me the BAR,” he said. “This is Keaton’s M-1. Take care of it. Keaton’ll watch over the BAR.” That would leave us unencumbered for the night ahead. Rocky was thinking clearly—I mean, when you consider that neither he nor Arch had any more experience with outpost duty than we did. In another moment, after glancing at my thumb again, he was gone, a long thin silhouette bent in half in the moon’s baleful light. Arch tailed him, humped over, giving us one last questioning look over his shoulder as though he didn’t really trust us. Well, screw him.

  I didn’t know whether or not I wanted moonlight when we were out there. Would it give us away? Or would it betray the Germans? I had other questions, too, lots of them, but I couldn’t seem to get my mind around them. I seemed to have little grasp of things as they actually were; they kept slipping away Mostly what I had was my fear.

  ACTUALLY, when the time came nothing much happened out there. We found the trench easily enough, crawling along side by side, guided by the pile of rubbish nearby, which turned out to be a dead cow, lying alongside its calf, both bloated to double size, but without a stink. We slipped into the hole face-to-face, our legs stretched out almost full-length and the soles of our feet resting flat a
gainst each other, as we had been told they would. It was a perfect fit, as though it had been exactly measured to our dimensions. We then tested our alert system by tensing up our bodies and pushing with our feet. We had already decided before we left our foxhole to repeat this exercise every couple of minutes to make sure that we stayed awake. The hole was dug to a perfect depth, allowing us to peer over the top with almost no chance of being seen (although of course we felt visible to the entire world). Johnson faced our lines, I faced the Germans. The idea, as Rocky had told us, was to switch positions midway through our duty, at three o’clock. That exercise would also help to keep us awake.

  A couple of hours passed, but when I looked at my watch I saw that it was 12:30. I waited a few minutes and checked again—still 12:30. I understood then, as my blood began to slow, that I would have to spend the rest of the night as a pathetic victim of tedium, that merciless bastard son of time, and that whatever my own human urgencies and needs might be through the long hours, I had better get used to the idea and learn to accommodate it. But once again my body was living its own life that night and had been for hours. I had almost no influence over it. All I could do was push with the soles of my feet against Johnson; and Johnson pushed back. That, at least, we could control; about the rest—the twitching and quivering, the prickling nerves and colonic rumbles—I was totally helpless.

  At last, half the night was gone. It was three o’clock and still quiet. That was how I wanted it. Johnson and I changed positions, making a flutter of noise, as we crawled past each other, that seemed to carry throughout the whole shallow valley; I thought I heard it echo around us. Behind me now, as I faced our own lines, I heard creaking sounds, very faint and slow and erratic. I listened, considered, worried. In the moonlight, which struck Johnson’s face at a sharp, revealing angle, I could see him considering, too. The noise repeated itself, part now of other sounds. Parsing these sounds, trying to separate them from one another, I told myself that I heard (1) wheels creaking, (2) metal cans rattling, and (3) something I couldn’t quite identify but that was definitely related to the first two. Supply wagons, I guessed, maybe pulled by horses. (That would be useful information to bring back, the fact that the German supply wagons were being pulled by horses.) I pressed Johnson’s feet. He pressed back. We listened together for another fifteen minutes, while the noises swelled, then dimmed, and finally ceased. An angry voice shouted something. One word, “Scheiss.” The sound of German, the obscenity spoken in the enemy’s voice, shocked me.

  Then all was silent.

  Of the five and a half hours that we spent in that first outpost venture, that was the moment of high interest, over in twenty minutes. It was also, I think, the only moment when I wasn’t afraid—maybe because I was totally engaged. I wanted to ask Johnson about this when we got back, but I forgot. I wanted to know whether he had felt the same way. By the time we got back, crawling again side by side, eating dirt, and almost missing the critical moment that separates blackness from first light, all the adrenaline had been drained from my body, my memory was gone, and I was curiously uninterested in the whole experience. It seemed to have happened to someone else, some uniformed impostor bearing my name and my features who was passing himself off in the third platoon as me. All I wanted to do was to go to sleep, where I knew—or felt—that upon awakening I would again find my real self.

  THE artillery barrages had started, just as Smith said they would. Early morning, before breakfast, and late afternoon. Perfectly regulated, perfectly predictable. Thirty minutes a day, sometimes a little more, paying particular attention to the supply depots that lay a mile or so behind us.

  Whump. Whump. Whump.

  The aggressive resonance of the German 88’s ejaculatory sounds was unique, not duplicated, to my knowledge, by any other artillery piece in World War II. It had the hoarseness of a deadly cough, the baritone echo of thunder, and you could hear it coming.

  Whump. Whump. Whump.

  Early morning, and late afternoon, with an occasional digressive round or two arched across perhaps in the evening or at noon just so we wouldn’t become complacent. Those potshots could be killers.

  We respected the 88. It was a formidable gun, with a definite personality of its own. Mobile. Agile. Swift. And accurate. It could bracket a five-hundred-yard ladder—run top to bottom, or the reverse, in half a minute, each exploding rung of the ladder moving ahead with every round. This happened often; it was a favorite German tactic. When it did, the point was to find yourself, flat out, between rungs of the ladder. If you did, and the terrain provided some generous cover, you were generally safe. Or safe enough. There were always exceptions, of course.

  Huddled in my foxhole with Johnson, I often got an erection when the shells of the 88s detonated; at the explosion, a panicked rush of blood was released in my groin that was almost Pavlovian in its reliability.

  AROUND this time I began to worry about my dog tags. Should I wear them? Should I get rid of them? They bore an “H,” for Hebrew, along with my blood type and other essential information. Hebrew was what the US Army had decided to call Jews. I had never been called a Hebrew before. Not even by Hebrews. To the world I had always been a Jew. To myself, as well. Why, then, was a “J” not good enough for the US Army? (Should I have read something into that, something patronizing and offensive?) But I wasn’t really worrying about the US Army. I was worrying about the Germans.

  What would they do with me if I became a prisoner, when they saw the “H” on my dog tags? What had happened to other “H”s when they were captured?

  POW camps, as an American GI, like any other?

  Or a German concentration camp, as an “H.” Juden, as we were known beyond the Rhine—Juden, scum of the earth, a phrase I had learned during the thirties from news reports from Germany.

  The obvious truth was that all these questions were hypothetical, all the worry mere inner bombast. I couldn’t imagine myself without my dog tags, whatever they read. My dog tags were the sole material proof of my identity, so important that they were stamped out of metal to resist destruction, the only external objects I carried that set me apart from everyone else. Without them, who was I? I decided that I would keep them, however threatening the situation. I would be an “H,” as the Army insisted. I would defy the Nazis and take my chances, a touch of gratuitous arrogance that I seemed to need to feel at the time.

  I FOUND myself wondering then whether Fedderman was also thinking about this, and if so, what he was thinking.

  And at the same time, I began to wonder what they had to say to each other—Ira Fedderman and Bern Keaton, chained together in their foxhole—while I was worrying in the silence of my own about my dog tags. Were they discussing Fedderman’s problems? About being outsized and physically incompetent; about being an intellectual and an aesthete (a word I learned from Fedderman himself)? Or were they talking about Bern’s slow, resistant slide down the slippery chute of secularism, not a happy subject for PFC Keaton, ex-pupil, as he was, of the nuns of Hackensack, New Jersey. (Bern was an intellectual, too, like Fedderman, but of an especially sweet and modest kind—the rarest kind, in fact, although he would have been surprised to hear it.)

  They had plenty to talk about, was my guess; they had a whole world, at least, not like Johnson and me, mumbling our way stuporously through dull two-word exchanges about the necessities of daily life, about food, water, sleep, the noisy state of our cranky bowels, other banal matters.

  “Are you okay?” we asked each other a dozen times a day. But not Keaton and Fedderman, I bet. Was I jealous? Yes, I think so. I was jealous because I was lonely. And I never learned what Fedderman thought about being called an “H” because I never got a chance to ask him. It was probably just as well. It was always my conviction that Fedderman had enough to worry about for his own good, without needing more.

  “TOUGH shit,” Johnson said when I complained about having to live at such close quarters in our trapezoidal hole in the ground. Those were the
first words he had spoken since breakfast, and it was now three o’clock in the afternoon. He was not putting me off or defending himself. He was commenting in his strange (to me), disinterested Green Mountain way. I didn’t understand disinterestedness. I’m not even sure I knew the word then. It was emotion that I understood, too well, perhaps—emotion and involvement, the more direct the better (although in style I was as cool as the next GI, hoping that my emotions would never be caught out). “Tough shit,” when Johnson said it, meant just that; it had no implied reference to me, it made no judgment. Only later, at a time not far off, would I see Johnson involved exactly like everyone else, with passionate emotional force, and that time would be a sad one for all of us.

  I never learned what Vermont town Johnson came from, what his family did to support themselves, where he had gone to school, what his prejudices and ambitions were, his likes and dislikes. I wondered then—and still do—whether he himself knew about his prejudices and ambitions. In place of real information, he offered a thin-lipped reticence, which had become a stony presence in itself—the Johnson presence, tight-assed and tense, that gave nothing away. I think he was even shy with himself.

  But my complaint was real. The hole had become crowded with personal trash. The mud didn’t help. Neither did the smell. Our sweaty bodies, rarely washed. Stained underwear, as soiled today as yesterday, and unchanged. Our excrement, a daily problem, never solved. All the sour run-off of ordinary life. None of it could be avoided.

  I lost control of myself then, as I had when I ran off during maneuvers in Tennessee, and again there was no warning. Late one afternoon, I leapt out of our hole, dropped my pants, and squatted on the ground six feet away. It was a kind of metabolic impulse, irresistible and even exhilarating. I remember, as I squatted there, objectively wondering how various the world can suddenly appear when you shift your angle of vision, even minimally. The plain in front of me suddenly broadened as though it covered all of Alsace, the shallow ridges seemed to run as far to the east as I could see, and there was a whole new world, it seemed, of thorny brush and dun-colored hills out there, glinting in the afternoon sun. Even the sky itself, as I looked up, seemed to open.